She looks about her, and a groan escapes her.
‘I moved you to your new chair,’ he says. ‘There’s no use crying out – nobody will hear you.’
She is silent, chewing her lips.
‘I just want to be your friend. I wish—’
‘You’re going to kill me.’ Her voice trembles. ‘You’re going to turn me into one of your specimens. You want my collarbone—’
Silas bends down so that his face is level with hers. ‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t understand – I never would. How can you think that? I want to be your friend. I want you to love me.’
She shakes her head.
‘What is it?’ he asks.
‘Love you?’ she scoffs, and her mouth is pulled into a sneer, just like his mother’s. ‘I will never. I despise you! I hate you – I—’
‘You don’t mean it – you will learn to. You’ll see.’
She lifts her jaw and spits out each word: ‘I. Will. Never.’
‘But you will.’
‘You repulse me.’
Silas did not expect this level of vitriol. He slows the anger in his chest, his frustration at her obstinacy. She is worse than the wayward ox that dragged the coal for the kilns, always stumbling, tripping, never going in the right direction. But the foreman broke it in, scored its back with whippings until its gambolling became a slow trudge, its skull bowed.
He waits for her to speak, and at last she does. She does not look at him.
‘Why do you do it?’ she asks.
‘Do what?’
‘Collect – kill these creatures, take away their lives?’
He shakes his head. She does not understand. He doesn’t end their lives but preserves their memory; totems that will last all of time, pelts which would have greyed then rotted in alleys. And what’s more, they mean something to him. Why does everything need to have a function in this modern age? Can’t joy be enough? He is about to articulate this when she abuts his thoughts.
‘I want food,’ she says, in the tone of a princess commanding a serf.
He will taunt her first, just as a jest. ‘I’m not sure about that.’
She doesn’t rise to it, so he sighs.
‘You bit me before, didn’t you?’ He holds out his finger, red and swollen, four sickled gashes made by her incisors.
‘I won’t. I won’t this time – I’m so hungry and so thirsty.’ She raises her eyes to him, and she is beautiful.
‘Very well, very well,’ he says, giving in sooner than he intended. He chuckles: she knows how to get her way.
He takes out a tin surgical dish, kidney-shaped. He won’t risk his hand again. He picks up the dirt-speckled chocolate bonbons which were thrown across the cellar before. He places them on the tray and holds it against her mouth. She turns her head on to one side and snatches one sideways. She eats them all.
‘Water,’ she says, and he fumbles for a bottle in his coat, pours the liquid into the tray, and she laps it like a cat. Dust floats in the dish.
‘Better?’ he asks, but she is silent.
He must make her love him.
‘I mean it,’ he says. ‘I just want to be your friend.’
He waits, and wonders if she is asleep.
‘I’ve been –’ he mouths the word first, because he has never said it aloud before – ‘lonely. I’ve been – I’ve been so lonely.’
There is no answer.
‘When I was a child, nobody wanted to be my friend. I never had one. I wished someone would want to be, but they all despised me. They laughed at me. And I thought I had one once, a surgeon, but he mocked me and . . .’
He tells her everything. He talks and talks, until his throat is hoarse. Gideon, his mother, the skulls he sold to the factory wives; he spills his life into the room, his words and worries embedding themselves in the fabric of the cellar. He tells her how sad he has been, how hard he has worked, how his curiosities have been an escape.
Still, she is silent.
Darkness
Time passes. Iris could not say how many days or how many nights. Silas brings her food and water. Part of her begins to look forward to the scraping against the ceiling, the whine of the trapdoor hinges, and to his footsteps on the ladder rungs. She hates herself for it, pounds her feet against the ground as if in revolt at her own mind, but in his company, she does not feel that she is going mad.
