SHAME, REMORSE (ENQUIRY VI)
As I stood to testify, exhaustion assailed me. Kate had demoralised the Enquiry: she gave them to understand not just that her establishment was nobly patronised and above board, but that the whole case against prostitution was wildly overstated, in her humble (informed) opinion. I thought she would speak eloquently on women’s behalf; but she never promised that. I cursed my own deluded hopes.
As in a dream, I took the oath, fighting off the shivering fits. My mind felt sluggish; my words stumbled. So much I must make public, so much to denounce.
I’d had a dream in the night, after closing the Flowers of Sin, a dream so fearful that I awoke in the wee small hours, heart pounding. The gulls were crying at the window—what business had they here? I could not sleep. I lay, rehearsing over and over what I planned to say in court, if the questioning would allow.
The barrister indicated that I should look around the court before I answered. Little confidence I had in him, the same intemperate young man who had detained me the night Groggins met his end. Kate had got under his collar; now he was getting at me. I would not be swayed. I breathed deep, trying to steady my heart, as the courtroom’s marble paving slabs shifted in my vision: black squares and white squares, a chequerboard pattern.
My dream returned to me with fearful clarity.
In my dream, I stood in this very dock. It was part of the chess automaton, larger than life and extending right across the room. The Turk studied my face. He moved his pawn to commence the Evans Gambit.
I studied his face in return: I would not be swayed. If I could only fathom those impassive features, I would triumph. Yet my pieces stayed pinned in their home rank. My pawns shifted, but slowly, shunting up the board to immolate themselves against the Turk’s marauding bullies. I had to shove them across the irregular slabs to meet their obliteration, heads dashed against castle walls, rookeries and bishops’ palaces. As the board transmogrified, I saw the Turk smile—a smile I recognised—and I couldn’t resist walking to him across the board.
The board had become Trafalgar Square; the bishops and rooks were domes and spires all along. I hastened to wriggle away down Holywell Street, to a most urgent appointment on Titchfield Street—with her. The sewerlike passage quivered, the ground swelling…
Damn and blast. I was at Kate Hamilton’s, quite the wrong place. Her entranceway plunged into a canyon; behind me, two hills rose up. I lost my footing. As I slipped down the passage, the mossy grove burst into colour with flowers. Cries resounded around me, like birds, like children. I fled.
I was aching to return to the room of love, where Alexandra awaited me. The ground was scattered with leaves and dried petals, inscribed with Groggins’ florid lettering, black on black. My limbs were sluggish, as I ran on the shifting ground. The fog enveloped me, the cries behind more terrifying than the dangers ahead. A wretched wind sprang up. I dragged the door open and found to my delight that beautiful bed, sheets, pillows, bonbons, but lying in it, the wrong person: a girl, half recognised, lying still, eyes open, awaiting me—or lying ruined—or was she dead?
Before I knew it, my chance was gone. I barely knew what happened.
The lawyer began by quoting complaints against me, from Mauve and Dugdale and others. He dropped hints about a traffic incident; he mentioned a quarrel in a night house in Denmark Street. I could not gainsay these conjectures, which painted a dire picture of my competence, though they seemed beside the point.
I asked to deliver my evidence, my arguments so painstakingly collated and rehearsed. Around the court, all eyes were upon me.
The lawyer’s questions allowed me to state only bare statistics. Night houses, prostitutes; compared to the previous census, he pointed out, the figures far worse. He looked round the court, and shook his head at me. “You must be disappointed with your efforts, Sergeant?”
“No, no. You misconstrue my task,” I stammered.
“Did Sir Richard Payne not commission you to—?”
“That is not the point.” I tried to go further, to touch on the business behind the figures. Manipulations. Contracts. Coercion.
“Please,” he smiled. “No need to explain the Great Social Evil to the court.”
I countered that there was need. We had made discoveries darker than the court imagined. Through my feverish haze, I tried to tell more of the Southwark academy. Jeffcoat had given the facts, but I wanted to convey the plight of the women subdued there. I tried to speak of the damned Regent’s Canal, but my voice failed me.
