by Carol Hedges
“We saw the headlines in the papers,” somebody interjects brightly from the back row.
About fixes his glittering dark eyes upon the commentator, and lowers his voice.
“Brother – do not say in this Holy Gathering of God’s People that ye have succumbed to the vileness and wickedness that is sold on our streets every day?”
“Umm … I just saw it on a board … as I was passing by …. very quickly.”
About’s eyes narrow. He stares hard at the man. There is an awkward silence during which the congregation shuffles its feet and tries to look as if it is nothing whatsoever to do with the recalcitrant sinner.
About sighs, and switches his gaze to the Infant Prophet, who immediately pipes up in a shrill treble,
“Nobody shall drink wine from the goblets of the unrighteous. Nobody shall partake of the passions and pleasures of the lovers of the flesh. Nobody shall eat of the foods sacrificed to idols, for Lo! Is it not written?”
“It is written,” the congregation intones, relieved to have found themselves shifted to safer ground.
“Brothers and Sisters in The Lord,” About resumes, “do not be afraid. The Lord knows your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. He knows you cannot tolerate Wickedness and that you WILL not grow weary.”
He stands on tiptoes, surveying them from under his grizzled brows.
“Who will do The Lords’ Work? Who will write what they have seen, what is now and what will take place later?”
“When you say ‘writing’ …” a man’s voice pipes up cautiously, “you mean writing Bible words?”
About inclines his head.
“It’s alright to write Bible words on things, is it?”
“If the Lord says so.”
“What if we can’t write the words quite properly? Some of them Bible words is awfully long and curly – will The Lord punish us?”
About tries not to let his impatience show in his expression. They are after all his followers, even if some have never really mastered pen and ink and still sign their name with a letter X, which they probably spell wrong. They are his holy sheep – though many of them have about the same level of intelligence as a real one.
“The Lord will guide your hand, my Brother.”
“Oh, that’s alright then. Only I wouldn’t want to upset Him. Didn’t do much writing when I was growing up you see and …”
About cuts in quickly,
“The Lord commands us to write. Will. You. Write?”
A murmur of willingness runs round the gathering. Suddenly everyone wants to be a writer.
“Then go forth into the highways and byways of the Great Babylon. Arm yourselves with paints and brushes from Brother Murdoch’s shop and let your words so appear before men that they may repent of their Wicked Ways. Be found Worthy of the Robe and Crown that awaits you in these Last Days, dear Brothers and Sisters. Be. Found. Worthy. Let us now seek Sanctification for our Great Endeavour.”
About breathes in. Closes his eyes. Rocks backwards and forwards a few more times. The candles hiss and sputter. Somewhere in the distance a church clock strikes ten. The congregation sits, eyes closed, and waits for the Almighty to make further contact.
While the members of the congregation are thus preoccupied, let us take a moment to consider the small blond-curled white-clad phenomenon that is The Infant Prophet, currently picking his nose in the front row.
He is the son of Senior Prophet About – a late and unexpected addition to a household barren of offspring until he was born. However, the ‘Infant’ is actually a boy of some ten years, though his small stature, long blond curls and piping voice gives him the appearance of a child much younger than his actual age.
The Infant Prophet has led an unusual life. He was born to older parents who, at the time of his birth, rented rooms in Montague Place, near the entrance to the old Reading Room of the British Museum. His father worked as an engraver nearby.
Both saw his arrival as a miracle, and being of a religious persuasion (during the long pre-Infant period, the couple attended a small moderately normal chapel close to St Paul’s), parallels were drawn to Abraham’s wife Sarah, who also conceived a child when well past childbearing age.
The events that set the family’s footsteps firmly on the visionary path were thus: One night the erstwhile engraver read the passage in the New Testament where the infant Christ informs his parents that He must be about His Father’s business.
That night he dreamed he saw an Angel wearing white robes and carrying a flaming quill, who pointed to these very words carved in burning letters on a large rock. When he awoke, it was with the conviction that he had received a personal prophecy.
