‘Well, well, Mrs Damage. What a delight it is to see you.’ Pizzy greeted me at the door, and relieved me of the box. Diprose came through from the back room.
‘I presume by this return visit that Peter’s foot is still ailing him?’ he said, and he and Pizzy shared a smile that excluded me. I cannot say how long we chit-chatted, for all I remember was the moment I was asked to open the box and reveal its contents, and Charles Diprose’s first, ‘very nice’, followed by an, ‘I’m impressed’. And I could see at last that the books were indeed very nice, and impressive. Possibly I had known it all along; but his verdict allowed me to believe it. Similarly, I cannot remember how much he paid me for the books, but it felt like both a king’s ransom and an insult to a pauper. Simply to have earned the smallest amount of money in those days was a great achievement, and yet reminded me of how much more we needed in order to harbour in a safe place. I was pleased, and proud, and scared, all at once.
When I left him, I walked due north-east through unfamiliar streets, through heckles and shouts, for close to an hour, to Clerkenwell, where I found my way to James Wilson, fabric merchants. Emboldened by Diprose’s favourable receipt of my cloth bindings – or rather, his lack of complaint – I was going to investigate whether it would be worth our binding the Bible in weave rather than in hide, to save a few pennies. The smell of dyes and fabric treatments got up my nose in the warehouse as I fingered the samples of cambrics and buckrams. I stroked the leather-look cloths, and listened as the assistant told me how suitable they were for use on everything from books to bonnets, curtains to coffins, but the prices startled me.
‘You want cloth, you gotta pay for cloth, love,’ he told me. ‘It’s the Yankees. The cotton famine. There ain’t no cotton to be had, scarce as honour right now. What you are, then? A hat-maker? A seamstress?’
‘My husband’s a bookbinder. Too busy to come out today. Apprentice is sick, you know what it’s like.’
‘Well what’s he doing sending you ’ere then, when he could’ve told you ‘isself and saved you the journey? Didn’t he know? What’s he been using all this time, then? Papyrus?’ He chuckled at his own joke while I flushed at my ignorance. Damages was not an industrial binders mass-producing cloth bindings. ‘It’s worse than the bloody Crimean, now, I’ll tell you,’ he went on. ‘See this. This is best quality Charles Winter-bottom cloth. Used to be seven pence a yard. In the war, it cost you four shillings sixpence. Now you can’t get it for less than six shillings. Why else do you think they’ve all had to go back to binding in plain boards? Nothing to fret about. They’ll become historic artefacts in a few years, them books.’
But I realised, as I mulled over bindings becoming casualties of war, and the prospect of Damages suffering the same fate, that I also had been frightened to go where I really needed to go. It was safe for me, a woman, to buy cloth. Leather was different; the tanneries terrified me.
But I set off again, this time due south-east, through the heart of the City, and over London Bridge. Each strike of my feet on the pavement was sending aches up through the very bones of my legs, and I was weary, and in need of a sit-down. The houses were miserable here, and as much in a state of disrepair and despair as their inhabitants. The closer I got to the broad, low tannery buildings, the more the cobbles beneath my feet were stained gules, and matted with clumps of fur, trod-in gristle and wool, like a peculiar red and brown moss.
This bloody carpet thickened underfoot as one neared the source of the vile smell, which had a pungency that stirred the guts with the fearsome rawness, not of death, but of the slow, putrid rot that follows. It stuck to the wheels of the wagons and vans, and to the wooden clogs of the workmen; one dared not slip, for fear of closer contact with the decaying, deathly slime. There were rickety wooden bridges over the series of tidal streams that condemned this district of London to its awful trade, providing sufficient new – one could not say clean – water twice daily for the tanners and leather-dressers. And where the river did not reach, pools of greasy brown water bubbled menacingly with poisonous gas, like pustulous, open wounds, and reeking of putrefying animal. Small boys with red legs squatted amongst them with sharpened sticks, scavenging for meat, which I hoped they would sell to the cat-meat man, and not the pie-man. Wandering amongst them were some older boys carrying buckets of dog turds, to take to the tanneries to cleanse the skins once they were out of the lime-pits; they’d get eight pence for a bucket of pure. The boys’ faces were sunken, their noses pinched, as if they had been bred to minimise the mephitic air entering their bodies.
