The fourth time I met her, I found her sitting at the cheval glass in her night shift. I entered without knocking; she started a little. Seeing it was me, she kept on brushing her hair. She allowed me to study her, her back elegant as a violoncello, the swell of her breasts, and her spine inviting the touch of my fingers.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
I laid my hands on her shoulders. “You shouldn’t have asked me.”
She shivered at my touch, my hands chilled by the icy wind. “It was foolhardy.”
“And last week?”
“I have been foolish all month.”
UNHOLY ROT
Gales, squalls, always the wind, and a murder a day in the Ha’penny Gazette. Brodie’s papers went from strength to strength, in the wake of their insinuations about Palmerston and the dead woman. I scrabbled at this same coalface of depravity, for which his readers had voracious appetites. His rags overflowed with scandal, strangling and suicide: FRIGHTFUL WIFE MURDER IN BRISTOL, BURGLAR BITTEN BY A SKELETON. With butchery in the news daily, every halfwit in the country solved each mystery, sending their deranged cogitations to Sir Richard Payne by the penny post.
Brodie’s papers were proud of their infamy. The Ha’penny Gazette sold best, with sketches of violence, alarmist propaganda and interviews with actual murderers. But now his empire suffered a setback.
It was another of his publications, the Bugle, that upset the apple cart. Jeffcoat had solved the case of the boy found in the queer house closet at New Year. Months before, he had investigated the son of a good family in Fulham gone missing. He spotted the connection between the two sorry tales and concluded the matter quietly, with consideration for the grieving family. (More plaudits for Jeffcoat; bully for him.)
Or so it should have been. Except that, just before Jeffcoat tied up the case, the Bugle cottoned on. They reported details of the son’s flight—household arguments, monetary woes—in such minuscule detail that the family complained. Now the boy was dead, the journalists’ meddling looked rum. The public lost patience: hadn’t the family misery enough? I would have blamed Jeffcoat for the leak, but the family lawyer proved that the revelations were gleaned by improper means: butlers bribed, wastepaper turfed from bins, blotters stolen for experts to study the handwriting. Such methods were beyond investigative licence and illegal. The journalist was sacked, the editor castigated; and that was just the beginning. Scandal, testimony, and counter-testimony. In the preamble to the trial, an affair between the lady of the house and the journalist was hinted at. The hounds kept a-baying. The editor was indicted and imprisoned (briefly; he was after all a school friend of Gabriel Mauve MP).
Brodie settled the compensation claim out of court. But the public decreed that things had gone too far. Out of the woodwork sprang a thousand more grievances against journalistic impropriety. Families whose bereavement was trampled on. The scurrilous accusations ruining a prominent cricketer’s equanimity, and his batting. An actress, followed to the house of a suspected amour. So many injustices committed in the name of scandal-mongering. The paper ought to be closed.
There was nothing for it, declared Brodie, ever the populist. He would close the Bugle forever.
A victory for fairness, crowed his competitors, admiring his methods—and envying his sales.
Brodie happened just then to have bought the moribund Police News. Rather than sack his poor journalists for misguided zeal, he magnanimously re-employed them, just in time to relaunch that august organ as the Illustrated Police News.
Garish engravings adorned each case, supposedly inspired by coroner’s inquests. But the details were so accurate, the portrayals so realistic, we police began to recognise details never mentioned in the inquests. Brodie paid the victims to tell tales. Brodie even paid criminals. The writers cooked up quotations to fit their racy versions of events; the editor paid witnesses to put their names to them. Brodie’s lawyers checked each story. Some painted us police as heroes; more made us idiots. Nothing to be done about it. Brodie’s various papers made the most of each scandal, corroborating each other’s facts like Mrs Gamp and Mrs Harris—“As discovered by the Illustrated Police News”—while each produced by the very same editorial staff.
As always, Brodie triumphed. I made enquiries about him. His mother was American, his father a Scottish miner from the Fife coal pits. He was not the obvious business mogul so often encountered in these times, full of inflated ideas and swollen vanity. He had no need of personal glamour. He was a manipulator of crowds, suffering the population to call unto him for scandal, sensation, gaming and liquor.
