Alan got down his potatoes and chickpea stew and bread with margarine—no perfect plush pats of butter here—and drank his tea with no sugar at all. He’d just polished off the last crust when there was a banging at the front door.
“That’ll be Berto,” he said, rising. “He’s picking up some papers.”
His cousin Berto was indeed coughing on the doorstep. The light had gone dusk-purple, the heat of the day starting to dissipate. Alan let Berto into the dim entryway and handed over the small pile of paper that was his latest manuscript, handwritten pages carefully wrapped and tied.
“Don’t read it.”
“Fuck off,” said the illiterate Berto amiably. “Nothing else? My man keeps asking if there’s any more coming, after those choice bits you gave me.”
Berto was far more of an East End criminal than Alan had ever been. His many connections, both professional and romantic, ran deep into the underbelly of the city. Alan did tell him he’d turn up strangled in the Thames if he kept fucking men with names like Bloody Joe, but Berto was useful. He knew a lot of fences—including the one who’d taken care of Lord Hawthorn’s pocket watch and cufflinks—and was a trustworthy and discreet middleman between the anonymous pornographer known as the Roman and the underground printer who produced his purple pamphlets.
Besides, they were the two invert cousins in the Catholic horde of their family, and that gave them a bond.
Alan lowered his voice. “I’m not stealing any more. I promised Mamma.”
“Maria don’t need to know—oi, all right.” Berto lifted the parcel in surrender. “Got it. I’ll be round with the payment for this next week.”
Carolina and Dick took their family to bed soon after supper. The house had a small downstairs room that served as a parlour, warm enough in summer to sit there in the evenings without a fire. Bella sat in a chair with a huge basket of the darning she took in for a small fee, balancing one garment at a time on the bulge of her belly. Her brow furrowed as she squinted at her rapidly moving needle.
“Do you want to wreck your eyes like Mamma?” Alan said sharply. “Light another candle, or put some pennies in the gas meter. We can afford it.”
Bella made a face at him, but did so. The light played on the glowing curve of her cheek and her glossy black hair. Emilio and Carolina were nothing to sneeze at, but all the best looks of Alan’s family had been saved for his little sister, as if to let her grow into the promise of her name. And pregnancy suited her, not that she’d have appreciated hearing it.
A long sigh from his ma. “You’re a good boy, Alanzo.”
Alan pulled up a stool and sat next to her chair, which was threadbare but cushioned. Maria had found work as a fur puller after Alan’s father died, and like most women in that profession had lost the best part of her eyesight to it. Alan’s writing had meant she could stop before she lost her lungs as well.
The prospect of this conversation had been poking Alan in the side all day. At least she was in a soft mood now. He took her hand in his own and patted it shamelessly.
Perturbator.
“Mamma,” he said. “When I was a boy, was there … I mean, did I…” Damn it. “Mamma, I need to know. Are there magicians in our family? Witches, sorcerers?”
“Witches? What are you on about?” asked Bella.
Their mother sat more upright in her chair. Her hand slid out of Alan’s so that she could cross herself.
“Don’t say such things! We’re good people. The Lord knows that. He gave us the strength to turn away the devil when he tried to do his evil work through my little ones. No witches. No.”
“What evil work?”
Maria crossed herself twice more and glared at him. So much for Alan being the good boy. He’d never been suited to that role anyway.
“It is nothing. We prayed, we used the rosary with you just as my nonna taught me, and see? The devil passed on. No evil in you. Even if you break your mamma’s heart by never coming to Mass,” she added pointedly.
“The devil— Madonna santa, Mamma!”
“Alanzo!”
The argument over his taking the Holy Virgin’s name in vain took another two minutes, while Bella—sinfully pregnant and unmarried Bella, who wasn’t allowed to go to Mass or indeed leave the house, in case anyone caught sight of her—fairly shook with smugness. Eventually, Alan managed to make his ma realise that he wasn’t going to drop the subject, and she threw up her hands and sent him upstairs to the tiny bedroom she shared with Bella, to fetch Nonna Sofia’s rosary from where it was curled up on the scratched old dresser.
Alan ran the beads through his fingers, an instinctive habit, as he took it back into the parlour. The skin of his hand warmed and tingled. The smaller beads were pale wood, the decade beads and the cross a deeper brown. All smooth and glossy with generations of prayer.
“I used to play with this,” he said. “When I was a boy.”
The feel of the wood had summoned it from the borderlands of memory. How young must he have been? Five years old, six? Living in a house like this one, his mother still sprightly and full of laughter, his father a beloved, black-whiskered presence who always smelled of sweet old milk. Being handed the rosary and taught how to say the prayers—being bored of that quickly and just enjoying the sensation of the beads running between his small fingers. His ma’s sharp voice if he stopped.
He’d completely forgotten. He’d tucked it away with all the other small pieces of painful happiness, during the bad years, and never brought it out again when life eased back from desperate to merely exhausting.
“I was never allowed to touch Nonna Sofia’s rosary,” said Bella to her darning.
No. Because only Alan, apparently, had thrown a tantrum that shattered two plates on the other side of the room. Maria had taken it as a sign that the family devil had reared its head, and the rosary had been shoved into Alan’s chubby hands the same day.
Now Alan sat with an odd clenching in his chest. He wanted to pick this up and run with it somewhere, as if it were a scandalous broadsheet wet from the printer. He wanted to—to wave it at Lord Hawthorn, who would say something puncturing so that Alan could lash back.
“Why do you ask about this now?” His ma’s eyes fastened on him as keenly as if her sight were perfect. “What happened?”
He had, damn it, sworn to Miss Blyth that he would keep what he knew about magicians secret. Alan produced a weak story about a crack in the cobbles spreading from beneath his foot when he was excited, knowing as he did that it would produce another flurry of exclamations and an exhortation that he must start using the rosary again, at once. His ma gripped the arms of her chair as if on the verge of scurrying out into the night to find a priest.
Alan hurriedly said a Hail Mary to pacify her and exchanged a final set of insults with Bella before retiring to his own room on the excuse that he had to write. Perhaps he even would. He wasn’t too tired. That strangeness still coursed beneath his skin, on top of the crackling irritation that had followed him away from Westminster, away from Lord Hawthorn’s aggravating largeness and deep voice, and through the rest of the day.