Authors: Leah Fleming
She avoided the drunks who thought she was fair game. Costellos might be dirt poor but Mother warned her not to give any of them the eye or they might think they could take her down the back
alley and mess with her private parts. Some of her school friends had already gone down that slippery slope, so on Friday nights they were out on the town with painted faces when the men had their
pay packets. She knew she didn’t scare the horses with her black hair and bluebell eyes, but nothing would make her go down that path. Greta had a nose for danger.
As she watched the young shoppers with their mamas wearing fine gowns, cloaks and over-mantles, sporting perky hats from the smart millinery shops, it was hard not be envious. They didn’t
have to rise at the crack of dawn or spend the week with hands doused in scrubbing soap.
The preacher at the Mission Hall told them that everyone was equal in the sight of the Lord but not in York, they weren’t. You knew your place just by your address. Living off Navigation
Road, Walmgate might be within the city walls but it was a rat infested, warren of back courts and dilapidated houses, full of Irish immigrants who came after the terrible potato famine years ago.
Brendan Costello worked as a navvy building railways in Yorkshire. He’d earned a decent wage and found an English wife. They’d been respectable, well shod and fed, living in clean
rooms, but his dying of the cholera fever changed everything. Now they rented two flea-bitten rooms and a wash house close to the stand pipe so Mother could boil water in the copper and take in
washing.
Two of Greta’s brothers had died as babies so now there was just To m and Kitty to feed and keep clean, but it was hard in those damp rooms. Let no one say Mother didn’t try her best
to keep them as they once were. There was no chance of staying on at St Margaret’s School when she was needed at home. Was it wrong to want more for herself than skivvy work? To m went out
with the street boys collecting dog muck in pails to sell to the tanneries and he stunk to high heaven if they got in a silly fight. Even Kitty had to mind babies for a few pennies. That’s
how they survived to the week end.
There were skivers like Nora Walsh who made her living reading tea leaves, telling stuff and nonsense to wide-eyed wifies. Only the other day she’d plonked herself down at their table to
cadge a mug of tea and a bit of a craic while Mother was trying to press shirts. She’d been to the pawn shop to redeem her son’s suit for Mass on the Sunday.
‘What can you see?’ Kitty asked, watching as the old woman swirled the tea leaves round.
‘Whish’t . . . I’m seeing. You’ll no have far to find yer sorrows Sadie, my girl,’ she sighed, looking up at Mother who stood pressing down on the clothes with
tight lips.
‘I don’t need you to tell me that. A husband taken before his time, two bairns dead of the fever, a house full of damp and vermin.’
‘Oh it’ll get better, in time, I promise . . . You’ll find comfort. Look.’
‘Read mine, then,’ Greta held out her hand, curious. Nothing could be worse than the last years. Perhaps there’d be good news for her too.
‘And me,’ Kitty added, looking up from her chores.
‘You’re too young for such capers,’ Mother snapped.
‘No, it’s never too young to know your fate,’ Nora replied, rinsing out the cup carefully, filling it up again and swirling it around.
‘I don’t hold with tempting fate, putting ideas in her head. Leave her be.’
Greta stood up in a sulk. ‘I never get any fun. My hand’s as good as anyone else’s or is it all a trick?’
‘Oh give the girl a go or there’ll be no peace . . .’
Widow Walsh examined Greta’s long fingers, looking up at the girl and then at the tea leaves in the cup. Greta’s face was pink with expectation. The widow opened her mouth as if to
speak and then looked at her mother, shaking her head. ‘I can’t see nothing, dearie. It’s all gone cloudy. Perhaps another day.’
Greta knew she had seen something in the shift and flicker of her eyes from hand to cup and in how she changed the subject, turning away.
‘Am I going to die young, then?’ she whispered, staring at her open palm.
‘Of course not, look at that long life line and those fingers.’
‘Then what can you see?’
‘Nothing for you to be bothering about, just live out your span as it comes to you but I see danger in running water . . . What’s for you will no go past you, child. Don’t be
in such a hurry. Thanks for the cuppa, Sadie, I’ll be away to my own midden.’ With that she rose and left them staring at each other.
‘That’s what comes of meddling in things that are not our concern,’ Mother said.
