The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  Harder to develop a design for were the collections of plates with brief introductions but otherwise few words that already had their own visual style, and not always to my aesthetic. For these, I resorted once again to the language of leaves, flowers and herbs; from the ‘secret love’ of acacia to the ‘remembered friends’ of zinnia, I had something, no matter how fragile, behind which to hide. Lilies were safest, due to their ambiguity, but the temptation always to resort to the cautionary oleander, and to eschew the lustful coriander, was great.

  Sometimes I was repelled, sometimes charmed, but always arrested, never bored. How strange the models looked, all tangled limbs, enlarged appendages and gaping orifices! Not one single image was anything like any amorous picture I had hitherto imagined; they were love unromanticised, but for that reason, possibly more authentic. One particular plate was entitled ‘cunnylyngus’: in it a man was behaving to a woman as a dog to a bitch, sniffing her crotch, and licking her with his tongue. My sentient mind screamed, Iniquity, diabolism, bestiality! until it heard a quieter, but similarly reasonable, voice in my head argue that it had never seen an animal behave in this way, licking another with such concern for the pleasure of the other. Something in me responded to this sense of transcendence, that in these pages there were higher, and not lower, energies at work. Even the most unwholesome of them, which inverted the tenderest act between a man and a woman into a display of violence and viciousness, held up to me what I had often felt underpinned my whole existence as a woman, but for which I had previously no visual representation in this world of convention and delicacy. I had not known that men could feel this way about women, but now that I saw it, dare I write that I felt gratitude to the images I was seeing for helping me make sense of foundlings and baby-farms and fallen women?

  But as I was never intended to be their audience, what mattered my response? I thought of the artist, cross-hatching away at his shady visions, and the models performing for his art. Were these personal masterpieces for him, and the height of his aspirations? Or was he a hack-worker, scratching a meagre income from other people’s lusts? Did he see the luminous beauty, the curious honesty, in these human forms, or were they as vile to him as the daylight world said they were? Possibly he was just like me, in it for the money, and doing what he was told.

  There was no place for shock, I learnt, if I was to get on with the work. The easiest were the tawdry novelettes and galanteries, which soon left me untouched, but eventually even the more vulgar literature ceased to raise a flush in my face: I started to find the endless litany of bodily parts rather tedious. The day soon came when I no longer had to wonder about euphemisms such as ‘visits to the dumpling shop’ and ‘sewing the parsley-bed’. I learnt entire new languages: I accepted words such as gamahuching, firkytoodling, bagpiping, lallygagging, or minetting as if they were my mother tongue. My world became tinged with unreality; such literature placated with its tone, written with such levity, good humour, civility and incoherence. It came to be endearing, childish, and meaningless. In fact, I came to realise, it was rather like the whimsical poems filled with nonce words that I read to Lucinda at night, only a bit wetter.

  But my amusement was my protection, for in truth I was deeply discomfited by some of what I was confronting. To justify my role as Mistress Bindress in the obscene underworld of the book trade, I had to convince myself I was fashioning, as it were, the pearl around the grit in the oyster; I was making something beautiful out of something ugly. And at times, what was so ugly did not embarrass me, or shame me, but sometimes gently, sometimes forcibly, led me to my own ugliness, my own grit inside my hard white exterior, to which I had little desire to go. They were places for which my upbringing and society had not prepared me, and I was angry both at my ignorance and at this rapid acquisition of knowledge that was both against my will and counter to my expectations. The books told me of strange spices and savoury fruits I yet knew not of; I read words of love uttered by fortunate tongues that had tasted its bittersweet juices, and they led me into the dark caves of sin, and left me there in torment and confusion.

  Over the following weeks, we bound scores of books with the insignia of Les Sauvages Nobles, plus one or other of the inscriptions. I started to notice a pattern emerging: twelve English names cropped up amongst the letters, the treatises and the accounts more often than others, and I could soon connect them to their particular Latinate expressions. They were names that I had seen in the pages of newspapers or heard talk of in the streets: names of noblemen. It did not take a genius to work out the correlation.

  The first time I tried to go up to Peter to talk to him about them, I found him rocking in his chair, his pink legs trouserless, flesh quivering in fear.

