In a china bowl, she stirred all of the ingredients together with water until she had a smooth, black, shiny cream. She carried the bowl upstairs to her sitting room, as well as two more tablespoonfuls of arrowroot powder which she had wrapped up in a poke of baking paper.
She locked her door. She didn’t think that she would be interrupted, but if any of the three or four girls who had stayed behind in the house came knocking, she wanted to make sure that they didn’t come bursting in and see her.
She listened for a moment. On the floor below she could hear Eliza coughing, and in the next room Emma was singing a coarse comical ballad called ‘My Thing Is My Own’. Beatrice couldn’t help thinking how sad a song that was for a girl who had been a prostitute since she was thirteen and a half years old.
She took off her primrose-yellow gown, hanging it over the back of her chair, and sat down in front of the mirror on her toilet.
Very carefully, she dipped the corner of a handkerchief into the bowl of black cream and smeared it all over her nose and her cheeks. She took great care wiping it around her eyelids and her eyes, because she didn’t want any pink showing.
After she had painted her face and her ears and her neck, she painted her chest, too, as far down as her corset. She would wear long black gloves, so there was no need for her to paint her hands, but as a precaution she painted her wrists.
When she had finished, she sat and stared at herself and she could hardly believe that it was her. Although the black make-up was shiny because of the cornflour, she could have been an African. Her father had originally devised the formula for Walter Blake, an actor who had been employed by David Garrick to play Othello at the Theatre Royal, and who had wanted to surprise his audience by looking as much like a real Moor as possible, and not just a white man blacked up.
To finish off her disguise, she lightly dusted her face and cleavage with arrowroot powder, which took off the gloss and gave her skin a more natural appearance. She had a small pot of beeswax coloured with carmine which had been given to her in New Hampshire, and she blended a little of this with the black make-up to darken it, and applied it to her lips.
She dressed herself in her black satin gown and put on the high black bonnet which she had worn to Francis’s funeral, tucking her hair out of sight and lowering the lacy veil over her face.
She opened her sitting-room door a few inches to make sure that there was nobody on the landing outside. Emma was still singing, and she thought she could hear Juliet laughing because ‘My Thing Is My Own’ was so bawdy. Beatrice had heard it sung in the street by beggars but Emma wouldn’t have dared to sing it if Ida had been in the house.
‘A Master of Musick came with an intent,
To give me a lesson on my instrument,
I thank’d him for nothing, but bid him be gone,
For my little fiddle should not be played on.’
Beatrice held up her petticoats so that she could run quickly and quietly downstairs, across the hallway and out of the front door. It was beginning to spit with rain so when she reached the corner of Newgate Street she hailed a hackney.
As she climbed in, the jarvis said, ‘Fearful sorry for your loss, ma’am.’ He obviously thought that she was veiled and wearing black because she was in mourning, and a word of condolence might earn him a twopenny tip. If he could have seen that her face was black, too, he might have been less solicitous. Beatrice had seen that black men and women were not uncommon in London these days, but with some exceptions most of them were servants or slaves brought over from the West Indies with visiting businessmen, and any black person who strutted about and put on airs would be openly jeered at.
‘Do you know the Earl of Coventry’s house on Grosvenor Square?’ asked Beatrice.
‘Of course, ma’am. And a wery grand ’ouse it is, too – wery grand. Right gentry-cove-ken.’
The streets were crowded with carriages and wagons and pedestrians spilling out across the roadway, and it took them nearly twenty minutes to reach Grosvenor Square. Because it was raining, the circular ornamental gardens in the centre of the square were almost deserted this afternoon, except for a sodden man in a coalman’s hat with a back flap who was scraping out a mournful melody on a violin.
The Earl of Coventry’s house had steep steps and a pillared portico. Beatrice wondered if she ought to go down to the basement and knock at the servants’ entrance, but she decided that she would like to hear about Grace from the earl himself, or at least from a member of his family, so that she could be certain that she was being well cared for.
