The White Rose of Spitalfields

Spitalfields belonged to Edmund Cryer and Emily Barnes. On paper it belonged to the landlords, the market masters and the silk masters, but the pavements, the passages and the dark little courts belonged to the children, and Edmund knew them as a clergyman knows his hymn book.

He was thirteen that autumn, a lanky, watchful boy with a cowlick that would not lie down and a jacket he had been growing out of for a year. Emily was eleven, a thin, quick, freckled girl with a gap in her front teeth and a laugh that carried across a street. Some years before, she had decided that Edmund was to be her particular friend. Nobody had thought to argue with her about it, least of all Edmund. They spent every hour they could in each other's company. They were out of the door at first light and not back until they were called in. They watched the porters heave their baskets into the great fruit and vegetable market, and the weavers' garrets above Fournier Street, where the looms clacked behind the long windows. They ran errands for pennies and sat on the steps of Christ Church, under that great grey spire, and watched London go by.

They were not bad children. They were mischievous, which is a different thing. They would creep up on a stallholder while he argued with a customer, and an apple would find its way into Emily's pinafore. A hot potato man once chased them the length of Wilkes Street, roaring, and they ran laughing until the stitch caught them. Mr Gedge, who kept the fruit stall at the corner of Brushfield Street, called them "the pair of 'em" and shook his fist at them twice a day. He never once sent for a constable, though. When the weather turned cold, he sometimes left a bruised pear where they would find it.

Edmund thought first of a Tuesday in the middle of October. He had gone over it so often that it had worn smooth, like a stair.

They had been up to their usual business all morning. About noon, Emily's stomach began to complain.

"I'm going home for a bite," she said. "Ma'll have bread and dripping. Wait for me by the church." And off she ran, her boots slapping the cobbles, her plait bouncing.

Edmund did not wait by the church. He wandered up Brushfield Street, where a flower seller had set up her basket against the market wall. Her name was Nell Doyle. She was a broad, red-armed Irishwoman in a man's cap, with a voice like gravel in a bucket. She sold what she could get cheap from the Covent Garden leavings: chrysanthemums, a few late Michaelmas daisies and, that day, to the boy's wonder, a bunch of white roses. They were hothouse blooms, pale as candle wax, and he had never seen anything so clean in all of Spitalfields.

He could not have said exactly why he wanted one. Emily had remarked, only the week before, that she had never been given a flower in her life. She had said it lightly, as she said most things, but he had remembered.

"How much for one?" he asked.

"Tuppence the stem, and cheap at that," said Nell Doyle, not looking down.

He had a ha'penny in his pocket, and a button. He stood there turning the ha'penny over, and he must have looked what he was, a ragged boy with a hole in his elbow and a great deal more hope than money. Nell Doyle glanced down at last. She looked at him for a long moment, then sighed through her nose and rummaged in the bottom of the basket.

"Here," she said. "This one's past it. Go on, take it, before I think better of it."

It was a white rose, but a sorry one. The edges of the petals had gone brown and papery, and the head hung to one side like a tired child. To Edmund it was the finest thing in London. He thanked her, or perhaps he only went red. He carried it back to the church steps in both hands, as if it were a lit candle.

Emily came skipping back with a crust in her fist and breadcrumbs on her chin. Edmund held the rose out. He said something clumsy, though afterwards he could never remember what.

She stopped. For once in her life she said nothing at all. Then she took it, very gently, and put her nose to it, though there was hardly any scent left.

"It's dying," she said.

"It's the best they'd give me."

"I don't mind." She looked up at him, gap-toothed and serious. "I'll treasure it, Edmund. I will. I'll keep it always."

She pinned it to the front of her shawl with a bent pin she kept in her hem. She wore it all that day and the days after, wilting as it was, and Edmund walked a little taller beside her.

That was the last whole, ordinary day he would remember. Nine days later, Emily Barnes vanished.

It was Thursday the twenty-third of October. The weather had turned raw, with a yellow river-fog that crept up out of the east and blurred the gas lamps even in the afternoon. Edmund had been kept home that morning to help his mother with her washing and was not let out until nearly three o'clock. He went straight round to the Barnes's rooms in Elder Street, and Mrs Barnes met him at the door with her sleeves rolled and flour to the elbow.

"She's gone for a loaf," she said. "I sent her a quarter-hour back. Wait, if you like, she'll be five minutes. Hollis's is only at the end of the street."

Hollis's, the baker's, was two hundred yards away. Edmund knew the distance exactly, because he would pace it afterwards more times than he could count. He waited on the step for ten minutes, and then twenty. Then he went to look for her, and found Mr Hollis scraping out his ovens. Mr Hollis had not seen Emily Barnes that day at all.

Edmund ran back. He would remember Mrs Barnes's face when he told her. It did not crumple, as he had feared. It went quite still, like a house when the lamp has been put out.

By dusk half the neighbourhood was in the street. Emily's father, Tom Barnes, was a market porter, a quiet bull of a man, and he came home at a run with his basket strap still across his chest. Constables came from the station on Commercial Street, and then an inspector in a good black coat. They knocked on doors, lifted the lids of coal-holes and had the cellars of three public houses opened. The men of the street went out with lanterns, and the women stood on the steps with their arms folded, watching the dark. Nobody had seen her. In broad daylight, in a street full of people, a girl in a grey shawl with a white rose pinned to it had walked out of her mother's door and gone clean off the face of the earth.

Edmund did not sleep that night. At first light he was out again, and he did what only a boy of that place could do. He went where a grown man would not think to look.

