The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

  * * *

  ARTHUR RETURNED and sat away by himself, a little black cigar clenched between his teeth. Catching Fergus looking at him, he stared back coldly, eyes narrowed against the smoke.

  A few minutes later, he was chosen again and left the room once more, following Shea.

  Perhaps half of the girls had been led away. Those not chosen gobbled more cakes and drank tea and laughed even louder at silly jokes, though it seemed to him some of them were near tears. He couldn’t tell if they were disappointed or relieved.

  Shea came in, pouring tea and telling girls to sit up straight. Standing behind Fergus’s chair, she placed her hands on his shoulders. “What is it, man? Why so sad? Everyone must have a trade, you know.”

  Empty chairs and abandoned teacups marked the places of those now upstairs wrestling with the trade.

  He suddenly knew how afraid he was. His body stiff in the chair. The faces of girls seemed blurry. He wondered if he was going blind from the poison of fear, which he could feel in his blood. He had never been so afraid.

  He thought of his parents lying in the cabin rubble. Married people were to be buried in the same grave or one would come looking for the other. By now the rain would have beaten the wreckage of the cabin down to a slick mound of clay.

  Jenny, tall and sallow, hair the color of wheat, sat down at the piano and started playing, the notes flying from the polished instrument so bright and hard he could almost touch them.

  Gathering around the piano the girls began singing about Greensleeves.

  Without knowing any of the words, he opened his throat to join in. They were all as frightened as he was. Some had been summoned from the room two or three times, inspected, sent back. Gathered around Jenny sitting at the piano, they were singing to defend themselves from how alone they felt, how unprotected, while Shea moved in and out of the room softly, touching girls by the arm, leading them away.

  Singing gave them a sense of something surrounding and protecting them, and they sang song after English song until Shea, reaching out, touched Jenny’s shoulder lightly.

  The whore immediately stopped her playing. Closing the lid, she arose, touched her hair, and followed Shea from the room. No one sat down to take her place. The singing was finished and he followed the girls back to the tea table and helped them light their cigars.

  WHEN SHEA shook him awake, he didn’t know where he was.

  Gazing around the smoky warm room he saw girls yawning, and realized he had fallen asleep with his head on the tea table.

  “Come, come.” Shea was nudging him impatiently.

  Thinking he had been chosen, he immediately felt queer and knew he was going to be sick.

  “You may as well go to bed before you put the others to sleep!” Shea said sharply.

  He looked up her. “What?”

  “You’re a dreary feature, not doing any good down here! Go upstairs. You’re casting a spell on the others. No one wants a boy so grim and unbecoming! You’re very poor investment.”

  Relieved and ashamed, he headed for the door, anticipating the quiet of the attic and the cool, dry sheets on his bed.

  “You’ll pick up by and by, Fergus.” Betsy was sitting in a chair, doing needlework. “He isn’t quite well, not yet,” she reminded Shea.

  “I want him fresh. Feed him some brandy next time! And not so much powder, Betsy! Lively and fresh — that’s what gentlemen want.”

  Fresh fish.

  IN THE middle of the night he woke to noisy shouting from downstairs. Racing down through the house, he found the kitchen crowded with excited girls and half-dressed gentlemen. Arthur had chased a wag out into the alley and was beating him with his fists. Standing barefoot in the cold, Fergus watched Iron Mike and three other men dragging Arthur off the man and carrying the navvy inside, kicking and writhing. They laid him on the kitchen floor, and Iron Mike sat on his chest, the others holding down his arms and legs.

  “You’re breaking me, Arthur!” Shea was furious. “You’re ruining the Dragon and everything I built!

  “He bit me!”

  “I won’t let you ruin my house. I’ll let those Scotchmen shoot you like a dog.”

  “I won’t have any maggot bite me!”

  Iron Mike and the others strained to hold Arthur down. Shea looked at him with disgust. “Put him below. Throw him in the coal cellar. We’ll see if he likes himself alone.”

