“Lost your partner in crime?” I said. “I was hoping for another performance.”
He considered me with no alarm. “The Pixie enjoys employments denied to cripples such as I. She only needs me on occasion, to voice her desires.” He frowned, evidently thinking better of this line of discussion. One glance at the chess board and he was absorbed. “Your Kingside’s a disgrace, old man. Play me for a shilling. I’ll straighten out that gambit.”
His face was handsome, the ample forehead testament to his intelligence. Direct questions might send him scarpering. Instead, I asked Bede about his life. As we played, his cripple confederates began gathering around us. They showed little concern for my presence, which reassured me. As I have said, a policeman must be wary of learning too much about his friends: even gents have pastimes frowned on by the Law, and Molly’s chums certainly dabbled in illicit trades.
Bede played a tidy game, countering my Evans Gambit with the Kieseritzky variation. Though Miss Villiers’ solution gnawed at the back of my mind, I was swept up in his story for the moment.
What a life he had led. His mother was a nobleman’s cook, her intellect weak: Bede was a lovechild. He never knew his father, who had soon sailed for Buenos Ayres. His mother fretted so, when she married a farmer of middling circumstances, that another servant took him on.
“No mother could have loved a child more.” He advanced his knight’s pawn. “Only her feelings were that strong, she could never bear to see me.”
The servant looked after him well. His mother visited once a year—or less—but sent £30 per annum towards his upkeep. She died four years back. Then the servant was seized by the cholera, leaving him all alone, cripple as he was, without a friend.
He tried running a tinware shop, with candlesticks and fire irons, but he couldn’t get the money in; there was a deal still owing. He tried hawking brushes in the country, and kept a boy with a barrow for a shilling a week. His limbs ached so badly from walking that he got no sleep. His knees in heat, he could barely crawl upstairs. He could neither wash nor undress; his boy had to hold drink to his lips. The thought of his helplessness threw him into a fit.
“But it’s the Almighty’s will,” he said, to my surprise, “and we must abide by it. Last winter, I was took bad with a fever. The boy was gone; I lay in my things all night. I was took to the workhouse, where they used me ill. They gave me gruel in place of tea, because I couldn’t work. Better die in the streets than be a pauper. A year ago, I begged five shillings off them and sought lodgings. Some Blackfriars girls bought my things and never paid. I crawled the streets, four days and nights, fit to die with pain. If I got a penny, I stopped for a half pint of coffee till they drove me out. Dreadful it was, out on my knees day and night. I was walking on my bare bones. I would fall asleep, sitting with my things, until you police drove me on.”
Bede stopped a moment in his story, his friends crowded round us. He never noticed the tears his tale had elicited. I studied the board intently. Something about this Evans Gambit piqued my memory; yet of all the tales I had heard on the London streets, this was the saddest. “And Molly?”
“I met her at Union Hall. She recommended me as an honest fellow for this confederation. I soon began communicating with the Pixie. She wheeled me to my aunt’s in Ham to ask assistance. They’re well-to-do but wouldn’t look at me for my affliction. I told them I had no food. Her husband shut the door in my face and sent for the police.”
He shoved a bishop crabwise across the board; he was thrashing me soundly. I had played an endgame like this before. Identical to this.
“Ashamed of scrounging, I learned to sell these nutmeg graters. But Molly urged us to use our talents—my memory and voice, Pixie’s dexterity—to set up in show business.” He brightened at this recollection. “The Pixie indicated I, being articulate, had as much to offer her as she me, with wheeling, dressing and feeding. I learnt her signage: no jargon but a full grammaturgical language, independent of English, shared by deaf and mutes across the capital. It shares words with Gypsy and the Argot. She can spell in Roman alphabet. I did as Molly asked: I wrote a scenario, Pix managed the puppets, I did the voices. We scored a hit. The Smallest Theatre in the World had quite the summer of it. We have struggled in these winter months, aside from your gig. The Pixie has returned to less savoury pursuits. I’d chum her along, but parties untroubled by muteness are often appalled by deformity, and vice versy.” He scratched his nose. “Checkmate, by the way, old man.”
