“You see,” she says, “there is much to say for never falling out of grace.”
“With whom? ” I ask.
“With whoever pushes us along those paths we should have never taken. It is too hard to turn back. I know that now. It is for the best, perhaps, that you did not come and work with me. At the upper portion of the market in my trade there are gentlemen who expect . . . specialisms,” she says. I feel the breeze more keenly.
“Your trade? ” I say. “Is that what you call it? ”
She smiles. “I would have been glad to have taken you under my wing and taught you what I know, given you tips, a little guidance here and there when your instinct didn’t know which way to turn, Agnes. You are a clever girl. You would’ve made a good success of it, I’m sure.”
“Would I?” I say. “What . . . kind of specialisms?”
“There are those, Agnes, who are not satisfied by what is enough for other men.”
“And how—”
“They pay more,” she says quickly. “Willing to pay above the usual price, for things, techniques, that meet their more . . . unusual appetites.”
I look at her clean and lovely dress, at last grasping what the cost of it might be.
“Does it hurt?” I ask, clumsily.
She gives a pretty shrug. “Sometimes. But my power comes afterward, because they must pay handsomely for what they like to do. However, I did not come to find you to say all that. Only to tell you that there is a woman called Dilly Martinment who can help you, lodged at this address.” She holds out a scrap of paper with something written on it in an untidy hand. “She does not waste much vigor on any kindnesses, but her practice is effective.” As I do not say a thing, she adds, “There is often no infection, no . . . trouble, when she is done.”
“I see,” I say. I take the paper from her and hold it tightly this time.
“You have money, still?” she asks. “It will cost more than a little.”
I nod. “The coins are here,” I say, and move as if to take them out to show her.
“No! No! In God’s name, child!” She looks about to see if we are overlooked. “Keep all your secrets absolutely hidden. No one must see. No one! Do you hear?”
I look at her. What if another person knew my shame? How I have longed for that relief, for some acceptance or forgiveness. My guilt is tainting the child, I am sure of it. A horrible seething mass knots and unknots itself in the place above my belly, where my heart is. My heart is choked with it. “I stole them,” I burst out suddenly. “I stole those coins. And I am going to confess.”
Her eyes are as round as buttons. “Confess! To whom, you crazy girl?” she hisses.
“Why are you angry with me?”
“You are so stupid!” she exclaims. “As if you imagine so simple a thing could put right all that has happened to you. I have never met such an innocent!”
“An innocent!” I say. Of course I am not.
“Now you are cross with me,” she says, more gently. “You must move forward, Agnes, take up your life, just as it is. Move on. You cannot trust a soul—tell nobody.”
“But I must,” I say, trying to make her understand. She shakes her head.
“You cannot.” She leans toward me and speaks quietly now; her eyes are narrow and very bright. “You must curb that feeling, you must knock it dead in its tracks, Agnes.” Her voice is as clear as if it were shouting the words at me. “At best you would be transported at His Majesty’s pleasure to some barren hellhole two months’ voyage away over the high seas. At worst—you will swing from the triple tree at Tyburn.”
“It will not come to that,” I say stubbornly.
She puts her forefinger to my chin and raises it up lightly, almost as though she were about to kiss me, her fine face brushes so close. But she is whispering into my ear.
“How much would you care to feel that gallows breeze about you, Agnes? They say that the wind blows more freshly the higher you stand.”
“The nearer to heaven,” I mutter halfheartedly, though she does not hear. She is frightening me now. “Think of the roar of the crowd come to feast on your death,” she murmurs. “There will be many reasons why those in the crowd are there for it; there will be many who sympathize with your crime, such as it is, and with your suffering, but with relief that it was not themselves this time around, among this crop of unfortunates. ‘Poor beggar,’ they will say, as they always do. ‘And such a pretty face.’ Remember that their sense of holiday comes not from the sight of blood cooling in its flesh so quickly before their thirsty gazes, but from the gladness that it was not a sentence dealt to them on this occasion. Think of the crack of your neck as the cart rolls forward, Agnes, your legs free to kick in the cold air!”