Henceforth, he informed his wife, over coffee and toast, his name would no longer be Millbank Tendring but Prophet About, as he had been commanded to be about His Father’s business.
All this meant very little to the child, who grew up subject to the usual killer diseases of childhood, which he survived. However, change arrived one fateful day when he was four.
The boy was sitting on the floor, turning the pages of a picture book bought to teach him to read (a process that was proving fraught with difficulties), when he suddenly pointed to a picture and said in a piping treble: “God”.
The picture was actually of a dog, but Prophet About immediately recognised this as a sign that the boy had been touched by the Finger of the Lord – the concept of word-blindness being completely unknown in 1856.
From that day onwards, the child became known as the Infant Prophet. His hair was never cut and he wore only white, evidencing to the outside world that he was a rare member of God’s Chosen.
It took some dedication and ingenuity to kit out a small boy in white clothes in a city where sooty smoke covered most washing in grey smuts within minutes, but such was About’s conviction of his son’s holiness that it was achieved.
By the time he was eight, the Infant Prophet had absorbed by rote chunks of the more obscure books of the Bible and the Apocrypha, which at a given signal from his father, he could spout parrot-fashion and at random.
Sometimes he conflated different passages, but as the congregation’s Bible knowledge ran the gamut from basic to non-existent, it only served to enhance his status.
Now, with the meeting ending and the flock dispersing to their various haunts, Senior Prophet About and the Infant Prophet lock up and make their way through the misty glimmering streets of the city.
“A good meeting,” About declares, nodding sagely.
The Infant Prophet says nothing. He is thinking about the hot supper that will be waiting for them on their return. He hopes there will be fish and baked potatoes.
“I am relying on you to tell me what the Lord wants us to write, my son.”
The Infant Prophet pulls a face which, luckily for him, is hidden in the darkness. He knows, because it has been dinned into him from an early age, that God has chosen him. But the responsibility lies heavy on his young shoulders.
Sometimes, especially when he has to leave the house to perform an errand for his mother and in doing so encounters the jeers and catcalling of the local youth, he can’t help wishing God would go and choose somebody else for a change.
***
Night wears on. Upstairs in her small Islington house, Marianne Corvid lies between her sheets waiting for the sleep that does not come. Instead, she passes through the familiar phases of sleeplessness known only to the true insomniac: the sly hallucinations, the endless settling of bones, the beating of her heart, so loud that it seems to fill the bed and resonate round the room. Her head feels empty, like a volute of a shell.
She loses all sense of time, hears the passing watchman call the hours as if on some other planet. She recalls kisses, words of rapture, a body hovering over hers. A touch that both consoled and devastated her. She strains to picture her lover, but although she can recollect individual features, the whole face eludes her.
For a space of seconds,
she is left with nothing. Not awake, not asleep, but trapped in between. There has been no reply to her letter. To her several letters. The pain of rejection is raw, unhealed.
Eventually she rises, opens the shutters, letting in a slab of paler dark. She fumbles with the window catch, hears herself sobbing. She throws a cloak over her night-gown and goes downstairs into the small back garden.
London seems more beautiful at night. The best of it is lit and the worst is glamorised by darkness. It can also seem less dangerous, though this is a deception. The air is sweeter. The moonlight is kinder.
Once again, she experiences that small shock of being outside, the small hardening of whatever had softened, opened as she lay alone in her bed. She pulls her cloak about herself, breathes the cold air. The houses on either side are sleeping.
Marianne’s mind is boiled down to the hardness of facts: her life has fallen away into itself without plot or premonition. Now she lives in the shadow of former pleasure. She digs her fingernails into the soft flesh at her wrist, greedily seeking the pain. She stares at the small red crescents, tears sliding down her cheeks like spilled wax.
