by Vanessa Tait
‘Do not gawp. I ought not to have brought you! Now you have seen the place, you can imagine what goes on! Must you see it with your own eyes? For once seen, you cannot un-see.’
‘I am come too far to leave in the anteroom!’ She grasped Eva’s hand and felt the bones move beneath her fingers. ‘Who is that?’ She pointed to the enormous painting behind them, of a woman whose wisp of a silken dress accentuated her pointed breasts, whose red hair tumbled onto her shoulders. Her breasts were bared and she leaned over a man curled up on his knees, his face twisted with terror, or laughter.
‘Do not point, you will bring us to notice!’ Eva glanced behind her quickly. ‘She worked here, her name was Mary.’
‘Mary? She does not suit it.’
‘She went by Esmeralda,’ Eva whispered.
‘What has happened to her now?’
‘She has been saved, I heard. She found God. Here now, get up.’
Rebecca looked for the Tom, she must have made them a sign, but she stood near the door and only made them another little bow and a smirk.
‘I know the way, come.’ Eva led her past the men – one of the swells could not keep up his dejected attitude and followed them frankly with his eyes as they went – and into another corridor. Down here the place was not silent at all. The doors all had a thick velvet piece of material hanging down over them, but even so she could hear a snapping sound, as if a branch had been broken, and then a sharp cry.
She heard a man’s voice: ‘Oh mistress, mistress, I’ll never offend my mama!’ Another thwack. ‘Oh my dear nurse, beg me off!’
‘No, sir,’ the woman’s voice was stern. ‘I am desired to see you well whipped. I’ll whip this backside of yours till I strip every bit of skin from it!’
Rebecca bit down on her lip. It was a house of flagellation – there had been a scandal about the same in the newspapers not three months ago. P’raps it had been this one. But she must calm herself! It was not she who was going to be whipped.
They went in through a door that looked like the rest; it might have been the main bedroom in an ordinary house. It was still a bedroom – of course, as sumptuous a bedroom as it had been in the days of the aristocrats. In the middle, a large bed, with tall silken canopies. In the panelled alcoves were classical paintings: Leda, Europa and the Bull. The humans with their animal partners were rendered very lifelike.
And propped up in front of the footstool, a wooden board with a golden crest written with the word PATENT, which cordwainers used. It looked very out of place. The board was padded in glossy pink satin, with a hole in the middle. The hole, as Rebecca knew, was for a lady to thrust her leg through and still remain concealed behind the board, to preserve her modesty.
In the grate the fire snapped and popped. Rebecca put her hand over her breast to try to quell the beating of her heart.
‘You must take this,’ Eva said, and gave Rebecca a mask, like the ones worn at the Venetian carnival. It was made for revelry but there was something else, a subdued malice in the expression of it.
‘We must not be seen, at any cost!’ said Eva, pushing it at her.
Rebecca put it in front of her face. Behind it she could be anyone; she could be no one. It smelled of unwashed necks and something sweeter, another woman’s scent. What type of woman had been behind this mask before her? Who could come here who had not been driven to it?
‘Other girls,’ said Eva, as if reading her mind, ‘from this house, usually, if they are free, come to watch, if that is what pleases a man. It is to increase his disgrace, us being here.’
Rebecca shuddered then and drew her arms around herself. A little of her strange excitement drained away. She thought of Jenny. Perhaps she had ended up in a place like this. Or this place! God forbid it. But it would not be unusual. Oh, she ought to have done more for the girl! But what could she have done? Again she felt her own impotence, and now she felt something like rage.
‘Eva, do you know all the girls who work here?’
Eva had her mask before her face and regarded her with its sinister expression. ‘No, not any more.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘Keep your voice low, it is about to begin.’
‘But do you know if a girl, quite plain – but you know her, my maid—’
‘No, no, your maid is not here!’ Eva put her fingers behind her mask and picked at her lips. Rebecca saw she was trembling a little, though she seemed to know all about the place, and was trying to hold it in. ‘Hush now, look, they are coming in!’ She inclined her head towards another door that Rebecca had not noticed, it was hidden in the wall at the back of the room. Someone was coming in.
It was a girl with alabaster skin wearing a toga; she looked just like a Roman goddess. Her hair was done up loosely and ringlets, which had been tonged, fell down around her neck. She held a bow and arrow – Artemis, then. She gave hardly a glance to Rebecca. She might have blinked at Eva once or twice, or it may have been part of her performance. Though the conceit was broken by her feet, which should have been in sandals, but which were clad in a pair of shoes with monstrous heels. The same, the very same – of course they were! – that had been on Alexander’s desk.
Such a pair of shoes on such a girl! On such legs, which were revealed by the toga as she walked to be smooth and bare and rounded. The toffer made a great show of walking in her shoes, grinding them down so that the wooden boards creaked and protested under the heel.
Behind the goddess came a man, up until now almost hidden by the swirling toga. He shuffled, cringed, looked at the floor.
With a sickening bolt of recognition Rebecca saw – Alexander!