He advanced the inevitable pawn. I glared at the board, thunderstruck. My king, already pinned by his castles, was pincered. An uncommon demise, just like my defeat by the Turk.
Bede saw my stare. The colour drained from his face, for a chess player as good as he remembers such an elegant victory. He realised too late: the checkmate he had just repeated was the same as the game I played and lost in Brodie’s cabinet—against the Turk.
As Miss Villiers’ researches had suggested, men come in all shapes and sizes. The original Turk may have housed a man. The New Turk, I could swear, would not, unless he could fit in a shoebox. But if you need a man to fit in a shoebox, somewhere in this great wide world you shall find him.
Too small to house a man—a full-grown man—but a boy with only head and torso would fit neatly at one end, with the other roomy enough for his miniature accomplice, moving silently from chamber to chamber as Brodie displayed the mechanism. Edgar Allan Poe had declared that the Turk must be worked by a misshapen midget; the second obstacle is that the midget in that fearful box must be a chess master.
I had not expected my suspicions to be confirmed so indisputably. It was later I learnt how Bede watched his opponent’s moves in a cunningly placed mirror; how he signalled his moves silently to the Pixie. She effected them via a system of pulleys. A deception to make you gasp in wonder, the demands on the perpetrators so great they could not be believed. Whenever the coast was clear, the Pixie could let them out to deal with their necessaries. They could endure a couple of days; the machine was then recalled to Brodie’s.
“Bede,” I began. “There’s a case I am struggling with.”
The atmosphere turned tense, as if the Oddbody confederates feared I would arrest their friend for trouncing me at chess. Bede shrank back. The Pixie leapt up and shooed away our audience in concern.
“Don’t worry, my pet,” he said kindly. “If we’ve done wrong, the fault is mine. Any judge would clear you of misdeeds.”
I pitied him. “This has just confirmed my suspicions, Bede.”
He shook his head. “What will my old mother say?”
“You said she was dead.”
“Right enough. Still, the shame of it.”
“Two things, and I shall let you be.” I patted his shoulder. “The deception itself is no crime. But you two have been stealing. For whom?”
“Stealing?”
“Papers.” I rolled my eyes. “Who told you to steal the papers?”
The Pixie made rapid gestures at him.
Bede sighed. “We couldn’t say. We’re just intermediaries.”
“Who pays you?” I needed this trail to lead somewhere. To the top, I hoped. Someone was paying for these papers, someone moving in society circles, knowing that these men, who should have more sense, were writing down amorous ventures that they ought to blush at. I tightened my grip on his shoulder. “Who?”
Bede toyed with the chess pieces.
“For God’s sake, Bede, the scandal could be vast. If certain blackmail cases result, you will be culpable.”
Pixie made a conciliatory sign.
Bede coughed. “We don’t know. We take the papers. We secrete them inside the Turk. We vacate. We don’t know what’s done with them. We don’t care to ask.”
“For the risks you take?”
“Better than sleeping on the streets.”
“Come on. Who’s pulling the strings?”
“I couldn’t say, old man.”
“You know who pays
you.”
The Pixie gestured urgently. Bede shook his head. She grabbed a chalk from Molly’s board and began scribbling the name before he could interfere.
G—R—O—
I whistled gently. That name again, so soon. I must pay him another visit. “Before I arrest you both, tell me, would the Pixie do anything for a shilling?”
Bede controlled his alarm. “Oh, she earns a lot of honest shillings.”
There was sniggering under the arches. I thought as much. “And can she report fully and faithfully what she has seen?”
“The Pixie’s the full shilling up top. It’s only her tongue as was cut out, back when mutes were in fashion.”
I looked at the impish little girl: the things she must endure. I would not shop them in; I need not arrest them. Why should I? Yet I might use the threat to my profit. “Bede, listen carefully. You must tell me the full story. You were foolish to get involved in such turbid waters, but consider: to your paymaster, you are dispensable. You’re in grave danger, and the Pixie even more so, whether you collaborate with me or not.” I let this sink in. “Fortunately for you, I need you almost as much as you need me. And I’ll tell you why.”