  NEAR DAWN, Fergus went down to the coal cellar and tapped on the iron door. At first there was no response, then Arthur’s voice said hoarsely, “Who is it? Let me out.”

  “I haven’t got the key. She’ll let you out in a couple of hours, I suppose.”

  “You go tell her let me out now. Tell her I’m sorry, I’ll be excellent, and she won’t have to worry about her precious old wags. You tell her so, Fergus. Go on. Please, man. You and me, we are the railway birds, ain’t we? We shall tramp down the line together, by and by. Only you tell her to let me out.”

  Fergus went upstairs and knocked on Shea’s door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Me.”

  “Fergus? What is it?”

  “Arthur wishes you to let him out.”

  “Tell him he can rot.”

  “He’s very sorry for the trouble.”

  After a few moments the door opened. Shea wore the silk dragon gown over her nightdress and held a candle in a silver dish. “He’ll ruin my trade. It’s always like this. He thinks being wild is glory — thinks we love him for it. He knows nothing of the world.”

  “You’ll let him out, won’t you?”

  “He’s never brought anything but trouble into this house.”

  But she already had the key in her hand, and followed him downstairs and into the gloomy cellar, where she unlocked the door.

  Arthur had been sitting on a pile of coal. He quickly stood up and stepped out without a word.

  “This is the last time, Arthur. Don’t do it again, I warn you.”

  “What am I to do when a fellow insults me?”

  “Take it — they’re paying good money.”

  “That rabbit bit me, bit my old cock.”

  “I don’t care if he bit it off.”

  “Sure you do, sure you do.” He smiled at her.

  Shea shook her head wearily. “I don’t wish to see you. Go upstairs, and make sure you’re clean before you touch my linen.”

  TWO COACHES had been hired to drive the whores into the country for their monthly outing.

  “And you shall come with us, Fergus, you want some color in your cheeks,” Shea decided. “That’ll get the old crooks snapping.”

  Shea refused Arthur’s plea to come along.

  “You needn’t punish me no more, Shea. I am quiet, so.”

  And it was true — since his night in the coal cellar, he had been gloomy and silent.

  “It won’t do to show your face. Iron Mike says they have a price on your skin.”

  “I’m a veal calf, Shea. I must get out! Only for a spin — I need the air worse than anyone.”

  “Should have thought of that before you stabbed their drum.”

  Arthur grew so morose that Shea finally agreed to let him come along on their outing if the girls disguised him as one of themselves. They bought fabric and Arthur stood in the attic room glumly smoking little cigars one after another as they measured, pinned, and cut. By Sunday morning they had him outfitted in petticoats and a gray morning gown, trimmed with green ribbon; with a pelouse, bonnet, and a rabbit-skin muffler. They hadn’t found slippers large enough for his feet, but the skirts concealed his boots.

  “Oh Arthur, you’re a bonny lass,” Betsy teased.

  “I don’t give a damn for it. I’d as soon let them kill me.”

  “Oh, don’t say so. If Shea hears, she won’t have you come at all.”

  Betsy and Jenny shaved and powdered Arthur, painting his lips, gradually transforming him into a sullen, pretty young woman.

  Fergus thought of Luke’s bo
dy, a passion between the two of them, a secret.

  Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and what they have done.

  STANDING IN the street, Fergus and Iron Mike kept a lookout for the hired coaches.

  Most of the loitering, lounging navvies had disappeared from the Dragon’s front steps when the cold settled in. Iron Mike said they had gone for the railway contracts in Wales, or London for tunnel work, or had crossed the water home.

  “When are you going yourself down the line?” Fergus asked.

  “Oh, I’m house porter now, Shea’s house cat. My railway days are over. Here we are,” Iron Mike said, seeing the carriages turning from Hanover Street. “Fetch the lovelies.”

  The whores came trooping down the steps in a pack, wearing cloaks and bonnets, keeping Arthur surrounded with their bodies and laughter as they piled into the coaches.

