by Louis Bayard
—Don’t be sad, Tim. He’s gone to his rest. Gone to your mother and the rest of the angels.
And at the time, that looked to be the only possibility. There was about as much life left in Father’s nightshirted stalk as in a tailor’s dummy. Whatever he was had slipped out the door while we were looking the other way.
But now I’m not so sure Father had the proper passport for the next world. Why else would he be pushing coster barrows, floating on river ferries, selling cures for corns? Why else would he be looking for me so diligently, even as he pretends not to see me?
I left it to Peter to sort through his possessions. The one thing I took was the comforter. I can’t say why. Father used to wear it to the office—long ago, in the days of one-coal fires. Wore it in the streets, too. Till the end of my days, I shall remember how he looked coming down Bayham Street with the ends of that bloody scarf swinging round his knees. Like a deposed king in an ermine robe, I think in my more charitable moments; like a blithering madman, I think other times.
The comforter was blue in its original incarnation, but years of street living eventually dyed it a pigeon grey. Mother was always offended by the sight of it, and so I had assumed it’d gone the way of other family belongings until I found it again, stopping up a hole in the back of a cupboard. I didn’t tell anyone, just stuffed it in my bag and left. Now it lies across a coverlet on the second floor of Mrs. Sharpe’s establishment. And it does keep out the cold, I will give it that, even where the threads have pulled away.
Some things it can’t keep out. I find them on my pillow when I wake, little lozenges of memory. My mother’s voice, perhaps, calling me down to dinner. Or the dark lily of my brother’s body, wafting down the canal. Or things of a more recent vintage.
One girl in particular—she visits my dreams quite often. No more than ten or eleven, I’d estimate, although guessing her age is difficult because when I saw her, she was lying on her side in an alley off Jermyn Street, stretched out like an artist’s model on a chaise. Fully at her ease, I thought, until I drew closer and saw the hands, not flexing as I had imagined but frozen in place—talons, smeared with blood. And her head had been ratcheted back and…and what else? Grey-blue lips. And grey-brown eyes, staring back down the alley, as though they were following the progress of her recently absconded spirit.
Two constables stood one on either side of her. Voluble, blithe chaps in swallowtail coats and specially reinforced top hats, waiting for another kind of reinforcement, perhaps, or just passing the time, and preoccupied enough or bored enough to admit company, even if the company was you, silent, bending to study the uncovered form on the ground. Their patter settled like foam on the back of your head.
—Fancy, though, the neck’s clean.
—Hundred to one it were a pillow.
—Come, now, Bill, blood on the hands? Fighting a pillow? Don’t be daft.
—Look who’s calling who daft.
You’d seen strangers’ bodies before and never once stopped. Why should this one have been different? And why this tender scrutiny? Your eyes lapping up everything, the dingy black stockings (torn and bloodied round the feet), the black woollen folds of the skirt, the shreds of petticoat. The face: white as sugar, and everything on it flung open like the windows on a cuckoo clock, mouth, eyes, even nostrils all dilated as far as they could go.
And something else, too. A square of skin where the sleeve of her dress had torn away, and through that aperture, the most remarkable sight, strangely accented in the gaslight. Not a tattoo, nothing so mild as that. A brand. The skin not dyed but blistered, seared, like the flanks of a Jersey. And what did you read there? A letter, that was all, an inch and a half in diameter.
G
Except there was more. Beneath the upper loop, a pair of eyes had been likewise burnt into the skin. And those eyes had the strange effect of turning the letter into something quite palpably alive.
A bird of prey, that was your first thought. And yet you might have read anything there: a jack-o’-lantern, a cloud-soaked moon. Nothing else, though, explained the animal intelligence with which this single letter quivered.
It was two months ago I saw that girl, and I don’t think a day has passed but that she hasn’t exacted some tribute from me, some revolution of my brain. I don’t even need to dream her. All it takes most days is closing my waking eyes, and I see everything again, freshly minted: the two constables, and the alley with its livid purple shadows, and the rumble of a passing dray, and this girl, opaque and anonymous. And I see that, too, the black G with its ravenous eyes and its orifice. And it seems to me the orifice has the power of speech, but only for people with the power to hear. I am not yet one of those.