She rang the bell-pull at the double front doors and she could hear the bell echoing inside the hallway. After a few moments the door opened and a young footman in a blue-powdered wig and a braided navy-blue uniform appeared.
‘Good afternoon, madam,’ he greeted her. ‘Is madam expected?’
‘No, I have no appointment,’ said Beatrice, trying to imitate Grace’s accent. ‘But I am making inquiries about a young woman who has recently been employed here. Her name is Grace, and I am told that she was sent here by Mr George Hazzard.’
‘May I trouble you for your name, madam?’
Beatrice lifted her veil to show her black face, and the footman blinked at her furiously, although he tried hard not to show how surprised he was.
‘I am Grace’s older sister, from Barbadoes. I wanted to inform her that I have arrived in London, and I wanted also to make sure that she is in good health and good spirits.’
‘Grace?’ said the footman. ‘We have nobody here by that name. You must have been given this address in error. Good day to you.’
He began to close the door, but Beatrice said, ‘Wait! Perhaps your master is calling her by a different name. She has dark skin, like me, and she is eighteen years old, and very comely.’
The footman shook his head. ‘The earl has only one blackamoor in his employ, and that is his positilion Limbrick.’
‘You’re sure? Is it possible that you haven’t yet seen her, or that your master has installed her in a different house?’
‘I’m quite certain. All of the earl’s household were assembled only this morning to be given instructions on this evening’s banquet, and there was no black person amongst them.’
Beatrice saw a movement in the window next to the porch, and behind the glass she saw a pale-faced woman in a tall grey wig and a red dress staring out at her, with one hand shading her eyes. As soon as she saw that Beatrice was looking at her, she stepped away from the window and disappeared.
Beatrice turned back to the footman. ‘Is there somebody at home I can ask about this further?’
‘Not to you,’ said the footman. Beatrice had noticed that as soon as she had lifted her veil he had stopped addressing her as ‘madam’ and his tone had become increasingly dismissive.
‘No, please, listen – I have to know where she’s gone,’ she said, forgetting to talk with a Barbadoes accent. The footman gave her an almost imperceptible shrug and closed the door.
She rang the doorbell again, and then again, but nobody came to answer it. After a few minutes she went down the steps to the basement, and knocked at the door there, but again nobody came to see what she wanted.
She could have gone around to Adam’s Mews at the rear of the house to see if she could find the black postilion, but it was raining much harder now and she guessed that the footman had probably been telling her the truth, and that Grace really hadn’t been taken in by the Earl of Coventry. After all, what would be the purpose of him lying?
She lowered her veil again and walked to the corner of Charles Street, where she managed to hail a hackney just after a big-bellied man in a huge periwig had climbed unsteadily down from it, loudly breaking wind as he did so.
‘Awful thundery weather, what?’ he remarked, before staggering away.
*
Juliet, holding up a half-eaten apple in one hand like Holbein’s painting of Eve, opened the door for her when Beatrice returned to St Mary
Magdalene’s.
‘Yes?’ said Juliet, frowning. ‘There ain’t nobody at ’ome at the moment – sorry. They’ve all gone churchifyin’. ’Oo did you want?’
‘For goodness’ sake, Juliet, it’s me,’ said Beatrice, without lifting her veil.
‘Be-ah-trice?’ said Juliet, but by then Beatrice was already climbing the stairs back up to her rooms.
It took her nearly half an hour to wipe and wash off all of her make-up, and by the time she had finished, the water in her basin was black, and so was her towel. She changed back into her primrose-yellow gown and as she laced herself up she wondered whether her disguise had been worth all the effort. At least she had managed to confirm that George Hazzard had lied about sending Grace to Grosvenor Square, while the Earl of Coventry’s footman would only be able to tell him that ‘some black woman’ had come asking for her. But if Grace wasn’t there, where was she?
She went down to the next floor to see Eliza. She tapped on her door but there was no response, so she opened it and went in. Eliza was asleep, looking peaceful and breathing easily. Beatrice had seen several of the other girls in the reformatory when they were sleeping, and she had always thought how young and innocent they looked, like orphaned children rather than hardened gigglers, as they sometimes called themselves.
