‘But a handy woman.’ Lord Rochford rolled his eyes despairingly. ‘A bloody handy woman.’
He flung off his cloak, jigged from foot to foot and pulled open his breeches, exposing a shrunken penis and swollen testes.
‘It burns when I piss. Is it syphilis?’ His face distorted with terror.
‘Is there a discharge, greenish?’
Lord Rochford nodded miserably.
Merriment leaned towards his crotch, gingerly moving his flaccid member to one side.
‘Worst case of gonorrhoea I’ve seen in a long time.’
‘It has me demented. The whore that gave it to me was fresh from London, may she die thrice from a triple load of pox. Damn bitch robbed me. Is this going to kill me? Has she shortened my days?’
‘You’re not going to die. I’m going to make you a salve.’
Relieved, Lord Rochford sat down, his breeches about his knees. He removed his hat and mopped the beads of sweat sprouting on his forehead with a lavender hanky.
‘I’m also going to give you this.’ Merriment opened a press and produced a small box. She threw it towards Lord Rochford. It landed on his naked lap.
‘It’s called Misses Phillips’ Engine,’ Merriment said as she broke the seal on a ceramic jar and with a small wooden spoon began stirring the contents, adding in drops from various vials and watching the waxy mixture loosen. ‘You need to use it.’
Lord Rochford opened the ornate tin and gingerly picked up a long strand of gut between his manicured forefinger and thumb.
‘A condom.’ He winced. ‘A damn condom.’
‘Better than the pox,’ Merriment said flatly. ‘It’s a proven preventative. You can wash it out, reuse it. You fasten it to your pizzle with the velvet ribbon, should be in there.’
‘Wash it.’ Lord Rochford flung the sheep gut back into the box and snapped on the lid.
‘Keep sleeping with whores and you will get syphilis, just a matter of time. Misses Phillips’ Engine is your only way of avoiding it. Well, that or abstinence.’
Lord Rochford snorted. Even without gonorrhoea he was a bad-tempered man, always dissatisfied with the incompetence he had to endure, always certain of some slight, some oversight, some failing on the world’s part that was guaranteed to annoy him. He was spoiled and indulged and that made him cruel. But he needed a cure so he bit his tongue and listened to Merriment lecture him on best practice when swiving.
‘Here we are.’ Merriment brought him an amber wax that stank of camphor. ‘Rub this on. It’ll cause blistering before it soothes the inflammation.’
‘What the hell is in it?’
Merriment laughed lightly, a soft bubbling laugh that made her suddenly seem very young.
‘Clematis erecta,’ she said, winking audaciously at Lord Rochford like he got the joke. Lord Rochford stared back blankly.
‘Clematis erecta,’ Merriment repeated. ‘Upright Virgin’s Bower. Ironic cure considering the ailment?’
Lord Rochford stubbed his clean index finger into the soft wax and began cautiously applying it to his swollen testes.
‘Very droll,’ he said. ‘Beresford told me you had an odd sense of humour. Typical that he should remark on your wit and not on your sex.’
‘We go back a long way,’ Merriment commented, opening the ledger and fetching an ink and quill from under one of the retorts bubbling by the back door. She carefully noted Lord Rochford’s ailment in one column and her proposed cure in another, working out a price.
‘We met at sea, when he captained the Redoubtable. He was a fine sailor.’ She scribbled a bit more. ‘You may have to come back for a second dose.’
Lord Rochford nodded bleakly, staring down at his sore orange testes.
‘That will be one and six.’ Merriment finished up her accounts. ‘And may I advise you keep away from the tarts, at least give your pizzle time to recover, and to eat plain food, nothing fermented.’
‘No wine! For how long?’
‘At least ten weeks.’
‘Jesus Christ. No tipping, no drink for ten weeks. Bloody hell.’
Lord Rochford buttoned up his breeches and fumbled in his purse for coin. The world had failed him yet again. He handed Merriment the money and grabbed his hat.
‘Come back in three weeks. And it will be three shillings for Misses Phillips’ Engine.’
‘I won’t need it.’
‘When the ten weeks are up and you’re better, you’ll need it.’
