From my pocket I pulled the drawing Jenny had made that morning. It was crude and childish, as one might expect. And yet I sensed that what she had drawn was exactly what she had seen, that the tattoo that Aberlady had attempted to gouge from his own arm had been similarly grotesque. An inky scrawl, ugly in its lack of symmetry, meaningless to anyone but the initiated, it was an indelible stain on the skin that spoke of secrecy, and belonging. What could it have meant – to him, and to others? I knew there were men about the waterfront who made the inking of skin an art, but what Jenny had drawn was something far less proficient. At the bottom was the same word I had seen scrawled by John Aberlady in the darkness of the operating theatre. ICORISSS. I had thought it was spelled with two ‘esses’, but here there were three. Perhaps I had been mistaken; Perhaps Jenny was mistaken; she could not read, after all, and there were no words that ended like that. And yet it was not the word that was so arresting, but the small pictures that were drawn above it, a macabre collection of random elements – a broken chain, a pair of keys, and the crude semblance of a skeleton, death himself, perhaps, a rope looped and coiled about his bones.
I had worked amongst the men and women of the poorer classes all my life, though few of them had sported tattoos. Down on the riverside, on the Blood, amongst sailors and ex-soldiers, former convicts and thieves, it was not uncommon to see the skin inked – lover’s initials, ships, regiments. And yet I had never seen one like this. There were a number of men on deck that morning. Those who were convalescing often came up for air, strolling about in their nightgowns, or rocking gently in hammocks strung up beneath a wooden awning adjacent to the cookhouse. I showed them Jenny’s drawing. Could they identify it? Did it mean anything to them? The men shook their heads. Some of them were keen to show me their own tattoos, and to tell me the stories that lay behind them – lost ships and shipmates, marks indicative of time spent on the prison hulks at Woolwich, wives and lovers marked in perpetuity upon their skin. Some were neat and skilful – flowers, ships, hearts, names – others were crude and misshapen, initials and dates, skulls and curious marks and runes meaningful only to the eye of their owner. None of the men could explain the image I showed them. The mystery seemed as fathomless as ever – and yet I had one last idea of who I might ask. It was someone who had nothing to gain by lying, and who was sufficiently removed from the Blood to tell the truth. I folded the picture away and slipped it back into my pocket, beside the love tokens, and the tiny key.
The Blood is an ugly place, filthy and stinking, though the men aboard are grateful for it, as they will not go to St Saviour’s Infirmary. They do not trust a place that is not surrounded by water, and are content to brave rats and typhus, and the ungodly stench of the river, rather than find themselves bound by bricks and mortar. When I start work there it is run by male orderlies. Men with scars and tattoos, who chew tobacco and fill the ward spittoons with brown saliva. But it is my brother’s belief that having women on board will raise morale, will improve behaviour, and contribute to healthfulness.
‘As a moral influence,’ he says. ‘All hospitals have ladies’ committees, nurses, Bible women. To have women amongst us would have a good effect on behaviour, and on the health and outlook of the men.’
‘But prostitutes?’ Dr Sackville is incredulous when Dr Birdwhistle suggests they employ the reformed women of Siren House. ‘Hardly a moral influence, sir!’
‘They are not prostitutes,’ says Mr Aberlady. ‘They are women looking for honest work.’
‘The women will be chosen by the medical staff,’ says Dr Bird-whistle. ‘As is only right and proper.’ Dr Cole and Dr Antrobus agree. Only Dr Rennie objects. At the time I do not know why. He says it is unlucky to have women on board, it always has been. But I know it is more than that.
