Just then, Evans began to stir. Murmuring, rustling his coats, garbling like a wing-shot duck.
“We don’t have any prohibited doxies here, sir, this is a place of great repute,” the Lady Abbess said.
“None? Not a one? Not even a one for especial pleasures or particular Fancies? Coves like that sort of thing.”
“Only Anglo-English girls here.”
Evans’ garbles were getting louder. Bess’s eyes search’d the back of the kitchen. Exit through a window? The glazes were small and tight—deliberately designed to prevent Peeping Toms and unpaying customers. It was unlikely she could squeeze through quickly, and being caught half in and half out of the bat house was—well—a magnificently stupid Plan.
“Have you ever had a prohibited doxy here?” The interrogation continu’d in the foyer.
“By what you’re telling me, such doxies only became prohibited tonight. Even if I ever had had one ‘prohibited’ one—as you say—she wouldn’t have been exactly prohibited then, now would she?”
Evans emitted a snarled honk from the floor. “EEEEEERE!”
“Oh, God,” Jack whispered, seeing Bess’s stricken face.
Before he could think further—and clearly under the influence of alcohol and the shock of the procedure—Jack leapt from the table, grabbing the pillow from under his own head, and throwing himself and the pillow upon Evans. Every nerve in his rib cage shrieked, but in his overwrought state it did not produce an immediate reaction. Pain simply rippled through his already wracked Body, unable even to elicit the usual counterflinch.
He was on top of Evans, bleeding onto Evans’ jacket and shirt, struggling the pillow over his face.
“Shhhhh,” he hissed. “For God’s sake, you hateful beet, shhhhh.”
Evans grabb’d up at him, his soft ash-white hands flailing, ripping at the air. His hands spasm’d, dragged along the ground, collecting dust. Evans clawed upwards, around the pillow, spearing his Nail into Jack’s cheek, drawing Blood. Jack threw his chest on top of the pillow, his entire body weight on Evans’ face. His chest fired from the pressure of the Stitches against the rough pillow, and the sharp bones of Evans’ nose and brow beneath that. He heard himself wheezing and sobbing. Tried to stifle the Sound of it. There was spittle running from his mouth. He cry’d out in pain, and cry’d with effort and fury.
“Jack!” Bess whispered. “Jack, you’re going to—”
And then he pass’d out.*3
*1 SULLIVAN: NOT TO SOUND LIKE A JEWISH MOTHER—HEH-HEH— BUT WAS EVANS A “REAL” DOCTOR?
ME: Though I can find no record of an author, “Evans,” of any disquisition on chimeras, Isbrand van Diemerbroeck (referenced above) did pen The Anatomy of Human Bodies, trans. William Salmon (London, 1689). Upon seeing a chimera in Utrecht, Diemerbroeck described “her” (sic) “yard” as “half a Finger long,” though rumor had it that “this Yard would upon venereal and lascivious Thoughts erect itself a Finger’s length.”
SULLIVAN: EXCELLENT DETAIL! ANY CHANCE THAT THIS MANUSCRIPT CAN GET A LITTLE MORE DIEMERBROECKIAN?
ME: I’m limited to transcribing what’s already here.
SULLIVAN: WELL, THERE IS THE MATTER OF THE MISSING PAGE.
ME: There is no missing page.
SULLIVAN: SPECULATE THEN.
ME: On the basis of what?
SULLIVAN: BUT YOU YOURSELF ARE A— SO SHOULDN’T YOU BE ABLE TO— WELL, NEVER MIND.
*2 Vomited
*3 SULLIVAN: EVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS?
ME: In person? I’ll reserve comment.
SULLIVAN: IN LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD.
ME: I am aware only of a similar operation performed nearly a century later on Frances Burney (1812). Athough also performed without anesthesia, the operation was to remove a tumor.
SULLIVAN: ANYTHING PERFORMED FOR THE PURPOSES OF GENDER TRANSITION?
ME: Even if I said it was the only such record I’ve ever seen, what with everything we’ve already agreed on re: Mignolo and the “epistemic disobedience” that is the archive (we’ve agreed on this, right??)—it wouldn’t really mean anything.
