‘What else do you know about them?’
‘My dear, very little. They mean next to nothing to me. You should hear the way they ridicule the Anti-Slavery lobby, indeed, the Anti-Anything lobby. I overheard them one evening, and my ears still burn at the memory. They were discussing the forthcoming marriage of Aubrey’s daughter, Herberta, to a Romanian prince, or a Bavarian count, I forget which, and they were debating amongst themselves about how far East was too far to accept in a son-in-law. Then they moved on to our more Western brethren, when I distinctly heard Jossie say, “My wife, lamentably, is a negrophile; give her a nigger over a Yankee any day,” to which Ruthven replied, “Rather an African Negro than an Irish Catholic.” And they laughed, Dora, all of them.’
I started to rub at the lamps again, with vigour, my cheeks burning.
‘Unfathomable, isn’t it?’ Sylvia said glumly, presuming to read my thoughts about her husband. Indeed it was, if I thought about it. Here was a man whose fascination with Africa and India was both personal and professional, whose scientific endeavours drove him to calibrate, study and truly endeavour to understand the African and other racial groups, and yet who read The Lustful Turk, took Turkish baths, and was more savage than noble in his racial and sexual attitudes. ‘But Jossie is by no means the worst of them,’ she continued. ‘The Noble Savages is, I have always felt, a club based on a shared understanding of – how best to put it? – cruelty. It is hard for me to say this, but I believe my husband and his contemporaries have a fundamentally evil streak that needs to be manifested in some way. I must confess to you, Dora, that I have over time grown to be grateful for his Monday nights of hellfire and savagery, for his vicious excesses, for he returns to me on Tuesday morning with a merriness and a levity that is sweeter than sugar.’
When I finally slept that night, the nightmares that visited me could have come straight out of the pages of the books I had bound. First, I was roaming along a row of female body parts suspended in spirits of wine in glass jars, trying to find my own heart. When I found it, I discovered a bite had been taken out of it, and next to it, on either side, were the two castrated organs of the Dey in The Lustful Turk. I seized my bitten heart, and ran with it along a corridor into a green room, where Lord Glidewell, clad only in tight black leather breeches, was standing on his desk, underneath a noose. Only it was not Lord Glidewell, but Sir Jocelyn. He asked me with great civility whether I would care to play his favourite game of cut-the-cord, and instructed me to put my heart into his mouth. I did as I was told, but with difficulty, for his mouth was small and my heart over-large, but the effect on limiting his breathing was excellent. Then he handed me a knife; I was to sever the rope just before the moment of ejaculation.
I awoke in horror as he was twitching and thrashing above me, his teeth clenching around my heart, and I stared into the darkness of the box-room, stifling my panicked breathing so as not to wake the others in the house, not knowing if I had killed him or spared him.
The following morning I took myself into the gold-tooling booth in order to prepare the ‘case’ for Diprose’s peculiar commission. His instruction that I should not work on it in the presence of others suited me, for it took me away from Din for the day in both body and mind. The mechanics of attaching the cords to the boards would be complicated: I would have to construct the boards out of one thick and one thin piece of strawboard, instead of one single piece of millboard. Strawboard was softer and less durable, but this approach would enable me to sandwich the cords in between for a secure finish. It was a blessed relief to be preoccupied with something other than my feelings for the man.
It was not hard to prepare, but I found the leather strangely unwieldy. It was stiff to work with, and did not take stretching or glue well. Either it had been very badly tanned – which would have been surprising, given the previous quality of Diprose’s materials – or it was indeed the skin of an exotic animal. I traced my fingers over it. It had a strange beauty, and the light played beguilingly on its uneven surface. Several pastings were required.
I did not work on Sunday during daylight hours, but once the household was asleep I started the finishing process. It was very simple – just the Noble Savages’ arms and Knightley’s Latin pseudonym – but the leather did not respond well to heat and glair, and I had to work long into the night to get a decent finish. I was tired, and worried that I was about to get a cold, or the dreaded influenza. There was also an ache in the pit of my stomach. It did not feel like something I had eaten, or not eaten, akin to hunger though it was.
