I must take you away from this place, my love. I must bring you somewhere clean and safe, somewhere in the light.
And then it starts raining. We almost run down the length of another long, long street, dodging men and women, some of them alone, some in couples, some drunk. Then we turn a sharp left into an utterly dark narrow alley. Gabrielle’s grip on my hand tightens to such a point that it hurts. Then we turn left again into an even narrower covered passage, and then out and right into a street flanked by brick houses, three stories high, and by a long line of lower shops or warehouses. It is not so very late, but there are only few lit windows in the houses, as if much of the business in the district takes the people outdoors at this time of night, even in dirty weather such as this. I thought Dartrey Road was bad, but this is far, far worse. I am desperately at sea here, in a city I don’t recognize, and when Gabrielle stops at a narrow door squeezed between two shuttered shop-windows, and starts fumbling with a key, I have a moment of hesitation. I wonder if I made a terrible mistake, if she thinks that I merely want her to do … well, whatever it is that whores do with men in their rooms at night.
“Gabrielle, listen,” I start, but she shushes me hurriedly.
“Not here. Inside.” She has unlocked the door, but she still holds it shut. “You listen to me, Nathaniel. You be quiet, all right? Don’t make a noise. If you say a word or make a sound we are dished.”
She eases the door open cautiously, like a thief stealing into a dark house. I wonder if this is indeed where she lives, or what.
Past the door there is a hallway I suppose, utterly dark, and Gabrielle takes my wrist in her cold fingers to lead me along, but we haven’t done three steps before a gleaming, fitful blade of light cuts in from a door opening on the right. The hallway takes on a lurid shade of arsenic green as the door opens wider, and then an extraordinary apparition comes out of the room, like a particularly grotesque female impersonator at the music hall. It is an elderly woman, tall, and very portly. Her face is painted so far from any resemblance to humanity, and has such a wicked cast to it in the flickering green light, that I’d cross myself if I still believed in God. As it is, I blink twice and entirely forget to turn my eyes away as she thrusts her lamp forward and looks me up and down. I can’t begin to understand how this bewildering piece of paintwork was contrived. I wish I could study her in broad daylight, but then thinking about it, I’d rather not, after all.
“Mrs. Gride,” says Gabrielle, with a quaking voice.
“Mr. Kenny. Ahem. Miss. I did say, no work in the house.”
“Yes. No. I know, but this is not work…”
“What then, charity?” asks the bewildering woman, chuckling, now, with the filthiest chuckle I ever heard in my life. “He looks like he badly needs one, poor chap. But rules is rules. If you bring one home, then all the girls will do the same, and before you know it, it’ll be the knocking shop all over again, and I am done with all that, you know? I keep a quiet, respectable house now, humble, as you know, but respectable. I don’t mind what your business is, yours and the girls’, as long as it stays out of the house.”
“Oh, I know, I know, but, oh mercy, please, please, please for this once, mercy…”
I hear nothing else, as Gabrielle leaves me standing in the entrance and steps closer to the landlady, murmuring so fast, and in such agitation of spirits that the words tumble out over one another, but I guess something significant must have passed between them because Gabrielle turns to grip my wrist again, and pulls me forwards, towards the narrow stairs.
“Come quick. And quiet. Be quiet.” She goes on ahead of me in the dark, and we mount, one, two, three more flights until a rickety landing under a skylight. The rain drums down like grapeshot now, and leaks in, dropping into a small basin, no, actually a cracked china chamber-pot, barely visible in the gloom, ready to be stepped into, like a trap. I hope whoever placed it here did not use it first.
“Step ‘round, take care,” she says, hitching her skirts higher, and opens a narrow door on the far side of the landing.
Behind the door is a small garret, barely lit by the murky nocturnal gloam of another skylight. She draws me well into the room to close the door, and I almost split my skull open against a low sloping beam.
“Stay put,” she whispers softly. “Don’t move, you’ll just crash into something.”
