‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That dead girl.’
‘No one knew much about her,’ said Mrs Speedicut. ‘She were only on board for a short while. Pretty girl, they all said so. Caught Dr Cole’s eye. He’s a handsome enough man for those what likes them tall with yellow hair and rosy cheeks. Looks too much like dear Mr Speedicut to me—’
Dr Cole was indeed a handsome man, with the languid eyes, curly hair and full lips of a poet, and the tall straight posture of a military man. The idea that a man with similar looks might lose his heart to a fat skivvy like Mrs Speedicut was a feat of imagination that was beyond me.
‘He’s got something of a reputation,’ she added. ‘Likes a pretty face, so they tell me. That Dr Antrobus ain’t quite so lucky. Takes Dr Cole’s leavings, if you follow.’
I did follow. And yet both men had pretended that they had never seen the dead girl before. Of course, for a young ambitious medical man to take up with a woman like Mary Mercer in anything but the most casual of relationships would have ended his career instantly. It was no surprise that they preferred to deny ever having seen her.
‘And Mr Aberlady?’
‘I don’t know about him,’ she said. She looked at me doubtfully. Afterwards, I realised that she had known exactly what sort of a man he was, though she had chosen not to tell me. Perhaps she thought I already knew. If she had spoken up then, how differently things might have turned out. I never blamed her, for I was thinking about the love token I had found in his pocket, and Mary’s, about the maidenhair fern with its message of hidden affection. The apothecary struggling for respect and recognition and the ex-prostitute: it would not have been a public affair, even if it had been a genuine one. Had it been reciprocated?
‘Anything else?’ I said. ‘Anything about Mary?’
‘Quite a secretive girl, by all accounts. Kept ’erself to ’erself. Sang while she worked, they said.’ She smirked. ‘Must o’ been in love. Or simple! Ain’t no other reason to sing when you’re stuck down there.’
One day I hide behind a curtain in one of the girls’ rooms. She bathes, this one, for her particular gentleman likes her clean and wet, likes to sit and watch her in the rose-scented bath water, soaping herself. He shows her what he will give her when she emerges, and I hear her coo in delight at the pale sausage of flesh that hangs from his britches. She rises from the water. The firelight glints off her wet skin, her nipples dripping, the hair between her legs dark and damp. They do not know I am there, or so I think. And yet when he mounts her he does it from behind, across a footstool, in front of the curtain where I am crouching.
I see everything. I see her face when he cannot, and she looks directly at me, her eyes meeting mine through the crack in the drapery. I see her skin pink and smooth beneath his hairy-backed hands. He grunts, periodically extracting himself, pumping extra life into the thing with his hand, flourishing it, white and sticky, in my direction. But I am not looking at him. I feel my heart beating through the whole of my body. I fear I have stopped breathing.
After he is finished, she rubs him with oils and plies him with brandy, as this is what he wants. He sits, fat and unclothed, before the fire, his feet upon her bare arse as she crouches before him like a footstool, as that is what he wants too. He reads the paper. He stays for hours, though I can see she is bored and tired, the draught that blows under the door as cold as a knife where her skin presses against the rug. I am bored and tired too, and in the end I fall asleep in my hiding place. When she wakes me, he has gone and she is in her nightdress. Open at the neck, she bends over me. I see that she is naked beneath it, her breasts swinging like bells. She smells of brine and roses.
‘Well,’ she says without smiling. ‘Is that what you want?’ Behind her, the bath water is cold and still, with a lace edge of scum.
Soon after, she leaves us. I don’t know where she goes. Another takes her place. There is an endless supply.
The one I am caught with is young, the youngest of all of them. We share a room at the top of the house, as she is the same age as me, and too young to have her own bedroom-parlour. Those rooms are large, so that the gentlemen can feel at home, can leave their favourite pipes and tobacco, and a change of clothes if they wish. But she does not yet have any gentleman of her own, and must work out of a small chamber, servicing men as and when required, unless one of them asks for her to be reserved. My mother likes to have two girls unreserved at all times. And so, when she is not with the gentlemen, Alice sleeps with me in the attic. We giggle and whisper in the night, our arms around each other, our legs tangled, naked and warm. Her mouth is an ‘o’ of pleasure in the darkness.