The church bells rang three times, and I was finished. I wrapped the casing in a piece of red velvet, and placed it back in the strong-box. I cleared up the remnants of leather. There was one particularly wide strip that appealed to me, and I placed it in the drawer of my desk, thinking that I would use it to make a novelty bookmark for Lucinda out of it. The rest of the leather went into the calico bag of scraps. I swept the floor, blew out the candles, and locked up.
And then I recognised the feelings for what they were. I had felt like this before, on Christmas Day. I was lonely: I craved company, gentleness and honesty. I craved Din.
Chapter Twenty
As I was going by Charing Cross,
I saw a black man upon a black horse;
They told me it was King Charles the First –
Oh dear, my heart was ready to burst!
The next day had scarcely begun in the bindery for Din and me, when we were disturbed by a scuffle in the parlour. I opened the thick wooden door to find Pansy and Sylvia having a loud argument, with Lucinda standing anxiously between them, clutching Mossie.
‘I en’t ’er slave, I en’t. I’m working for you, aren’t I, mum, an’ not ’er. I do what I can to make ’er day a bit nicer, an’ I’ve ’eaved ’er into ’er stays and tugged and primped and preened ’er for hours, but I en’t gonna do everyfin’ like a friggin’ lady’s maid. I’m sorry, mum. Your notice said sew an’ fold an’ nurse an invalid an’ a child. Not a toff an’ a baby as well. I’m sorry mum, I am. I’ll try and do better, I will. D’you want me to leave nah? I’m sorry. I won’t mind lookin’ after the baby, I won’t.’
I looked at Sylvia. Her face was clean, her hair was immaculate and high under the bonnet she had been wearing when she arrived, and her extraordinarily firm figure revealed that she was wearing a corset again. As she put on her white kid gloves, she flashed her eyes up to me from below the feathered brim. Oh yes indeed, the lady was ready to be looked at again; she was back to something resembling her old self.
‘We were a mere five minutes upstairs, altering my toilette. The girl is full of untruths.’ Then she said, more softly, ‘I’m going back to Jocelyn. I simply asked her to look after Nathaniel for the morning. I will return, of course, in time for his next feed. If he gets hungry, she can give him a paste. That’s all I asked. Don’t look at me so, Dora.’
‘You’re going back to Jocelyn? Will he take you back?’
‘Your insolence is uncalled for. He needs to see me. He will be missing me, regretting his actions, and desperate for news of me and his son. I will tell him that the jaundice has passed, and that his son has skin no darker than his own.’
‘So take Nathaniel with you, to prove it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It would be a hindrance. I must be able to speak lucidly. And to show him unencumbered how my figure has returned. Besides, it will increase his curiosity, to make him wait.’
I paused, before assuring her that we would indeed look after Nathaniel today. ‘It will just be for this morning,’ I soothed Pansy. ‘I will be able to help you this afternoon, once I have taken care of some business. Mr Diprose is due this morning, you see.’ Pansy curtsied. Then I went over to the tea-caddy, and took out half a crown. ‘Here you are,’ I said as I gave it Sylvia. ‘I think you’ll need to take a cab, looking as beautiful as that.’ I kissed her, and whispered ‘good luck’ into her ear.
She looked at the coin, and said a quiet
‘thank you’. She planted a kiss on Nathaniel’s brow, and stroked his forelock with her gloved finger, then left the house.
‘Nobody’s asking you to leave, Pansy,’ I said. ‘And don’t you dare go considering it. I need you, and I will ensure your happiness so as you stay with me. Why don’t you take Lucinda and Nathaniel out to buy some sherbet?’ I gave her some pennies. ‘There might be some spring greens in the market, even. Take some air for yourself.’
As I waved them out of the door, I could see an old hansom turning into the street. I shut the door, smoothed my hair and adjusted my cap, then hastened through the door into the bindery and locked it behind me.
Diprose seemed unusually pert and dapper this morning, albeit in his habitual ungainly way.
‘Tell the nigger to go,’ was the first thing he said to me, sotto voce.
