I fumed about it. His gift to the British Museum clinched it; what is justice, after all, beside a first edition Don Quixote?
It seemed just that he lost so much, though, despatched to the Americas. In New York, he was hounded from town, his reputation destroyed in articles by Dickens and Collins. Half his papers closed, half were sold. I believe he ended up on the West Coast or Mexico, where his proclivities (the weakness he spoke of) were more tolerated.
Yes, Brodie was despatched. And his sins with him? I never knew. I would love to believe that such a tangle of sin could never again be spun. But I know human nature.
* * *
I didn’t see the triumph in court played out to the finish. Molly tugged me by the sleeve mid-morning.
“Felix is talking. Telling ’em everything. He’s desperate we find the girl, old cove.” She wiped her nose. “And I may’ve found her.”
MEAN TEARS
By the time we rescued Eveline, it was too late. Foolish overstatement. It was already too late when Felix had his stroke; even when I first laid eyes on her at the opera. Caught, then ruined, now doomed.
Molly worked it out from our visit as sweeps. The counterpart of the courtesans conveyed to Quartern Lane was the doxy despatched to Lansdowne Gardens.
As we arrived in the syphilitic back alleys of Stockwell, the weather was changing at last. A whiskery Irishman hitched up his trousers with twine, looking at the clearing skies. “Same time next week, darlin’?”
“She won’t make it to next week, you devil.” The old bawd yawned. Three pups yapped at her heels; she kicked them back. “Nor’ll you, if you catch what she has.”
“Ah, well, Queenie. Beggars can’t be, et cetera.”
Lansdowne Gardens looked respectable enough. But within lay a decaying morass of humanity: laudanum fiends, poxed doxies, squeezed into interstices.
If the Flowers of Sin were the gleaming frontage, No. 9 Lansdowne Gardens was the dirty rear, where cast-offs were left to rot. The opposite of the refuge Felix had founded, this was a compost heap of misery.
* * *
Eveline was laid spread-eagle on a tawdry bedspread, festooned in taffeta, as if she were part of this drear garret’s furnishings. Her dress was torn. She tugged at her décolletage, perspiration dripping down her collarbone. Her body seemed drawn with effort; yet her face—that face—shone with the radiance of an angel fallen from grace, descending toward her last end.
“Just in time.” Molly sighed. “I hope.”
“What the devil’s wrong with her?” I said roughly. It was indecent, as if some monster had tossed her there, weary of her attentions. The bed was barely made up.
The old bawd bustled in, buzzing like a fly. “I’m sure I don’t know, sir.”
I snorted. “Someone had better.”
“They’re brung ’ere from scrapes of every sort. Beatings. Disease. It’s habitual, sir.”
“How did she come to be here?”
“I’d say she’d have been on the street, sir. But I’ve not seen her before. Working up the West End, she said. Many do. Whatever the nuns say, it’s reasonable a young girl should want the gay life and make the most of her glorious youth. Better than hiding such a face in rags—”
There was a noise on the street below. I glared at the old bawd. “Go on.”
“Can’t I speak for myself?” The girl turned on the meagre pillow. “Just this final once, mayn’t I?”
I looked to Molly astonished. I had seen this phantom just twice and never heard her speak. Those poor, gravelly tones took me aback.
“She’s all burned up.” Molly tugged my arm. “Get that window, will you?”
I drew back the pitiful curtain. Damp mushroomed across the ceiling, creeping in from the roof. The vapours in the room were enough to give you tuberculosis in five minutes. I forced the skylight open. The rain was done. The aroma of onions cut through the air, and distant piano music, as a shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds.
Molly liberated the girl from her crinolines. Her pupils were small as she flinched in confusion. She quivered, clinging to her underskirts. She raised her heart-shaped face to me, pale with exhaustion. I had despaired of getting anything from her but recovered my determination. Those eyes I had seen in Felix’s daguerreotype, and in her Wildernsea sisters. There was even something about her gestures and expressions that I recognised.
“We’ve come to hear your story,” I said, “if you can be so bold as to tell.”
“Must you harass her?” Molly chided. “We’ve come to help you.”
