The Journal of Dora Damage

by Belinda Starling

  ‘And he came,’ I mused.

  ‘Of course he did,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘It was dangerous for him,’ I argued.

  ‘Do you doubt the man’s affections for you?’ she said. When I did not reply, she insisted, ‘You do, don’t you, Dora?’ But I could not answer.

  ‘Would you really have killed him?’ Sylvia asked me gently, changing tack. And I wondered at first what she was asking me, but I knew already that the answer was yes, yes of course I would have, yes, if Sir Jocelyn had not proffered me the chloroform. My choice was between good and evil, and I knew that good would not have served me. And then I killed him anyway, despite myself.

  Sylvia was silent for a while, before saying solemnly, ‘I believe Jossie knew what he was doing when he told you to chloroform Charles. It is quite a skill. The dose needs to be carefully administered over a period of time; he must have known you would simply smother Charles in it, for one quick, large dose is likely to finish an old man off.’

  ‘But why would he bother to do that, if he saw that I was set to kill the man anyway?’

  ‘That I do not know,’ Sylvia answered. ‘My husband’s mind is more than ever a mystery to me.’

  We lapsed into silence, and the waiting, once more. I pictured Din going to the tenement of the Japanese artist, who would be jabbering and gesticulating, with his wrinkled little wife bowing next to him. I prayed Din was right in his suspicions, that their home was indeed where I had been, and that they could tell Din clearly what had happened to Lucinda. And as I prayed, I found myself making strange noises, and I realised I was sobbing out loud, and there were wet tears on the back of my hand when I rubbed my face.

  Sylvia stood up and came over to my chair, where she knelt down. ‘Why don’t you go to your special place, and cry?’ she suggested. She stroked my hair, and dabbed at a tear with her finger. I did not know what she meant. I must have looked at her blankly. ‘Where do you go to, to cry, Dora?’ she asked. ‘Everyone has a special place where they can cry safely, don’t they, Pansy? I used to go to the bathroom, when I had one.’

  ‘I’ve seen it. It was lovely.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Sylvia sighed.

  ‘I do it under the blankets, at night,’ Pansy interjected. ‘Or when I take the slops out. I have to be quick about it, though. There’s nowhere you can cry at home, or in a factory. I do a lot of cryin’ when I’m walkin’, it’s handy cos it keeps the odd folk away. They look at you, cos they think you can’t see them if you’re cryin’, but they won’t come near you at least.’

  ‘Do yourself a favour, for once,’ Sylvia commanded. ‘Go, find yourself a space, and cry in it. What are you afraid of? Tears are only salt and water.’

  And I knew where I had to go, and I lay there, in her little bed, and cried until the mattress was soaked through, which was going to be a bore for Pansy, but I do believe it was some help to me. At times, I feared I would never stop. It seemed I had forgotten how to be soundless. My eyes and the patch of skin between my nose and mouth became raw, and I yearned to rub my face on Lucinda’s soft hair.

  I got up out of her bed eventually, angry at my indulgence. My arms felt heavily light without their usual charge, and a strange sensation ate at my chest. Grief enshrouded me like a mist, as I drifted around the house, picking up and moving around Lucinda’s possessions hither to thither and back again. I had to hide Mossie above the wardrobe, for fear I would do her some damage; I took her down again and placed her in the ottoman; I moved her to the coal-cellar. Anything to fill the waiting.

  Sylvia and Pansy looked at me as I came through the parlour.

  ‘Sleep, won’t you,’ I scolded them. But this is a shared grief, their faces said. We are with you, and yet we are not you. We do not presume to know how you feel, and yet we sympathise and feel it too.

  And then the front door opened, and Din staggered in, carrying a bundle in his arms, from which a leg fell, and then an arm, and then a cascade of blonde hair, and I rushed to help him put Lucinda down on the rug by the fire.

  ‘Is she alive?’

  ‘Sleepin’, ma’am. Safe, and unharmed.’

  I knelt down at her head, and rested my hand on her back.

  ‘Where was she?’

  ‘She was with them all along. Mr Diprose gave the woman some money, an’ tol’ her to keep her until he sent word.’

