Struggling and kicking, Beatrice was humped up the staircase, and then dragged along the first-floor corridor to the same bedroom where she had discovered Grace. The flashman threw her onto the bed and then fastened a pair of black iron handcuffs onto her wrists.
‘You’ll be hanged for this, you wretch!’ Beatrice spat at him, but all he did was lean over the bed and grin at her, showing her the broken brown stumps of his teeth. Then he left the bedroom, closing the door. She heard him turning the key in the lock and walking away.
She felt both confused and frightened. She could understand why Violet had spoken to her so sharply, but she still felt that she had been badly let down. She didn’t know what Leda Sheridan intended to do to her, but she was more worried about Florence now. What would happen to Florence if she could never return to Black Horse Yard to collect her? She would be brought up among prostitutes, and that’s if they chose to bring her up at all. They might throw her out onto the streets, and she would have to beg and sleep in doorways like so many other homeless children.
It was growing dark, and the only lights she could see were in the windows of the houses opposite. Even these disappeared one by one as curtains were drawn, or candles extinguished. She tried to tug her hands out of the handcuffs but they were far too tight, and she succeeded only in scraping her wrists.
She closed her eyes and said a prayer. Although she was so frightened, she didn’t feel that God had abandoned her, and she also felt that Francis was close. She almost expected to open her eyes and see him standing in the shadows in the corner of the room, smiling at her, and telling her to have courage.
44
She could hear talking, and the sound of a violin being tuned, but she could also faintly hear the chiming of Leda Sheridan’s clock, so she knew that two hours had passed. Then she heard girls’ voices coming closer, and the bedroom door was unlocked.
Five girls came in, three of them holding candles, and gathered around her bed. She recognized them from the evening when Grace had been murdered – the three holding candles had been naked waitresses, serving drinks and jellies and canapés, while the other two were the lesbian girls who had performed on the stage with the huge ebony phallus.
‘What do you want?’ Beatrice asked them. ‘Please – take these manacles off me and let me go. I promise not to tell the police that you’ve been keeping me captive.’
Two of the girls tittered and nudged each other, but none of them answered her. After a few moments, Beatrice heard footsteps approaching, and the girls all backed away from the bed so that a newcomer could enter the room.
When she saw who it was, Beatrice was so shocked that she couldn’t speak. It was Godfrey Minchin, the young apothecary from the Foundery. He was in his shirtsleeves, with a long-tailed waistcoat the colour of snuff, and his spectacles were perched on top of his balding head.
‘Well now, Beatrice!’ he said, as if they were already halfway through a conversation. ‘This is a real pickle you’ve got yourself into, wouldn’t you say?’
He approached the bed and stood beside her. In his left hand he was holding a clear glass bottle with a glass stopper, and in his right he was holding a thick, folded pad of white gauze. He took out the stopper with a squeak, and Beatrice immediately smelled ether.
‘Godfrey,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how you’re involved with this, but I beg you to reconsider what you’re doing.’
‘I won’t injure you in any way, Beatrice,’ Godfrey told her. ‘All I’m going to do is put you to sleep, so that you won’t have to suffer any indignity.’
‘Godfrey – you do understand that what you’re doing is a criminal offence, and that you’re going to be severely punished for it?’
Godfrey turned the bottle upside-down and shook it until the gauze was soaked with ether.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘I don’t believe that it’s against the law for an apothecary to anaesthetize a patient who appears to be unwell. In your case, Beatrice, I would say that you have a dangerous case of hysteria, which could well lead to apoplexy and heart failure. I could well plead that it would be criminal of me not to put you to sleep.’
‘Please, don’t. This is insanity.’
‘Beatrice, it would be insanity for me to turn down the five pounds that they give me for every patient I treat.’
‘But you’re not treating patients, Godfrey! You’re putting healthy young girls to sleep so that men can have their way with them! And worse! How did those seven girls die – the girls that everybody says were witches? Did you have anything to do with that?’
