The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  Without a single look at the sharp eyes glinting at me from behind windows and door-curtains, I walked north-east, towards the river. I wondered if this was the route Din had taken when I sent him to find out what had happened to Jack the day Peter died. I tried to think of my dear husband, but, cruelly, my thoughts kept wandering back to Din, Din here in these streets, Din here on my cheek, until eventually I came to 13a Howley Place, as Din would have done, and saw these same squat little houses with broken windows and paintwork that had peeled so much one could scarce tell what the original colour had been. There were ragamuffins sitting outside these houses in the street. The door to Lizzie’s home was wide open despite the cold, so I called inside.

  Out from the shadows came a wizened and pinched woman, like a thread of grey dust that had been wafted upright by a breeze. Her eyes were sad and sunken; everything about her was meagre.

  ‘I wondered when you’d come,’ she said, as I lifted my veil. Her lack of teeth was only revealed when she spoke, for she never smiled. ‘Should’ve gone and told you meself,’ she said. ‘But it’s been busy, with the little ones, and Jack gone and lost us his money. Cou’n’t tell the darkie, no matter what Jack said about him. Cou’n’t bring meself to.’

  ‘That’s all right, Lizzie. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. It’s not that I didn’t care – I’ve been worried sick – but I haven’t had a moment, what with Peter dying so sudden and . . .’

  ‘I’m ever so sorry about that.’

  ‘Thank you. It was strange, not having Jack at the funeral. Is he in trouble?’

  ‘Come in. I’ll tell ya all about it.’

  She led me inside, into a room that had scarcely any plaster left on the walls, and that smelt of rotting floorboards, rising damp, and decay. A dozen bright eyes peered from the stairs from dirty little faces, most no bigger than Lucinda, although I knew some were older. There was one chair in the room, and two little three-legged stools.

  ‘Sit down,’ Lizzie said to me.

  ‘No, you have the chair, Lizzie. You look weary.’

  We both remained standing in the end. The floor was so uneven, due to sinking walls, I felt like a sailor in need of my sea-legs. ‘So tell me, Lizzie.’

  ‘We didn’t know it ourselves for a while. Should’ve seen the signs. Should’ve. Good thing Dan isn’t ’ere no more, ’e’d have brained ’im, straight off. Dan would’ve killed that boy, I’m tellin’ ya. That’s summink to be grateful for, I s’pose.’

  ‘Why would he have killed him? What’s he done?’

  ‘That night, when he left yours. He was arrested, right on the door-step.’

  ‘On what charge?’

  ‘Ugh, Mrs D, that’s where it ’its ’ard.’

  ‘Has he gone down for it, whatever it was?’

  ‘Hasn’t gone to trial, yet, but ’e ain’t got a hope. Ten years, I’ve bin told. Ten years, ’e’s gonna get.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you what for?’

  She sighed deeply, as if what she was about to say might kill her off finally, and slowly and heavily raised the middle finger of her left hand, which she curled upwards, and then made a sudden jerking movement upward with it. And then I knew, without any doubt, and years of not knowing all flooded with meaning.

  Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nomi-nandum, as I had read in a thousand texts.

  ‘Ten years!’

  ‘Ten years. Still, could’ve been worse. If it’d been a year ago ’e would’ve been ’ung!’ Her voice was rising, and her hands lifted like shabby angels’ wings, as if for all the world she were about to ascend to reach her maker, along with her voice.

  ‘No, Lizzie, they wouldn’t have done, I promise you.’ I grabbed her arms and brought them down again, and held her hands to my chest.

  ‘’Swot I was told by the Shiv,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘The knife sharpener,’ she said, as if that proved it.

  ‘Lizzie, yes, in theory, yes, he’s right. They repealed the death penalty for – for – that crime only last year. But they haven’t hung anyone for it since the thirties. Trust me, I know these things. It’s in the books,’ I said, then added hastily, ‘I mean, the books Peter used to bind, when he worked for the Parliament, him and Jack. Don’t you be troubling your head any further with these things. Ten years, it’s better than the noose. Console yourself with that, Lizzie.’

