“She has a family.”
“We’re never here. There’s no one to make her do her schoolwork or come inside at dark. She’s going to get into trouble, Papa.”
Neither of them so much as noted in passing that it was the child who was leading this conversation.
“You want to quit?” Hudson asked.
It did not need the dangerous edge to his voice to make Clarissa see the bad in that idea. Without her, Papa’s attempts at crime would lead first to the bottle, then to the police, and finally a return to rooms with peeling wallpaper and the stench of urine and cabbages. She shuddered, and brought out the idea that she had been aware of for weeks now: an idea both appealing and repugnant. “I’m sorry, Papa, but unless you want to get a regular job, I think we’ll have to find a family that Allie can live with. Just until we get more settled.”
She hoped her father would object harder than he did. She knew that she was being selfish, wanting him all to herself. But he did not. In the end, it was Alicia who cried and sulked and dragged her toes—up to the moment when the spinster teacher in need of income opened the door of her guest bedroom, and little Alicia’s jaw dropped. Her eyes travelled across the frills on the bed, the crisp curtains on the window, the little painted bookshelf in the corner. There was even a brand-new dolly with a porcelain head and fluffy skirt, propped against the pillow.
After that, it was Clarissa who had the tears in her eyes, leaving her sister with Miss Constable. And even when she and Pa did move, to a proper flat with a kitchen and housekeeper (of sorts) to keep it running, Alicia only came for the occasional visit.
The following year, they had to buy a series of new frocks as the old ones became too short and too snug. Clarissa no longer looked like a child playing dress-up, when she wore bustled skirts. Once or twice that autumn, she caught an odd, thoughtful sort of look on her father’s face. Not until the closing weeks of 1871 did she understand.
Clarissa Hudson was fifteen and a half years old. It took some work now for her to look like a child, but no effort at all to dress her as a young woman. They were in Ballarat, working their way through the booming mine towns, posing as the widowed owner of a large emporium looking to expand business into the hinterland. It was not entirely appropriate to take his shy young daughter into the meetings he held in restaurants and saloons, but his widowhood was recent, and surely it was all quite innocent…
A survey of the railway maps had given them their plan. Three towns: Echuca, Bendigo, Ballarat. Find a Mark, soften him up, lighten his wallet, slip away.
The first two went fine, the takings nice and rich. But Ballarat was a problem. For one thing, the town was in the midst of a slump, having over-extended in the madness of gold lying free on the ground. As a result, the people weren’t…happy. Not one expansive face in the lot.
“I think we should go home,” Clarissa said to her father that night. “It would be a nice surprise for Allie.”
“She’s not expecting us until Christmas,” Hudson said. “We can spend a few more days.”
“Pa, I don’t like it here.”
His face took on that hated expression of wheedling he got when he was either keeping something from her, or trying to convince her to do something she didn’t want to. “The place is one step up from the Bush, yes, but the men here have money.”
“I know that, Pa, but—”
“You losing your nerve, girl? Want to trade places with Allie for a while?”
“Of course not, Pa. It’s just, I don’t like it here.”
“Oh, for Christ sake, Clarrie,” he snapped. “I hope you’re not going to get all dithery on me. There’s gold here. We’ll leave when we have our share.”
The next day, coax her as he might, Clarissa would not settle on a Mark. That night, Hudson got drunk for the first time in weeks, and ended up slapping her across the face. At luncheon the following day, a man approached them in the busy hotel restaurant, gave her a polite tip of the hat, then turned to her father to ask about the shops he was thinking to build.
It was a surprise, but not unheard of, for a man to hear rumours of profit and approach about getting an early slice of the pie. More unusual was the man’s willingness to ignore her: Clarissa Hudson was presenting herself to the world as a nubile innocent, a morsel few men could resist. None in her experience had entirely overlooked her.
Until Mr Bevins. She might have been Pa’s elder sister, for all the interest he demonstrated.