Because it is all black, black, black, endless black, until she thinks that she might suffocate. There is no pigment dark enough, no brush thick enough, to describe it. Her thoughts grow ragged-edged and unreal. She starts to imagine her sister sitting in the corner, her head bowed over her sewing, the hiss of her needle. A rat scratching becomes the scrape-scrape of Millais’s palette knife against the canvas. The press of her bindings becomes Louis’s caress on her arm, his whisper in her ear. She does not move, and the stiffness is pain. She wets herself and shits into a bucket. She is an anchoress bricked into an abbey. A medieval maiden trapped in a tower. A conspirator in a jail. A doll in a box. A dog in a cage.
By Jove, I’ll need to find a stupendously beautiful creature for it!
What a fine creature she is!
She eats, conserving her strength. She does not try to escape again because first she must contrive a plan which will not fail: she must be measured, calm and patient. Silas must trust her first. He must make a mistake, forget something. He must let his guard slip. She was too hasty before. She should have waited, or hit him harder with the lantern. She bucks in the chair at her own stupidity. It could have been her only chance.
She wonders if Louis has returned. A thousand scenarios track through her mind. He falls in love with Sylvia again, who recovered, and stays in Edinburgh. His steamer is delayed, or sinks. He returns home and thinks she has abandoned him, as she said she would.
Or—
Or—
He arrives at Colville Place, hears the quiet hum of the house, feels the chill of the rooms. He calls her name, and his voice echoes back.
He shoulders his cloak (if only she had left the letter!) and walks to her lodgings on Charlotte Street.
She hasn’t been seen for over a week, the matron tells him. (Has it been a week? Or has it only been a couple of days? Time is slippery.) She has taken nothing from her room, nothing to suggest a journey. He is disquieted.
He visits Rose – Iris can hear the chime of the bell, smell that sickly sweetness, feel that patchy carpet under his boots – and she has heard nothing either. She is disturbed too, because Iris wasn’t there for their walk, and she thought that Iris and Louis had gone away together on a whim.
He remembers Silas now – of course he does! He remembers the bauble and the hand on her arm, Iris’s unease and fear, and he comes at once to the shop.
He shoves past Silas, knocking him squarely on the chin.
She hears another man’s tread upstairs, and she screams for him, again and again and again.
He pushes aside the heavy object blocking the door.
She sees it open, and Louis is there, calling her name, holding her, pulling her free of her restraints—
Madame
Silas is sitting in his armchair when he hears the snap of the trap. He folds The Lancet and The Times carefully, and tucks them into the journal rack he made out of whittled bone and badger hide. He cracks each of his knuckles in turn.
Usually he would ask Albie for specimens, but he hasn’t seen the wretch in weeks, and when he went to rap on his window as a reminder of their agreement, he almost scared a different child senseless. Perhaps he’s gone away, moved to a new brothel, and can do without Silas’s generosity. It’s easier this way, as he wouldn’t want the little imp sniffing around while he has her here on a séjour. Silas already worries he suspects too much.
There is a plump white mouse lying in the jaw of the trap. Its eyes are blank and staring, two red rubies, but its belly writhes. Silas prods it with a toothpick. How perplexing!
It is then that he under
stands – the stomach is quickening with baby mice. He has only ever seen this once before, but on a hound. Is there a name for them? Mouslings? Mouselets?
He prises the mouse free. It is a good specimen. The cracked spine does not matter; he wants it for its pelt, and the fur is unpunctured.
Silas sits at his workbench, lays out his tools in a neat row – three pared scalpels, elbow scissors, a fleshing tool and skin scraper – and pins down its four feet. He cuts the quivering belly, picturing himself as a surgeon.
‘Naughty mouse,’ he says. ‘Let’s ease out your bastards.’
Each baby writhes in a sac. He splits the membranes, watching as each creature tugs free and begins to nose its way over the bureau. Six stumbling mouselets. They are raw and pink, their eyes faintly bruised like the fly in a maggot. He laughs a little at one, nudging his scalpel with its translucent snout.
Then he grows bored, and squishes them with a mallet, one by one.