  I sank her down onto the chair at last, and looked around at the misery surrounding her, to see if I could find something to wrap around her.

  ‘What do you need?’ I asked, but I knew there could be no real answer to that. She was beyond tears, and sat numb in her shock.

  ‘Can I visit him, Lizzie?’ I asked. ‘Where is he?’

  But she shook her head. ‘’E don’ want no visitors, ever, ’e said as much.’

  ‘I’ll bring his wages round next week,’ I said quietly, then I squeezed her hand and got up to leave. Three little children, all with Jack’s red hair, stood in my way.

  ‘Are you gonna bring Jack back?’ one of them asked me.

  ‘I wish I could, little one,’ I said.

  ‘Cos Mama needs him,’ another piped up.

  ‘An’ he owes me money,’ the third said.

  ‘Clear orf, all of ya,’ Lizzie shouted, her last burst of action before she slumped down over the back of the chair like she was dead. ‘You can get me some gin, if you really want to help,’ she uttered miserably, like a guttering candle, as I left.

  I cursed my empty head all the way home for not realising. All that time I’d known Jack, and I had chosen not to read the signs. His lack of care for a sweetheart. His embarrassment at so much of the literature we worked on; and his lack of it for others. And, just as when one has recently been bereaved one starts to see crêpe and jet everywhere one turns, I started to see them everywhere, and realised what I had been overlooking. The boys in sailors’ uniforms along the Strand. The post-boys in Holywell-street. Mary-Annes, all of them. Mandrakes. Inverts. Bin-dogs. Sodomites.

  Was I disgusted? A year I ago I might have been. A year ago I might not have struggled so hard to understand. Little Jack. He was such a loving, good-hearted boy. Jack and his furtive, secret little life. No, I was not disgusted. Ashamed to say, I was somewhat relieved: relieved that it had only been coincidence that had seen his arrest fall on the same night as Peter’s departure from this world. Possibly Peter had witnessed it, and heard the charge being spoken to his apprentice. Peter would have been more than disgusted; he would have been sickened to the core. Possibly that was what tipped him over the edge, into his last bottle of laudanum and onwards along the final journey to his Maker. It would not have surprised me in the slightest.

  And as I saw Peter’s outraged face, I saw Lizzie again in my eye, crushed by her sense of betrayal, wounding herself over and over by his insult. Mother, I reject your sex, and choose for myself my own.

  I met his father, Dan, at the beginning, when they signed Jack’s indenture, shortly before he ran off that night after the prize-fight when he pocketed ten pounds. Some say he went to sea. Some say he had another wife in Glasgow, where he lived now. I remember he moved heavily and slowly, like someone who had accumulated grudges since the moment his mother yanked him off her tired breast. A blacksmith, he was, before he turned to the drink, a rough old man, who beat little Jack with iron rods, and threatened to brand him with bars out of the forge, and despaired of him, his lean, wiry scrap of a lad who showed no signs of following his father into the blacksmith’s trade. Jack was the only one in their family who could read, and he taught himself entirely from the newspapers he collected from the streets. It was a while before Dan accepted he wasn’t going to toughen up his boy through hitting him, that it only sent him off into the corner where the newspapers were stacked, and slowly, Dan and Lizzie’s hopes and aspirations developed for him. They grew to encourage his bookishness; they scrimped and saved for his meagre education. Dan came home one night
with two books he had proudly nicked from some men in the pub for his lad. One was Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (had Dan known it was poetry, he might have taken it back); the other was the 1844 Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy, which didn’t tell Jack anything he hadn’t already learnt from life by the river, and boosted his confidence in his own intellectual capacity. When they finally signed the indenture for his apprenticeship at Damage’s, I remember thinking that Lizzie’s heart would burst with pride. Jack would not have to go and work in the blacking warehouse, or on the river; Jack was the great hope for the family.

  Poor child. It was a wonder he had survived in Lambeth as long as he had.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bye, O my baby,

  When I was a lady,

  O then my baby didn’t cry;

  But my baby is weeping

  For want of good keeping,

  O I fear my poor baby will die.

