Chapter Six
Polly Nichols needed a drink.
It’d been nearly seven hours since her last glass of gin and she was beginning to shake, she needed another so badly. There was no money in her pockets, either, to buy more. Worse, trade had been miserably slow all day, everywhere from the Tower north to Spitalfields Market and east to the Isle of Dogs. Not one lousy whoreson during the whole long day had been willing to pay for the price of a single glass of gin to calm her shaking nerves. She hadn’t much left to sell, either, or pawn, for that matter.
Polly wore cheap, spring-sided men’s boots with steel-tipped heels, which might’ve been worth something to a pawn broker, had she not cut back the uppers to fit her small legs and feet. Worse, without boots, she could not continue to ply her trade. With rain falling nearly every day and an unnatural chill turning the season cold and miserable, she’d catch her death in no time without proper boots to keep her feet warm and dry.
But, God, how she needed a drink . . .
Maybe she could sell her little broken mirror. Any mirror was a valuable commodity in a doss house—which made Polly reluctant to give it up. For a woman in her business, a mirror was an important professional tool. She frowned. What else might she be able to sell? Her pockets were all but empty as she felt through them. The mirror . . . her comb . . . and a crackle of paper. The letters! Her fingers trembled slightly as she withdrew the carefully folded sheets of foolscap. That miserable little puff, Morgan, had lied to her about these letters. There was no name on the paper, other than a signature. She suspected she could figure out who the letter-writer was if she could only get the letters translated from Welsh into English. A translation would make Polly a rich woman. But that wouldn’t get her a drink right now.