Chapter 2

The twelfth day of the month of November in the year one thousand, eight hundred and sixty eight dawned just as its predecessor had dawned before it, accompanied by a thick layer of ice which painted the roofs of the houses in Grimsby Street a glistening, frosty white, so different and so much more welcome than the impenetrable fog of the day before, though traces of the intense vapour still hung thinly in patches.  The air was chilly, perhaps colder than the morning of the day before and the few people out and about at this early hour had taken care to pull on a thicker pair of boots and their warmest and most protective winter cloaks as they prepared to go about their daily business.  Smoke curled from several icy chimneys, indicating that the surly houses were not as disused and lifeless as they had first appeared, though the light of the morning did not make them any the less filthy.
  At precisely eight minutes past eight on this frosty, wintry morning, an exhausted, middle-aged man turned the corner and strode across the road towards number five. He was of average height and had thin, auburn hair, balding in places. He had been walking for just over an hour and looked frozen, despite being wrapped heavily in winter necessities.  He sighed thankfully as he pushed open the door and stepped into the warm and shabbily cheerful interior of his own home.
    As he crossed the threshold, he was greeted warmly by three children seated at the table under the tiny window, polishing off the last of their breakfast.
  “Father!”
  “You’re later today, Papa!”
  “Mother’s got your breakfast ready but she said it would be stone cold by the time you got home.”
  Their father smiled affectionately and was on the verge of responding when his wife came scurrying along the passage from the kitchen. She rushed over to kiss him on the cheek and bade him good morning.
  “Take your hat off indoors, John. Set a good example to the children!”
  “You’re quite right. They get away with enough as it is,” John smiled with a twinkle in his eye.
  “For goodness sake, remove your boots!” the children’s mother fussed. “You’re trampling ice across the floor. Your breakfast is on the table. I expect you’re hungry; you’ve had a long and tiring night, I’ll be bound!”
  John gave a slight smile as he removed his cap and scarf. It was always a relief to return home in the morning after a hard night’s work. Whatever else he might have been, John Taylor was an honest, hard-working man who loved his family dearly and enjoyed spending time with them, though this wasn’t as often as he’d have liked for times were hard and he had to work his fingers to the bone to provide for his wife and children. They didn’t have an awful lot, but they managed.
  John reflected on this as he pulled off his thick, winter boots which had indeed left a trail of silver frost across the threadbare carpet, rather as though the soles had been taken out and replaced with a pair of begrudging snails.
  He pulled out the fourth chair at the rickety table and sat down, his back to the fireplace where a bright orange flame was glowing softly in the grate. No doubt one of the boys had lit it early this morning, for the little house was often extremely cold in the winter months and it was exceedingly uncomfortable to be inside when there was no source of warmth.
    “Met the paper boy on the way home,” John remarked conversationally, delving his red, raw hand into the inside pocket of his overcoat which he had draped over the back of the spindly chair on which he was sitting. “Jones’ lad, not the new one.  A nice young fellow, he is.” He unfolded a rather crumpled newspaper and disappeared behind it.  The children sat respectfully quiet, munching on the remainder of crusty bread. They knew their father’s custom was to read the paper in silence; it was one of the very few things he asked them to do.
  John gave a loud exclamation as he turned the page and found himself staring at a name that he recognised.  William Grapplewell was a very well-known criminal mastermind who operated in and around the main areas of London. His trade involved smuggling and burglaries and he did it well. Not a soul knew he had been and gone at first glance and the policemen could never catch him on their beats in the dead of night.
  “What is it, John?” his wife inquired immediately, looking up sharply from the row of uneven stitches she had been unpicking in her needlework.  “You look startled.”
  “There’s been an arrest,” John replied, his face grave as he reappeared from behind The Times.  “They’ve got hold of a man; Nicholas Savage, his name is. Suspected of being involved with Grapplewell. But they are after another who was last seen in the Dagenham area a little before midnight.  He is thought to have been wearing a travelling cloak that masked his face entirely. Why this man was here last night! He might have passed this very house!”
  His wife shook her head, almost fearfully.  “London seems to be full of thieves and scoundrels and ruffians nowadays. They all want to be taken to the Old Bailey and hanged straight away.”
    “Quite right, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” her husband replied, austerely.
  “Papa!” one of the boys piped up suddenly. “I’m not afraid of criminals, I’m not! I’d have ‘em all rounded up, I would! And then I’d give ‘em a thick ear!”
  “That’s the spirit son,” John replied, clapping him on the back.
  “Don’t be so vulgar Daniel,” his mother replied reproachfully. “And you oughtn’t to encourage him, John!”
  “He’s only fooling around, Mary. Where’s the harm in that?” John said lightly. “You’d do a marvellous job, son!”
  They were back; back to genial family banter. But there was one person seated at the table in the cramped, warm sitting room that didn’t join in. Janey sat there, rigid as one of the bare boards on the floor beneath her. She hadn’t moved a muscle since her father had read the newspaper article aloud. For Janey was frightened; frightened because she didn’t know and she couldn’t understand.  She knew not who the man in the article was, but she had seen him before.  He was a criminal, and it was she who had brought him here, she who had allowed him into this world.  She was confused and tired and she needed to think.
    Janey Taylor had always been regarded as the bright spark in the family and her parents had learnt to expect great things from her; only they didn’t and probably never would have enough money to act upon and better her intelligence. In any case, it wasn’t considered right for a young lady such as Janey to be properly educated. But she had her own methods of grooming her skills and concentrating on something she was passionate about; she had been a writer for several years now. However, she belonged to a reasonably poor family and so a decent education had always been unaffordable, simply out of the question for any of them.  But her father had taught Janey and her two brothers how to read and write simple phrases and sentences and she had picked up a lot of the language from everyday conversations she heard at home and in the hustle and bustle of the city centre.  And one thing Janey had discovered was that her real enthusiasm lay in conjuring up different characters and different worlds; worlds where everything didn’t have to be logical and orderly and nobody even knew the meaning of the word methodical.  Worlds that were surviving two hundred years into the future where Planet Earth was a better place or thousands of years into the past when times were even more dire and tiresome than they were now.  Worlds that could be transformed and manipulated as she pleased; worlds where the people were as weird and wonderful as she cared to make them and nobody judged. Worlds that Janey believed she would be better off living in. Her writing was far from perfect, as could only be expected from a girl with as little experience in spelling and grammar and sentence structuring as a five-year old in the present day. But one thing that could definitely be said in favour of Janey’s collection of stories and musings was that they were never dull; her raging imagination never ceased to amaze when she put pencil to paper and all sorts of colourful, wacky scenarios came tumbling out of her naturally artistic mind.
      Lately though, due both to the grim place in which she grew up and the bitterly cold weather of the season, Janey’s writing had become increasingly darker and on the whole, very much more complex.  Whilst she generally wrote about things that she liked, things that filled her with happiness, things that made her feel brighter and more hopeful, Janey had become bored with her dreams and aspirations for the future and had started on something different; something bleaker, gloomier and also more realistic. She had taken to conjuring up places she knew well; not necessarily places that she liked or disliked but places she could picture perfectly in the eye of her mind, down to the very last detail. Of course, Janey was never able to explain the kind of scene she was trying to create, nor what emotion she wanted the reader to feel, because she had never been taught how to do either. Every instinct with which she wrote was natural and entirely down to her creative mind.  In short, an outsider would never have guessed she was quite so uneducated had the sprawling, childish handwriting that filled the page not been such a clear indicator.