by Philip Kerr
And then the sadness came. Of course, it is normal for a man to feel this way. But this was a sadness like no other I had ever felt, for I sensed that I had somehow tarnished the bright perfection that was the regard I had for Miss Barton. And I felt the remorse of it most acutely. So that when I heard a man cry out in pain, I almost thought the sound came from within my own breast. It was Deborah’s laughter that persuaded me the sound had come from somewhere else; and when I heard the man cry out again, this time he seemed to have been prompted by another, sharper report.
“Why does that man cry out?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s just Monsieur Vogueavant,” said Deborah, trying to coax my cock to crow again. “Vogueavant’s French for ‘stroke.’”
“I had quite forgotten him,” I confessed.
“And he is beaten with a whip.”
“A whip? Good Lord, where is there pleasure in that?”
“Not so as you would notice. I’ve beaten him myself upon occasion. But I care not for it. It’s warm work. Warmer than this. For Monsieur Vogueavant has a tolerance of pain like no other man I have ever met. And one must lay on hard to please him. The English perversion, they calls it, but Monsieur Vogueavant learned his taste as a galley slave on a French ship. His back tells the story well enough, for I never saw the like.”
Once again I heard Mornay cry out in response to the sting of the whip.
“And the Major has himself beaten in order that he should recollect his experiences? How monstrous.”
“I believe that it is more confused than that. He himself told me that he is beaten so that he will never forget his hatred of the French, and of Roman Catholics in particular.”
I was properly confounded by this information, which at least served to take my mind off the insult I had privately done to Miss Barton, and would have said more about the disgusting things men will have done to them in pursuit of pleasure, yet I feared Deborah’s abusing me for a hypocrite and so I kept silent. Which was more than she did, for momentarily she was troubled with some wind in her cunny parts, and I was moved by her farts to take my leave of her bed.
I had just started to piss in her pot, which be another good precaution against the clap, when I heard Mornay’s door open, followed by the sound of his boots stamping downstairs; and I made haste to dress and go after him.
“Why do you rush so?” asked Miss Barton’s facsimile.
“Because he does not know that I am here. And I know not where he goes now.”
“Oh, I can tell you that,” said Deborah. “He goes over the water to the Dutchman’s house in Lambeth Marshes.”
“To do what, pray?”
“It ain’t to have his fortune told by gypsies. It’s a wicked place he goes. What a man with money cannot obtain there, let him not search for it anywhere else in this world of ours. He wanted to take me there once. Offered me a guinea to go with another woman, he said. Well, I don’t mind that so much. It’s safer than going with a man. Just licking another girl’s cunny and moaning a bit. But I’ve heard tales about that place. Called The Dutchman’s. Some of the poor molls who go to work there are never seen again.”
Having for a shilling obtained some directions to this house of evil repute, I went outside onto Fleet Street, took coach, and went down to White’s Stairs in Channel Row, where, hearing a wherryman shout “Southward, ho!,” I joined a boat that was crossing the river.
The moon edged out from under a black flap of sky like a curling yellow fingernail. Halfway across the river a mist descended upon our boat that was like some floating pestilence. In the distance, the windows of the leaning houses on London Bridge were lit up like a necklace of yellow diamonds.
So far I was making a sorry job of plaguing my quarry; and I hardly knew how I was going to tell Miss Barton’s uncle where my pursuit of Major Mornay had taken me. Nor knew how I would present my expenses. Would any man wish his ward to associate with a fellow that had visited such places? Especially a man like Newton, who took a dim view of all licentious behaviour and was only concerned with higher things—a man for whom the body and its needs hardly seemed to matter except as the possible medium for some scientific experiment. Every time I looked Newton in the eye, I thought of him probing it with a bodkin. What did such a man know of human frailty?
Our boat rocked on, making, it seemed to me, very little progress across the grey water, and somewhere above our heads, a seagull hovered like some invisible screaming demon. Gradually, we neared the other side of the river where the mist lightened and the skull-shaped hulls of ships loomed across our boat. A dog barked in the distance as I stepped off the boat at the King’s Arms stairs, and then all was quiet.