  I shuddered to think what would have happened to her had Diprose decided that she was to be ‘disposed’ of, like her mother. It would not have been too hard a task, in Limehouse.

  And then, just as if it were the gentle awakening of a normal sunny morning, Lucinda shifted herself under my palm, and started to stir. Her eyes opened, and closed again for a moment, and then opened fully. She moved her lips together to moisten them after her sleep, and gave one stretch, and then settled back against me, staring straight ahead with her big blue eyes. None of us dared move. And then she tilted her head back a bit so she could see who it was sitting at her head, and I moved to a crouch so she could see me more clearly, and her mouth broke into a smile, and she curled her fingers up to my face. Then she closed her eyes again, and stretched once more, yawned, and flexed to see the room on the other side of her, scanned the faces of the onlookers, and then turned back to me, and grasped my ribbons in her hand.

  ‘My darling, my darling,’ I whispered. ‘Lucinda, Lucinda. You’re home. You’re safe.’

  She said ‘Mama,’ and smiled again, and turned fully on to her side, facing me, and closed her eyes once more. I reached for her hand, and there was no such thing as wrong or right, or sick or well, or noble or savage, or old or young, only her and me.

  ‘Where’s Din gone, Mama?’ she said, after a while.

  I looked around. ‘Go see if he’s in the bindery, Pansy,’ I said. But he wasn’t. He was nowhere in the building. ‘He must have slipped away,’ I said. ‘He’s very good at that.’ I was slightly troubled not to have noticed, or to have extended to the man my thanks, but I had my Lucinda, and as we sat with our hands entwined, and our faces shining, and so many salty tears that one could have been forgiven for thinking that it was like a birth all over again, I knew that, contrary to my mother’s ruling, I had, at last, all that I desired, at least until the men came from Scotland Yard to mete out something approximating justice.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Who are you? A dirty old man

  I’ve always been since the day I began,

  Mother and Father were dirty before me,

  Hot or cold water has never come o’er me.

  It is July, 1865. I have just had an extraordinary encounter which I need to relate here, for the story seems to have some sort of an ending at last. But first, let me catch up on the intervening years.

  I started to write this journal shortly after Lucinda was returned to me, as I laid low, and waited for the knock at the door. The writing kept me busy, and was a vain attempt at making sense of the previous year or so. I chanced upon this small half-bound notebook stashed in a drawer in the bindery: it was a mockery of leather, silk and gold, entitled MOIV BIBLL, but it had beguilingly blank pages, like the blank book that St Bartholomew had intended to give to someone who was to delight under that name in her impending life, only she never showed up, or, possibly, had changed her mind at the last minute, and opted for the book that had been written in instead. Either way, it was if I had got her cast-off, being next in line for a blank book. It was the one book I had bound for nobody else but me, for nobody’s perusal, for no purchase, and I realised at last what its purpose would be.

  I never saw Din again. Pansy got wind, through her brother, that he had eventually left for Bristol, and thence to America, and although I know that it was his true destination, I could not help but think that it was his sacrifice for me. It may even have been his plan, if they ever had come looking for me: it would have given me the chance to blame the murder on him, this renegade black man. Sir Jocelyn would even have backed me up on it, no doubt, as the onl
y, and most expert, witness. I was aware of what he was risking for me by coming to Berkeley-square that night, and I knew that he would have killed for me. In that way I consoled myself that he must have loved me. For what is love, anyway? Did he not say to me, ‘Is love not only sacrifice? Do we not give up those we love, in order to prove to them that they are loved?’ But there were times I could not help but feel my victory had been a Pyrrhic one.

  But they never did come for him, nor for me neither. As I said, I laid low for a while, scribbling in my journal, and making commonplace books and albums for a stationer’s up in Lamb’s-Conduit-street, but the knock at the door never came. I scoured the papers daily for news of the Diprose murder. I learnt of the Winner of the Ascot Cup, the Progress of the Building for the Great International Exhibition of 1862, and Paris Fashions for the Summer, but not of what had happened to Mr Charles Diprose. My eyes lingered longer over the reports of the Civil War in America, but they were as missives from a dream state or some distant solar system, and left no trace around my heart.