“But I could plead my belly,” I say, swallowing. “They do not hang women who are with child.”
“They do not,” she says. “And after your conviction, how would you fare in Bridewell, grubbling in the dark for your waterpot, your clothes rotting from your shoulders while they wait for the child to be born so it can be removed to the workhouse? And then you will stand sentence, just as before.” She shrugs.
“I know a gentleman whose fantasy it is to see women strung up by the neck. Imagine, Agnes. And there are plenty like that—men with a streak of the Devil inside them whose predilection is for cruelty—and when a handful of these men have also law and order on their side, then they will use it shamefully. They like a pale face hanging from a rope. They like it regular, at each assize, and take it for granted, like some men enjoy a stroll in the park. Believe me, even the word execution affords them a little shudder of delight. I have seen men moaning with pleasure at the thought of pronouncing death upon a woman’s head.”
“It was to be a priest I told,” I say, thinking of Reverend Lindsay at St. Stephen’s, his kind, open face.
She looks incredulous. “And you can do that at the gallows, Agnes, as you will find churchmen there to lay a cast of sanctity over the proceedings, preaching to the damned to save you on your path to higher judgment. Small shame, sweetheart, that they do not spend their breath instead on saving the blighted souls of those who wield their strength so mightily.” She looks away down the street. “No, Agnes, take up your life, just as it is, and run with it.”
She seems somehow thinner than on the day I met her out in the fresh air on the carrier, and she does not meet my eye so many times. The joy in her eye is gone, though it is still as blue. There seems to be less of her substance, not of her body, so much as though her spirit itself were smaller, humiliated. I do not like to see her like that. I do not know what I can say.
“And are you well yourself? ” I ask uselessly, into the quiet of the lull in the traffic, and she brightens and straightens up and smoothes a hand down her silky skirts, which sheen and ripple like a tabby fur.
“Oh, I do not do so badly!” And her laugh is firm, like it was on the day I first met her. “My luck changed for the better—as yours will, Agnes—when I found a way to take what I can from life. I have no regrets about what I have done, having taught myself skills that most would shy from and applied them shamelessly, but always in command of the way I lived.
“Come and see me,” she shouts over the noise of a carriage passing, and I tell her that I shall, though I know that I will not. She embraces me then, very lightly, her fine clothes just brushing my own, and when she touches my hand to say goodbye I see a line of bruising about her wrist, as though some twine or rope had been bound and tightened there. She flinches away when I reach out.
“He did this to you? That soldier man?”
Lettice Talbot shakes her head and smiles at me, as if it is of no consequence. There is too much I do not understand.
“Go to the woman,” she urges me. “It is not a difficult undertaking, but neither is it easy. There is pain, and there is risk.” She shrugs lightly. “But there is always risk. You are simply choosing one risk over another.” She picks up her leather case and leaves me the
n, and goes away into the crowd gathered around a juggler on the corner of King Street. The crowd shouts and claps.
When she has gone, there is still a trace of her sweet smell in the fabric of my clothes, and it does not fade until the evening.
32
I look at the scrap of paper, over and over, until it is soft with being held in my hand. And then I go to the woman, at her address on the edge of St. Giles. It is not hard to find.
She has a dour, shuffling maidservant who shows me to a downstairs chamber. The woman is at home. “One of Mrs. Bray’s girls, ma’am,” the maidservant mutters as she leaves me alone with her. Dilly Martinment’s jaw juts from her face in a curious manner; the flats of her hands are narrow like the paws of a stoat, and her nails are overgrown.
