‘And so you offer oblivion?’
‘I offer to blunt the sharp edge of life. I do not charge them for it. What would you have me do? Give them some iron tonic and a lecture about God?’
By now we were on Spyglass Lane. The door to Mrs Flannigan’s pub stood open. Mrs Flannigan herself was outside, sweeping what looked like a mixture of beer and urine out of her premises and onto the street. The Blood was visible at the end of the passage, a great dark carcass, high in the water, sheets of washing hanging in grey pennants between her severed masts.
My mind and heart were filled with conflicting feelings. I seemed no closer to uncovering what had happened to Aberlady, the links between his death and the three dead women as invisible now as when I had first come down to the river three days ago. I had told Will I knew what had happened, who had murdered them all, but in my heart I was still unsure. I fingered the love tokens I had found in the pockets of Mary Mercer and John Aberlady. The two flowers – forget-me-not, and maidenhair fern – seemed an odd choice, even if they were lovers. Forget-me-not was common enough, but the maidenhair? I could not fathom it. And yet somehow, somewhere at the back of my mind the answers shifted in the shadows. All I needed to know was already laid out before me if I could just step back and see the connections.
‘Miss Proudlove,’ I said. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’ I took out the piece of paper on which Jenny had drawn that curious fragmented picture – the keys, the broken chain, the bound skeleton.
She stared at it. But at that moment a dray rumbled past, the driver cracking his whip so that we both started, and I glanced away. When I looked back her face was closed. Impassive between the wings of her bonnet. But I was sure I had seen a flicker of something – surprise, alarm – cross her face.
‘Miss Proudlove?’ I said.
‘No, sir.’ Her voice was disinterested, as if she were bored of me now. ‘Is it a child’s drawing?’
I folded the paper up and put it in my pocket. ‘Yes,’ I said.
She pulled the cloth over her laudanum bottles and turned away. I let her walk on alone. She was tired of me, that much was clear, but I was tired of myself. Tired of thinking and worrying and trying to work out what was going on. I thought of Will. What would he say if he knew I had given away my gravest secret to a woman I hardly knew? Or if he found out that I had asked her about Eliza? All at once the first of those seemed the stupidest and most careless thing I could have done, and the second the most callous and selfish. If Eliza wanted to be with me she could find me. Why did I still think of her? And yet Will was always there. I sighed and put my hands to my head to shut out the noise. I would have liked to walk away from myself, just for a while, but I could not. I looked up – and then I saw the sign: Cards it said. It was hung above a shop door, which also advertised in smaller words underneath, Spirits. Fine Wines. Pipes. It was the ‘place up on Spyglass’ where Aberlady had gone. The Golden Swan.
The woman didn’t say anything to me when I walked in. She was sitting before the stove eating what looked like a bowl of vomit – a mess of stew not dissimilar to the stuff that came out of the cookhouse on board the Blood.
‘Don’t taste o’ much,’ she said without looking up. She chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful, and then extracted something from between her lips. She stared at it. ‘Been chewin’ this for ages,’ she said. ‘Don’t know what it is.’
‘Perhaps a piece of cloth,’ I said. ‘Or a lump of shoe leather. Sometimes they forget to take the clothes off when they render the bodies. Did you get it from Mrs Flannigan’s?’
She cackled. ‘Yes, sir, I did.’ She plucked a lump of bone from her bowl and tossed it onto the floor. A dog, a pale English mastiff, its tiny eyes beady in its great blunt muzzle, lumbered out of the shadows beneath the table, wolfed down the titbit, and vanished back into the gloom. The woman still hadn’t looked at me.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘There ain’t no one here for a game o’ cards, and you looks to me like you can afford to buy your spirits elsewhere, so I’m guessin’ you’re here for a pipe.’
‘Yes. How’s business?’ I added.
‘Sometimes we’re busy, sometimes we ain’t.’ She shrugged her shawl up around her skinny shoulders.
‘Did you know Mr Aberlady, from the Blood? The hospital ship? Did he often take a pipe here?’
