The Crimson Petal and the White (52 page)

‘Don’t look in my face,’ she says again, squeezing Agnes’s shoulders tightly. ‘I will help you. Wait here.’ And she runs off, back into the lights of Bow Street.

Once more in the mainstream of human traffic, Sugar looks around her, examining each person critically: can anyone in this swirling, chattering swarm supply what she’s after? Those coffee-sellers over there, wreathed in the steam of their stall … ? No, too shabby, in their burlap caps and stained smocks … Those ladies waiting to cross the street, twirling their parasols and preening their furry stoles while the carriages trundle past? No, they’re fresh from the Opera House; Agnes might know them; and in any case they would sooner die than … That soldier, with his fine black cape? No, he would insist on summoning the authorities … That woman over there with the long purple shawl – she’s surely a prostitute, and would only make trouble …

‘Oh! Miss! Excuse me!’ calls Sugar, hurrying to accost a matronly woman lugging a basket of over-ripe strawberries. The woman, poor and dowdy, Irish or half-wit by the look of her, nevertheless has one asset (besides her load of squashy fruit): she wears a pale blue mantle, a huge old-fashioned thing that covers her from neck to ankle.

‘Mout-waterin’ strawberries,’ she replies, squinting ingratiatingly.

‘Your cloak,’ says Sugar, unclasping her purse and scrabbling inside it for the brightest coins. ‘Sell it to me. I’ll give you ten shillings for it.’

Even as Sugar is extracting the coins, six, seven, eight, the woman begins to cringe away, licking her lips nervously.

‘I’m in earnest!’ protests Sugar, pulling out more shillings and letting the light catch them in her gloved palms.

‘I ain’t sayin’ you ain’t, ma’am,’ says the woman, half-curtseying, her bloodshot eyes rolling in confusion. ‘But see, ma’am, me clothes ain’t for sale. Mout-waterin’—’

‘What’s
wrong
with you?’ cries Sugar in exasperation. Any second now, Agnes could be discovered cowering in the dark by one of the alley’s scavenging regulars; she could be having her throat slit by a grunting man in search of necklaces and silver lockets! ‘This cloak of yours – it’s cheap old cotton – you can buy something better in Petticoat Lane any day of the week!’

‘Yes, yes ma’am,’ pleads the drudge, clutching her mantle at the throat. ‘But tonight I’m awful cold, and under this cloak I’ve only a shivery t’in dress.’

‘For God’s
sake
,’ hisses Sugar, half-hysterical with impatience as Agnes’s head (in her imaginings) is sawn free of her gushing neck by a serrated blade. ‘Ten
shillings
! Look at it!’ She extends her hand, shoving the shiny new coins almost against the woman’s nose.

In another instant the exchange is made. The strawberry-seller takes the money, and Sugar divests her of her cloak, revealing bare arms underneath, a gauzy skirt, and a sagging, bulging bodice much stained with breast-milk. A wince of disgust, too, is then belatedly included in the bargain. Without another word, Sugar walks away, folding the mantle against her own discreet velvety bosom as she retraces her steps to the alley.

Agnes is exactly in the spot where she was left to stand; indeed, she appears not to have moved a muscle, as though petrified by fairytale magic. Obediently, without being reminded, she averts her face as her guardian angel approaches, a tall, almost masculine silhouette with a mysterious pale glow shimmering in front of its torso. The rats which have been circling Agnes’s skirts, sniffing at her soft leather shoes, take fright and scurry off into the blackness.

‘I’ve brought you something,’ says Sugar, drawing up to Agnes’s side. ‘Stay still, and I’ll wrap it around you.’

Agnes’s shoulders quiver as the cloak falls around her. She utters a cry that’s little more than a breath, unidentifiable as pleasure, pain or fear. One hand fumbles at her breast, uncertain where to grasp the unfamiliar garment … or no! – it’s not that at all: she is crossing herself.

…’ Holy Ghost …’ she whispers tremulously.

‘Now,’ declares Sugar, clasping Agnes by the elbows, through the pale fabric of the mantle. ‘I am going to tell you what to do. You must walk out of here, and turn right. Are you listening?’

Agnes nods, with a sound remarkably like the erotic whimper Sugar performs when a man’s hard prick is nuzzling for entry.