HYPOCRITE READER
I found it hard to sleep. After a long shift, I would fall asleep sitting up, only to wake thinking about Felix. There was something rum about the whole business. I couldn’t put my finger on it; I just had some instinct. Molly was always telling me to trust my instincts, while Ruth begged me to doubt them; between us, though, we had solved the thefts—though what was to be done about it, I had yet to decide.
Darlington, though, wasn’t sleeping a wink, his look furtive, black rings round his eyes. He said he was top hole. “Having a time of it, I am, Watchman.” Which made me wonder. I recalled his louche attitude to policing the night houses; what benefits was he exploiting now?
As we walked from the Yard to Charing Cross, he made his confession. I was on my way to the 9.23 Club, he back to Dugdale-Hotten’s.
“Attendance on the erotic muse is driving me dotty, Watchman.”
I glanced at him. “Your new lending library?”
“The temptations are too much. I confiscate these damned erotic volumes, I read them, they stick in my head. I can’t sleep. I read them again and again. I lay my head on the pillow and I’m still inside them with all their—pardon my French—minetting and gamahuching and hikerypikery.”
He sketched out tales gleaned from loose chapters at Dugdale-Hotten’s: of three couples who played a game to see how well the wives recognised their husbands in the dark, by several means; and another from a French book he’d confiscated about an Irish priest, an altar boy and a boiled egg.
“Do people invent these scenes?” He was quite entranced. “Have they the gall to make them up?”
“Depraved minds, I suppose.”
“Yet more depraved if they’re true.” He was truly disturbed. “Whatever you and I can dream up, I reckon somebody is already doing here in London right now.”
I shrugged. “And worse.”
He bit at his fingernails. “Oh, I can dream up pretty dark scenes, I tell you.”
Silence. We were both wondering, who writes these memoirs? My first thought, of the low and uneducated, I dispelled, for who has the leisure and the money to pursue peccadillos? I recalled Dugdale’s subscription list and I couldn’t help picturing all those MPs and luminaries in Darlington’s stories, in the darkened room, or at the altar. I ought to be ashamed, or envious.
“Do you ever think,” he said, looking absently across Trafalgar Square, “that the whole city is alive, old man? I look around and see bodies. Entangled bodies.”
“These lovers you’re always reading about.”
“I see ’em emerging from the pavements. An unholy parade, bodies in delight. Trains pounding through tunnels, panting engines beneath the skin, filth drizzling from water pipes, sewage, hydraulics, like animal spirits pumping around the body’s cavities.” As he was staring up at Nelson’s statue, a woman with her head buried in a book trod on his shiny leather boot. He glared after her, aggrieved. “And they think it’s acceptable to go round openly reading such claptrap.”
“Teach the great unwashed to read, and they taint their minds with cheap filth.” I glanced at his satchel. “Never mind what they get up to behind closed doors.”
“But that’s different. The tastes of gents, that’s something loftier.”
“Maria Monk,” I said, “and her Awful Disclosures?”
“Not that modern tripe. No more scandalous than Lady Audley and her blasted secrets. But the pope’s manual on the positions! I’ll lend it you—”
“No. Thanks.”
“The female body described like a landscape: skin fresh as snow, sullied by trampling boots.” He gestured expansively at the spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He was all pent up, like a balloon about to burst. “Damned architects are obsessed. Columns everywhere. Domes and columns.”
“I believe you are raving, Darlington.” I led him across the junction as I would lead a child. “With such overactive imaginings, you’d best move to Devon with a bag of dispiriting pastoral novels to read.”
“Better than these newfangled detective yarns.”
“Why would people want to read about our irksome investigations?” I laughed. “Please God, there’s a genre that won’t catch on.”
