The Corn

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “I don’t need the chains,” I whispered. “They rub. They hurt. I hurt so much anyway, in so many places.”

  “Drink up, darling,” nodded the woman. “Them irons will come off as soon as I’m sure of you. Won’t be long now. Be a good girl, and I’ll fix up all that hurts. This drink will take the pain away, I promise.”

  Then, already half doped with the poppy drink, she gave me strong beer, and I slipped happily into a deeper intoxication. It kept me permanently malleable, which was no doubt Hawisa’s reasoning, but it was kind too, in a way. I felt very small and was barely aware of sequences. In fact, few specific details impinged at all.

  At first, I was floating, and the dreary attic turned all to shimmering silver. I felt as perhaps Jak felt, with his wonderful world of haloed colours. The world became momentarily beautiful, but with the inevitability of life, it turned dank and ugly. I shrank, becoming tiny – an insect scuttling beneath my own skirts, antennae breathing in the stench and the sweat from my own body. Then realism impinged. Several men entered together, but they came at me one at a time, and quite peacefully. They wanted a low-cost service, accepting the discomfort of the dirty attic without objection. Even my own obvious slavery did not seem to disturb or inconvenience them. They waited quietly in turn, a shifting, silent queue, coarse unbleached shirts pulled up ready over naked thighs like men in a latrine. Each a minute or so, grunting and pushing, and then gone. No speech and no pretence at formality or friendship. I didn’t see faces. Amongst the stink of sour breath and dirt, another smell filled my nostrils, unpleasant and strange, and I began to recognise the smell and feel of a working man’s seed. Human noises that sounded animal. Sometimes, like a distant echo, I heard my own sobs. It didn’t seem to worry them either that I was crying. Perhaps the opium and the alcohol disguised it, and it was only me who knew about the tears which overflowed inside.

  Sometime following this, I was taken downstairs. I cannot know when it was. Many days later. Again it was Hawisa, helped by another woman. The anklet was removed, and I was no longer a prisoner. I was wrapped in the same bedcover and they took me to a pallet in a half-timbered cubicle. A float of cobwebs, one solid wall behind me, two planked barriers to either side like a stable, and the fourth side open and uncovered. No door. There was a chamber pot, two dirty blankets and a mattress, flat lumps of fleece in a coarse linen envelope. I curled under the covers and closed my eyes. The sticky smell of grime and semen was insistent. The world was reeling. I was offered more beer. I shook my head, already nauseas. They insisted, holding the cup to my lips so that I spluttered and coughed. Then they left me alone. I was desperate not to think, not to allow one single coherent thought to press itself on my mind, not to permit any acknowledgement of what was happening to me. Then the opium wormed deeper within and saved me. Gentle floating, clouds above, below and within, amber reflections, and finally, I seemed to sleep for a year.

  Even afterwards, they kept me drunk, and they kept me drugged. At first, I was terribly frightened, but the poppy made everything easy. The men came and went, but I barely noticed them. The pain lessened. I no longer had the wits to understand or even to care. My mind followed no straight lines, no pathways to conclusion, or avenues to memory. In every sense, I began to belong.

  Unlike the poppy juice I had used for medicines in the past and which I had bought in small flat cakes of soft paste, shining like polished yellow marble and wrapped in green leaf, the opium Hawisa used was bought in squashy lumps, easily crumbled for insidious narceine dreams. I had bought from special traders, but the cheaper stuff was not so hard to find in large spice-markets. The poppies of Eden’s Southern Plains gave solace as soft as their sand dunes. Just a flake squeezed into a few drops of beer flew me to another place far preferable, so the drug quickly took the place of food and left no other appetite. I drank it each morning, my regular breakfast, to lapse gently into a serene calm where my eyes no longer burned, and my stomach no longer rebelled against the customers allotted to me. Hawisa sent in the men, and I no longer cried.

