‘Those who returned,’ Constance reminds her.
The docks have survived the horrors of the Zeppelins, but not without casualties. It is impossible to calculate how many young dock workers, sailors, merchants and wharfingers never returned to Sailortown. With their absence in mind, the sisters find the streets and dwellings teeming with people. Barefoot children spill out onto the pavement to collect manure and coal.
‘Mr Atlee’s in charge of Limehouse now. He has work to do here.’ Constance murmurs.
Verity’s confidence builds with each step on the cobbled streets. No one pays the slightest attention to the tall man with the dark glasses. Twenty minutes later they arrive at Three Colt Street. An artificial teeth-maker occupies the Fowler’s former house. Displayed on velvet cloth in the front window, pink-gummed models varying in size seem to laugh at them in an entirely sinister way. Knots twist in their stomachs. A memory of Rafe’s form standing in the first-floor window sears them.
‘Come, Verity. Don’t dwell here.’
They hurry past the artificial teeth, as if chased by their clomping bites, stopping a few feet down the street at a lively spit-and-sawdust pub. Seated at the Five Bells and Blade Bone they nurse their shandies with a ridiculous hope that someone will fling helpful gossip their way.
‘That’s my limit,’ Constance says. ‘I can’t drink any more.’ Her glass is still three quarters full.
Snatches of conversation hum in the background and then one voice hovers closer than the others.
‘I am arrested by your appearances.’
A trace of accent clings to her delivery. The slight trill to her ‘r’ makes the sisters bolt up in their seats.
‘Shhh. Do not say a word.’ Clovis, with her back to their table, speaks over her shoulder. ‘You place him in danger by coming east.’
Constance refuses to stay silent. ‘Is he well?’
A chair scrapes the floor. Clovis slides into the empty banquette at the sisters’ table. They are buttonholed by her muscular perfume and stupefied by this turn of events.
‘Did you not hear me?’
The sisters heed this new vision of Clovis Fowler. Her hair is either cut and dyed or she wears a wig of dark brown finger-waves under her cloche hat. A box-shaped knitted dress clings to her torso and flares out into a pleated skirt. Her legs make their shapely appearance into the world. There is a moment’s pause as the three women face up to their fresh transformations born in a new century.
‘I know the reason you keep him from us. I saw the evidence years ago.’ Suddenly clear-headed, Constance careers to the heart of their quest.
‘You know nothing.’
‘We have recently written again to Benedikt with our concerns.’ Verity says.
‘He has no power here.’
‘That isn’t true. More than once he has intervened …’
‘Yes.’ Clovis snaps. ‘Because you were careless. Twice they almost nabbed him.’
Verity feels as if she has been slapped. But Constance is livid. It looks as if she goes to pat Clovis’s hand, and instead she grabs her wrist, pulling her arm under the table, digging her nails into her wrist until she draws blood.
‘You will take us to him,’ Constance says.
‘I will not. The men from Copenhagen … if they see us together …’ She jerks her wrist from Constance’s grasp. ‘They haven’t yet discovered where we live. If you and your sister haunt my home like a couple of old ghouls, you’ll bring attention to us. If you really have his best interests at heart and not your own selfish wishes, then you will leave us alone.’
‘We would never put him in harm’s way.’
Clovis takes a handkerchief from her purse and dabs her wrist, then tosses the lace-trimmed linen on the table and stands.
‘None of this matters.’ Clovis looks down at them. ‘He thinks you’re both dead.’
‘He … he what?’ Verity stammers.
Clovis backs away from them expressionless, a witness to the effect of her blistering words.
The sisters long to lurch at her but they are thwarted by the lie, as if their limbs are screwed to their seats. Not until the door of the Five Bells and Blade Bone closes and the daylight disappears once again do they rouse, and then in a swift panic they bolt out after her.
Verity curses that she must wear her dark glasses and is no help to Constance who looks left and right until she catches sight of a swinging, pleated skirt. She spots Clovis turning onto the Commercial Road. Clovis moves like a dart to its target, and when she rounds the corner to Salmon Lane the sisters moan with what they face.