My mother finds out – I never know how – and Alice is sent away. I never find out where. And I? I am to be cured.
‘Well,’ says my mother. ‘If you are as hot as a cat on heat then perhaps you would like to earn your keep like the rest of them. I have someone who has been asking about you for a long time.’
I fight, but he is strong. He likes the way I struggle too, I can sense it in his panted breath, in the way his heart thumps and his eyes fix angrily upon me. I am a wild beast that must be tamed, and he is the man to do it. My mother holds my hands above my head so that I cannot scratch his face as he takes his pleasure.
After that, as I know of no other place that I might go, and of no other person that I might be, I become what my mother is. And with Alice gone she is in need of another girl to put out to tender.
In time, my mother goes mad, but not before she has lost what she prizes the most – her beauty – to the pox. She wears a veil then, though I know what horror lies beneath. She spends the last year of her life in Angel Meadow Asylum thinking that she is the Queen of Sheba, and that our gentleman father – the man she set to rape me when I was sixteen years old – is John the Baptist.
Chapter Eleven
When Mrs Speedicut left, I went to see how Will was getting on at Deadman’s Basin. I was glad to get away from the hospital ship, even for an hour or so, though I knew there would be nothing to gladden the heart where I was heading. When I got there, the place seemed curiously silent after the noise and bustle of the waterfront, and for all that I often longed for stillness – a commodity hard to come by in London’s teeming streets – its air of malevolent calm filled me with dread. My footsteps sounded loud, echoing against the walls as though I were dogged by a mocking companion who stopped as I stopped, and moved as I moved. I’d expected carts to be there, or men beginning the process of clearing the area, draining the basin and removing the ugly, decayed structures, but there was nothing, nothing but dark walls and silence. The shadows gathered thickly in the corners, and beneath the sagging roofs of the tumbledown buildings.
‘Will?’ I shouted. My voice echoed until it was swallowed up by the silence. There was no reply.
I went into the boathouse. Will’s hat was on an old workbench against the wall, beside it his notebook and pencils, the drawing he had made evidence of his recent work. I peered into the shadows – nothing but a wreckage of rubble, broken wood and sacks, animated by the scuttling of rats. The boathouse gave out onto a workshop filled with more of the same, and beyond this was a yard, paved with flagstones, slippery underfoot, that had clearly been used as a latrine.
Across the yard was the old villa. Its windows had been boarded over long ago, though here and there they hung crookedly, revealing rotten window frames fringed with broken glass. Once, perhaps, it had been a handsome riverside spot, close to the quays that lined the waterfront, with a yard at the front and stabling at the back, though there was no evidence of these now, for the warehouses of Cinnamon Street had been built full-square against it. The door to the old villa stood open. It had been locked the last time we had been there. But Will would have been given a key by his master at Prentice and Hall, I thought, of course he would want to take a look inside. I only wished he had waited for me, or for the foreman who would help with the demolition – anyone, rather than enter such a place on his own.
I went
back into the boathouse. On the floor beneath the workbench was a lantern. Its glass was blackened and cracked, but when I shook it there was still a little oil inside. I wiped some of the greasy soot from the glass chimney with my handkerchief, though it made little difference to the visibility of the flame, which was as dim and yellow as a guttering candle. I hoped it would be enough for me to see where I was going.
The steps that led up to the villa’s entrance were green and slippery beneath my boots. Inside, away from the open door, the place was dark as a glove. I held up my lantern.
‘Will?’ But the house seemed to snatch the word from my throat and his name came out as a whisper.
I crept forward. Doors on either side of me stood open. The windows of every room were shuttered and boarded, and the only light that penetrated the blackness was the glow from my lamp. I was surprised the building had not been colonised by thieves and beggars, as from the outside it appeared to be wind- and watertight, the roof slates intact and the brickwork in reasonable repair. And yet the locked front door was a sturdy one and not likely to be broken down easily, the boarded windows, at least on the ground floor, tightly nailed.