He knew the back ways of Spitalfields as he knew his own hands. He knew the gaps in the fences and the courts where the washing hung so thick you walked through it like a forest. He knew the stable yards and the loose boards, and the cellar grating on Lamb Street where he and Emily had once hidden from Mr Gedge for a whole hour. He crawled through all of them. He called her name down areas and up stairwells until his voice cracked. He looked at the church crypt-door, under the market stalls and in the empty weavers' lofts where the pigeons nested.

It was in Elder Street itself, in the grey of the second morning, that he found the first petal. It lay on the wet cobbles near the corner, small and brown-edged and curled like a dead moth. He stared at it for a long time before he understood what it was. Then he found another, a few yards on. A third lay in the gutter by Folgate Street. After that he went along on his hands and knees like a dog, and it was almost a game, though a terrible one. A fourth petal lay at the edge of a carriage-yard gate, and a fifth in the ruts beyond it. Then there were no more. The yard was wide and cobbled, and it opened onto the road where cabs and carts came and went all day. Whatever had carried her, whether it had four wheels or two, had taken her on from there.

He took what he had found to the inspector, who was kind enough, in his way. He listened with his hands behind his back and looked at the five brown petals in the boy's palm. Then he said that Edmund was a good lad, and that rose petals blew about every street in London. He had a hundred men to organise. He sent Edmund home to his mother.

Edmund was not a clever boy then, only a stubborn one, but there are things that stubbornness notices. He noticed that the petals had gone one way, towards the carriage-yard. He noticed that Emily's rose had been pinned on tightly with a bent pin, and a pin does not drop from a shawl in a fog without a reason. It seemed to him that somebody had held her close enough to jostle it, and that she had pulled at it, or been pulled. He noticed, too, that nobody had asked Nell Doyle a single question.

So he asked her himself.

She was at her place by the market wall, blowing on her hands. Edmund told her all of it, and watched her face change.

"I wondered where that child had got to," she said slowly. "I thought nothing of it. There was a lady, the day before she went. A proper lady, mind, in a long grey cloak, the kind for travelling, with a veil. Stood where you're standing and bought my last four white roses and paid in silver without counting it. And then she asked me, quiet as you like, who the girl was with the white flower in her shawl, the one that was always about with the lad in the torn jacket."

His mouth had gone dry. "What did you say?"

"God forgive me, I said Barnes. I said she was a Barnes, from Elder Street. I thought she'd taken a fancy to her, that's all. Ladies do, with a pretty child." She stared at her red knuckles. "I told the constable who came by. He said I'd had a drop to drink, and told me to move my basket on."

Edmund ran every step of the way to the Commercial Street station, and the sergeant on the desk heard him out with the patience of a man listening to a dog bark. It was the day he first understood something about the police. They were not wicked. They heard what they had decided to hear. A flower seller who drank, a boy in a torn jacket, a lady in a grey cloak with silver in her purse: none of that fitted what they knew about missing girls in Spitalfields. They looked for the man in the doorway, the drunk, the lodger with a bad name. And the real thing, if it was the real thing, walked past them in good wool and a veil.

To be fair to them, they did look at others. There was Silas Pike, the rag-and-bone man, a sour old fellow with a donkey cart who had been seen speaking to Emily on the Monday. He was kept three days in a cell and wept the whole time. All he had done was give her a clay marble. There was Jem Corrigan, the Barneses' lodger, who had gone off without a word that same week. The police hunted him with great energy and found him in a ship's forecastle in the Poplar docks, where he had signed on in a hurry to escape a debt. He had been aboard since the Wednesday evening, and a dozen men swore to it.

And so the hunt ran dry. The hours became days, and the days became weeks. Tom Barnes walked the streets at night until his boots gave out, and Martha Barnes kept a lamp in the window of the Elder Street room. The weeks became months, and a hard winter came down over Spitalfields. Bills were pasted up with a description of Emily and then rained off the walls. A new crime, a new scandal came along, and the street's attention drifted, as it always does. Only the Barneses and one thin boy went on looking.

Edmund kept looking for years. He walked every court in the district on Sunday afternoons when he should have been at chapel. He stood on the Bishopsgate platforms and at Liverpool Street and watched the faces of the girls who passed. He kept one petal in a matchbox, the fifth, the one by the carriage gate, and he took it out and looked at it more often than he would have cared to admit.

The seasons went by quickly, as they do. He grew, and left school, and went to work. In time he put on a constable's coat and found there are doors that open to a uniform that never open to a boy. But in all those years, and behind all those doors, he never found a sign of Emily Barnes. There was no body, no letter, no grave. She had taken a ha'penny's worth of a dying rose and a promise to treasure it, and gone into the fog.

From Cryer’s journal

Rawtenstall, late autumn. The fog came down off Cribden this evening, thick and yellow, and for a moment I was thirteen years old again with my knees on the cobbles of Elder Street. I have solved a good many things since. A stolen loom-part, a drowned man, a lodger who was not what he said. And not one of them has lifted the weight I carried out of Spitalfields. I still keep the fifth petal in a matchbox in my waistcoat drawer. It is almost dust now, and I cannot bring myself to throw it out.

I used to think I became a policeman to find her. I think now I became one so that no child's friend should be sent home with a pat on the head, as I was. I have never forgotten Nell Doyle's red hands or the inspector's kind, useless smile. When a frightened lad comes to me with something small and odd in his palm, I stop what I am doing and look at it properly, because I know what it is to be told that it is nothing.

Wherever you are, Emily Barnes, I hope somebody gave you a flower that was not dying.

The White Rose of Spitalfields

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