“You can pay me, I take it?” She turns her back as she wipes her long hands on a piece of rag and puts it aside. “I do not talk to girls unless I can be sure. Mrs. Bray’s girls, they gets reduced rates. Put the coins on the table and then we can begin,” she directs. There are buckets with cloths soaking by the door. “How many months? ”
“It is hard to be sure,” I lie. “Perhaps six?” If I tell her how close I really am to my time, I know she will not treat me with her medicine. I am good at lying now. I do not even blink.
I place six shillings on the tabletop, saved from my wages. As she gathers them up she bites each one. Her teeth are short, as though she had spent a lifetime doing that, or eating stones instead of bread. I do not like this woman. I am glad I do not like her.
“There are cheaper remedies to purchase—powders,” she says. “But frankly they achieve little. They cause a bellyache that may lead you to believe yourself to be undergoing the required treatment. By all means try them, if you will, but I sense you will not find them efficacious.” She eyes my belly, then unlocks a chest and takes out a squat blue bottle. She draws a quantity of liquid deftly from it with a burette, and releases the drops into a small phial. She counts under her breath, and stops when she reaches the fortieth drop.
“Oil of savine.” She raises the phial and checks the level. “It is a potent stuff. I assume you do not take it lightly. Three drops, three times a day, on a good piece of sugar. Clear?” Unexpectedly, she stands up and reaches out and presses her fingers proprietarily into my belly. I do not like her doing this; indeed I am repulsed by her and have to try hard not to pull away. “Six months? I would say seven, at least,” she says. “But I am guessing. You look a healthy girl.”
“I have been fortunate.” I mean to say that I am fortunate about my health. She looks at me and makes a tutting noise between her tongue and ground-down teeth.
“I would say you have been careless or unlucky, girl. Yet,” she adds, “let’s not beat about, your misfortune is my gain.” And she expects me to join in as her jutting chin quivers briefly with laughter.
“I have no sugar,” I say stupidly.
“Buy some, beg some, steal some,” Dilly Martinment advises. “It will be a bitter thing to swallow, lacking it.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. I think of the tall white conical loaf of the sugar on the high dresser. I imagine rasping off what I need with the tongs, under the nose of Mrs. Blight, and carrying a brazen bowlful of pieces right through the house to my room. It would be unthinkable.
“It would be missed,” I say.
“It will be bitter, with no sweetness to offset the edge, like a dry knife at the back of the throat,” Dilly Martinment cautions me. She rubs at her neck and grimaces, her chin jutting out. “Little steely raspings.” And at that moment another paneled door, which I had not noticed previously, opens a crack.
“Well enough to leave us now?” she says to the small bony girl who emerges unsteadily from the back chamber.
The girl looks distinctly unwell. A strange smell has accompanied her into the chamber. Her face is as white as wax and clammy with perspiration, as though she is on the brink of a fainting fit. She grasps the back of a chair.
“Still I do not feel quite as I should.” I can barely hear what she is saying. She removes one hand from the chair to touch her hair. Her fingers are red and small, and make a poor attempt at tying the ribbons of her bonnet when Dilly Martinment passes it to her.
“Wait,” she says, “I am faint again,” and she grips at the chair and leans over it. Her eyes are wide and blank, as though her mind were somewhere else.
“I cannot touch my stomach,” she whispers. My hand strays to my belly under my cloak; it is firm and full and moves about.
“You will not need to,” Dilly Martinment says, glancing over her shoulder at me.
“Wicked, I am,” the girl whispers.
“I believe in neither hell nor damnation,” Dilly Martinment remarks briskly. How much easier for her to say this than it is for us. “We must make the best use of what comes to us.” She continues talking, but I do not listen as I am looking past her with a dawning kind of horror into the back room. I can make out a table and a pile of cloths upon it, dark with fluids. The lamplight shines upon some kind of metal instrument.