  ‘Leave me, leave me,’ he was moaning. ‘Go away, you vile woman! Get off me!’

  ‘Me, Peter? I’m not on you, love.’

  He had to swallow the spittle in his mouth before he could say anything more intelligible. ‘Dora! Get her off me, Dora! Get her away!’

  ‘No one’s there, Peter. Tell me what you see. Who is it?’

  ‘She’s monstrous! She’s the devil!’

  ‘No, she isn’t.’

  ‘Can’t you see her? Look at her red face, see how she drips blood. Clean them, clean these sheets. She’s dripping blood all over them. Get them off! Get her off! Clean me! Look at her teeth, her fangs. Catch the blood. Catch the blood before it falls on me. Catch it! Remove her! Scrub them clean!’

  ‘Peter, you’re not in bed. There’s no one here. There are no sheets. There’s no woman.’

  But it was all in vain. His cries continued, so I raced to the dresser for the Black Drop. He guzzled at the bottle, then wiped his mouth with the back of a swollen hand that appeared as one with his swollen arm. He laid his head back on the antimacassar, and was calm for a while. He gazed out of the window to where our daughter was playing, but I doubt he saw her.

  ‘I need – I need a cup of tea.’

  ‘I shall bring you one.’ I made a pot, but Jack needed me to advise on margin widths and flyleaves, so I could not stay with Peter much longer.

  It was a few days later, when Peter expressed an interest in the activities of the workshop, that I decided to distract him with my queries about these men.

  The first one, ‘Nocturnus’ or ‘Nightly’ I kept to myself, for I already knew it to be Sir Jocelyn Knightley, our host to this strange biblio-ball. But I listed the other guests to Peter.

  ‘Lord Glidewell.’

  ‘Ah yes, Valentine, Lord Glidewell. He is a judge. One of our finest.’

  ‘That’s right. I remember seeing his name on a broadsheet handed out after the hanging of Billy Fawn Baxter.’

  ‘Must you mention that dreadful affair? He murdered his mother, didn’t he?’

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Unnatural,’ he shivered. ‘And so, Lord Glidewell must be . . .’

  ‘. . . Labor Bene. Labor – to slide, or glide.’

  ‘Ah, I see. That’s how it works. Who’s next?’

  ‘Dr Theodore Chisholm. I presume he’s an eminent physician; his name is all over a lot of these medical tracts. And on those bottles they send you.’

  ‘Why, he’s on the board of the Royal College! To think, my prescriptions are personally authorised by such a man. And his Latin name?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I can’t work it out. Let’s leave him until later. Now, Aubrey Smith-Pemberton. Who’s he?’

  ‘He’s a Member of Parliament. I bound for his office on the Yale affair, several years ago. He presides over the committee that regulates the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens. The sooner he shuts it down, the better, as far as I’m concerned. It represents all that’s loose about today’s society.’

  ‘But we had such fun, there, Peter, when we were courting!’

  ‘Child, must you?’

  ‘I’m sorry. So, Smith-Pemberton. This was the hardest one. It’s usually written “P. cinis It”. I only managed to work it out because I found it wr
itten at the end of a poem as “Aubretia Malleus P. cinis It”. “Aubretia” being the flower, which is obviously Aubrey, “malleus” is a hammer, so, I thought, related to a smith, then a “P”, followed by “cinis”, which is ash, or ember, and then “It” is not “it”, as I first thought, but one ton. So, Aubrey Smith-Pemberton.’

  Peter seemed bored with my puzzle-solving; he was tired, and I feared I was wearing him further. Possibly I was being too pleased with myself.

  ‘Next?’

  ‘Dr Christopher Monks.’

  ‘Headmaster of Eton – no, Harrow, actually.’

  ‘A-ha. And he, therefore, is . . .’ I pretended to fret over the Latin names in front of us, and waited for an age for Peter to get there first.

  ‘Monachus! ’

  ‘Oh yes, you are right, Peter! How clever!’

  ‘Next?’

  ‘Sir Ruthven Gallinforth.’

  ‘Governor of Jamaica.’