“Oh, but there is a hurry,” Eveline said.
Five minutes later, she was ready to tell us her tale, propped up on plumped pillows and fortified by tea, with lemon.
“The Frenchy way, if you wouldn’t mind.”
She was recovering her colour, but oh, she was frail. Molly brushed her hair from her forehead, settling the sheets, and performing countless ministrations that neither I nor the dunce of a bawd had the wit to think of. Thank God Molly was there: I was beyond exhaustion and felt a poor witness to eternity.
Noises on the stair, and Simpson blundered in. I had sent word to the college hospital with little hope, for he had refused to treat the Flowers from Southwark. I viewed the doctor’s arrival with astonishment and dismay. I longed to hear Eveline’s story, for we did not yet know if Skittles’s gambit would play out.
Brusquely, Simpson examined her pupils. He put his stethoscope to her chest. I found myself fascinated by the pearly lustre of her skin, her raven hair tangled with sweat. There was something about her, something light and magical, an ineffable welcome.
Simpson tossed down his instruments. He pulled me from the bedside and spoke, white-faced, in urgent appeal, a tone unusual to this most arrogant of men. “Let us pray, Lawless, that you may ask your confounded questions. First leave me to examine this poor wretch and treat her.”
He kept Molly to assist him. I passed a wretched quarter hour with the harridan of a landlady. “A cup of scandalmonger?” she offered, and made me the filthiest cup of tea I have ever imbibed, speaking all the while of her gentleman callers. The moment I asked of Eveline, she shut up like a Whitstable oyster.
Simpson pushed the door open and collapsed against the wall, holding back tears. I had never seen him care one iota for any creature, living or dead. It made me fear for her. She would tell him nothing, fearful of recriminations; but she was badly bruised and had bled considerably—“Externally and internally,” he said. “You mustn’t tire her.”
I went back in and sat by her. Simpson loomed up, preparing the injection.
“I was a good girl,” she said, “a milliner’s step-daughter, you know.”
As Simpson held up the syringe against the skylight, Molly stood up, knocking it from his hand. The bottle tumbled to the floor. It did not shatter, but the sedative poured out on the floorboards.
Simpson cursed. “Damnable girl. That’s the last of my opiates. You shall have to run along to the chemist’s for me.”
Molly ducked his hand. “Run along yourself, you cracked old crocus.”
“Simpson.” Eveline hushed him with a contemptuous glance, like a lady long used to ordering professionals around. Her dark eyes unnerved him. “Get out, you dirty sawbones. You are no longer welcome. I have something to tell Molly here.”
Simpson huffed and puffed and stormed out. He would return within the half hour.
* * *
“My name is Angelina. An orphan with neither parents nor siblings. Childhood a mystery. Born in Italy. Uncle used me reasonably. Taught me to mend clothes. Transported from Naples to the London docks—”
I nudged Molly, appalled. This was not the Effie I had heard of in Wildernsea, and her native freedom in speaking was quashed in the retelling.
“You doxy fishbag,” Molly said kindly. “Cheese your tosh and flam. You’re well trained, you are, but save that bosh for the bigwigs. We know about the Flowers, see, and we know about Brodie, so you�
��ve to have no fear that you’re welching. We want the truth of your flash life, and your vocation, and most of all the truth about Felix.”
Eveline blinked, shyly, but the light danced in her eyes. She reached for Molly’s coat sleeve, nodding. “Thank you, Molly. Some tales, if not told, fold in on themselves and disappear. I’m not just any girl. A ruined girl is like every other ruined girl, unless she tell her tale aright.”
It was true: I had heard so many tales of ruination that I was inured to the tellers’ tears. They were numbers on a census, headlines in the Illustrated Police News, or stories in Mayhew’s reports, stories that might end in resurrection but more likely in abandoned love. This poor soul deserved a better redemption.
Angelina was haughty as you like to Simpson; but to Molly, in those last hours on earth, Effie confessed her tale, trusting entirely to this smudge-nosed ginger-mopped tyke.
