“You an Abbess?”
“I appear that old?” The girl squinted. Truth be told, she couldn’t be much older than Bess herself. Sixteen perhaps?
“No, but you seem”—she seem’d, in fact, a strange combination of Composure and a hectic, livid Temperament—“like you know the city.”
“Too well. And I do happen to work for an Abbess. One looking for fair-roe-bucks*3 just like yourself.”
Bess stiffened. “Just like what in particular?”
Without a second’s hesitation: “Full of bosom, lush of hair, but empty of purse.”
So she would not mention the lascar*4 matter.
Which meant the girl was like any of the London Anglos, the ones who thought not mentioning it meant they were virtuous. And yet something about this girl intrigued her. She had a flash of Bess’s mother about her—a certain persuasiveness. Some doggedness to join Forces.
“I don’t favor the peaceful approach either,” Bess said, returning the girl’s opening salvo. “Bess Khan.” She extended a hand—still a bit wind-chapped from her journey to the city.
“Jenny Diver.” The girl took her hand, strok’d the back of it. “And I more than ‘don’t favor’ it.” Her indigo eyes turn’d a deep-water black. “These drumbelos*5 deserve what’s coming to ’em.” She look’d down at Bess’s hand, still in hers. “I have a salve for that. I’ll share it if you follow me to the back room.”
Bess knew what Jenny was asking. To make a choice. Between sitting and listening to evangelizing that was all too palatable to the merchant classes who liked to pretend disgust with commerce, or catting*6 these same merchants out of their coin.
And Jenny. How heedless she seemed of the bourgeoisie surrounding them, regarding them with disgust. Perhaps Jenny had attained some of this confidence through Congress with the men of London who held the keys to a map of its Interior. Bess had told herself she was coming to London for a Method, an understanding of the mechanics of the World.
On meeting Jenny, she saw how to get it.
“I’ll go to the back with you,” she said. “And see.”
* * *
—
It hadn’t surpris’d Bess that her first job would be the pastor—Ezekiah Smith—himself. He of the agonized declamations on Pacifism.
He look’d upon her in the faint Light of his small back office.
“ ’Scuse the clutter,” Smith said, whizz’ng ’round in excitement, thrusting aside papers and notebooks from an expansive splintery desk. “My scriptural studies, you understand.”
Bess mm-hmmed vaguely.
But Smith was waiting for something more. Bess realiz’d that she could read men the way she read deer tracks. And she saw at once that Smith’s Vanity lay in his belief that he was interesting.
“Tell me more about your studies,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse.
Which set Smith on an extensive ramble about the Anabaptist commitment to the equality of the sexes, all the while conducting a protract’d ogle of Bess’s heavers.
“The true believers were such pacifists,” he began, leaning his thin haunches against the desk, “that they would never raise a hand, even in self-defense. They permitt’d their own slaughter, running ragged for many days, hunted along the Voderrheim. The German town officers stormed the forests, driving the flocks of Believers down the Gulleys where they’d pitched themselves one after another into the Curnera Reservoir, there to float, frozen and bloated into the Rhine—” Smith caught her gaze with his weepy expression. “Men and women dove into that bright aqua basin together, hand in hand, equal in the eyes of God.”
This story was quite a romance to him, Bess could tell. He said Vonderrheim like he was masticating a rich cake. And now Smith had some questions.
“Do they have any such fables where you’re from?” Smith was unbuttoning his breeches. “What exotick beliefs were you given to learn? I have it on good authority that lascar regions are universally cruel to women. You won’t find any such inequalities here.”
Smith was naïve and stupid. All his facts were fictions, but what to address first— She open’d her mouth— A Word formed— She caught her tongue—swallow’d the sentence, I’m from England.
She could see that in order to begin—and hence conclude—this Transaction, Smith’s requirement (as he stood, priapic and Hesitant) was that he appear a Savior. Helpful and needed.
Bess lay upon the floor, spread her legs, and muster’d, “What a Mercy is England.”