Saturday’s commerce spills out into the great market street of the district. Clovis easily disappears into the densely packed throng. Assaulted by the stink of naphtha, the sisters quickly lose the woman’s heady scent. They dodge the hanging, newly killed rabbits. Pushing past buyers and sellers they ask, ‘Beautiful lady, dark green dress?’ But an organ and coronet warm up to earn their Saturday shillings, drowning their enquiries. The sisters jostle past several fried-fish bars, forging on to the end of the market until they reek of frying oil.
‘We’ve lost her,’ Constance says.
They reach the bottom of Salmon Lane and stop to rest in front of the turtle warehouse. Its window boasts signage for ‘the Real Turtle Soup’ and inside, the calipash and calipee await transport to the city restaurants.
Verity uses her pocket handkerchief to remove a film of grime from her glasses.
‘She’s a liar. Even if she has told Rafe we are dead, he won’t believe her. I know he won’t,’ she says.
‘It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he’s somewhere in London. We should not have doubted. We will not give up this time, Verity.’
A sea turtle thumps its shell against the window. It claims its freedom from the boiling pot for a while longer.
Clovis turns off Salmon Lane into Copenhagen Place. Wondering if it is somehow possible to crush the Fitzgeralds, to silence them forever, she takes a dusty path that leads to the back of a timber-framed building. The door opens before she knocks.
‘I saw you through the window’ Mockett says.
He bolts the door as she sweeps in.
‘Your palace of science is a wreck,’ Clovis says.
Mockett ignores her comment. His workspace is normally immaculate when he isn’t creating a new product. She knows this.
She dips a finger into a concoction seeping through layers of muslin and sniffs.
‘Mint and lavender?’
Mockett nods.
He deals the legal drug: cosmetics. It is almost robbery. Face creams keep him and the Fowlers comfortable.
‘The mint is too strong.’
He nods again. She’s probably right, she has a good nose.
Mockett’s empire burgeons with a chain of chemist shops, but like the others, he cannot be acclaimed for his work. From his cavernous warehouse he doggedly protects his identity. There is no shortage of people with whom to do business; no one cares who he is as long as he produces and the profits soar. His medical, pharmaceutical, and science degrees, printed with pseudonyms, lie concealed in his desk drawer.
‘I thought we were meeting at the Five Bells,’ Rafe says to Clovis. ‘We’ve just begun.’
‘It’s no longer safe to be seen there. The publican is suspicious.’
‘Perhaps it’s time to make yourself scarce in Limehouse.’ Mockett suggests.
‘What about you? You still live here.’
‘I visit Wapping and Poplar. I never go to the Five Bells.’
Rafe sits in a dark corner, the laboratory section of Mockett’s workspace. Mockett taps Rafe’s vein. Another puncture, more blood. Tendrils of hair, nail-clippings, urine, a scraping of cuticles, and, did he remember to bring his semen, Mockett asks quietly. Clovis fastens her attention to the answer.
Rafe reaches into his trouser pocket. He’s past humiliation, but not anger. His tutor teaches him to paint with fingers tipped with fire.
Your power as an artist is in your anger, he said. Rafe will be sad to leave him, as he must when his tutor’s sharp old eyes begin to notice.
‘Spit please, Rafe.’ Mockett holds a specimen jar to his lips.
Initially excited and challenged by Clovis’s wild quest to replicate Rafe’s fever sweat, row upon row of Rafe’s samples are a grim reminder of Mockett’s own arrogance. And now as he looks at the young man baring his arm, Mockett is awash with guilt for continuing useless experiments.
Rafe made his peace with Mockett one night when they were drunk as anything, both sick from a spit of ale. It was the night Mockett told Rafe what year he had stopped ageing. Painstaking record-keeping and monitoring of Rafe’s secretions, skin and blood, did actually account for something and revealed that Rafe’s body had not aged since 1867. They had guessed as much, but as science advances, it speaks clearer.
‘I’m thirty-five?’ Rafe had asked. ‘Why thirty-five?’
‘I have no fucking idea. It seems entirely random. Let’s get drunk.’
On these occasions when Clovis is present, Rafe closes his eyes. She tries to impress upon him the importance of what they do here, but he ignores her. Clovis and Mockett turn their discussion to cosmetic ventures.