***
Sunday morning. The din of the working week is dimmed. Shops are shut. Bells summon the faithful and the recalcitrant to worship. For Emily Cully, however, Sunday is just another working day. Here she is spreading woollen cloth on the clean parlour floor and laying a paper pattern upon it.
And here is Jack Cully in his shirtsleeves, released from police duties to act as pin-passer and wife-encourager, roles he is only too glad to take on.
“That’s nice material,” he observes. “I like the coloured green squares.”
Emily Cully gives him that amused sideways glance of wives everywhere whose husbands are trying, thought not succeeding, to comment appropriately.
“It is very nice, dear. And the design is called tartan. It is Scottish and much favoured by our Queen.”
“Oh? So now you’re making dresses for Royalty. I am impressed.”
She smiles.
“It is for that new customer – the one I told you about. Miss Bulstrode is her name. She is currently visiting London with her brother. The dress is for a trip up North. It will be cold at this time of year, and I shall have to line it.”
“Nobody better than you, Em,” Cully says.
“She pays what I ask, and seems pleased with my work. That is the main thing. Although I shall have to work late to get the dress finished by Tuesday.”
Emily Cully stands, holding her hand to the small of her back, where a niggling and persistent ache has started in the last few days. She decides not to mention it to Jack, who is carefully pinning the paper pattern to the material.
“You have done very well,” she says gaily. “Should you decide to quit the Detective Police, I’m sure I could find you a job as a pattern-cutter.”
Jack Cully sits back on his heels and grins.
“That will be the day Em, when men make dresses for ladies!”
They laugh, and she passes him the big cutting-out scissors, then goes quickly into the tiny back kitchen where a pot of stew is bubbling, before she is tempted to tell him about the ache.
No point in worrying unnecessarily. And she has so many commissions to fulfil. Business is booming. Married life is bliss. Sufficient unto the day. So Emily Cully stirs the stew and thinks instead about her husband and how much she loves him, and about the nice meal they will enjoy together later.
***
There is precious little love being shared at the Undercroft dining table, although there is plenty of food. Husband and wife sit at opposite ends of the elegant oval rosewood table, given as a wedding present by her doting parents so long ago that it almost seems like a different era.
They are served. In silence. They eat. In silence. Or rather, she picks at her food, he moves it around on his plate peering at it suspiciously as he does so. It’s Sunday, and his club is shut – as are the city watering holes that he likes to frequent.
This is the only reason Undercroft has joined his wife for an unpleasant family meal. Not for long. A few bites into the main course, the master of the house throws down his knife and fork with a loud clatter that makes Georgiana start, then swallow nervously.
“What is this muck we’re eating?”
“It is curry. Cook got the recipe from Colonel Morton’s Indian cook. It is what they eat in India.”
Undercroft glares at his plate.
“Faugh! Filthy foreign food. Are you trying to poison me?”
There. It is said. The words hang in the air like birds of prey looking for a corpse to land on. Georgiana’s mouth tightens into a hard line.
“If I was trying to poison you,” she says, her voice clipped and harsh, “I would hardly be eating the same meal as you are.”
Undercroft stares at her sullenly.
“What happened to you, eh? You used to be quite an attractive woman in your own way.”
You happened to me, she thinks. Though, of course, she does not say it.
“If you do not like the food, I can always ask Cook to make you something else. An omelette, perhaps?”
Undercroft pushes back his chair. For a moment, the room spins around him and he feels his gorge rise. He grips on to the edge of the table to steady himself. Lately, he has been experiencing some worrying symptoms: his hands and feet feel numb, his limbs ache.
He has also lost his appetite. He puts it down to the stress of his current situation, where every mouthful of food eaten in his own home, his own home – might presage his painful demise.
“I’m going to my study to read. Tell the servants I don’t want to be disturbed.”
His wife watches him leave the room. She hears the key turn in the lock of the study door. Soon he will be flicking through his extensive collection of dirty books, looking at his pictures of women en deshabille.
