The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  Something fell to the ground between us. I waited for a moment, then cast my eyes down, and slowly stooped to pick it up, hoping she wouldn’t notice the movement to her right side. It was a fine gold earring, inlaid with four garnets. I hesitated for a moment, and looked at my lady’s ears. They were graced with simple diamond studs. I scanned the rest of the group to find the lady with the naked ear to whom I should return it. I saw her; she was directly by my left arm, but she had not cared to look at what I had collected from the pavement. In an irreparable instant, I curled my fist over the earring. I waited a few moments until the end of the song, and then in the midst of the applause I reached forward between two gentlemen and tugged gently on Lucinda’s braids.

  ‘Come now, little one,’ I hissed.

  ‘But Mama,’ she wailed.

  ‘Hush your moaning, child. We must be off. Hurry, or I shall tell your father.’

  The garnets would be perfect for my design. I had become a thief.

  I showed the earring to Peter, who did not ask me how I had come by it, but straightways set himself to troubling how to provide a firm setting for the garnets. I bit my lip as he held the piece on the palm of one hand, and prodded it with a bloated finger-pad of the other hand. It was going to be a painstaking piece of work for him, and I meant that literally.

  That afternoon, after Mr Skinner had come and gone with one half-sovereign and eight shillings and very little trouble else, Peter found solace for his resultant nerves in the laudanum bottle again. I put Lucinda to an early bed, wiped the brown spittle off Peter’s chin, and stayed up until midnight disbanding and cleaning off the backs of the sections of the old binding of the Decameron, and mending the holes in the folds with pared paper. It was an arduous and fragile process, but I trusted that the mends, which seemed invisible by candlelight, would be likewise barely perceptible in the light of day. My eyes were heavy by the time I rigged up the sewing-frame, but it was a simple enough layout – octavo, with blank first recto, engraved frontispiece on first verso, title page on second recto – and I sewed all the sections together and left them on Jack’s bench in time for his half-past-seven start. Despite my empty stomach, I slept soundly at last, well nigh oblivious to Peter’s moans of pain and fitful snores.

  In the morning I let Jack in, settled Lucinda with some sewing in the kitchen, and returned to the workshop. Hands on hips, I stood looking at Jack, waiting for him to look up at me, but he did not; he continued to prepare the cords and boards. Then he snorted, as if trying to suppress a laugh, and I giggled at the sound, and soon he was chuckling too. Finally he turned his back on me to fiddle with the laying-press and said with a guffaw, ‘I thought I’d seen everything, me, living by the river!’ I grabbed the duster from the rail and wiped down the bench with what felt like alacrity, and Jack turned his head round and winked at me. I cocked my head and my hip towards him in one motion, and grinned.

  ‘But what do you reckon, we don’t show the old man?’

  ‘Mr D? Do him the world of good!’

  ‘Hark at you! Vile little river-scamp! Be the end of him, more like.’

  ‘Nah, keep him busy in there.’

  ‘Impudent lad! Give your red rag a holiday, Jack-a-dandy.’

  ‘Beg pardon, Mrs D. Didn’t mean no harm.’

  Now it was my turn to wink at him, and he beamed across his wicked freckly face like a sweet urchin.

  ‘Hush thy mouth, Jack,’ I added quietly, ‘because thy lord and master will be amongst us this morning.’ Jack struck his brow with his fingers in a mock salute, and the tattooed skull on his forearm grimaced at me as if it wanted to warn me that this was no laughing matter, when the only funds that had come in had gone straight out again, and every knock at the door put a terror into us. Truth be told, I was rather troubled about how Peter would fare, not only with the garnets, but with the mischievous book itself.

  I need not have worried. The garnets took so much of his concentration that he never once so much as asked the title. As far as he was concerned, it was another fancy lady’s book, of no interest to him, all shimmering gold flowers and flagons, scrolls and swags. I adorned the back with the crest of Les Sauvages Nobles, and tooled the word ‘Nocturnus’, as instructed by Diprose, beneath it. And the four stones studded the corners like small pools of blood.