The needle pricks again. Rafe recalls when once she had the audacity to mention love. The word was unnatural when she voiced it.
‘One day you will fall in love,’ she had said. ‘You should have the option. You’ll need a replica to keep her alive, if, as you claim, you have no more fevers.’
‘That’s rich,’ he’d replied. ‘You pretend to do this for me? If you really want to do something for me, you will give us what belongs to each of us. Give us back our phials.’
‘I can’t. It is for your safety, for everyone’s safety, that I keep them.’
While Mockett gently clips his nails, Rafe thinks of the men from Copenhagen who search for him. Why him? he’d asked when he was young and still growing, still ageing. The fever, he was told, he is a carrier, the only carrier. And on that sobering day when he discovered a partial truth about himself, he decided to hide his fevers from Clovis. How many he had secretly suffered in his room in that first house in Bermondsey, he could not count. Now, when it arrives with its blistering heat, he retreats to his studio, locks the doors, and sweats it out alone.
From the moment she first appeared, tainting the doorway of Lawless House, he couldn’t bear to be near Clovis Fowler. Those first years, she did not often touch him, but sometimes she placed her hand on his shoulder, or held him down until he understood what was required of him – the needles, and the lancet, and the scissors – and then he almost fainted from nausea. Her touch was worse than any bloodletting.
She often asks if he ever suffers from the fever to which he always replies that he does not, so convincingly that she only nods and then reminds him to let her know if that should change. He would never tell her the truth, because darkness rises in everything she does.
‘Rafe. It’s time to go. And we need to hurry, I think my long sleep is coming.’
Mockett and Rafe both supress the urge to acknowledge her remark. They have waited months for her next sleep to arrive. They have all waited.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
On a balmy evening two weeks later, both Finn and Clovis approach the end of their long sleep.
‘That wasn’t supposed to happen,’ Jonesy says. ‘Both of them at the same time. Now what are we going to do?’
‘Before he fell asleep Finn insisted we continue as planned. That’s what we’ll do,’ Rafe tells him.
‘But he’ll be in danger,’ Willa adds.
Owen Mockett arrives to make their group complete.
‘Have you locked her in?’ Mockett asks.
‘Yes, and she was completely unaware,’ Rafe says.
The day after she fell asleep, Jonesy and Rafe moved Clovis from her bedroom into the anteroom, the small room sandwiched between the annex and the kitchen. They locked the door to the annex, and then locked the door to the kitchen. The room is bare but for a few boxes of books; there is nowhere in the space where the phials may be hidden. Willa searched Clovis for her chatelaine and a phial but nothing was concealed in her dressing gown.
‘This would be an excellent moment for a whisky,’ Mockett says.
‘If anyone needs a drink, that’ll be me.’ Finn joins them.
‘Finn!’ Rafe says. ‘Maybe we should call this off until her next sleep, when you don’t need the drops, too.’
‘No. I want to do it,’ he addresses them all. ‘I’m at peace with this.’
Mockett opens his physician’s bag and begins to lay out a stethoscope, a blood-pressure cuff, a leather headband with a mirror, and a tongue depressor.
‘Good Christ, Owen,’ Finn says.
Mockett throws his hands up. ‘I don’t know what to expect.’
A quick rapping on the kitchen door restrains them.
‘Finn? Open the door, Finn.’
‘We want the phials, Clovis.’
‘Open the door.’
‘Not until you tell us where the phials are.’
She doesn’t respond. Clovis hears breathing on the other side of the door, and the creaks in the floor as they adjust their weight. Now food is being prepared; they speak in low tones. Is that Mockett? Yes. He’s there as well. She’s ravenous. Bacon sizzles, there is toasting bread, a kettle is on. The intensity of hunger after the long sleep gnaws at her. How purposeful they are.
‘Finn, I want to speak to you alone.’ She raps on the door again.
He nods to the others to give them privacy.
‘They can’t hear you. What is it?’
‘I can’t give them the phials. It’s too dangerous.’
‘How so?’
‘Think about it. Willa, out there in the world not bothering to disguise herself. One day someone will become too curious. And Jonesy. God, Jonesy. He will choose the wrong man, the wrong place, and they will lock him up and then what will happen? Don’t you see the danger?’