She turned her head to look at me, surveying my red face, my feigned nonchalance. She turned back to her stew. ‘Your Mr Aberlady from the Blood was a reg’lar customer. They all come here.’ She laughed. ‘Everyone likes a pipe. In the end.’ She muttered something unintelligible.
‘I beg your pardon, madam?’ I said.
‘Madam!’ she laughed. ‘I like that. I said “how’s your father” in Chinee.’ She pointed to a door. ‘Go up. Pekin’ Johnny’ll see to you.’
The stairs were worn smooth with the passing of boots, rough boots, not the smooth leather soles of gentlemen, for they would go elsewhere for their entertainments. Places like this one – no more reputable than Mrs Flannigan’s – catered for those with shallow pockets and desperate needs.
Upstairs, the windows were shuttered. The room, some thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, was lined with narrow beds, one on top of the other like berths in an emigrant ship. The room was dark, illuminated only by the dim glow of small red lanterns, and thick with a heavy, sweetish smoke. A young man, ‘Peking Johnny’, I assumed, was sitting on a chair beside a small stove, a cat crouched in the gloom at his side. The lad’s feet were encased in a pair of Chinese slippers, on his head was a Chinese cap – but he wore a shirt and waistcoat like anyone else. He had a round, grubby face, and he was reading the latest edition of Tales of Violence and Blight by the light of a Chinese lantern. He could hardly take his eyes from it, though he did so long enough to hand me a long wooden pipe, as thick as two fingers and black with the patina of repeated use. He put his penny paper aside with a sigh, and dragged himself to his feet. He rummaged about, rolling a sticky blob of opium round and round in a small bowl to form it into a pellet, before leading me over to one of the low beds against the wall.
‘You’re not from Peking,’ I said, for some reason feeling the need to converse before I sank into a drug-induced lethargy.
‘You’re a sharp one,’ said the lad. He pointed to his head. ‘See my ’at?’ and at his feet. ‘See my slippers? Silk they are. Cantonese. Go on, have a good look. That’s all the Chinaman you’re gettin’. Shadwell,’ he said. ‘That’s where I’m from. I’m called Pekin’ Johnny on account o’ my ’at.’
‘I see,’ I muttered. The place unsettled me. The lad himself had the pinprick pupils of the opium smoker, no doubt simply from being in attendance. The cat that crouched beside the stove had the same look, its eyes blank green discs, the pupils unnervingly invisible.
The room was low-ceilinged, a dim, murmuring cavern. The charpoy on which I lay was stained and lumpy. In the darkness I could make out other bodies lying down, the pipes to their mouths resting on the lamp before them, so that the opium vapour might be heated and sucked in. Some were clearly unconscious, sunk in the warm stupor the drug was famous for. Others were stirring, replenishing their pipes, muttering to their neighbours. One of two of them rose to their feet and disappeared, vanishing wraith-like down the stairs, their faces wasted, their eyes bewildered beneath unkempt hair. The first of these was in the garb of a clergyman, the other, who rose soon after, was a tall, ashen-faced Lascar.
They said Aberlady had come here. Had he? It seemed more than possible. And surely it would not hurt to try one pipe. I might forget all my troubles. I might make the connections I was groping for between the silver sixpences, the keys, the dead girls. I might escape from myself, and who I was, just for a while.
Everyone likes a pipe. In the end.
Peking Johnny crouched down and applied the pellet of opium to my pipe, the large cup-shaped bowl resting on the conical tip of the lamp he had placed before me. I put the pipe to my lips as the vapour
s rose.