Chapter 2
—FIRST…I MADE HIM KNOW that his name should be…Ffrigh….
Mrs. Sharpe crumples her plucked brows. Her eyes shrink to coin slots, and her lips encircle the errant sounds.
—Fffriday. Like the day, does he mean?
—Yes, exactly.
—…which was the day I saved his life. Oh, yes, I see. I likewise…mm…tawt…taught him to say, “Master,” and then let him…let him know that was to be my name.
—Good.
—I also taught him to say…“Yes” and “No”…and to know the mee-ning of them.
She holds the book very close to her face, like a priest with a missal. The candlelight softens the rather florid henna of her hair, the powdery steppes of her face.
—I kept there with him all that night, but as soon as it was day, I took him away with me.
—Very nice.
We meet every afternoon at three-thirty. We sit in the one place where we can’t be heard: a small back room just off Mrs. Sharpe’s bedchamber. Bare walls, bare floor. Just the two of us and a table and a tallow candle and an open book. And in this spartan setting, free of any obligation, Mrs. Sharpe greets the English tongue with the raptness of first love.
—So that’s how they write drawers, is it? Nothing at all like doors. Ooh, it’s a silly language, it’s frantic!
There is something so undistilled about her in these moments. One would never guess what heights of artifice she can otherwise scale: the buns and swags and tendrils of synthetic hair, the wreaths of imitation pearls, the Chinese brisé fans. The giddy, affected lilt that flies up from her throat every time a patron walks through the door, a voice like a drunken piccolo—high and girlish, but with no foundation—crashing down every few seconds in a raucous scrape.
—Sir Edgar, it’s too ecstatic! I don’t think I’ve ever seen you looking so well. And there was I, thinking marriage would be the ruin of you, when here you are, ripe as a peach and handsome as a church. Your wife is to blame, I think. Oh, someone else? Well, whoever it is deserves a medal and a citation and quite possibly sainthood. Now as I recall, you and Sadie had the loveliest chat when you came by last….
This is the public Mrs. Sharpe. But here, cocooned in this dark, unventilated office that smells faintly of attar and night soil, she is illuminated in a different way. She runs her finger down the printed columns, she licks her lips clean of each word, and a smithy fire burns inside her. It taps something molten inside me. I think this must be how a father feels around his child.
And then the inevitable, the tectonic shift occurs, and I find I am the father of a child. I am the father of that child. I am bending over her still form in the alley, I am trying to wrench her bloodstained fingers back to their natural shape, but the rigor mortis has frozen them into claws, and as I tug on them, they snap like icicles, and I leap back, but it’s too late, someone is screaming…
—Mr. Timothy? Are you all right?
—Fine, thank you.
—You look like someone walked over your grave.
—I’m fine, thank you.
That’s what comes of my trying to imagine myself a father. Absurd! When not six months ago, I was myself something of a child, uncompassed, wandering nameless streets, looking for who can say what. So much of it dissolv
es in the memory now, but I do recall strolling quite merrily down Charing Cross Road and stopping before a padding-ken in Seven Dials and deciding that here I would stay the night. The mistress of the house wouldn’t hear of it.
—You’ll find no private rooms here. Best try over by Drury Lane, there’s a good man.
I told her I wasn’t with the police. I told her my tuppence was as good as anyone else’s. I told her I wouldn’t leave until she gave me a bed, and I never once stopped smiling. A disturbing figure I must have cut, because the good woman did find a place for me, in a room already crammed with a dozen others. I slept on a rag bundle. Fifteen minutes after I set my head down, a boy with no shirt tried to pick my pocket; fifteen minutes later, he went for my hat; half an hour after that, I found him very calmly unlacing my shoes. And sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by the strenuous sounds of human congress, punctuated by a man’s gruff voice:
—Here, that’s my wife you’re fucking.
—It’s my wife, ain’t it?