He concentrates on the mother mouse, working carefully around the points where the muscle attaches to the fur – ears, tail, forelegs – and when he has the limp, salted pelt in his hand, he decides to leave it to dry before stuffing it. This way the creature is less likely to turn mouldy.
He remembers Louis and the damned rotten dove. That is what started all this – handing Iris to him.
As he runs a moistened finger inside the mouse’s coat, he realizes that this is the first time he has thought of Iris all morning. She is starting to tire him, with her fearful eyes and the stench of her waste in the bucket. It is foul, inhuman. It didn’t even occur to him that she might make such smells.
There is a knocking at the door.
Silas flinches at the sound, resolves to ignore it. There have been a few customers whose footsteps he has heard in the alley, but the ‘Closed’ sign has been enough to deter them even from ringing or knocking.
The hammering grows louder, more insistent, and Silas tucks his quivering hands underneath his thighs. He hears the faint pulse of the bell in the cellar; Iris will hear it too. This is no ordinary visitor. He imagines Louis there, led by Albie . . .
‘Mr Reed – I command you to open this door,’ a man says, stern and commanding, but Silas does not move.
Another voice. ‘Open the door, you bastard.’
He would recognize that yowl anywhere – it is Madame from the Dolphin. What can she want now? Surely this is not still the nonsense about that dead harlot? It hasn’t even been in the newspapers, so it can hardly be important. This is not the time – he thinks of Iris in the cellar, the pitch of her scream – how tightly did he fasten that gag? A pellet of sweat gathers on his brow.
‘Open up!’ the man’s voice says, and the door bucks on its hinges. They will beat down the door if he doesn’t answer it. He wonders who the man is, concludes it must be a heavy from the tavern.
Silas scours his dressers for the sharp blade which he uses on the larger specimens. He will assuage any of their fears, respond to their questions. And if the heavy wants any nonsense – well, he’s a fair enough match for any bludger.
‘What is it?’ Silas asks, cracking open the door.
But to his surprise, it is not a heavy with Madame, but a tall peeler, dressed in a long navy coat and varnished leather hat. A truncheon, lamp and rattle sit at his waist. His silver badges and buckles gleam like herrings.
Silas feels the knife slip in his palm, and he tries to tuck it down the back of his trousers.
‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,’ the constable says, and Madame’s eyes are narrowed, two serpentine slits.
‘You bastard – I know you did it,’ she says, lunging forward, but the peeler stills her with his hand.
‘Please, ma’am – control yourself.’
‘Did what?’ Silas says, forcing levity into his voice. ‘If there’s any enquiry I can assist with, please let me know.’
The constable’s mouth moves under his sprawling moustache, and at first Silas can only focus on the movement of it, a small, twitching mammal on his slab . . .
‘What?’ he says, blinking.
‘I asked if you are familiar with Jane Simmond?’
‘Bluebell,’ Madame barks. ‘Bluebell. Of course you knew her, you yellow—’
‘I knew her, in the way that others in the tavern knew her. She was often there, hustling.’
He sees by the tapping of the policeman’s foot that he is already impatient with Madame, keen to dismiss her as a hysteric. Silas knows what he must do. He must address him man to man.
‘I didn’t know her myself, except by sight,’ Silas continues. ‘She was ill-mannered. I heard tell of her death, but in truth I’d forgotten about it.’ He arranges his face into a perplexed expression. ‘But really, I thought there was nothing suspicious – I heard she was out of her wits on opium or gin, and slipped – so I can’t fathom why you are here.’
The constable nods. ‘That’s what we were led to believe, but –’ He beckons towards Madame.
‘I know it was you,’ she spits. ‘I know it was, and I won’t let it rest.’
Silas buries his chin into his neck, feigns a look of surprise. ‘I can’t think, if her death was an accident, what on earth I could have to do with it.’
The policeman glances him an apology. ‘I must ask: where were you on the night?’
‘Here, I should imagine,’ Silas says, crossing one foot over the other in a casual stance, but his leg is shaking and he feels hot. The knife is starting to slip, and he longs to rid himself of these people—
He hears her, a quiet, insistent mew.