I felt as though I were sinking into a warm bath, the liquid rising up over my limbs, supporting me so that I was as weightless as gossamer. I closed my eyes, and yet I knew they were open, I knew that what I saw was real and that the dark and smoky den had gone, and I was lying in a garden of pure enchantment, of flowers, trees, fountains and birds. I saw Eliza, my lost love, and I felt my body dissolve in the smoke, become nothing more than a mass of petals. I had in my mind the sweetest sense of order and clarity. I saw the key, small and black, and the drawing and the letters, ICORISSS, written on two shining sixpences. I saw a poison dart frog as blue as the summer sky, and a bright unblinking enamelled eye staring at me through the laden boughs of my own apple trees. I saw Miss Proudlove lying naked on an operating table, a bottle of laudanum in her hand . . . and all at once everything was clear to me. I knew I had to tell Will, had to bring him to this place and show him what I had learned. I heard voices – familiar ones from the Blood, and even in my cocoon of warmth and light I knew there was danger nearby. I tried to rise. The edge of the pallet was hard beneath my hand and I was surprised by it, so that the curtain in my mind shifted and I glimpsed a cold world of squalor and darkness. I turned my head, and in the next bed I saw Dr Proudlove. He was on his back, his eyes looking straight at me, his teeth showing white between his smiling lips. I tried to speak to him, to ask what he was doing here, but I could not. I was surrounded by harsh voices and ugly leering faces – an old woman with gravy on her chin, a callous-faced boy in a Chinese cap, a cat with no pupils to its acid-green eyes. Hands pushed me back down. I felt a familiar smell of carbolic and effluent in my nostrils, and I recognised it as the reek of the tween decks on the Blood. I heard a voice, a man’s voice, and I knew whose it was – and then the pipe was against my lips once more, the smoke warm and silken in my lungs and I had not strength for anything. The dragon came then, with its rolling eyes and fiery tail. It turned a summersault and I saw that it was Maximus, and that his jaws were wide open.
Do I ever think about the years I spent in our mother’s house? All the time, though I never speak of those thoughts. They remain locked inside me, like a door slammed on a basement full of rats. One day I might open the door and they will all be gone. Either that or they will come seething out in a fury, hungrier and more frightened than ever. But that day is not yet.
At my mother’s house I helped the girls with the misfortunes and trials of their profession. By the time I was fifteen I knew a pox sore from a pimple, could measure the correct dose of mercury so that the patient’s teeth would not fall out, and could fish out a precautionary sponge stuffed deep into a cunny with one thrust and flick of my fingers. And so I understand more about the girls that come to see us at the dispensary than anyone. The bruises they sport are bruises I had once owned – they are the shape of men’s fingertips, men’s teeth, men’s fists. They come with black eyes, with lice, with the clap and the pox, and the babies of strangers growing inside them. Erasmus is happy to leave them to me, for he has grander ambitions, and the women are glad to be seen by one of their own sex.
Do I miss my easy life as a whore? I do not, though the memory of it lures some of the others at Siren House like a false light glimpsed in a turbulent sea.
One day at the end of June I am ill. It is nothing a dose of valerian will not sort out, but I am tired too, and my head aches. I worked late in the dispensary the night before, making up prescriptions, for Erasmus had gone out with Mr Aberlady. Now, Erasmus is busy binding the broken head of a drunken Lascar, his waiting room full to bursting. When Mary comes with some medicines from the Blood, he sends her upstairs to see how I am. She finds me in bed, my hair undone, my skin glowing and burnished against the whiteness of my open nightdress. I see her lips part, the pink tip of her tongue pass between them.
We lie in my bed with our arms around each other in the lamplit gloom of the darkling afternoon. I kiss her, and it is as though all the words I have wanted to say have passed in an instant from my lips to hers. In the darkness we tell each other of our pasts. Her first love was an alabaster angel. I am the stuff of idols and totems and I am jealous, and afraid; afraid she loves her dead mistress, the pale and sickly Marianna, more than she could ever love my dark, angry face. I have felt my difference every day of my life, for all that I am as English as anyone in this hotchpotch of a nation. But she lays her hands upon my heart and says I am not to think that way, that she loves me no matter what.
We go to my room above the dispensary whenever we can, snatching at moments as we snatch at each other, all legs and arms and hasty tongues and fingers. But she is not ready, not yet. I see it in the cast of her face when she thinks I am not looking, in the way she gazes at nothing, or lets me put my arms about her, drawing her back, stiffly, onto my pillow. She says she loves me, but I know her heart still bears the imprint of another. And so, I give her the time and the solitude that she needs. What else might I do? She will come to me when she is ready. In return she gives me a token – it is nothing much, nothing at all to anyone but me. A sixpence, the crown and the year of our meeting on one side, the other side with the Queen’s head smoothed away. In its place is a picture etched onto the silver: the forget-me-not, and the maidenhair fern. She makes one for both of us. I punch a hole in mine and wear it around my neck on the thinnest of chains, so that it lies against my heart.