‘When you are back on the street, walk a short way, just a hundred paces or so,’ continues Sugar, pushing Agnes gently towards the light, step by step. ‘Turn right again at the flower-seller’s barrow: that’s where Cheesman is waiting for you. I’ll be watching you to see that you’re safe.’ Leaning forward over Agnes’s shoulder, she steals a glimpse of where the smear of mud and blood glistens, and wipes it off with a dab of her dark sleeve.

‘Bless you, bless you,’ says Agnes, tottering ahead, yet tilting backward, her internal plumb-line knocked askew. ‘William s-says you are a f-fantasy, a trick of my im-m-magination.’

‘Never mind what William says.’ How Agnes trembles in her grasp! Like a small child … Not that Sugar has any experience, outside novels, of what a trembling child feels like. ‘Remember, turn right at the flower barrow.’

‘This beautiful w-w-white robe,’ says Agnes, gaining courage and better balance as she goes on. ‘I s’pose he’ll say it’s a f-fantasy too …’

‘Don’t tell him anything. Let this be our secret.’

‘S-secret?’ They have reached the mouth of the alley, and still the world streams by, as though they’re invisible figments of another dimension.

‘Yes,’ says Sugar, inspired, in a flash, with just the words she needs. ‘You must understand, Agnes: angels aren’t permitted to do … what I’ve done for you. I could get into
terrible
trouble.’

‘W-with Our Lady?’

‘…Our … ?’ What the devil does Agnes mean? Sugar hesitates, until a vision glows in her mind of Mrs Castaway’s picture albums, with their lurid host of paste-glazed Madonnas. ‘Yes, Our Lady.’

‘Oh! Bless you!’ At this cry of Agnes’s, a passing dandy pauses momentarily in his stride; Mrs Rackham’s nose has re-entered the flowing current of Life.

‘Walk, Agnes,’ commands Sugar, and gives her a gentle shove.

Mrs Rackham toddles into Bow Street, in the correct direction, straight as a machine. She looks neither right not left, despite a sudden commotion elsewhere in Bow Street involving police and gesticulating bystanders; she completes the requisite hundred paces to the cab rank, and turns right just as instructed. Only then does Sugar leave her vantage-point and follow on; by the time she reaches the flower barrow and peeks round the corner, Mrs Rackham has been safely installed in her brougham, Cheesman is climbing up the side, and the horses are snorting in anticipation of the journey.

‘Thank God,’ says Sugar under her breath, and reels back in sudden weariness. Now for a cab of her own.

The commotion in Bow Street is over, more or less. The dense pack of onlookers is dispersing from the scene of the incident. Two policemen are carrying a stretcher between them, in which sags a human-sized shape snugly wrapped in a white sheet. Carefully, but mindful of the obstruction they’re causing to traffic, they load their flaccid burden into a canopied cart, and wave a signal of send-off.

It’s not until two hours later, when Sugar has returned to the stillness of her rooms in Priory Close, and she’s reclining in her warm bath, staring up at the steam-shrouded ceiling, that the thought comes to her:

That body was the strawberry-seller
.

She winces, lifts her head out of the water. Such is the weight of her wet hair that she’s almost pulled back under by it, her lathery elbows slipping on the smooth enamel of the tub.

Nonsense
, she thinks.
It was a drunkard. A beggar
.

With a jug of fresh water she rinses herself, standing up in the bath. Eddying around her knees, the soapy water is grey with the soot of the city’s foul air.

Every bully and bughunter in Bow Street would’ve seen her take those coins. A
half-dressed woman at night, with ten shillings on her
…

She steps out, wraps her body in her favourite snow-white towel, quite the best thing to be had in Peter Robinson’s on her last shopping expedition there. If she goes to bed now, her hair will dry in the wrong shape; she really ought to dry it in front of the fire, brushing it constantly so it achieves the airy fullness that William so much admires. She has all day tomorrow to sleep in; he’ll still be en route from Birmingham.

Old starvelings drop dead in London every day of the week. Drunkards fall under
the wheels of carriages. It wasn’t the strawberry-seller. She’s snoring in her bed, with
ten shillings under her pillow.

Sugar squats naked in front of the hearth, allows her damp mane to tumble down across her face, and begins brushing, brushing, brushing. Necklace-thin rivulets of water trickle down her arms and shoulders, evaporating in the heat from the fire. Outside, a stiff breeze has sprung up, whistling and whooping around the building, blowing innocuous debris against the French windows in the study. The chimney harrumphs; the wooden skeleton of the house, concealed beneath the plaster and wallpaper, creaks.