‘I’m not going to argue with you, Beatrice,’ said Godfrey. ‘I’ve been sent up here to anaesthetisze you and that’s what I’m going to do.’ With that, he bent over and grasped the hair at the back of Beatrice’s head, so that she wouldn’t be able to turn her face away when he pressed the gauze pad against her nose and her mouth.
She held her breath for as long as she could, her eyes watering from the fumes, but at last she had to breathe in. The bedroom shrank, and grew dark, and the girls’ voices seemed to come from further and further away. At last she blacked out, but she still felt as if she were floating in a starless sky.
I’m dying, she thought. This is what it’s really like to die. No heaven, no angels, no shining lights. Death is nothing but endless darkness.
*
When she opened her eyes, she felt cold, and she shivered. Her brain felt as if it had turned into cotton wool, and for a moment she couldn’t think where she was or what had happened to her. There was a high plastered ceiling above her, decorated with floral mouldings, and a chandelier with at least a dozen candles in it, so that the room was well-lit. It was draughty, though, which made the candle flames dip, and this had the effect of making the figures on the wallpaper appear to be alive.
The wallpaper was the brightest green, and the figures were men dressed in riding habits, with top hats and crops, and they were sitting astride naked women wearing bridles and bits.
Beatrice could feel something constricting her chest, just under her breasts. She reached down and realized that it was a tan leather strap. She lifted her head and looked down to her feet. No wonder she was feeling so cold – like the women pictured on the wallpaper she too was completely naked. She was lying on a narrow cast-iron bed, on a thin horsehair mattress, pinned down by the strap around her chest, and by two more straps, one across her thighs and another across her ankles.
She looked to her left, and saw that there was another bed, close to hers, and that one of the five girls was lying on it, as naked as she was, but still unconscious. On the far side of that, at right angles, there was yet another bed, and another. By the opposite wall, she could see Judith. All five girls were here, every one of them naked, every one of them motionless. If they hadn’t all been breathing, the room could have been mistaken for a mortuary.
Beatrice had no idea how long she had been anaesthetized, but she could see from a triangular gap in the bottle-green curtains that it was still dark outside. From the height of the room she guessed that she was downstairs again now, and she could faintly hear music – the same kind of scraping music that had been playing when Grace had been murdered. The music stopped, and now she thought she could hear people clapping.
She lay back for a while, and then she lifted her head again, to see if it might be possible to loosen the leather straps. But they were at least three inches wide, and far too tight for her to wriggle out of, and their buckles were underneath the bed so that it was impossible for her to reach them.
She looked around. There was a door on the left-hand side of the room, which she guessed must lead out to the hallway, and another door directly in front of her. The music and the applause were coming from behind this door, and she realized that it must be the door beside the stage – the door from which Grace had appeared, followed by the ‘nim gimmer’ in his pointed white hood.
At least half an hour passed, and then the door from the hallway was abrup
tly opened. In came Leda Sheridan, wearing an emerald-green gown embroidered with gold stitching, and a green turban with ostrich plumes on top of it. She was followed by a young man wrapped in a grey silk robe and the two girls from the lesbian performance, both in white silk gowns. They had wings made of white goose feathers pinned to their shoulders and gold wire haloes on their heads, so they were clearly intended to look like angels.
Leda Sheridan looked around the room and then came up to Beatrice. She smelled very strongly of some musky perfume.
‘Well, well. The Widow Scarlet. It’s a pity that your church never taught you to respect the privacy of others,’ she said.
‘You should release me at once,’ Beatrice retorted, although she was finding it hard to catch her breath.
‘How can I do that? If I release you, you’ll go running off to make a complaint to a magistrate, and don’t try to tell me that you won’t. Even if you did, it would do you no good, I can promise you. I have too many clients of importance. But it would be certain to cause a most unpleasant scandal, and a great deal of publicity in the papers, and I can’t allow that. This house has a reputation to uphold.’
‘You, Mrs Sheridan, are a murderess. Nothing more and nothing less. Even if the law doesn’t punish you, then the Lord certainly will.’