  When the book was finally finished, the three of us gathered around the wine-coloured volume, silent with satisfaction. ‘The Decameron. Bockackio,’ Peter read from the spine. The lettering was perfectly even – Moive Bibble had packed her bags – although Peter said nothing about my handiwork.

  I gave it to Jack to deliver to Holywell-street, with the map on the scrap of paper to guide him in the back way. He left at midday, and I spent the next few hours scrubbing the workshop. I cleaned the windows and oil lamps thoroughly, and garnered together every last trace of gold-dust to take back to Edwin Nightingale. Then Lucinda and I made griddlecakes for our tea. Still Jack was not back, and the clock was chiming four.

  Finally, just before five, he rollicked in with a nose as red as his hair, a wet patch down the front of his coat, and a large brown-paper package in his arms.

  ‘Look at you! You’re bung-eyed, Jack!’ I scolded, and whipped his behind with a kitchen towel.

  ‘And you’re lovely, Mrs D.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘At the sluicery.’

  ‘I can see that. What have you had to drink?’

  ‘Why? You offering me some more?’

  ‘No, I am not. But go on, then, tell me what happened, but hush you now, before you wake the squire.’ I took the parcel from him and placed it on the table; it felt like more manuscripts.

  ‘He was chuffed to pieces, Mrs D, to pieces. You won’t believe what he gave me. This.’ He opened his fist to show a handful of silver and brown coins. ‘Nah, that’s not it. Well it is, or it was. It was a friggin’ coach-wheel, Mrs D!’

  ‘A crown? He gave you a crown?’

  ‘Aye he did, and I said to him, I said, am I to give this back to Mr Damage, and he says no, Jack, my boy, it’s for you. It’s your tip, young lad, he called me.’

  It was as much as I could do to restrain myself from snatching them out of the sot’s hand; the injustice of it stung my cheeks. Here my child was starving while Jack went out drinking on my employer’s gratuities.

  ‘And this is for you, he said it was.’ He waved a brown envelope in my face. I grabbed it, and felt inside to find a sovereign. It was more than I had handed over to Skinner.

  Jack whistled. ‘A thick ’un an’ all. Crikey. And go on, open the parcel, Mrs D, when you’ve stopped dribblin’ over the balsam.’

  I prised open the seal, and found inside several thin manuscripts and a letter from Mr Diprose.

  Dear Mrs Damage,

  I enclose twelve books which I would not trouble you to persue at any length. Their literary merit is scant; they belong to that subset of facetiae known as galanterie, and they are nothing but the simplest examples of that genre. Despite their gaudiness, I ask you to dress them with understated elegance, as one would make a lady of an opera-dancer. On the back of each must be the crest of Les Sauvages Nobles; underneath, one each of the following noms de plume, in the order in which the manuscripts are stacked herewith:

  – Nocturnus

  – Labor Bene

  – P.cinis It.

  – Monachus

  – Vesica Quartus

  – Beneficium Flumen

  – Praemium Vir

  – Clementia

  – R. Equitavit

  – Osmundanus

  – Clericus

  – Scalp-domus

  Yours most sincerely, &c

  Charles Diprose

  * * *

  I chose to ignore Diprose’s suggestion that I should not read the books, for I felt it important to distil the essence of the book on to the binding. But he was correct about their merit: they were sentimental novelettes with little thought of style, charac
terisation and plot, and I only managed to wade my way through the first three of the twelve.

  The first was rather fancy in its descriptions of marital passion, and the protagonists preferred to do the act en plein air, as Diprose no doubt would have said.

  The second made me blush even more, for the activity, although occurring inside the house this time, was not inside the marriage, and described with a bit less restraint.

  By the time I reached the third, I wished I had taken Diprose’s advice more seriously. I knew not how to clothe these naked bodies in the binding of a book.

  Eventually I restored to the language of flowers. In the centre of each front cover, I wove a wreath of ivy leaves, as a symbol of wedded love and fidelity, and these poor souls needed all the help they could get. How appropriate, I thought at the time, that I lived in Ivy-street. And within each wreath of ivy, I placed a different bouquet of flowers according to the requirements of the story.

  For the first, fern, for shelter from the elements.

  For the second, marigold, for the health and vigour the protagonists clearly required.