  Shea nodded to the coachman and they were off, rolling by street corners where emigrants stood guarding lumps of baggage. The sky above the stone buildings was dark blue. Burnished pavement and scraps of frost shone in hard light.

  WRAPPED IN rugs, the whores dozed, lulled by the crackle of wheels and the fresh air. The dense stone city thinned out to muddy building sites and bleak new terraces of brick houses standing isolated in fields. Fergus kept awake, alert and watchful, amazed at Liverpool’s power and sprawl, the way it lay upon the land.

  Finally they reached open country, driving along a metaled road lined with fat gray trees, sunlight flickering through the canopy of bare branches.

  The whores awoke famished. There was a hamper and two bottles of champagne in each carriage. They drank champagne out of the bottle and ate ham sandwiches and cold meat pies as the pair of carriages rolled through a country of clipped meadows and soft hills.

  After noon the light thinned, the sky slowly losing its luster, and the air grew sharper. In the yard of an inn, the horses were fed and watered, and the whores brought inside and given warm cider and rum cakes with butter. Piling into the coaches again, they started for home, the horses’ hooves snapping briskly on the road.

  Late in the afternoon, near dusk, the coachmen made a last halt so the girls could run out in a field and pee, while Shea fed apples to the horses, whispering and stroking their necks. Arthur stood in the middle of the road, clutching a champagne bottle, bonnet thrown back off his shoulders.

  Fergus had climbed up in the driver’s seat to look at the rim of country, the hills of England, the neatly organized rigging of fields. They were close enough to town so he could sniff coal smoke in the cold, still air. Daylight was murky. The whores were squatting in tufted wet grass, peeing and swigging champagne.

  Peering ahead, Fergus saw two figures approaching along the road. Jumping down, he stood alongside Arthur.

  Breathing the cold, loamy air of England, tinted with smoke.

  “Shea, have a look,” Arthur said. “Here are a couple of poor Cathleens.”

  A pair of girls, both wearing cloaks. One limping slightly.

  “Good day to you,” Shea called.

  One girl stopped and the other bumped into her. Both were barefoot. Their faces looked dull with exhaustion.

  Fergus said a greeting in Irish, and they started to cry.

  “Ask if they’ve had the fever,” Shea said.

  He asked in Irish. Both girls nodded.

  “Ask how old they are.” Walking up to them, Shea stood looking them over head-to-toe. “Tell them to open their mouths.”

  The two girls stood dumb as cattle. Straw in their hair.

  “Go on!” Shea told Fergus impatiently. “Do as I say.”

  Their names, they told him, were Brigid and Caitlín. They were thirteen and fifteen, and from a townland he didn’t understand the name of but near, they said, Tullamor.

  They stood with mouths open like birds while Shea squeezed their cheeks and peered at their teeth and their tongues. The two coachmen and the whores watched in silence as Shea felt beneath the coarse workhouse gowns and squeezed their breasts then lifted up their skirts and studied the triangles of hair, white bellies, and thighs streaked in filth.

  The bigger girl was shivering. The horses shook their iron hooves and dropped shit on the road.

  “What a pair of haggard little creatures,” Arthur said.

  Shea stepped back, still studying them. “Cheap meat, but I can feed ’em up, I suppose. Need a bath more than anything. Tell them they shall come along with us, Fergus.”

  When he didn’t respond she glanced at him. “They’ll have a warm bed, rations, and pocket money. Shall you leave ’em here, then? They’re dead in a week.”

  In Irish he said to the girls “She will give you a roof. Come with us now.”

  THE CHAMPAGNE was all finished. Cold and tired, the whores wanted to go home. The outing had lost its glamour.

  The pauper girls were seated in Shea’s coach, and Betsy was tucking a blanket around them. Girls were still climbing in when Fergus heard a puffing, like the warm breath of an animal.

  On the edge of the sky, he saw an explosion of white smoke.

  “Train!” Betsy called.

  Snorting, hissing, clanking, the train rose from a cutting he hadn’t noticed, speeding along the rim of the horizon, like a line drawn under everything he hadn’t known before.

