The Sea Officer Bentley Thrillers

by Jan Needle

  “No! Sam is just — Deb, what is here for you? What happens when your face is healed? My God, at least Sir Arthur — I want to help you, Deborah!”

  “You cannot help me, sir. Dennett would fetch me if I went back there, and I could not stand for that. What would you do? Be my protector! You are not rich, are you? Do you have anything?” Her face was kindly, as if she were helping him. He had a scant few pounds; less than enough to keep a midshipman on. “I will be a whore, sir. It is not the worst of fates.”

  “But Marigold has a plan for you.” Her mouth twisted, but not bitterly.

  “I might be considered beauty enough to pose, and dance, strike attitudes,” she said. “It depends on what men pay, however. If more cash comes from matching me with tups, then… I am not a whore, not yet. So what is your alternative?”

  He was still standing, she sitting, with the pisspot peeping out between her ankles. Mad thoughts came and went within his mind, thoughts of a small room somewhere, of paying for her keep while he should be away. It was madness and he knew it, though. For instance, he did not know how much a room might cost, he did not know how much money food would require in a week, he did not know how one would find a place, except a room like Deb already had, which was her quarters and her workplace both. He lived on board the Biter for his duty, and then he would go home to Petersfield. He wondered, fleet-ingly, what his sisters would say — let alone his mother — if he should turn up with a young woman behind him on his horse. Young woman, whore, wastrel, waif. Deb was no different in her outer aspect from a respectable country maid, but everyone must know, immediately, because she had no trappings of support. At the best they would set her on as a drudge, at worst hurl her out into the night. He did not even bother with consideration on his father; it was unthinkable.

  “Then there is Cec,” she said. “We left the north together, together we will stay. We both must eat, you see.”

  “How will they…? Do they use her as a servant wench?”

  “She can be a whore like the rest of us, says Mrs Pam. When her mouth is healed up. Some men like that sort of thing, she says, already she has been noticed and written down for when the pain has gone. She was too scrawny for the peephole job, her tits ain’t full enough.” She laughed. “It’s a pity you ain’t rich, though. I would not mind to be a whore for you.”

  Will was in a sort of lather, and a daze. His stomach had dropped into a pit, her words had opened up the ache again. He found her wistful, her bruised face appealing yet boldly challenging, her hair, her neck, her lips cried out to him.

  “No, not a whore,” he said.

  “Aye then, not a whore. Not yet.” She rose. She seemed quite calm. “But you may have me, if you want to. It is what Marge expects, intends, but I will deny it, we shall have each other and you shall not pay. You helped me on the road and you came back to help once more. Would you like to be the first?”

  He had a vision of her, naked in her silken shroud, and it almost overwhelmed him.

  “The first,” he said, but the words caught in his throat. She smiled, not wistful, but possibly amused.

  “As a whore I mean. I cannot claim you are the first of all, that’s pity but it’s true.” Her face lightened. “The first for pleasure, though.

  Aye. The first because I wanted to. You do not mind my face?”

  “Oh no! I…”

  She touched her blackened eye, more brown and bluish now, and William wanted to as well, he wanted to caress the hurt. She moved towards him, and, hesitatingly, he approached her, hands lifted from his sides, the bed between them, awkwardly. Then footsteps in the passageway outside, a carefree laugh, a thunderous knocking on the flimsy door.

  “Will! Have you not finished yet! Christ’s blood, man, Kaye will have us flogged, do you not realise what o’clock it is?” The handle rattled and the door pushed open, and Sam was grinning with self-satisfaction, like a gargoyle. Behind him Mrs Putnam was peering in.

  “Lord,” she said, “young maidens nowadays. She still has every stitch of clothing on.”

  Across the narrow bed, they had only touched a hand.

  *

  Will Bentley had been almost angry when Sam burst in, but that did not last for long. His friend was such a humorist, and the sight of Mistress Putnam and her curiosity lanced the boils of both his embarrassment and his confused desires. Deb also — her face was instantly comical in its surprise, then laughter flooded it. She yelped and seized Will’s hand to squeeze it, then let it go. Two minutes later, the riots of sensation lost in Holt’s jostling, he found himself outside the Marigold establishment, being hustled through the darkness for the Thames.