  For the third, euphorbia, to represent persistence, the key value praised therein.

  And may the Lord bless my naïveté, for I made sure that the discerning booklover could delight himself with the discovery that, in each circlet of ivy leaves, every third leaf was in fact a heart.

  Chapter Eight

  When I was young and in my prime,

  I’d done my work by dinner time;

  But now I’m old and cannot trot

  I’m obliged to work till eight o’clock.

  'You are skimping on the household,’ Peter shouted at me from upstairs as yet another parcel arrived at the workshop.

  This one seemed innocuous enough at first glance: an Apocrypha, a Litany, a Paradise Lost and a Regain’d, an Areopagitica; two reprints of Michael Drayton’s The Nymphidia and The Muses Elizium; M. Felix Lajard’s Cult, Symbols and Attributes of Venus, published in Paris in 1837 and in need of a re-bind, a minute-book for a Turkish Bath company; several collections of correspondence; two Visitors’ Books, four blank account ledgers; twelve black journals; and various short anthropological, medical and anatomical tracts. Most were to receive the coat-of-arms of Les Sauvages Nobles, especially the blank ones, which would display it on the front cover, not the rear.

  ‘Smell that?’ Peter shuffled into the workshop as I was reading Diprose’s accompanying letter. ‘ ‘Tis an ill bird that fouls its own nest. You haven’t cleaned the range properly for days, and the house forever smells of burnt fat.’ I knew I would have to scrape it well and rinse with more than vinegar, but it was the least of my worries. If the business coming through Damage’s doors were only half of what I had wanted, I thought to myself, my initial desires must have been truly excessive. And Diprose was reminding me in his letter that Lady Knightley persisted in her wish to meet with me.

  But Peter was right. I was keeping the windows in the workshop scrupulously clean to help our work-weary eyes, but I had not cleaned the windows in the house since January, so it looked gloomier than ever. A thick layer of grime had settled over everything, and I knew I performed every task – the laundry, the cooking, the scouring of pots, the cleaning out of the grates, the filling of the coal-scuttles – in a manner that became more slapdash by the day. I rarely had the time in the evenings to sit and mend clothes, so holes grew in Lucinda’s frocks and my smocks. Peter, fortunately, rarely changed out of his nightclothes these days, except when some of Dr Chisholm’s precious mixture spilt down his chest. Washing days – when I used to have to get up at four to start heating the water – had started to drift over now on to other days, so each morning I would treat only the dirtiest of the linen for stains, put them in to soak, pummel them in a snatched morning break, then try to rinse them some time in the afternoon, and hang them out to dry in front of the fire overnight. By morning they would always be speckled with soot and dirt from the coal fire, oil lamp and candles. But they were still cleaner than they would have been if I had hung them outside on the line.

  Peter was also right about housework being circular and endless, but he was wrong that it was best suited to a woman’s disposition. That is to say, it was not suited to mine. I always found myself eager to start work in the workshop despite the pressure of household chores, for in binding books I faced a result, an object that I could hold, and of which I could be proud. I could see little purpose in taking pleasure in the whitening of a doorstep or the making of a plum pudding: both would vanish within minutes, along with all proof of my toil.

  Peter’s scolding that morning only made me feel cooped in a cage. To avoid facing the mouting workload and more of his wrath, I decided that today I would visit Lady Knightley in Berkeley-square.

  I put some sand to heat in a pan over the range, beat and sponged my floral dress once more, and set about making myself somewhat more presentable. A hard task, or so I thought, until I ran a brush through my hair and looked in the glass. Are my weary eyes deceiving me, I wondered, or have my grey hairs disappeared? Where could they have gone to? I looked younger, more like myself as I was a few years ago. Could it be that I was actually thriving on this new regime? But alas, it was not my eyes, but my hairbrush (and the dirty glass) that played tricks on me. I had not washed either for weeks: filthy from the constant grime snared by my hair, the hairbrush blackened my hair back again every time I brushed. I smiled at my own vanity; I was meeting a lady today.

  I went back to the kitchen, transferred the hot sand into a calico bag, brought it up to Peter, and tucked it in at the bottom of the bed where his feet lay.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To see a lady about some books.’