  But one article caught my attention for a brief moment: ‘Eminent Judge Dies in Tragic Accident’. It read:

  Valentine, Lord Glidewell, the most eminent judge of his time, and the most excellent person from whose hammer justice was meted upon the worst felons of this land, has passed away in tragic circumstances. As the authorities debate the merits of moving the gallows into the penitentiary, and ending the ancient tradition of execution as public spectacle, which can have no place in a modern and civilised society such as ours, the esteemed judge was found hanging from the ceiling of his study in Belgrave-square this Thursday last. It is believed that Lord Glidewell, out of the spirit of compassion and consideration for which he was widely renowned, had determined to understand more intimately what was at stake each time he sent a criminal to the gallows, but this noble experiment had a most tragic ending . . .

  But of Mr Diprose there was nothing. Presumably the same contact in the Home Office – indeed, possibly, the same Noble Savage – who repeatedly got him off his obscenity charges, enabled this cover-up of justice too. His allegiance would have been to Knightley, not to Diprose, after all, and there had to be some advantages to having a secret society, didn’t there? Possibly Sir Jocelyn donated his body to medical science; they were both, in their own way, fine anatomists, so it was only fitting that Diprose should join them, and save the body-snatchers the trouble.

  I found out where Jack was imprisoned, and visited him when I could. He had grown twice the size, and aged as much too, since I had last clapped eyes on him. His hair was darker, and his muscles as big as his father’s now. He was quieter, though. A kindly warden brought him some books now and then; that much I gathered, but little else.

  After a while, I ventured out and started to earn my living once more. I gave lessons in bookbinding to gentlewomen at a studio in South Kensington: how times were changing! Veritable ladies were choosing to use their idle time in the gentle pursuits of fine handicrafts, and my, they paid handsomely for it. Twenty-five guineas for three months’ tuition, forty for six, seventy for twelve, plus materials at cost. But the money was only important in terms of what it enabled me to set aside for Lucinda. There were fears too: I fretted constantly about what would happen if one of my lady pupils were to discover my past. Or worse, if I were to discover the identities of their eminent husbands and find them to be . . .

  Eventually, I tired of these ladies, for it was not in my heart so to instruct them. Besides, Din’s legacy persisted. I never forgot that day in the bindery when he quoted Ovid at me, or our subsequent conversations in which he revealed his determination to build the kingdom of heaven here, in this life. He was ever true to himself, for that is what I trusted he was now doing in America. And so, too, as an act of love and, in some way, commitment to the man, that was what I had to do here, in England, amongst my own people.

  And so, with Ovid’s words as our motto, I established here in Lambeth an organisation that rejoiced under the name of ‘The Union of Women Employed in Bookbinding’. Pansy, Sylvia and I were its founder members, and we were soon joined by thirty-four others. Our initial costs were funded almost entirely with the money I had earned from Damage’s: a nice example, I thought, of converting filth into something more worthwhile and spreading the riches amongst those more deserving of the profits of obscenity. It was a sound enterprise, based on the trades union model, offering support, advice and representation to women in the bookbinding trade, with a target of a thousand members, and a weekly wage of a pound for our girls.

  It was Sylvia who suggested I burn the book, the one Din had stolen back for me, the one we now referred to as Jocelyn’s Little Black Book. I simply put it in the grate, without ceremony, and watched it flare up. The widow got burnt after all, only not on her husband’s pyre, and who can say which outcome was the more barbaric? And then, talking of barbarism, I remembered the photographic catalogues still in their crates, and Sylvia and I burnt them all, one by one, over the next few days. It was a waste of good paper; I would have given them to the poor in their tenements, to burn in their own hearths and keep them warm, had the pictures not been so horrific, but then, if that had been the case, I wouldn’t have needed to dispose of them.

  But the tattoos, of course, persisted. I did not mind them at first; I felt I deserved them. A clitoridectomy would have been a punishment too extreme for the nature of my crime, but the tattoos felt somehow fitting, the secret branding of a clandestine criminal. Like Hester Prynne, I wore my badge of shame, only further from the heart and closer to the seat of my transgressive pleasure. Only the visuals mocked me: I did not mind so the picture of myself in a wreath of ivy, but the insignia of the Noble Savages rankled and reminded me of the man I had murdered.