They argued for several minutes, until the woman in question screamed:
—Christ, will you shut your holes! I got three more in the queue!
I left early the next morning, without my watch. I wandered into and out of public houses in St. Giles and was fleeced of a couple of pounds by a magsman. Most of that afternoon is lost to me now, but I do know that at just past eight in the evening, I was standing on a street corner in the Haymarket. A tiny girl with no shoes and a great black orb round her eye was pulling on my sleeve, demanding sixpence, and a hansom cab was swerving past me, spraying up a spume of mud, and a troop of gay ladies was passing by, in bonnets and gloves and white silk stockings and dresses turned up just slightly at the bottom, and in this context, they were as beautiful as daylilies. Seraphim lowered by heavenly wires.
I felt a clap on my back. A slope-shouldered bald man with theatrically guileless blue eyes swung his head round to meet mine.
—Sir, if I may ask, what’s a discriminating personage such as yourself wanting with these hags? Seems to me you’d hanker after a more refined class of gal. A woman with je ne sais, you get my drift. Here.
He handed me a card.
*
MRS. OPHELIA SHARPE
Rooms for Gentlemen
No. 111, Jermyn Street
Referrals Required
*
—Comfy beds, sir, you can’t go half wrong. Just tell ’em George sent you.
I don’t know which was more startling, being offered a houseful of women or being mistaken for a gentleman. I stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, examining myself with a new interest. And it was then that I realised I was still dressed for a funeral. Black top hat, black crepe frock coat, black gloves. Black bluchers. (Someone must have polished the shoes: they were too clean to have borne me on a week’s pilgrimage through London.) Father, it seemed, had gone to the furthest possible extreme to make me a gentleman.
I sniffed at my sleeve: kitchen grease, rat droppings, spit-laden gin. The smell passed all the way through me and then out again, and it took all my concentration not to retch on the spot. I bought a vial of toilet water off a vendor and splashed it behind my ears, beneath my arms. For the breath, I bought a tin of mints from a confectioner, and then I ducked into a pub for a tankard of hot lemonade and gave my hair a quick dousing, parted it again as best I could, and clamped the hat back on top. By the time I reached Mrs. Sharpe’s, I was giving off a great cloud of spurious scent.
The house was easy to find. A quick right off Regent Street and there it was, rearing up from the pavement with an almost comical respectability, a three-story Georgian with ideas above its station, taking on airs as it rose: small cornices over the ground-floor Palladian windows, more elaborately reticulated pediments over the first floor, trumpeting gargoyles over the second, and finally a great gaudy mansard roof, patched with strumpety green and yellow tile and pierced by two breasty dormer windows with lime-green sashes.
It was a warm evening in June, and all the windows were open and blazing with candles, and the day’s last expirations filled the toile curtains and gave them a quicksilver human shape, a teasing dancing odalisque motion. The curtains curled their painted fingers and beckoned me in, and it was such an insinuating gesture that I had half a mind to scale the building, grab the nearest gargoyle, do anything to shorten the distance between us. I settled on the door. A timid rat-a-tat, and within seconds, the oaken slab was being dragged open by a plump, beet-haired woman in a black lace collar. She was panting from the effort, but her sound was lost in the bull-like moaning of the door.
—Mrs. Sharpe?
—Yes, sir.
—George sent me.
In the ten seconds she took to look me over, all my last-minute toilet seemed to be for naught. A rill of impure sweat bled down my temple, a monstrous itch spread across my scalp….
—Very well, said Mrs. Sharpe.
The door scraped shut behind me. We passed through a cramped vestibule and down a long, dimly lit hall, unfurnished but for a fist-sized looking-glass, missing a frame, and a small wine table on an empty porcelain pitcher.
—I will say I’m surprised, Mrs. Sharpe said.—You’re a little younger than what George normally sends our way. But I daresay we can find someone to answer.