I walked past the warehouse of Felix Stephens, for I knew we owed him, and found the sign of Select Skins and Leather Dressings. I hesitated at the door, then sidled in, to find thousands of hides stacked ceiling-wards, and a considerable number of men shouting prices, writing notes, and exiting briskly with rolls of leather under their arms.
‘You lookin’ for summink?’
‘I am,’ I said with false confidence. The man’s voice may have been youthful, but his skin was as leathered as his wares, and his arms as strong as an ox. I told him my purpose, and he pulled out for me several fine moroccos, some pigskin, and some calf, and let me peruse them all.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing at a line running across the hide.
‘Prob’ly a vein. Too reg’lar to be a scar.’ He pulled out some inferior hides from another stack, and showed me flay marks, fighting scars, trap scars.
‘Is it cheaper like this?’ I asked.
‘Depends,’ he shrugged. ‘These are beasts, wild beasts, who’ve lived their lives, and all the better for it. Might seem imperfeck to you, but it’s beau’iful to summun else.’
‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing at a white patch on one of the moroccos, which was otherwise relatively unblemished.
‘We call that a kiss mark,’ the youth said, without relish. ‘It’s where the hides have touched each other in the pits, so the tanning agent couldn’t get there. Just meant someone didn’t rock the frames properly, didn’t do their job. Prob’ly a Paddy.’
‘Will you accept less for it?’ I asked. It was of a lovely quality besides, and I knew I could disguise it somehow.
He thought for a while. ‘A’right.’
I bought just the one skin: a skin of such quality, without a kiss mark, would have cost me two shillings and four pence, but I took it away for just one shilling and sixpence, which I estimated would be sufficient to bind eight crown octavo books.
My journey home was not far, through the fog and the Borough, and as I walked I wondered how much I dared spend on food tonight, or whether it would only be scraps again for supper. I buried my nose in the scroll of leather – it smelt better away from the tannery – and let the magnificent smell of dead beast nourish me. Would that I could have bought its flesh, too. But Diprose’s coins still danced in a pouch beneath my skirts, and I felt something akin to, but not exactly like, hope.
Jack marked round the Bible, and cut out the leather. He snipped the corners and spine spaces off as accurately as a surgeon, laid it on the marble slab, and pared away the dermis, grading it thinly towards the corners and top and bottom of the spine. It must have been hard for Peter, watching Jack’s hands on the knife he would not have been capable of gripping, paring with precision the leather he could only have destroyed.
‘A pea of paste, a pea, no more!’ Peter ordered, as Jack damped the leather on the front and worked the paste into the reverse, then smoothed it firmly but not tightly across the millboards. He folded the leather over around the tops of the boards, and tucked it in around the head-band, using the bone folder, then started to form the head-cap on to the leather, when I had to leave to settle Lucinda for her nap, and collect the water in the pails, before it was turned off again. When I returned, Jack had repeated the whole process with the bottom of the boards and spine, then the sides, and finally the angles of the corners, which met in a perfect mitre. Jack was skilled, but he had learnt from an expert. Th
en he inserted the boards and books between flannel and tin, and put them into the press.
At least twelve hours had to pass before it was ready for finishing; I needed as many of those hours that Lucinda and the house could spare me, and then I would need to be ready for the finishing, too. Its permanence daunted me: unlike a hearth or a doorstep that could be gone over repeatedly should one miss a mark or a stain, gold-tooling cannot be erased or painted over. The finishing announces excellence and nobility, from the gold itself to the pleasing hand-tools, which, like dainty but solid bits of jewellery, feel satisfying in one’s hand. I heat Peter’s hand-tools on the stove, and my spoons and pans look dirty and ugly by comparison. I whisk up egg white and water to make bookbinder’s glair, and I am an alchemist; I whisk up the remnant egg yolks to make omelettes, sauces, custards, and I am a curmudgeon. Finishing is the way the book presents itself to the world and gets noticed; the forwarding is more like women’s work, for one never notices it unless it has been shoddily done. Twelve hours, and the task, the honour, the responsibility, would be mine.