‘Hurry up there, lass,’ shouted a farmer’s wife, as Greta stood daydreaming of this conversation. It was a long day until the market had to be packed up, but she was free now
to wander round the ancient streets with coins jangling in her pocket. She was in no hurry to go home for the bath time in the zinc tub. They had to be scrubbed up for Sunday school and spotless no
matter what it cost Mother in soap and elbow grease.
Greta was proud that their rooms didn’t smell, like so many down the street, of wet nappies, damp dogs, boiled cabbage peelings and sweaty armpits. Not that there was much for them to
clean in the way of clothes and boots but they got by, just.
Greta took her usual zig-zag route along the back streets to the heart of the city’s shopping. If you lived in York, you lived in many worlds: poor folk by the river, parsons by the
Minster, soldiers in the barracks and shopkeepers open all hours. There were cobblers, dairymen, theatres, a church on every corner, coaching inns and public houses and cobbled streets with tall
houses leaning over to almost touch each other.
The walls of the city were like arms enclosing everyone inside and Greta loved going through the ancient city gates, shuddering at the thought of heads stuck on spikes for all to see in the
olden days. There was the famous castle up a steep mound and parks to play in, but it was the rows of higgledy-piggledy shops under the watchful eye of the Minster towers she was making for now;
those shiny shops full of beautiful hats, pictures, pretty pieces of furniture and, best of all, the sparkling windows full of jewels, ticking clocks, rings and necklaces.
Greta knew every one of those windows and how their displays changed from season to season. It was hard not to stare at the elegant ladies and gentlemen who came in their carriages to glide
through the hallowed doorways, waited on by men in dark coats and white collars. She was invisible to them in her short grey cloak and patched skirt stained from a day’s market work. She
melted into the stone walls letting them pass as she lingered, eyeing what she would have if she could have it, while knowing it was all wishful thinking.
Dreaming cost nothing but sometimes she stared in a window for so long that a young assistant would tell her to move on. ‘You’re blocking the view, girl.’ There was one
jewellery shop in Stonegate she never lingered over since the time the owner threatened to call the police, suspecting she was casing the shop to rob.
If only I could be a part of this world
, she sighed. There must be magic behind those doors, handling such beautiful things: a world far from the squalor of Walmgate’s back to
back houses and noisy neighbours. Greta stared at her callused hands. Who would want hands like these? What had Widow Walsh seen that she refused to tell? Was there a future waiting for her if only
she could find it? A future where one day she would walk through those fine shop doors in furs and finery? The very thought of this made her ache with longing for a life better than mending
combinations, drawers and scrubbing work clothes.
She wanted a house with a proper fireplace and coal scuttle, net curtains and somewhere to sit of an evening. It was this longing that was like a grit inside her. ‘All that glitters
isn’t gold,’ went the proverb she’d embroidered for the nuns. All that mattered was that Mother and the others were fed and the younger ones strong enough to find work when the
time came for them to leave school. She’d been taught at school that hard work and duty was its own reward, but there had to be more to life than that, some sparkle to lift her spirits out of
those horse-dung streets. Colour and starlight, beautiful objects dazzling the eyes; they would brighten anyone’s life. How was she ever going to find those things while living off Navigation
Road?
It shouldn’t matter, but in her heart, she knew it did. The Costellos, through no fault of their own, were poor, back-street-poor. Mother deserved more than what she’d suffered and
it was up to Greta to make something happen. Staring into shop windows wouldn’t alter anything. Perhaps, she thought, her future was in these hands of hers. Perhaps if she tried to better
herself, these hands would open a path to a better life for all of them – if only she just knew how.
Ebenezer Slinger was having a bad day. Since the pearl fever of the 1860s, many of the Scottish rivers were being fished out. He saw banks of broken shells piled up on the
shingle that told their own tale of reckless fishermen gouging out the estuary beds in a search for a quick sale.
The season was short in the summer and other pearl dealers were tramping round the traveller camps for a quick exchange. Farm boys and town lads with tents were lining the inland rivers hoping
to make a fortune on their weekend jaunts.
