So, if he were to walk quietly past now? To walk past and to go softly up the alley and in at the door of the house at the end?
Of course, Balneal might at any moment turn and see him. And, sadly, the moon was shining through a large break in the clouds and the poles generally hung with drying clothes were bare. Nor would the slight disguise of his wideawake hat serve very well. But he must get to Mary.
He set quietly out.
As he passed behind the solemn investigator, not more than two yards away from him in the narrow entrance of the alley, the harlot was still holding his full attention. Softly onwards. Breaking into the hurried pace he craved for would be almost bound to alert, not Arthur Balneal, but the sharp-eyed citizens at present giving him their delighted interest. And they would, like as not, be quick to point out to the investigator the sight of a fellow gentleman in these parts. With a coarse comparison, no doubt.
He reached the far end of the alley. Shortly before he got there he had heard a louder-than-before burst of laughter. But he had not dared to turn and see whether he was the object of it. He pushed at the familiar time-darkened door and an instant later he was in the comforting gloom of the house.
He tumbled down the steps into the cellar in one wild rush. And there was the fly-paper man. He was sitting at the big table, quite near the fire, eating a piece of cheese. But of Mulatto Mary there was no sign.
He flung himself towards the lank-haired monarch with the rind of cheese.
‘Now then,’ he shouted in the most ringing tones of authority he could muster, ‘where is Mary? Where have you hidden her, you damnable villain? Out with it. Out with it this instant. Or, by God, I’ll have the police on to you the moment you set foot out of St Giles. I’ll hound you. I’ll hound you and hound you till you wish to heaven you had never set eyes on me.’
As his tirade swept him on—and after so many checks and so much frustration he found himself more carried away than he knew he ought to be—he saw a series of expressions appear and disappear on the grimy visage looking up at him. Shock had come first. But that went quickly. There followed, and nor did this last long, a look of keen rage. And then came what might have been a sullen determination on vengeance, except that it too was so briefly present that it was difficult to be sure. And lastly and more lengthily there appeared a lugubrious sorrow.
And it was this that found expression when at last he shouted himself to a stop.
‘Sir, sir. Oh, sir, there’s no need for this. No need at all. Was you a-thinking I’d gone back on my bargain? Oh, sir, the very last thing that’d enter my old head. No, no. It was all most unfort’nate. No sooner ’ad you left me, sir, an’ I ’ad come back ’ere to take a bit o’ supper than who should walk in through the door but the creetur ’erself. Made a mistake in the message I sent ’er, she ’ad. Told ’er to stay where she was, an’ instead she come over ’ere directly. I trounced ’er for it, sir. I trounced ’er good.’
Godfrey decided to ignore the show.
‘Then where is she now?’ he demanded. ‘Is she in the house here?’
He glanced furiously all round, as if expecting somehow to see evidence of Mary’s nearness.
‘Why, sir, seeing as ’ow we wasn’t expecting you no more, not to put too fine a point upon it, she’s with a cove, sir, as is paying five shillin’ for the privilege. But ’e won’t be long, sir. I’ll ’ave ’im out of it in a trice. I won’t ’ave the likes of ’im stand in the way of a gentleman. I’ll go over directly.’
‘Go over? Where is she? Speak up, you damnable rogue.’
‘Never fear, she’s close at ’and, sir. Never fear. It so ’appened we’d no room ’ere, sir, so I ’ad to put ’er— Well, in a place you know well, sir.’
‘Where? Where? Damn you.’
‘Why, in the paper-gatherer’s place, sir. Yer’ll know that’s right enough fer it.’
And the maltreated king gave him a leer of sharp revenge.
‘Then take me to her,’ Godfrey said brusquely. ‘I’m not having you make off with her under my nose again.’
‘No, sir, no. Stand up fer yer rights, sir. We’d none on us get anywhere in this world unless we did that. You jus’ foller me, sir, an’ yer’ll see yer light o’ love in less nor five minutes, sir.’
The old man got up, groped for his greasy fur cap and led the way up the steps out of the kitchen.
