Later that evening when the flames are extinguished and the snores and whimpers of the girls form the melody of the night, doubt overcomes her and she worries that the lady who has offered her a life outside these walls will not come again. What if she changes her mind? With a hand still greasy with gristle she reaches under her mattress to retrieve her most powerful charm, a copper, crescent moon. She holds it to her lips and rocks until finally she falls asleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Willa’s first employer arrives on this dismal morning dressed in the colour of the gunmetal sky. The outline of her body between the two columns of the portico appears sharper than the week before, her jacket more severe, she looks more like a governess than the colourful and blooming flower of last week. Willa stands at the edge of the first-floor window peering down, with her head slightly cocked at this inauspicious beginning. She can hardly say for sure, because she doesn’t consider herself to be a good judge of character, but surely Mrs Fowler is a little less radiant today – but perhaps more powerful for it, Willa goes on to think; really it’s just her own silly supposition, her own weak effort to form an opinion after her upset with Matron, that Mrs Fowler, perhaps not aware of being observed, bears the aura of menace. And as the lady in grey lifts her petticoats to climb the step, she turns her head to the left and looks up into the window, where Willa flinches and draws back from sight.
No one comes to offer Willa a farewell. No one wishes her well. She wore the invisible mark of Matron’s Girl, which left her friendless during her time in the Refuge. She stands before Matron this morning her skin still red from the scrubbing she gave it last night. Her nails shine blue from her efforts to extract the essence of wild violets. Her desire to be and smell clean when travelling with her new mistress had almost made her ill and robbed her of sleep.
Whatever final business Matron and her new mistress may have attended is now concluded. With a slight nod Mrs Fowler turns on her heels and marches out of the Home of Refuge for Orphaned Girls with Willa following closely behind, clinging to her box of modest goods.
A two-wheeled, one-horse cab waits for them at the gates. Willa is unsure how to actually get in it, having never in her life ridden in or on anything, and though it looks simple enough, she is certain it is not. Clovis instructs her to climb in the cab before her, but the girl misjudges the height of the step, struggles with the box and becomes entangled in her petticoats, and with a dive forward lands with her face on the floor.
Clovis has not yet smiled at her servant today, but now she laughs. When the warmth of that bright beam of light shines on Willa, just as it did last week, it is worth a great deal more than a sore nose. In fact, the radiance so occupies her thoughts on their journey that she doesn’t notice that the hansom has stopped. She assumes they have arrived, but she cannot make out the river stairs from the little window, nor is the great river itself to be seen. She edges forward a bit more for a better view of a sprawling and imposing building. Its centre dome seems to stare back at her as though it were a large eye drinking in her soul.
‘Do you know what lies within this building, Willa?’
The cadence of her mistress’s words, spoken with the trace of a foreign accent, sounds like a song and they are the first she has spoken to Willa today.
‘No, mistress.’
‘Men and women who have fallen out of themselves. Some will be restored and others have fallen so far they will never be seen again.’
‘The madhouse?’
‘Indeed. Bethlem. Leave your box here and come with me.’
Frightened that there has been some trick played and she will be left here, Willa protests.
‘But, mistress! I don’t want to. What are you going to …’
Clovis turns on the girl with such fury and force in her expression, that the girl’s confidence is shattered.
‘I will not stand for disobedience. Nor will you ever question me again. If you doubt you are capable of either of those, then I shall return you to Matron Jennet at once.’
‘Oh no, mistress. Please. Forgive me. Please. I thought that …’
‘We will take the air here.’
Clovis steps down, adjusts her petticoats and begins to promenade along the perimeter of the formidable home of the forgotten. The cab waits.
‘Many arrive here and most will never leave alive. The criminally insane have their own ward but often they are so clever that they find ways to infiltrate the other wards … the women’s ward. I have also heard that a young woman’s hands may be tied in such a way that she cannot freely do her counting, or rub her amulets and charms.’
