A few years ago she wouldn’t have touched this enterprise. She’d have tested the risk, and put it back in a drawer. But big jobs had their own momentum. They’d keep Mr. Murphy and any other rival families in line. And this was big. This was bigger than big.
Her next chore was one she despised. She went to get a second pair of hands to mind the shop. She met her cousin Archie on a bench in the park. He’d curled his mustachio to magnificent points, and Mrs. Bone didn’t like that. She didn’t care for showy fashions, not outdoors. Archie jumped at the sight of her ratty skirt and blouse.
“What in the world?” he said, not able to help himself.
“Manners,” she said, pointing a finger in his face.
He ducked his chin, gave her an oily kiss on the cheek, then the hand. “Is the ledger up to date, ma’am?”
Mrs. Bone didn’t lower her finger. “Don’t you worry yourself about the ledger. Anything tricky comes up, one of the boys’ll know where to find me. I can be back in a jiffy. Believe me.”
He scratched his nose. “I was thinking about going on holiday myself.”
Mrs. Bone told him his fee.
His eyes popped. “Why didn’t you say so? I thought business was slow?”
Mrs. Bone leaned in, gripped him by the arm. He smelled of sugar and oil, pomade and cologne. His skin was polished and creamy. He looked like an egg.
“Business is never slow,” she said.
Great confidence: that’s what she would always project.
Arriving at Park Lane was quite something. The house was like a hotel, Mrs. Bone thought, wiping a line of sweat from her brow. Doors opening and closing, parcels and goods coming in and out. A place this big needed feeding, laundering, delivering, restocking. Waste of money. Of course Danny had an army of servants. Typical of his extravagant tastes. Mrs. Bone tugged her ugly hat down over her ears. I’m a poor, humble creature, she told herself sternly. I’m as low as can be. I’m a rat; I’m a worm.
She reached out and jabbed the tradesmen’s bell. Heard it ring, shrilly, somewhere in the depths of the house.
She looked up. White walls, fancy pillars, windows the size of buses. So big it could squash you. “I’ll tear you limb from limb,” she told the house, under her breath. She corrected herself. She hadn’t made any decisions about investing in this job yet. She was here to check the lay of the land—that was all.
It wasn’t the first time she’d visited. Back then the house was only half-built. She’d seen the dust cloud all the way across the park, heard the clang and clatter of construction as she approached through the trees. The scaffolding was immense: a monstrous, sprawling mass of beams and joists and planks and cranes. There must have been fifty men employed on the site. Carts lined up around the street. White tarpaulin flapping in the breeze, a tall ship with a hundred sails. It frightened her, somewhere far, far down in her gut. It made her feel nastily tiny.
She’d seen Danny stretched out on a picnic blanket, watching the men at work. Tweed jacket, white boater tied with a yellow ribbon—immaculate silk, that. His butler had crossed the grass with a silver platter, a jug of lemonade, ice bobbing on the surface.
She’d balled her fists. “Danny,” she’d called, voice hoarse.
He’d aged. Of course he had: it had been a decade since they’d seen each other. But she still recognized that quick, lethal turn of the head. That was an O’Flynn, through and through. If anyone could spot it, she could. Wealth hadn’t made him soft, not at all.
She’d wanted to scare him. At first she reckoned she’d managed it. She noted the click in his jaw. But then his mouth revealed a Cheshire Cat grin. She remembered that, too. He loved it: the thrill of winning, of beating her, of having something over on her. It was everything, the stuff of life. He was pleased to see her.
“Hullo, Sister Scarecrow,” he said, same as always.
Mrs. Bone had loved her brother. He was five years older than she was. He took her gambling when she was still a girl—only fourteen, fifteen. Dogs, fights, sometimes the races. She watched him take men out by their kneecaps. Helped him count out the returns. Went shopping with him, helped him choose beautiful things. Danny knew his silks. He had a fine collection of neckerchiefs. Yellow spotted, black fringed, always printed, never plain. He bought quality. So did she.
The diamonds had been his idea. She had to credit him with that. It was the early rush across the world to the mines in Kimberley: you had to be quick as lightning to get in with a shot. He’d brought the scheme to all the neighbors before he came to his little sister.
“You’re asking me last?” she said. Clever of him, really. It put her in a temper. She had the cash, after all. She was already making good money, her commissions from prizefights and protection.
“You’ll make it all back,” he said. “And then some.”
“Says you.”
“Says me, exactly.” He gave her a hard look. “And you can’t tag around after me forever. You need a husband. You’ll need a down payment.”
Mrs. Bone wasn’t Mrs. Bone, back then. She was just a girl called Ruth O’Flynn, from Devil’s Acre, working for an ironmonger called Mr. Bone who kept a shop over in Aldgate. She was good at selling nails. She looked like a nail. Hard and pointed and gleaming. Her older brother was the flash one, the one with the wild schemes and reckonings. He was twenty-one and a man of the world: he was going to bend it to his will.
“Don’t mess me about, Danny,” she said.
He shrugged. “The risk’s on you. Take it or leave it.”
He called a spade a spade, did Danny. Or at least he did when it pleased him. When it suited the story. But she understood that, too, didn’t she? She gave him what he needed in the end. Enough to buy his ticket all the way across the world, to the Cape Colony.
I’m on the make, she told herself, reading his letters, racing through the newspapers, waiting for him to buy his first claim, purchase his first stones, start making returns. It was very wonderful, that heart-stopping, breathless feeling. That certainty that she was sorted, that this was it, this was her made, forever. It lasted until the letters stopped. Till Danny dropped her. Vanished altogether.
At first she couldn’t credit it. She went up to town, waited outside the offices of the only mining company she knew, doorstepped a clerk on his way home for dinner. There were a whole host of women on the pavement, waving billets and ticket stubs and blurry photographs, asking for news of husbands and brothers and cousins who’d gone off to the mines.
“It’s about my brother,” she said. “Daniel O’Flynn.”
The clerk was a young man, but he had silvery threads in his hair. He smoothed them now, irritation written all across his face. “Madam. I get inquiries such as these nearly every week. There are as many as fifty thousand men out there. You understand? I would have—we have—simply no way of knowing all their movements.”
She squared up to him, pressed a letter into his hand. “Put out an inquiry. That’s all I’m asking.”
The clerk clicked his tongue in impatience. “I see I must be frank with you. It is a hard life out there. It’s been a long, taxing summer. Even when they take the greatest care in the world, men put their lives in the hands of their Maker every day.” He frowned. “Is this an insurance matter?” he asked. “If so, I really must reserve my counsel.”