The Lady in the Cellar by Sinclair McKay

Author:Sinclair McKay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Published: 2018-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

18

Avowed Admirers

There would have been days without number when the sky above was broiling brown; and the air was thick and suffocating with chemicals, with the piercingly caustic smell of burning rubber and ammonia, and the weightier stench of animal dung and urine. Under the shadow of the vast railway viaduct that stretched out from London Bridge station for four miles down to Greenwich was an infernal world of leather tanneries and rubber works; there were distilleries too, although their own distinct aromas were wholly smothered. Hannah Dobbs’ first view of her new city neighbourhood must have been – in the most literal sense – breath-catching and daunting.

Before she left Devon, she had secured herself lodgings in the district of Rotherhithe, on the south side of the river, near the vast timber warehouses of the Surrey Docks. Hannah did not know any better; but did the cheapness of the room on offer cause her any kind of premonitory flutter of disquiet or unease? Hannah’s train, after a change at Exeter, would have arrived at Waterloo; and after a tiring seven-hour journey, she would have stepped off the train into a shattering clamour of noise and smoke. A young woman, quite alone in this vast metropolis; how was she to establish herself? And once she had engaged a horse-drawn cab to Rotherhithe, how was she to adjust to that new realm of narrow, glistening alleys and damp walls and rotting weather-boarding, where the nearest green space was a mile away and where the close-built streets at night were alive with the pervasive menace of male drinkers?

A satisfactory domestic situation seemed elusive. There were employment agencies for servants; but her references were by necessity limited. And Hannah Dobbs was also in precisely the wrong location to walk around looking for work in grander houses; though there were some middle-class households to be found a little further south in Peckham and Camberwell, it would have been an increasingly trying business for the former dairy-maid to trudge from door to door asking if there were any jobs to be had. The real focus of work lay north of the river.

In addition to all this, a young woman living quite alone in a mean rented room close to the noisy pubs that served the hard-drinking dockers, in moist passages that by night were a malign maze, would surely have found this first taste of London deeply unsettling. After a month, when Hannah’s meagre funds had dwindled, she was forced to leave.

But she was not ready to give up altogether; somehow, she got to hear of a position at ‘Mrs Nicholson’s, Woodlands Road, Redhill’1 – a town in Surrey swaddled in the lee of the North Downs.

The work must have been relatively agreeable; Hannah stayed there for fifteen months and indeed might well have stayed longer. The reason for the termination of this job was once again her compulsion to steal. This time, she purloined ‘a piece of silk, and £1 3 shillings from a box’.

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