Lord Rochford looked scornfully at the ornate pink tin trimmed with fake lace and pinched his mouth shut. He silently handed over three shillings and Merriment wrapped the tin box in brown paper.
‘Good day,’ she smiled, handing Lord Rochford his mermaid-tipped cane.
There was a thump from the yard outside. Merriment glanced behind her despite the fact there was no window in the room. She turned back and smiled at Lord Rochford, waving him through to the shop and escorting him out the door. He mumbled a goodbye and stormed off disgruntled because life had let him down. Merriment re-latched the shop door and paced through the anteroom, pulling open the back door to see what had made the noise in the yard.
There, standing on a mound of rubbish, barefoot and bedraggled, was a little girl. She sifted through the rubbish with her hands, pulling out a gelatinous wad of sloppy bread and sniffing the grey mass like perhaps she might consider eating it. She found a chunk of metal and flung it into the bucket by her feet with a noisy clang.
‘What are you doing?’ Merriment asked.
The girl shot upright, flummoxed.
‘Sorry, mister . . . I mean, miss. I didn’t know you lived there. I’m scavenging, miss, cleaning scrap, collecting for the Aldermen, miss.’
The girl was about eight years old with the thin limbs and huge haunting eyes of a malnourished child. Her lips were cracked and her petticoat was so filthy and patched it looked like she was wearing a dress made of moss and earth, a used shroud, decomposing on a living creature. Her left arm was crudely bandaged with loose rags that ran from her elbow and completely covered her left hand. That didn’t stop her rooting. She used her left hand like a trowel, so the area around her bandaged fingers was black as soot and soaking wet.
‘What happened to your hand?’ Merriment asked.
The little girl didn’t answer. She just glanced at her bandage and looked back at Merriment, more interested in inspecting a half woman, half man than explaining how she got her injury.
Merriment swept her fringe back before turning.
‘Come in and let me take a look at that,’ she said.
The little girl climbed down, delighted to be invited anywhere. She left her bucket teetering on a mound of stinking dead cabbage and used mollusc shells and marched into the kitchen like she’d been invited to take high tea with the queen of the fairy kingdom. The interior of the anteroom stopped her in her tracks. The little girl looked about, her large eyes drinking in the bizarre retorts and hanging herbs, the fire and the furniture, the dark walls, the foul smells, the soft candlelight. She watched Merriment come at her, observing her long leather boots polished a deep tan colour and her buttercup breeches. She took in Merriment’s long hair and the bulge at the side of Merriment’s waistcoat that hinted provocatively at a secret.
Merriment took the little girl’s arm and began unwrapping the filthy cloth, slowly exposing a septic, blistering mass oozing little runnels of purplish puss.
‘This is badly burnt.’ Merriment kept her voice steady and calm. ‘How did you do this?’
‘Carelessness, miss.’
The little girl’s head pivoted, more interested in her environment than her own sore hand.
‘Are you a physic, miss?’
‘An apothecary.’
‘Janey Mack, is that a baby in a jar?’
The little girl pointed to a huge fibrous root preserved in a large glass jar on a faraway shelf.
‘Of course it’s not a baby.’ Merriment turned the little girl’s hand ove
r. ‘This is very pussy.’
The little girl nodded.
‘I try to keep it clean, miss. But you know, scavenging is mucky work. I thought this place was closed down, otherwise I’d have knocked in and asked yer permission to scavenge. Used to be a Doctor Grimshaw lived here. He was cranky.’
‘We need to get this cleaned up and sealed, otherwise it’ll have to come off.’
‘Janey Mack. Amputated, miss?’
Merriment filled a basin with fresh warm water and added a few drops of lavender oil.
‘Come here till we bathe it.’
The little girl looked forlornly at her hand like she expected it to disappear once it was immersed. Merriment smiled.
‘Don’t worry, it won’t have to be taken from you. Now, what’s your name?’
The little girl hissed as her sore hand was submerged in the warm basin.
‘It’ll sting a little,’ Merriment said.
‘Stings a lot.’
‘Are you all right?’
The little girl nodded, tears popping into her eyes and staying there.
‘Your name?’
‘Janey Mack, least that’s what everyone calls me on account of me saying Janey Mack so often.’
