‘Les voicis,’ Diprose said, holding a pile of large, heavy books, which he handed to me one at a time. ‘Three volumes, all in need of a good re-bind. The first is what you might call anthropology; a foray into rites, practices, folklore of certain curious cults.’ There was no title on the old binding, so I opened it to read the frontispiece. ‘Oh, please,’ he hissed, in exasperation, ‘do you have to open it in front of me, and in the street of all places? It really isn’t suitable, you know. Don’t make it any harder for me. If I had my way you wouldn’t be working for us at all.’
It was called Des Divinities generatrices ou le culte du phallus, and the design of the frontispiece was an enormous disembodied phallus reaching to the sky, penetrating some clouds. I closed it quickly.
‘And in case it is not evident to you,’ he muttered, ‘our conversation today must not reach the ears of Sir Jocelyn. I do not wish for him to know about your currish slave, at least not until you have proof of his loyalty; his wife’s goings-on are not exactly his cheval de bataille. And neither must you reveal to him my threats to you,’ he added, rather more casually, as he suddenly became rather interested in the curling endpapers protruding through a corner-tear of the cover. ‘I am, unfortunately, bound to him as you are to me.’ Before I could ask how, he had continued, ‘We must, I suppose, find a way to muddle through –’ the tip of the endpaper crumbled between his fingers, and he rubbed them together to get the paper off ‘– much as I would relish putting a plug in your rather mediocre sink-hole.’ If he were expecting a reaction from me, he did not receive one. So he gestured at the book I was holding. ‘Paris, 1805. I want the three as a kind of trilogy, and this will be the first one. Here is the second. A classic from 1786 by Richard Payne Knight, the grandfather of priapus.’
It was A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients. I knew it well, if only by its extensive referencing throughout other works I had bound.
‘And the third?’
‘The Satyricon and Other Priapic Writings. Imagine, if you will, a series of bindings dedicated to the great God Priapus. May I suggest to you that the cover design to unite the three should be, what one might describe as emblematic, if you understand my meaning. I need these quickly; they must take priority over the rest of the consignment. Au revoir, Mrs Damage. Ill met by gas-light, as ever. I will not bid you good day.’
Oh, but he was poisonous, but poisons could be avoided, or purged, or antidoted. I returned to the workshop, closed the door firmly behind me, and chose to worry not about Diprose’s contemptible chaff, but about how to occupy Din today, and whether Lucinda was getting enough to eat, and how on earth I was to gold-tool three ‘emblematic’ designs without Din noticing.
I gave the books to Jack to disband and clean, but I could not help but steal a peek at the wicker box before I settled to my own work. I gasped, and had to open it fully when I saw its contents.
‘Blow me dahn!’ Jack said. ‘Bellytimber!’ It was a hamper of exotic foods: Danish tins filled with sticky pastries, jars of French jams and preserves, a large, spiced ham studded with cloves and pineapple rings, two bottles – one of port, one of champagne – and two cheeses wrapped in wax paper. Tucked down one side was a brown-paper parcel; I opened it to find inside a cream silk ladies’ scarf, cool and smooth as soap, and a child’s navy-blue wool coat, warm and soft and snug, like my Lucinda herself.
Also for me was a pair of bronze kid boots, with a pointed toe, a dainty heel, and laces all the way up to the top of the boot, which curved around my calf. I could not help but try them on straightways. They were a perfect fit, as if they had been made for me. How had they known the angle of my toes, the arch of my soles? But the heel was so high that I stumbled, and I cursed the gentleman and rubbed my sore ankle; how badly I needed a new pair of boots, but how useless was a pair I could not walk in!
I took them off quickly, and returned them to the hamper. I closed the lid hastily; such distractions would turn my head today. I would leave them for Lucinda to discover. I returned to work, ashamed at my excitement and angry at the profligacy of a gift I could never use.