‘I doubt it, Widow Scarlet. The girls who provide our entertainment here are far beyond redemption, and the fate they meet here is all they will ever be fit for. Besides, isn’t it a quick and clean demise more desirable than to suffer for years in some wretched rookery, old and half-starved and wracked by the pox?
She turned around and beckoned to the two girls dressed as angels, and then she turned back to Beatrice and said, ‘Feel yourself at liberty to report me to the Lord, because you will be meeting him long before I do. Before the next hour is out, if not sooner.’
‘I have a small daughter,’ said Beatrice. ‘Please, you can’t leave her motherless.’
‘London is full of motherless daughters. All of my girls here are motherless daughters. Yours will no doubt survive, Widow Scarlet, never fear. There are always men with a twitch in their breeches and a shilling in their pocket.’
Beatrice heard the musicians in the next room strike up with ‘Lady Lie Near Me’.
‘That’s our cue,’ said Leda Sheridan, and stepped away.
One of the angel girls came up to Beatrice. She might have been beautiful, but her cheeks were pockmarked from smallpox and four of her front teeth were missing and her huge blue eyes were unfocused as if she were half-asleep. She drew a thin, black silk scarf from out of her waistband and pulled it tightly between Beatrice’s lips, lifting her head and tying a knot behind the back of her neck to gag her.
Beatrice shook her head violently from side to side and tried to cry out, but all she could manage was muffled, goose-like honks. The scarf tasted of ether and something else musty, like mould or dried semen.
Now the man in the grey silk robe bent down beside her bed and unbuckled her straps. As he unfastened the strap around her chest, she realized who he was – the same man with the rubbery lips who had been raping Grace when she was beheaded. The hair on his head was cropped short, but his dark chest hair curled out of the top of his robe, and the backs of his hands were hairy, too. Close up, she could see that he had a large wart next to his nose, and he had the coldest, deadest eyes that she had ever seen.
She tried to hit him and kick him, but he was far too strong for her. Underneath his slippery silk robe, his muscles felt as hard and curved and sinewy as those of Kingdom, the horse that she used to ride in Sutton. He heaved her up off the bed and carried her out through the door, and onto the stage.
The room was crowded. Beatrice turned her face away, because she was too ashamed of her nakedness to see who might be there. But there was loud applause when she was brought in – ribald whoops of encouragement from the men and little shrill screams from the women. The musicians continued to play ‘Lady Lie Near Me’, faster and faster, and the audience clapped in time to the music. Out of the corner of her eye she could see flushed faces and sparkling jewellery and fans furiously flapping because the room was so airless and hot.
The man laid her down on the oval table in the centre of the stage, and the two angel girls came up and fastened ribbons around her wrists in the same way that Grace had been restrained.
Leda Sheridan came out and held up her green-gloved hands for silence. The musicians stopped playing, although the audience kept on shuffling and laughing and nudging each other.
‘My lords, ladies and honourable gentlemen, welcome to yet another spectacular evening of amorous entertainment!’ Leda Sheridan sang out. ‘Tonight we have a show for you that will exceed in its erotic audacity any performances that you have ever witnessed anywhere, not only in London but in any capital in Europe!’
There was more applause, and cries of ‘Brava!’ One of the women in the audience swooned, collapsing into her gown like a huge red chrysanthemum, but she was lifted up again by the two men standing either side of her, and they fanned her in the face until she recovered.
‘Tonight you will see no fewer than five young virgins – five! – deflowered simultaneously on their deathbeds! But to whet your appetites, as a juicy hors d’oeuvre, I give you this delectable female sacrifice – the beautiful Aphrodite!’
The musicians started to play ‘The Jovial Broom Man’, and as they did so, the two angel girls went up to the hairy man and dragged off his grey silk robe. Men in the audience roared encouragement, while the women screamed.
The hairy man stood at the front of the stage, posing and flexing his muscles in imitation of a Greek wrestler, and then he strutted up and down, waggling his penis.