It was only then that Godfrey remembered Arthur Balneal. Would the Celebrated Investigator still be putting his questions at the end of the alley?
‘Stop a moment,’ he said to the fly-paper man. ‘Is there no other way out of this place? No back way? No tunnel?’
‘No, sir, no. None o’ that. There’s times I’ve wished there was I don’t mind telling yer that, as a gentleman. But we ’ave to go the straight way, sir. The straight way.’
Godfrey determined to brave the risk. If Balneal saw him in company with this notorious pander, why then he saw him.
Yet, stepping out, he could not but dart a glance along the alley that was full of a slyness he could have wished not to possess.
The knot of laughing statistics fodder at the doorway of the first house had disappeared, however. He marched along the rubbish-strewn unpaved way behind the fly-paper man with his head held high. But at the corner he again felt compelled to glance furtively round to see if all was clear. And he thought he caught a fast-vanishing glimpse of a shiny silk hat. But it was difficult to be certain. And in any case Mulatto Mary was, surely, only a few minutes away now.
‘Mend your pace,’ he tersely instructed the old man, who had lapsed into something of a shuffle.
They hurried on. And at last they came to the entrance to the house in the little night-black court. Once again he lent the old fly-paper man a match and once more the old man found the lantern just inside the door, lit it and showed him in.
But this time when they reached the passage leading to the yard at the back a figure appeared in the far doorway.
Even in the first rays of the dim lantern Godfrey knew that it was her. He glimpsed the whites of her eyes and then saw her broad bronze face.
It was as he had seen it in his thoughts a thousand times. From the deepest recesses of his mind he had dredged it up, perfect in every detail, from that period three years before when he had seen her from time to time at the other house. He had got her right.
‘Mary,’ he said.
‘Somebody wantin’ me?’
He recalled her voice now. Those deep vowel-rolling sounds that seemed to be offering him, even in only two or three syllables, a long sloping verdant path leading down and down to something he still could not guess at in its entirety but cried out for and cried out for with all that was ever in him.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I want you, Mary. I’ve wanted you for a long, long time, though I would never let myself believe it.’
She came towards him as he stood beside the greasy-coated form of the fly-paper man and peered at him closely.
‘I ’member yo,’ she said. ‘I ’member yo from two, three years back. Yo was the gennelman that wouldn’t and wouldn’t have Mary.’
‘I was. The more fool I.’
‘An’ yo come axing fo’ Mary now?’
‘I am. I am.’
‘Yo ’member her all that time?’
‘I have indeed.’
‘Yo lucky gennelman. I’se only jus’ come from Rotherhithe way. So I’se all the time in the world fo’ yo.’
She leant forward then and enveloped him in a huge embrace. He felt her dress-straining breasts warm against him, heard the thudding of her heart, smelt her musky odour. Regardless of the watching face of the fly-paper man and of the patent lie he had told about the five-shilling cove, he put his hands on to her great spreading hips and pressed her hard against him.
And once he had run away from her. He had dodged and sprinted as he had not done for years when he had encountered her in Coventry Street and she, a little drunk perhaps, even a little mad, had
openly pursued him. That night, the night he had earlier first met Elizabeth at the Bosworths’ ball.
He felt intoxicated with happiness.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was a wonder to him when by the light of the cold moon shining through the boardless roof of the paper-gatherer’s little room he saw Mulatto Mary naked. And, unlike many of the whores he had gone with, she had delightedly and at once, despite the chill of the night, stripped off shawl, gaudy green dress, thick but holed serge petticoat, stockings, shoes and chemise.
‘We gonna be warm, the two of us,’ she had said, standing in front of him, a thick bronze ebulliently carved pillar of flesh. ‘We gonna have warm work in here.’
He had looked at her. She was superb, with big round forward-spreading breasts, with smooth rounded stomach that he could hardly wait till he had kissed and licked and stroked over every inch.
He had snatched off his own clothes, once more in this room, gloves, hat, paletot, coat, shoes, socks, tie, waistcoat, trousers, vest and undertrousers, and had flung them wildly to the floor.
