“It’s not pride, dear Mrs. Pottage, that prevents my staying on with you. You mustn’t think that. It’s simply that I could not bear to go on living alone where he and I lived together. I’m sure to find an engagement presently. I have enough money left to keep Letizia and myself for quite a little time.”
“Well, don’t let’s lose sight of each other for good and all,” said the landlady. “Let’s meet some day and go down to Margate together and have a nice sea blow. I’ve got a friend down there—well, friend, I say, though she’s a relation really, but she is a friend for all that, a good friend—well, this Sarah Williams has a very natty little house looking out on the front, and we could spend a nice time with her when she’s not full up with lodgers. I’d say ‘come down now,’ but Margate in January’s a bit like living in a house with the windows blown out and the doors blown in and the roof blown off and the walls blown down.”
So, Nancy left Starboard Alley and went to live in rooms in Soho, perhaps in the very same house where more than a century ago Letizia’s great-great-grandmother had been left with that cageful of love-birds and the twenty pairs of silk stockings.
The houses in Blackboy Passage were flat-faced, thin, and tall like the houses in Hogarth’s “Night.” At one end an archway under the ancient tavern that gave its name to the small and obscure thoroughfare led into Greek Street. At the other end a row of inebriated posts forbade traffic to vehicles from Frith Street. The houses had enjoyed a brief modishness in the middle of the eighteenth century, but since then their tenants had gradually declined in quality while at the same time steadily increasing in quantity. By this date nearly every one of the tall houses had a perpendicular line of bells beside its front door and a ladder of outlandish names. The house in which Nancy found lodgings was an exception, for all of it except the basement belonged to Miss Fewkes, who was her landlady. Miss Fewkes was a dried-up little woman of over fifty, with a long sharp nose, and raddled cheeks so clumsily powdered as to give to her face the appearance of a sweet which has lost its freshness and been dusted over with sugar. Incredible as it now might seem, Miss Fewkes had had a past. She had actually been in the Orient ballet once, and the mistress of several men, each of whom was a step lower in the scale than his predecessor. From each of these temporary supporters she had managed to extract various sums of money, the total of which she had invested in furnishing this house in Blackboy Passage, where for many years she had let lodgings to the profession. In spite of her paint and powder and past, Miss Fewkes wore an air of withered virginity, and appeared to possess little more human nature than one of her own lace antimacassars. Her thin prehensile fingers resembled the claws of a bird; her voice was as the sound of dead leaves blown along city pavements. Letizia disliked Miss Fewkes as much as she had liked Mrs. Pottage. Nor did Miss Fewkes like Letizia, whose presence in her lodgings she resented in the same way that she would have resented a pet dog’s.
“I noticed your little girl’s finger-marks on the bedroom-door this morning. Two black marks. Of course, as I explained to you, Miss O’Finn, I don’t really care to have children in my rooms, but if I do take them in I rather expect that they won’t make finger-marks. It’s difficult enough to keep things clean in London, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”
Nancy would have left Miss Fewkes after a week if she had had to leave Letizia in her charge while she hung about in the outer offices of theatrical agents in Garrick Street and Maiden Lane. Fortunately, however, there were staying in the same house a Mr. and Mrs. Kino, who took a great fancy to Letizia and insisted on having as much of her company as they could obtain. Mr. Kino was the proprietor and trainer of a troup of performing elephants, which were then appearing at Hengler’s Circus. Mrs. Kino, a large pink and yellow woman, had domestic ambitions and a longing for children of her own. Possibly her dependency on elephants had begotten in her a passion for diminutiveness. At any rate, until Letizia won her heart, she spent all her time in stringing beads for little purses. Even when she made friends with Letizia, the toys she always preferred to buy for her were minute china animals and Lilliputian dolls, for which she enjoyed making quantities of tiny dresses.
“Too large, duckie, much too large,” was her comment when Letizia showed her the cargo of her Christmas stocking.
Miss Fewkes sniffed when she saw the china animals.
“Silly things to give a child,” she said. “Next thing is she’ll be swallowing them and have to be taken in a cab to the hospital, but, then, some people in this world go about looking for trouble and, when they get it, expect every one else to sympathise. Ugh! I’ve no patience with them, I haven’t.”
Nancy had found it impossible to persuade Letizia that she would never see her father again in this world.