Eben was not downhearted. He was one of the best in the business. There was not a pearl of note that passed him by. He had a nose for a paragon gem and his nose was twitching. Those
unios
were still sitting proud, those
margaritaferas,
mussels making beauteous Scottish fresh water pearls were famous since Roman times.
He had learned his calling the hard way in a London apprenticeship: examining, selecting, grading pearls to be drilled through and strung into the finest of necklaces. It was years of hard slog
spent at the beck and call of a tyrant jeweller, but now he was ready to strike out on his own. Now he needed stock – quality stock – but even more than that, he needed a clutch of
priceless pearl eggs to warm his heart and set him up in business.
His earliest memory was clutching at his mother’s string of pearls and the scent of her porcelain skin. He had fallen in love with the pearls’ lustre and subtle hues. They reminded
him of her before she died, leaving him to the mercy of those two cold aunts. No mention was ever made of his father who abandoned them before Eben was born, leaving him only a second name,
Alfred.
As a boy he read the legend of how the pearl oyster rose to the surface of the sea once a year to catch a drop of moon dew. His head told him this was scientific nonsense but in his heart he
wished it could be true. Out of such an ugly casing came the gift of a teardrop from the gods. To his eyes, the pearl was the queen of gems and from those earliest years his desire to know more had
grown.
Eben could repair a timepiece, solder gold links. He could assess a fine Ceylon sapphire or Burmese ruby, a well-cut African diamond, but there was only one gem that lifted his spirits. Now he
was back in his old hunting ground ready for the chase.
He smiled, feeling into the deep recesses of his old coat for a nest of pearls in a chamois leather pouch that no pick-pocket would ever reach without having his throat cut.
It never paid to look prosperous. He was young enough to look like any other town boy off to chance his luck in the fast-flowing Tay river outside Perth. He’d come up on the train from
Edinburgh and he was intending to take lodgings in the town and wander around the farmsteads in the winter months when trade would be easier to come by. Housewives needed shoes and tweeds, coats
for their offspring, he reckoned. Selling a few good pearls was an easy way to augment the family coffers.
He consoled his conscience with the thought that he was only doing what others in the trade were doing. He was what they called round here, ‘canny’. He struck a hard bargain but his
prices were fair enough – though woe betide any fool who tried to foist fakes on him: alabaster beads covered in salmon-skin paste. He knew a dull ‘sleepy’ pearl, fit only for
background decoration or ground up for medicines in the Orient to treat yellow eye and snake bites. It wasn’t his fault if the seller had no idea of the value of what he held in his hand or
if the pearls had been mishandled. Ignorance was no excuse in his trade. Ignorance was stupidity. If someone spent all day fishing these river mussels and gave them no respect, then he didn’t
enlighten them.
How could anyone treat a precious pearl with careless abandon, scratching the surface, squashing them together? He had heard one of the greatest pearls ever to see daylight was ruined because it
was baked for a meal, and only found when eaten. How Eben yearned to find a rarity so fine that all the world would come to his door; kings, maharajahs, empresses, coming to be in its presence and
buy from his emporium.
He learned early that no jewel could bring warmth to a cold heart and an unloving embrace, that no pearl could have ever cured his mother’s madness or stopped his father from deserting
them. Yet in the calm beauty of a fine pearl there was cheer and the inspiration to collect others, to become rich and respected in the trade. Now the search for such treasures was taking over his
life.
In his mind his pearls were symbols of love and perfection, purity and wisdom. Even the Bible said the same thing – and he’d read that they were luckiest in life who were born in the
pearl month of June, which he was.
On that bright autumn morning of 1879, Eben was a young man on a mission to make his fortune in discovering the finest of Scottish pearls. ‘Search and ye shall find, knock and it shall be
opened up to you,’ was his mantra. There was a spring in his step as he got off the train north, for he sensed in his very bones they were here for his taking.
As the summer faded into golden leafed autumn, Sam Baillie’s cough grew worse and no amount of Jeannie’s hedge doctoring could shift the phlegm or the shivers. Jem
feared for his father. They had told no one of their rich find and Sam, like a man possessed, returned again to the same spot just in case, but his hoard yielded just a few more button-sized pearls
– nothing to compare with the dream pearl. The winds blew over the river making it brown and swirling with mud. Sam took to his bed and Jem was afraid it was for the last time.