I situated myself in the draught-proof booth to plan my designs. Din could see me from here, but if I angled my work correctly he would not see what I was doing, and besides, once the gold-tooling had begun, the curtains would be closed.
And so to the frontispiece of the first book: a phallus complete in itself, not appendaged to a body. I copied it, and experimented with suspending it in a fine-tooled oval of ivy-leaves. It felt curiously normal for me now to be doing this, despite the fact that I was a wife, and had only occasionally seen my own dear husband’s ‘emblem’, and that woefully long ago. I entertained myself by wondering what his reaction would be were I to announce to him that I needed to disrobe him for the purpose of research. His seemed to belong to an entirely different species from Fanny Hill’s maypole or the Dey’s masterpiece; neither did I remember his throbbing with ammunition like a flesh-coloured trebuchet, or ‘at full cock’ like a loaded gun, or erupting like Vesuvius. But then again, at least, that meant that I had never been the silent victim of bullets, shrapnel or lava either. Perhaps that was how men preferred their women; what a disappointment I must have been to my husband, for not being a docile and willing conduit, a physiological sewer, to the pourings-forth of his mighty Jupiter Pluvius.
Perhaps the simple answer was that Diprose was right, and it was not I who should have been reading these things at all.
Chapter Twelve
As I went by a dyer’s door,
I met a lusty tawnymoor;
Tawny hands, and tawny face,
Tawny petticoats,
Silver lace.
'The devil has come upon us!’ Peter shrieked. I was just coming up from the cellar with some fresh paste, so I rushed to him, anticipating the discovery of my child on the floor: it had been so long since she had fallen fitting, but still I feared it daily. But Lucinda was nowhere to be seen. Peter was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the workshop, clutching the hem of his nightshirt around his crotch like a boy who has had a bad dream, and wobbling a purple finger in the direction of the benches.
‘Take him away!’
‘Peter, my love, may I introduce . . .’
‘Take him away!’ The bloodshot folds of skin hung from his face like an ornate gold and red brocade curtain, which quivered as he shouted, as if someone was hiding behind them shaking their swags and festoons.
‘He is working for . . .’
‘Give me my draught,’ he pleaded, suddenly.
‘Peter, there’s nothing to be afraid of. This is Mr Din Nelson and he’s going to be . . .’
‘Give me my draught now!’
I uncorked the bottle and handed it to him, and he swigged it gladly, and sat quivering in his armchair by the fire once more. So I never did introduce him properly to Din, and he never mentioned the man again either. I instructed Din to stay in the workshop at all times, and never to come through into the house even to make paste, and the curtain was kept closed from hereon in.
The same group of children escorted Din to work each morning; it was the mothers pulling them inside who varied, according to the daily rumours of his good nature or malevolence. It was a struggle between respectability and convenience, for there was no doubt the man was entertaining their children, which was always a blessing when it kept them out from under one’s feet. Besides, there was something jaunty about Din’s striding limp, and every morning he would raise his hat to the women, and each day he met them – and they him – with an increasing firmness of eye.
In the evenings he would stay until six, when he folded his work, swept up the threads below his seat, gathered his coat, and bade us good evening. He never enquired, as a more diligent employee seeking promotion might, as to whether I might require him to stay longer; he never waited for my dismissal every evening. But I was hardly bothered by this; what concerned me mo
re was his fourth day, a Friday, when I darted into the house at five o’clock to serve Lucinda up some pancakes, and when I returned, Din was nowhere to be seen. He had cleaned up his mess, put away his work, and taken his coat an hour before time, and all without Jack’s noticing. I thought no more of it, aside from a minor indignance at his insolence.