And Smith dove, head-first, and set to work with what Bess would soon realize was the world’s worst capacity for such mouth-Touch. Perhaps this was Smith’s version of equality: a determination that pleasure be had by both parties. Unfortunately, his technique suffered muchly from an inability to conceptualize female Pleasure.
Smith rotated his rigid tongue like he was churning dough, cutting a horrendous Path around Bess’s quim, in which he outlin’d yet somehow never actually contacted the Point of Interest. The episode transpir’d for many long minutes. Smith was an odd combination of peacock and mouse—puffing himself and cringing in equal Measure. He was an appalling, dramatically “helpful” sexual actor. Bess soothed herself with memories of home. The soft, fleshy way the pages of her book got in the humid air; reading by candlelight in the cricket-stuffed nights.
Meanwhile, Smith was in a trance, grinding his tongue like an ancient grandfather Clock thunking its way through relentless seconds, and humming into Bess’s madge a muffled Quaker hymn. When Smith began emotionally spitting the chorus, she sighed and pulled him up by his armpits.
Consequently his arborvitae*7 now poked dumbly from its collection of wet gray hairs, straight at her. Smith was aiming—and then achieving—and Bess went numb, as if all of a sudden Smith’s arborvitae and Bess’s madge were having a conversation without her. The edges of her customs-house*8 felt cold and shivery in the air. Smith made his way in. It hurt a little, but not enough. That is to say, the hurt felt far away, or split Bess momentarily somehow from herself. Like she was reading a minor item in a distant rural broadside about someone who got hurt.
What was there to say? The congress felt entirely unspecific—as if Bess could be anyone. But men—thought Bess—need anyone so much.
* * *
—
After the disquisition on scripture, the lengthy, chaotic irrigation of Bess’s quim, and numbing Gut-plastering, Smith returned to his selfish and sentimental monologues.
Bess lay quietly with the pastor sprawl’d across her like a damp Claw, murmuring inane things into her hair.
“If the World could see you as you are right now”—she assumed that meant naked, or clicketed*9—“t’would be Peace everlasting.”
And then long contemplative Pauses as he considered the weight of his words.
“Oh, it’s Devilish here, all right,” he said. “You’re welcome to take refuge in my quarters if you need.”
Bess had to stifle a laugh.
“I’m due at my Abbess’s,” she said, her mind flashing to Jenny, waiting—she was relieved to remember—just outside the door.*10
*1 Rogues’ slang
*2 Madam
*3 A woman in blooming beauty. Infrequently used.
*4 Here is another detail of the manuscript that bears further mention. Bess identifies as “lascar”: a term that had broadened from its original usage denoting a South Asian sailor in service to the East India Company (from lashkar, or khalasi, orig. Persian: “an army”; through the Portuguese, “lasquarin,” “lascari”; and then the British, “lascar”; cf. K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company, Routledge, reprint 2000).
Not a single Sheppard text describes Bess as South Asian. Not one.
So then, between this characterization and that of Jack’s assigned sex, what we have here is either the most or the lea
st authentic Sheppard document in existence.
*5 Dull, well-fed folk
*6 Prostituting
*7 Penis
*8 Pussy
*9 Copulation (of foxes or persons)
*10 We know even less about Bess than we do about Sheppard. Researchers have long been forced to source her “truths” in the Sheppard works, in which she appears regularly, albeit in a variety of shifting forms. (Though, caveat: this profound lacuna in the records cannot be simply filled; it must be encountered head-on as constitutive of the archive as such.)
But to press forward. The two major fictionalizations of Sheppard’s life are John Gay’s wildly popular 1728 Beggar’s Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 Threepenny Opera. In the first, Sheppard is portrayed as the character “Macheath,” Jonathan Wild as “Peachum” and Bess as “Polly”—most likely a hybrid of three historical figures: Edgworth Bess, reputed to be Jack Sheppard’s lover, sex worker and partner-in-crime, and the notorious lesbian pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read. In Brecht’s work, Sheppard is “Macheath/Mack the Knife,” Wild is “Peachum” and Bess again is this hybrid, “Polly.”