Inside, I expected to find nothing but empty, dusty rooms, the building a sad, echoing shell. Instead, it was as though the people who had once owned it had only just left; as if they had become so frustrated by the clamour of the docks that they had snatched up their coats and flounced out, locking the doors behind them, for each room was furnished, as if they had expected to return but had simply not yet done so. My father had told me that the place was built by the man who owned the nearby docks. So proud had he been of his work corralling and taming the river that he had built a house overlooking the place, but the noise and the stink had driven him away within the year. Once deserted, around about it the warehouses had mushroomed.
The place was silent. The dust lay as thick as felt upon mantels and sideboards, the tops of tables and the shoulders of chairs. On a side table I saw a tray covered in tea cups and saucers, the silver teapot at its centre as black as if it had been hewn from a lump of coal. Cobwebs festooned it, as they did everything, hanging from lamp brackets and dark, formless paintings, from candlesticks and vases, like ancient ropes, ragged with weed, glimpsed at the bottom of the sea. They swayed gently, as if someone had just passed by, though I knew it was simply the air stirring as I moved.
I climbed the stairs. Beneath my feet the floorboards creaked, the carpet moth-eaten to grey fragments. I heard a noise, a groan, I was sure of it, somewhere above me, deep in the heart of the building. I looked up to see a face, monstrous, diseased, wild-eyed, coming towards me out of the darkness. I cried out, my lantern slipping from my fingers – just as I realised that what I had seen was my own face, reflected back at me in a tarnished mirror. The lantern went out as its glass chimney smashed, the shards crunching beneath my boots in the darkness.
I waited, trying to master my fear. My heart was thumping. Should I go back down and look for another lantern? But there had been no other lantern, and I could not go back, could not leave this building without Will. At length, I became accustomed to the gloom. Here and there the boards that covered the windows of the upper storeys had slipped, and slim blades of light sliced through the dark like silver knives, illuminating fragments of what lay within – the edge of a rocking chair, the belly of an oil lamp, the moth-eaten head of a child’s hobby-horse. Up ahead, at the end of the hallway, I saw a glow against the wall.
I crept forward, my eyes fixed upon that dim patch of light. Was it moving? Flickering? I blinked. I could not be sure. Should I call out? What was it? I held my breath once more and listened. I was sure I could hear breathing, and a curious crackling sound, at once familiar and yet I could not think what it was. And then I knew, and fear stabbed me.
‘Will!’ I screamed out and ran along the hall, bounding up the next flight of stairs to the very top of the house.
In the attic there were four doors, all closed but one, which stood open at the top of a flight of steep, narrow stairs. Inside, the window gaped wide, throwing a square of grey afternoon light into the dark passage. My heart felt as though it had stopped dead in my chest, for at the foot of the stairs lay Will, his head at a horrible angle against the wall. Behind him, at the top of the stairs, was a dancing wall of flames
I cried out, and leaped forward. Why had I let him come here alone? I knew the place was dangerous – had we not found a girl dead and drowned in the waters outside? We should have stayed together; we were partners, companions of the closest and dearest kind. He could easily have stayed with me on the Blood for a few hours then we might both have come up to Deadman’s Basin. Tears stung at my eyes and I felt a wail rising in my throat. I swallowed it as best I could; this was no time for noise and fury and useless panic – not before I had established the facts. I crouched at his side and put my fingers to his wrist. His pulse was strong. I moved him gently, relieved to see that his neck was not broken, but merely twisted badly. His head was bruised at the temple, his right eye blackened and his nose bloody. I saw that, like me, he had dropped his lantern. But whereas mine had gone out, Will’s had stayed alight, the oil coursing out into the floor of the room he had entered at the top of the narrow, uncarpeted stairs. The flames were now streaming up the peeling distemper walls.
I rummaged in my satchel, and jammed the bottle of salts beneath his nostrils. His head snapped back as the fumes of sal volatile struck home, and he gave a strangled cry.