He deflected my challenge, as if batting away a gadfly. It was an expert smothering, as deft and deadly as any murder. First he swamped my half-hearted testimony, bamboozling us with meaningless facts. Then he swayed the gallery’s attentions from my discoveries by uprooting my private life.
Lord Chief Justice Fairchild eyed me warily. “I must allow, with some reluctance, that Counsel mention allegations against Sergeant Lawless’s conduct.”
The self-satisfied lawyer laid out a catalogue of my misconduct. Mauve’s theft I had failed to solve; and now he was dead. Groggins, who died so soon after I pestered him, sneaking in uninvited. Where was my witness, Felix? Struck down. And my colleague Darlington, for whom I had procured dubious remedies? Where was he?
“I further put it to you,” the barrister began with apparent relish, “that you were often seen in an establishment in Leicester Square with one of these women, when you were not, in fact, on duty.”
That would be Cora. Nothing untoward, but I could not deny it.
“I put it to you that, as a regular customer at Kate Hamilton’s bordello, you were accustomed to accepting favours. Drinks. Rooms.”
“I played chess with Cora. One of the girls. Women, rather,” I spluttered. “No favours.”
“Never?”
“They offered me whisky.”
“Which you drank?”
“No.” I shrugged. “Not usually.”
“On duty?”
“The line between duty and not duty… It’s an awkward distinction, in our work.” This was not the moment to defend my methods. “But no other favours, as you put it.”
“Rooms?”
“No.”
“Never?”
My mouth sagged open. I could make no reply.
“There are allegations, My Lord, regarding Sergeant Lawless’s relations with women. We prefer not to tarnish the other parties. Only, if I may show Your Honour these daguerreotypes. This image. Yes, My Lord. And worse—these.”
Easy to shame me publicly. I stood awestruck. Nothing could have thrown me more than revealing my love for Alexandra. Threatening to ruin her. She had ended it, our imprudent indulgence; but too late. I had erred, I suppose, but that should not stop the court from hearing me.
“Whatever my folly, why should my testimony be rendered stingless?” I struggled to muster my reason. “Which of us is pure? None of you. We all—”
The judge called me to order, troubled. My deposition was concluded.
I stumbled from the court. I barely knew what I had said. Little of purpose. I had ranted, wasting our months of work, undermining our case. The damnable lawyer: Brodie’s spies had told him everything. I was not even sure which crimes were imputed to me and which only in my imagination.
Jeffcoat laid his hand on my shoulder. “They’ve found Jimmy Darlington.”
FURTHER INTO HELL
I should have gone to see Darlington. You work and work, never imagining that one day your friend is there, and the next he will be gone.
He had been dead for days before they found him. The coroner recorded a surfeit of opiates.
They had to hold the funeral at once, the body was that degraded. Beforehand, Jeffcoat and I visited Darlington’s quarters. I had never been before. What a small, tidy life he had. I expected papers everywhere, encrusted with baked potato and coffee stains, dirty books left open. Nothing. Tidy notes on life in the police, scribbled in a workaday journal; perhaps he hoped
to be discovered, just like Sergeant McLevy in Edinburgh, and published to critical renown. I offered them to Hotten, but he found the prose style too sensational.
After the funeral, the 9.23 Club agreed: he was the kind of man who wouldn’t be told. Collins was strict about dosage; Darlington must have doubled it. Some people are natural addicts: bibliomania, morphinomania, erotomania. You cannot save a maniac. We should have looked after him. He was weak, it’s true, and gave in to many temptations; but we are all weak at times.
WOEFUL FATES
The bodies from the canal were buried the same day in one large grave in the police cemetery at Manor Park. Simpson would not even put a number on them, the remains the diver had found in those tattered bags of bones. The doctor was reluctant to spend his valuable time without assurances; he had been duped before. Before? Why, yes. Mass graves were dug up all the time. The Artillery Ground, the Foundling Hospital, the Strand Union Workhouse: these diggings turfed up so many burial grounds, he was sick of old bones. Why, a doctor he knew in Blackheath—
I reminded him that these bodies had not been buried in the first place.
