by Carol Hedges
“Ladies,” he says, raising the hat. “May I be of assistance?”
Sissy turns to him, relief plastered all over her face.
“Oh, Mr Hawksley, is it you? Oh – we are in such a plight. We cannot reach the cab rank and we need to go home. My brother will be waiting for us.”
Hawksley eyes Belinda, who is deliberately averting her eyes.
“I happen to have a cab waiting around the corner,” he says. “May I offer to escort you both?”
Sissy’s expression brightens instantly.
“Oh, that would be so kind of you.”
He offers her his arm. She grabs hold of it as if it were a log in a fast-flowing river. He does not offer his other arm to Belinda, who is forced to push her way through the crowds on the pavement, trying always to keep them in sight.
Hawksley steers Sissy into a side street, and there, just as he said, is a cab. He opens the door and helps her inside, seating her on the single seat with her back to the horses. Then he holds out a gloved hand to Belinda.
“Thank you, but I can manage,” she says, tossing her head.
Hawksley smiles down at her. He stands slightly aside to allow her to enter and once again, she feels his breath on the back of her neck, is aware of his strong powerful body, smells his exciting cologne. He gives the driver instructions, then seats himself next to her.
The carriage moves off. Sissy closes her eyes. Belinda stares out of the window, seeing nothing but the blur of rain and the fractured glimmer of gaslight. Suddenly she feels the sensation of Hawksley’s leg against hers. She gives him a quick sideways glance but he is staring straight ahead, his face expressionless.
She moves her own leg, but she is already sitting close to the carriage wall. His leg finds hers again, presses gently against it. She feels its firmness, the warmth of it. She does not pull away.
Later that evening, when her brother returns and they are seated at the dining table, Sissy hesitantly relates the events of the afternoon to him.
“By God – that man did you a good turn,” Josiah says, pushing half a potato into his mouth. “I have a mind to write and thank him. Indeed, I shall write and thank him. And I shall invite him to dine with us – what do you think of that, little Sis?”
“Whatever you say, Josiah,” Sissy says, blushing.
“Aw – I can see you’re pleased with the idea. A new love to drive out the old, eh?”
Belinda pauses, a forkful of food suspended in mid-air. She stares fixedly at Sissy, who is simpering at her brother in a slightly foolish way.
“See, I told you you’d soon forget that great booby of a farmer once we got to London. And wasn’t I right? Mr Hawksley – who’d have thought it? A fine figure of a man. Elegant, good-looking. Owner of a diamond mine to boot. Rescuing my little sister!”
He throws down his cutlery with a clatter.
“Damn it! I’m going to write to him now! Strike while the iron is hot. Dessert can wait.”
He pushes back his chair and strides noisily out of the room. Sissy averts her eyes from Belinda’s gaze and fixes them on her plate instead. She pushes her food around, a secret smile lurking at the corner of her lips.
It is none of my business, Belinda reminds herself, returning her attention to her supper also. So this was, presumably, the Unfortunate Incident – some ‘great booby of a farmer’ back in Yorkshire had jilted her. Somehow, she is not surprised, given Sissy’s unprepossessing face and figure and her diffident personality.
She recalls the warmth of Mark Hawksley’s leg pressed against hers in the carriage. The way his eyes brightened and crinkled at the edges with wry amusement as he helped her down from the carriage, holding her small hand in his just a little longer than propriety demanded.
One didn’t have to be a mind-reader to know which of the two of them he preferred. But he is not going to marry you, a small voice inside her head reminds her. You may have far better looks, but you are only the hired companion. You have nothing and you are nothing.
Belinda Kite turns her attention back to her dinner, which she finishes in silence.
***
Meanwhile Frederick Undercroft, who has a fondness for the company of women who are not his wife, is spending the evening with his lovely friend Hectorina Rose. They have spent many evenings together over the years, either dining out, or sitting next to each other on the sofa in the tiny house he rents for her in Maida Vale.
Hectorina Rose has very black hair, likes very showy jewellery and has the full-bosomed figure that men of Undercroft’s vintage find most alluring. She also wears stylish silk dresses. Some of them have been bought and paid for by Undercroft. Some have not.
Tonight, they have supped at Cromerty’s Restaurant – a discreet little place where a gentleman can entertain a member of the opposite (or the same) sex and no eyebrows are raised. Oysters and French champagne have gone down a treat. Now a small silver bowl of hothouse red grapes is placed on the table. Hectorina Rose picks up the fruit scissors and cuts a stem of grapes from the bunch.
“I think I’d like a grape too,” Undercroft says.
She pushes the bowl across the table.
“Help yourself.”
He leans forward. “Oh, let’s do it properly.”
Hectorina Rose knows the routine. She dutifully picks up a grape, and offers it to his waiting mouth. Undercroft smiles. To him, this simple manoeuvre is so much more than a mere sharing of food. It is as if the woman is symbolically offering herself to him. Which, a short while later, she will do, in one of the small upstairs rooms that smell of old cooking and stale sex.
But even as he is working away on top of her, with Hectorina Rose dutifully writhing and groaning beneath him, as befits a true professional who knows where her silk dresses come from, Frederick Undercroft cannot escape the dark thoughts that lately seem to have attached themselves to his life like limpets.