His heart is sore. Men have surely died of lesser shocks. They must leave – he has to get them away from here.
‘Sir?’ the constable asks, peering closer at him. Silas feigns a smile.
‘Sorry. I didn’t quite—’
‘I asked you what happened on that afternoon when you quarrelled. Tell me from your arrival at the Dolphin, and then afterwards.’
He went to the rookery – that false girl with her counterfeit tresses – and then returned to the Dolphin, and nothing after that until he waited at Colville Place. More: Louis and Iris entwined, and a smell – the scent of Bluebell’s perfume. He has to steady himself on the door frame. But he must not think of it. He just has to stop them from hearing Iris’s bleating.
‘What did you do that afternoon?’ the constable prompts.
‘I visited the Dolphin, and she was a little rude, I admit,’ Silas says, and he hears the words pour from his mouth, and cannot believe how silky they are, how convincing, how educated, when everything in his mind is disorder. ‘But I put it down to her being in her cups. She was rolling in her seat. She had some gentleman with her. An elderly fellow. Really, I did not think of it at all. I mentioned to Madame here—’
Madame snarls at him.
‘That I was concerned she was over-soused on gin—’
‘He was livid! The anger was a heat off him—’
The peeler holds out his hand, and silences her, and Silas keeps talking. If he fills the void with words, then the sound will mask the squalling that he hears at his very core.
‘And after that, well, I came back here.’
‘Was anyone with you?’ the man asks.
‘I live alone. Surely there can be no suspicion?’
The peeler stops. ‘What the devil is that noise?’
‘What noise?’ Silas asks, and a coolness creeps over him. His throat is dry and he clears it.
‘That sound. You must hear it too?’
‘Oh, that. It drives me wild,’ he says. ‘The brats living in there –’ he points at the derelict building behind him, where he has seen nobody pass for weeks – ‘they keep a kitten in a cage. The cruelty of it is quite upsetting.’
‘I see,’ the policeman says, and he shrugs. ‘Urchins.’
And as he veers into conversational small talk about London’s housing problem, Silas can scarcely credit that the constable has given up the thread about Bluebel
l entirely, and believed him so readily about Iris’s cries. The policeman trusts him and sees nothing suspicious.
‘Was there anything else?’ Silas asks, daring to push the conversation to a close, and then, ‘I’m sure you’re grieving, Madame. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but really, dragging me into this mire when it’s clear it was nothing but a tragic accident –’
‘You bastard! You –’ and Madame hurls herself at him, her fingers on his hair, pinching and scratching, and Silas does not respond, just bears her lashes until he feels the constable pulling her free, rebuking her.
‘Really, Madame.’
‘I don’t blame her,’ Silas says. ‘It’s the gin. It can pickle a brain to hysteria if taken too often.’
The peeler rolls his eyes, and says, ‘Enough, ma’am – and thank you for allowing us to trouble you—’ and Silas closes the door, and presses his back against it, breathing hard.
Guigemar
Dear Guigemar,
Our love affair has soured. I have little to say except farewell. You are not to worry about me. I ask only that you do not try to find me or correspond with me.
Yours,
Iris
Beast
Iris closes her eyes. The floor is cold against her cheek, and she has tipped over the chair again in her frenzy. The bucket has fallen on to its side along with the seat. Some of the contents leach into the ground, some into her skirts. It is all hopeless. All for nothing. She tried so hard. She tried and tried and tried, a deep throaty wail in her lungs that was muffled by the gag – again and again she cried out, stamping and rocking the chair beneath her. She heard the shout of a woman – it was faint but it was something – and the vibration of the door closing.
And now she hears his footsteps across the ceiling.
The heavy item is pulled back, and the trapdoor opens. She blinks against the brightness of his lamp. She can smell herself. Piss and sweat. It appals her. She remembers washing herself each morning from the pail, squeezing the coal-warmed water from the sponge and dribbling it under her arms, between her legs.
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