He would give cause of death for the first five. If there were a prosecution, it would be a collective one; each post-mortem required a report; the Yard would hesitate to pay his total fee per cadaver, and he was in no mood to quibble.
He thumbed through the swaddling garments. Ages: from two months to three years. Two were suffocated, he told me blankly; one starved; one had its head stove in. The last was uncertain: the fractures of the ribcage suggested violence but might be rickets, often fatal to infants.
We spoke no further of it.
The man who cast the bundles was arrested, undemonstratively. On the Caledonian Road, one can do nothing without an audience, but we gave out that a neighbour had reported a nuisance; we gave no reason to think it part of a wider investigation.
The atmosphere within the Yard was subdued. Jeffcoat and I spoke in hushed tones. We could let nobody know that we were on to the warehouse nursery: the Flowers of Sin, as Groggins’ card styled it. Not yet. A few officers came to us, pledging loyalty. Others treated us like lepers. What made these colleagues treat us circumspectly was not clear, but the poison was deep-rooted. I came back to our lodgings in the Yard to find the boys taunting Jeffcoat’s cat.
One blockhead grabbed it by the tail. “I told you. Not enough room to swing a cat in here.” Having cracked it about the head till it stopped mewling, he threw it out the window and into the river. I am ashamed to admit that I watched it drown.
Jeffcoat was devastated to find Thom vanished. I persuaded him to move back to my old rooms, where together we should be safe from threats. I never told him the truth about poor Thom.
ASHES
It was my darkest hour. Jeffcoat and I kept a late vigil. Dawn glimmered golden red over the rooftops. I was at my wits’ end. Of my humiliation in court we said little. What was there to say? It was over.
Jeffcoat took it on himself to haul me into action. “It’s not the end. Not yet.” He’d appealed for a fresh barrister, beyond Brodie’s manipulations; we had one last trick up our sleeve. “New lawyer, new witness. Just so little may tip the balance.”
We had set up our final gambit, and we were ready to sacrifice all our pieces. To fight those with friends in high places, sometimes one needs friends in even higher places. Who? Who is left on the side of right?
* * *
I regretted promising Miss Villiers I would attend her blasted charitable book swap. Molly had strong-armed me; I could not think why.
When we heard about Darlington, Justice Fairchild had called an adjournment. I had a day’s reprieve to straighten out loose ends. Jeffcoat packed me off for the early train to Crowthorne. I hadn’t slept. He reminded me to get Felix’s book: I still hoped Felix could testify decisively. I walked through the rain, addled with the shame of the courtroom. The ad hominem attack to bury my evidence. They wouldn’t need to shut me up, as they had done for Mauve and Groggins.
The clean bricks of the new Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum promised a different type of reform. I asked to see Dugdale, author and engraver. I was brought through endless bright corridors, ashamed of my muddy boots. Dugdale had been dropped right in it, after all his work on the secret manuscript and its subscription list. He just might risk testifying against them.
I saw Dugdale—but he did not see me. The electrical charge run through his temples that morning had been at a new, experimental level. It could be a month before he spoke in full sentences.
* * *
The branch line stations were a biblical lamentation: Ash, Ash Vale, Wanborough, Godalming, Havant. I slept right through Petersfield and woke at the end of the line. I walked blindly on to Portsmouth Harbour, where I stood on the pier like an inarticulate slave.
Boys were frolicking in the mudflats, as the quality hurried through the drizzle to the Isle of Wight ferry. A girl flipped a farthing into the mud below. The boy turned a somersault for her; he came up like a painted minstrel, the coin gleaming between his teeth. The girl gave a shy wave, while her father bought the tickets. How many obstacles love will overleap.
A boatload of women was ferried ashore from the hulking destroyer at anchor in the harbour: black-haired, dark-skinned, dishevelled and excitable. What they had to do with the British Navy I could not imagine.
“Why, sir,” said the station guard, with a wink. “Officers’ wives, them.”
