The Angel of Bishopsgate

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Finn paced the edges of their small room. He would have traded places with her in a heartbeat if she’d let him. Instead, he waited. It went against everything he expected of himself and the worst of images flooded through him. He wanted to protect her. Always. What was she walking into? What would they do to her?

Around the room, her belongings were strewn about. Her emptied cake baskets full of stale crumbs - her treacle tins and stockings, a drying petticoat and a burgundy shawl - one he had given her for a birthday kept only for special occasions. Things that smelled of her, things worn with her touch. In all their years together, he had wanted to give her more. To provide a life that let them flourish and rise above the struggle of the Old Nichol. And yet here they still were.

They had settled here by accident, glad to be anywhere but Dublin, and he’d slogged each day of the last eight years in its work yards and grime. Always striving. Always. Breaking his back and busting his knuckles, fighting back the niggling feeling that a day would come when he couldn't hold on any longer. A day when Tessie too might disappear.

At ten years old his mother had taken her last breath in the street, tossed from their boarding house for fear of spreading her infection. He and his younger brother, Tadhg, only six, had been left to forage alone. They’d survived a year with Finn making sure Tadhg had food in his belly, that he was warm enough, that he was safe. He fought for that little boy as everything he had left in the world. Until Dublin took him too, in a moment of carelessness, of reckless boyish abandon. He carried the weight of it with him always and had barely spoken the details to anyone, even Tessie, only sharing shreds of the truth of it - that he had lost him. That he was gone.

It seemed Dublin wouldn’t rest until it had stripped him of everyone and everything he cared for. Until he’d found Tessie and they’d found their way to the Nichol. It only amplified his love for her.

They should have left this place already. If he’d ever been able to get the money together they would have been long gone. It was what they had dreamed about on so many nights, Tessie’s head on his chest and his hands tangled in her honey-auburn hair. He told her stories of New York, of Boston, of how their lives would be out on the gold rushes. Stories he’d heard from immigrants or paperboys screaming out the headlines. But he wanted more than stories. He wanted it all to be true.

His shoulders ached and burned from his day lugging crates on the barges, and he felt them straining as he moved their bed to the side and pulled out their stash of rent money. Laying it out on the table he willed there to be more. If only they had enough to run now!

Counting it out in small, meagre piles, the numbers had not changed. Two bob short for rent, and a full six pound shy of two steerage tickets to the New World.

Finn ran his large hand over the cracks and crevices inside the wall at the chance a stray coin or two had become lodged. It hadn’t, and he packed away the rest of it, a heavy weight burning in this chest.

Whatever happened tonight, they wanted to be the authors of their own lives, not weighed down by class or history or where they had come from. Especially not by the Angel. He wanted to give that to her, for all that she had given him. They just needed to survive. He had to keep her safe.