We came at last into a parlour. The first sounds I heard were the peaceful murmurs of a parrot, calmly yanking out one of his breast feathers—he had evidently been most industrious, for he was already half bald. A cat was stretched snakelike along the swag of a divan, and sitting on a camelback sofa were three women in flounced crinolines. One of them was darning a pair of stockings; the other two were playing a languid game of Pope Joan. Such a domestic effulgence! It spoke of maidenly comforts—trousseaus and hearthside prattle. Even the smears of red on their cheeks were like archetypes of innocence. What cruel bowman was I to disturb this palisade of nymphs?
The darning girl took one look at me and averted her eyes. As luck would have it, this was the girl Mrs. Sharpe fastened on.
—Iris?
The girl froze for a second. Then, with her mouth set in a grim line, she laid down her needles and stood. A vacant, lopsided smile slid across her face and then off again, like rainwater.
—Iris, please make our guest welcome. Your name, sir?
—Timothy.
—Mr. Timothy, she said, landing lightly on each syllable, as though it were the airiest of fictions.
As we climbed the stairs, Iris trailed her hand along the banister. Two steps shy of the first landing, she wheeled on me.
—D’ye hurt your leg?
—No.
—You was limping a bit, is all.
The room faced the back alley, and a thick sandalwood scent was pouring through the open window, but from the look of Iris’s quivering nostrils, it was my smell she was trying to fix.
—It’s ever so hot, isn’t it? she said.
She stifled a yawn and sat down on the edge of the chintz-covered four-poster. Her hand, working almost independently of the rest of her, wriggled through the folds of her skirt and gave a yank. A great silent commotion of rings and cords, and then, like a gathered drape, the skirt began rising…rising…revealing first a measure of magenta stocking and then the embroidered hem of a single petticoat, even more brilliantly magenta.
—Ever so hot.
A fine-looking lass, I could see that. Eyes perhaps too given to starting—as though someone had just swatted her on the back of the head. In her late twenties, very likely: no longer ripe but retaining some of her original juice. Thin in the arms and shoulders, with a compensating fullness below—the kind of plenitude a man could lose himself in. I lowered myself onto the bed next to her. I took off my hat. I fingered the top button of her bodice, and just as the button pulled clear, I felt a drop land on my knee.
And then another. And another.
I didn’t understand at first where they were coming from. I had to rule out several
possibilities before my hand at last flew to my face and came away wet. And just then, my chest coughed out a sob so large my throat couldn’t contain it. It caught halfway up my windpipe and then exploded out again.
Iris leapt from the bed.
—Bloody hell! What’s got into you?
I couldn’t answer; I was too busy. So many tears, a factory’s worth, and no one but me to cry them. My head dropped into my hands, my chest shook, my eyes blurred into darkness. I had never done anything quite so thoroughly.
And still I tried to speak.
—I’ve got the money. I can make good.
In fact, I was already reaching into my pocket, feeling the familiar press of Uncle N’s change purse, but Iris was having none of it. She had already thrown open the door. Yelling, she was. Loud enough to scare rats from the walls.
—Mrs. Sharpe! We’ve got us a weeper in the Regency Room!
The entire house broke into alarum. A cavalry of footsteps thundered up from below, and the light from the hall dimmed and flickered around me as body after body passed into the room. I had become, in the span of thirty seconds, a blood sport. And recognising all this, I yet persisted in grief ’s offices. My arms wrapped themselves around my chest, my head lolled between my knees. The sobs came vomiting from my chest.
—Lookit him.
—Third weeper this week.
—Must be the lunar cycle.
Iris cried out:
—Shit, he’s no gentleman! He’s got crawly nits in his hair.
I heard a quick hot slap. And then Mrs. Sharpe’s voice, cool as licorice:
—Miss Iris, you will kindly watch your fucking mouth.
And then a few seconds of edgy silence before Mrs. Sharpe said:
—Everyone else can clear off.
I had assumed that losing my audience would come as a relief, but this feeling was somehow worse. Like being hauled up before God’s throne.
Mrs. Sharpe cupped her fingers under my chin, raised my face until it was looking into hers. She had great rings of kohl round her eyes—a parody of mourning.
—You remind me of someone, she said.