  ‘I need nursing.’

  ‘I will be back soon. What do you need?’

  ‘Some beef-tea.’

  ‘I will get some gravy-beef from Sam Battye on my way back,’ I said. I knew already that I would lie and say that he had none, not that we had not the pennies for it. I would make him some arrowroot, or toast-water, instead.

  I walked quickly from the dingier part of the metropolis to the more delightful one; I could not be away from Lucinda, or my bindings, for long.

  It was not Goodchild who opened the door between the plant balls today, but a short, squat woman who looked as if she had been accidentally crushed in one of our presses, which had crumpled her face and body latitudinally before some kind mechanic had noticed and unscrewed her. She was a series of wide horizontal folds: her forehead bulged low over her brow, her nose over her chin, her chin over her neck, and her breasts over her gut, somewhat like the old Tudor tenements in Holywell-street or by the river.

  ‘I’m here to see Lady Knightley, please.’

  ‘Card?’

  ‘I have no card.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Mrs Damage.’

  She closed the door in my face, and the latch clicked shut. I stood looking at the fine brass door-furniture on the black-painted door for a moment, before turning to face Berkeley-square, with its enormous trees, and close-cropped grass, in which not a weed dared grow. Then I turned back again, and the door was still closed, so I started down the steps. A wasted journey, but at least I could say to Diprose that I had tried. I crossed the road and stood on the verge of the grass. I crouched down, and reached out to touch it. It felt illegal.

  ‘Mrs Damage!’

  I pulled my hand back and stood up as if I had been stung by a bee in the non-existent clover, but I did not turn round.

  ‘Mrs Damage! What are you doing?’ It was that maid again, calling from the top of the Knightleys’ steps.

  Head bowed, I hurried back across the street so I would not have to shout my feeble explanation. Touching the grass. I’m ever so sorry. We don’t have grass like that in Lambeth, see.

  But before I could speak, the woman called again, ‘I’m to take you up to see Lady Knightley,’ so I ran up the steps for fear that the door would
close in my face once more, and into the hall, and was taken aback again by the statuary Negro lad, at whom I nodded by way of apology, and followed the maid up the stairs. We went along the plush, carpeted corridor, past the lion’s den of Sir Jocelyn’s office, and stopped outside another door.

  The maid opened it, but before she could show me through she rushed inwards, saying something that sounded like, ‘Let me help you, ma’am.’ The door swung back towards me but did not quite catch: was I to push it open with my fingertips and peer round to show my presence, or was I to wait until it was re-opened for me? I stared at the strip of light between the jamb and the door. I heard panting as the maid plumped cushions, a lady sighed, a drink was poured.

  ‘Where is the girl?’ the sighing voice enquired. Footsteps approached the door again. From the maid’s face as she pulled the door open, I realised I should have been bold enough to follow her in initially. A less polite girl than me would have thought of a name for that woman, even if she would only have hissed it under her breath to her on passing.

  The lady, lying on a mauve chaise-longue, was as graced in charm and sensitivity as her maid lacked it, but that, then, is because she was the lady, and not the maid.

  ‘Thank you, Buncie,’ she said, by way of dismissal to the maid, and turned to me. ‘The little bookbindress!’ she exclaimed. ‘Come, sit here by me. Let me see you!’ But it was her I wanted to see – and not be seen by – and this glorious chamber too. It was a paradise of femininity and sweetness; she was not the only treasure in it. Everywhere was silken, shiny, smooth and soft: fringed shawls bedecked with roses and peonies were draped over the backs of chairs and occasional tables; the mantel was pelmetted with pink and green tassels, some so deep I feared they would catch fire. The sound of birdsong was such that I had never deemed possible to hear in London – it seemed louder even than when I had stood in Berkeley-square itself – and the dried spiced petals in bowls gave off the smell of roses so strongly it was as if every fabric in the room had been rinsed only yesterday in pure rosewater. Everything beckoned ‘touch me’, but the moment I entertained that thought the room seemed to shriek at me, ‘but not with those grubby common little hands!’ and so I swelled and shrank my way round the room by turns.