Chapter Five
I’ll tell my own daddy,
When he comes home,
What little good work
My mammy has done;
She has earned a penny
And spent a groat,
And burnt a hole
In the child’s new coat.
'MOIV BIBLL,’ Jack read over my shoulder. ‘Moive Bibble. Who’s she? The police officer responsible for offences against spines?’
‘No. She’s the Patron Saint of Bad Toolers.’
‘What’s it meant to say?’
‘Holy Bible.’
‘Ah. Never mind, Mrs D. You’ll get there. That’s not half bad for a first try. I’ve seen plenty worse.’
It had not been the easiest of mornings. We had started with a discussion of the brief: ‘a simple representation of God’s bounty in tropical climes’. Peter had no pineapples, no fig-leaves, no palm trees, amongst his tools. The closest he had come to the tropics was binding The Reports for the Year 1856 of the Past and Present State of Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions. I wondered why Diprose had even thought of Damages for this brief. For all his curves, Peter was a rectilinear sort of man; his fillets were the straightest in London. His idea for this would have been a geometrical diaper pattern across the front cover, with a border of straight lines of varying thicknesses.
‘But you are not capable of the discipline of regular diaper tooling,’ he told me bluntly. ‘You are clumsy. Let us not even consider it.’
Yet he would not consider anything else. I had painted watercolours on some rectangles of vellum, too small to make more than a book for a midget, but each one was too sensual, or too beautiful, or too dangerous for Peter to contemplate turning into a tooled design. I had designed Biblical scenes for Peter before in this way: the Annunciation, countless Miracles, the Crucifixion. But when asked for God’s bounty in the tropics, I found myself time and again in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, serpents, fruit, and the innocence of nakedness.
‘No fruit. Too suggestive, too much a woeful reminder of the fateful apple,’ he would say. Or, ‘Fig-leaves? A representation of the civilised – by which I mean, clothed – appearance of Western missionaries, would be more appropriate than their naked and barbarous brethren.’ And finally, ‘Are you attempting to incite my wrath with your border of snakes, or are you merely stupid?’
‘Diprose has asked for simplicity,’ he went on to explain.
‘Diprose is a man of the times. Not for him this endless gold filigree, this vulgar excess, this florid lack of taste. Nor for me neither.’
My paintings were also too elaborate for me to convert into tooled gold. I could have embroidered them in coloured silks and silver and gold threads, onto the purest white satin, with the most elaborate border of beasts, birds and fish, but both Peter and I knew I could not hope to gold-tool them.
‘It is quite apparent,’ Peter eventually said, ‘that we must start with establishing of what you are capable, and work the design within those meagre limitations. A simple diaper is what it must be. A leaf will do.’
Peter had several leaf tools, but they were the ash, the oak, the sycamore, the chestnut, not the palm, the baobab, the gingko. ‘God’s bounty in tropical climes,’ I muttered, as I played with the tools. A tentative pattern was forming in my mind. I selected a small crown tool, a miniature diamond, and a triangle. I sketched it on a piece of paper, and showed Peter my idea. ‘Imposs –’ he started to say, before sucking in his lower lip and nodding, slowly.
I practised on the half-leather of the woefully bound journal with which I had started and ended my forwarding career. Peter showed me how to draw up the template on paper, and fix it in place over the half-leather. Then I warmed the tools on the stove, and went slowly over the pattern. My dwell was insufficient here, and too much there, the crown was not straight here, and the diamonds did not align there, but slowly the leather became covered with indentations that represented tiny, imperfect pineapples. The crowns were the leaves, and the diamonds and triangles the matrix of the skin. I was still tooling blind; we could not waste a speck of gold dust on practice.