It rather suited us, because we needed to get on with the Priapic Trilogy, and due to Din’s absence, we could start on it an hour early. We were planning to experiment with répous-sage, whereby the design is modelled into relief from the underside of the skin. Jack dampened the leather and, while he held it taut, I cut halfway down along every line of the design, with a knife sharper than paper, and with scarcely a breath between us. Then we coaxed the three proud peni into tumescence: with the point of the bone folder and the agate we made the incision bulge and rise, before filling the hollows with a mixture of papier-mâché, sawdust and glue. Jack and I were so absorbed in the vulnerability of the procedure that we soon forgot the subject matter at such close quarters; we could just have easily been performing répoussage on a nose, or a chin. And at around ten o’clock, when Jack and I beheld the first of the three finished books, we could see that we had created a veritable masterpiece of the nether regions.
I heard a shouting from upstairs, and raced up to find Peter kneeling by his bed, grimacing, in a puddle of urine. He had knocked his chamber-pot over, and his nightshirt was soaked.
‘Give me some draught,’ he begged. ‘Give me some Drop.’
‘I will, love. Let me clean you up first.’ I rolled the wet portion of his nightshirt up into the dry bit above, then lifted it over his head. I found a clean one from his cupboard; it hadn’t been aired, but there was urgency in his nakedness, so I dressed him quickly and got him back into bed. He dosed himself straightways, and sank back into the bed and into himself, as I soaked up the rest of the puddle with the old nightshirt, tucked it inside the chamber-pot, and took the whole lot downstairs.
Back at work, I fretted about Peter, and wondered if I really were doing the right thing in my new trade, with my leather penises and the like. They certainly made a change from the books a woman like me was meant to be reading, which seemed to demonstrate over and over again, with a million minor variations, that women are untroubled by desire, and that on their purity and domesticity depends the moral state of the entire nation. I thought of the books I had loved, rather than those that set out to belittle me. I tried to imagine Jane firkytoodling with Rochester, which was not hard, given that they only made love once he was a cripple, and I had bound plenty of literature which dealt with that topic. Or Cathy and Heathcliff, with Edgar watching, or, better still, a ménage à trois powered by the passion of hatred. It surprised me how easy it was for me to imagine this, but then again, I had always found more genuine passion between the pages of Jane Eyre than between the sheets of The Lustful Turk. I empathised with Jane: her lack of hope for her life, her minimisation of her desires, her ability to knuckle down and do whatever it was that needed to be done. After all, I was the daughter of a governess who had never hoped to marry either; and, like Jane, I never felt that I was included among the fair sex.
But then again, the women of Lambeth on a Saturday night could not be described as the fair sex, either. Women who shrieked and fell, and showed their thighs from the gutter, all the while laughing from the drink. Women who sold their babies to the baby-farmers, who were all women too, to do away with them because they couldn’t bring themselves to do it with their own hands. Women who gave over their own daughters to the men who refused to pay for the old crone any longer, women who could do this to their own girls, to avoid hunger, rather than throw themselves off a bridge first. What on earth was fair about that? Fair sex, what poppycock, I thought, before remembering that I couldn’t use the word ‘poppycock’ any more, not now I knew what else it could mean. No, we were the unfair sex, and yet what was really unfair was that if we went to public hangings, or public libraries, or public anythings, we received a scolding for not protecting our purity.
When the church clock chimed midnight, I laid down my tools, took off my apron, and didn’t even bother to check the kitchen fire. I left the kitchen dirty, and I looked in on my sweet Lucinda, only I didn’t kiss her cheek, as I was dirty too, and I took off my dirty smock and put on my dirty chemise. But I could not take off my shame and lay it on the chair by the bed. That would never go away, and I lay down next to Peter in an uneasy sweat of tiredness and dirt, in a stew of dirt and shame and anger, and I knew it would still cling to me in the morning when I woke, like a clammy shawl, like the London fog.
The following day was Saturday, and I was ready to speak to Din, not about his reasons for leaving us an hour early, but in an effort to find some way of binding him to the workshop. I had not planned my questions wholly on behalf of Mr Diprose; I confess to a certain curiosity about the life he had lived, before circumstance and rich ladies conspired to throw him up on my shore.