* * *
She told her tale, and I wrote it all down: of gentlemen who stopped to see her mother or her sisters. She told of leaving the north. Uncertainty arriving in London. The training. Her weakness for the elocution teacher, who taught other things, too: practical biology, he called it.
Then, oh, the glorious time before her fall. She might have gone back to her parents, to shame and good works; more like, she would have been shut in a home for fallen women, with no hope for larks. It was bad enough being poor, but she feared losing her larksomeness more than her health.
She spoke of Felix, and I wrote that down too: how he showered gifts upon her, time and attention. He loved her. He was the first ever to love her. Now she was ill and feared she would never see him again. This was the terrible part. That this beautiful girl should not have been loved. Not just beautiful; irrepressible and unvanquished by hardship and injustice. She should have been loved by princes; she was sold into slavery.
I prayed that she would survive to know better. I thought of the woman I saw that first night walking with Felix, fallen dead in the gutter. Another of Brodie’s Flowers of Sin, tossed in the compost, with a story that would never be told.
I gazed down at Eveline. As I lowered my head, I seemed to rise into the sky and look down into all the apartments; and in each another Effie told her final narrative; higher still, peeking under the Stockwell slums and Waterloo whorehouses. So many untold testaments to a city of sins uncounted, unaccountable.
Who can say that Felix’s love for Effie, even if deluded, was not real? Her bubbling, intemperate voice, telling this implausible tale: this was the sound of no mythical lyre, but of life itself.
At the end she murmured, pale as death, “Take me to see him.”
VOWS OF FAITH
Simpson returned in a fluster. Saying nothing of his telling-off, he took the girl’s pulse and insisted she could not be moved.
I insisted she would be. We could not leave her. I would take her to the Clapham Hospital and—though I did not say it—to Felix. Simpson might give her something to ease the pain, no more.
Shuddering, she reached out for my hand. She held my shirt cuff, rubbing it between her fingers for comfort. I recalled the girl at the party, in Brodie’s photograph, pinching a fold of my trousers, transporting me back to my childhood.
Eveline was not that naive girl, turning cartwheels, unaware of herself and the ill-meaning gents ogling her. But, dear God, Eveline was not so much older. This elegant flower had been just such a girl a year or two before, transformed from child to adult not by stays and petticoats and make-up, but by the arts of the Flowers of Sin. Brodie had seen she would soon be a woman: men would stumble over one another to declare their love for her. In that time, she had grown fulsome and lustrous—an irresistible beauty who brought Felix such love, who brought Felix so low—only for that lustre to fade.
I saw now what I had recognised in her gestures: Skittles’s grace. Schooled in the same nursery, with the same cultured laugh, half covering the mouth, Eveline was a life-size study for Anonyma, the most famed courtesan in London.
Why she was dying I never understood. The violence done her so carelessly in those weeks at Lansdowne Gardens was enough; on top of that was a wasting disease that set her coughing. Whatever Felix had done to her, we would never know; but I knew that Brodie’s jackals had dropped her here, where they knew she could be silenced, and anything she did say would be ignored or ridiculed. We shall never know.
As she slipped into opium dreams, she repeated her wish to see Felix. To my surprise, Simpson yielded. In the cab, he wept. I thought I had seen everything, but this man weeping I had never thought to see. For Groggins he had shown no emotion, nor even the bones dredged from the canal. Now, over this lost girl, he was broken.
In a funk, he admitted he’d treated Eveline before. First, with the Flowers, where he conducted medical checks; then in Quartern Mews, laid low by Felix’s passions. I have no doubt that he genuinely felt for her, but he was also ashamed at having forsworn his Hippocratic Oath. He had seen the punishments she endured; he had not stirred to save her; now she could not be saved. But he was told not to interfere, and threatened that his personal affairs would be revealed to the police. Besides, what was she anyway but a whore—even if a winning one?
There it was: this venerable medic, our mortician for murder cases, and all the while, he was one of Brodie’s underlings. What sins had he helped to hide? I could sense the shame he had suffered, enduring blackmail to value silence over his medical duties, this man without scruples. He deserved to suffer.