“Done to death already: The Notting Hill Mystery, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, The Female Spy. Tiresome, believe me. All copies, copies from life. It won’t last. What next? Polar explorers, God damn you? Ships to the stars?”
“Vampyres?” I offered.
We burst out laughing.
This was where our ways parted. I was concerned about Darlington’s ravings; I would ask the advice of the 9.23 Club.
“Here.” He brought out a sheaf of his confiscated papers. “Like some?”
My face was stony.
“Not intending offence, Watchman, old man.”
I hesitated. I might spot connections between Dugdale-Hotten’s publications and Groggins’ tales. It also flashed through my mind that Alexandra was not averse to such tales, for she spoke of paper-covered volumes from the Burlington Arcade. I nodded. “I shall seek clues about our thefts.”
“Don’t spoil ’em, now.” He passed them over with a sly look. “Payne wants the volumes returned.”
“To Dugdale? For heaven’s sake.”
“Word from on high. Something to do with the British Museum.” Avoiding my protests, he slunk away down Holywell Street like an eel down a sewer. If he, a trained detective, could be so turned by his readings, what of the common man? I had better bring Darlington to the 9.23. They’d give him a talking-to.
I would rather have brought along Felix, of course. With his modulated tones and wit, his was the kind of gentle chivalry that would fit with these renegades and misfits. I would rather that than spend my time with Darlington talking of dirty books and prostitutes, but it seemed unlikely now.
OFFENSIVE FRIENDS
“He’s simply not sleeping.” I told the 9.23 Club about Darlington. I alluded to his reading obsession, without mentioning Groggins’ erotic magnum opus. “What is the remedy?”
Collins patted his pocket. “For your friend, I’ve something that’ll put him out for the night. For society, as long as there are sexual relations, there will be pornographers. Wouldn’t you agree, Acton?”
Mayhew had come up trumps. He had written letters to charitable societies across the capital, commending my work and asking them to share their own researches. He also brought Dr William Acton, author of Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects. Acton looked the born aristocrat, neatly combed hair matching his bow-tie, yet he had researched these murky subjects for years.
“I interviewed many young males,” he declared, “for my treatise on masturbation and you’d be astonished—” People along the bar moved away, and he thought better of his topic. “Yes, Collins. Q
uite right.”
I filled them in on my labours in the calibration of carnality. My figures so far already outstripped previous returns. The 1857 census had divided its 2,825 brothels into categories:
WHERE PROSTITUTES ARE KEPT: 410
WHERE PROSTITUTES LODGE: 1,766
WHERE PROSTITUTES RESORT: 64
Likewise 8,600 prostitutes comprised:
WELL-DRESSED, LIVING IN BROTHELS: 921
WELL-DRESSED, WALKING THE STREETS: 2,616
LOW, INFESTING LOW NEIGHBOURHOODS: 5,063
Collins guffawed and began scribbling wicked additions to the schemata:
COFFEE HOUSES/OTHER PASSING ACCOMMODATION: 10,000
WELL-DRESSED, IN PRIVATE LODGINGS:
½ OF KENSINGTON
What I wanted to know from Acton was how he had arrived at his higher estimate, in 1851, of 210,000 prostitutes.
“Simple, Sergeant.” That year, forty-two thousand live births were recorded to unwed mothers. Taking this as the first step into prostitution, Acton estimated that each of these mothers worked as a prostitute, on average, for five years. “Thus my total.”
My jaw dropped. “Does their misfortune make them prostitutes?”
“It’s the first step, I’m afraid,” he replied. “Some escape; others fall for longer. Your police figures are a mere palliative.”
Mayhew sniffed. “Any woman who sleeps with a man outside marriage is technically a prostitute.”
“Oh, Mayhew,” Collins groaned. “A woman mayn’t but a man may? You’re an old Presbyterian.”
“People may one day laugh at such attitudes,” said Acton. “In my Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs—”
“Acton,” cried Mayhew.
We laughed. I called for a pitcher of stout. “Acton, I had imagined you to be a puritanical prude.”
Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Page 13