by Ed Gorman
A knock on the front door one floor below, the confident knock of somebody who didn't expect to be kept waiting. Trillow sighed with relief and threw down his charcoal.
"Her at last. Go down and let her in, Ella."
On her way out, she glanced at his drawing board. Only a hand on a wheel, that was all. She'd half hoped— more than half hoped— that a miracle would have happened and Trillow would have bestowed sainthood on her. As she went downstairs, the segs of her boots tapping on the uncarpeted boards, she tried to crush down her disappointment. Her face was too angular, body too thin, hair too ordinarily brown to make her a saint. Saints Triumphant had smooth faces, rounded bodies under their white draperies, swathes of black or golden hair.
Saint Catherine was waiting impatiently on the step. She was wearing a black velvet jacket over a skirt of yellow and black tartan, draggled with mud at the hem. A red shawl covered her head and the fringe that frizzed out of it at the front was as gold as fried egg yolk. She pushed past Ella without saying anything and went upstairs trailing a smell behind her. It was a warm, sourish smell, the sort you got when you knelt down to watch the mother cat feeding her kittens on the old blanket in the corner of the kitchen. As soon as Saint Catherine set foot on the landing the door to Trillow's studio opened. She went inside. The door shut.
* * *
"Come along, Kate dear, give a little more."
"Me knee's stiff."
"Rub it then. Ah, that's good. Keep your hand there like that. Don't move."
"Thought you said I could rub it."
"Shhh. Keep still."
"Rub somewhere else if you want."
"Only ten bob extra. Yes, I know."
"So what's ten bob to you?"
"A lot of money. Now try lifting your petticoat up and holding it there on your knee. Knees apart for goodness sake."
"Ten bob's not a lot when you're selling them for five guineas."
"Who says we're selling them for five guineas?"
"Urse knows a man."
"Ursula talks too much. Stop fidgeting."
"Me titties are getting cold. I'll get goose pimples."
"It's not cold in here."
" 'Ow would you know? You've got a jacket on.
"Alright, five minutes' break if you must."
"Something to warm me up?"
"Help yourself. I only hope it puts you in a better mood."
"Ten bob'd put me in a better mood."
"Pity, because you're not getting it. We have a lot of expenses to cover."
"Like bribing policemen to look the other way."
"Just get your drink and sit down."
"Only bribes don't always work, do they? You know Dutch Joe was raided last week? Took all 'is pictures and plates away and 'e's had to do a bunk."
"Are you threatening me?"
"Ten bob."
"I'll have to ask Ned."
* * *
The door of Trillow's studio stayed closed. Ella and Ned lunched in the kitchen off tea, bread and cold mutton. His long hands were flecked with acid burns and a distinctive smell clung to him; of ammonia, linseed oil and resin, overlaid with the strong tobacco he smoked when he wasn't working to drive the chemical fumes out of his lungs. Ned had to sleep in his workroom. Through the winter his thin face had turned yellowish and there was a boil on his neck that wouldn't go away. When Ella had cleared up the lunch things, she went through to his room to help. There was a new batch of copper plates to be prepared, first cleaned with ammonia and whiting, then heated over a burner and spread with a fine film of wax. Ned had taught her the business as if she were a proper apprentice and she did all the preparation work and clearing up.
Ned stood at his big table by the window with a drawing Trillow had made the day before spread out in front of him, copying it onto a waxed copper plate with a sharp engraving tool. Ella left her first plate drying and went over to watch. The picture was of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, a snaking line of them with their palm branches, stretching to infinity in correct perspective. Ursula was tall and stately, with dark hair stretching down nearly to her feet. Ella thought of Trillow's long charcoal strokes drawing it and felt as if her own hair were being stroked into sleekness by his hand. A little shiver went through her.
"She's beautiful, isn't she?"
Ned didn't answer. He'd seemed preoccupied over the past few days. She noticed that he kept passing his hand over his eyes.
"Eyes tired?"
"A little."
"You're working too hard."
She heard him from her cupboard bed next door working late into the night, coughing from the fumes of nitric acid.
"We have to work while the market's there."
"Surely people always need saints."
He laughed and it turned into a cough. "Wouldn't you like to live in a house, Ella, with bedrooms and meals on a proper table and a skivvy to make up the fires?"
"I suppose so."
"I suppose so too."
"And Trillow?"
"Oh, I don't know what Trillow wants."
The possibility that there might be a future without Trillow sent a different sort of shiver through her.