  ‘Ah, I thought as much. I have only recently bound some of his richly colourful accounts of the Caribbean islands; he has some shocking tales to tell of the tensions between the British and the plantation workers.’

  ‘It must be hard, dealing with such indolence. They are not natural workers.’

  ‘Is that so? I was not . . . So, I struggle here too . . .’ And again I waited. ‘Hmm, I wonder. “Vesica Quartus”. I don’t know what “vesica” means, but “quartus” is “fourth”, so presumably . . .’

  ‘Next.’

  ‘Archdeacon Favourbrook. Jeremy, he is referred to in one of the letters.’

  ‘Yes, he is an archdeacon, of somewhere. A venerable man. So, let’s see, do you have any words there that mean favour, and brook?’

  ‘I think we must. Do you suppose “Beneficium Flumen” would be that?’

  ‘Precisely. Next.’

  ‘Hugh Pryseman. I’ve heard of him. He’s heir to the Viscountcy of Avonbridge, and he must be . . . “Praemium Vir”. Prize man.’

  ‘Next.’

  ‘Well, the rest don’t seem to be as important. They haven’t written anything I’ve bound, and they don’t feature as much in the texts or correspondence. There’s Brigadier Michael Rodericks, of the Royal Artillery, the Reverend Harold Oswald . . .’

  ‘A clergyman.’

  ‘Indeed. Then there’s Captain Charles Clemence, of the Bombay army of the East India Company.’

  ‘Clementia. ’

  ‘Of course! And finally, Benedict Clarke, who seems to be in industry.’

  ‘I know not of him. But the others are clearly all eminent individuals. Members of Parliament, churchmen, dignitaries, noblemen.’

  I showed him the coat-of-arms.

  ‘Why, they must all be members of the same club,’ he said, not reading the inscription of Les Sauvages Nobles. He nodded heartily. ‘Oh, Dora, this is magnificent news. I’d been touting for the off-trade from White’s ever since I got the Parliament contract. My dear wife, I must confess to underestimating you. You will save the Damage name yet. Keep up the good work. Now, be a good girl and bring me my draught, for I must sleep.’

  But I could not rest easily that evening, as I thought of Jocelyn, Valentine, Theodore, Aubrey, Jeremy, Christopher, Ruthven, Hugh, Michael, Harold, Charles and Benedict. I could assume the intimacy of their first names in the dream-creations of my workshop, as I, mistress of their dreams, knew their fantasies probably better than their wives. I thought of Sir Jocelyn, with his beautiful, clean new wife, Sylvia, and wondered how he could leave her to breathe not just the fetid air of my Lambeth but the miasma of sin emerging from these pages. I thought of the others: as I tooled the spines, I tried to imagine what rooms they would look down on, from what shelves. And if the pages had faces, whose faces would they see looking back at them? What acts would they bear witness to? These were not the sort of novels to be read around the hearth by father or mother to the rest of the family. These were solitary pleasures, not read at bedtime or in one’s chair, but under the bed covers, or with the chair in front of the door, yet such precautions would never suffice. It was as if safety could only be had if the head that read them could be sliced open, and the books secreted inside the cavity of the skull itself before suturing the incision shut, for these books were temporary balm and permanent antagonist to the needs, twists and wounds of an already tortured mind.

  But until medical science had progressed to this point, the books would have to be held in furtive hands, which no doubt would have preferred to have been free to whip the nether regions into a similar torment as the mind. Was it really, I had to ask, possible to have fun in this manner?

  Chapter Eleven

  Who’s that ringing at my door bell?

  A little pussy cat that isn’t very well.

  Rub its little nose with a little mutton fat,

  That’s the best cure for a little pussy cat.

  Measurements and weights of paper, margins and gutters, rectos and versos marched across my brain even while I was sweeping the floor, shaking the mattresses and banging the rugs. Crimson orifices and their myriad descriptions, endless and ever more extraordinary plays on the word ‘cock’, and the more absurd euphemisms for sexual congress danced round my head as I served supper, aired our nightgowns, and shooed the beetles out of their dusty hideyholes in the kitchen. My husband slumped in his bed, my daughter frolicked in the street, and my hands, feet and shoulders permanently ached; I never sat, except to sew. But I did not complain, even when Jack found me asleep among the paper-shavings as he lit the candles at seven the next morning. For this pestle-and-mortar existence, hard though it sounds as I write it, was not in fact grinding me down. It was refining me.