Clovis’s voice has become trance-like. ‘Worse yet, Willa. There are hundreds of women within those walls who are exactly like Matron Jennet. But even these women, well, they are lightweights compared to the doctors, who apply leeches to a woman’s labia.’
Here Clovis pauses to gauge Willa’s understanding.
‘Your quim. Imagine it.’
Willa tries desperately not to do so.
On the street the slow plodding donkeys bray against the rush of the horses and carriages. Fresh excrement steams in piles they build indiscriminately. The first drops of rain fall on Willa’s face. Clovis’s large, brimmed hat, wrapped in a long swath of grey chiffon, dramatically envelops her face and protects it from the mist. She is just beginning to warm to her subject.
‘But all is not gloomy. There is a ballroom. What do they look like I wonder, Willa? Do they dance in tattered and stained gowns? Might their shaved, scorched heads, oozing with wounds, catch the flickering light? And how, I consider, do people who are mad take to the drink when they are offered ale and punch. I dare say it is not for the weak. Hmm?’
Clovis draws her chiffon mask higher still.
‘Well. We must get back to the river before the heavens open. My goodness, but you are shivering. One of these days soon Willa Robinson, you are going to rub a hole in that pocket of yours. Whatever is the matter with you?’ she asks innocently.
Willa may be naive and unworldly, she may possess a head full of spectacularly simple thoughts, but she is not stupid. She knows a threat when she feels it.
Before Clovis steps up into the cab, she turns again to face the hospital.
‘A dead house stands behind those walls. An apothecary hacks off the heads of the dead patients and places them in pickling pans until the flesh falls off. A gruesome end, yes?’
‘Yes, mistress.’ Willa enunciates the words but her mind is free now, counting – one, two, three, four, five, six … and on and on until she crushes the panic.
The cab driver, who would normally curse and spit during the interminable wait, stands quietly as if under the spell of the unnerving place. After the jerk of the first turn of the hansom’s wheels, Clovis turns her entombed head and unties the chiffon, until it falls down in long strands around her neck. She calculates that this would be an opportune moment to release another smile. It is after all a new beginning, a new relationship. So she summons it, warm and inviting, full and open, until Willa’s shoulders relax, and the girl’s hands are finally still.
Then Clovis lays forth the map to Willa’s new appointment.
‘Should the two of us ever come to any … disagreement … that we cannot remedy, or if you ever display a single act of disloyalty, that broad building where London deposits its mad will be your new home and its inhabitants your new family.’
Willa casts a timorous parting glance. Her mistress’s sweet breath fills the cab.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The smoke is as thick as a hand; the stench in the stifling room is born of ale and sweat. Finn Fowler’s insides churn with the pure exuberance of what is sure to be a win.
It has only been a few months since Willa’s arrival and the peopling of the Fowler household is near completion.
Around the table in the house of Far East whores, unshaven men murmur at the scene in progress, set for a climax and perhaps a fight. The Chinese proprie
tor’s son perches on a tall stool with a knife in his hand. He scrapes away at a piece of wood and while he seems to be concentrating on the shape taking form, he also listens to the men who are carving the shape of another’s life – his.
‘Nothing left,’ Mr Ling says.
‘You have one asset.’ Finn raises a brow at the boy.
The two men lock eyes.
‘I need an apprentice,’ Finn says.
‘Premium?’ The Chinese man asks and looks away, as if he’s no longer interested.
Finn glances again at his cards.
‘Twenty pound.’
Someone coughs.
‘Count it,’ Another man says.
‘There ain’t twenty on there,’ says the man next to Finn, entirely drunk.
‘Whatever sits shiny and hard on the table, the premium is twenty pound,’ Finn says.
‘Terms?’ Mr Ling asks.
The men at the table groan. Their tough-skinned fingers impatiently strum the table and they adjust their itchy crotches.
‘Agree the twenty, finish the hand. If I win, we sort out the rest tonight and I go back to Three Colt Street with the boy. If my hand’s a crapper, well then, you keep the boy – for now.’