* * *
Spring had arrived overnight, packing the winter back to its mothballs and mildew. The day was warm. Families were picnicking on Clapham Common. As we sped past, six girls were singing in a ring beneath the blossom of a cherry tree.
Sparrow, come, the first spring morning.
Will you take my garland?
Sparrow, come, your girl is calling.
Will you take my ring?
The daffodils reared rampant, the narcissi close behind. All over the city tonight, flesh would be on view again, like these garish blooms, as women threw off their inhibitions along with their winter coats.
The Clapham Hospital for Incurables was in mayhem. I had not foreseen reprisals from Brodie’s men, that they could move so fast. Our closure of the Flowers of Sin sparked it, I suppose. Somebody had welched. That morning, before Skittles testified, Brodie’s jackals could not have imagined that within a few hours, he would be jailed and his empire fallen.
As we hurtled into the courtyard, people huddled around a pile of blankets. I saw Bede’s withered hands rubbing the silken hair of that august head. I ran to him, fearing we were too late. We could not piece together what had happened from the conflicting reports. Felix did not fall from the window: he would not have lived.
We lifted him gingerly back to his room, while Molly carried Eveline.
Bede sat in the corridor, quivering. Smoke billowed out under the door of Felix’s room. When I reached out to him, Bede flinched away.
“Bede, where’s the Pixie? Bede?”
His eyes darted around wildly. He scrabbled at the door, then fainted. I had to pull Bede away and barge the door down. The flue was on fire. But why a fire? This was the first warm day of the year.
By the time we found the Pixie, it was too late. Despite my precautions, Brodie had got to them. How she suffered with the flames and the smoke, we shall never know. She could not scream for help. I sat on the floor with my head in my hands, as the orderlies took her little body away.
The birds were singing in the courtyard.
IN DEATH AS IN LIFE
We laid Eveline and Felix side by side on the bed. I stood gazing at them: the old man with his lustrous silver hair disarrayed, the young woman with the irresistible heart-shaped face, both of them ruined by this dreadful sink of a city. Effie’s story was magical and strange, a tale of deception, and yet, in the end, I wondered which of them was the less deceived.
Simpson tended them intently. A ladybird fluttered above
the bedposts.
Felix’s breath was short, but he took her hand. Effie seemed at peace, her smile beatific, but she was never conscious again. Her tale was told. Now I should never hear Felix’s. I fell to my knees by the bed.
Molly settled Bede on a blanket by the window. He was shuddering with fear and cold, trying to talk. Molly told him to shut his trap and breathe. Now at last, he was coming back to his senses.
Still shivering, he tried to sit up. “Where’s the Pixie, then?”
Molly looked to me. We turned away, unable to reply.
“She must have got away, then,” said Bede, eyes wide with hope. “I told her to run. She’s a fast little slip of a thing when she wants. Where’s the violin case?”
“Bede, settle down.” Straining to steady my voice, I rose from the bedside and brought him the case.
“Lovely.” He heaved a sigh of relief. “Felix has been in cracking form. Oh, his logicality is all sewed back to a totality. Pixie has him learning her sign language. Didn’t he pick it up easy! Musician, ain’t he?”
With Felix on his way to complete recovery, Bede and Pixie between them had been piecing together what Felix wanted to say.
“You got his testimony?” I meant to sound sceptical; I sounded impatient.
“Oh, we’ve notated his whole bleedin’ memoir for you, Watchman.”
I attempted a joke, my voice choked. “More in Groggins’ style?”
“No, no. No erotic memoir, this.”
“And where is said memoir?”
He blinked brightly. “That violin case: there’s a false back panel.”
I opened it. The violin had not even a scratch. The inside panel, though, was ripped out. There was nothing there.
“See?” he said. “There’s your manuscript.”
Not till then did I realise how thorough Brodie’s men had been. Someone had threatened to unravel the yarn that led to the monster; if it was Felix and the Pixie, they must be silenced. Not content with doing for Felix, they had burnt his story and snuffed out the poor soul who wrote it down. Lost, all lost. I took the violin and held up the empty case. “Oh, Bede.”
Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Page 28