Merriment very delicately swept a soft cloth over the young girl’s hand. The water in the basin turned brown with flecks of yellow.
‘I’m Merriment O’Grady.’
Janey Mack’s head shot back. She forgot her hand.
‘Merriment O’Grady who went to sea?’
‘That’s me.’ Merriment’s smile split open and she revealed a captivating gap between her two front teeth.
‘The one the ballad’s about?’ Janey Mack’s huge blue eyes blinked incredulously.
‘I haven’t heard any song.’
‘It’s a great tune. You dressed up like a lad in a pair of breeches and you put tar on your face.’
‘Is that right?’ Merriment gently removed Janey’s hand and rested it on a towel. ‘You can’t run about on a ship in skirts and stays,’ she said. ‘I got into the habit of wearing breeches and knee-high boots wading through the gore in the sickbay.’
Janey Mack nodded, her whole face alive with an infectious earnestness.
‘Is it true you shot your lover dead straight through the heart?’
‘No, it’s not true.’
‘You shot him but didn’t kill him?’
‘I didn’t shoot anyone.’
‘But you’ve a pistol stuffed under your waistcoat. I can see the butt end of it pokin’ out sure as I’m standing here. Song says you saw him “walking along with his lady gay and you drew out a brace of pistols that you had at your command” and you shot him . . . he annoyed you so. And then you were made a ship’s commander.’
Merriment shook her head.
‘I was made a ship’s surgeon.’
‘After you shot him?’
Merriment laughed, reaching for Janey Mack’s head and tousling her hair.
‘No. There was no shooting . . . at least . . .’ She paused a moment and Janey Mack leaned forward, waiting for a full confession.
‘We did shoot at the enemy. But I never shot a lover who betrayed me.’
‘Oh.’ Janey Mack’s tiny frame released a little. She was deflated. Merriment wrung out the wet cloth and ran it swiftly over Janey Mack’s tiny face quick enough to surprise the girl into stunned compliance.
‘Now,’ Merriment said, bringing the bowl to the back door and flinging the contents into the yard. ‘These are the best cleaner-uppers in the land.’
Merriment fetched a dark wooden box from one of the shelves and laid it on the table. Janey Mack watched her unhook the latch and lift the lid releasing an acrid smell into the already odiferous room. The little girl rolled down her bottom lip uncertain about what she saw.
‘Maggots,’ she said, looking at the seething mass of white plump pupae wriggling over and back. They seemed hungry.
‘I’ll bandage them softly,’ Merriment explained. ‘Let them clean the wound.’
Janey Mack’s eyebrows lifted a moment. She liked Merriment. She would oblige her by giving up her sore hand to be wrapped loosely. Merriment tipped a pile of maggots into a linen bandage and brought Janey Mack’s burned hand towards them, slowly lifting the cure to the septic wound.
‘This is very severe, how did you manage it?’
Janey Mack shrugged, trying not to pull her hand away.
‘Absent-mindedness, miss, least that’s what Hoppy John says.’
‘Hoppy John?’
‘You know him?’ Janey Mack’s eyes darted to Merriment’s face, looking for something.
‘No. I don’t know him. How would I know him?’
‘He was at sea too. I thought . . .’ Janey Mack didn’t finish her thought. ‘He ran a race with a cannonball, miss. Cannonball won, took his right leg clean out from under him. I think it took half his wits as well. He’s always telling me there’s bees in me head, on account of I don’t listen much and I like to sing and talk and that aggravates him.’
‘You aggravate him?’
‘On occasion, miss.’
‘Enough for him to stick your hand in a fire?’
‘What?’ Janey Mack looked curiously at Merriment, her head tilted to one side. ‘He says I’m a jinny-joe is all. Whistlin’ and wheelin’ and good for nothing but sifting rubbish.’
‘What is Hoppy John to you that gives him the right to comment so much on your character?’
‘He’s me boss, miss.’
Merriment washed her hands and fetched a loaf of crusty bread from a deep ceramic jar stored behind the door that led out to the shop. She cut two thick slabs and began to butter them. Janey Mack’s mouth watered.