They lock eyes once again. The expression on Mr Ling’s face is blank. He agrees with a swift nod.
The boy’s knife stops its work. He reveals nothing. His stomach, however, churns at the events being played out before him. His future will be decided by a game of Put. His father prefers Fan-Tan, or Pak-ah-puh, but the rogues insisted on their English card game tonight and he was impotent against them.
‘Fer fuck’s sake, show yer cards,’ another brays.
This has never happened before. Mr Ling has never allowed the stakes to stack up so high that he could not meet them. But things have been bad for him lately. The parish is becoming more dangerous for those who operate below the law. He has no allies and there is no other Chinese man who resides within this parish. He could die quickly and quietly and no one would notice, and those who would, well, they would be grateful to his murderer. People owe him. People despise him. There are those who find this foreigner too foreign.
The boy is long ruined. Ling first noticed it after his mother crept out of the door late one night and never returned. He heard she’d hidden on a ship in the docks that sailed the next day for the East, but was discovered during the voyage and thrown overboard like a morsel, fed to the insatiable sea. What a good idea, Ling thought. He was tempted to drown the boy. He is meant to treasure a male child. But he does not, not this one who pines after his grandmother from some shitty little province full of Jurchens.
Jonesy’s mother had been running her entire life, first from an arranged marriage in Shanghai, then from the floating life of the canal brothels, and finally from him and his father. She had learned to travel light. Several of her tunics were left discarded in a sad pile on the floor, except for the green one that on an enlightening morning fell loosely from the boy’s naked shoulders. Ling dreamed of wrapping Jonesy in the green tunic and tossing him into the Thames. He consulted the oracle. When he threw the yarrow sticks for guidance the reading was unclear. He had no wish to anger the ancestors, so he let the boy live.
The more he thinks on it the more he hopes his cards are shit. He could then leave this rank, black cloud of a country and return to Shanghai. He’ll be hired to work his passage back, but has only enough money for one life when he arrives and he’ll be hanged if he’ll throw his savings in the mix tonight. Now that the circumstances are right in front of him, he prays to his ancestors to lose.
Finn needs only one more point to win and he holds a ‘3’. He has no need to bluff, but he allows the tension to build anyway.
‘Put.’ Finn says at long last.
All heads turn to Ling. He does not follow his opponent’s advice to throw, or ‘put’ his card in, rather, he forces Finn to lead with his card. His aim is for everyone to witness how squarely Finn will triumph. There must be no dispute.
Finn pauses again, which sends the other men into an aching moment of anticipation, then he flips his ‘3’ down in front of Ling. Unless Ling also holds a ‘3’ the boy is Finn’s.
A whoop goes up all around the table, and then another moment of complete silence prevails until the slow steady scraping commences when the boy takes up his knife again. He received his new name by means of his father’s casual glance at an English newspaper, Mr Jonesy Rawlins, who finished his apprenticeship on Tuesday … While he lay across his mother’s breast, blood gushing from the place of her recent delivery until she almost bled to death, or so the midwife said when she insisted on increasing her compensation, he was named Yun, ‘born in the clouds’.
Father and son have not exchanged glances during this game of ownership. Mr Ling places his card down as Jonesy’s shavings fall silently to the floor.
The King card shows his face. Ling has lost. The boy is lost. And then a great roar of voices and the pounding of fists on the table are too much for the small room as they celebrate the birth of Jonesy’s apprenticeship.
Three Colt Street is deserted at this late hour. The screeching sounds of fighting crows break the silence as they lay waste to a mound of discarded entrails the lazy butcher has tossed in an alley near his blood-splattered shop. A breeze carries the stench. The master and the apprentice walk in different forms of sobriety; Finn’s ale has worn off after the thrill of his victory, and Jonesy entertains a thoughtful terror of the unknown.
Finn wends his way along expertly in the fog that speedily rolls in from the river. He is a late-night creature, a man who is comfortable in and with the darkness. Jonesy notes this and how efficiently his master slips his key in the front door.