As he climaxes, too soon and unsatisfyingly, he feels shapeless words rise to his mouth and stay there, unfinished and uncertain.
By the time he leaves it is past midnight and the streets are cleared out of rain and people. Undercroft walks to the main thoroughfare, where there are always cabs to be hired, at whatever time of day or night.
As he turns a corner, a man hurrying in the opposite direction bumps into him. He is carrying what looks like a pot of paint in one hand, and a brush in the other.
Undercroft pushes him off with an exclamation of annoyance. The man mutters something that could be an apology, could be a mouthful of profanity, and vanishes into the anonymity of an adjacent alley.
Only when he is seated in the cab does Undercroft notice that there are drops of red paint on his shoes. Like blood spots. All the way home he stares hypnotically at them, wondering whether they could be an omen.
In what is left of the night he lies awake, the inside of his head shiny with the clarity of sleeplessness. It’s hard to contemplate, in the grey hours of the darkness, that possibly the only reason someone would come to your funeral would be to make sure you were dead.
***
A fine golden bowl of an autumn morning, and it is standing room only in the outer office of the Detective Division. The Anxious Bench has metamorphosed into the Angry Bench, and is currently packed with the kind of people who live in the separate world that exists behind the respectable facade of the city.
The noise is deafening, the smell of cheap scent and unwashed bodies is overpowering, and the duty constable is struggling to maintain some sort of order as Jack Cully pushes open the door.
He is immediately mobbed by a group of men who all try to talk at once, each raising their voice to be heard above their fellows. Cully sends the constable a What-the-hell? look. The constable shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders.
“Gentlemen,” Cully raises a hand. “I can’t attend to all of you at once.”
He scans the group, picking out one man whose face seems vaguely familiar.
“You, sir – would you
care to accompany me to a quiet room, where you can explain what this is all about.”
“It’s all about vandalism,” a voice at the back of the room calls out shrilly. “Desecration of the vilest and basest kind.”
Cully can’t make out the speaker, but he recognises the voice as belonging to Reverend Micah Eliphaz, the vicar of St Xavier the Charitable. It is a very High Anglican church and the vicar has a voice to match. Over time Cully has had to deal with numerous formal complaints from him about ragged street children sheltering in the porch, or beggars sitting outside the gate.
“Words,” shouts a florid-faced woman sitting on the bench. “Someone painted rude words all over our door.”
“And on ours,” another woman echoes.
“And on my Boarding House for Respectable Young Professional Ladies,” a third adds.
“Red words,” the first woman says significantly, nodding her head at Cully as if the colour is somehow implicated in the crime.
“Step this way,” Cully orders the familiar-looking man, who dutifully follows him to one of the sparse whitewashed rooms that are used either to house criminals temporarily or to interview suspects. A small group of supporters gathers outside the door.
“Name?” Cully asks.
“Edwin Gregious, city bookseller.”
Ah, now Cully remembers. Mr Gregious has a shop in Holywell Street. The police had conducted a razzia upon his and several other warehouses, carrying off masses of obscene books, photographs and prints. Jack Cully prided himself on being broadminded, but even he was shocked by some of the confiscated material.
“Can you tell me what has happened?” he inquires.
“When I went to open up my shop as usual this morning, somebody had torn down the shutters in the night and covered all over the window with red paint.”
Mr Gregious’ moustache quivers with indignation.
“I have my regular customers. What will they think? Then there’s the passing trade. I had just put a whole new selection of pictures in the window too. Classical and Roman themed. Very tasteful.”
Cully recalls some of the ‘Classical themed pictures’ seized on the last raid – they consisted of stark naked women lying down with their legs wantonly open, and priapic satyrs or bulls standing over them in various states of arousal.
“So what are the police going to do about it?” a voice from the half-open doorway interrupts, followed by a chorus of disgruntled citizenry.
Cully attempts to build a barricade against the rising tide of ire.
“If you would all like to give your names and addresses to my desk sergeant, I will make sure an officer attends each incident and takes a statement from you,” he says.
There is the muffled sound of boots moving out of the way and Sergeant Evans enters the room, making it seem suddenly much smaller.
“I am sorry to interrupt you, Detective Sergeant Cully,” he says in his lilting Welsh accent, “but I have just been talking to some of the ladies in the waiting room, and I wondered whether the person, or persons, unknown who perpetrated these acts of vandalism could be connected to the red painted doors that I saw in the Drury Lane area, as mentioned in my recent report?”
Only Sergeant Evans would refer to the bedraggled army of elderly whores working on their decline as ‘ladies’, Cully thinks wryly.
“You wrote a report?”
Evans draws himself up with pride.
“I placed it upon Inspector Stride’s desk myself.”
Oh damn, Cully thinks. Someone should have warned the young sergeant about placing things on Stride’s desk without telling Stride that they had been placed. The report was probably sitting under a vast pile of unread paperwork. And Stride himself was currently in a meeting with the Home Secretary.
“You mean there’s been other properties painted and the police ain’t investigated it yet?” Mr Gregious exclaims.