‘Actually, miss, now that I think of it, he’ll explode in a passion if he finds out I’ve been sitting here on me arse letting maggots munch away on me hand instead of rootin’ and collectin’.’
Merriment looked up sharply, her eyebrows rising with humorous disapproval.
‘Is that so?’ she enquired lightly. ‘Well, you’ll have a glass of milk and a slice of bread while I make up the day’s prescriptions. Shop doesn’t get busy till noon or so and you’ll sit here until I say you’re ready to go. He’ll understand if I tell him you were only delayed by having your hand seen to properly.’
Merriment brought the bread over and lifted down a lace-covered jug to pour a generous glass of milk.
‘Eat up.’
Janey Mack took a massive bite, barely chewing before swallowing it down. She swapped the bread for the glass and paused, looking sadly at the delicious white liquid gleaming in the half-light.
‘That won’t stop Hoppy John,’ she said, suddenly taking a deep gulp.
‘What won’t?’
Janey Mack’s enormous eyes blinked behind the rim of the glass.
‘You, saying how I got delayed and all. Won’t stop him from grabbing the nearest stray stick to wallop me with for skiving off.’
Merriment went about her business.
‘Then I won’t say anything. Sure, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’
‘He’ll know. Course he’ll know when I’ve nothing to show for me day’s labour, only a clean bandage . . . oh, Janey Mack, they tickle, I can feel them wiggling. Oh, it’s horrible, miss. Is that what it’s going to be like when I’m dead? Maggots eating away me smile and I won’t be able to move a muscle?’
Merriment stopped fetching her jars and piling them on the table to pause and look at the little girl with the huge eyes and the milk-stained mouth. She shook her head and wondered what she was going to do with the urchin leaning against the table before her.
‘You have an over-heated imagination, Janey. God knows where those ideas come from. Eat up and drink your milk and don’t think about being dead.’
‘All right, miss. Thanks for this. I’m starvin’.’
‘I’ll cut you another slice.’
Merriment cut two more slices and left th
em by Janey Mack’s resting hand.
‘Now, I have a bit of work to do.’
‘You go ahead,’ Janey Mack said, her eyes fixed on the delicious thick butter spread over the soft bread.
Merriment pinched back a grin, rummaged through a sheaf of loose papers that had been stuffed into a drawer and one by one began reading them. She weighed powders and cut waxy sticks, adding leaves and berries to several bowls and wine and crystals to others. Janey Mack watched her for a while, munching on her crusty bread and sipping her creamy milk.
‘Where do you live?’ Merriment asked without looking up.
‘Down the docks, miss. Why do you have a pistol, miss?’
Merriment paused, took in a breath and stood upright. ‘I discovered it was a very good negotiating instrument. You don’t have to discharge it to settle a dispute.’
She reached inside her waistcoat, pulled out a squat pistol and gave it to Janey Mack to hold.
‘I call it the Answerer,’ Merriment told her.
‘That’s dandy, so it is.’
‘Looks pretty too.’ Merriment tapped the ornate ivory butt plate. ‘Don’t let it fool you, the barrel is made from Damascus steel and I’ve engineered the interior myself, rifled it. Learned that from a soldier who fought in Silesia. Means the aim is sure and true. Mind you, I’m still trying to refine the flashpan, make it more consistent.’
Janey Mack’s little hand wrapped around the butt, her finger reaching for the trigger.
‘It’ll be handy if the Ormond Street Boys come calling. This’ll shut them up. Pity poor Jo-Jo Jacobs didn’t have it when Olocher dragged her away.’
‘Olocher?’
Janey Mack’s eyes lit on Merriment’s face.
‘You don’t know who Olocher is?’
‘I presume a reprobate of some sort.’
‘Janey Mack. He’s a murderer, miss. Cut the girls open so he did. Chillin’ man, miss. Black as the devil. His eyes cold as the grave. He killed six young girls, miss. It was two men lamping deer what caught him out. Found him slicing little Jo-Jo open. And the two of them kicked him down the mountain and brought him to the beadles and he never admitted to killing the others, but everyone knows it was him. I’d liked to have squared the Answerer between his eyes.’
The Dolocher Page 2