But he was at home. Wasn’t he? He would have come back from the pharmacy by now, and ought to be eating the plate of fried lamb that Mrs Bunclarke had left out. Rebecca blinked behind her mask, wanted to reach behind and rub her eyes. She had such a strong sense of the other spectral Alexander eating his dinner that she could not align herself to this real one, who was getting down on his knees in front of the board.
Rebecca turned to Eva, letting her mask slip just for a moment, and showed Eva her eyes, which were rounded with surprise, and her eyebrows, which had shot up into her hairline.
Eva shook her head and motioned with her hand – up, up!
Rebecca put her mask back up. She shrank back into the wall. She must look ahead, though she would rather do anything else.
‘Hurry now!’ the toffer barked out. The silence had been thick and the strength of her voice made Rebecca start.
The person who seemed to be – must be – her husband flattened himself on the floor.
‘Wait!’ the toffer said. ‘Unbutton your trousers and lower them. And your undergarments too.’
The space between Rebecca’s face and the mask had become hot, stiflingly so. She wanted to tear it off, she needed air, she was halfway from her seat when she felt Eva’s hand on her thigh, pushing her back down.
‘We must stay, else he will suspect something is wrong,’ she hissed.
Like a play unfolding backwards, in which the end is known before the beginning, the scene in front of them inched slowly towards its inevitable conclusion.
The toffer strode over and gave Alexander a little kick, letting her toga fall open to reveal a thick triangle of curling hair. Not Artemis then, at all. Her body was like poured cream. She must, thought Rebecca distractedly, be very well paid.
‘Lie down!’
Alexander made a snuffling sound and lay on his back. Rebecca saw that his face wore an expression just the same as the humans in the paintings: ecstasy and humiliation. But he was still in his pharmacist’s clothes! At least, his jacket was off, but he had his waistcoat still buttoned up and his shirt still on, though the collar was loosened. And his breeches were on too, but unbuttoned, with his cock sprouting through the middle, bent upwards towards his waistcoat, its tip a surprising pink.
Rebecca was an eye, another eye. She would turn it on the girl, not her husband! The husband she did not recognize.
Her breath came heavy behind her mask.
The girl must have been about one and twenty. Her lips were painted with carmine and her cheeks were pinched red. Her eyes sparkled with brandy, or something else, Rebecca could not see the size of their pupils in the dim light. She wore an expression on her face of rebuke, as if to a difficult pupil.
‘You are not low enough. I shall make you lower, now see if I don’t!’ She put her shoe in the middle of his chest and pushed down. ‘Do you see?’ She pushed down harder until all her weight was upon him, then she swung her other leg to meet it so that she stood upon him. He gave a groan, of lust or pain.
The toffer wobbled a little but managed to walk down the middle of his chest. Then she stood again on one leg and one shoe pressing down on Alexander’s body, lower and lower, until the sole of it was on his cock. She rubbed her shoe up on down on the veiny underside of it and Rebecca saw it twitch.
The air in the room grew thicker. ‘Oh!’ Rebecca gasped. Eva turned her head minutely towards her and shook it. But Alexander had not noticed. Rather, he had hardly looked at them at all. Rebecca wanted to tell Eva: But Alexander cannot abide uncleanliness! And now here he is being caressed by the bottom of a shoe. But all she could do was shake her head back at her friend; the sides of the mask grated against the sides of her cheeks.
‘That’s enough,’ said the goddess, after some more frottage. ‘Now get up – do not dress! Undress rather; yes, that is right. Quickly!’ Alexander kicked off his breeches and was pitifully revealed in his socks and garters, his cock redder than ever.
‘You may get over there.’ She indicated the board. ‘On your knees. It pleases me to be served, and you have not served me enough this evening.’
This whole time Alexander had uttered not a word, but now he said just one: ‘Yes.’ He said it long and low, with a hiss at the end that made Rebecca shudder.
The board. Now she understood. The board with its pink upholstery.
Alexander shuffled on his knees to the front of the board. The toffer strode, as best she could – one of the heels tipped to the side as she did it – to the back.
‘Closer! Closer still! Do not look at me!’ The shuffling and adjusting seemed to go on for an age.
The toffer took off her shoe and pointed her toe, and slowly, first the big toe, then the others, and then the arch and heel, pushed them all through the hole, which, Rebecca realized now – exactly resembled a puckered arse hole.
The toffer clenched and unclenched her foot and turned it about on its beautiful ankle, her bow and arrow propped up against her chair. They were the same as the ones a little boy might use, Rebecca saw now, quite cheap and bought from a market.
Alexander, on the other side, received the foot, licking his lips.
‘Now, now, you may not clean it, you disobedient boy!’ she said, as his tongue lapped between her toes. ‘Put my shoe back on. For I am to go to a ball and I must look my best!’
The fire and oppressiveness of the room and all the heavy furnishings and sumptuous fabrics combined to make it terribly hot. Rebecca longed to run to the window and throw off her mask. She felt the press of the bench against the back of her legs, and sweat. She lifted first one thigh up, then the other.