Mary comes to Siren House. She is quiet at first, her face pensive, her eyes sorrowful. The girls are charged never to talk of their pasts, but they do. Of course they do. Mary, however, says nothing. I know she is a country girl. I hear it in her soft, rounded Oxfordshire vowels, and I see it in her love of the garden, though it is little more than a shadowy patch of green at the back of the house, for we are surrounded by the high walls of the lane and the warehouses, and overlooked by the tenements of Bishop’s Entry and Herringbone Court. The other girls are appalled at the idea of grubbing about in the sticky black soil. They prefer to stay indoors – perhaps because that is what they are used to – even if it means listening to Dr Birdwhistle thumping on the piano, or sitting before Mrs Birdwhistle as she reads improving essays from Benfield’s Instructional Catechism.
There is only one place in the garden where the sun falls. Every morning from half past eleven to the early afternoon it warms a patch of earth in the south-west corner. After that it moves behind the shoulder of Drake’s Warehouse and the whole garden is plunged into shadow. We grow lots of different plants. I don’t know what they are but Mary does. She calls them by their country names, names she has grown up with: bleeding heart, foam flower, bishop’s hat and lady’s mantle. In our sunny corner we plant clematis. Tall and fast growing, it manages to thrive despite the damp place where we keep it, reaching its leaves, and its pale spring flowers, up to the sun. We lean against the wall, side by side with the clematis, our faces, like the flowers’, basking in the sunshine.
I remember the first time she smiled – she remembers it too, for she thought she would never smile again. We are planting seeds, nasturtiums, more in hope than in expectation, for the earth is either too wet or too dry, and they are as likely to drown as to be baked hard. But we must try all the same, she says, for life deserves a chance even in the darkest corners of the city. Our fingers touch beneath the wet earth, the spring sun warm on our backs as we crouch together and sow our garden. She promises me they will be colourful, a yellow as brilliant as a blackbird’s beak, the leaves round and bright like tiny lily pads. But I have never seen a blackbird, nor a lily pad, for neither of those is found in the streets I come from. Had she said ‘as oily as a starling’s wing and as rank as dandelions and fireweed’ I would have known exactly what she meant. I tell her so – and that’s when she smiles.
‘One day I’ll take you to the country,’ she says. ‘To Oxfordshire, and we’ll lie in the long grass beside the water where the lilies open in the sun, and we’ll watch the blackbirds singing in the trees.’
We are opposites, she and I. She small and neat, her eyes downcast as if she has been schooled in deference; her feet and hands dainty, her waist so narrow I could have put my hands around it. I am tall and slim, but broad shouldered, my gaze proud and imperious.
‘You are full of rage, Gethsemane,’ she says. ‘In your heart. Can’t you learn to forgive them?’ She is gentle and kind. She has forgiven everyone. Everyone but herself – that is something she can never do.
The other girls are abrasive and sharp-edged – as I can be. They chatter like sparrows. But Mary, like me, keeps her own counsel. It is not that she despises them, but she sees them as she can never be – indifferent, tough, hardened to the brutality and wickedness of others. She cannot make for herself the flinty carapace the others possess, no matter how hard she tries. It protects them from the world, but she has no such armour.
I love her. I know I do, though I never touch her, and I never say a word about it to her. Not then, anyway. We are so rarely alone, so rarely away from the scrutiny of others – even in the garden there are windows, watching us blankly. Who knows what malicious eyes might be looking out, unseen? I am sure she feels the same for me as I do for her. I see it in her face, in the moistness of her lip and the darting of her eye, the beating of the pulse in the hollow of her neck.
Chapter Seventeen
Will returned to the Blood at teatime. We were due at Dr Sackville’s later that evening, and I was anxious to make the most of it. I had been drinking nettle, feverfew and ginger infusion all day in a bid to calm my stomach and soothe my head and I was feeling much better. I gave Will a cup and sat
him down before the apothecary stove. Work had started at Deadman’s Basin in earnest, and he was filthy with smoke smuts. He looked tired and troubled, and I could tell something was amiss. I sipped my tea, listening to the muted sounds of the river, and waited until he was ready to talk.