Finally, something to make her jump out of her skin: a knock at the front door. Extravagant imagination? No: there it is again! William? Who else could it be but William? She springs to her feet, half in panic, half in excitement. Why is he back so soon? What about the box factory? ‘I got half-way to Birmingham and thought better of it,’ she anticipates him explaining. ‘Nothing good can be so cheap.’ Jesus, where has she left her night-dress?

On impulse, she runs to the door naked. Why not? He’ll be startled and delighted to see her thus, his bold and guileless courtesan, a freshly-unwrapped gift of soft clean flesh, fragrant with Rackham perfume. He’ll scarcely be able to contain himself while she dances him playfully backwards towards the bedroom …

She opens the door, unleashing a great gust of biting air onto her instantly goose-pimpled flesh. Outside, waiting in her ink-black porch, there is no one.



EIGHTEEN

H
enry Rackham pulls a second time on the bell-cord, one hand fingering the calling card he fears he may have to leave instead of being permitted to visit Mrs Fox in person. Can it really be true that in the brief time since he saw her last she’s become mortally ill? The brass plaque on her father’s door, which once seemed merely informative, is suddenly suggestive of a universe in which sickness and fatality reign supreme: JAMES CURLEW, PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON.

The door is opened by the doctor’s elderly housemaid. Henry removes his hat and presses it to his chest, unable even to speak.

‘Please come in, Mr Rackham.’

Ushered into the hallway, he catches sight of Doctor Curlew almost disappearing at the top of the stairs, and can barely resist rudely shaking off the servant as she fusses with his coat.

‘Doctor!’ he cries, yanking his arms clear of the sleeves.

Curlew halts on the top stair, turns and begins to walk back down, silently, with no acknowledgement of his visitor, but rather as if he has forgotten something.

‘Sir,’ calls Henry. ‘How … how is Mrs Fox?’

Curlew comes to a stop well above Henry’s head.

‘It’s confirmed: she has consumption,’ he remarks emptily. ‘What else can I say?’

Henry grasps two struts of the banister in his big hands, and looks up into the doctor’s heavy-lidded, red-rimmed eyes.

‘Is there nothing … ?’ he pleads. ‘I’ve read about … I think they were called … pulmonic wafers?’

The doctor laughs, more to himself than at Henry.

‘All rubbish, Rackham. Trinkets and lolly-water. I daresay your prayers might have more practical effect.’

‘May I see her?’ entreats Henry. ‘I’d do my utmost not to tax her …’

Curlew resumes his ascent, casting the burden of hospitality carelessly downstairs to his housemaid. ‘Yes, yes, by all means,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘As she’ll tell you herself, she feels perfectly well.’ And with that, he’s gone.

The servant leads Henry through the austere corridors and Spartan drawing-room of the doctor’s house – a house which, in marked contrast to his brother William’s, is wholly unfeminised. There is no relief from subfusc utilitarianism until he reaches the French windows that open up onto the garden, where Nature has been permitted to embroider the bare earth ever so slightly. Through the immaculately transparent glass, Henry looks out on a sunlit square of clipped lawn bordered with neat evergreen shrubs and, in the middle of it, the most important person in the world save Jesus Christ.

She reclines in a wicker rocking-chair, fully dressed for company, with a tightly-buttoned bodice, boots rather than slippers, and elaborately coiffed hair – more elaborate, in fact, than usual. Nestled in her lap is an upright and open book, into which she gazes intently. She is more beautiful than ever before.

‘Mrs Fox?’

‘Henry!’ she cries delightedly, dropping her book on the grass beside her. ‘How very nice to see you! I was going mad with boredom.’

Henry walks out to her, incredulous that Doctor Curlew can so confidently write a death sentence for one who’s the very embodiment of life. They don’t know everything, these medical men! Couldn’t there be some mistake? But Mrs Fox, observing the confusion on his face, mercilessly sets him straight.

‘I’m in a bad way, Henry,’ she says, smiling. ‘That’s why I’m sitting still, for once! This morning I’ve even had my feet up, which is about the limit of what I can submit to with good grace. Do sit down, Henry: the grass is
quite
dry.’

Henry does as he’s told, even though she’s mistaken and the seat of his trousers instantly begins to dampen.