“Officers’ wives?” I winked in return. “Any bargains?”
“Not here, sir. Nobody does business here. There’s Spice Island if you wants a passing taste. For purchasing, you wants to go up the hill, to the new forts.” He pointed and winked again. The chalky hilltop was pocked with half-built battlements. Palmerston’s follies: I’d read of them in the papers, bankrupting the nation against phantom enemies. “Tell ’em you’d like to buy a piglet. That’s it. A nice little piglet.”
I gave the man a shilling. I was always out of pocket.
MEMOIRS AND MEMORIES
It had done me the power of good to smell the sea. I did not have time now to go up the hill; I’d return later, in search of the piglets.
I arrived in Petersfield ashen, with the rain finally easing. I walked to the book swap, in a private garden filled with flowers, where Miss Villiers received me with such warmth, I nearly burst into tears. She looked lithe in an elegant aquamarine dress, nothing like her dowdy library outfits. How had I spent so long without seeing her? Molly was clever to engineer this, knowing I missed Ruth’s bright company. Ruth saw I was in no state to be presented to shire society. She took pity and hid me away.
“Still, I must introduce you to the dreaded aunt.” She took the liberty of straightening my hair and adjusting my lapels; it was such a heedless intimacy, I couldn’t help but smile. She frowned. “What?”
“Must I meet the aunt? I was hoping to drown my sorrows.” I told of my courtroom disgrace. I wanted to tell her of the canal, and the end of my inappropriate relationship, but I dared not. “What about these books you’ve investigated for me?”
Ruth stood conspiratorially close, and spent a stolen half hour neglecting her charitable duties.
Around the same time as my first letter, a couple of gents had enquired laughingly if she had Walter’s My Secret Life on her shelves. “They kept asking, ‘Does it pique your interest, Miss?’ in a roguish sort of a way.”
She consulted the catalogue. Nothing. She consulted her superior, Panizzi.
The Italian’s brow darkened. “Licentious pranks,” he blasted, his accent sharper when he was angry. He blamed her for encouraging them, though the gents were already vanished. The next thing, Ruth was reprimanded and her contract under question.
“Your job? I’m mortified.”
“He’s a rotten prig.” She waved a hand. “I’m better off out of it.”
It took discreet enquiries to discover that she had chanced upon a Masonic secret. Following recent do
nations to the Library, a battle was raging. Some said every book should be catalogued and available; others insisted certain tomes be removed to a special chamber.
Her eyes sparkling, she whispered, “Erotic books.”
When Panizzi examined the catalogue of priapic exhibits from the Museum of Naples, he was decided. A cupboard amid the stacks acquired a lock. Thus began the Museum’s famed Secret Cabinet. Already it was growing. Only trusted collectors were given access, upon enquiring in the right way, from the right librarian. And there was a rumour of a vast bequest to come.
Brodie’s bookshelves. I knew it.
Ruth nudged me. “An eye-opening collection, this gents’ flower garden.”
I spluttered. “You’ve seen it?”
“I had a peek. Freethinking women must broaden their minds.”
“Freethinking.” I nodded.
Her eyes flashed. She would refuse, on principle, to be shocked by licentious material, though the degenerate scenes Darlington had shown me would puzzle her. If Ruth liked nothing more than a mystery, nothing irked her more than being excluded. “Panizzi means to dismiss me. The old goat. Not that I would allege he prefers young males. To employ young males, I mean, of course. Wait, now.” Ruth peered from the camellias and called out, “Aunt Lexie, here we are. I must introduce you.”
The dreaded aunt, about whom I had heard little all these years, looked over at us.
My mouth ran dry.
“Why, you must be the famous Sergeant Lawless,” she said, as if we had never met, “of whom my darling Ruth tells me such stories.”
I looked at her.
Ruth looked petulant. “I can’t see how you didn’t meet at Felix’s party.”
“Didn’t we?” The aunt blinked her lovely eyes. She tucked a ringlet nervously beneath her hat, not to say seductively. “I don’t recall.”
Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Page 24