Lambeth was a large unruly village on the Surrey bank of the Thames, with most of the buildings grouped around the palace and the Parish Church of St. Mary, and behind these, the black masts of ships. It was separated from Southwark, with its many small metalworking shops to the east, by the marshes where many crooked houses and lonely taverns were situated. As soon as I landed I drew my sword, for it was much darker on the south side of the River, with one or two ruffianly-looking men about. I walked east, along the Narrow Wall, as Deborah had directed, until I came to the sawmills, where I turned my footsteps south, across a stinking, muddy field, to a small row of houses. Here, next to the sign of the star, which is often said to indicate a place of lewd purpose, I found the house I was looking for. I peered in at a grimy-looking window, and seeing the orange tongue of a candle, I knocked.
The door was opened by a woman who looked comely enough, although she also seemed somewhat hard and yellowish in the face, and her eyelids almost motionless; and having saluted her and paid the ten shillings she asked, which was a large sum, I went inside. A sweet, heavy aroma filled air that was thick with pipe smoke.
The woman took my cloak, and as she hung it on a peg I recognised the Major’s hat and cloak. He was here after all. “So,” she said, in a whistling accent that made me think she must be Dutch. “Will you take a pipe first, or see the show?”
I have never much liked smoking, for it gives me the cough; and I replied that I would see the show. She seemed a little surprised at this, but led me through a tattered green curtain and down a flight of stairs to a low, mean room, surrounded with greasy-looking mirrors, that was stopped from any light save a few candles, where five dull-looking men sat in the shadows and, like a theatre audience, awaited some kind of performance. I knew not what this might be, and thought another posturer was probably expected. Of Major Mornay there was no sign, and I presumed he must have gone to smoke a pipe first. Meanwhile I made no attempt to conceal myself and took a most prominent seat so that Mornay, when eventually he came in, might easily see me.
My breath came uneasily to me down in that loathsome room, for the atmosphere was filled not just with smoke but also with foreboding, as if something dreadful was about to happen. And yet, curiously, I did almost feel at my ease.
After a good deal of waiting, two women brought a nun into the room and treated her most cruelly, spitting upon her and slapping her before eventually stripping her naked; whereupon they made her lie belly-down upon the bare floor without any garment. Her arms and legs were drawn with cords to a post in each corner of the room; and all the while the poor, dull-eyed nun bore her torments without protest, as if she cared little what happened to her. As I was myself. I know not if she was a real nun or no, except to say her hair was cut very short, which is, I believe, a sign of the nun’s renunciation of the world; but she was most comely, being no more than twenty years of age, and the sight of her naked body and privy parts stirred me much.
It was now that the Major came downstairs, and I remarked to myself how he seemed to be almost ill, or drunk; but despite my very obvious position, he sat down without even seeming to notice I was there.
After she was properly secured, one of the other men stood up from his chairs and started to whip her, all the time cursing her for a damned Roman Catholic whore, a
nd other words most obscene, so that I began to apprehend some real danger to the girl’s life. And standing up myself, I remonstrated with these men most openly, calling them monsters to mete such treatment to a woman, and entreating them all to desist, although I looked only at the Major so that at last he recognised me, and with such anger in his yellow-looking eyes that it quite froze my blood. It may have been his eyes, but it was more likely the sound of a piece cocked and the chill of a pistol pressed against my cheek that was so disconcerting.
“What’s this girl to you, then?” asked a man behind me, whose voice persuaded me that he also must be Dutch.
“Nothing,” I replied. “I care not for Galloping nuns, Quests, or Beguines, but she is human and, being so young, seems hardly to deserve such abuse.”
“Abuse you call it,” laughed the man. “Why, we ain’t hardly started yet.”
