The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman

Author:Philip Pullman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic UK
Published: 2015-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

THE ORDER OF SANCTISSIMA SOPHIA

Mr Parrish had many contacts on the unsavoury shores of the underworld, and it didn’t take him long to set the search for Sally in motion. He did it scientifically, following the principles outlined in Abner T. Handley’s capital work, The Young Man’s Friend: A Guide to Business Success, which he had spent many profitable hours studying. Abner T. Handley was eloquent on the subjects of prudence and resourcefulness, and Mr Parrish felt that he’d set new standards in those departments, because he’d offered a reward of fifty pounds for news of Sally’s whereabouts – the money, of course, being Sally’s own. What could be more elegantly economical than making the quarry pay for the hunt?

Simultaneously, Assistant Commissioner Bushell was instructing the Superintendents of the Whitechapel, Stepney and Thames Divisions of the Metropolitan Police to divert as many men as possible to the search. They had a total of 1,235 men under their commands, and while privately each of them thought it was a quite extraordinary and unwarranted interference from the old man, who ought to stick to pushing paper around in Scotland Yard, they were none the less each determined to look well by catching her; so they returned to their divisions, and set a good number of those 1,235 to work.

Nor did Assistant Commissioner Bushell forget Goldberg. He had his own views on foreign agitators, socialists to a man, or communists, or anarchists, or worse, and he had an agent who’d done this kind of work for him in the past; so he summoned him to Scotland Yard and told him to look for this political scoundrel and report back as soon as he’d found him.

Sally, that morning, went out with Miss Robbins again. They went this time to visit a family of matchbox-makers. Miss Robbins was compiling statistics for a report on social conditions in the East End, and Sally went with her because she wanted to see a sweatshop.

It was a family of five: father, mother, two daughters in their teens, and a sick little boy of seven all crammed into a room no bigger than twelve feet by eight. The boy lay on a mattress in the corner, scarcely breathing. The rest of them worked around a table in the dingy light from the window. The air was thick with the smells of sickness, of sweat, of fish, of glue. The family’s hands moved without ceasing, pasting strips of wood to strips of magenta-coloured paper, standing them on one side to dry, then folding them into matchboxes. One of the daughters, a bright, rebellious-looking girl, was tying bundles of completed boxes together. They got twopence farthing from the factory for every twelve dozen boxes they made, said the father. Sally could hardly believe it, but Miss Robbins confirmed what he said. Furthermore, they had to buy their own string and paste. By working all the hours of daylight and late into the night, they could make just enough money to keep starvation at bay.

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