“You will find now that things will take their course,” Dilly Martinment calls after the girl. “I do not ever ask for names,” she mutters to me. She shuts the door, and eyes my belly again. “It has a good hold in there,” she says. “It may be more difficult to dislodge than you imagine. Of course, there are other ways yet.” She taps the glass of the phial with a sharp, discolored fingernail. “But the oil is a successful provoker of the catamenia, that monthly scarlet discharge that you lack and will remember now with something like a fondness, I am supposing, despite its inconvenience and accompanying aches and miseries.”
“Does it take long?” I say, not being able to ask what I really need to know.
She looks at me.
“It does not.”
I go away from there with a sense that it is all bad. All bad. At home in my chamber I find a strange comfort in the familiar smell of mice, a thin, pungent smell that bites at the nostrils.
I hide the oil at the back of the chest where my small linen and my Bible lie, and at night I take it out and look at it before I sleep. The baby drums on inside me, its limbs drumming and drumming at the skin of my belly. I turn the blue phial between my forefinger and thumb and watch the oil slowly coat the inside of the glass. It gleams poisonously by candlelight.
I know I cannot wait a moment longer. I take up the spoon that I have hidden for this purpose, and pour a little of the oil of savine into the spoon’s bowl.
It is long after dark. Mrs. Blight has gone to her lodging and Mary Spurren is in her chamber above me. I can hear the creak of her bed as she settles.
My hand does not shake and I do not spill a drop. I put the spoon to my mouth and swallow the liquid down. It is so dryly resinous, disagreeable and bitter that my throat clamps shut. I clench my teeth and rock backward and forward in the effort not to vomit. Then I pour another spoonful and swallow it. And then another.
I climb into my bed then and I do not move or speak a word out loud, but inside me every fiber of my being shouts with rage.
Murderer, the voice inside me whispers back.
In the morning before I go to breakfast, I do the same, though it is vile and taints the flavor of the bread and ale.
Mrs. Blight notices the absence of the spoon, and my cheeks redden as I look with her into the cutlery box. I know she thinks that I have stolen it, but she does not say a word to me. Instead she exercises sarcasm to the air in general when, by the afternoon, the spoon has reappeared again.
“Would you look at this,” she says, holding it up. “Always the silver ones what disappear, isn’t it, Mary? Remarkable swift how they come and go, I always find,” she says. She mimics the bleat of a young girl.
“Oh, madam, I cannot think how that came to fall into the pocket of my apron. How shiny it is! How lucky we found it before ’twas lost at the laundry!” She bends and whispers viciously at me over the table. “Little thief! And
I can’t help thinking, Mary, that there is something here that Mr. Blacklock ought to know of.”
How right she is. Alone in my chamber that night I drink the oil directly from the phial, and again in the morning, tears squeezing from my eyes, it is so bitter.
33
I dream of a jester performing a trick before a crowd, and the crowd is jeering. Lettice Talbot is there, too, and a man whose face I cannot see strokes the back of her white neck, and she is turning to him, her head falling back and her lovely eyes half-lidded, and then I feel a wrenching tug as if from some danger I had forgotten, and someone cries out, “Agnes, Agnes!” until my ears are ringing with distress. I wake with a gasp.
Mary Spurren is banging on the door. “Agnes?” she shouts, grumpily. I touch my face. My cheeks are burning as though I have stood too long at a bonfire. What is the matter with me? “Get up!” Mary Spurren calls through the door. “I won’t say it again.”
“Coming,” I reply, and then I hear her stamping down the stairs. At first I do not remember that Mr. Blacklock is away, and when I do, it is a sobering thought and the house seems different.
“Feeling slow today, are we?” Mrs. Blight says, when I go to the kitchen.
How sick the oil of savine makes me feel. My mind is quite displaced with thinking of it.
“You must go to Spicer’s for me,” Mrs. Blight says. “I need this and that. Been rushed off my feet these last few days.” I am too tired to argue that I have a pile of rocket cases to complete. Besides, Mr. Blacklock’s bench would be empty beside me. I can catch up later. He would not even know.
The Book of Fires Page 27