The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  ‘What in the devil’s name have you done, Charles?’ Sir Jocelyn eventually said. His voice was low and urgent, as if his teeth were clenched. ‘Get off her.’

  Diprose’s weight shifted on my back, crushing my ribs into the floor. Then he stood up, and I breathed out heavily, and pushed myself quickly up to standing, arranging my skirts.

  ‘Come, Sir Jocelyn,’ Diprose said hastily. ‘Could there be a more appropriate way . . . ? Just think of the beauty . . . The perfect accord with . . . The pricelessness . . .’

  ‘Of what, Charles?’ I could not read Sir Jocelyn’s face.

  ‘Come, Sir Jocelyn,’ he said again. ‘This time I will prove to you I’m no circus master. You shall know that your masterpieces are not made from white pigskin, unlike those shrunken heads and miniature mummies in the street shows.’

  ‘All this, because I didn’t believe your feeble inscription.’ Sir Jocelyn had started to laugh, shaking his head. ‘Really, Charles, you have excelled yourself this time.’ He wiped a tear from his eye.

  ‘Why, thank you, Sir Jocelyn.’

  ‘You idiot, Charles,’ Sir Jocelyn snapped.

  ‘But, Sir Jocelyn, you told me to dispose of her,’ Diprose protested. ‘You have always referred to her as our whore. Before I throw her into the Thames, I thought I might as well get our money’s worth. So they will discover that one of the many prostitutes’ corpses they find today has been flayed. Qu’est-ce que cela peut bien faire?’

  ‘I said that I believed she was coming to the end of her employment with us, and that we had to find a reasonable way of disposing with her. Reasonable. Not barbaric.’

  ‘Dispose of . . .’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t mean kill her! Relinquish. Remove. Not rub out! And reasonably, too.’

  ‘So what are we to do?’ Diprose asked. I looked from him to Sir Jocelyn, and back again. My future was held in their decision. Sir Jocelyn walked towards me, looking me up and down.

  ‘I always thought you were too scrawny, Dora,’ he said at last. ‘Charlie, couldn’t you at least have found me a woman with an arse that had been fattened on the cushions in the Dey’s harem? The perfect quarto, you said? Mrs Damage’s arse, I’m afraid, will cover little more than an octavo, and a crown octavo at that.’

  Mr Diprose’s vile mouth broke into a smile, then a laugh, and soon the two men were chuckling heartily at my demise, and I knew I had no ally in Knightley.

  ‘Never mind,’ Sir Jocelyn continued. ‘She shall be our perfect pocket-book!’

  ‘And as for her daughter,’ Diprose adjoined, laughing so hard he could scarcely get the words out, ‘there’s no pleasure like the ploughing of a first edition.’

  Quicker than the men could follow what I was doing, I ran to the wall and seized one of the tribal spears, feathered with orange and yellow. It came off easily in my hand, and I hurled myself with it towards Mr Diprose’s shaking back. I rammed it in hard. It met with resistance. I saw his round, purple face turn to me with surprise; his eyebrows were lifted, and his wet little mouth grinned over his shoulder at me. I battered the spear into him again, this time into his side, and then, now he was facing me fully frontal, into his chest. Still nothing. He was still laughing, and looking at me in wonder. Possibly the spear was blunt. Again, and again, I hammered it on to him, fear growing with every blow, from every angle I could, until he simply caught hold of the shaft and held it upright to keep me from attacking him further.

  ‘I had not thought until now how fortunate I am to wear this wretched back brace,’ he said superciliously. ‘ “The advantages of scoliosis as a life-protector.” Another treatise for you to write, Sir Jocelyn.’

  But before he could finish smirking, the spear was removed from him and he was flattened against the wall with the same spear across his chest, before any of us knew how it had happened. But then it became obvious, for the man holding the spear across Mr Diprose, the man whose face was pressed up against his, eyeball to eyeball, and threatening to crush the very life out of him there and then, was Din. Din, holding the spear, the same spear he had brandished at Sylvia’s bosom.