She busies herself for a moment. I can hear her moving about, her skirts swishing. I don’t know if she can see in the dark, like a cat, or if she just knows the whole house by heart. There are the scratch and sizzle of a match and then the flickering light of a candle illuminates the place wall to wall. One candle is enough, indeed—it’s such a small room.
The walls and ceiling are stained with damp, as if the house is slowly rotting on its foundations, but the person who lives here is obviously orderly and neat. Everything is as tidily arranged as the tiny space allows. There is something touching to that neatness, in such a place.
The room must have been papered fifty years ago with leavings from the better apartments downstairs. The wall where the door opens is a dirty pinkish white, studded with blood-red fleur de lys. The adjoining wall sports a mesh of faded orange rosebuds over powder blue. Each pattern is questionable on its own. The corner of the room where they meet is likely to drive me insane, so I look away, to Gabrielle, the one beautiful thing in this absurd house. She is patting her hair more or less dry and studying her face in a small mirror over a tall narrow chest of drawers that obviously serves as her dressing table, too. I stand bent like a highland spruce under the eaves of the roof, uncertain what to do.
“Do sit, Nathaniel, for shame. You’ll do your neck an injury standing there like that,” she says, finally turning around.
There is a chair, but it’s got a skirt draped on its back and folded linen of some sort piled on the seat, so I sit gingerly on the foot-end of the narrow bed.
“Sorry, it ain’t luxurious, is it? It’s all I can offer,” she says. “You had better have stayed home with your books.”
I remain silent. The silence seems to soften her. She has taken off her shawl, and now she comes sitting by me on the bed.
“Why did you come, Nathaniel? That was crazy, crazy, crazy, and stupid. I will do you no good, nor you to me. I told you to stay away from me, didn’t I?”
I don’t know what to say.
I have searched for her everywhere for days. I have worn my soul out in that howling waste of loneliness, and now I am here with her, I do not know what to say.
I came because I need you. And I need you because when I’m with you, the charred darkness that is locked inside me is loosed, and unfolds into transparent green-gold.
That is what I want to say.
But it does sound silly, when you put it like that. It’d be better to paint it. Seriously, I am not cut out to be a poet.
“You do not know what I want. Or what is good for me,” I say, lamely.
“You do not know what I am.”
I laugh quietly. “I know exactly what you are.”
“Oh? What am I, then, Nathaniel?”
I turn to look at her face. Until now I saw nothing but the knees of her skirt, and the tips of her boots where they poked out of the hem. But now I look up and up and up, to her eyes. It should be difficult. My eyes don’t want to go there, not without a sheet of paper and a pencil between us, to give a sense of purpose, of safety to it. But when I look, when I look right into her eyes…
They have this quality, like some jewels, like deep ice, like phosphorescent sea water, to collect the light, even the dim light of this flickering candle, and hold it, like a cup holds pale wine. And in these orbs of glowing blue-green, her pupils are wide, deep and black as midnight. Is it her soul that I see in her eyes? Can you really see a person’s soul in their eyes? I do not know. But I am drawn to those dark pupils like a moth to a light not of this world. In that darkness, in its depth, there is something calling, calling.
“I know,” I
say very slowly, “that you are flawless. Faultless. Perfect. That whatever you are, I would not have you be anything else.”
She is speechless, for once.
“And I do not know how to love you,” I say, quickly, quickly, diving into her silence, before it closes. “I don’t, yet, but I know that I will find a way, if you let me.”
I look down now. I cannot bear to see her eyes as she takes this in, and understands what I mean.
“Nathaniel, acushla…” she whispers, after a silence. “You are so very … good. But you cannot love me.”
And suddenly I am angry.
“What do you know of what I can or cannot do?” I snap, loudly, and she suddenly presses her left hand on my lips.
“Hush, Nathaniel, damn, damn it. Be quiet! You want to have me thrown out of the house?”