  I did not ask for a stronger dose when, after a few ten-days, I knew I had become habituated. The pain had subsided, and the effects of the drug were enough for mindless complacency while keeping some semblance of my wits. I knew the risks of increasing the strength. So quite easily and quite soundlessly, I became a whore.

  Within those vague layers of tutored acceptance, which then substituted for mind and brain and consciousness, I found my education dull. There was a routine, the stern, strong arm of massive Hawisa somehow reassuring, the poppy juice which remained the most reassuring of all, and a life I could once never have imagined but which slipped in, almost unannounced.

  “You awake, doxy?” One man, heavy muscled, looked into my eyes. I stared back at him in surprise, as if I had not previously realised he was there even though his full weight rested on me.

  I blinked. “No,” I said, “I’m deeply asleep. There are small beetles flying over your shoulder. Pretty and green and smiling at me. Please don’t interrupt.”

  In years past, when I had dreamed of Jak, in the ignorance of my innocence, I had imagined a delicious intimacy. There had been rainbows in my dreams, golden words, magical touching, all the nonsense of romance. The yearning excitement he had aroused that one night during the last days of his sickness when his caresses had awakened something I did not understand, I had never even guessed at the truth of making love, which now had nothing to do with love at all.

  “Just let them get on with it,” advised Hawisa. “It’s them that does it, and they knows what they need. Don’t bother getting involved nor pretending nothing, for they won’t pay more, and don’t care neither. Some of the girls, well they get caught up in the game, moving around and squeezing or making noises and smiling. Do that if you want, but it won’t profit you none.” Well, smiling was the last thing I wanted to do. I loathed intimacy with strangers, but the strangers were rarely strange. They were as dull as everything they did. “There’s no whore who likes it,” Hawisa continued with my education. “Pretending or not pretending, it’s a dirty business without pleasure, not at one end nor the other. But just as well the men like it, or there’d be no more children born to fill the whorehouses in their turn.”

  I was suddenly terrified, “Children?”

  Hawisa showed me. There were sponges. Small and dense and easy to insert though sometimes difficult to extract, they were essential and dealt both with a woman’s monthly courses and the dangers of pregnancy. Washing for re-use was an unwelcome task as they became sticky and clogged, but the house would not supply replacements until they were worn into crumbling pieces. From my past doctoring experience, and before that of helping my mother, I had my own additional herbal safeguards against unwanted pregnancies, although I knew that these were not infallible.

  Once I was permitted to move freely within the house, drifting the creaking stairs, sitting forlorn and aimless in some shadowed corner with the spiders and the beetles, and was accepted as a regular member of the household business, I explained my own unusual talents. Since sickness, small wounds, and the fear of pregnancy were common, the girls were eager and interested. Hawisa first disbelieved but then trusted me and eventually what I asked was answered. So once again, I began to make medicines. The weighing and measuring was less exact, the grinding less refined as my energy, will and concentration wandered, but habit and long experience meant my potions worked.

  As I gained a reputation for being useful, so I quickly discovered that I could refuse to do certain things. Both with the customers and within the house, I could assert small choices, and this freedom became exceptionally important to me. The other women sneered and called me childish, ignorant, and squeamish, but because I made them a variety of ointments and contraceptives and asked little or no monetary payment from them in return, I became gradually respected. Not trusted, and never liked, but allowed my small eccentric sensitivities.

  I ordered the herbs and spices I needed
. I was not yet allowed out of the front door, but other girls went to the market, and they took my shopping list with them. Not on paper of course, for there was none, and none of them could read anyway, but a whore has a good memory for what will keep her safe.

  Demanding a broom, I swept the corners of my own little cubicle. I ordered sulphur from the market and made powders to eradicate lice and fleas from my pallet. There was no bathtub in the building, but I heated water and washed myself, stripping off my clothes by the warmth of the kitchen fire. I had been given a gown, a second-hand tunic of woven flax with a torn neck and no belt. I still wore my stockings, but they were already torn and now frayed into holes around the feet. I washed my shift when I could, but this dragged on the seams, and they began to pull apart.