‘Good day to you too, Mr Diprose,’ I retorted as I went over to Din to tell him he could leave for the morning.
We watched as he hung up his apron and left. I locked the door behind him, and made a show of checking that the door into the house was locked. Then I pulled the strong-box out from under the tooling-bench, unlocked it, unwrapped the casing from the red velvet, and laid it on the bench.
It certainly did not rank as the best binding I had ever produced. The design was too simple, and the leather was not special enough to warrant such lack of ornament. Still, Diprose proceeded with a ceremonious air. He removed the manuscript from its muslin bag; he kept it closed throughout, so I could only see the spine and end-papers, which were marbled vellum.
Together we fixed the book onto its binding. It was intricate work, and our hands worked closely, holding tension here and tying cords there, but it only served to remind me of the lack of intimacy I had with this man who brought me so much wealth, and so little true happiness, and of the power in the air in this exact same spot when Din held some leather for me here so recently. But the book, when finished, did look remarkably good, and in certain lights, the leather was beautiful, welcoming, and touchable.
Then Diprose reached into his pocket, and pulled out a long, thin strip of metal, like a ruler, which had a small square cut out of the centre.
‘Now, finally, I need you to tool an inscription for me. It must be here.’ He turned to the back of the book, and pointed to the thin strip of folded leather at the bottom of the inside cover, below the end-paper. ‘Let me see . . .’ He perused my lettering tools. ‘Your smallest font, lower case . . .’ He pulled one out of the rack, and experimented with pushing the tool through the square in the metal. ‘These will do. A perfect fit. I will need you to tool an inscription, but you must not know what it says.’
‘How am I to do that, then?’
‘You will draw a grid on the leather according to my instructions, then I will tell you which letter you must tool through this hole in each square; the metal will cover up the words, so you shall only see the letter you are working on.’
‘But I shall be able to work out what it says according to the order of the letters.’
‘I shall instruct you to tool the letters in a random order.’
‘Mr Diprose, forgive me, but it will be impossible to align the letters perfectly like that. Letters are never spaced according to a square grid; I always position them by eye.’
‘Mrs Damage, impossible n’est pas français,’ Diprose cajoled. ‘My other bookbinders accept this occasional practice. Do not cause trouble for me, now. Of course I accept some inevitable loss of aesthetic. Come, come, girl. It is the only way.’
So, despite myself, I marked out a grid of twenty-six identical squares, to fit the selected tool size, and Diprose held the metal over the grid, revealing only one square at a time – first in the middle, then close to the beginning, then right at the end, and so on, in random order – instructing me on the letters to use in each square. Having tooled blind, we then had to do the same with the gold.
It was a droll undertaking; its laboriousness amused me. I wanted to tell Diprose that I really did not care what his tawdry little inscription said. But the more we continued, the more intrigued I became. Ironic, I thought, that the procedure only drew attention to what it sought to diminish.
I left out each tool after using it, rather than returning it to the rack, in order to clean them later. I made a mental note of how many times I had used each of them, and those that I had only used once. I would work it out, I reckoned, after he had gone. I would not be hoodwinked.
At length we were finished. My back was aching from the effort involved, and so was Mr Diprose’s. I stretched and bent forwards to ease out my back; Mr Diprose grimaced, held on to his waist, and attempted to do the same. He was trying to adjust something at the back of his trousers. I did not look.
‘It’s just this damn brace I have to wear,’ he explained. ‘It rubs sometimes.’
‘A brace?’
‘I would be un invalide without it. I have soft bones, bones that bend. I was fitted with it when I first worked in Paris, in my twenties. I met Sir Jocelyn there. It’s a fine contraption – steel and leather – but it does cause dreadful pain. I do not complain. Vincit qui se vincit.’ He stretched his chest out, and released his hands. ‘There, that is much better.’ Breathing deeply, he returned to the book. ‘I am delighted, despite myself. You have excelled yourself, and I am proud of you. It is a particularly splendid day, today.’ He placed the book with similar ceremony into the muslin bag, then dug into his pockets, and presented me with three shining sovereigns and a crown. ‘Gardez la monnaie. And now, the remnants, please.’
