The Linnet Bird: A Novel by Linda Holeman Page A

want findin’ ya? Well?” She tapped her foot, waiting for an answer.
    “I’ll stay with Linny,” I said. “Linny Gow. And if anyone comes looking for me,” I added, as the unshaven face of Ram Munt filled my head, “I’ll look after myself.”
    “Fine. I got rooms ya can use, and ya can work for me as long as ya prove yourself. ’Ave trouble with a customer or any of the other girls or the ol’ Bill, ya come to me.You’ll find me fair, if you follow the rules.” When I nodded, she smiled, revealing a missing eyetooth. Otherwise her teeth were long and square, strong-looking. “Seems like you’ve got pluck,” she said. “Men who come down to the streets lookin’ for it, they like a bit of pluck, don’t they? If they want coyness and reluctance, well, I tells ’em, stay ’ome with yer good missus.”
    She laughed at her own joke, and I opened my mouth and made a sound that may have been interpreted by some as laughter.
     

     
    M Y HAIR GREW OUT and eventually I could lift my chin and straighten my shoulders without my chest pulling and aching. In exchange for a share in a cramped room to sleep in and another room, curtained into three spaces with a thin flock mattress in each, to bring customers to, I handed over half of my nightly earnings to Blue, as was our deal.
    “Where’d you say you come from?” asked Lambie one night, as we sat around a greasy table in the Goat’s Head.
    “Back Phoebe Anne Street, off Vauxhall Road,” I told her.
    “Vauxhall Road? Then how is it you got that smart talk? Them wots from Vauxhall don’t talk like yer does. I’m from Scottie Road meself, and I sure never learned no fancy talk.”
    I smiled, a true smile. “Noble blood,” I said. “Noble blood, my dears.” I raised my glass of sugar water, and Lambie and Sweet Girl and I toasted to noble blood, to earning more in an hour than a day in the glassworks or the pottery or the candlemakers or the sugar refinery or bookbinders, and to the freedom that comes from not giving a monkey’s of what anyone thought.
    “No shortage of customers for you, is there? How does she do it then, eh?” Lambie looked at Sweet Girl. “How does she pull in the most customers? And her with that.” Lambie pointed a finger. I looked down. My right breast swelled gently above the graying lace of my bodice, the skin smooth and glowing with the dull sheen of pearl under the stinking sputter of the gaslight. But on the left side the wide, jagged crimson ridge ran from the top of my breast to the top of my first rib. When no one was watching I rubbed that deep puckered scar on the flatness of my left breast. It still ached sometimes, as if the blades that had sunk deep into the tender flesh there had left invisible poisoned barbs that nipped and stung even after the surgeon had cut away the destroyed flesh and clumsily stitched the ragged edges together. The nipple was spared, but the muscle and fat that caused the slight fullness of my right breast was lost on the left.
    Sweet Girl shrugged. “Sure as hell I don’t know, but I wish she’d send some of whatever she’s got my way. Some nights are damn useless, with little but piss-dribbling poxy cocks.”
    “I think it’s because she let’s ’em pretend she’s a fine lady, just stepping down for a quick fuck with her pretty little cunt all powdered and fresh. Ain’t that right?”
    They laughed loudly, and I raised one eyebrow at them. I knew it was my blood that made me different. And there was something else. I knew I wouldn’t be staying in this life, knew there was something different, something bigger for me. Linny Gow would become a name people would remember.

 
     
    Chapter Seven

     
    I T WAS TRUE; I HAD NO SHORTAGE OF MEN. M OST I TOOK TO ONE of the tiny cubicles containing the mattress covered with layers of cheap, coarse sheets—the top soiled one taken off after each customer—on the third floor of the house on Jack Street, one of the narrow lanes that led