The Corn

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  But when I heard someone running up the stairs outside, I knew it was not the shopkeeper next door. The footsteps were doubled. Two people. I lay back down again and mentally surrendered to whatever was about to happen. A sick dizziness blurred both vision and sound, but I heard the door being unlocked and recognised the voices as they came into the room.

  Then someone kicked me again, a pointed toe sharp between my legs. Bembitt’s voice was hoarse, as though aroused, but he said, “She’s a mess. I don’t want her now. Beat the bitch and I’ll watch.”

  I kept my eyes squeezed very tightly shut. The other voice said, “I already beat the whore into strips. I’ve had enough. Well, get rid of her somewhere. I don’t want this coming back on me.”

  “You did it,” Bembitt’s voice again. He sounded, if anything, faintly amused.

  “That’s as maybe,” said Bryte. “But it was your idea. My idea was to be nice to the silly cow and keep on till she accepted me.”

  “Well clearly, you’re no appealing husband,” Bembitt sniggered, “since your plan didn’t work after all that time trying. My plan worked, didn’t it.”

  “So you think of a way to get rid of the bitch.” The pause lengthened as I lay, eyes squeezed shut and legs squeezed close. Finally, as though feeling some guilt about what he had done to me, he mumbled, “Well, shrew had it coming. If she’d agreed to the marriage, I’d have followed through in good faith. Well, more or less. I’d have started the business with your help and kept her in the shop until it stopped paying, unless something else came up. Maybe she’d have done all right out of it too if she’d kept her mouth shut.”

  “A real marriage, after all?” Bembitt sounded surprised.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Bryte. “You’ve forgotten I’m a Fixer? I’d have fixed it up right and tight. But as long as the profits kept coming in. I might even have stuck to it, who knows? If the bitch was obedient and worked hard. With ready money building up and a willing fuck each night, I would have kept her. She’s got tits as flat as biscuits, but she’s pretty enough.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Bryte laughed. “It’s only a beating. Every man beats his wife. She’ll mend. They reckon in Shamm the men beat the women from birth onwards.””

  “Then keep her as a wife,” Bembitt suggested, as if thoughtfully planning a respectable future. “With proper witnesses, you’d never have got out of it, anyway. A marriage is a marriage. You’re not the king, to wed and then deny it at will.”

  “I’m not an idiot either. The witnesses would have failed to turn up at the last minute, and I’d just have taken her hand and said a few words which I could deny whenever I wanted. Down the slums that happens regular enough. But I don’t want her anymore. The bitch tried to turn me down. Took my coin, took my bread, took it all and then rejected me. What a slut – did she think me stupid? Did she think me so besotted I’d take whatever crumbs she gave me? Took the whore out on the town, I did, and paid too. So, what now? This fire and so on was all your idea. So now you have to do something about it.”

  “Like I said,” repeated Bembitt. “You did it. It’s your shit, so it’s your risk. The marriage and taking over the business was my idea, not the rape. And besides, why not just rape the bitch, without all the kicking? She’s black as a bullock’s prick. What if she dies?”

  “Probably best if she does,” sighed Bryte. “Dump her in the river. Do it anyway if you want.”

  Bembitt paused. “Well, I don’t want. Throw a woman alive into the river? What a dumb turd you are. A Fixer you say? Not such a good one, I say. You think she wouldn’t scream? You think no one would notice? What if she floats on down to the council chambers? So fix it.”

  “All right.” Bryte again. “I’ve had my fun, but I won’t kill. You planned this, so now clean it up. If anything comes back to me, I pull you into it with me and that’s a promise. I know too much about your past for you to risk double-crossing me. Now don’t be a cowardly bastard, and just do it.”

  I heard every word. My eyes were tight shut, but I was wide awake and ready to escape if I got the chance. Finally; “All right,” said Bembitt. “I know what to do. Wrap her in that blanket and follow me. And you help. Remember I know a good deal about you too., shit-arsed prick. We’ll do this together.””