She drew the plain wooden chair across to the bed and sat beside Eliza, watching her sleep. After about ten minutes, Eliza must have sensed that there was somebody else in the room, because she opened her eyes and lifted her head off the pillow.
‘Beatrice! What you doin’ ’ere? You didn’t ’alf give me a fright!’
‘I came to see how you were feeling, that’s all.’
‘Not too bad, thanks. I ain’t coughed all day. And I can breathe through me nozzle now, even if it whistles now and again.’
‘That’s good. I’ll give you some more physic in a minute. But listen, I’ve just been out looking for Grace.’
‘What for? I thought you said you knew where she was. George ’Azzard borrowed ’er to some nib, didn’t ’e?’
‘That’s what he told me. He said he’d sent her to work for the Earl of Coventry at his house in Grosvenor Square. But I had reason to doubt what he’d said, and so I went to Grosvenor Square to find out for myself.’
‘And? Did you find ’er?’ asked Eliza, sticking one finger up her left nostril and twisting it around.
‘Eliza, you mustn’t say a word about this to anyone. Not to Ida and not to any of the other girls – especially not to Ida.’
‘’Ere – what do you think I am? I ain’t a snitch. I never turned a split on no one, not never.’
‘All right. I went to the house but she wasn’t there, and from what the footman said I don’t think they’d even heard of her. So she’s not working at the tobacco factory and she’s not working for the Earl of Coventry.’
‘If you asks me, Beatrice, I reckon I know where she is. In fact I’ll post the pony on it. Old ’Azzard’s sent ’er off Leda Sheridan’s. That’s what ’e’s done. ’E wouldn’t ’ave ’er workin’ in ’is fogus factory – a dimber-mort like ’er? She’s black, too, and some coves’ll pay more than double for black.’
‘Oh, dear Lord, I pray not,’ said Beatrice.
‘Well, you can pray as much as you like, but prayin’ ain’t goin’ to ’elp poor Grace – not one whit. I don’t know what ’orrible things they was doin’ to them other girls when I was there, but if I ’adn’t cleared off when I did, I’d ’ave gone to Peg Trantum’s long ago. I’m sure of it. I still ’ave ’orrible dreams about them screams. You never ’eard the like of it. Ugh!’
Beatrice said nothing for almost half a minute, thinking, while Eliza finished picking her nose, studying what she had excavated, and then rolling it up and flicking it across the room.
‘You know exactly where Leda Sheridan’s house is, and what it’s like inside, don’t you?’
‘’Course I do. I could draw it for you. I’m a dab ’and at drawin’.’
‘What I’m thinking is, perhaps I could go there in some sort of disguise, and see if I could find Grace, and help her to get away. That’s if she’s there.’
‘I’ll bet you a stranger that’s where she is – well, I would if I weren’t so seedy, and I ’ad one. But you know, thinkin’ about it, you wouldn’t ’ave no trouble with a disguise. Leda makes most of the girls wear them fancy masks when she’s puttin’ on one of ’er orgies.’ She pronounced ‘orgies’ with a hard ‘g’, like ‘ogres’.
‘Oh, yes? You mean the sort of masks that women might wear to a ball?’
‘That’s it. I seen them in Vauxhall Gardens, too, in the evenin’s sometimes when they’re ’avin’ a bit of a dance. Leda makes the girls wear ’em so that ’er customers can’t tell one girl from another, and which ones ’ave been prigged and which ones ’aven’t, so she can sell them as virgins twenty times over.’
Beatrice sat back. In her mind she was already working out a plan for finding out if Grace had been sent to Leda Sheridan’s brothel, and how she could safely rescue her. She would also have to consider the possibility that Grace might not wish to be rescued. Life at Leda Sheridan’s might be dangerous but it would be exciting and lively, and she might well prefer it to a life of piety and prayer and acting as Ida’s unpaid maid-of-all-work.