With growing pique, she watched the man and Pa talk business. Twice she broke in with witty remarks; both times, he gave her a polite smile and returned to the topic.
Then he asked how far the plans had got. Hudson had an increasingly worn set of architectural drawings to pull out when the topic was approaching actual sums, but they were not the sort of thing he carried about with him to the luncheon table.
He laid his table napkin by his plate and said he would just be a minute. At last, Bevins turned to Clarissa—but still, with that absent politeness on his face. It was becoming vexing.
“Your father is quite the inspired businessman,” he said.
“Isn’t he, though?”
“Although a girl like you must find these conversations tedious. It’s too bad—oh, drat,” he said, and pulled his watch from his pocket. “I forgot all about a wire I promised to send my partner in Melbourne. Young lady, I don’t suppose you know where I might find a telegraph office?”
She did, in fact. She started to explain, but he apologised that, being new to town, he was unfamiliar with the landmarks she was mentioning. So she offered to show him the way.
Stepping down into the street, he offered his arm. She took his assistance, and left her arm through his. If she could convince the fellow that she was not a child, she might work herself back into this Job: it would not be good to encourage Pa to think he could manage without her.
They strolled past the shops, Mr Bevins paying a degree more attention to her, although there was still something of the attitude of an uncle unfamiliar with the ways of children about the way he kept his head politely tipped to listen.
Until they stepped around a tall heap of builders’ materials and, momentarily out of sight of the street, he picked her bodily up and carried her into the dark alleyway beyond. One hand was across her mouth, the other pulling at the thickness of her skirts. In seconds, all that separated their flesh was the thin cloth of her drawers—and already, those fingers were seeking out the dividing seam…
The nearness of his goal distracted him. The hand across Clarissa’s mouth went slack, just a fraction—and Clarissa’s teeth clamped for all she was worth into one thick finger. With a bellow of pain, he shook himself free. She drew breath for a scream, but it scarcely began when his unwounded hand slammed against the side of her face. In a fury, his fingers went around her throat—but her one brief moment of shriek had been enough. Bevins heard the shouts from the road, and ran.
Her father put his arm around her shoulders and hurried her to their rooms in the hotel. The instant they were inside their rooms, he pushed her away and slapped her so hard, she fell to the floor.
“What the hell were you up to, you damned hussy? You think I didn’t see how you had your eyes on that bastard? Flirting and—”
“No, Papa!” Her voice was hoarse, coming out as little more than a whisper. “I never, I didn’t want, I was just—”
“—flinging yourself on him. Jesus wept, what would your mother say?”
“No! I was only showing him where the telegraph—” She was weeping, cowering on the floor.
He hit her again, and kicked her thick skirts, and might have done her serious damage but for the banging that came on the door.
Since she’d been in a state of turmoil when she’d entered the hotel lobby, the manager could not claim that her father had been roughing her up. He had heard the angry shouts, though, and knew what had happened. He agreed to say no more—if they left his hotel.
The Hudso
ns fled Ballarat that afternoon. Once they were alone in their train compartment, she used the last threads of her voice to convince her father that she was not at fault. That she was, despite her profession and her history, an innocent victim. A child who had failed to see danger in a predatory male.
Her voice trickled away to nothing, but not before his wrath was set aside.
It took many months before Clarissa’s front teeth felt sturdy enough for an apple. Her throat was hoarse for a week, her body—and her confidence—badly shaken. When she could talk again, she told her father that he absolutely had to let her choose their Mark, from now on. That never again would she work a Cheat on someone who felt smooth as a sheet of polished glass.
James Hudson agreed, vehemently. Once he’d heard her truth, he was almost as frightened as his daughter. He gave her another long lecture on the dangers of loose morals, and the need to live up to her mother’s love—which might have seemed outright hypocrisy, but did in fact make sense to Clarissa. She promised him that she would never give herself to a man except for love, as her mother before her had. Hudson put his arms around her, and wept, and went out and got drunk.