At this point the Major ran quickly out of that terrible room and up the stairs. Meanwhile the naked girl on the floor looked up at me with a most peculiar indifference, as if she cared very little for my intervention, so that I wondered if she did not mind her pain, or even enjoyed her flogging, like the Major.
“Surely she doesn’t deserve such cruelty?”
“Doesn’t deserve it?” said the voice. “What has that got to do with anything?” The voice behind me was silent for a moment. “What are you doing here?” it said at last.
I pointed upstairs. “I came with him. Major Mornay. He brought me. Only I came with little understanding of what I was to see, for he did not warn me of anything.”
“It’s true,” said the Dutch woman who had admitted me. “He did arrive not long after the Major.”
The man holding the pistol stepped in front of me so that I could see him. A most ignoble ruffian he was, with a forehead villainous low, and boils like barnacles; his red eyes were fierce, and yet his hand trembled upon the pistol which now he waved up the stairs.
“Your friend has left,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you had better leave as well.”
I moved toward the stair, glancing back all the time at the girl on the floor, whose back and bottom were already striped like a maypole.
“She cares not what happens to her,” laughed the man. “It’s the price she pays to satisfy her cravings. I wouldn’t worry about her if I were you.”
And still the girl said nothing; and endured her whipping, which commenced as soon as I had mounted the stairs, without so much as a murmur.
I hardly knew whether to believe him or not, but leave I did, although I was part minded to mount the stairs and return with my pistol in my hand to see that nothing more happened to the girl. I might have shot the one with the boils, but the other men were armed as well, and I do not doubt that they would have killed me. And for a while I was haunted by the possibility that the girl was a real fille dévote monstrously abused and perhaps even killed for their delectation, since the men all had murder in their faces, and most obviously regarded Roman Catholics with such malice that they would hardly have shirked the commission of such a wicked crime.
Much relieved to be out of that evil house, and somewhat light-headed, too, for the cloying smoke had been as thick as the river fog, I took a deep breath of cold air, and thinking Major Mornay to be long gone, I started back the way I had come, toward the wall and the river. I had not gone ten paces when he stepped out from the door of a vile-looking tavern and, trembling with anger, confronted me.
“Why are you following me, Mister Ellis?” he asked and, drawing his sword, advanced upon me with such obvious intent that no other course lay before me but to draw myself and prepare to answer his attack. True, I had promised Newton not to fight, but I could hardly see how I was now to avoid it. I snatched off my hat for ease of movement and vision, although I would have parried his first thrust easily enough had I been wearing St. Edward’s Crown, for it was plain to see that Major Mornay was indeed drunk. Which at least explained why he had taken so long a time recognising me.
“Put up your sword,” I told him. “Or I shall be obliged to wound you, sir.”
With some ferocity he redoubled his attack, so that Iwas obliged to fence with him in earnest. And still not troubled by any of these attacks, I allowed him to meet me, hilt upon hilt, where, so close to me that I could smell the smoke that still lay upon his breath, he asked his question a second time.
“Why are you following me, Mister Ellis?”
Thus I did almost not notice how he had armed his free hand with a dagger, and I barely had time enough to step back before he lunged at me with his second blade, only to be caught in the flesh of his left upper arm with the tip of my rapier. The dagger clattered to the ground and Mornay dropped his guard so that, bating my own sobriety, I might easily have run him through. Indeed I almost wanted to kill him, for I dislike a man who brings a knife to a sword fight. Instead I retreated several paces, which allowed Mornay to turn and flee into the darkness of Lambeth Marshes.
After a moment or two I collected his dagger off the ground, glanced at its curious shape, and then slid the blade into the neck of my boot. I hardly knew if I should feel pleased with myself. I had not killed him, he had not killed me, and there was surely some cause for rejoicing. But would Newton find much to learn from the way the Major had been “refracted,” if that was how his vile and intemperate behaviour might be described? It seemed more likely that Mornay would inform Lord Lucas, who would use the news and bruit of our quarrel to make another complaint to the Lords Justices about the conduct of the Mint. This hardly grieved my heart, for I was suddenly very tired, and thought myself very fortunate not to have been murdered. In view of my own licentious behaviour that might have been just, for I had clearly dealt sacrilegiously with Miss Barton in my heart, and I resolved never to do the like again.