  On the row downstream he kept his silence in the face of questioning, whether playing a sulk or gripped by the real thing he would not have cared to give an answer to. The night had turned out grimmish, with a misty rain blowing from the south and west that kept their necks huddled in their shoulders, so he could think and wonder about what he’d nearly done. Deborah had been going to bed him, no doubt of it, and she said it was because of want, not for the sake of whoring, which was of an importance to him that grew unstoppable Will could see her face, her eyes, her look, and was relieved but bursting with regret that his friend had ended it. He did not even know for certain that he wanted to, except he knew he did. His feelings for her were confusing and immense.

  “Sam,” he said, after a long while. “You know these matters, I do not. Deborah is beautiful, that’s so?”

  There were two watermen at the oars, and he sensed their ears prick up. They were old hands with the passengers, however, and their indifference was studied and complete. Sam’s eyes flashed with humour, but he played calm and cool.

  “Aye,” he responded. “She’s fair enough.”

  “She,” William began. “Well, she takes my breath away. Is that… completely normal, do you think?”

  “Oh yes, completely,” Sam said, gravely. “It is known as love, and can be a very dreadful thing. Your cleverness, Will, is to do it with a whore, which renders it inconsequential, and therefore safe. Bravo, as the Frenchmen say.”

  He was clearly mocking, and the oarsmen as clearly liked the fun, although all three faces as Will studied them were expressionless as wood. Love, he thought, and suspected it was right, all jesting notwithstanding. Then he cleared that, with a mental shrug. Deb was young and beautiful, that was all, and he had never been that close and open with a maid, nor never had an opportunity to do the beastly thing. She had been ready to, and he had been afraid, but he would by God the next time, yes he would. Next time, if her offer was withdrawn, he would buy her. Then a fantasy came in, and he saw them in a little cosy room, with her long dark curls across her naked shoulder, and his hand upon her breast. He sighed, then jumped as Samuel lightly touched his arm.

  “Yes, she’s fair,” he said, low and kindly. “But don’t take hurt, there’s many of them are. I’ll show you a selection as will take your breath away. Don’t plump for one before you’ve even seen the field. Blood! So late as we are, our lord commander will likely cut it off for you!”

  But when they climbed the Biter’s side ten minutes later — and not unfearfully — it was a surly company who greeted them, and cursed them on account that they were not Slack Dickie. He had not come on board as promised, and when he did they had missed that morning’s tide. Will lay in his blanket later, aware of grumbling from forward that was loud and hardly sober. They’d missed their time on shore, they’d missed their fun, they’d missed their ladies of the night.

  And what have I missed, Will asked himself interminably. I have missed her.

  FOURTEEN

  The woman who had had the teeth had been a beauty in her time. The women of her household were generous in this consensus, sharing delight in the subtle malice inherent in the position. Their mistress had been a beauty, and had married well an older, solid man. But even before her teeth had begun to fall away to rottenness she had lost the bloom of youth — her time, i
ndeed, had almost passed. If she was old, her man was older, and if she was vain, her husband was yet worse. He had taken her because when young she had been beautiful, and he had agreed to her idea of desperate surgery because his need for female loveliness was greater than her own. The women of the household, watching and waiting since the operation, were gleeful at their own hypocrisy.

  At first, it seemed, the teeth had taken well. Milady — Mistress Amelia Wimbarton — had suffered bravely in the process of extraction, fortified by far less drink than Cecily but immeasurably more determination. Cecily had been crying even before Marcus Dennett had produced his instruments, and had had a paroxysm of screaming when Mistress Wimbarton had pulled back her lips for one last view of them in situ. She had had, indeed, a flash of doubt that so characterless a girl, and one so unattractive in her squawking selfishness should be the donor, as if her teeth might be as inferior as she herself appeared. The other one, the beauty with the hair and figure, was a far more likely maid, but Dennett spoke darkly of problems with her gums (that could, however, be overcome if Cecily’s did not take, or broke as he extracted them). What’s more — the clincher — the chosen ones were in fact superior in their whiteness and their shape. They also, measured with his callipers, were the perfect size.