I was reeling from the coins, shining like three suns and a moon in the palm of my hand, and the instruction to keep the change.
‘Mrs Damage? The remnants?’
I placed the coins quickly on the bench, before tipping out the contents of the scrapbag. Mr Diprose and I picked out the remains of his leather from the scraps. I had no spare bag to put them in, but Diprose seemed happy to stuff them into the pockets of his trousers, his frock coat, and his waistcoat.
‘You may wonder why I want these back,’ he said defensively. ‘What I gave you was my only stock of that particular hide; I may wish to re-source it at some point, depending on how well received the binding is. And now, I will bid you farewell, Mrs Damage. Au revoir.’ He lifted his hat, and was about to go, when he seemed to remember something. He leaned stiffly towards me, a stiffness I now knew was due to his back brace, and I moved my ear towards his mouth.
‘This has been one of our more sensitive operations. Tell but a single soul of what you have been doing, and Sir Jocelyn shall not hesitate to undertake another such – sensitive – operation, for your epileptic daughter.’
And then he was gone.
I paced into the house, wishing I had not sent Pansy out with Lucinda so I could keep her at closer quarters. I tried to distract myself by returning to the bindery and writing down the letters of the tools I had used before clearing them away. I was angry, I suppose, that he had excluded me from the text, while exploiting my labour to achieve it. So, I noted that a, i and r were used three times, c and o were used twice, and the single letters were b, d, e, f, h, m, n, p, s and u. I also jotted down a reminder that the grid I had marked out was of twenty-six squares: two letters, followed by a one-letter space, then six letters, a space, eight letters, a space, and seven letters. If I had been really bothered, I could have troubled myself over the anagram right then, but it was a sport I would save for another day.
At length, Pansy came through the front door with Lucinda and Nathaniel.
‘Mama, Mama,’ Lucinda cried as she bounded towards me. ‘We saw a puppet show! We saw a puppet show!’
‘Well, not quite, Lou, love,’ Pansy said. ‘We saw them arrive, didn’t we? We was comin’ back to ask if we could go back for the show, which’ll start any moment, but we need some more pennies for them, an’ we was wondrin’ if that was not too much to ask, mum.’
I looked at my precious daughter and w
ondered if I dared let her out of my sight again. I knew not of how idle that threat really was. But her eager face could not be disappointed. ‘Of course not, Pansy,’ I said, as I turned to the tea-caddy. I took out another half-crown, and pressed it into Pansy’s hand. ‘Take them to the baked-potato man too; we haven’t done that for a while. And pick up something nice and easy for tea – some sheeps’ trotters, or some oysters or stewed eels.’ I looked at her hard, and said, ‘Are you sure you can manage this, Pansy? I’m happy to stop and help you this afternoon, with Nathaniel.’
‘No mum. We’re fine. I just came over funny when she started all them orders at me. Thanks, though. It’ll be best to take ’em out anyways, give ’em a nice time.’
I embraced Lucinda again. ‘Have a lovely time, darling. Make sure you listen hard to the story, so as you can tell it me later.’ Then I turned to Pansy once more, and said in a low voice, ‘Keep a close eye on her, won’t you?’
I waved them off up Ivy-street. The clock struck twelve, and Din was striding towards them, and me, grinning and waving. He stopped to exchange a word with Pansy, and pulled a flower from behind his back which he presented to Lucinda. Then he tickled Nathaniel in the tummy, waved good-bye to them and started up again with his jaunty saunter towards the workshop. I pulled inside before he reached the house; I did not want to talk to him. I heard him go into the workshop through the outside door.
The house was silent, but I was troubled. I was tired, oh, so tired: the exertions of the past year were catching up with me, along with the strain of Peter’s death, and now this constant warring of heart and head. I sat in the Windsor chair, and closed my eyes. I hated Din for an instant. I could hear him in the distance, rigging up the sewing-frame, but once he started to sew all was quiet once more. I could sleep here, now.
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 35