Two weeks later, he gave her a Christmas present of more value than a lecture: he gave her a gun.
It was an ivory-handled, two-shot derringer, tiny enough for a lady’s handbag, serious enough to damage. What’s more, he took her out into the bush to practice with it, until she could hit two bottles out of three from twenty feet away, and every other one at twenty-five.
Hudson’s thoughtful looks disappeared, replaced by a sort of knowing pride, the shared secret of her weapon, and her skill. As he told her, men don’t expect a pretty girl to have a sting.
That, then, was the life of Clarissa Hudson. For nine years, 1867 to 1876, she and her father worked their way up and down the young, growing country, Brisbane to Adelaide, running their Cheats. Every few months they would cross to New Zealand for a few weeks (Hudson fortifying his nerves with drink) to take advantage of the fresher fields of Wellington and Auckland. They talked occasionally of going further afield, despite Hudson’s horror of sea voyages, but neither of them wanted to be too far from Alicia—though in fact, that young lady seemed little interested in their presence when they were in Sydney, and rarely replied to the long letters her father wrote from distant cities.
Alicia was one reason for staying near to Sydney. Clarissa’s other concern was that, outside the rough-and-tumble societies of Australia and New Zealand, her father would look like what he was: a working-class outsider.
Not so with Clarissa. During those years, she went from child to woman. As her bust developed and her face lost its childish lines, the Cheats changed, becoming darker, more dangerous, and ever more lucrative. She was good at what she did, capable of everything from the most complex and time-consuming Cheat to the slow, flirtatious glance in a street-car, distracting a man so her father, despite his rough hands, could slip away with the fellow’s wallet. And even if the man discovered he had been robbed, he never suspected the girl with the pretty dark eyes.
Which was the final lesson in her education: a man was loth to press charges if he was aware that greed—or lust—had got him into that situation. A public declaration would not only reveal his stupidity, but let others know how fully he had participated in his own downfall. Clarissa’s victims practically begged her to take their money.
Still, by Christmas of 1875, Clarissa was aware that Sydney was growing decidedly small for the Hudsons. It took ever longer to locate a victim, and the machination of the Cheats became increasingly elaborate as the wary attitudes of those they’d taken from began to penetrate even the thicker skulls of Society.
Shortly after Clarissa’s twentieth birthday, in May, 1876, Jim Hudson told his daughter that they were going to London.
—
“Don’t be ridiculous, Papa,” she said absently, studying her reflection in the cheval glass. “You’d be arrested in an instant. And besides, you hate to travel.” This year’s fashion suited her, she thought—what version of fashion that reached the antipodes, at any rate. No more crinolettes, thank goodness, and the combination of frothy bustle and train at the back with the long polonaise bodice up front made even sparsely-endowed women resemble a ship’s figurehead. Clarissa Hudson was by no means sparsely endowed.
She smoothed the long bodice that stretched down torso and hips, then turned face front, attempting a deep breath: the whalebone made it difficult, but doing so certainly pushed out the breasts in a way that would distract the Marks. Maybe a bit too much? Or were the soft violet satin and white tumble of lace sufficient to counteract the low neckline and naked shoulders? Lace was always reassuring, somehow, to the mothers.
“Girl,” her father was saying, “I won’t be arrested—it’s been twenty years. Nobody remembers Jimmy Hudson. Certainly not the police.”
Clarissa lifted her gaze at last to her father’s reflection, sprawled across the chaise behind her. “You aren’t really serious?”
“As a corpse.” He swigged the last of his drink, and got up to pour another.
The silken layers whispered as she abandoned the looking glass. “Why London? Why not Macau, or—I don’t know. San Francisco?”
“You noticed the number of invitations on the mantelpiece have gone down?”
“Papa, I did tell you that your manners are a touch…jarring.” And had become more so in recent months. He’s bored, she reflected. Really bored, if he’s considering a trip to England.
“Manners? For Christ sake, girl, this is Australia!”