  It was the cover from the bed they wrapped me in. Bryte carried me. I was muffled up past my chin, and I could hardly breathe. My body ached as if shattered, and my head was pounding. His touch disgusted me, and I heaved. My face was squashed against the man’s doublet, and I could see the flecked bloodstains. My own blood. I tried desperately to struggle, to wriggle out of his arms, spit in his face, and run away. But instead, I lost consciousness.

  It was probably some hours before I opened my eyes again. When I did, nothing made sense, so I shut them at once and hoped I could disappear and leave the world altogether. Once I accepted that wouldn’t happen, I allowed myself to think again. At least I was lying down. I could feel straw beneath me and the itch of something crawling from it. I could recognise a dirty pallet without seeing it, and so I lay quite still, eyes shut, and breathed deeply. Everything hurt, my head most of all. A heavy burning weighted my body. My joints throbbed and my back and belly ached. My eyes stung. A grinding mill wheel seemed to be dragging my body apart. Every bruise, and there were hundreds, pounded inside and out, as if I was still being kicked again and again. But at least, I thought, they’ve put me in bed and left me to sleep.

  What absurd optimism.

  When I heard a voice, it seemed to be an echo. I could hear only as if from a distance. Then I focused. “Wake up, stupid whore,” said a woman, leaning over me, breath of a sow. “Can’t lie there all day. There’s work to be done and you ain’t fucking dying.” I wished to God I was. There was a smell which insisted and invaded, very stale beer, garlic, dried blood, mouse piss and filth. Nothing was real, and my head began to split. I doubled over, which hurt as well, and vomited. “Fuck,” shouted the same woman’s voice. “This doxy’s spewing everywhere.”

  Someone else came over to me, heavy, tired footsteps stomping on bare boards. A foot nudged at me, not a kick but a gentle, explorative testing, to see to what extent I was alive. I rolled back and looked up. Elderly and mountainous with a face all dimples and pink rumbling layers, she had a yellow stubble across her upper lip and heavy eyelids with no lashes. She bent over me, frowning. “Are you all right, darling?” A voice like a cracked church bell. I didn’t answer because I couldn’t. The fat woman turned to the other who had complained about me. “Leave her alone,” she said. “Can’t you see the girl’s not right? Looks like someone’s roughed her up pretty bad.”

  “Why should I care?” said the strident one. “She ain’t one of us.”

  “She is now,” said the fat one. “And no use to me half dead. So leave her be. She’s only little. I’ll clean her up in a while but let her sleep a bit first.”

  “Who the fuck cares,” objected the first voice. “The men won’t care. Most of ‘em wouldn’t even notice.”

  “You heard,” said the fat woman. “Fuck off and leave her to me.”

  A third woman’s voice, faintly in the background. “Another? Where she come from?”

  The first one called back, “We bought her from the two city Fixers. Promised she were a good-looker once them bruises fade.”

  “Buying more? We don’t need no more. Just means less for the rest of us.”

  The fat woman said, “Enid died last ten-day, poor trollop. Got the measles. Sissy’s run off with a pimp. If we get too low on talent, the plodders won’t come.”

  “They always come,” objected the other. “Pissed. Sober. They crawls in anyhow.”

  I curled back into myself, hugging downwards under the thin cover. It was the blanket David had carried me away in. It was wet with rain and blood. Now it was smeared in vomit, but no one made any attempt either to remove it or wipe it. Beneath it, I was naked except for my torn stockings. Now I was left
alone and soon, from extreme weakness, confusion and exhaustion, I slept.

  When I woke again, there had been few improvements. My head was splitting. Sometimes in the past, I had stood on the riverbank close to the Bridge, watching the heaving current surge between the arches below, too narrow for its depth and power. Floating wooden platforms protected the bridge’s supports, but they also restricted the waters, causing them to bottle up between the pillars. When the tide was high, and floodwaters swept in from its rain swollen source, the river mounted upstream and then tumbled to a murderous drop of five-foot or more between the river either side of the Bridge. It could mean a quick death to risk those thundering brown currents. To challenge that tidal thunder took a brave boatman, or a stupid one. I had seen men drowned. Now that same black swirl was all in my head. The incoming tide of pain behind my eyes was like the rush and swirl of the river beneath the Bridge. The chaos behind my eyes was the cascade of the waters with all their dreadful noise and the onslaught of their relentless surge. My mind was taken and hurled, like the river would snatch a small barge and pound it to splinters against the stone. It was all there, scrambling inside my head. I was drowning too.

