Freda was not going to work in Rowntree’s! She was going to be a star! She was going to be famous! She was going to go to London! She would rather die of a surfeit of exclamation marks before she worked in an office or a factory!
What she needed was a kick up the bum, Gladys said. Full stop.
* * *
—
The night porters in Covent Garden had given way to the daytime barrow boys and stallholders. The world was waking up. Freda’s feet were already practising steps beneath her thin coverlet. Florence, sharing the lumpy horsehair mattress, moaned a protest in her sleep.
The Grand Tableau
Nellie’s flock still nestled in their beds, all apart from Niven, whose whereabouts were an eternal mystery to the rest of his family. The Cokers were, of necessity, nocturnal, the dawn chorus their lullaby, although it was already fading by the time they arrived home after celebrating Nellie’s release. They roosted in Hanover Terrace, where Regent’s Park was literally on their doorstep. Their grand white stucco house was a world away from the seediness of the Soho that paid for it.
Nellie, however, had grown accustomed to the harsh prison clock, being woken at six by the wardens banging and crashing on cell doors as if sleep itself were a sin. Sore-eyed with insomnia, she rose now from her sleepless bed after barely an hour, made herself a pot of tea and took her cup out to the garden just for the pleasure of opening a door and breathing her own air.
While she drank her tea, Nellie watched a freckled thrush tugging a worm out of a bed of red tulips. The worms would have their vengeance, for one day they would eat the thrush. They would eat Nellie, too. She feared it would not be long before she was worm food. She must prepare. She needed a plan.
When she had finished her tea she threw the residue into the flowerbed, surprising both tulips and thrush equally, and scrutinized the tea leaves that remained in the bottom of the cup. They confirmed her suspicions. Change was coming. It was time to do a Lenormand Grand Tableau.
Nellie went back inside the house and laid out the full pack of cards on the huge dining-room table. （Early Georgian, Cuban mahogany, a bargain obtained from the estate sale of an ancient lineage destroyed by the war. Nellie loved a bargain.）
“Hmm,” she said when she scrutinized the cards. A more expressive sound than it appears when written down. There was nothing mystifying about the cards. You might have said their message was Ozymandian. The serpent, the scythe, a coffin and a bouquet. The end of the party.
* * *
—
Nellie was tired. For perhaps the first time in her life she was wearying of the relentless drive required to keep their lives thrusting forward. The anchor of the Amethyst, the drag of the whole empire, was tugging her down. She knew that her health would not survive incarceration a second time and while in Holloway had begun to wonder about retiring—Deauville possibly, or even Torquay （a residential suite in the Imperial Hotel perhaps）—handing the keys to the kingdom to her children, with the crown going to the ever-reliable Edith.
Maddox had failed her in his role as protector. There had been no warning of the unexpected raid, of the sudden arrival of the uncouth troupe of uniforms who had lumbered into the club that night and arrested her. It had been humiliatingly public—the night of the Lord Mayor’s Show—and the club had been packed to the rafters. She had been led away in handcuffs, bolstered a little by the supportive jeering by the police aimed at the Amethyst’s regulars.
Maddox had visited her in jail, vigorously defending himself. He had not been on duty on the night of the raid, he said, and she must surely understand that, despite his best attentions, he was unable to divert the entirety of the Metropolitan Police all of the time. “Methinks he doth protest too much,” Nellie said to her new cellmate.
The Belgian woman who had murdered her lover had been moved to a long-term wing. Nellie’s new cellmate, Agnes, was from a family of cockney crooks and thieves; she and her sister were members of the notorious Forty Thieves gang. All women. （“Good idea,” Nellie said.）
There was a grapevine telegraph in Holloway that buzzed with a heady mixture of rumour and fact. Agnes herself was well acquainted with Maddox. “He’s after you, Nellie,” she warned. “He’s watched you all these years, seen how well you’ve done and now he wants it for himself.” It seemed that Maddox was no longer content to be the knave, he wanted to overthrow the Queen of Clubs and make himself the King.
“Over his dead body,” Nellie said.
She was puzzled. Why wasn’t he making his move while she was in jail?