“All the more reason. Society here is so new, it can’t afford to ignore the niceties.”
“Well, whatever it is, I think they’re on to us.”
“I did warn you it was too soon to go after Mrs Pondworth’s emeralds. Are we expecting another visit from the police, then?” It had happened twice before. Both times, although the detectives had eyed her father with suspicion, in the end Clarissa’s unassailable wide-eyed naiveté had sent them on their way. She did not wish a third such experience. “And even if the London police have forgot you, what about your boss? You left England in the first place because of him.”
“Oh, Clarrie, The Bishop’s sure to be dead and gone by now. And if he isn’t, well hell, it’s only money. I can pay him back easy.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t call me that. You know, perhaps it’s time for me to set out on my own.”
He laughed. “And without a loving Pa in the picture, what do you suppose Society will make of you? You think any of your high-and-mighty ladies would let a solitary girl like you within shouting distance of their sons?”
Clarissa frowned at her image. It was true, the mothers had begun to bristle when she stood too near their darling boys. Plus, she’d met all the local lads, not a one of whom interested her beyond what she could take from his bank account. She was twenty years old, and the prospects in Sydney—for money or for marriage—were few and dull.
“You may be right. When would you want to leave?”
“The Season gets going after Christmas. We should be there before, so you have some invitations to be starting with.”
“That doesn’t give us much time,” she protested. “Surely we can wait until Alicia finishes the school year?”
“I think we’ll have to leave Allie here for the time being.”
She whirled. “Pa, we can’t leave her behind—we’re a family!”
“You sure about that? Miss High-and-Mighty Constable counts more with her than you or me.”
“I see Allie every week, I send her money, I take her to the theatre, I…” Hudson got up to splash another dose of gin into his cut-glass tumbler.
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” he said when her voice had run down. “I’m not even sure she’d want to go to London, come to that.”
But as Clarissa turned back to study her reflection—the composed young woman with artfully constructed hair, wearing a dress that cost what Miss
Constable earned in a year—she knew that her father was wrong: Allie would react to the city as she would to this dress: she’d claw her sister naked for a chance at England.
But once there, what? Alicia had none of the elder sister’s chameleon tendencies. Her voice and manners were nicely suited to Miss Constable’s schoolmarm household, but even in Sydney, grandees would smirk before she so much as opened her mouth. Plus that, Miss Constable had spoiled her a bit. Alicia would never admit the need to learn a new way, to change with a new society. Here, among the middle classes, she had a niche. But in London?
“Still, she’d have time to get used to the idea,” Hudson was saying. “It’ll take us a while to get ourselves situated, like. Next year, maybe. The year after. She’ll be, what, eighteen? We can hold a dance for her. She could come out, even—ah, darlin’, just think what your mother would make of that!”
The idea was as absurd as a dingo in a silk bonnet: even Papa didn’t believe in the likelihood of his blonde-haired daughter, tiara on head, making a curtsey before the Queen. As if she’d said it aloud, he went on quickly. “Still, it’s a long time to leave her here, halfway around the world, all on her own.”
But at that, Clarissa laughed. “Pa, Allie has more friends than I do, and Miss Constable’s like a mother to her. What’s more, the woman manages to keep Allie in line. Without Miss Constable watching, it wouldn’t be long before—”
“Before what?”
“Oh, nothing. I just worry. But Alicia won’t be lonesome here, and I agree, eighteen would be a good age to give London a try.”
He was diverted, fortunately. Because what Clarissa had caught herself about to say was, How long before Allie meets a Mr Bevins?
Miss Constable would keep her charge from trouble, Clarissa had no doubts about that. But in fact, a beau would be an ideal solution. Alicia Hudson at sixteen and a half had a graceful figure and a convincing sweetness of manner. However, along with her father’s features, she had inherited some of his darker traits: a blithe assurance that the world was there for the taking, a fondness for secrets, and a boundless persistence when it came to getting what she wanted—what she felt she deserved.