  “If she needs a surgeon,” said a new voice, soft and slurred, “they’ll have to pay. But I don’t give a shit. I’m not paying no share.”

  “Who asked you to?” demanded, the fat woman with the blurred, sunken eyes. “I’ll pay, and she can pay me back. I’ll take it straight out of her cut. Now fuck off, the lot of you.” She bent back over me. “Now, my darling. Don’t you let the little turds upset you. I’ll send someone up with gruel later on. You’ll soon feel better again. I’ll not put you to work till you can face it. I’ll know when you’re ready.”

  “Put me to work?” I tried to ask. But she didn’t understand me. I had no strength to talk and the words were just a whispered mumble. She smiled, a smile which disappeared into the wallow of cheeks around her mouth. When she patted my shoulder, it hurt, and I cringed. She stood up and left me then, with a slurp of flesh and a heaving bosom, and I shut my eyes and wondered, desperately, what was real, and what was nightmare, and if reality had any place in the impossibility of what seemed to be going on around me. I didn’t know these people, and I didn’t know what was happening. Sleeping, waking to the same pain, new voices, complete denial, I slept, awoke, slept and woke again, just drifting in and out of consciousness.

  It was sometime later when I realised I was chained. While barely understanding anything, it had seemed the restrictions on my movements were the result of injury. But as I awoke more fully, I saw that a rough circlet of metal around my left ankle secured me to an iron hook in the floor. So I knew I was a prisoner and I knew it was a whorehouse.

  I was given soup. The fat woman brought it and supported me while I drank it. It was tasteless and lukewarm. My stomach lurched. I did not want food, but she insisted. I did not vomit afterwards, but nor did I feel any stronger. A man came. He called himself a doctor. He was dirty and he prodded and stared. I found his examination invasive and embarrassing although he did not attempt to remove the blanket, simply touching me through the thin wool. Yet he treated me with such a complete lack of respect that I decided he had learned his trade by doctoring dogs and farm animals. His fingers were filthy, and the dirt was thick under square, ragged nails. He prescribed nothing. I told him what he should be prescribing and asked if he had an ointment of alum, or of honey and egg white. Leeches were usually applied to blood bruises, but he never recommended such an expense. He looked at me momentarily as if surprised that I had the power of speech, and then left, ignoring what I had said.

  The fat woman cared for me in her fashion. She brought me a chamber pot when I asked and took it away again afterwards. Pissing stung like crazy. I asked if she had aged wine, which I could use as my own soothing ointment, also as an efficient deterrent to likely infections of the many cuts and grazes. She shook her head. This involved a slow swing of flesh which began high around the loose rolls of skin under her eyes, oscillated downwards to the full width of her cheeks and then continued in a pendulum to the jowls which swung like the folds of a gown in dance, finally proceeding to the many layers of chins. The woman probably took my stare for mental incompetence. “Not stale wine, darling. But there’s plenty stale beer, if it’s what you like.”

  I was fed on beer and soup for two days, and I am not sure which felt worse during that time, the physical pain, or the misery. I asked for a pain-killing mixture of brandy and willow-bark, and at first, she had no idea what I was talking about. Eventually she visited the apothecaries. Not my own shop, of course. She bought me what I asked for, but warned me it had cost a great deal, and I would need to pay her back once I started work. Eventually the pain faded, but the misery did not. Since it was only the fat woman whom I saw, and she was kindly in an odd and disconnected manner, I finally begged her to explain what was happening to me and why.

  She looked steadily at me, as if deciding whether it would be wise to tell me the truth, or whether a lie would be safer. I said, “I don’t know why I’m here, but I know who brought me. I shouldn’t be here. I was – I am an apothecary. I had my own business. The man who brought me here raped me.”