Also, you know you don’t need to use all caps when you write me, right?
SULLIVAN: LEADERSHIP TECHNIQUE! CAPS SETTING NON-NEGOTIABLE.
5.
Jack woke in the daybed in Bess’s room.
“How did I—?”
Footsteps neared the daybed. “We carry’d you,” Bess said.
“Who we?”
“Jenny and I. You aren’t heavy.”
Jack yelped as he tried to turn towards the sound of her, and caught a stitch against the coverlet. The sutures felt to be made from rusted wire. Each breath unleashed a volley of arrows into his chest.
“Don’t move. You’re leaking fluids everywhere, healing and—” She laid a hand to his boiling forehead. “Just don’t move,” she repeated.
“Evans?”
“Well.” A pause. “You happen to have killed him. Inadvertently or whatnot.”
“Killed him?”
“Very much so, yes. Dead at your hand. Well, maybe, more specifically, at your chest. You—well—smothered him to death with your bleeding chest.”
“I didn’t mean—I mean, I did mean to, but I—”
Bess shrugged. “He was a wretch.”
“But I didn’t mean—”
“Even if you did.”
“And yet—”
“I thought it was sweet—albeit a touch dumb.”
“Ah.”
“Caus’d some problems for Jenny, tho’. As she was the last one seen with him, she’s had to Flee.”
“I’m sorry,” he croak’d. “Is there something I can do?”
“A well-crafted calling card eloquently offering your most sincere apologies always suits.” She snickered. “This isn’t a tea party. A scamp went wrong. Jenny knows what to do. She went to Dennison’s seraglio, near Drury Lane.”
“Dennison’s?”
“Dennison’s is”—searching for the word—“shabby. It’ll do for a while at least. Look—” She pulled something from her skirt’s pocket. “I discovered this on Evans while pulling you off him.”
She handed him a crumpled note.
Met with Okoh and the Lion-Man at the Tower.*1
There is a replicability problem.
“What do you make of this?”
Jack squinted up at her. He was drifting into a half-dreamworld—images of the two doxies dragging Evans into the street. Them carrying him up the stairs. Did they put his Trousers back on? He reached for his legs. He was trouser’d.
They had cared for his Body like a child’s. He attempt’d to turn to his side and was stabb’d with Pain. His stomach rose in his throat and nausea overtook him. He garbled out something.
Bess put a brandy to his lips, and he pushed it away, reaching for her skirts, drawing her close. She dropped to her knees, and he rested his head against her Armpits, rooting with his nose, and she let him. He drank in the wet Smoak scent. Her Livingness. Her Bessness.
He breathed. He breathed. Bess. Bess. He slept.
* * *
—
Jack lay in the daybed for a week, villainous juices seeping from his ribs. He slept in the days and thrashed at night against the twinges of healing, scarring. Unaccountably, given his discomposed condition, he was besieged by flashes of Desire. His groin flared. Impossibly, but it did. He attemped to stagger from the daybed several times to lie with Bess. She would glance over. “Not yet.”
* * *
—
The scars took a week to crust. And there were Infections. Bess had closed Jack’s chest with rough brown twine that ached and itched when he breathed. Pus collected in small puddles around the twine, tiny irises of bright green Oil. A line of septic Lanterns cutt
ing his torso in two.
* * *
—
And then an urchin dropped a broadside at the door of the bat house, announcing the imminent lifting of the Quarantine. Soon. Within the week. After which the centinels would remain on the streets— Of course, grumbled Bess, that’s what this entire charade was for anyway. Gettin’ us used to centinels breathing down our necks. But the quarantine would be lifted. The air shift’d and the return of daily life drew near.
* * *
—
By the time the quarantine had been ended, Jack found himself thrilled with his new quaddron,*2 and spirits buoyed. Quite buoyed. He wasn’t bluff*3 and buff-beefed*4 like some of the coves who frequented Bess’s rooms. He was still spider-shanked*5 and lithe. But he felt so alleviated of his dugs*6 he was inclined to parade about without a flesh-bag*7 on as often as possible. He became what Bess would say, with a smile, was “rather huggy.”