At first, he sat in silence. Then, after a while, he said, ‘I don’t think I’m very good at this, Jem.’ He did not look at me as he spoke. It was as though he was ashamed, unwilling to confess his weakness, his sense of unfitness for the job he had been given. ‘I love to draw, to try to make even the most humble and utilitarian of buildings as elegant as possible.’ He closed his eyes. ‘But in this city, building anything new seems to require the removal of the vilest and most decayed remnants of the past.’ He rubbed his hands together, and stared at his palms, at the way the dirt had gathered in the lines and fissures of his skin. ‘It’s as though it does not want to be forgotten; as if it does all it can to stay with us, oozing up, seeping through, sticking to everything. Oh, I know that there is nothing there but dirt – soil and water and waste and dead, meaningless matter. And yet . . . it bleeds into the very pores of my flesh. I can smell it upon me, all the time. The oily stink of those horrible waters, those blackened burned buildings. And . . . and I can’t get the images of those girls from my head, Jem. The bodies. The flies. The water. D’you know, the only time I’ve been able to forget them is last night, when I was drunk and singing fit to wake the Devil.’ He put his head in his hands.
‘And now I am sober and they are before me once more. One drowned, one consumed by maggots, one dried beyond all imagining. It is a waking nightmare, and I am a haunted man.’ He stared up at me. ‘We have seen some things, you and I, Jem, but this is the worst. This is the worst by far.’
He drove the heels of his palms into his eyes as if he hoped to obliterate the images that burned upon them. ‘I wish I had not seen them. That I might go back to not knowing, but I can’t. I can’t go back and I can’t stop seeing their faces, rising before me in my mind’s eye, white spectres screaming for help. But no one helped them Jem, not then, and not now—’
I put my arms around him. What else could I do? I should have known how badly he would be affected by what we had found. He had not seen as much death as I, he was not inured to the sight of bodies – drowned, decayed, dissected, fleshless – as I was. I held him close, and felt him shake against my shoulder as he struggled to control his emotions. Around us, the shadows lengthened.
He pushed me away and sat back, his face streaked with tears. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ he said. He still could not look at me. ‘Do you know?’
‘I think I do. But I cannot say until I’m certain.’
He said nothing. It was as though he hoped that I did not know, as though he hoped such wickedness might be so rare as to be beyond all understanding and explanation. But it wasn’t.
The bath I prepared was all I could offer, something warm and fragrant to counter the cold and dark engulfing his spirits. I drew the blinds and lit the candles. I filled a muslin bag with oatmeal and lavender, lemon balm and heartsease and dropped it into the water, squeezing it gently so that it released its scents and oils. The water grew creamy and fragrant.
‘Get in,’ I commanded.
He peeled off his clothes, dropping them into a stinking pile beside the stove. I hesitated for a moment, then I opened the stove door, and stuffed them in, shirt, jacket, britches – everything. The fire roared and danced, the flames transforming into leaping tongues of vivid blue and shimmering bottle green. I slammed the door closed and dropped the tongs back onto the hearth.
How pale and slim he was, hardly more than a boy once his dark suit and tall hat were gone. He sank into the water, and closed his eyes. I scrubbed his back and washed his hair, labouring in silence as the water cooled and grew murky. I drew some of it out and replaced it with more from the kettle. The steam rose in a white cloud. I took Aberlady’s razor, and drew it across his cheek, his eyes closed, my hand on his chin, tilting his head this way and that. I let him soak while I fetched a towel from the laundry, and then I made him get out. He obeyed in silence. I rubbed him briskly, then dripped some lemon and comfrey oil between my hands and smoothed it over his torso. His bruises had turned purple.
‘You need to eat more,’ I said mildly. ‘I can count your ribs.’ He did not reply, but let me smooth my hands across his chest, his back, his shoulders, arms and legs. The room was warm and scented. I handed him a clean suit of clothes, neatly folded and perfumed with lavender and cedar against the moths. ‘These belonged to John Aberlady,’ I said. ‘He was a good friend. A good man. He had an eye for a well-cut suit. I think he would be glad to see you wearing this one.’