  “I want no coin in return for my medicines,” I said to Hawisa, “but I want something decent to wear. I want a gown and a clean shift. I want new stockings and real shoes. I want a comb, and I want a warm cloak.”

  “You’ve got that ring and that funny round thing you wear on a cord around your neck,” said Hawisa. “Sell them. I’ll order you fine wool made up to measure at the cheap.”

  “I won’t ever sell this ring,” I said. “And if anyone tries to take it from me, I’ll kill them. The other thing is a talisman from my mother, and no one would pay more than a penny for it anyway. But I need clothes.”

  She grinned. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  This was no licensed stewe. In the midden heaps and crowded alleys of Bog-dock, jurisdiction of the crown was officially claimed, but no law existed. Little observance of regularities was enforced. The legal hours a brothel might operate within the city were considered utterly irrelevant south of the river. The customaries governing a licensed stewe, the strict laws that controlled the profession of a prostitute and her landlady, its emphasis on closure during holy days and the careful check on its practises, was here all completely overlooked. A drunken disturbance in a city stewe might lead to the pillory with the business fined or even shut down permanently. Here, disturbances were expected. Chapel days were our busiest and even the ultimate illegality of a woman sold, imprisoned and forced into harlotry, inspired no more than a blink amongst the incest’s and murders of a thousand wretched lives. Poverty brought slavery of many kinds.

  I treated one of the girls for an infection on her neck. I scraped the green pus away with the blunt edge of her own knife. “You should have come to me before,” I said. “It’s a nasty mess. It must hurt.”

  “Hurts like fuck,” she said. “But I don’t like you and I don’t trust you. I only come to you ‘cos Hawisa says as how you’re clever, and ‘sides, there ain’t nothing more I can do.”

  I couldn’t care less if she didn’t like me. I didn’t like her either. “It’ll get better after a ten-day or two if you keep coming for ointment,” I told her. “How did it happen?”

  “Some bugger bit me while he were fucking me,” she said. “Bugger’s teeth were rotten.”

  All the girls were stupid. “Why do you stay?”

  “Two year back, my old man brung me here for punishment. Didn’t like what I cooked him for dinner. I threw the platter at his ugly head. Hit him too, with potage dripping in his piggy eyes. He dragged me here and told Sal to keep me for a ten-day. I said as I’d stay forever, long as I didn’t have to pleasure my old man ever again.”

  Whoring had many levels, and perhaps absurdly, I found some practices more repugnant than others. Most of the men were little more than cattle themselves, without either the desire or the imagination to initiate any unusual desires, but a few, either tentative or demanding, had diverse needs. I found I could accept the normal. I lay silently rigid on my back, closed my eyes and flew my thoughts into barely conscious clouds. I hoped for nothing. I remembered nothing. But anything different disturbed me and I objected. I wouldn’t let a customer touch my mouth, neither for kissing nor anything else. I refused buggery, I refused to piss in company, and I refused to service any man reeking of his own shit or too cupshotten to stand. I had become a drugged and brainless slut, but after years of innocence, these diverse things still horrified me. I also wanted time off, and when there were few customers, I curled tight and alone and slept without disturbance. If any brute purposefully hurt me, I yelled and scratched until Hawisa came to haul him off. I was therefore in control of some aspects of my life, was pathetically proud of this small grain of power, and because of the inertia of the opium, accepted the rest.

  “I want the little brown-haired slut,” one man said as Hawisa took his coin and stuffed it in the big leather purse. “The pretty one what lies there smiling and looks like she just found a pocket of coins.”

  I could hear him from the passageway, and knew he meant me. But poppy dreams are much sweeter than just finding a purse of Kamps.