For Bess had freed him of a chest-burden so great he hadn’t even known, until it had been removed, what weight he had carried. Every breath was wholly a new event now. The touch of smish to his skin was an Ecstasy, even with the crawly feeling of the stitches. The touch of skin to skin an even greater joy.
The interstice between Jack’s insides and his skin—that chasm of echoing hollow, the miserable Gas that kept him from himself, and from the world, had been closed. Bess had closed the chasm, sutured it when she sutured Jack’s chest. And now, undeniably, there was a new thrumming in Jack’s body. He could feel himself inside and out. And he was on a constant prowl for Bess. Just the touch of his hand to the small of her back, where her spine arched into the top of her Bum, set him afire. The lock of their eyes sent Bess-flares to his groin. At night, when Bess returned from her strolls to the Thames—there are more of them, she’d say—more ships, like the ones we saw the night they put on the Quarantine—she would find the dark air streaming in and Jack with his head stuck out the glazes, huffing hard at the breezes, his shirt off, wet Atmosphere clinging to his chest, brightening his scars to a rose-pink. He would advance towards her, skin glistening with the ashes and wet of the City, and take her in his arms.
*1 I’m unable to source either “Okoh” or the “Lion-Man” in any of the reference material.
*2 Body
*3 Big in body
*4 Big-bodied
*5 Thin-legged
*6 Breasts
*7 Shirt
6.
Perhaps it was the heat of the summer that inspired it, but turning Water-pad*1 had been Bess’s idea.
The town swarm’d with centinels, and the monied sort had begun to walk with greater ease through all the parishes. They flaunted watch fobs and rings—jaunted around smirking and unafraid.
“Let’s do a spectacular Heist,” Bess said.
They’d toss’d about ideas. Nothing had stuck.
And then, one heat-stuffed day—“Trinity House is kept up nice,” she observ’d as they strolled past the Lighthouse Authority on Tower Hill after an advantageous turn bamboozling and pickpocketing the whiskey-soaked patrons of the Spotted Hen.
“Since they’ve issued the plague warnings, they’ve been unloading some merchant vessels at the Lighthouse ’stead of the docks. Heard it from a cove.”
“The Lighthouse Authority are just a crew of thieves with the blessing of an Act of P-Parliament,” Jack spat—barely missing the boots of one of the centinels who seemed to be everywhere now, doubling or tripling by the day in some mysterious municipal Orgy. They occupied every street in Cheapside and Spitalfields now, with their muskets slung over their shoulders and their eyes narrowed into mean Pinholes, surveilling the corners like angry owls.
“So they are.” Indeed, she’d told him this just the other night. Bess toss’d her arm dramatically against the back of Jack’s shoulders, pushing them both out of range of the beady centintel. “But what I’m getting at is maybe the Lighthouse is particularly heavy with treasures these days.”
He’d turn’d, press’d Bess against the back wall of J. Scott, Booksellers, in Bow Street (or China Street, as the thieves called it, for the profusion of porcelain shops along the avenue), as she explained to him he’d have to enter from outside the upper floor, in order to avoid the Watchman keeping a lookout on the ground level—and Jack was yes’ing, yes’ing, sayin’ of course he could do it, his head swimming with Lust as her hair clung and spread against the heat and moisture of the bricks.
* * *
—
Which all occasion’d the fact that sometime later, Jack found himself hanging nearly twenty yards above the Thames. His stitches strained against newly healed skin as he dangled off the nails. Bess had heard tell from one of her callers that a merchant ship would be making its way to port with a hold full of the finest Madras cottons. It would fetch a pretty penny in the back alleys.
From the great height of the Lighthouse, he could see the expanse of Plague Ships. He counted twelve vessels dotting the river from Wapping New Street down to Red Yard and the Lower Docks—a creaking archipelago. He briefly wonder’d if that meant plague was drifting through the air—if it rose on the wind currents. He twitched his nose. Continued climbing.