  I did not stop to think how he had managed to be here; instead I ran to the wall again, and seized the another weapon, which had a short shaft but a long blade, and without testing it with my fingers ran with it straight towards Diprose, but this time I aimed for below his brace. He saw me coming, and there was nothing he could do, for his arms were pinned by the spear. I landed it directly into the softness of his crotch. Oh yes indeed, this one was definitely sharp. Fabric and flesh yielded. Diprose screamed and quailed. Blood was dripping from the spear, and from Diprose, onto the tiger’s head on the floor at our feet. I knew what I was capable of, and what I had to do. I looked at Diprose’s pale, shaking face, and knew I had to strike somewhere up here next. I had to find his elusive throat somewhere beneath his quivering chins and beard.

  But with every murder there is a moment of possibility, and when that passes, the deed cannot be done. With Diprose pinned to the wall by a stronger man, squealing like a pig, I could pretend I was safe. With every second that ticked by, the moment evaded me further. I was still holding the bloody spear, but did not know what to do with it.

  ‘Kill him,’ Din shouted at me. ‘What you waitin’ for?’

  Sir Jocelyn was watching me with the bemusement of a man who has seen too many peepshows, but has finally found a more interesting one. ‘Damned if you do, but what if you don’t, Mrs Damage?’ he asked, cocking an eyebrow at me.

  And I wondered then why it was Diprose I needed to kill, and not this other man, who was glowing redder than the devil in front of me. After all, were not I and Diprose both his victims? But I knew the answer before I had even finished the question. What murderous feelings the prostitute dares entertain are reserved for her pimp, not for her clients, no matter how loathsome. Besides, I dared believe, as Sir Jocelyn looked at me, that although his gaze had not the sombre shadow of respect about it, yet it radiated a certain admiration. No, I would let Lucifer live, for his Faustus was the more despicable to me, having chosen his devilish entente. The devil, I believed, had no such freedom of choice.

  And it was choice that I had here. It was no longer the choosing of a mother for the welfare of her daughter: Lucinda would suffer either way now, with a mother flayed and murdered or hanged for murder herself. My choice was a simple one: good versus evil, virtue versus revenge.

  But even though I quickly knew what my choice would be, I heard Sir Jocelyn say, ‘Buy yourself some time, my dear. Give him a taste – or rather, a smell – of his own medicine.’ He walked over to Diprose’s pocket, and said, ‘Chloroform, Mrs Damage.’

  Diprose started to thrash again under the spear, as Sir Jocelyn tried to pull the bottle out. Diprose spat in Din’s face, and kicked out, just as I had when he had earlier restrained me, and got Sir Jocelyn squarely in the shin. The man buckled slightly, and grimaced, nearly losing his grip on the bottle; Diprose was pinned at the shoulder, but his flailing hand seized hold of Sir Jocelyn’s hair, and tugged.

  ‘Charles!’ Sir Jocelyn yelled, for it seemed as if Diprose had actually ripped a handful of hair from Sir Jocelyn’s head.

  ‘Oh!’ I cried. What pain he must be in! And how peculiar he looked, with only a dark shadow over his skull. I blinked, and tried to grab the bottle of chloroform off him in case he dropped it. Chloroform. Of course. It must have been chloroform that subdued me for the tattoo. Chloroform. I would render him unconscious, and delay the evil moment.

  And as I uncorked it and was wondering how to administer it, I saw Sir Jocelyn upright again, with his hair as normal, and the strange hairless image of him disappeared. A cloth was what I needed now, surely. I looked around for one, but had none. I grabbed the bottom of my skirts, drenched a section in the liquid, and pulled it up to press it firmly into Diprose’s face, my whole body lunging over his as I did so. I think I must have showed my tattoos again, but dignity was the last thing on my mind.
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br />   ‘How long do I hold it for?’ I screamed at Knightley, but he shrugged, and seemed to recede from me. Diprose shuddered and panicked beneath my skirts, then he could not help but inspire deeply, and his body immediately went limp, and slumped. Din pressed the spear further into the wall, to keep him upright.

  ‘You can take it away now,’ I panted.

  ‘He’s bluffin’, Dora!’ Din shouted.

  I pulled my skirts away from Diprose’s face; his skin had blistered around his nose and mouth. His eyes were glazed; I pulled his eyelid upwards, and prodded his eyeball.

  ‘No, he’s gone.’