She said, diffidently, "Trillow works too hard as well. He's out every night."
Evenings were a good time to sell, Trillow said. It surprised her a little that Sunday school people should be doing business in the evenings. She waxed another plate and tidied the workroom. Artists like Trillow could work in confusion, but engravers had to be orderly: the sharp tools in racks on the walls, sheets of dampened paper piled between plates of glass ready for printing, bottle of linseed oil for mixing the ink, bottle of nitric acid for biting the design into the copper plates. Damping the paper, keeping the tools clean and the bottles topped up were part of Ella's work. At about half past three they heard feet stamping down the stairs and the front door slamming. Soon afterward heavier feet tramped upstairs and Trillow came in, carrying a sheet of paper.
"That bloody woman…"
Ned gave him a warning look and glanced at Ella. Trillow went over to the work table and dumped his paper on top of the picture that Ned was copying.
"One Saint Catherine, as per specification."
Ned looked at it, frowning.
"More of a sketch, isn't it?"
"The light was going. You can put in the detail when you're copying."
"It's not that easy."
"For heaven's sake, I have to deal with these women. It's all very well for you to sit up here and—"
"Ella dear, would you go and make us a pot of tea?"
She went obediently and, from the kitchen, was aware of low voices rumbling next door. She couldn't hear what they were saying, but knew it was an argument. It hurt her that the two people who meant most to her should argue.
* * *
"So I told her I'd ask you."
"You decide."
"No. You're not putting it all on me. Equal profits, equal risks."
"It seems a lot of money. But then if she's a good model…"
"If you catch her quick between the third and fourth glass of gin she's not so bad. I'll bring the other ones up later, when Ella's out of the way."
"So you mean, you think she's worth it?"
"Nothing to do with it. It's not a model fee she's asking, it's blackmail."
Ned put down his engraver's point and stared.
"She wouldn't, would she?"
"She dropped a hint about Dutch Joe."
"Oh God, don't you think we ought to leave off for a while?"
"No! With Joe out, we can take over his market. Every porter at every gentleman's club in London knew Joe. They'll need somebody to send their people to now he's gone."
"We shouldn't get in so deep. Just a few months of it, we agreed."
"Oh yes, enough for the rent on a little house in Barnes for you and your sister, then puppy dogs and prayer book markers for the rest of your life. Ned, there are thousands of pounds, tens
of thousands in this— town house, flunkeys and carriage."
"Is that what you want?"
"I certainly don't want to spend the rest of my life in a scrubby studio getting whores drunk."
"Shhh."
"Oh for goodness sakè, your sister must have some notion of what's going on."
"Of course she hasn't, and she's not going to."
Trillow shrugged. "So?"
"So?"
"Do we pay Kate's ten bob or don't we?"
"I don't know."
* * *
The raid came three days later at around four in the morning while it was still dark. Ella, closed into her cupboard, heard the knock at the front door like something at the back of a dream, then woke as noises of outrage rose through the house, with tenants poking heads out of doors to ask what was happening, and heavy steps clacking on the stairs, strange voices. While she was sitting up and blinking, trying to separate reality from dream, she heard the door open and steps coming into the kitchen, soft steps, not like the ones on their way upstairs. The fire was out and the room quite dark.
"Ned? Ned, what's happening?"
Somebody pulled the cupboard doors open and stood close to her in the dark. Not Ned. Not Ned's smell.
"Ella, take these. Keep them in there with you and stay where you are."
Trillow. He pushed something at her, something that dug against her ribs. Her hands closed around it and she knew at once what it was. Parcels of copper plates were as familiar to her as bread and cheese. Then the cupboard doors closed on her and Trillow was gone. She heard his voice out on the landing, louder and grander than usual.
"There's a sick girl in there. If you must go in, show some humanity."
Then Ned's voice from the doorway, not all loud or grand.
"Ella dear, I'm afraid there are some people coming in."
Through a gap where the doors didn't quite meet she saw oil lanterns beaming over the kitchen, making ordinary chairs and bowls look sinister. Then steps toward her cupboard and Ned's voice, "No, my sister…"
Trillow's voice, full of contempt, "If they insist on violating a poor girl's sick bed, let's get it over and done with."
The doors flapped back. She shrank against the wall from the lamplight, pulling the blanket up to her chin. The parcel of plates was pressed between her spine and the wall at the back of the cupboard. The light beamed at her for several heartbeats, making her screw up her eyes until a rough voice murmured, "Sorry, miss," and the doors shut on her.