‘Follow me. I’ll get you sorted tomorrow. Tonight you’ll make do with a sleep in the scullery. At least you’ll be warm.’
Jonesy bows his head and begins to express his thanks when a figure advances and moves the air in the room like the shadow puppets of his childhood. She looks like midnight meeting the waning sun. Her gown is a blue so dark it seems it’s been dipped in a bottle of ink. He has never seen hair the colour of a Shanghai sunset, or the beauty of that sunset in a woman. It leaves him speechless. He is not aroused; the feeling is purer, as though he has stepped into a poem, her beauty encased in a couplet.
Clovis takes the measure of Jonesy with a vulture-like eye that seems to penetrate his deepest fears. She circles him; her nostrils flare at the clinging aroma of herbs and other men’s games. She steps back and surveys the delicate manner in which he allows the observations. His thick, dark lashes fall to his cheeks when he lowers his eyes. He cannot bear to be scrutinized so, but he endures it.
‘I have seen you skulking around the river front. You like to watch the ships. Yes?’
‘Yes, mistress.’
‘Hmm. What shall we do with that long plait hanging down your back?’
‘Whatever Mistress wishes.’
This makes her laugh.
His queue is thick at the top and gradually tapers out to a few thin strands below the back of his knees.
For a moment her gaze travels from Finn to Jonesy and then back again.
‘I think you can train him,’ she says to Finn. ‘But he won’t last long.’
She offers him no bedding, nor food or drink.
Finn cuts a piece of cheese and points to the bread and a slice of meat pie.
‘You look like a fuckin’ skeleton. If you’re gonna work for me, you need more flesh.’
No one has ever considered his strength, or lack of it. No one has ever considered him at all.
The stinking cheese tastes foul, but Jonesy scoffs it with the bread. He’s smart enough not to refuse the food. In the past, a simple statement such as ‘I do not care for cheese’ could bring a slap, or worse.
Finn has made a bowl of punch, and this Jonesy does like. His senses sharpen after the first few gulps. He will not speak until he is allowed, but he would like
to say that he is very glad to be here and away from his father’s house where the walls never rest, where someone is always in need of extra care, where the days never end, they just turn darker. He’d like to say aloud to someone that already he breathes a larger share of the air than he ever has done in his life, but his English isn’t up to it yet. He will do whatever job Mr Fowler asks of him, whatever dirty and low thing his master has in mind, he’ll do it. And he vows to show the mistress who looks like a goddess that she is mistaken, that in her presence he will only grow stronger.
Shown into a small room, where short stacks of goods neatly line the walls, a bed is hastily made on the floor with fresh linen and a pile of some sort of packing cloth on which to lay his head. Jonesy slowly lies on his side – he never sleeps on his back – and extinguishes the tallow, closing the light on the stolen goods that he will soon learn to move around Limehouse and beyond with the speed of a flying dragon.
At the top of the house Willa tosses and turns in her bed. Change unsettles her. She finally puts her bare feet on the floor and from under the bed she retrieves her box, swinging it out and up between her legs and onto her lap. From it she scoops up a handkerchief, heavy with her calming charms, and selects the most precious of all, the small, velvet bag that holds a lock of her mother’s hair. She chews on the brown, matted hair until she is comforted and falls into a dreamless sleep.
The next morning while Willa completes her morning chores, her attic room is in the process of transformation. It sounds like hell is entering it. There is scraping and banging and cursing and all this because the new boy is moving in on her territory, a space that has become sacred to her. When she has the courage to climb the steps to the eaves of the house a wave of anger passes through her. A heavy damask curtain hangs from a wire suspended across the room. In an uncharacteristic flash of temper, she casts it aside with a strong jerk. Pushed up against the wall is another bed. The middle of it sinks with the weight of a wooden box similar to hers, though slightly larger. Drawn to the strange script engraved on the top of it, she hesitates, and before she is aware of what moves her to do so, she tries to open it. Locked.
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