He had told me to call on him. He had hinted that his reporters would help my census-taking, if I had something to offer him. He meant me to pass on information on violent crimes, to enliven his rags. I never did call on him—but someone did. Someone was dishing the dirt, and I was superfluous, because he was never short of his murder a day.
THE DINNING ROOM
“Miss Sabine’s table,” I said, above the noise, “if you please.”
The legend “Dinning Room” was inscribed on the wooden gateposts of this fashionable Leicester Square coffee house, adjacent to Burford’s Panorama; the continental owner had insisted on it, overconfident of his spelling. The maître d’ winked. The staff pretended to be French, to maintain their dignity. The clientele was genteel, yet the bully by the kitchen door kept his eye on us. I discerned consorts and courtesans, not from their dress (more demure than the wives, who tried too hard to be risqué), but rather their arched eyebrows and self-possession.
“Moisten your chaffer, may I?” It was Sabine, or rather Stephanie, the doxy from Kate Hamilton’s with the pocked face and the ample bosoms. “You like to hear girls’ stories, I’m told.”
I looked past her. This was not our agreement. “You told me Sk—”
“Shush.” She glanced about, then went on. “You wasn’t expecting nobody else, were you? Well, I’m a seduced milliner.”
“And we must all go bald-headed, if so many milliners are ruined. Would a sovereign entice you to drop the usual flam?”
“Carry me out and bury me properly!” she cackled. “Money? What do I want with money? Stand me a white satin, though, and I’ll make a clean fist of it.”
I called for the gin happily enough.
While the waiter fetched it, she whispered that I must play along. “We’ve to talk a while before you give the bully a sovereign and we takes a room. Standard practice, you greenhorn.” She drank the gin, straight off, and plucked at her taffeta pleats. “S’pose you might as well hear my real story. I don’t care to tell you where I’m from, sir. Touches me on the raw, that does. I was so young when enticed.” She was the daughter of a countryside vicar. Visited an aunt in the big city; met a gent at Hackney market; evening walks; a stop by his cousin’s. “No wonder I acquiesced, charmed at such refinements, never suspecting a fault.” She refused brandy, begged for a cab, took coffee. And when she awoke, she found herself ruined. “I wept. I ranted. Wanted to kill myself.” Thence to Kate Hamilton’s, where new opportunity knocked, several gents liked her, and she truly was saving up for that café, to leave this life and become a lady.
After a second glass, her voice grew lower and her tale bleaker. She wasn’t brought directly to Kate’s. She described sotto voce a house where girls were broken in: spirit tamed, body disciplined; trained up for the flash life, how to win gents, the ways of the flesh; how to please ’em, seduce ’em, marry ’em.
Finally, a tale I could believe. “I can’t imagine how they tamed you.”
“Lack of imagination on your part.” She laughed.
“Where is this house? This branch establishment?”
“Such talk needs privacy.” Her eyes darted rapidly about, and she squeezed my hand. “They make us sign a contract. Drink up, and we’ll go. We are closely watched, and Skittles closest of all.” Sabine extracted my pocket watch, nodded, and shoved my hand under her skirts. “Oh, oh! My sweet,” she gasped with mock outrage. �
��Follow me down.”
I palmed a sovereign to the bully, who opened up the door by the kitchens. A stairwell took us beneath ground level. Haphazard doorways off the lower vestibule. Sabine pushed me against the wall, as one of Kate Hamilton’s bullies strolled our way, pressing my hand to her backside. “In case they know you,” she whispered. “As long as you’re paying for my attentions, you’ll escape theirs.”
We circumnavigated an ill-lit bar, where dancing girls toyed with serious gents. From the snugs surrounding us, muffled gruntings and squeals. In a dark corner, a fracas arose. A figure was catapulted out.
“That, sir, is too far.” It was Mauve, his eyes moony, his demeanour self-satisfied. If he saw me, he gave no sign of it. He pursed his lips. “Too far by half.”
Sabine tugged me onward through the circles of the underworld, giggling to see me disconcerted. I thought I knew all the brothels of Leicester Square. “Where the hell are we?”