‘What do you think of this truncheon?’ he shouted out. ‘Any of you ladies like to luncheon on my truncheon?’
Beatrice closed her eyes. Please, dear God, take away all of my senses. Let me neither see nor hear nor feel anything during this ordeal. Take my mind back to the parsonage in Sutton, on a summer’s day, walking hand in hand with Francis down to the stream and smelling the trees and the grass and hearing the vireos whistle.
But this was a prayer that God didn’t answer, or perhaps he didn’t hear. Beatrice felt the hairy man grasping her ankles and spreading her legs, and then she heard the table creak as he climbed up onto it. Her throat filled with saliva and behind her gag she had to swallow and swallow which made her feel as if she were drowning.
Edging up the table, the man used his coarse hairy thighs to lever her legs even further apart, and then he opened up her vulva with his thumbs, stretching her labia as wide as he could. She kept on praying inside her head as he prodded at her with the swollen head of his penis, but then he gave a loud grunt and forced himself into her, all the way up to his pubic hair. She was dry, and his penis was enormous, and she couldn’t stop herself from letting out a gargle of pain. It was like having a thick wooden pastry pin pushed into her vagina.
The crowd cheered as the hairy man entered her, and then cheered again when he drew himself right out of her again. He brandished his penis in his fist before squashing it back up inside her. Every time he heaved himself forward, her pelvis was knocked against the tabletop, hurting her spine. She felt as helpless as Minnie, Florence’s doll, when Florence flung her around the room in a temper.
As his thrusting grew faster and harder, the hairy man started to sweat, and his warm perspiration dropped onto Beatrice’s face. He leaned forward and grasped her breasts in both hands, squeezing them hard and pinching her nipples. His thumbnails were coarsely bitten, and she winced every time he dug them in deeper.
Please, dear Lord, let this be over, she prayed, but almost as soon as she thought that, the audience started to chant.
‘Nim gimmer! Nim gimmer! Nim gimmer!’
As soon as she heard that, Beatrice was swamped from head to foot with a cold sense of utter dread. She couldn’t stop herself from opening her eyes, and there above her, so close that
their noses were almost touching, was the sweaty dead-eyed face of the hairy man. When he saw that she was looking up at him, he winked and gave her a rubbery leer.
‘Almost there, darling!’ he panted. ‘Almost there!’
‘Nim gimmer!’ chanted the audience. ‘Nim gimmer!’
From where she was lying on the table, Beatrice couldn’t see the door at the side of the stage, but she knew when it had opened because the audience suddenly roared and screamed and stamped on the floor and the musicians began to scrape their instruments even faster, as if they were racing each other.
‘Nim gimmer! Nim gimmer! Nim gimmer!’
The hairy man raised his head, and grinned, and nodded, and Beatrice guessed that the tall man in his white robes and pointed hood had appeared.
Pray God it won’t hurt too much, having my head cut off. Please let it be quick, and let me feel nothing, and please take care of Florence for me. And Noah, wherever he is. Poor sweet Noah.
The man in the white robes circled around the table until Beatrice could see him, and he stood beside her motionless while the hairy man continued to pant his way closer and closer to a climax. Beatrice could see his eyes blinking behind the holes in his pointed hood like an animal peering out of its lair, and there was a damp patch on the cotton where his mouth was. He must be salivating.
‘Nearly, nearly, nearly!’ the hairy man gasped, with clear snot swinging from his nose, and the man in the white robes drew out his shiny curved sword.
Beatrice closed her eyes again, expecting to feel the cold blade slicing across her throat. But it was then that she heard a thunderous crash from the hallway, and men shouting.
The musicians abruptly stopped playing, and the audience stopped chanting and clapping. There was more shouting from the hallway, and the loud bang of a pistol shot. The hairy man said, ‘God’s teeth!’ and climbed off her. She opened her eyes in time to see him jumping naked off the stage. The man in the white robes had already vanished.
The Coven Page 34