Cully curses inwardly.
“I’m sure the police are doing all in their powers to catch the criminals,” he repeats, reaching for the automatic response that worked nine times out of ten.
Sadly, this is the tenth time.
“So we aren’t the first after all?”
“I shall make sure I look into it personally,” Cully says.
Another stock phrase. That doesn’t work either.
Mr Gregious’ air of righteous indignation is so tangible you could strike matches on it.
“I find this very hard to hear, officer. Very hard indeed. You were quick enough to come down and raid my premises and confiscate my stock on the mere hearsay of a couple of magistrates. Now it appears that when I am the innocent victim, you can’t be bothered.”
“Nobody said that,” Cully replies in what he hopes in a reasonable tone of voice. But Mr Gregious is currently not at home to Mr Reasonable.
“Let me give you some free advice, young man,” he huffs.
Jack Cully groans inwardly. In his experience, free advice often turned out to be expensive.
“I pay my taxes, so I am entitled to protection under the laws of this land. As are all those good people in your outer office. And if we don’t get it – well then, we shall just have to take the so-called law into our own hands! So there!”
Having uttered this anarchical threat, Mr Gregious rises, glares at the two men and stomps out of the room, where his aggrieved voice can be heard sharing his opinion of police incompetence to the waiting crowd.
“Oh dear. I’m so sorry, Detective Sergeant Cully,” Sergeant Evans says, his expression woebegone.
“Not your fault, lad. You weren’t to know. Now, let’s get that mob out there calmed down and pacified before they really do riot. Then I suggest we head for Detective Inspector Stride’s office, find your report and start looking into things.”
***
Meanwhile in a smart hotel room off Bath’s beautiful Regency Crescent, a man stands in front of a mirror, tying his cravat. Shortly, he will make his way to the Assembly Rooms where he will give a presentation to the good citizens of that fair spa town.
In the presentation, which has been widely advertised and will be standing room only, he will invite his audience to purchase shares in his company, which has been founded to re-open his late father’s diamond mine, loaded with priceless gems just waiting to be dug out.
The name upon the poster is one he has chosen specifically for this event. It is not the name he uses in London. He has learned early on that if you want to get anywhere in this world – and he decided right at the start that he wanted to go as far as it was possible to go – you wear names lightly, discard them when appropriate, and seize the advantage anywhere you can.
And you move around a lot. You do this because most people do not. Change your town and your name, and if you have the right clothes and the right manner, the whole world is your lobster. So to speak.
He finishes tying the silk cravat, brushes a few imaginary threads from the lapel of his well-tailored black jacket, and smiles confidently at his reflection. He looks every inch a gentleman. Every inch a charmer. He turns from the mirror and hooks his top hat from the stand. Curtain up. It is time to charm some more golden guineas out of some more gullible pockets.
***
It is a day’s coach ride from the elegant Assembly Rooms of Bath to the more mundane Lily Lounge, a discreet and pleasant tea-room. Located in Flask Walk, a narrow lane off the fashionable Hampstead High Street, it was initially opened to serve female shoppers with a choice of teas and delicious homemade cakes.
Now, with the advance north of the railway, the subsequent extension of the housing stock, along with the arrival of some more nice little shops, the Lily Lounge has branched out into also offering light lunches.
The lunch period is well under way when the door is pushed open to admit Regina Osborne in a severe tailored coat and an uncompromising bonnet. She is accompanied rather hesitantly by Georgiana Undercroft.
The two women are greeted politely by the tea-room owner, a
lady of similar vintage but far finer beauty. She is wearing respectable shop black, her abundant dark hair coiled up and covered by a becoming lace cap. She offers to show them both to a table.
Regina plants her feet firmly and glares at her.
“You are ‘Mrs’ Lilith Marks, the owner of this … establishment?” she says, waving a dismissive gloved hand in the direction of the customers.
“I am indeed.”
“I do not suppose you know who we are?”
“I do not suppose that I do,” Lilith responds equably. “Would you like to see the luncheon menu?”
Regina Osborne tosses her head.
“Certainly not. We are not here to see the menu. We are here to see YOU!”
Georgiana Undercroft plucks her sleeve,
“I really think we should keep our voices down, Regina,” she murmurs. “There are people staring at us.”
“Nonsense, Georgy,” Regina Osborne booms. “Everybody has the right to know who this woman is.”
“Everybody knows that I am the owner and manager of this tea-room,” Lilith informs her.
“Ah – but you were not always such, were you?” Regina sneers.
Light dawns on Lilith’s face.
“Yes, I once was somebody different,” she says quietly. “I presume you are referring to that time. But I left those days behind me a long while ago.”
“Oh, I doubt that. Once a whore, always a whore.”
Georgiana shifts her feet and looks uncomfortable.
“Is there some reason why you have entered my tea-room, other than to insult me?” Lilith asks, acid etching every syllable.
“You know the reason all too well,” Regina spits. “We have come to confront you and tell you that we know all about your evil plans to poison our husbands by placing arsenic in your cakes and IT WILL NOT WORK! Now then – what do you have to say to that?”
Lilith stares at her as if she were mad.