‘I see that you’re frightened everyone will leave you. Give them to us, Clovis.’
‘No.’
The pains begin an hour later. Finn doubles over as if he’s been punched. Clovis tries to stifle a moan but it escapes. A harrowing, haunting sound that shocks them.
Mockett wants to check his heart, but Finn waves him away.
‘Water,’ he whispers.
Willa, who fetches it, shakes at the sight of Finn in such agony and spills the water all over herself.
A scream pierces through the anteroom door and lands on all of them. Willa weakens.
‘Isn’t there another way?’ She paces, her fingers counting and tapping.
‘No,’ Finn says. Then he puts his hand to his mouth. His tongue has thickened. His fingers curl up so that he cannot use them. They watch, stunned, as his hand turns to something claw-like covering his mouth.
Rafe goes to the door. ‘Clovis, tell us where the phials are. You don’t have much time left.’
Silence.
‘Is she dead?’ Jonesy asks.
‘Rafe, unlock the door. She’s your mother for God’s sake,’ Mockett implores him.
Again Finn says no. His eyes roll back in his head.
‘This must stop now. His pulse, and his heart, they’re poor.’ Mockett shakes his head.
A weak sound persists against the door. They cannot see that Clovis lies against it in the foetal position. Her foot taps for attention. Urine seeps from the bottom edge of the door.
‘Open it,’ Finn rasps.
Mockett quickly opens the door to the anteroom. Clovis points to the opposite door that leads into the annex. He helps her to stand and she whispers the location. Steadying her body against the wall she watches Mockett search the tool shelf for the large tin of polishing wax.
‘In here?’ he asks.
She nods.
He opens the tin and takes out a small package wrapped in newspaper and ope
ns it.
‘One? Just one phial?’ he asks with an incredulous gasp. ‘Where are the others?’
She manages a smug smile before she doubles over again in pain.
LONDON
1956
CHAPTER FIFTY
The room is dripping in tat. A frayed lampshade sends a sickly, yellow glow into a grey corner that rivals the afternoon’s clouds. Puckering across the single bed a dingy, blue blanket fails to disguise the lumpy mattress. A weathered, Lusty chair, meant for a garden and cocktails, sits beside a small, unused Victorian fireplace in this rented room in Pimlico. It’s noisy, a bit smelly, and a hidden paradise. Kay Starr sings from a beaten up portable gramophone. Two men stand entwined in a small moon-shaped space in the centre of the room. To dance naked is unbearably exciting. Jonesy lets David take the lead.
‘I love your long brown cock. It’s the longest I ever seen.’
‘And I love your short fat red one.’ Jonesy laughs.
David smacks Jonesy’s buttocks hard. ‘Are you laughin’ at mine?’
‘That hurt. No. I said I love it, didn’t I? I love you.’
Jonesy missteps, longing to hear if maybe today David will requite his love.
After David’s hungry mouth and his short, square body are satisfied, he chooses another record, snaps it across his bare thigh, and throws the pieces onto the floor.
‘I hate Doris fuckin’ Day. That’s all Tammy ever listens to. Fuckin’ Doris Day.’
Jonesy ignores the mention of David’s fiancée.
‘I’ll go out and get those cakes you like.’ Jonesy wipes himself with a towel and pulls his trousers on.
‘Get three of them lemon ones for me. I’m hungry. Bring us a tea.’
‘Whatever you want.’
Jonesy makes no eye contact with any of the other men he passes in the dim corridor or on the stairs. This is a careful house; a room to let by the day doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a safe haven for two men to have sex. They don’t wish to give the discreet landlady any reason to reconsider her business with them.
Uneasy in Pimlico, Jonesy walks swiftly past the rubble of building work. Each time he comes here, and it takes him forever because the Tube hasn’t reached these parts, he discovers a little more of the area that borders his former miserable nine years of incarceration. He would have liked to witness the destruction of that gruesome fortress and shudders with wonder at how the four of them were released with their sanity intact. He knows how they survived physically, those two little magical drops, but he was so often sick with despair. The kind of despair he feels today, sore from the reminder that his rough lover upstairs will be married soon. Jonesy conceals his hurt in David’s presence. Lust is a healing companion.
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