I put my hands on his shoulders and leaned my forehead against his. ‘I can’t do this without you, Will,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t go on . . . without you.’
We dined, as Aberlady had usually done, on the fare dished out by the Blood’s cookhouse, a large shed that had been erected towards the stern of the ship and from which the smell of boiled meat and overcooked cabbage wafted twice a day. The food was basic, and not at all wholesome. I subscribe to the unorthodox view that plenty of fruit and vegetables in the diet are to be recommended – I had a section of the physic garden given over to the cultivation of these for our personal consumption at the apothecary on Fishbait Lane. But on board the Blood such radical notions were eschewed. And yet I had lived and worked in medical institutions all my life, and I was no stranger to the mush we were served. It was the same as the men downstairs received, and Will and I ate the stringy meat and soggy potatoes without complaint.
‘Have you been to Dr Sackville’s before?’ asked Will. ‘What do you think will happen?’
‘It will probably be the usual display of medical arrogance, and competitiveness, for they are all vying for fame and fortune,’ I said. ‘There is no money in treating the poor. So it is those who are rich and influential that one must help, especially if you can give them something unusual that they can talk about at dinner. Mesmerism, for example. Or electrical therapeutics. Of course, ideally one needs to be a physician – like Sackville. Surgeons and apothecaries are far inferior – we still have the whiff of the tradesman about us, though I suspect chloroform will soon change that. Have you noticed how they all defer to him, falling over themselves to please him?’
‘Of course,’ said Will.
‘And that Proudlove is “surgeon apothecary”? He’s better than any of them, but he’ll never be a physician. He needs a licence from the Royal College but they’ll never give him one.’
‘D’you think he’ll come tonight?’
‘Undoubtedly – if Dr Sackville invited him, which I hope he has. I told Sackville that Proudlove was right about using bhang as a treatment for tetanus. Hopefully Sackville has asked him along tonight by way of an apology for humiliating him in front of the others – that was my intention, at least.’ I pushed my plate away and wiped the grease from my lips. ‘I imagine Dr Proudlove has been waiting for such a moment for a very long time.’
Dr Sackville lived on Livingston Fields, a wide, gracious square to the west of the city.
‘Such classical beauty,’ breathed Will, leaning forward as our cab turned into the square. ‘The whole area was designed by Robert Adam, I believe. I realise the vogue these days is for a far greater degree of ornamentation, but the elegance of these buildings touches my heart.’ He peered out from the hansom, his face rapturous. ‘Which one is it?’
‘Number six,’ I said. ‘Here.’ I banged on the roof and the cabman drew his nag to a halt. I paid the fare, and watched him rattle away over the cobbles.
Number six was a fine tall building, the soot that habitually cloaked the city eradicated by a coat of white stucco that glimmered with an eerie beauty in the light of the street lamps. The house was brightly lit, and the sound of music echoed down to us.
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ said Will.
I look
ed again at Dr Sackville’s card. ‘Assuredly,’ I said.
We climbed the steps. The music grew louder, now accompanied by the sound of a man singing in a tremulous tenor. I reached out to pull on the bell, but the door opened before my hand had even touched it. A butler looked down at us. Beyond him we saw a lofty ante-room lit by a shimmering chandelier of candles. The light danced off gold-framed mirrors, and large round-bellied vases. Beneath a gleaming onyx mantel a fire blazed and crackled, whilst high overhead a sumptuous frieze of flowers and cherubs garlanded the wall. I heard Will draw breath in awe and pleasure.
Beside us, in the glittering hall, a towering portrait of a chinless woman stared down with bulbous green eyes. Her dress was rumpled silk, her shoulders white and fashionably sloping. Behind her there were tropical plants and a table covered with dishes of fruit. A black servant waited in the shadows. The gold frame bore a curling golden scroll at its base. Maria Callard, I read.
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 22