So now one of the tracks his mind was flying off on was how it wasn’t just the vote women wanted. No, now he could see with unhappy clarity that what they wanted was to be treated like equal human beings, and not like someone’s possession. Why, he reckoned that there were more laws in place saying what a man could do to his horse or his dog than there were ones saying what a man could do with his wife.
He knew better than to toss and turn in his bed; it served no purpose, it frequently made his stump ache worse. He’d learned long ago that when a black night came, the only thing he could do was to lie there and wait it out.
It wasn’t fair to Katie. What had Katie ever done to deserve what was happening to her now?
It wasn’t fair to him, either. They had everything arranged! Within months, she would be free, and they could be married! What harm had he ever done—
But then, he knew what he had done to deserve this. Granted, it had been in war, and soldiers were always told that God was on their side, and anything they did in war was for the sake of God and country. But he had known better, and he had never believed that. There were things that were immoral, and wrong, and even heinous, and you didn’t do them even if you got thrown in the stockade and court-martialed over them.
He hadn’t done those things—but—he wasn’t innocent either. He hadn’t done harm on purpose, but. . . .
Well . . . harm by omission. I followed orders and said nothing, in Africa. I wasn’t the one who was rounding up kiddies and women and burning them out and herding them into prison camps to starve and die—but I didn’t say anything either, and I didn’t do anything about it. Could I have found a way to make people see the terrible things we were doing there? Probably, if I tried hard enough.
Maybe all of this was his fault, for entangling Katie’s life with his. . . .
Maybe if he gave her up . . . maybe if he promised God he would be nothing but a friend to her and put distance between them. Maybe God would be merciful and stop heaping punishment on her that was rightly due to him.
The curtain moved in the breeze from the sea; heat and sorrow weighed down every limb like a blanket of stones. Distant noises of people moving through the streets only served to remind him that other people were happy, and that he did not deserve to be.
The night stretched on, and despair closed over him like the dark waters of a pitiless sea.
• • •
Katie had resorted to pulling a pillow over her head despite the heat in the loft, and trying not to hear the noises coming from the bed. It wasn’t just the squeals and the cries and the panting and grunts, nor the thumps and creaking of the bed, either, it was smells she couldn’t wall out. Dick’s violet hair oil, some cheap, nasty scent one of the women had drenched herself with, sweat, and an intense and unmistakable musky odor that she knew all too well. The smells were actually worse than the sounds, because they seemed to get right inside her.
The heat in the loft was not helped by the embarrassment and shame that permeated her, shame that made her whole body seem on fire. Oh the shame! She hated all of that, and yet, there was a part of her that was going, but if that was Jack . . .
But eventually, all the sounds stopped, and she got used to the smells, and once a sort of silence settled over the cottage, she actually dozed off for a little.
She woke, as if shocked awake by a bucket of ice-cold water to the face, to a sickening and familiar sound—the meaty sound of a hand smacking into a face.
Only this time it wasn’t her face that was being struck.
There was only a little light in the cottage now, from one of the gaslights turned down low. There wasn’t much danger that Dick would spot her, so she wiggled to the edge of the loft and peered over.
There was only one floozy in the cottage now; where the other had gone, she had no idea. The woman was sprawled ungracefully on the floor, wearing nothing but her bloomers and chemise, her face already going black and blue on the side where Dick had slapped her. She was a dirty blonde—literally. It looked to Katie as if she hadn’t washed her hair in six months, or her body in three. It also looked as if she never scrubbed off the paint on her face, only put on a new layer over the old. Her underthings were dingy and stained, and the hems were all out and fraying.
Her eyes were screwed up tightly with rage—at least the one that hadn’t started to swell closed was—and her mouth snarling under the paint. She made a snatch for something in the puddle of clothing beside the bed. “Ye right bastard!” she spat. “I’ll cut ye fer that!”
Before she could make good on her threat, Dick had reached out, with that fast grabbing motion Katie knew so well, hauled the whore up from the floor by her hair, and methodically punched her once in the stomach. That drove the breath out of her, both her hands flew wide-open. A knife clattered to the floor out of the right, and one of Katie’s little keepsakes out of the other.
Dick punched her again and she gasped with pain.
But Dick was far from done. This was his cold rage, much more frightening than his hot anger. He didn’t say anything, just kept hitting her. It was exactly as he’d beaten Katie last night; the same silent rage, the same methodical blows, with the sole exception that with this woman, Dick wasn’t trying to spare her looks or her ability to dance. He was striking her where he pleased, taking care only to not kill her on the spot.
She couldn’t even scream, because he had driven all of the breath out of her body, and kept driving it out every time she managed to get a lung-full.
He’d done that to Katie, too. It was his way of keeping her quiet, so no one knew he was beating her.
When he was finally satisfied with his handiwork, he opened the back door, threw the whore out into the scrap of yard back there, and threw her clothing after her. Then he shut the door, dusted his hands like a man who is pleased with a job well done, and turned.