“The Alhambra, ain’t it? Members’ club, where enthusiasts may express their admiration for the dancers. At close quarters.”
“Don’t tell me this joins up with Kate’s emporium.”
“Maybe it does. Maybe it don’t.” She took my arm, led me chummily down another corridor, and bundled me into the first cubicle. “I’ve chose us a fair to middling room.”
“No peepholes?” I smiled. “Costs extra, I imagine.”
“You can always donate on the sly to my coffee shop fund, if you’re pleased with my work.” She dimmed the lamp and regarded me across the threadbare mattress. “I’m bursting to piddle. Stay here.”
She grabbed a pot and disappeared through the adjoining screen doors. I sat on the rickety bed, glanced at the sheets, then stood again, brushing at my trousers. If this warren of corridors stretched all the way beneath Leicester Square, underlying the Alhambra, Dinning Room, Burton’s Panorama and Kate Hamilton’s, then for every miscreant we had seen dallying over their pleasure, a hundred more were pursuing personal depravities behind closed doors: a vast subterranean counterpart of the grand square above, like a harlot pinned beneath her gentleman caller.
A faded print on the wall portrayed a lady striving to rise from her whiskered fellow’s arms: he lounged at the piano, playing some childish ditty; in her face torment and exaltation competed. I must get to Skittles. Sabine was testing my patience. This contract of hers intrigued me. Ignoring the sounds through the partition, more like hinges creaking than piddle in a pot, I called out. “Will you really leave this life if you can, Sabine?”
“Inquisitive party, aren’t you?” Her voice, above the ruffling of skirts, sounded strange through the doorway.
“I don’t mean to preachify. All my questions and queries—I hope they may make life better for you and your friends.”
“I’ll stick to the life till I’m a stiff ’un, I suppose. Where’s the fun in suffering? That’s my philosophy.” Her voice was quite changed. In she came, her face shadowed, placed her rear gingerly on the bed, and turned to look at me. “But Steph’ll escape yet.”
I stared at the damask rose in her hair. “Sk—!”
Skittles put her hand over my mouth. “Hush, you old fool.”
A ROSE ENSLAVED
Skittles silenced me with a smacker of a kiss on my cheek.
“Your perfume,” I hazarded, “is very nice.”
“I’m not wearing any. Here, where’s the gin?”
She had sent Stephanie-Sabine to divert the bullies’ attention. A laudable scheme. With a new customer like me, they would earwig, like as not; Sabine’s verbosity had blunted their vigilance.
“You may think her a moaning minnie. But I’ll see Steph a-right, set up with her respectable café at Waterloo, if you can help me now.”
What ups and down Skittles had undergone since that day at Paddington Station. Rising to elevated circles, with her own apartments. (I was charmed that she made time for me that day on Rotten Row.) Now she was reduced to this raggle-taggle cubicle. I studied her pale make-up. “But you had risen so far. I thought you beyond the clutches of these bullies.”
“I carry myself gaily, but have never broke free of my doubtful origins.”
“Skittles, are you all right?” I wondered what her powder was hiding. Sabine’s bottle of gin quieted her sobs.
I will not record here everything she told me. My cosy view of Kate’s was blinkered; but my wider researches should have prepared me for her revelations. Much came out before the Commons Select Committee’s Enquiry; some still too shocking to believe. Some girls might be willing debauchees, but most were not. Skittles held back her tears. “You should see the little tykes they drag in, some of them tiny as sparrows.”
There were dark forces at work. She herself had been tamed again. Her pet duke dropped her; the bullies picked her up straightaway, and had bent her again to their will. Their sins she hid with the powdery cosmetics, scars deeper than I could see.
“Walk away,” I said.
“I signed papers on my first day at Kitty H’s, giving them powers over me; I don’t know what.” She spluttered on the gin. “I’m grateful to them. The things they taught me. Riding. Piano and cribbage. Groggins dispensing fine talk, highfalutin manners. I’ve been content these last years. My fellows provided apartments and opera boxes. But my poor duke has been scared off marrying me.”
He wouldn’t be the first aristocrat to pull back from such a marriage.