  There was a woman, or a lady, I should have said, waiting for me on the door-step when I returned from Lizzie’s house. It was dark already, but I could see in the gloom someone wearing a bonnet that jutted up above her head like a spoon, with pale feather trimmings inside, as if the top of her head were a chick hatching from an egg. The bavolet behind was long and cream-coloured, and around her shoulders was a three-quarter-length dark-grey hooded cloak of softest cashmere. Beneath it was another shawl, this time of fine Chantilly lace, and underneath it a large bundle of lace and silk. Her face was more pinched and her brow more furrowed than when I first saw her, but it was clearly the face of Lady Knightley, like a star that had fallen from heaven, and was troubling itself in the worry of how it could possibly get back up there.

  She did not seem to see me, but stood on the pavement, eyes glazed, with several brown leather cases around her feet. She can’t have knocked, I thought, or Pansy would have brought her inside by now. Then the crying started from within the bundle of lace at Lady Knightley’s front, and I knew without thinking that I had to get her off the streets and into the warm.

  ‘Lady Knightley, what a pleasure. Please, come in.’

  But she made no move, and the crying escalated.

  ‘Come in, now.’ The fog and darkness were too great for us to be seen from Mrs Eeles’s house, but she would soon hear this racket, and be sending Billy off to Holywell-street, or indeed, Berkeley-square. But still she stood, and I started to panic. ‘Please, move quickly, now.’ I grabbed her arm more forcibly than I had intended, and she leapt at the touch and darted past me into the house.

  I ushered her and her screaming bundle away from the windows into the kitchen, where Pansy was cooking griddlecakes. I pulled the Windsor chair in from the parlour, and waited for Lady Knightley to settle herself gingerly into it. Slowly, as if unaccustomed to such an action, she unfurled a tiny baby from the yards of lace; he was purple in the face. Once free from his swaddles, Lady Knightley held him up at arm’s length, and watched him cry. I did not know if she were proffering him to me, or what, but her face betrayed one who was utterly spent, and that always meant danger to a little one. Lucinda cowered behind me.

  I saw Lady Knightley’s lips murmur something which I couldn’t hear, and then, over the din, she shouted, ‘For God’s sake, take him!’

  So I did, and cradled him in my arms, and he was startled into silence for a moment.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked. ‘Is he hungry?’

  ‘How would I know?’ she snapped at me, and he started to cry once more.

  I wiped my little finger on my smock and curled it into his mouth. He sucked frantically on it for a moment, then pulled off in disgust and rage, and howled worse than before. He scrunched his fists and eyes in fury, and opened his mouth wide, his tongue tensing along the length of each scream between snatched breaths, and I wondered at how a being could come into the world with such a quantity of rage.

  ‘ ’Ere, take it, get this dahn him.’ Out of nowhere, Pansy was brandishing a bowl which looked as though it held milk with bread crumbled into it. ‘I ain’t ’ad time to warm it, but don’t matter. Get it dahn ’im.’

  I perched on the rickety stool, and held the baby as still as I could, while Pansy gently spooned the pap into his mouth. Lucinda scrutinised her every move. At first he gagged, but some dribbled to the back of his mouth, although much went down his cheeks and into the collars of his fine lawn smock. I looked over at Lady Knightley, who didn’t seem to care; her head was resting in the crook of her arm, and I could not see her face.

  ‘This can’t be the best stuff for him,’ I said to Pansy. ‘Lady Knightley, what do you normally give him?’

  She looked up at me with a vapid gaze. ‘What?’

  ‘The baby. What are you feeding him?’

  ‘Are you asking me? Ask Fatima.’

  ‘Fatima?’

  ‘Fatima!’ she almost shouted, but the exertion was too much. ‘The monthly nurse,’ she whispered.

  ‘Where is she? Nobody was with you, Lady Knightley.’

  ‘No. She’s gone. Gone. She wouldn’t come here. Not –’ the word was a struggle for her, ‘– not – south – of the river, not – to an unknown address. She went. I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘ ’Is bowels ain’t gonna like this, mum,’ Pansy said to me as she spooned more pap into his mouth. ‘It needs to be goat, at least, if ain’t gonna be heaver-brew. Oh well. She’ll find aht in his napkins, soon enough.’