She knew instinctively that he was going to look up, and pulled her head back out of sight before he could. She didn’t know if he would be angry to catch her watching, spying on him, or if he would consider the beating an object lesson for her. He had to know she had heard everything. She could only compromise by staying out of sight, and letting him imagine she was cowering with fear in her bed.
It wouldn’t be that much of an untruth. She certainly was shaking with terror, chilled despite the heat.
She waited until she heard the sound of a bottle being uncorked followed by noisy swallowing, and looked cautiously down again, just easing her head over the edge of the loft in tiny increments so that he wouldn’t be alerted by movement.
As she had thought, he had uncorked the bottle of gin and was guzzling it. She pulled her head back again, just as slowly, before he got a chance to see her watching him. “Spying on him,” he would certainly call it, if he caught her now. And despite having worked his anger out on the whore, there would be some sort of punishment for her.
Then he turned out the light and she heard the bed creaking under his weight.
She lay there, staring up at the darkness, her body aching—half from her own beating, and half in sympathy for the one she had watched. She knew exactly what every one of those blows felt like, and although the whore had been caught stealing, surely the theft hadn’t merited being pummeled half to death. Katie thought for certain she would never be able to get to sleep after all that.
But exhaustion was too much for her. It had been a long day, full of anxiety, punctuated by dread. She fell into a restless, half-aware “sleep” in which she was conscious of every sound from the room beneath her. The only difference between last night and this was that Dick’s heavy body was not beside her, taking up most of the bed, and making her aware every second that she was his slave as surely as if he had bound her with chains.
The sounds of the milkman arriving woke her, and she frantically tried to remember if she had left th
e money out. Because if Dick didn’t have his eggs and butter—
But the sound of clinking bottles as the milkman left new ones told her that she had, and with a surge of relief that made her feel dizzy, she slowly made her way down out of the loft, step by careful step on the ladder, determined not to allow it to creak. She had heard Lionel at the door when he had come to find out where she was. She had heard every word, and if there was a single thing that she was grateful for, it was that Lionel had put on a show, had made up a story of a rehearsal, and had fabricated the persona of the kind of “boss” that Dick would grovel around. Thanks to Lionel, she knew she was expected at the hall at nine, and to get there she would have to leave at eight. Above all, Dick must have his breakfast before she left, and a stack of ham and cheese sandwiches already made in case he wanted them for luncheon. She would have to get very busy.
She opened the back door—the milkman went through the alley, not the main street. This was not the sort of neighborhood where those here wished to be reminded of the existence of tradesmen.
The sun was up in a cloudless blue sky, and it was already as warm as a decent summer day should have been, which meant the heat was going to be punishing again. She got the container of eggs nestled in enough hay that they wouldn’t get cracked, with a pat of butter wrapped in white paper atop them, then picked up the glass bottle of milk and the smaller one of cream. Until she had come here, she had never seen milk and cream separated before, nor in glass bottles. When she’d gotten milk, you just got a jar or a little pail and went to the farmer, and if you wanted cream, you skimmed it off the top. Well, you did if you knew of a farmer who was friendly to Travelers—and if you didn’t, you did without.
Living in the city and buying things from shops had been a revelation. She was glad Mrs. Buckthorn had walked her through it all—passing her off as a new kitchen maid getting training.
The little bit of backyard had a very low wall around it and no gate. It was scarcely more than a bit of lawn surrounded by a knee-high stone fence. In that, it was identical except for size to the other bits of back garden up and down the block. People in offices didn’t want to have to tend to gardens too.
There was no sign of the woman that had been tossed into the little yard last night, not even so much as a few threads or a lost ribbon. So at least she hadn’t died out there of her injuries, and she’d been sound enough to get away somewhere.
She wondered how badly Dick had hurt the whore. She wasn’t going to be the type to go to the law over being beaten, of course; she was a prostitute, and they’d just as likely arrest her. They certainly wouldn’t take her complaint seriously, and in the unlikely event that someone did come around to make inquiries, Dick would just say he caught her stealing, and that would be the end of it for her—she’d be taken up as a thief. Katie felt both obscurely sorry for her, and grateful. Dick had needed someone to take his rage out on last night, and for once, it hadn’t been her. In the past, the women he’d bedded had been women he didn’t dare beat; wayward wives or daughters, servant girls in love with his oiled hair and muscles. He could take them to bed, but he didn’t dare lay a hand on them—they could call it rape, show the bruises and be believed. So all his rage had been worked out on Katie.
But then she felt guilty for feeling glad that it had been someone else, not her, that had suffered.
Then she was shamefully grateful all over again, for she was only half as sore as yesterday, and the bruised places were starting to heal. And the thought came to her unbidden, a wish, almost a prayer—if only Dick would bring home more loose women, every night, and beat them instead of her! It would be worth every penny he paid for them, if only—
Then she was appalled at her own thoughts. How could she wish that on anybody? What was wrong with her? She was a horrible person!
