“We did not take the carriage,” Margo kept her voice low, “because the last thing we want to do is attract attention to ourselves. Nobody in this part of London arrives in a chauffeured carriage. So unless you enjoy being mugged the instant you set foot on the pavement, I’d suggest you resign yourself to hoofing it for the next three months.”
As the poisonous glare died away to mere hellfire, Margo reminded herself that Dominica Nosette’s work in clandestine photography had been done in the comfortable up-time world of air-conditioned automobiles and houses with central heating. Margo told herself to be charitable. Dominica Nosette’s first daylight glimpse of London’s East End was probably going to leave her in deep culture shock—she just didn’t know it, yet.
When they reached the corner of Whitechapel and Commercial Roads, one of the busiest intersections in all London, they ran afoul of one of the East End’s most famous hallmarks: the street meeting. Idle men thrown out of work by the previous night’s dock fire had joined loafing gangs of the unemployed who roamed the streets in loose-knit packs, forming and breaking and reforming in random patterns to hash through whatever the day’s hot topic might be, at a volume designed to deafen even the hardest of hearing at five hundred paces. From the sound of it, not one man—or woman—in the crowd had ever heard of Roberts’ Rules of Order. Or of taking turns, for that matter.
“—why should I vote for ‘im, I wants t’know? Wot’s ‘e goin’ t’do for me an’ mine—“