  She nodded slowly, with the beginnings of a smile. “Well, darling, you sound like you’ve got your wits back. So I’ll tell you what I can. But I’m not interested in who you were. Who you are now is a whore in Sal’s Stewe.”

  I swallowed bile. “You can’t make me be a whore against my will.”

  “We can here, darling,” she said. “You’re in Bog-dock now. There’s no running to the law nor begging for help. Sal bought you. Not for coin, but the Fixer owed her plenty, and he paid up by bringing you here. Sal took you, so you belong to her.”

  “To buy – or sell – a person – is wicked.” I couldn’t believe it.

  “Happens all the time, darling.” She was patient, sitting beside me like a kindly rolling hillock. “Many folks can’t manage with too many brats, can’t feed the family, so they sell their daughters to some matron as a laundry girl, a cleaner or a whore at the stewe. Maybe the father’s been losing at dice and the tavern says pay up. He’ll sell his daughters to clear the debt.”

  “Let me go,” I said at once. “And I’ll pay back whatever this woman bought me for.”

  “Let’s get one thing clear,” she continued to be patient. “I’m not your friend, girl, nor will take risks I don’t need to. Sal’s the owner here, and she’s a nasty bitch. She makes the rules. She’d never trust you to pay back once free, and nor would I. It’s Big Sal’s stewe, and I used to be one of her whores and did as I was told, just like you will. Not that I was sold into it, I came of my own free will. But my story’s my own, and it’s not one I’ll be telling you, but believe me, it was no easy one, and that’s the same for every wretched girl in here. Now I’m the carer, too old and too fat for anything else. I still do as I’m told. I worked my arse for nigh on twenty-two years, but I hated whoring. I liked getting old, and I ate too much to get fatter and fatter.”

  I just kept crying. The hopelessness I had known after the fire and Feep’s death seemed to be growing blacker. I whispered, “Before I was raped, I was – I was –”

  She interrupted me. “We were all virgins once, darling. But virginity don’t keep you warm in the winter, nor put food on your platter. Working here can do both. Now listen to me, and I’ll help you settle in.”

  Her name was Hawisa, and she held a position of some authority. Now outworn, too old and retired from the business, she ran the place during any absence of her mistress, Bog-dock Sal, who was a working madam with no desire to retire whatsoever. We were in a busy stewe south of the river, where I now belonged. I had been beaten, abducted, and sold.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was a barn of an attic. The pitched ceiling was open to the rafters and the rats climbed them in the night, their useful runways to the stores. Utilised for the storing of grain and flour sacks,
the drying of meats hanging from the beams, and the keeping of all the girl’s personal belongings, bundles carelessly strewn, dirty clothes, broken stools, rusted pots and a variety of weapons, the flotsam of theft and the illegal trade of stolen objects, it was also used for the isolation of prisoners such as myself. I could tell from the hook in the floor and its chain and anklet, that I was not the first.

  I was kept there on my own for several days, left to recover from my injuries while watched by Hawisa. As my body slowly healed, I became more conscious of my surroundings. There were no clear definitions of time’s passing, nor of which blurred nightmare constituted day and which night, but an age seemed to pass with nothing but Hawisa’s visits to interrupt the interminable black depression. At first, I struggled, from habit perhaps, to live. At the same time, I was wishing to die. I didn’t really care what might come after death – total nothingness probably. Or life ever after in the clouds.

  Of course it wasn’t death. I expected what came next, but not the way it happened. Hawisa drugged me first. I understood medicines, I knew poison, I knew drugs. I knew when I was given poppy juice. Not enough to make me vomit, nor enough to make me comatose, but sufficient to make me obedient, sluggish, and amenable to further pain and degradation. Although I was well aware of what I was being given and its probable effects, I accepted the draft for it was a sweet and necessary escape. I had prescribed it myself, though rarely, to those in pain. The possibility of too large a dose worried me not in the slightest, for I would have welcomed the strange sweet dreams it can bring, even the ensuing oblivion. But Hawisa understood opium as well as I did. She helped me sit upright, her huge sweaty palm firmly supporting my back. She pressed the dented tin cup to my mouth, expecting me to object since the taste was unpleasant. But I blinked, recognised, and drank.