Then they joined, with a shock of bare flesh on bare flesh that boomed like a cannon-shot in the little papers-strewn chamber. And he surrendered to her, felt and welcomed the kisses of her generous mouth on every part of his body, responded utterly, was lost.
Indeed, had he found his goal at any earlier time in his quest he knew that in his overpowering desire he would have spent copiously and vigorously almost as soon as she had hurtled him on to her warmly pulsating body. But in this same box of a room not so many hours earlier he had already expended himself not a little in the performance with the lily-white Lushy Lou that the fly-paper monarch had demanded as his price for putting him on the path he had so wanted. So in the event, though he at once felt himself sunk fathoms deep in the dark waters he had utterly desired, it was a long road that led towards the expected towering climax.
He was still at some distance from that end, though he saw it ahead with heart-thudding breath-gasping certainty, when with appalling suddenness the door of the little chamber was pulled squeakingly open and an old high-raised querulous voice exploded above them.
‘You. It’s you. It’s you, you bloody mulatto whore.’
‘Go ’way. Go ’way. We’re just a-coming,’ Mary shouted, raising and thrusting her bronze bulk up and down over him with redoubled force.
‘No, you don’t,’ the aged voice thundered hollowly.
Godfrey, in face of the intrusion, could not go on. He moved his head on the thick-layered paper to see who had thus interrupted them.
It was no doubt the paper-gatherer. He was a little old man, eighty at least from the look of him and not five feet tall, dressed in an old coat much too big for him wrapped round and secured with a piece of rope. In one hand he held a flickering smoky farthing dip, in the other his collecting sack.
But Mary was not so easily checked.
‘Move, move,’ she yelled down into his ear. ‘Don’ let that bugger stop you. Come on, gennelman, come on.’
‘You would, would you?’ the paper-gatherer shouted. ‘You creature of ungodliness, you whore of Babylon. Defile the Temple of the Lord, would you? You blaspheming bitch, you devil of unrighteousness.’
‘Go ’way. Go ’way.’
And frantically Mary tried to restore the fast-declining channel of sensuality between them.
‘Avaunt thee, Satan,’ the little old man shrieked.
And he stepped forward, raised his sack and brought it down with tremulous rage, again and again, on Mary’s broad naked back.
‘No. Stop, stop. Oh, stop,’ Godfrey broke in, half laughing, half enraged, not really knowing which of them he was addressing.
‘Come on, gennelman,’ Mary yelled. ‘Come on. I wan’. I wan’.’
‘Whore of Babylon, bitch of unrighteousness,’ came the high-pitched furious old voice.
And then the sack burst open in the flurry of his feeble blows and Godfrey found both himself and Mary showered with pieces of dogs’ excrement, many-coloured and vile-smelling.
The deluge finally cooled Mary’s ardour. She flopped down on top of him, heavy, quivering with a sudden storm of laughter, sweat-smelling. He lay there under her, not knowing whether he wanted to be in some distant place or whether even this ridiculous indignity was not somehow sweet.
‘Oh God, gennelman,’ Mary said when she could speak for laughing. ‘Give the old sod some money, for Heaven-sake.’
Godfrey thought it might be wise to placate this quaveringly avenging demon. No doubt, in fact, he had been sent by the vengeful fly-paper man. But it was his place they were using, probably without permission or payment. And he had too split his old collecting sack and had had the painful acquisitions of perhaps a whole day and half the night go scattering everywhere. He groped for his clothes and money.
The little old man stood there, the tallow dip still waveringly alight in his hand, and continued to spit curses at Mary. She was ‘a pillar of iniquity’ and ‘a defiler of the holy’ as well as both ‘the scarlet whore of Rome’ and ‘the filthy whore of Babylon’.
But at last two half-crowns revealed themselves, the very last of his money beyond the sovereign he had set aside for Mary.
‘Here, please, we are very sorry,’ he said, thrusting the coins towards the offended ancient.
