The Linnet Bird: A Novel by Linda Holeman

even thinner than usual, which was a temporary thing, but it was my eyes that showed the change. They had an intenseness, grown darker and larger, and they glittered with something that I had no name for. My pale hair stood up around my head with the look of a pullet, but the lack of curls and new angular cheekbones had taken me from child to young woman.
    I unwrapped the strip of muslin I had exchanged for the dirty flannel. The stitching on my breast was dark. I touched it. The skin was raised and sealed in a twisted, ropy seam. It was beginning to harden, and I knew that with the hardening of that skin something deeper had also grown dense and rigid. Resistant and unyielding.
    I cleaned up the green dress and stitched the rent. I hunted out and found coins Ram had hidden away about the room—my money, what I’d earned. The only thing I was sorry about was that Ram seemed to have drunk most of it away, and it was a pitiable sum for the years of work both on my feet and on my back.
    And then I ate the heel of bread I found on the table, holding my hand over my mouth as I swallowed, willing myself to keep down the first solid food I’d had for so long, took a drink of tinny water, and walked out. I left the miserable room on Back Phoebe Anne Street, left the miserable court with its trickle of human waste running down the shallow gutter in the middle, left the blocks of leaning, back-to-back, vermin-infested buildings.
    I wore the sophisticated green gown and a clean shawl and a straw bonnet, and under my arm I clutched the fruitwood box with its mirror, book, pendant, and my folding knife. The bit of money was twisted in an old handkerchief, which I’d sewn onto my underskirt.
     

     
    “T HIS IS MY TERRITORY, ” the tall, raw-boned woman said, eyeing the golden fringe poking out from my bonnet as, a few hours later, I stood along Paradise Street, filled with its sailors’ lodgings and doss-houses.
    “It’s a free street, isn’t it?” I said, my tone matching hers.
    “How long you bin workin’?”
    “Close to three years,” I told her.
    “Not around ’ere, you ain’t. I knows every girl in a square mile. But you do look as if you knows your way around.” She studied my face. “You’re young. Younger’n most. From what I can see most likely the curse ain’t even on you yet.”
    I didn’t answer.
    “How old are you?”
    “Fourteen.”
Close enough to fourteen
.
    “You want to work around here, you work for me. What do you say to that?”
    “Depends,” I answered, with a boldness I didn’t know I was capable of. I liked it. “How much do you take?”
    “’Alf of what ya makes each night. Rules are I don’t abide my girls drinkin’ on the job. And I’ve me ways to find out if youse bin cheatin’ me, and if you ’as, you’re out of ’ere before you can tie your bonnet strings, and I’ll see to it you never gits no more customers in this area again. Understand?”
    I nodded.
    “You clean? My girls don’t work with clap or open pox. I got a name to up’old. Only clean girls, anyone wot comes to Blue’s girls knows. Were the same when I run my business down in Seven Dials in London afore I come up ’ere; my girls was all clean.”
    “I’m clean,” I said, then purposely let my shawl drop open. I was rewarded by the slight look of disgust that filmed the woman’s expression.
    “Bleedin ’ell. That’s fresh. You wanna work with it in that state?”
    “I don’t care.”
    She pulled a grimy yellow scarf from around her own neck. “Cover it with this for the next little while,” she said. “Don’t want to be scarin’ ’em off first fing.”
    I took the scarf and arranged it over my scar.
    “What’s yer name?”
    “Linnet,” I told her. “Linnet Gow.” I pulled myself taller. “Although I go by Linny.”
    The woman shook her head. “You wanna change your name? You got anyone from before lookin’ for ya”—here she raised her chin at my chest “—that you don’t