But I cannot wait, and in my haste I drive her away. We are alone in the Seaman’s Dispensary. She has come to help me take an inventory. Erasmus is out again, and I know he will not be back for a while. I take her into the back room of the dispensary and I tell her I cannot be without her. We must live together, just the two of us, I say. We would be safe, and happy.
She says ‘yes’, though there is something in her eyes that should have made me pause.
That evening, I lose the token Mary has given me. It slips from my neck when I am working on the Blood. I don’t see it fall. I look everywhere, but someone must have picked it up. It is an omen.
A The next day she is gone.
Chapter Nineteen
I stumbled from the Golden Swan with Will’s arms around me. I heard laughter, and a voice babbling about keys and forget-me-nots and skeletons wrapped in chains, and I realised it was my own. He laid me down on a soft bed, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again and turned my head I saw that I was lying in a hard and dirty place. I put my hands to my head, my mind filled with images of smoke and cats, of keys and coins and lamps as red and glowing as the eyes of a dragon.
I sat up and breathed in deep lungfuls of the salty air. I felt a deep sense of peace wash over me, and as I looked down at the squalid street where I sat, at the fish bones in the gutter, and the horse dung in the road and the beer slops upon the pavement, I felt nothing but contentment. Before me was a door. Above it, a painted sign, dirty and peeling, that read Spirits. Fine Wines. Pipes. The door was open. An ugly white dog stood inside barking. An old woman in a Chinese shawl came out and kicked the beast aside. I saw Will, and a young man in Chinese cap and slippers stagger out into the street, a body wrapped in a greasy length of canvas slung between them like a sack of dirty laundry. I knew that inside it was the body of Dr Proudlove. And yet . . . surely he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be! I had seen his eyes glittering in the darkness, and he had grinned at me as I lay there.
I pulled myself up from the pavement, and took a gasp of air. Will and the lad loaded Dr Proudlove onto a hand cart that someone had brought up from the nearby quay. The woman in the shawl and the boy, both of whom were clearly no stranger to the removal of a dead or insensible body from their premises, vanished back into their smoke-filled lair.
Will was silent, thin lipped, as he wheeled the body down the lane and along the clamorous waterfront towards the mortuary. No one stopped and stared, or even paused in their work as we passed by. Death was commonplace in those streets. Men fell from the open windows of warehouses, or from the rigging of ships; they beat each other senseless over
the cost of a pint of beer or fell, drunk, into the docks. Women and children were drowned or murdered, they died of cholera, hunger or cold. The sight of a body being trundled through the streets was nothing to them. I noted their indifference, and I was sorry.
I looked at Will, but he turned away from me, his face furious. ‘Someone tried to make me smoke more,’ I said. ‘I felt hands push me back. I smelt the ship. The Blood. It was . . . I don’t know who it was, but I believe they tried to do the same to Aberlady. They knew I would go there to ask about him. They had that woman look out for me. They tried to make me take too much—’
‘Like Dr Proudlove?’ said Will. ‘You have much to be thankful for then, that I found you in time.’
‘They tried to kill me—’
‘Who, Jem?’ he said. ‘Who are “they”?’
I did not answer.
We took Dr Proudlove into the mortuary, and between us we laid him down on the slab. There came the sound of footsteps scuffling on the steps and Toad and Young Toad appeared. The lad looked sulky, his dirty face streaked with tears.
‘Not another one?’ said Toad. ‘Who is it this time?’
Young Toad pushed forward. He gasped when he saw who it was. ‘The darkie!’
‘That’s Dr Proudlove to you,’ snapped Will. ‘Show a little respect for your betters.’
‘Where’s your waistcoat?’ I said. My voice was mild, languid, but the hand with which I grasped his collar was steel.
Young Toad scowled and wiped his eyes with his fists. He writhed in my grip. ‘Gone, ain’t it?’ he said.
‘Gone, ain’t it, sir,’ cried Toad. ‘Forgive the young tyke, gen’men, he’s aggrieved because I took ’is fancy waistkit—’
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 26