A hot gust, stinging with Seawater, buffeted down the Thames. The tower of the Lighthouse vanished out of perspective as Jack craned up, searching out the iron cleats jammed into the wooden boards. He clung to the splintered wood, breathing slow and deep. Felt for the interior architecture of the walls—the venting, the erection of crossbeams and lintels.
The glazes fac’d south down the Thames—Bess had told him—not to catch the setting sun or to flood the dusty recesses with a heartening Light, but to intercept deep-sea vessels en route to their destinations. At first sight of a ship crawling up the river, the Eddystone would blink its beacon two short flickers of candlelight for “slow,” and three for “stop.” Then the Lighthouse Watchmen would lumber down the many circling flights to Sea-level, prepared to exchange one neatly-scripted Deep Sea License for a “fair percentage” of the booty on board.
Jack knew that, after they commandeered it, the Licensers would drag their haul back up the many flights of stairs. They would sleep with their booty close. He knew this because that was what he would do. Knew the Lighthouse men slept where they could breathe the Vapors of their catch.
Jack bored a hole in the window shutter and cracked the Glass. Out poured the sweet piercing scent of Watchman’s Blue Tape Gin and the musky rot of sleep. He peer’d through the window. A Lighthouse Officer snoozed in a four-poster bed. An East India trunk lay beneath the Sill.
And then the voices hit him. Jack jerk’d his head back from the edge and crouched under the sill, taking nervous Bird-Breaths, near blown off the side of the building by the piercing howl of commodities yelping.
Focus— Don’t fall— Find the goods— Take the goods— Descend Lighthouse with goods, thought Jack.
(And then: Sell Goods— Roger Bess— Sleep Naked and Entwin’d.)
But Focus wasn’t easy. Peeking in the window of the Lighthouse, Jack was besieged by his affliction. Thing-voices swelled over him, a shrieking tide.
The room was a chaos of sound. Bess had prepared him for a complex heist with commodities that had traveled a long way, confin’d and likely desperate for Release. She’d told him what she had heard of the seaside fortress town of Madras—lashed with the fiercest surf along all the Coromandel coast. Told him of the weavers and dyers who lugged their linens and inks a week’s journey from Fort St. George, barefoot through the salt-water lagoons to the back Edges called Black Town, dense-nested Shanties occluded by mangrove from the bright halls of White Town’s mansions and pavilions—then along the dry, sand-swept bricks that paved the way from every abode in Madras to St. Mary’s, the only Anglican church east of Suez.
Hanging through the cracked glaze, though, that wasn’t what he heard.
The sound was something else. A repetitive, garbled Sobbing. Nothing about any of the geographies or Histories Bess had told him.
Just this:
Nobody, nobody.
One pealing call: Nobody. Again and agan.
The wind squeez’d a cold tear from his eye. Jack wiped it, clinging with one hand to the lighthouse ledge.
Nobody. A howl. Nobody.
* * *
—
Jack had learned that commodities understood much more about themselves than their buyers could ever begin to grasp. They were bursting with Histories to tell. A commodity that had escaped the infernal cycle of production-display-sale was a happy, content object—returned to serving a purpose. For commodities hated merchants and shopkeeper-shelving. They liked to be in use. Or squirrel’d away in a pocket, kept close, coveted. Frankly, like anything else, they wanted to be loved.
So it was natural that they bawled and howled when up on display or trapped in the circuits of sale. But tonight’s monologues were different. Worse. A terrible screaming. Something had happened—Something that made it impossible to tell a History at all.
A swinging Vertigo overtook Jack, and—with his stomach wheeling and bunching—he lost one hand’s grip on the sill. His left flailed in open air—his right slipped to its tip—his toes clenched around the cleat—his left hand claw’d at bricks without purchase—
The sound of his scrabbling woke the Lighthouse Officer. Sounds of quilts being thrown off, and then thudding steps towards the window. Jack did the only thing he could.
He let himself drop—
—and caught a cleat between his nethers. The air knocked out of him. And now the Officer had shut the window, muttering about cold breezes and ’fections.
Jack spun his aching nethers around the cleat then dove headfirst through the window below, landing on his back with a thud. Lay gasping for a moment in the empty Storeroom, his breath fogging the air.
Confessions of the Fox Page 16