The feeble smoky flame of the dip caught the shine of silver.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the old man, stretching out a horny crack-nailed hand.
He peered at what he had been given.
‘Bless you, sir, bless you,’ he said, turning at once to depart. ‘Please go on with your business, kind sir. Do not be paying attention to old Jack. Fuck this black girl as much as you want, my sir. Pray do.’
But he felt altogether unable to avail himself of the invitation.
He had been plunging with Mary to depths he had never before felt, not even in his first down-swarming time-removed days with Lisa, not in any of the experiences he had embraced in the weeks when he had wandered through the deeps of London seizing with avidity on whatever presented itself until at last and suddenly his meeting with Sir Charles in the mountainous reaches of Lombard Street had wrenched him, torn roots open to the stinging day, up again to the world he had thought he had left.
He could not now resume that hurtling plunge. He got to his feet and began picking up his joyously discarded clothes.
But he knew that now he had finally left the world of order. He had left it a thousand times more decisively than when he had run out of the Opera to hurl himself into the ruleless delights of the Holborn Casino, more completely than when he had rushed from the unsuccessful too successful Venus Verticordia and had sought out Lisa only to find her gone. Now, in and with the Mary whom he had once run away from, had in later days rejected by some instinct that had made him delay this black baptism until he was altogether ready for it, he had arrived at last at entire citizenship of the land without laws.
Now he knew, standing bent low in the little paper-strewn chamber struggling in the chill to get into his clothes, that he had abandoned totally the whole of that old upper side of life. He had made in the last quarter of an hour a departure real as stepping on board a clipper bound for Australia.
But was he—the idea jabbed at him suddenly and sharply— was he never in fact even going to see Elizabeth again, Elizabeth his lawfully wedded wife?
And his painting? Was he never to paint again? The Brocken Scene from Faust, was that never after all to take shape on canvas? And, if it was not, did not such a defection at once devalue, render empty and meaningless, everything else he had painted? The ‘Nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta’, until a few weeks ago that had been the active centre of his life. The ‘Hermann and Dorothea’ and the others that had been so much praised, had the solemnly printed considered words of acclaim for them been totally wrong? The ‘Torquato Tasso Leaving the City of Ferrara’, was the Queen’s six hundred pounds for that mere waste of money? How strange.
How strange that this should be.
And the people he had known all his life, known and loved, Lady Augusta, Sir Charles, so many others? Were they dead to him from tonight? Such a small break from the life in which they had played such parts. But a break, it seemed. A cutting off. A gap created.
‘Yo gonna buy me some supper, gennelman?’
He halted his fumble-fingered dressing and looked unseeingly at the big mulatto doing up with deft brown fingers a long row of buttons down the front of her dress. And then he found that he had come to a decision.
‘No, my dear,’ he said slowly. ‘No, I cannot stay to buy you supper. I must go just now. I find I shall have to go back home after all. For a little while.’
He would, after all, see Elizabeth. It was not possible simply to drop out of the world as if he were a pantomime actor and the stage-trap had opened beneath him. He would need, at its simplest, to take such a useful precaution as securing for himself as much money as he could.
So, stopping only to pay over his carefully guarded sovereign and to make a hasty rendezvous for the next evening, he left on what he thought of as a last pirating voyage out of the country of which he had just been made a freeman.
A freeman? Thrusting his way through the rookery’s sharp-faced dwellers now being pushed on to the pavements as the seven big gin-palaces of Seven Dials closed their doors at last, he wondered whether ‘freeman’ was after all the right word. Oh yes, he had passed portals now that he had always wanted, whether he had known it or not, to break through. He was in the land. But were those portals not ones through which it was not possible ever to go back? Was he a freeman of this underworld or its slave? But it was a slavery in which he delighted.
It was perhaps because in the course of the next day he had begun to find that it was even more difficult to leave the land of rules and order than he had supposed that, when eight o’clock in the evening, his rendezvous hour with Mulatto Mary at the Whiffler gin-palace, came and went without her arriving, he was by no means downcast.
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