So Bess’s character has been the location for a particular liberty of speculation. And yet she is consistently, unquestionably portrayed as white—not only in Gay’s and Brecht’s works, but in the numerous other fictionalizations of Sheppard’s life and circle as well (cf. footnote *3 on this page).
Given that London was not by any means a white city in the eighteenth century—and indeed that there were no legal prohibitions on interracial marriages at that time (see Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation, Rutgers University Press, 1995)—we have to take the unquestioned nature of Bess’s characterization as white as less a reflection of “actual” history than as the occlusion of it.
The departure from this occluding whiteness—this whiteness that occludes even the possibility of history itself—in the text at hand thus inclines me to regard this document as potentially more accurate to the period and its personages than either Gay’s or Brecht’s renderings.
5.
Ten years of Servitude. Ten years of Polhem Locks.
Jack lived one life during the days he was sent to the market. More and more the brims*1 of the streets took him for a boy. (Once, even, a bulky cove*2 with a ginger-and-black speckled beard, scuffing at some cobblestones in Lamb’s Conduit alley, tried to sell him some stolen kerchiefs. Fancy some fine linens, boy? he’d whispered. Jack had not realized ’til he’d gotten some way down the street that the man had been speaking to him.) He anticipated traveling to and from the sellers’ stalls in Covent Garden, oiling his curls so they would fall just so over his eyes, conditioning his apron with sheep’s-fat so it shined. He liked how it sat on his thighs when he bounc’d down the lanes.
At the Kneebones’, he lived another life. The life of an ugly, misshapen girl chain’d to workbenches to turn out useless items for aristocratic dogs. There was a constant knot at the back of his neck where his spine met his skull. An Ache that he associated with his vex’d relationship to breathing. It was as if he had been born with a spike between his vertebrae, and, with each failed attempt’d full breath, some Demon hanging just over his shoulder nailed it deeper, deeper. Anyone else looking through his eyes would have known immediately how to remove this Torment. Flee the house, and the spike will work itself loose. Even an animal will seek out relief. But Jack mistook his Suffering for subjecthood. And consequently, he desired the doubleness to which he had been forc’d to resort as a form of survival.
There had been opportunities for Jack to escape. But he had always come back right away, hadn’t he. Wide-eyed and full of longing for the free World. Full of longing, too, for the women he’d begun to notice, the women who began to populate his imagination at night.
But he had always come back.
Because of his Demon. This Something that hung over his shoulder. This something that set him apart from other coves. Something that had caus’d him to dress his own chest in taut bandages under his clothes since his twelfth year, pinching at his ribs, throttling his every Breath to a forced shallow bird-sipping of the air.
And this Something was the same something that made his mother not look back at him when she walked from Kneebone’s door, though Jack watched after her until she turned the corner and was gone. This Something—what he thought of as his something—made his servitude, while a miserable confinement, a hidey-hole too. His whole life was some hidden, rank place. And so his confinement became the door inside him between his waking life and something still unwoken, something lying close-packed like a bomb at his core, poised to shiver into a coruscated, glinting shower of—of—of what, he knew not. But there was Something just beyond the door inside him. Some difference within that he did not yet want to know.
A snapping, muttering billow of voices, badgering and chafing, scudding just underneath his thoughts like a low-lying Thunderhead.
* * *
—
Until 12 March 1724.
En route to the New Exchange, Jack caught the eye of one particularly dark-eyed doxy resting against the side of the Ewe’s Nest doorway. She was startlingly fetching. Deep-set eyes with a piercing, Haunted look. His preferred sort. The sort he had begun looking at more regularly—a great deal more regularly, truth be told. None had yet look’d back.
This woman held his gaze.
Something loosen’d inside him, spiraling down from his heart to his torso’s nether root. It was a Feeling he had always known—it flashed up at the sight of a wash of hair down the shoulders of a cloak—the blink of kohl on an eyelid—the dusty fume of rose blowing off night-chilled skin—but it made itself much more Urgent now. When his eyes caught hers, the word “thamp” occurred to him. His heart was thamping against his chest, some combination of thumping and stamping.
