Page 2 of Infamous

Eddie looked up and surveyed them. For some reason they were all looking at her expectantly. She glanced at Rose, bemused, and then picked up her fork and pointed at the spread in front of them.

‘If you’re quite finished with the interrogation,’ she said, ‘this bird is not going to eat itself.’

After supper they gathered in the drawing room, as was customary, although their approach to the whole ceremony was noticeably lax. In other houses across London, men would be huddling to discuss war, finances or recent sporting endeavours, and ladies would be laughing from behind their fans or preparing to entertain with a jaunty tune on the pianoforte; at the Millers’, Beatrice was clinging on to Simon’s leg like a limpet as he walked, and Eddie was holding a piece of cake in her mouth, shedding crumbs as she led them into the room.

‘What’s the latest story about?’ Rose asked Eddie once they were settled.

The heavy blue drapes were closed, the smell of her father’s pipe smoke filling the air, and Lucy-Anne had started playing her harp with a sense of grandiosity and an excess of flourishes that did not quite match the occasion. She kept shooting them all furious, narrow-eyed looks every time they were too loud; juxtaposed with the angelic piece she was playing, it was starting to feel like a very surreal performance about the duality of man.

Eddie unfolded the rather ink-stained and crumpled wad of paper from her pocket and smoothed it out on the polished walnut table between them.

‘Do not get ink on my polished walnut table,’ Mrs Miller said from her customary chair in the corner. Eddie rolled her eyes.

‘This one,’ she said, leaning in close to Rose with a dangerous grin, ‘is aboutlady pirates.’

‘They don’t let ladies be pirates,’ Simon said from underneath the table. ‘They are bad luck, and bad omens, and their arms are too small to put hooks on the end. Imagine how silly it would look, to have a spindly little arm and a big great hook at the end of it.’

‘Simon!’ Beatrice shouted. ‘They’d just get smaller hooks. There isn’t just one size of hook, youninny!’

‘I am having a private conversation,’ Eddie said, although she knew it was futile. Their house was generously proportioned and should have been more than big enough for all seven of them – eight, if Rose was to be included, as she almost always was – but no matter which room she entered in search of some much-needed privacy, there always seemed to be at least one sibling in there, ricocheting off the walls or demanding help with their dress or asking if she thought their fingernails had grown a suspicious amount since last inspected.

‘Go on,’ Rose said, nudging Eddie’s foot with hers underneath the table, and narrowly avoiding kicking Simon in the ear.

‘These werereallady pirates,’ Eddie said loudly, mostly for Simon’s benefit, but also to encourage Beatrice, should she have aspirations of a piratical nature. ‘From just a hundred years ago. Anne Bonny and Mary Read. They dressed as men and they pillaged the Seven Seas andthen, when the time came for them to face the noose, they pleaded their bellies so they wouldn’t swing.’

‘God,’ said Rose, looking fascinated and a bit sick. ‘Is that what your story is about, then?’

‘No,’ said Eddie. ‘My version imagines them as young academics, disguised as men so they can study at university. They meet for the first time in a tea house, both reaching for the last piece of gingerbread. A tense argument ensues.’

‘Which one of them gets it on their hook first?’ said Beatrice, already entranced, if slightly confused. Amelia, who had been lying face down much too close to the fireplace, flopped gracelessly over onto her back. Even their father had lowered his book and was waiting expectantly for Eddie to speak.

‘You’d all better be quiet if you want me to read it,’ she said sternly. There were general noises of assent, except from Lucy-Anne, who only played the harp more loudly.

‘All right.It was a cold, misty morning in March when Anne Bonny opened the door to the Jelly Roger Tea House – for all intents and purposes a morning like any other, although the events that were about to transpire were to change the course of her life forever .?.?.’

Chapter Two

When Eddie first met Rose Li, the latter had been standing in the Millers’ garden clutching one of their kitchen cat’s two-week-old kittens. Rose had been black-haired, pink-cheeked and pleasantly chubby; after she had deposited the kitten back into its box with its harried mother, she had wiped her furry palm on her dress and solemnly stuck out a hand to be shaken. Eddie had been immediately fascinated, and had announced that Rose was staying for supper.

It had been pointed out to her that as she was eight years old, she had no business announcing exactly who was staying for supper, even if theywerechildren of her father’s business associates; luckily the Li family had already been planning to join them for their meal, and Eddie had ushered Rose to the seat next to her as if she were the owner of a fine dining establishment seating her most important customer.

‘Our cook is very dreadful,’ she said to Rose in an undertone. ‘Mama says we mustn’t take it personally, and that if she really meant to kill us, she’d have done it years ago.’

‘Can I please have a kitten, if you have one to spare?’ Rose had replied, apparently unbothered by the quality of the upcoming victuals.

Eddie had struck a bargain – a kitten in exchange for Rose returning the next day to continue their friendship. She hadn’t factored Lucy-Anne into this particular negotiation, who had screamed as if she had given birth to the kitten herself when she saw it being borne away in the arms of a stranger. She had never particularly warmed to Rose, and Eddie suspected it was entirely due to that kitten, who had disappointed them anyway by ignoring their plans to take him marauding and include him in various criminal activities and deciding to become a prissy little lap cat instead.

Rose lived only two streets away in one of the more modest terraces, and was present at dinner at least three times a week for the next fourteen years. At one point she and Eddie had attempted to calculate how many dinners that added up to, but they had given up on the mathematics after five minutes and had to open a bottle of wine to recover. Over the years their interests had matured from exploring the wilderness of the small garden to swapping horror stories and snatches of poetry by candlelight in the attic; from standing at the window throwing stones at passing boys to see how many they could hit, to lurking in the corner of their parents’ dinner parties, throwing grapes at passing boys to see how many they could hit.

At thirteen Rose had had the better arm, but Eddie was entirely unafraid of being caught.

Eddie had always loved to invent stories, from lengthy plays for her siblings to perform to short, dramatic tales of daring starring herself and Rose in the main roles, but it was in her early teens that she started to write what she thought of asproperstories – all of them written exclusively for the entertainment and delight of her best friend. She was relentlessly prolific; there was an entire trunk full of her work at the foot of her bed, a treasure trove of great loves and gruesome deaths that she would dip into regularly so that she could present Rose with a story like one might give a bouquet of flowers.

‘I am going to be a famous writer one day,’ she told Rose once, when they had spent the evening giggling over her latest. She had decided that this was to be her fate only moments before.

‘I know,’ said Rose, immediately and without an ounce of doubt.

Eddie had become accustomed to feeling as if she and Rose weren’t really two separate people at all, but some many-limbed creature with a shared neural centre. They didn’t exactly look alike, but they weren’tunalike, either; Eddie was tall and Rose of average height, Eddie all sharp angles and gangle where Rose was soft, Eddie pale and hollowed-out next to Rose’s light gold skin. They both had dark hair – Rose’s was very long and straight and black, Eddie’s shorter, wavy, darkest brown – and when they sat ensconced somewhere together at the end of an evening, their heads meeting in the middle, the differences fell away. Rose was certainly friendlier and far less impudent, but otherwise they were so alike in humour and temperament – so aligned on almost everything they encountered in their shared existence – that it was an enormous shock when sixteen-year-old Eddie had called round to Rose’s house, flopped onto a chaise and started complaining about the evils of being forced to come out into society, and found herself alone in her misery.