‘You may clean the shoe. The shoe is dirty, the foot is not.’
Alexander snuffled gratefully and bent his face to the sole of the shoe and began to lick it.
And suddenly, Rebecca would never know why, the whole scene struck her as ridiculous. A leg coming out of an enormous arse! As if a cow were birthing a human! Rebecca gave a hiccup and Eva jerked upright. And – her husband, a ludicrous figure! To think she had ever been frightened of him! She snorted. Oh, if only his customers could see him now!
Eva turned. Her frizzed fringe above her sinister mask did not go at all, it gave it a comical effect. Rebecca gasped and clamped her lips closed, biting them between her teeth. Her shoulders started to shake.
‘What are you doing?’ Eva hissed.
But Rebecca could not answer. Hilarity was beginning to cluster in her belly. Eva let her mask down and shook her head more vehemently.
But it was too late, Rebecca’s eyes had begun to water and her cheeks were burning with hysterical mirth. She gave a louder snort.
In front of them Alexander and the toffer turned. Alexander frowned, and suddenly he looked more like his usual self, as if he had been disturbed at his desk, only his cock sprouted there—
And it was that which made Rebecca finally burst out with a shout of laughter and – she could not help it – she dropped the mask from her face.
Alexander’s astonished gaze met her own for two, three heartbeats, perhaps more. And then, the laughter dying on her lips, Rebecca pushed herself up and away from the bench, and grabbed onto Eva’s arm. Eva, in her shock, had let her own mask down – Alexander must see them both, though Rebecca looked only to the door, and ran through it, pulling Eva with her.
CHAPTER 19
The feeling of lightness pursued Rebecca all the way back through the corridor, past the closed doors with the smack of the rod coming from them, through the great salon with the waiting men and out onto the street. So he had seen her! That was for the best, was it not? And with everything stripped away, they were free to have a new kind of relationship. Not the usual sort of husband-and-wife drear. He could be free of her, and her of him. They need barely see each other!
But at the rag and woollen shop her mood darkened. Her husband would never let her go free. Now he would keep her even closer. And how would he punish her? Surely witnessing his shame would lead to a worse beating than the men were getting in the bawdy house.
They slowed to a walk. The run away from the bawdy house had not coloured Eva’s cheeks at all, though a sheen of sweat lay over her face, making her look as if she’d been polished.
‘I am sorry!’ cried Rebecca. ‘I don’t know what overcame me.’
But now Eva turned to her with fury. ‘Sorry?’ You are sorry?’ She shook her head. ‘You have put us both in danger! And you are sorry.’
‘It was only, simply … I mean to say, the occasion was so strange, it seemed to be another man there all together, and then, thinking of Alexander sitting over breakfast so stern, and seeing him like that … It seemed comical all of a sudden.’
‘It is not comical to me,’ said Eva, her mouth set into a line. ‘God only knows what he will do; he is not a man to be crossed. As you yourself know! Added to that, there is Agnes.’
‘Agnes?’
‘The girl you have just seen him with. She will be furious. She won’t get paid tonight, I’m sure, and she let us in there for a favour. And p’raps word will get out, and it will be written down in one of those horrible guides that she cannot be trusted.’
‘It will not come to that, surely! P’raps I could make it up somehow, could I pay her myself?’
‘You? How? What money do you have? Would you take it from his pocket?’
It was true. She had nothing, it was all Alexander’s.
Things did not now appear humorous at all. It had started to rain, a thin insistent drizzle that made the black streets blacker. Drops of it fell from Eva’s hood onto her eyelashes.
It was not only Agnes’ night she had ruined. Her husband knew that she still associated with Eva, after he had forbidden it. Though what could he have to say about it now, after this evening? They had both been found out. She shivered.
‘I have used up my new medicine for the day. I wish I had not,’ said Eva, passing the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘How I wish I had not! I ought to have saved some. Alexander said he would come, this evening, to give me a drop more, but he will not now. P’raps he will never come again, nor Mr Badcock neither.’ Eva’s voice rose. ‘And then what will I do? Where will I find it? For no one else has the same, not yet. He’s to send it round the country, he says, after the patent, but, oh that may be months off!’
‘What about the drops? Do they not help?’
&nb
sp; ‘Drops?’ Eva laughed harshly. ‘Drops do not help, they are too weak! Oh, I ought never to have agreed to show you.’
‘You did it for me, Eva, you remember, and I am grateful.’ The rain came down, coating Rebecca’s cloak with a heavy dew. Her skin prickled and itched, she felt as if she were on the verge of an illness – the influenza, p’raps. How lovely it would be to feel warmth again, that kind of rightness, in her belly, that only the medicine gave!
Eva looked so dejected, and it was all her doing.
‘We could go to the pharmacy,’ she said. ‘I know where the medicine is kept – the salts, I mean. The new kind would be there too, if it were anywhere.’
‘But the shop is all shut up for the night. We could not break in, like a pair of common thieves. Alexander would know, and then it would be worse.’