With his heart thamping, he rounded the corner, a tuffet in each hand, his walk a bit stilted against the load. He was reviewing in a fizzly, excited manner the way the doxy’s eyes had blinked shut for a flicker that practically stopped his Heart—when a butcher’s cart loaded with carcasses, dead legs swinging from the sides, blast’d out of the dark at the end of the alley, plowing towards him, raising a complex squall of clove-scented holly berries crushed under wheels, the stale dank of rodent musk, and the rotted rush of drying Blood—and just at that moment, a vision of underparts slamm’d into his Consciousness.*3
Naked, bared Muff between wide-spread legs—open for him.
There in the alleyway, as he leapt to the side of the oncoming butcher’s cart, this sudden and absolute obsession was imprinted upon him. He wip’d his face in the crook of his elbow. Shook his head, blinking. His nethers were pounding. Several years of the incessant hounding of his waking and dream lives with thoughts of women cohered its chaos into a simple thought. He wanted this— He wanted women not as objects of fascination, dream-images, figments— He wanted them body and soul like he wanted food, drink, air, sleep. He wanted them all over—and he wanted them very especially at their Boiling Spot. But what did he want to do with it? He couldn’t make this vision of nethers go away, but he couldn’t quite understand what he was supposed to do about it either.
As he stagger’d a bit in the street, the breath knocked out of him, he re-heard what the doxy had uttered as he’d passed: Handsome Boy, she’d said. She’d called him Handsome. He adjusted his smish into his trousers, and found himself smiling for the remainder of the walk to New Exchange. The din and clamor of the sellers’ stalls didn’t bother him near as much as they did usually. He let the world wash over him.
Because he’d heard Boy, handsome Boy—her throat caressing the words as they slid out of her mouth—and the whoop and clatter of commerce cottoned softer, fading into the background.
* * *
—
Later that evening, Jack sat under the windowsill plucki
ng through a news broadside on the Protestant émigrés, the French Prophets stockaded at Smithfield and pelted for days with rotten fruits, accused of false Visions and inciting Panicks in the Queen’s Publick.
As he shift’d, Jack felt the heft of a steel file thump his leg. He’d forgotten to return the tool to Kneebone before lock-in. And Kneebone—distract’d by some escalated fear of an ague, as he’d heard a vagrant cough outside the window earlier that day—had forgotten to check his tool inventory as they vacated the workroom in the evening.
Jack palmed the file. He thought of Kneebone’s warning: “This lock can’t be picked.”
He heard it, now, in a new way.
Jack bent over his ankle, considering the mechanism. Then he inserted the file into the Slot and jiggl’d four times in a rattling downward motion. The teeth slipped free. The Polhem Lock was even easier to pick than the standard British padlocks he affix’d to the hasps of the chests he built. Jack stared at the open jaw of the contraption in his hand. He almost felt sorry for Kneebone for being so mistaken about the lock. Then felt sorrier for himself for not having thought—not once in nine years—that Kneebone had not been so mistaken.
He had been lying.*4
* * *
—
Now that he was Free, Jack’s mind turn’d to the doxy from the afternoon. Who would—he hoped fervently—be where all the best rogues went after nightfall: the Black Lion Inn.
A quick dash into the street? He wouldn’t be missed. He knew the Kneebones’ routine as well as his own. After locking Jack inside his attic room, Kneebone would descend to the plain chambers he shared with Lady Kneebone and—as it was a Sunday—calculate that week’s Accounts, read together briefly from their Bible, then blow out the Lantern (Jack catching the reflection of the flicker puffing out in the glazes across the way) and fall to sleep. This was Jack’s best surmising of the Kneebones’ nightly affairs, as he never had heard any sort of Screwing from the room below, nor indeed any suggestive creaking of the floorboards.
Confessions of the Fox Page 4