She heard Trillow asking, "Are you quite satisfied now?" in a voice as sharp as any engraving tool. Then the feet went clacking away downstairs.
Much later, when the house was quiet again, Ned came to her. She heard his apologetic whisper through the doors.
"Ella, are you awake?"
She sat up and opened the doors. He was carrying a candle in an enamel holder. His face in the light reminded her of a severed head in an engraving of a cannibal feast.
"What happened?"
He pulled a chair over and sat down.
"Ella, my dear somebody… oh, so much malice…"
"It was the police?"
"Yes. You see, when you're in trade, when other people see you doing well, you make enemies…"
"What did they want?"
"Our plates… you see, somebody who wanted to do us harm had told them we were… doing things we shouldn't. So they've taken the plates and…"
"Not all of them."
She pulled the parcel of plates out from under the blanket. The candle wavered in his hand, sending shadows rocking across the room.
"How did they get there?"
"Trillow brought them."
He turned away. "I'll…" She waited, but he didn't say anything else, only put down the candle, grabbed the package from her and stumbled out.
Three days later, with casual apologies, a police constable returned fourteen engraved and etched copper plates of Saints in Triumph.
* * *
"We're safer now the police have made fools of themselves."
Trillow leaned back on the chaise-longue, brandy glass in hand. Ned stood by the table, compulsively sorting sticks of charcoal into a neat length-graded row. His face was yellower than ever in the lamplight, the boil on the back of his neck more vivid.
"If they'd found the other plates…"
"Luckily, one of us didn't panic."
"But to hide them in her bed… I don't see how you could think of it."
"It was either that or harder beds for all of us— her included."
"Not Ella, no."
"She helps you, doesn't she?"
"Not with those."
"Would the police believe that?"
Ned came up the step to the dais and stood at the end of the chaise-longue, hands clenched together.
"I'm getting out. Now. I want my share of the money and I'm getting out now."
"Where to, Ned? And how long will a couple of hundred pounds last you? Give it a few more weeks with the plates we've got and an open field and I'll guarantee you ten times that."
"What if the police come back?"
"Unlikely."
"And Kate?"
"I'll speak to her."
The next day at six o'clock it was getting dark and Ned was out buying ink powder. Ella was on her own in the kitchen, grating suet onto a plate ready for tomorrow's steak and kidney pudding. She was alarmed by her brother's nerviness and loss of weight and had decided that more red meat might counteract the overwork and the acid fumes. Every night shut into her rectangle of darkness, she fell asleep to the creaking of his printing press. Sometimes she woke as the first gray light was coming in through the crack between the doors and heard him still moving about next door. He was getting through their supplies at an unprecedented rate. Every morning the stacks of dampened paper were used up, the linseed oil bottle empty, the floor scattered with bits of ink-stained muslin. Every morning Ella tidied up, refilled bottles, damped more paper. The stacks of finished prints under weights on the drying bench were twice as high as usual. She thought about it as white flakes of suet piled into a pyramid, and imagined their saints being seen and possessed from Land's End to the Hebrides or even further afield, going with the missionaries along the steaming rivers of Africa or across the plains of China. Then the kitchen door opened and Trillow walked in, pouring blood.
Most of it came from a torn ear, though she didn't realize that at the time. She saw the odd way he was walking, hunched forward with his head sunk into his shoulders and a hand clapped over his left ear. Blood was seeping through his fingers, running down inside his coat sleeve and soaking the cuff of his shirt. He came lurching across the room and, without speaking, leaned his elbows on the table where she'd been working, his head down. She gasped and dropped the grater, scattering suet. It mingled with the drops of blood coming through his fingers onto the table. He asked in a terrible flat voice where Ned was. She gasped, "Out."
"Water. In a bowl."
Shaking, she filled a soup tureen with water from the bucket in the corner, slopping it over the floor. He pulled a chair up to the table, grabbed the pudding cloth, soaked it in the water and held it to his ear. When she took a proper look at his face she gave a little scream. His left eye was closed, the flesh around it swollen and purple-red. His lip was split and a line of congealed blood ran down his chin. The pudding cloth was already turning red.
"More cloth."
She ran into her brother's printing room and came back with a roll of muslin, used the kitchen knife to hack pieces off it. She passed piece after piece to him. As each one was soaked he let it drop to the floor and grabbed another. Gradually the flood slowed until the pieces were only stained pink. He took a long shuddering breath.