  The operation was fast, brutal, and extremely bloody. Cecily was tied into a heavy oaken chair, because she just would not be still, and Mistress Wimbarton sat beside her, unfettered, and at a three-foot distance. She had only women present, except for the surgeon, because it was not at all the place for men (who would likely faint, as Dorothy, her best woman, rather grimly jested), and least of all for Wimbarton, who claimed he should be there to hold her hand, and whom she suspected most deeply of a black and shameful interest in the sight. The pair had had no children, despite her good wide hips, but she had miscarried once, a long, long time before, and her husband had had a morbid and (she thought) unnatural fascination for the details. That experience, incidentally, had taught her about natural agony. She took only two large glasses of brandy before Dennett set on, and was confident it would be enough. In all twelve minutes that he took, she uttered not a single cry.

  It took twelve minutes, and two of the younger women fainted, while the dark-haired girl started a sobbing fit until the surgeon clouted her, then later vomited in a corner and had to be released outside. The surgeon himself went deadly pale at times, and produced so much sweat that it blinded all three of them promiscuously by running off his face, and caused him to put his spike and pliers down quite frequently because he lost his grip. He had pulled teeth before a thousand times, which much was obvious, but no one except himself knew this was his first time at a full extraction. Each time he got a stubborn one, and had to jerk and twist and tug, he found himself wondering what the next step would be, if it refused point blank to leave its home. He heard bone splinter once, and to his horror it was in the buyer’s mouth, and he saw small shards drop on her bloody tongue, and he caught her eyes, which were opaque with agony, and she did not so much as groan. Dear Jesus, Marcus Dennett caught himself at thinking: today I earn my bread. The smell was evil, also, in the hag’s mouth (as he thought her), and he realised he should have charged her husband more.

  Twelve minutes of exhausting work, and anxiety in case it all went wrong. The method was tried and tested — although not by him; he’d had instruction of a Scotchman he had beat at cards and who could not pay in cash — with satisfaction far from guaranteed. For best results you did it tooth for tooth, first one from the buyer’s mouth to make the hole, then the corresponding one torn from the seller, but torn more carefully so as not to damage it. For the first few, Dennett found this relativity difficult, for speed was of the essence but inflicting greater pain on the buyer by greater haste was not a good idea, and nor was appearing to be more delicate with the seller, despite the fact that fast extraction could end in disaster if a tooth should crack or crumble. The order of attack was crucial, as he had been told not once but several times by his instructor: the front teeth were the easiest to come by, not having the deep and complicated roots of side and back ones, but complications could outweigh advantages. If you took the front ones first it made a passageway, or access, for the rest, and gave you room to lever and to wrench the reluctant biters at the back. But some schools said experience showed the operation could only be successful if the giver’s tooth was plugged immediately into the socket of the receiver, the very instant that this socket should come clear. Therefore, if one took out teeth and put them to one side for later, the holes would close in the recipient, or would reject the new teeth completely, just never tighten round them for a grip of permanency. Further, one could fail to match them, take the wrong tooth for the wrong hole, or become entirely befuddled.