‘Thank God,’ I said. I rubbed the tears from my cheeks. ‘Can you get up? What happened?’ I eyed the flames, orange and red and now stretching up the wall of the attic room in long eager tongues. ‘We must get out.’
He stared at me for a moment, as if wondering who I was, and then all at once he reared up, his face a mask of horror. ‘Jem!’ he sounded as though he could hardly articulate the words, as though fear had frozen his lips and tongue. ‘Jem! Oh God! Oh God! Did you see them?’
‘See who? Can you get up? Are you hurt? We must get out—’
‘In there.’ He pointed over my shoulder, to where the flames jumped and reared. ‘I saw them,’ he whispered, seizing hold of me with iron fingers, his face inches from my own. ‘I dropped my lamp. I ran, I don’t know – into the door, the wall, fell down the stairs. Stupid.’ His fingers dug into my shoulder, his eyes so filled with terror that I could hardly bear to look at him. ‘My God, Jem,’ he said. ‘What happened to them? Did you see?’
I climbed the five steps to the open attic door, and peeped inside. It was a small bedroom, once the realm of servants. Its walls were plain and ugly, the floor dusty and bare. A crude wooden washstand stood to one side, the pitcher and bowl in pieces on the floor beside it. It was the only room in the house whose window was not completely covered over. Instead, the top two boards had been torn away, their nails bent, pulled from the wood by a claw hammer and scattered about the floor. The upper sash of the window had been smashed so that the room was cold and draughty. Outside, the London sky swirled with grey-brown clouds.
On either side of a blanket box were two brass beds. Their mattresses had been removed and tossed against a wall, so that the wire frames were exposed. When I saw what lay upon them I cried out and reeled back, banging my head on the combed ceiling and stumbling against the door, just as Will had done. I had been prepared for horror – no one who had seen the look on Will’s face could have expected something benign – but nothing had prepared me for this.
What lay upon the first bed was no more than a skeleton. It was laid out as if had been lifted straight from the grave, its arms by its sides, its head slightly to one side, its jaw set wide. Its empty eye sockets were fixed upon the door as if in hope of rescue. There were no clothes – no rings or hair pins. Not a shred of flesh, blood or sinew remained, only the bones, and a dusty tangle of dark hair.
There is something about a skeleton that allows us to remain detached – all skeletons look broadly the same; they possess little,
or nothing, that reminds us of the person they once were, and we might view them with dispassion as much as with horror. The skeleton’s companion, however, allowed no such indifference.
She had once been a woman, that much was clear, though what remained of her now was no more than a grotesque relic, a withered husk of her once living, breathing body. Her skin was intact, but desiccated, leached of every drop of moisture that had ever given her form and substance. What had once been soft flesh was now nothing but a leathery sheath, a fibrous membrane as dark and withered as tobacco leaves, cleaving to the bones beneath. As the skin had dried, it had contracted, drawing back the lips to expose the teeth in a perpetual silent scream.
Behind me, the flames crept up the dry walls and lapped at the ceiling. Smoke poured from the window, drawn by a draught that came from a ragged hole in the lath and plaster above the bed frames. But then the wind changed direction and the smoke swirled into the room. It engulfed the bodies for a moment, and then streamed over the dried-out corpse, sucked out through the hole in the wall.
I heard Will enter the room behind me and felt a hand tug my sleeve. ‘We must go.’
‘We must take them with us.’
‘What!’ Will shook me. ‘Are you mad?’ He coughed into his handkerchief, his eyes streaming. ‘Look at the flames. Look at the smoke. Do you want there to be four corpses here instead of two?’
‘But I must see—’ I stepped forward and bent over the skeleton. It was a woman – the width of the shoulders and pelvis told me as much – not much taller than five feet in height. The hair remained, though it had come away from the head in a halo of dry black fibres. The bones of the skull were small, the face narrow, the front teeth crooked, the left front one chipped so that there was a triangular gap between them. Other than that I could discern nothing that might tell us who she was or how she came to be there. It was as though she had been boiled in an anatomist’s cauldron, for every bit of soft tissue was gone.
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 14