  The summer was over before we even realised, and the first cold, foggy, September day meant the leather started to feel more supple in the workshop. But otherwise it was a day like any other. I rose at five, riddled the cinders, drew up the fire, unpegged the linen, put the kettle on, cleaned the range, whipped around a sweeping-cloth, steeped the washing, made the breakfast, and set to soaking and boiling enough ingredients to cover the day’s meals.

  Then I ran into the workshop, and cleaned it thoroughly, making sure to collect every last grain of gold-dust to sell back to Edwin Nightingale, and to continue my war against mites and silverfish. I ran a wet cloth over the windows, but the autumnal fog hung like a pall around the house, so I might as well have left them alone for all the light we gained. I let Jack in at seven, but my chores still weighed over me, so I returned to the house. I counted out twenty grains of bromide for Lucinda, which she took before her bread and milk.

  ‘Mama, I’m still hungry,’ she said once she had finished. She had taken to saying this, since starting the bromide.

  I took Peter his porridge, tea and toast in bed, but he would not eat until he had had his first dose of Dr Chisholm’s laudanum. While he toyed with his food, I emptied the slops, cleaned the outdoor privy, and rinsed the chamber-pots with hot water and soda, before returning them to the bedrooms, when I collected Peter’s tray, and handed it over to Lucinda to finish. His appetite was decreasing as hers was growing, which at least balanced the household bills.

  Throughout the morning I would go into the workshop to sew a few signatures, but run back at times to stir the copper, to check the row of bottles of Black Drop fermenting by the fire, and to turn and shake the mattresses. At eleven, Lucinda and I went to the market, but through the soupy yellow fog we could scarcely make out the market stalls, and we returned with only a basket of milk, eggs, bread, butter, ham, apples, and cheese, and our mood was as dark as the day itself.

  As we walked slowly back up Ivy-street through the dingy mist, we could just make out the shape of the perambulating pot-man and his large wooden frames, pulled by a mule, by the workshop door. ‘D’ya want any, lady?’ he said to me as we approached.

  ‘Jack?’ I asked, who had joined us at the door. Peter had never allowed alcohol on the premises, nor drank it himself, being temperately inclined, but I
couldn’t help but worry at all the water in his tissues. I knew it was a practice in most of the other binding workshops to wet their whistle daily. The men had to have some perks, I thought.

  ‘Up to you, Mrs D.’

  ‘What have you got?’ I asked, peering at the frames through the gloom.

  ‘English Burgundy, heavy brown, porter and stout.’

  ‘I think we’ll have a jug of the burgundy and one of porter, please.’

  ‘Regular, or just today?’

  ‘Make it regular. We could do with a bit of liquid to keep us going in the evenings.’

  ‘Right-ho, Mrs?’

  ‘Mrs Damage.’

  ‘Alrighty, Mrs Damage.’

  A train rattled past us, and as the man started to fill the jugs he asked, ‘That the stiffs’ express?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said, and could not help but laugh.

  Truth be told, and I never would have said it to Peter, but I was all in favour of a spot of beer. The pump in Broad-street from which my mother contracted cholera also served Golden-square, Berwick-street and St Ann’s, which is why mother caught it from the water at the Ragged-school where she had started to teach, for in Carnaby-street we never would send to Broad-street for water. It impressed me that none of the seventy men working at the Broad-street brewery died; most of them confessed to never drinking water at all, only beer. And when one remembers that over six hundred died then, there’s a lot to be said for never drinking water again. They opened up the pump-well and found a cess pool was leaking into it. Since then, I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that water wasn’t good for one, but I could never say this to Peter.

  Lucinda and I took our purchases inside. I put the apples in a bowl, and the eggs, cheese and ham on the marble slab, then poured the milk into a pan and left it to scald on the stove to keep it fresh. Once I heard the pot-man rattling his frames over the cobbles, I nipped back into the workshop to instruct Jack about the brown diamond shapes I wanted him to inlay into some black morocco.