  From his own experience, Dennett knew some of the other problems. Some tooth sockets produced blood in gushes, some mouths filled so full and swiftly one could see no holes at all. Then there was dropping, swallowing, jaw-clenching for the pain, even (so the Scotchman claimed) the fear that one of the surgeon’s victims (he used the word, but gave a hoot to soften it) should drown on her own blood. Or his, as some men were vain enough to try it, it appeared; more normally it was a woman, often at her man’s insistence. The mountebank, steeped in sweat and fear and gore, had to juggle all this in his mind for this long twelve minutes of his life, buoyed only by the thought that he was making sixty pounds from it, except that only thirty had been paid, with the residue collectable when the new teeth had stayed firm and splendid in Mistress Wimbarton’s physog for a week. Oh yes, and ten pounds of the sixty went to the maid for her part in the jollity; although Dennett had his own ideas of that. He’d brought the two maids here by a long arrangement with the gentleman, he’d persuaded them there was no alternative save starve or sell their bodies to some villains that he knew lived locally, and he’d figured that with luck he’d end up with a customer exceeding satisfied, and one undamaged Deb to make a living on her back for him, being a surpassing beauty. Cecily’s ten pounds would be paid in drink to ease her pain and pap to pass her gums and serve as food — a neat arrangement he had not even told her of — wherefore her loss soon afterwards from the copse was hardly loss at all, although Deborah had irked him with her going. If Milady’s teeth held as they ought to do, no concern — he would collect the second thirty pounds. If they did not, though, he would have to find the spares, or forgo that vastly sum of money. Or run, and lose goodwill from Chester Wimbarton, a magistrate and man of great importance locally. Still, he’d done the operation with great care, he thought, and skill. They should hold.

  Mistress Wimbarton had memories of the operation which were as vivid as his were, but different. She remembered great agony, the girl’s hysteria, the other maiden’s cries and vomiting and running clean away when put outside the door (which she was told about afterwards, and which miffed her dreadfully; today’s girls were so dishonest and untrustworthy). Most of all she recalled the aftermath, when Mr Surgeon, without a by-your-leave, had bound her jaw up so that the teeth were clenched one atop the other, leaving her to swallow what blood could not be eased out through her lips, and told her women — as if she herself could not be trusted, or could no longer hear — that she was to remain bound up for one whole day, however great the pain, how much the oozement.

  She had lain for one day like that, in a darkened room, then Dorothy and Joan and Sue had taken off the binding bandage but exhorted her, with great fear in their eyes, not to open lips “as much as for a whistle” and keep her choppers pressed together hard. On the second night she had supped a little broth and sucked a little bread in milk, and on the third had seen her husband, Mr Wimbarton, for whom she had drawn back her lips in semblance of a smile — which he’d returned, an unfeigned show of warmth. By now she was exceeding anxious, because the teeth were wrong, all wrong, they were lumpy and felt — God spare the thought — like someone else’s. Unlike her servants, Mistress Wimbarton was confident, as far as any
woman can be, that her master loved her (else why take up with her, who had brought nothing to the house except herself?), so his smile was great balm, and she spoke some few painful words assuring him that it had been a fine success and not to mind the bruising and the slurs, for in another day or two she would be herself again; as beautiful and good-tempered and attentive as such a noble man might wish.

  She lied, and knew she lied, and one day later three of them fell out, however hard she pushed them back into the screaming sockets. Three fell out, and five or six (or seven? Maybe all) began to slip and slide within the holes, some of which were hardening and healing, others of which began to fill with fluid, brown and thin, and one or two with pus. Towards the end of the week her husband came to speak to her, but the women kept him out because, although they did not say it, Milady had begun to smell. Strangely, Milady could not seem to smell herself (no one dared to mention it, or hint, or ask her) but they knew from the way her brow went furrowed, by the horror in her eyes, by the way she was caught on sudden by the bile that tasted on her lips, that Mistress Amelia Wimbarton was aware of a great sorrow and a trouble coming on her. Although they did not like her, the women, from Dorothy right to the bottom, felt pity then, as well as admiration for her courage. For she faced it squarely, and called him in, and even ended up by shouting at him, that something must be done.

  The women thought the master a cruel man and a selfish rakehell, but conceded that in this they might be wrong. For although he left Milady’s room pale in the jowls, and called furiously for his steward Jeremiah, it appeared the target of his wrath was the mountebank, Marcus Dennett. He offered money as an incentive, and for failure he promised blows or worse. The quack, the mountebank, the whoremonger must be found, was his decree. Found quickly, brought to the house, and a cure would be effected on the mistress. Or, by God’s blood, someone would pay.