But if only—
All the time she was thinking these confused thoughts, she was working, working; she didn’t dare stop for a minute, not even though her own stomach was growling at the rich smell of the bacon she was frying. Her hands worked without her even thinking about it, frying the bacon, cutting ham for the sandwiches, working frantically to get the meal ready so she would have time to get herself ready. She knew that the smell of the bacon would wake him, and it did; she felt his eyes on her as she set aside the bacon on his plate, then fried, first the eggs, then the bread in the grease. She turned with two brimming plates, identical to the ones she had served him yesterday, to see him watching her, face expressionless.
He was sitting up in bed, waiting for his food, his hair in oily curls, with a bit of the bedspread over his lap, not for modesty, but to keep his bits from getting burned by the hot plate.
She brought him the plates and then turned to get his tea, when he seized her by the wrist. “I s’pose yer thinkin’ Oi’m a wrong ’un fer bringin’ them hoors ’ere,” he growled, eyes narrowed. The sweat-and-musk smell coming from him was overpowering. It made her feel sick. She fought it back. She dared not show it.
“You can do anything you like,” she whispered. “This is your house. It doesn’t matter what I think.”
The scowl turned to a smirk. “Demned rioght!” he agreed. “Oi say wut goes, yeah! Oi wanta hoor, I gotta roight t’hev one!”
“Yes, Dick,” she replied. “You say what goes, and you do what you like. Let me get your tea before it gets cold.”
He let go of her wrist, then, and she hurried over to the stove and the teakettle. Strong enough to take the silver off the spoon, and three sugars, that was what he liked first thing in the morning. She brought him the tea mug. He was already finished with the first plate of food, and she took away the empty to the sink, starting the washing-up. “I made you sandwiches for luncheon,” she said, looking fearfully over her shoulder and pointing at the pile on a plate on the sideboard, covered by a glass bowl as she had seen at the pub, so they wouldn’t get stale. He began to scowl.
She knew what he was thinking. He had expected her to be here to make him his lunch and his tea. He hadn’t thought it through—well, he never thought anything through that he didn’t have to. He was accustomed to getting his way in everything.
Except . . . except when a boss was telling him what to do. So that was how she would phrase it.
Before he could say anything, she added “It takes me an hour to go to the hall by ’bus, and I’m only allowed an hour at noon.” Then she added, thinking quickly, “The doorman is right there, with his watch in his hand, writing down when we go in and come back for the boss. If I take too long, they take shillings out of my pay.”
As she had hoped, it was the mention of having her pay cut that convinced him. He was still scowling, but it was sullen, not angry. “Mis’rable bastards,” he grumbled. “Bosses! All alike.”
“Yes, Dick,” she agreed, and came for his second plate, bringing him a couple of the cheap cakes she had bought that made his eyes light up. He was as greedy as a child for sweets. “The last show ends at nine. I have to make sure all the things are properly put up, and then I have to take the ’bus home. If I hurry and run for the bus, I can catch the one that leaves at ten. I can’t possibly be home before eleven. Do you want to wait that long for your supper? There are fish and chips stalls. . . .”
If he had a confederate at the hall, he already knew this; this was something of a test—
“Oi’ll get me own supper,” he growled. “Jest git here quick. I got plans.”
Part of her was dismayed by this—it meant that tonight would probably replicate last night, with the shame that made her stomach churn and the twisted . . . yes, admit it . . . twisted arousal of it. Part of her was glad—it meant that someone else would be enduring him. She resolved to bring home some cotton wool and wax from the hall to make earplugs with, and soak a handkerchief in the lavender cologne that Suzie had given her. Maybe if she couldn’t hear and smell what was going on . . .
She had left the cheese, butter, milk and cream up here rather than taking them down to the cellar. They might spoil, but she didn’t want to take them down there. He didn’t know there was a cellar, and for some reason she didn’t want him to know. Of course, she couldn’t possibly hide down there; he’d tear the place apart looking for her, and he’d find the cellar right away. . . .
Or he’d go straight after Lionel as he had threatened.
But somewhere in the back of her mind, there was a ghost of a thought. Not even as much as an idea, just a thought, that if he didn’t know about it, she could use it somehow.
He wouldn’t think to look for it, maybe; he’d never lived in a house before. She wouldn’t have known it was there if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Buckthorn and her explanation of what it was for. So as long as she did nothing, he would have no idea that the rug covered a secret.
And there was another reason to make sure he didn’t know about the cellar. He’d take one look at the place and know that he could take her down here, drop the hatch, and no one could hear her scream. She had the bone-shuddering feeling that there were things he hadn’t done to her yet purely because she would scream, she wouldn’t be able to help herself, and he knew that screams brought unwelcome attention. He’d have to explain himself. Someone might try to interfere, law or no law.
And what if he saw the cellar and decided it would be a good place to keep a woman captive? Not her, of course, he couldn’t do that and still enjoy the money she made. But a whore, or more than one? Whores could go missing and no one would care. He could keep women down there, tied up, made captive—and that was against the law. She’d be part of that. He would make her part of that. He’d probably make her feed and care for them.
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