  Yet perhaps it was because of my fussiness, and because I clearly believed I was superior to the rest, including Big Sal herself, I was not yet trusted to leave the house. No further attempt was ever made to restrain or chain me, but I was forbidden to approach the main door and threatened with extreme violence if I tried to go outside. I believed the threats. I had nowhere to run to and Hawisa could have stopped me as easily as crush a flea. Instead, my freedom within the sad old building and its three creaking floors seemed sufficient. I told whichever girl was going to market what herbs to buy for me. Hawisa would nod, silently endorsing permission. Fresh vervain to fight fever, mandrake root and henbane leaf to be mixed with one drop of opium to mask pain, vinegar, honey and willow bark for ointments and potions. Alum and cloves were considered too expensive and oil of wormwood too strange, but most of whatever I ordered was brought back to me. They thanked me for their comforts, the curing of a toothache and the easing of a flux. When the men were rough, intentionally or otherwise, and the girls were torn or bruised, I treated their wounds, but I made no friends.

  Hawisa became the closest I had to a friend, but she controlled me, she controlled my obedience, and she controlled the opium and beer which kept me docile. I told her, “You treat me like an infant. I’m not so dumb. And you call me darling, but I’m nobody’s darling, least of all yours.”

  She chuckled, which was a warm throaty sound. “You want me to call you whore?”

  “Just don’t pretend you’re my friend when you’re not.”

  “Make me your friend then, my darling, and I shall help you a little more, and watch you a little less.”

  I stared in silence, then took a deep breath. “You mean – you’d look the other way? Even if – even if I went to the door?”

  But she shook her head. “Not that, for Sal would whip my hide from me. But a little more to eat – a little more to drink. And maybe, just maybe, a walk outside with me very close and your arm tight linked to mine.”

  Whereas most of the girls wandered the streets and taverns to look for custom, men were sent to me. Gruff and tired, slouching out from the stink of their own sweat with their ten-day’s wages to squander, they were desperate for a moment’s squalid ease before trudging to the tavern, and the next day back once more to toil. Some were thieves with a profit to spend, or farmers with a penny to spare from selling apples or eggs after the drudgery of a poor harvest. Men from the tanneries, yearning for release from the stink of urine. Exhausted Diggers working to enlarge an island or build a new one. Train drivers, desperate to escape from the noise of pounding and rattling wheels, and butchers wanting a different smell to blood and torn flesh.

  For months I neither breathed fresh air nor saw the sky. I did not count either days or ten-days, and it was only afterwards that I learned how long I had been trapped there. At the time, it felt like years, and I knew only that winter ground on as surely as I ground pennywort and marigold and the men ground into me.

  Chapter Thirty

  As mid-winter started, I spent the day drunk, witless and buried under a series of heaving bodies, all nameless, faceless and rabid. On the actual day of the great winter Process
ion, I was drugged and virtually insensible. Again there were men, I have no idea how many.

  The season of festivities was only briefly festive, and from a distance. On the evening of the month’s end, and the eve of Probyn, I heard singing in the streets. Staggering to the small scraped parchment window and peering through the grime, I watched the procession winding from the river banks as far as I could see, past the many inns and taverns visible from the casement, the Block, the Crooked Knife, the Dirty Duck and the Baker’s Dozen. I knew all their names now; the Brothers, the Vine and the Drowning Wherry, though had entered not one of their doorways.

  Passing them all in their vestments of blazing scarlet and gold swinging to the march with furred hems just clear of the wet filth below, fifteen palace servants carried the great jewelled Eden-Emblem high, until I thought their arms must ache and drop. The High-Steward sat on a chair atop a small dais all tessellated and fringed in golden velvet with tassels swaying. I knew his face at once and stepped back. Then I laughed at myself. I stood behind a filthy parchment window, my hair tangled, and my face grimed. No one would recognise me. Supported on the shoulders of six priests, the steward waved to the crowds that watched, squashed back against the shop fronts, taverns spilling drunken delight and the cheering of eager arms and awed faces, tapestries thrust flapping and gaudy from every open window. Eager for the blessing of the new season, new growth and new sunshine, eager for the celebrations, they claimed one last glimpse of Paradise before such happiness was over and inevitably turned, as usual, to disappointment.