The next morning Newton examined Mornay’s dagger with interest, polishing it up like some back-street bravo, while I related a purgated version of my evening’s adventures in pursuit of the Major. I left out the fact that we had fought with swords; while my explanation of how I had struggled with my own lust drew the following advisement from Newton’s ascetic lips, for I doubt he ever kissed anything other than Miss Barton’s forehead, or a book he had particularly enjoyed.
“By being forcibly restrained lust is always inflamed,” he observed gravely. “The best way to be chaste is not to struggle with unchaste thoughts, but to decline them, and to keep the mind employed about other things. That has always been my own experience. He that’s always thinking of chastity will nearly always be thinking of women, and every contest waged with unclean thoughts will leave impressions on the mind as shall make those thoughts apt to return more frequently. But pray continue with your story. I am all fascination.”
“It is finished, more or less,” I replied. “Outside the house in Lambeth Marshes he ran away and dropped that dagger behind him.”
“But you have left out the story of your sword fight,” protested Newton. “I am keen to hear that most of all. Tell me, is the Major badly wounded?”
“He drew on me,” I stammered. “And I was obliged to defend myself. I only pricked him in the arm and I daresay he’ll recover soon enough. But how did you know, master? Did he inform Lord Lucas? Is it bruited about the Tower? Has His Lordship already complained?”
“I am quite certain that Major Mornay will not inform Lord Lucas,” said Newton. “What? A Major in the Ordnance bested by a mere clerk of the Mint? His reputation could not bear the ignominy.”
“Then,” I said with no small exasperation, “how did you know that we fought?”
“Simple. You have cleaned your sword. The cup upon its hilt now gleams like a communion chalice when yesterday it was as dull as pewter. I recollect that the last time you cleaned that rapier was when you drew it in Mrs. Berningham’s defence. I daresay that when you had bettered the Major with your sword, he drew this dagger and attempted to prick your ribs with it.”
“The fight happened just as you say,” I ad
mitted. “I don’t know why I thought to hide it from you. You seem to know everything without the need to be told of it first. It’s quite a trick.”
“It’s no trick. Merely observation. Satis est. That is enough.”
“Well then, I should like to be as observant as you.”
“But there is nothing to it, as I am often telling you. But it will come in time. If you live that long. For I believe you have had a fortunate escape. It’s clear from what you have told me, and from what is written on this blade, that Major Mornay and, very likely, several others besides are religious fanatics.”
“I saw no engraving on the blade,” I said.
“You would have done better to have polished up this dagger than your own sword,” said Newton, and handed me back the dagger, the blade of which now shone like firelight.
“‘Remember Religion,’” I said, reading one side of the blade. “‘Remember the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey,’” I continued, reading the other.
“This is a Godfrey dagger,” explained Newton. “Many of these were forged following Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s murder, in 1678.” My master searched my face for some sign that I recognised the name. “Surely you must have heard of him?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “I was but a child at the time. But he was the magistrate who was murdered by Roman Catholics during the Popish plot to kill King Charles II, was he not?”
“I abhor Roman Catholicism in all its aspects,” said Newton. “It is a religion full of monstrous superstitions, false miracles, heathen superstitions and foul lies. But there was nomore wicked lie perpetrated against the safety of the realm than that Popish Plot. It was given out by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge that Jesuit priests conspired to murder the King at Newmarket races. I don’t doubt that there were Jesuits who conspired to do much to restore the Roman Catholic faith to this country. But murdering the King was not one of their designs. Nevertheless, many Catholics were hanged for it before Oates was found to be a vile perjurer. He ought to have been hanged himself but for the fact that the law does not prescribe the penalty of death for perjury. Instead, Oates was whipped, pilloried and sent to prison for life.”