“Oh, he loves me more than ever.” She sighed. “Blackmailed. I know who scuppered our plans and why. They want more out of me; and I tell you, I am frightened, Watchman. I’m mightily come down in the world, without patron, or solace.”
She would think of escape, but she had not a penny to her name; she had set aside earnings aplenty, but from their false accountants, she could not retrieve a sou. Her fellow had made arrangements, heartbroken, to pension her off, but what did she see of the money? Nothing. His family heard he had settled upon her three hundred pounds per annum; they questioned his sanity, and the money was withheld pending a writ of de lunatico inquirendo at Gray’s Inn Coffee House.
“And here?” I asked. “What about your earnings now?”
“The meagrest portion is set aside as our share; the rest is counted against our clothes, victuals and lodgings. The moment we are ill or damaged, they drop us. If we escape, they track us down.”
Did Kate’s bullies, godlike, see everything? “They?”
“The organisation that—” Her courage failed her. She looked wildly about and needed calming; I had never seen her like this. She continued in a fraught whisper. “They track us down, make no mistake. They drag us back like dogs, with you police behind them. We have signed our lives away.”
“Kate protects her women.”
“You would say that,” she said. “Men love the old battleship. You think her a champion of women; she cares only for profit. The monies paid for us Kitty takes. She pays off our protectors, and their protectors’ unseen protector. So on, ad infinitum.” Her bosom rose and fell. “Help me escape, Watchman.”
“Do you mean it?” I half rose.
“Not now.” She tugged me back. “They’d kill us both.”
“I promised Kate—”
“Oh, she has you wrapped up too now, has she?”
“I owe favours to no one.” It was not true. My census had me mired in collaborations. Was I compromised? I need not regret enlisting the 9.23 Club, nor asking Mayhew to enlist the charitable societies. True, I had benefited from Kate’s help, even if her girls’ tales were repetitious. I did repent of my chat with Brodie, but I had made no deal with him. I cast my eyes down. “It’s not my business to meddle in things I don’t understand.”
“Oh, Watchman. It is your business.” She gave a hollow laugh. “This is it, love. Do you want to save my life, or not?”
Whatever my debt to Kate, it could not prescribe my loyalties as a policeman, nor as a man. “Of course.”
The lines around her pretty eyes softened.
“Make plans for me. Most secret plans.” She rose and adjusted her damask rose in the glass. “What it costs you, in time and money, I shall pay you back some day. I do not wish to presume.”
“Perhaps you can.” I explained how hard it was to gather women’s stories.
“No wonder, if you keep harassing women with questions.” She told me of girls she knew, and how they came to live the life: stories less sensational than the novels and less erotic. Girls preyed upon, lied to, promised the earth; enticed from slums, countryside, and abroad. Working girls, young girls, naive girls; girls such as Cora and Sabine, lured to the Great Wen to make their fortune. Girls drugged, kidnapped, coerced, tricked by loose gents, swayed against their will, forced through misfortune and cruelty; snatched, drugged, violated.
I sat on that meagre bed, mired in the smell of exploitation, as debaucheries reverberated through the thin walls. Skittles’s shining eyes betrayed no exaggeration; if anything, she was understating the matter. I laid my hand upon hers, my great brutish paw on her slender fingers, but drew it back out of a sort of shame.
“And you?” I swallowed. “Were you too unwillingly ruined?”
“Not I. I’d had a fucking; I wanted more.” She observed my shock. “Have I misjudged my lexicon, Watchman? Groggins told me off for my unscriptural tongue.”
I grabbed her hand. Twice she had mentioned him. “The Irish elocutionist? How is Groggins mixed up in this?”
“That old rascal. Ah, he schools us entirely. No electrocution needed. Insists upon every detail from our vowels and consonants to our bowels and—”
“Skittles!”
“Too much detail?” She burst out laughing. Skittles changed my view of the whole census that night. If even Kate’s girls were enslaved, or believed themselves enslaved, this story was likely repeated in every borough, with all colluding to whitewash it in the eyes of the authorities.
“Why not leave? You’re not locked up.”
“They don’t need locks, Watchman. I told you: the contract. I should have asked my duke when I could—he works in the Law—but I was cocksure, and ashamed, all at once—”
Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Page 11