  The baby did not eat much, but soon his eyes closed, and I was honoured with the sweet sensation of a baby falling asleep in my arms.

  ‘Bless you,’ I whispered, and planted a kiss on his wrinkled forehead. It was soft and downy; the skin of someone who hadn’t lived life yet. Lucinda stroked him nervously. His head lolled back in my arm, his eyes and mouth hung half-open, and his breathing became slow and heavy.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I ventured.

  ‘Nathaniel,’ she said without thought, and without looking over at me or him.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘A week.’

  ‘He’s lovely,’ I said, but the silence poured in on my comment, and we sat in the chill of the kitchen as the night fell around us. I waited for Lady Knightley to say something that might explain her presence here, and give me some indication as to whether she wished to stay for supper; Pansy, bless her heart, knew that I needed her, and did not leave.

  ‘Are you – are you passing through, Lady Knightley?’ I eventually proffered.

  ‘Damn your impertinence!’ she suddenly shouted. ‘You dare not interrogate me! I am to stay here.’

  ‘Here? Why?’

  ‘You will not disobey me, Dora!’ But this last was almost a question, and not a statement. Her tyranny originated only from her own uncertainties; I had no reason to be afraid of her. ‘Not you too. Damn you! Curse the lot of you! I have spent the entire day driving around with that wretched driver sniggering at me, from Mayfair to Belgravia, to Chelsea, to Kensington. I have been to Baroness Temple, and Lady Montgomery, and Honora Williamson, and Victoria Hamilton-Wright, and all the other women of the Society, but Sir Jocelyn has turned them all against me. So now I have come to you. You cannot turn me away, it would be the final insult.’

  ‘I am not turning you away, Lady Knightley. I am just rather surprised. I was not expecting . . . I don’t expect you shall be comfortable here. Perhaps you have us wrong. Surely there must be somewhere else you can go.’

  ‘Are you delighting in my injury? I will not suffer it. If only Lady Grenville were still with us – she’d not have spurned me – she cared not what society thought!’

  ‘And I’ll not spurn you neither, Lady Knightley,’ I said softly. ‘We shall make you comfortable for the night as best we can.’

  ‘I’ll sort a bed out for her, mum.’

  ‘Thank you, Pansy. I suggest you change the sheets on my bed, and I’ll sleep in the box-room.’

  ‘Very well, mum.’

  I did not believe what was happen
ing; it was not possible that we were the only hope for a woman so well connected as she, and besides, the knock would come at the door soon enough, and Diprose, Pizzy and their men would turn up and take her with them.

  ‘Papa warned me not to marry a man who did not have a country seat,’ she sobbed, as if she had not heard me. ‘That would have been the safe place to go while this all blows over. I’ve never had anywhere to retire to once the season is over.’

  ‘What of him, Lady Knightley? Can you go to your father?’ I wondered what sort of trouble she could be in.

  ‘Good Lord, no. It would force him into a most ugly position. And my brothers besides. Everyone has turned me away! I would not have chosen to come here, Dora, but where else could I have gone?’

  ‘Lady Knightley, if you don’t mind my asking, why have they turned you away?’

  ‘Why? I wish I knew too! Jocelyn has told them all I am mad, and that they are not to associate with me!’

  ‘Why on earth would he . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said in a loud, almost bored voice. The hard edge reappeared in her speech when she was not crying. Then she changed tone again, and asked, ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ and I could see from her face it was a genuine question. ‘It will not be for long,’ she assured me, and I knew she was right, for Diprose and Pizzy were surely just round the corner. ‘It is mere caprice on Jocelyn’s part, and he will be begging for me to come back. Are we not bonded by the sacrament of marriage? I am much prized; I have borne him a son! I shall soon be back at my rightful place by his side, and afterwards, we shall reward you greatly for your pains – and, it goes without saying, your discretion.’

  We lapsed into silence. It was getting late, and Lucinda needed to eat and to go to bed, and Nathaniel was stirring in my arms. ‘Lady Knightley,’ I attempted, ‘what are we to do about feeding him later?’