Jack Lark: Rogue Read Online Free Page A

Instead, he was gawping at a pair of young girls hurrying along, their bare heads an indication of their employment. One caught his eye and blew him a kiss before rushing past, her skirts lifted high above ankles encased in faded pink silk stockings.
    ‘Whitechapel is no different from any of the other rookeries that plague the city.’ Sir Humphrey carried on with his lecture, only pausing to smile as he saw the direction of his son’s gaze. ‘We shall not venture in far. The place is full of robbers, cut-throats and thieves, and even I should be lost within minutes. But at this hour we should be reasonably safe. Most people will still be sober, and we are too early for the drunk to have started a ruckus. We shall take just a taste of the atmosphere; I know a place that should suit us admirably, one that is listed in
The Swell’s Night Guide
, a book I heartily recommend you read.’
    Sir Humphrey reached across and laid his arm protectively around his son’s shoulders. He put his lips close to the boy’s ear, his voice hushed. ‘I shall be honest with you. I should not be brave enough to venture into such area once the light has gone.’ He glanced upwards. The day was grey, the sky the colour of smoke, but it was not yet four in the afternoon and he felt reasonably confident escorting his son into the fringes of Whitechapel. They had enjoyed a fine luncheon at his club before taking a hackney carriage to Bishopsgate. From there they had walked, picking their way through the side streets that led in the direction of Petticoat Lane. ‘I fancy we shall be safe for a while longer. I would suggest that you keep your wits about you and look sharp.’
    Edmund glanced keenly at his father. Even through the fog of claret and port he heard a hint of fear in the old man’s voice. It was hard to read the face hidden behind the white mutton-chop whiskers, though, and Edmund did not know his father well enough to understand his emotion.
    They stepped on smartly, Sir Humphrey’s cane pointing the way, but their progress was soon slowed. The streets were busy, and a great crowd of people bustled this way and that, the noise washing over father and son as they attempted to make their way through the river of bodies. Edmund trotted after his father, doing his best not to get left behind. People jostled past, heads down, and he was knocked from side to side by the jarring of an errant elbow or shoulder used to force passage, the collisions so common as to be taken for normality in such a crowded thoroughfare.
    Not everyone was on the move. The streets were where people came to do business, and the sound of fast-moving boots merged with the cries of the mechanics touting their work and the loud voices of the patterers, the aristocrats among the street-sellers, who harangued the passing crowds, their fantastical boasts and wild claims falling on the deaf ears of those who had heard them one time too many. Yet not all the traders were having such poor luck. The watercress sellers were doing a fair business, their penny bundles bought by housewives preparing for their tea; one such seller, a girl of no more than eight, stepped towards Edmund, the tin tray suspended around her neck held out towards him.
    ‘Cress, mister? Penny a bundle?’
    Edmund shook his head and hurried on. He wondered at his father’s sanity in bringing him on such an expedition. Edmund spent little time in the family’s house in Wilton Crescent, yet Sir Humphrey had insisted that he learn something of the great city before he finished his studies, and so he had come to town with his mother and three sisters.
    ‘Catch ’em alive-o!’
    A man wearing a tall top hat pressed close as he worked the crowd. The sight of the hundreds of dead flies trapped on the sticky paper wrapped around the hat was enough to send another bitter surge of bile into Edmund’s throat, and he did his best to step past the fly-paper seller without coming close to his nauseating