‘Now for the spine.’ Peter showed me how to grip the book in the press and prepare the lettering. I selected the type for ‘HOLY BIBLE’, warmed them too on the stove, and pressed them into the leather. It would not yet pass muster with Charles Diprose, but even Peter knew it was an admirable start. Some of the letters were skewed, I had dug in too deep in places, and held the tool at the wrong angle so that one side of the letter went deeper than another, but it was just about legible.
‘Never mind. We must pursue our goal with determination. You have had enough practice with the – the – that – pineapple, and we will have to hope for the best.’
With a ruler I marked out a paper grid with the precise location of each tool, and affixed it to the front cover of the Bible. Then we took the book over to the booth in the corner, along with the tools. Jack locked the external door and pulled the door curtain across it, stopped up the bottom with the felt draught-excluder, and pulled the curtain across the internal door and around the booth.
I tooled the design through the paper, removed the paper, and heated up the tools for the first round of blind-tooling. I painted the design with glair using a fine sable brush, and let it dry. I repeated it, another thin coat. Then a third time, on Peter’s insistence. Finally, I took the gold out of the strongbox below the bench, greased the impressions, laid the gold on, and heated the tiny branding irons.
It was unbearably slow, and the irrevocable nature of the work was daunting: I could burn the leather, or cut it, or get the tool in the wrong place, or tool unevenly. When it came to putting the gold down, there really was no return. I kept holding my breath, and becoming giddy.
‘Your hands must not shake,’ Peter insisted, but my hands were not shaking, and both of us knew it. ‘Where the iron touches, the gold sticks for good,’ he murmured, but I was getting it right. My pressure was still uneven, but I took the time to rock the tools, which increased the amount of light reflected from the gold. ‘Give the pattern dignity. Slow and steady.’
But soon he stopped instructing me, and finally conceded, with discernible sadness, that I did indeed, and most fortunately, have a steady hand. He left after a while, to find some salicin or take a rest, I did not know. I paused while he moved the curtains, and ensured the gold was not disturbed by any breeze. When he had gone, I continued.
Give the pattern dignity, slow and steady. His words still rang in my ears. I continued – four, five, six, seven more pineapples. I was almost halfway down the front cover. Then, despite myself, my focus shifted from the present tooling to the ones I had yet to do, and back to the ones I had done before, and I congratulated myself on how good they were, and gained from them a false sense of confidence. Then in crept the thought that Lucinda would soon be ready for some food,
and then her nap. Was that her I could hear, wandering around in the house saying ‘Mama, Mama’? She knew better than to come in and disrupt the folds of the curtain, but what if she did? I lost momentum; my mother’s brain took over, my hands rushed and tried to do their usual several things at once instead of the one task in progress. And so I made two errors simultaneously: I burnt the leather, and I mis-tooled, which meant the ghost and the final impression would not sit squarely on each other. In an attempt to rectify it, I dampened the leather and picked at it with a pin to try to lift the impressions, but I only scratched the leather and made more of a mess.
I stood back, hot and breathless, and looked at the central row of pineapples. Not just one but all of them were out of kilter and at odds with each other, strewn like children playing in the fields, rather than neatly serried ranks of pupils in a schoolhouse. I stopped, and wondered why I had ever been so hard on Peter for only being capable of doing one thing at a time.
I did not allow myself to despair for long. I simply left the workshop behind me to see to my child, and do what at heart I knew I was best at. I did not return to the workshop at all, but busied myself about the house to thwart the worrying. And when I heard noises later coming from the workshop, I did not dare descend to see what Peter was up to. There was swearing, and shouting, and a bench leg being kicked, followed by puffing, and panting, and sobs. I trembled in bed and cried myself to sleep. I knew I should have got up to confront the responsibilities that I had ensured were now my own, but I decided to let the man be, for a while. I must have fallen asleep at some point, for I woke with a start as the church bell tolled five, and my hands were still gripping the top of the counterpane tightly. Peter was soundly asleep next to me. I took the chamber-pots and descended, then rifled through the fires for embers to put in the range. Only then did I go into the workshop.
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 9