She knows exactly what he keeps in his study. She knows where he keeps the spare key. She has been into his study while he was at work, or away with one of his whores.
She has seen the paintings and lithographs. Naked women in classical poses. Women with thinly-draped bodies lying on couches. Women with large breasts and ample open thighs.
She has also looked at the books that he keeps in a cabinet by his desk. Lurid tales of women who like having the sort of things done to them that have always utterly revolted her.
She also knows who introduced Frederick to the delights of this noxious stuff. And to the sluts he still patronises. For whom he forsook her bed so long ago. Her one consolation has been that Regina Osborne is in exactly the same position. And that she suffers doubly, as her son George also follows in his father’s louche footsteps.
Undesired and unwanted, she finishes her meal and gives instructions to the servants. Suddenly unable to bear the proximity of her husband and the contents of his study a minute longer, she gets her coat and her bonnet and hurries out into the raw chill of the sooty Sunday afternoon.
Georgiana pulls her veil down over her face so that nobody recognises her. She walks towards the Heath, past the small box-pewed church of St John’s Downshire Hill, where she used to go every Sunday morning and evening without fail in the early days of her marriage.
She no longer attends. God has not been kind to her, so she is repaying His unkindness by absenting herself from His house. She doubts that He cares either way.
She reaches the green fringes of the Heath. As it is a Sunday afternoon, there are lots of families out for a walk. Small children run by bowling hoops. At the crest of the hill, kites bob and duck in the nipping wind. Servant-girls, easily distinguished by their cheap finery, stroll arm in arm with their young men.
Everybody is part of a family or a couple. Everybody is happy and smiling. Only she is on her own. Alone. Unhappy. Georgiana Undercroft huddles her coat closer around herself and strides resolutely on, thinking bitter and vengeful thoughts.
***
A Monday morning in London. Sooty
drizzle fills the air. Iron-shod wheels rattle over cobbles. Horses clop, drivers yell, costers shout. The sounds are thrown back by the narrow streets, so loud that it is impossible to hold a conversation.
The river Thames, that liquid coin that runs through the heart of the city, is alive with wherries and skiffs that bob and duck in the wake of larger vessels. There are hay boats, their lateen sails discoloured, coal barges and great lighters laden with bricks and ashes.
Swift, grimy steamboats chug upriver from Chelsea and Pimlico, their whistles screaming, their decks crammed with living freight, passing by oozy wharves and grim-chimneyed factories, by tumbledown waterfront pubs and vast warehouses.
Chimneys belch forth black smoke. There is the smell of gas, dung, dead dogs, decaying vegetables, ancient fish and dubious mutton pies all mixed with the smell of thousands of unwashed, unkempt human bodies slipping and sliding, scuffling and pushing their way along the slimy thoroughfare.
Look more closely. A man in his shirtsleeves wearing a floury apron, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, has just opened the door of his shop in Chalk Farm Road. His name is Alfred Turnock and he is a master baker. The sign above the door, written in very curly green and gold lettering, reads: A & E Turnock, Bakers and Confectioners.
There are glass shelves lined with paper doilies. At the moment, they are empty – except for two very elaborate white tiered wedding cakes, which are actually made out of plaster of Paris.
The wooden shelves behind the counter are also empty, though judging by the warm bread smells wafting out into the streets, they will not be for long. Alfred Turnock, who hails from Scotland, the great nursery of bakers, folds his hands under his apron, blinks and takes a deep lungful of foul air. He has been working all night, having risen from his bed at 3am because of the public demand for hot rolls at breakfast.
The bake-house is situated under the shop, and as a consequence is very dark. A low-ceilinged room, it is barely high enough for a man of five feet four inches to stand upright. There is no daylight, and the ventilation comes from a hatchway. There is a privy at the top of the stairs. Turnock’s two journeymen bakers live on the premises in a small hot room adjoining the bake-house. They too have risen early and have been working ever since.