But what Eliza had told her about the screaming had disturbed her. She knew very well that there were men who would pay handsomely to see girls bound and whipped and penetrated with all manner of objects, and even have congress with dogs and donkeys. Several of them had visited her father’s apothecary when she was younger, asking for liniments to soothe their injuries, and although her father had always spoken to them in private, she had often hidden behind the door and listened to them. One girl had been hysterical because she thought that she might give birth to puppies, and begged her father for pennyroyal oil to abort them.
‘I’ll bring you some more tonic,’ she told Eliza. ‘Now that you’re breathing so much better, I think a little syrup of coltsfoot should be sufficient to soothe you.’
‘Are you goin’ to do that?’ asked Eliza. ‘Are you really goin’ to go and find Grace? She’s a lovely girl. You ought to.’
Beatrice nodded. ‘Yes... I’ll try my very best.’
‘Could you bring us up some paper and pencils, then, and I’ll do you a drawin’ of Leda Sheridan’s case. It’s all big rooms downstairs, but upstairs it’s like a rat’s nest.’
‘Thank you, Eliza. But let’s hope that you lose your bet, and that Grace is somewhere else, and safe.’
She heard the front door opening downstairs, and voices. Ida and the rest of the girls were back from their service at the Foundery.
‘Remember,’ said Beatrice, standing up and touching her finger to her lips.
31
Once she had tucked Florence into bed that night, she sat at her toilet and wrote five letters to her friends and former parishioners in Sutton, including Major General Holyoke, William Tandridge and the Widow Belknap. She also wrote to Goody Rust and Goody Greene, who had both attended her when Florence was born.
She asked them to send her news of life in the village, and to place flowers on Francis’s grave for her, although she expected that they did that anyway, because he had been very well loved. When she had put down her quill, she realised how much she missed New Hampshire, and wondered if she would ever find a way of going back. She could almost hear the whippoorwills warbling in the forest.
Completely unexpectedly, she started to cry, and sat there with her hands clasped tightly together and tears rolling down her cheeks. After Florence had been born, Goody Greene had sat on her bed beside her and said that ‘the tears of grief water the garden of happiness’, but this evening she felt only misery. She missed Francis so much that it felt like a physical pain.
After a few minutes she took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Francis was gone, but she would need a male companion if she were to enter Leda Sheridan’s
brothel looking for Grace. She wouldn’t be able to ring the doorbell and simply ask if Grace were there, and say that she wanted to take her back to St Mary Magdalene’s. From what Eliza had told her, Leda Sheridan was a termagant – domineering and bad-tempered and obsessed with making money. She wouldn’t allow Grace to go easily, especially if Eliza was right and her customers were paying double for her.
Beatrice thought briefly about enlisting Godfrey to come with her, because he was so watery and mild-mannered and she felt that he would probably do anything she asked of him. But Godfrey didn’t really look like the kind of man who had the money or the style or even the inclination to spend the evening in a high-class brothel in Drury Lane. She would have to ask James.
She knelt beside the bed while Florence slept and said a prayer in memory of Francis, and for all the desperate girls and women in the world who had to sell themselves simply to survive. She had been an obedient wife, but Francis had been a caring and reasonable husband, and that was rare among men, particularly here in London.
She climbed into bed and lay there for almost an hour, unable to sleep. It was cloudy tonight, although it wasn’t raining, so there was no moon. Beatrice could only hope that God could see her.
*
James said, ‘You want me to do what?’
They were sitting in a dark corner of Whitney’s coffee house in Threadneedle Street. Although it was early, it was crowded with men buying and selling stocks, and reading newspapers, and having loud conversations, and laughing, and smoking. Beatrice was the only woman in there, and she had dressed herself discreetly in her dark-brown cape and hood.
‘I need you to pretend that you’re interested in having a party for some of your men friends before you get married, and that you’ve heard that Leda Sheridan’s is the best brothel in which to hold it.’
‘I’m speechless, Beatrice.’
‘I know that I’m taking a liberty in asking you, but I don’t know any other man who could carry it off. The Reverend Parsons is far too old, and Godfrey doesn’t look as if he has a licentious bone in his body.’
The Coven Page 22