  It was Pansy who suggested we do something about it. She got a sailor friend to help her, an inksmith who had been responsible for the artwork on her brother’s arms. A bit at a time, she inked roses (true love), hyacinths (forgiveness), daffodils (respect), lily (to ward against unwanted visitors), nasturtiums (a mother’s love) and of course, pansies (merriment) over my right buttock, until the insignia of the Noble Savages was completely overgrown and invisible beneath the flora.

  About a year after Lucinda’s safe return to me, in the early days of the Union, we saw a carriage parked at the very top of Ivy-street. It was like Sir Jocelyn’s brougham, only shabbier, and the wheels were orange, not red, and it lacked a coat of arms. We were to see it there once every six months or so, never frequent enough for us to remember the last time with any certainty. And if Nathaniel were out playing in the street when the carriage arrived, it would stay there for twenty minutes at a time, sitting, watching the children, until the mothers got wind of it and called to their children to come inside. A pederast, they would whisper to each other, or years later (for the carriage kept coming), we would say a child-snatcher, with the modish hysteria about the white-slave trade, and kidnappers crawling our streets. But I kept my suspicions to myself. I had the fancy that it was Sir Jocelyn, looking from afar at the child he wished were his son. And just occasionally, I spotted Nathaniel, who was growing into a fine lad, with his mother’s fondness for excess and drama, standing stock still, and staring back up the street at the carriage, before his mother’s fears snatched him out of the way.

  And what of Din? Despite all my best intentions, my memories of him crept back. I learnt wilfully to remove all thoughts of him, all conversations my head hosted for me, every moment we had together which my mind wanted to relive, every longing my ears had for his voice, my skin had for his touch, my heart for his love. I did not want Din to become a tormentor of dreams, an invader of hearts; he was only gone, and I was slowly setting him free. Or rather, I was slowly setting myself free of him.

  I still used to think about crossing the seas to find him. I was free to go; it might even have been safer for us there. It was Sylvia who told me she had seen the name ‘Dan Nelson’ in an article about the first
black regiment, the 54th Regiment of Massachussetts, and I often wondered if that were him. But, for all my vain fantasies of his leading them on to glory and my meeting him at the edge of battle, I feared I would find him only as a name on a white cross, or maybe never at all. Besides, my life was here. There is hope, I would console myself, for I have loved a stranger, and after him I will not go.

  Sylvia became more of a friend than I ever expected, and it was she, of all people, who helped me understand and relinquish my yearnings. She found herself with many an admirer once she started to brave the streets of Lambeth more often, but she never bothered to court them. I thought at first that this was because someone of her standing would have found the thought of a match anywhere outside Chelsea, Kensington or Mayfair as inconceivable, but over time I realised I was wrong. She had, I was to realise, many secret lovers that she picked up here and there. But she had no desire for union with them in anything other than the carnal sense, and she went for considerable periods without any at all. ‘Rather no lover at all than a lousy one,’ she opined to me. As the former wife of a physician and a bookbinder of erotica, we had enough combined knowledge to ensure she could enjoy these encounters without the threat of impregnation, and with her annuity and my income we lived comfortably without the need to seek out a man on whom to depend, by whom to be owned.

  The greatest crime against humanity is ownership, Din had said once. And another time, he had described it as the enemy of desire. Sylvia taught me, over time, to agree with this sentiment. ‘My passion for Jocelyn ended the moment I became Lady Knightley,’ she said one night when we were both soaked in a hot flannel of the liquor variety, as we shared stories of the men we had known. ‘He wanted to own me, and once he did, I presented no further challenge to him. He said I was a dry old stick. Ah, Dora, give me a man who knows nothing of my title, my money, my breeding; bring me a workman, a bricklayer, a mechanic, with strong arms and dirty fingers, who lacks an eye for a conquest and a heart set on ruination, and I shall show you the extent of this woman’s lust!’