My eyes go wide with shock at my own outburst. When she sees that, she makes to take her hand away, but I stop her, and hold her fingers to my lips, the anger gone as quick as it flared. I hold on to that long, lean, beautiful hand, mine now, finally mine. I know every delicate joint of it—I have drawn it so often that it haunts my dreams, like her eyes, like the exquisite curves of her lips. I kiss her fingertips one by one, then catch her right hand, and place it palm to palm with the left. I hold them both between mine, hers so slender and pale, mine darker, rougher, as if we are made from a different substance, I, rude clay, she, pure light. I kiss her joined hands, fingertips to fingertips to lips.
“I can love you if I want, and I will, if you let me. Just let me. I beg you, I beg you.”
“But, Nathaniel, Nathaniel, listen to me…”
“I know, I know, I know, I am not that simple,” I say, over and over, until I realize that words will bring us nowhere, that I am not good enough with words to make her listen, and that now I am here, now that I am so close, I don’t want to talk anymore. I take her face in my hands, and I kiss her. For a moment she holds back, stiff, with shock or surprise, I cannot say. Her hands are spread on my chest, and I don’t know if she’ll push me away or pull me close.
I am poised in the frightening uncertainty of the moment, ready to let her go if she pushes—I am no brute—but ready, nay, desperate to lean into the kiss if she lets me … and then her fingers sink into the lapels of my coat, holding, and her lips part under mine.
Her mouth is like the fruit you pick from the spreading, ever-thirsty trees of Sicily, of Greece, of Cyprus, fruit so drenched with sun that its skin is like shattered velvet and its flesh melts on the tongue, and runs like honey, like warm sugar, like sweet, sweet wine.
There is no such fruit in any garden of England.
****
Gabrielle
I thought that he knew nothing, that he was innocent.
But now I see that it was me, it was me all along who knew nothing.
This kiss, this kiss that takes me like the sunshine takes the morning, gently at first, thinly creeping, and then golden hot and dazzling, this kiss, I am lost in it, in him.
I truly know nothing.
Only that nobody ever kissed me like this.
Why?
Because I’m a whore?
Because I’m a man?
Because nobody loved me before?
And I know he loves me. I know he does. I knew, when I walked out of his door for the last time, that it would break his heart. I don’t deserve him, and yet he’s come for me, he still came to find me, when I told him to stay away. Oh, Nathaniel.
I am like heated wax in this kiss. Something that was frozen stiff inside me is softened, so he can leave his mark upon me, like a seal in the wax, like a potter in the clay. His tongue explores my lips like a brush painting a delicate picture, and like I did so many times before for him, I open myself to his need. I let this mysterious energy flow between us, I let him free to find what he is searching for, ever so gently, ever so passionately.
Can this be it? Can this be, quite simply, what he wanted all along?
I do not think it’s so simple. I am finally understanding that this man is really not as simple as I thought, and when very gently he puts his arms around me—a gentleness I’ve never known—drawing me closer to his chest, instead of backing away as I would have done just yesterday, I find myself returning his embrace, opening wide to his tongue.
I have been used by so many men in so many ways. But I have never known what it was like to be loved, cherished, revered like this.
“Oh, Nathaniel,” I whisper softly, in his neck, when he breaks the kiss. Nothing else. I don’t know what to say. I just let him hold me. Perhaps I will have an epiphany and think what to do next, about him, about Browdie, and all of it. For now, I am just so tired of running, so tired of the cold dark streets out there. I just lean into his embrace, and let go—of everything.
He’s warm. There is a faint smell of damp wool, and dust, and coal-smoke about him. To me, it’s the smell of the cozy afternoons I spent in his rooms. He has not shaved in days and his cheek is rough on my neck, but there is something strangely comforting even in that.
“My dear, my dear,” he whispers, finally, pushing me away just far enough that we can look at each other, and he caresses my cheeks, my ears, my neck, but tenderly, tenderly.