‘Where do you lodge, Mr Din?’
‘In the Borough, ma’am.’
‘Your exact address, please, for my records.’
‘The Lodging House for Transient Male Workers, ma’am, on the High-street.’
‘And your landlord?
‘Mrs Catamole.’
‘You have been there how long?’
‘Eight months, ma’am.’
‘And before that, you were where?’
‘At a flop-house.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘A beer-stop.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘Them places is only temporary, ma’am. The Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery wanted to find me better straight off, and cheaper too, so they sent me to Mrs Catamole.’ His accent was enchanting: thick, and syrupy, with an evident American twang, but with something else, too. Like his step, his speech was jaunty.
‘Is it to your satisfaction?’
‘Yes, ma’am. The bed is comfortable, and the board wholesome and pleasant. I never expected so much, nor hoped for it neither.’
‘How long have you been in England?’
‘Eleven months, ma’am. Nine months in London.’
‘Where were you in the interim?’
‘In Portsmouth. The Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery got me safe passage with a Dutch ocean-liner. They dropped me in Portsmouth.’
‘And where did you lodge in Portsmouth?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘So where did you go?’
‘I walked, and took lifts where I could.’
‘And where did you sleep?’
‘Rough, ma’am.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘On the streets. Or in boat-yards, or fields. I got to London soon enough, ma’am. I took myself to my benefactress, but she had been unwell, she died.’
‘Ah, yes, Lady Grenville. You must have thought your luck had died with her.’
‘No ma’am. I make my own luck. I was expectin’ nothin’ more from the Ladies’ Society for the—’
‘Yes, yes, I know who you mean.’ How quick he was to subdue, from my rude interruption! I bit my impatient tongue, then said softly, ‘You may continue. Pray, tell me, how did you get to be here?’
‘I knew of another American fellow like me, who had run the railroad for a while before the price on his head got too high, and he ran to England. I heard he was in Limehouse. So I took myself there.’
‘Did you find him?’
‘No. But I found those who knew him. Americans, lots of them, all of them Negroes. Another runaway, too.’
‘So how did Lady Knightley find you?’
‘Lady Grenville’s girl asked me to leave an address. The only one I knew of was this one I was headin’ to in Limehouse. I had carried that address with me for years.’
‘And Lady Knightley found you there,’ I said.
‘Yes. The folks there told her they might find me on the
floor of a Chinaman’s rooms some streets away. And there she did find me.’
The vision this presented was remarkable. Lady Knightley, driving around from place to insalubrious place, in search of a man she had never met, from a country she had never been to. I bowed my head; if she had been present I would have dropped to my knees in humility and respect.
‘And she took you to the flop-house? And thence to Mrs Catamole’s?’
‘Yes ma’am.’
‘And how have you found the English to be, Din?’
‘Mighty helpful, ma’am. Civil as they could be. They do not trouble me while I walk the streets. When I hail an omnibus it stops. At table Mrs Catamole asks me how I find the fare. That never happened at home, even before I was caught.’
‘You were caught?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Did they send you back?’
‘No, ma’am. I was caught in the beginnin’.’
‘Forgive me, Din. I am not understanding you.’
‘I was caught by the tradin’ men, when I was a boy. I was free before that.’
‘You – became – a . . .?’ He had not used the word to me; I did not know if I could say it to him. ‘You were how old?’
‘Fourteen, ma’am.’
I wanted to clarify what I was hearing, and to find out more, but I was straying into dangerous territory, and the man wasn’t revealing without my questioning. I picked up my pen and resumed what I thought was an official line of enquiry.
‘Next of kin, Din? For my records, again.’
If I had thought this was a safer way of interrogating I could see from his face that I had got it wrong. I did not know then that a man of his colour could turn pale; it was a fearsome sight, and was as unfamiliar to me as the paleness of desert sands to those smeared with city grime.
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 19