  Din relinquished his grip on the spear; Diprose’s body hit the floor, and lolled over the tiger. And I knew then that I had done the wrong thing; I would never be able to kill him now, a sleeping man, in cold blood. A curse on Sir Jocelyn. Possibly this had been his intention all along.

  Sir Jocelyn. What would he do to me now? Would he let me make my escape, for Diprose only to find me and kill me in anger at a later date? Or would he finish me off? As I thought of the Devil, he sauntered out of the shadows, and knelt down next to Diprose. He felt for his pulse. ‘He has, indeed, gone, Mrs Damage. He is dead. Congratulations. You have killed him after all.’

  Din reached for me, but I would not be held. I waited for Sir Jocelyn to say something, but he did not. Presumably he would now send someone to Scotland Yard. I would be hanged for murder. The inevitability of it stretched out before me. Whatever my claims, who would believe a woman and a black man over a Knight of the Realm? I had killed a man.

  ‘Go to my room, clean yourselves up,’ he said, with a calmness that terrified. He opened the door for us himself, and led us down the corridor into a room with pale blue walls. It had a bath in it, and a sink, and a pan with a cistern hung above it on the wall. Din and I stood in the middle of it all, and dared not move.

  ‘Here.’ Sir Jocelyn handed us both a small flannel square, and a white towel. ‘Come now, act quickly.’ Still we did not move. We watched as Sir Jocelyn turned the taps, and the steam rose from the water to fill the room.

  ‘You have piped hot water!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘And you have blood on your hands.’

  And so we jumped to, and scrubbed our faces and hands, and mopped at the stains on our clothes.

  ‘Now go, quickly, with discretion,’ he whispered, holding the door out to us once more.

  ‘My veil, and my shawl,’ I said, bewildered, to Sir Jocelyn.

  ‘I do not know. Charles was evidently not intending for you to leave the building again.’ Then he said gravely to Din as he passed, ‘I suggest you take the lady out the same way you entered the building, so as not to draw attention to yourselves.’

  Din nodded, and led me silently downstairs, only we did not turn left at the bottom to go to the front door, but right, to the servants’ area, where the flagstones got rougher, and he pulled me into a cupboard as a maid glided past with a candle, then we slipped along further, into the kitchens, which were empty, and out into the area that led up to the mews. But just as we were about to ascend the iron stairs to the gate at the top, Din pushed me into the coal-hole under the street. I could see in the dark at the top of the steps that a woman was pressed up against the gate, and a man on the other side, and they were clearly in some deep embrace, despite the restrictions of ironmongery between them.

  Din and I steadied each other on the precarious piles of coal beneath our feet. We must have waited for a quarter of an hour for the amorous couple so to finish their business, and in the interim we, likewise, could not help but find ourselves in each other’s arms, our heartbeats clamouring loudly in fearful unison. Our lips and tongues were dry, but it did not matter. He was my saviour and my solace, and I knew that I loved him. But I could not say so to him; I feared it would mean little.

  Then we heard the woman tread softly down the steps, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and laughing to herself, and we pulled away from each other, watched her go inside the house, and crept up the steps ourselves. Din made a foothold for me with his hands, and lifted me up and over the gate, which was as tall as I was, before vaulting it himself, and we dropped into the mews, dirty and black-faced. Din led me across Hill-street, then we ran along Hays-mews and turned right onto Charles-street, from where we could skirt across the south side of Berkeley-square and drop down into Piccadilly.

  ‘We have to find Lucinda,’ I said to Din, clutching at his arm.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And I related to Din the events as best as I could remember, breathlessly, as we rushed along the pavement, oblivious to the phantoms and menaces of the London dark.

  ‘Was he Japanese, this man? And his wife?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Oriental-looking.’

  ‘It’s just I know a Japanese tattoo man, in Limehouse. He is the only, the best. All the slaves go there to get their slave marks changed. That’s how I got to know the Whitechapel crowd. I was lodgin’ just up from him, and saw all these niggers comin’ and goin’. He turned their brands into dragons, or flowers, or patterns.’

  ‘There was a dragon and a fish on the door.’

  ‘It’s him. It’s him all right. And that was when you last saw Lucinda?’

  ‘I heard her, as I was under the chloroform.’

