The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd

quickly as I could, across Battersea Fields, and as soon as I entered our lodgings I knew that my old life had already come to an end. I gathered the rest of my money from beneath the floorboards, and placed it neatly on my mother’s dirty bed. There was an old tin trunk against the wall, which we used as a seat when we were sewing together; it held nothing but some scraps of her religiosity, some ragged hymnals and the like, which I gladly chucked out of the window. Then I took out all of our clothes, plain though they were, and folded them neatly within it. I could have carried it on my own shoulders, it was light enough, but I did not want to show myself as in any way unladylike; so I dragged it only as far as St. George’s Fields, where I hired a horse cab which took me to the New Cut for threepence.
    Number 10, New Cut, was a neat little house in a new terrace, and I felt quite a princess as the cab came to a halt and I stepped out onto the pavement. The driver was a scrawny piece of meat, with a stovepipe hat to hide his baldness, but very gallantly he carried my tin trunk to the door. He had a little mustache, and I could not resist making a joke out of it when I gave him an extra penny. “Has your wife been punching you?” I asked. “There’s a bruise under your nose.” He put a hand up to his mouth, and rushed away.
    “What is it?” As soon as I had knocked upon the door, I heard a female voice bellowing in the passage.
    “It’s the new girl.”
    “What is her name?”
    “Lizzie. Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.”
    “Is she from Dan?”
    “Yes. She is.”
    The door was opened suddenly by a man wearing a seedy frock coat and huge bow cravat, just like the comic singers I had seen in the Craven Street theater. “Well, my dear,” he said. “You look rather like a low-comedy granddaughter. Come.” Obviously I had been mistaken about hearing a woman’s voice: it was his own, but so high and tremulous anyone would have judged it to be of the opposite sex. “I’m putting you with Doris, the goddess of wire-walking. Do you know her?” I shook my head. “Lovely party. She can spin upon a penny. Great friend of mine.” I could tell from his flushed face, and his trembling hands, that he was a drinker; he must have been no more than forty, but he looked too frail to last. “I would carry your trunk myself, dear, but I’m prone to faintness of the arteries. That’s why I gave up the profession.” He was mounting the stairs, talking as freely and as gaily to me as if we had known each other for many years. “Now I’m a landman. Do you get it? Landlady. Landman. I don’t like landlord, do you? It sounds too beery, too saloony. I’m known to all the hall folk as Austin. Simply Austin.” I ventured to ask him what he once did upon the stage. “I was a blacked-up turn, and then a funny female. I only had to pop on a wig, and they would all yell. I killed them stone dead every time, dear. Here we are. Goddess? Are you in?” He put his ear to the door in a very extravagant manner, and waited there for a few seconds. “And answer came there none. I think we’ll just push our way through, don’t you?” He knocked again, and then slowly opened the door upon a scene of great disorder: there were plumed hats and pieces of corsage, lace drawers and crumpled skirts, tights and shoes, littered all over the room. “She is not a very neat creature,” Austin said. “She has the soul of an artist. Your bed is over there, dear. In that corner.” There was indeed a second bed, although it was covered by clothes, hat boxes and clippings from the newspapers. “I wondered whathappened to that teapot,” he said, and removed a brown enamel article from what was now my pillow. “Doris loves her tea.” He was about to leave the room when he suddenly turned upon his heels, in what I later discovered to be a comedy way, and said in an exaggerated whisper, “It’s ten shillings a week to share. Dan says he’ll take it