He’s so kind, and so desperately earnest, and I know that I cannot give him what he wants. I cannot be his model, his muse, his love. It would be sweet. It would be the loveliest thing that ever happened to me. But it would be the end of both of us.
I should never have brought Nathaniel home. Why did I bring him here tonight? Because I was scared, scared that Browdie might be out there, somewhere, lurking in the darkness, so scared that I stopped thinking, and did this incredibly unwise thing. Because now he’s here, there’s only one way this night can go. And tomorrow his heart will break again, his and mine, both.
“Gabrielle,” he whispers, and I look up at him. “What happened? Why did you stop sitting for me? What did I do wrong?”
I shake my head weakly.
“Nothing. You did nothing wrong. It’s just that, it’s just that, it’s just that… Oh, Nathaniel.” I heave a deep sigh, and pull him close, to kiss him. It seems easier than talking, easier than thinking, easier than unravelling this tangle. He returns the kiss with the same wonderful tenderness, as if he fears to hurt me, and that makes me bolder, and I search his mouth deeper, leaning into that kindness. I am not used to tenderness anymore. Maybe I never was. It’s not as if there’s ever been much of it in my life. Sure, there are men who want it, even out there on the street, and when they want it, you try to give it to them, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.
Nathaniel is so profoundly real, and utterly earnest.
He’s still wearing his rain-dewed coat, and it’s making me and my bed wet. I didn’t even notice until now. I tug at it, and he gets rid of it, and hangs it at the foot of the bed, together with a satchel he carried under it.
“What’s that?” I whisper.
He shrugs. “Pencils. Paper. I thought I’d take them along. Just in case I found you… I needed to believe that I would find you.”
It is embarrassing, but there are tears welling behind my eyelids. What a pathetically sentimental sort of whore I am, after all. I give a small cough, to keep my composure, and I smile, teasing. “Did you come just to draw me, then?”
He hesitates, and then he shakes his head. “I don’t know… I came to love you. If you would let me. But I will be content with drawing, if … if you don’t want me. Just, please. Please don’t shut me out of your life.”
He kisses my eyelids one by one, and runs his fingertips down the sides of my neck.
And then, with a questioning glance, he opens the top button of my jacket.
I take care of the rest of the buttons, because his hands are trembling.
So are mine, a little.
I am still not sure that he realizes what I am. He has truly seen the woman in me, like nobody ever did before … so much so that I still cannot believe that he
has seen the man. I do not know if I can undress for him, or if I must hide forever. Not that there is much of a forever for us. Our forever will be over with the morning light.
But until then…
I am not sure how to touch Nathaniel. I want him to kiss me again, I want him to hold me, I want him to look at me that way he does in his studio, when he watches every line of my body and sees a woman. And at the same time, I wish he would see me for what I am, all that I am, once and for all, so I don’t have to hide anymore.
So I shed my jacket, and the blouse underneath. I shiver a little in the cold when my arms are bared, and he runs his warm palms on my goosebumps, soothing them.
Then I stand to unbutton my skirts and petticoat, and untie my bustle, and I let it all swish down around my knees, and I stand here naked, in my small chemise, and stockings and corset, and my boots.
I am still silk-skinned and woman shaped.
Except for that one thing.
I steal a glance at his face—I can hardly bear to look at his eyes, standing here so naked—thinking he will wince, or frown. Or scream, what do you know. You can never tell, with a sensitive artistic temperament.
But he does none of these things.
Instead he goes to his knees on the floor, like a man about to propose in some play, and with a sort of mute reverence he strokes my thighs and my buttocks, and the back of my knees, through the stockings. When he lays a kiss and then his forehead on the hard of my hip, where the bone pokes sharply under my skin, I put my hands on his crazy hair, and hold him there, and with the barest, lightest touch of his fingertips he caresses the front of my corset, on my belly, and then down, down.
And to my acute embarrassment, the damn thing shivers to his touch, stiffening, rising.
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