  ‘Yes. This all make sense. There’s only one professional in London. Diprose couldn’t exactly take you to a sailor in the backroom of a pub, could he? I’ll go straightways, once I get you home safe.’

  ‘You? I’m coming with you! She’s my daughter! You might need me.’

  ‘Dora, no. Think. How will we get there? It’s too late for an omnibus.’

  ‘I will pay for a cab.’

  ‘Ain’t no way you could even bribe one to take you to Lime-house this time o’ night.’ In the distance we heard a shriek, and the pounding of footsteps that echoed around the stony streets.

  ‘We will walk.’

  ‘And you will slow me. I’ll run there. I can run there barefoot. You’re tired.’

  ‘I am not.’ I quickened my pace as if to prove it, but I was out of breath now, and we were only at Trafalgar-square, where ashen-faced men in black silk and lace loitered on the edges of the pools of light like vampyres.

  ‘And besides, am I not good at getting secret things out of hidden places? Especially things hidden by Sir Jocelyn.’ And with that, he pulled out a book from the waistband of his trousers, and I could see in the gas-light, as we stood in the shadow of the College of Physicians, that it was that horrific book, the one with the hateful inscription.

  But still I tried to argue in the face of such evidence of his skill. ‘This changes nothing. I’m coming with you.’ I took the wretched book from him, and set off at a pace again. ‘Why did you take this?’ I panted.

  ‘Sylvia told me all,’ he said. ‘I did not think it fair that those men got to keep it.’

  ‘You spoke to Sylvia?’ I said.

  ‘She came to Miss Catamole’s and found me. She was worried.’

  ‘She came . . . ? She has some bravery in her after all! You were meant to be in Bristol . . . you were meant to have set sail.’

  ‘The boat was delayed. We heard word to stay.’

  ‘Did Sylvia mention . . . anything else?’

  ‘She told me all.’

  ‘About the boy?’

  Din kept his pace, although I was faltering now, and he simply said, ‘I do not follow you.’

  ‘Sir Jocelyn is unsure about Nathaniel’s parentage. Do you have anything to say to that?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘I’m not accusing you, Din.’

  ‘Good. Because I have told you the truth. The women touched me. But we did not do that.’

  But I did not care any more. I only wanted to get Lucinda back safely, and every second I persisted I was still slowing Din down. We could not afford to lose a moment. ‘So go, Din,’ I eventually said. ‘Do not take me home to La
mbeth. You will be quicker if you head off now.’

  ‘I am not leavin’ you on the streets at this time o’ night,’ he said, clutching my arm tighter. ‘If we hurry it won’t delay me over much.’

  So we hastened along the Strand, arms locked, and from there he took me home, where Sylvia and Pansy were both sitting up waiting for me. Sylvia hugged me and settled me in front of the fire, and Pansy brought me a hot flannel to calm my nerves, and together the three of us waited into the night and as the dawn spread across the city sky, for Din to return with some news of my Lucinda. As we waited, I told them what had happened. I troubled about when they would come to arrest me, or when the retribution would come from Holywell-street, and whether Din would find Lucinda in time, and if so, whether we should run, and to where.

  Sylvia, in turn, told me how she had started to worry when Lucinda and I had not returned; the terrifying realisation that our absence was due to her incautious disclosure to her husband crept stealthily over her, before seizing her entirely in a grip of horror. Her first instinct was to go to Berkeley-square herself.

  ‘Would you really have done so?’

  ‘Yes, I would. In that moment I felt invincible, and that it was my redemption to use that strength to recover you. But I am no stranger to my weakness. I knew I would not even have been allowed past the front door.’

  ‘And so you went to someone who knew how to slip in and out of your house.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose those soirées had some useful function, after all,’ she said ruefully.

  ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘I searched your files for his lodging address. You had made it easy for me.’

  She was right. I had only recently checked his address myself.

  ‘He was not there when I went,’ I said. ‘He should have been on board the boat.’

  ‘The heavens must have stayed him,’ Sylvia said, without satisfaction. I could not smile at her, but I felt something akin to deep warmth and gratitude. I knew how hard it would have been for the woman to navigate her way from Ivy-street to Borough High-street, tottering over fouled cobbles, dodging urchins and fielding coarse banter. I had not thought she had it in her.