WHEN HER PARENTS died of diphtheria, just two days apart, Agnes did not have the luxury of mourning. There was no time to let a tear slide down her freckled cheek, no time to pull a dirty handkerchief from the pocket of her only slightly less dirty dress pocket, no time to hold her younger brother (now her only remaining relative) to her skinny shoulder for a shared sob.
In fact, time was what it was all about. Agnes’s parents had been knocker-uppers in their East End neighborhood in London. Every morning, they knocked on customers’ windows to wake them in time for their factory jobs. If Agnes and Ernest did not replace their parents as knocker-uppers that very morning, the customers would be late for work. The police would know that their parents were dead. And Agnes and Ernest would be carted off to the orphan asylum.
So, in the cold damp dark, before the sun rose over Tower Bridge, Agnes and Ernest approached the tenement where their first customer lived. It was a three-story brick building that used to be the grand home of a wealthy merchant and now housed six families, two flats on each floor. Agnes squinted up at the third-floor window.
“Here is what we are