  The whores stood waving their handkerchiefs and bonnets, pitching champagne bottles, screaming.

  “Come lay with me you iron monster!”

  “Give me a shilling for my breath!”

  “Kiss my squeak hole, you old smoky beast!”

  Shea sat with a rug around her shoulders, ignoring the train, and the two paupers huddled together, terrified at the commotion the whores made.

  A train was an idea, he saw that right away.

  Before he knew what he was doing, he had leapt down and climbed the wall and was racing across the wet meadow grass, whooping.

  Passion of motion and distance.

  Power of smoke, transformation.

  Possibilities. Change.

  He reached the line just as the train blew past, hard as Hell and flagrant with speed, light bursting from carriage windows. A gorgeous disturbance, breaking up his sense of the world.

  Then she was through, leaving the air buffeted, disturbed by the violence of the passage. He bent to touch the rail, feeling the heat.

  The whores were calling, waving their bonnets and handkerchiefs. He stood on the track bed staring after the train as it took a bend, ramming across the open country, like a promise of everything you could leave behind.

  HE TOLD Iron Mike he was going on the tramp, looking for railway work, and the porter directed him to an old-clothes stall in the Vauxhall where he swapped his button jacket, nankeen waistcoat, strapped trousers, ruffle shirts, and slippers for greased hobnail boots, woolen stockings, moleskin trousers, two linen shirts — one green, one blue — a tweed coat, a good stiff beaver hat only slightly dented with a hatband to tuck a pipe into, and two red handkerchiefs.

  “Take the Woodside ferry across the river,” Iron Mike advised. “Catch the line for Chester. Don’t buy no ticket, but ride the trucks; you’ll see plenty of fellows jumping. From Chester you can follow Mr. Telford’s road out along the coast of Wales. You’ll soon see railway works, the Chester-and-Holyhead. Contracts are let in ten-mile sections, and they will have navvy camps all the way to Anglesey. Mr. Murdoch has one of the contracts, I hear, and you could do worse. I’ve worked for him in Scotland and in France and he always paid his men in coin of the realm, no scrip, as some of them will try.”

  SHEA WAS annoyed when he told her he was going. “My God, Fergus, do you really believe you can help yourself by leaving? My girls live as soft as house cats. I’m offering you the life, and you’re going to break yourself on the navvy line?”

  He nodded.

  “Can you tell me why? Have you been so ill treated?”

  He shook his head.

  “Was it that no one chose
you last week? Listen, boy, we shall dress you up a little nicer next time. You already look so much healthier. You have to remember there is a lot of Irish boys harking the streets these days and they’re terrible cheap, and many with black fever — Irish boys seem a little out of fashion, at least among my class of gentlemen. But we’ll get you a velvet suit and a softer name — William, Albert, Edward, something squishy like that. We’ll tell ’em you’re Scotch. Don’t worry, you’ll do fine.”

  “But I was glad I wasn’t chosen.”

  She shrugged. “You were scared, so. That’s natural —”

  “I can’t do that, Shea, what the wags want. Don’t wish to be open that way.”

  She shook her head slowly. “Boy, they’ll get into you one way or another, don’t you know?”

  “Still, I’m going to leave.”

  She crossed the room and he thought she was going to slap him and he prepared to take the blow, thinking he deserved it from her, but instead she placed cool hands on his cheeks and kissed his forehead.

  “They’ll crack you like mice,” she said.

  EARLY IN the morning Mary fed him breakfast in the kitchen of the Dragon. The whores stood around in nightdresses and flannel wraps, sipping milky tea and admiring his hard new clothes.

  Mary fed him toast, honey, tea, and an orange, and gave him a parcel for the road, tied up in a handkerchief.

  “You’ll be sorry,” said Arthur. “Only when you get down there, tell them you’re the friend of Arthur McBride, best hammer there ever was on the Manchester lines.”

  “I’ll tell them so, Arthur.”

  “And don’t think ill of your old house.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Which took you in when you was a scarecrow, don’t forget. And look at you now.”