‘Well now,’ she carries on, in an odd tone, a mixture of breezy cheer and bitter fatigue. ‘What other news do I have for you? You may already have heard that I’ve been … how can I put it? … delicately expelled from the Rescue Society. It was decided, by my fellow Rescuers, that I’d grown too feeble to perform my duties. There was one day, you see, when the walk from Liverpool Street Station to a house of ill repute exhausted me, and I had to rest on the front steps while the others went inside. I made myself as useful as I could, by having strong words with the spoony-man, but my sisters plainly felt I’d let them down. So, this Tuesday past, they sent me a letter, suggesting I restrict my efforts to corresponding with Parliamentarians. All the Rescuers wish me the speediest of recoveries, in the most florid of terms. In the meantime, they obviously wish me to be bored to death.’

Unnerved by the ease with which she allows this obscene word to pass through her lips, Henry can scarcely bring himself to press her for more details. ‘Has your father,’ he ventures, ‘discussed with you … what exactly it is, or might be, that you … ah … have?’

‘Oh Henry, how you
pussyfoot
, as always!’ she chides him affectionately. ‘I have consumption. Or so I’m told, and I’ve no reason to doubt it.’ A glow of fervency is ignited in her eyes, the same glow as when she argues points of faith with him on their walks after church. ‘Where I
differ
from the general opinion, including my learned father’s, is that I know I’m not destined to die – at least not yet. I have, inside me, a sort of … how can I describe it? A sort of calendar of my days, put there by God, and on each leaf of that calendar is written what errands and appointments I have in His service. I don’t claim to know precisely how many pages there are, nor would I wish to know, but I can feel somehow that the calendar is quite thick still, and certainly not the slim portion of pages everyone supposes. So, I’ve consumption, have I? Very well, I have consumption. But I shall survive it.’

‘Oh, brave spirit!’ cries Henry, suddenly on his knees, grasping her hand.

‘Oh, nonsense,’ she retorts, but locks her cool fingers into his, squeezing gently. ‘God means to keep me busy, that’s all.’

For a minute they are both silent. Their hands are clasped, channelling naked and inarticulate feelings back and forth between them; that which innocent impulse has joined together, propriety cannot yet put asunder. The garden basks in sunshine, and a large black butterfly appears from beyond the high fences around the garden, fluttering over the shrubs in search of a flower. Mrs Fox withdraws her fingers from Henry’s with sufficient grace to make clear that no rejection is implied, and rests her hand on her breast.

‘Now tell me, Henry,’ she says, inhaling deeply. ‘What’s new in your life?’

‘In my life?’ He blinks, dazed by the heady indulgence of touching her flesh. ‘I … ah …’ But then it all comes back to him, and he finds his tongue. ‘Quite a lot is new, I’m pleased to say. I’ve been’ – he blushes, casting his eyes to the grass between his knees – ‘conducting researches into the poor and the wretched, with a view to preparing myself, at last, for …’ He blushes deeper, then grins. ‘Well,
you
know what.’

‘You’ve read the Mayhew I lent you, then?’

‘Yes, but I’ve done more than that. I … I’ve also begun, just in these last few weeks, to conduct conversations with the poor and wretched themselves, in the streets where they live.’

‘Oh, Henry, have you really?’ Her pride in him could scarcely be more evident if he’d told her he met the Queen and saved her from assassins. ‘Tell me, tell me, what happened?’

And so, on his knees before her, he tells everything, almost. Full descriptions of the locales and of his meetings with idle men, urchins and the prostitute (he only omits his one lapse into prurience). Emmeline listens intently, her face aglow, her body restless, for she’s uncomfortable, shifting about in the chair as if her very bones are chafing against the wicker. While he speaks, he can’t help noticing how thin she has grown. Are those her collar-bones he sees beneath the fabric of her dress? What do his ambitions matter, if those are her collar-bones? In his visions of himself as a clergyman Mrs Fox has always been on hand, advising him, inviting him to confess his failings and his sorrows. His ambition is only strong when it wears the armour of her encouragement: stripped of that, it’s a soft and vulnerable dream. She must not die!

Uncannily, she chooses this moment to reach out her hand to him and clasp it over his own, saying, ‘God grant that we might, in the future, work side by side in this struggle!’

Henry looks into her eyes. Moments before, he was telling her that loose women have no power over him; that in their squalid poverty, he is able to see them as souls and souls only. All true enough, but suddenly he realises, as his hand tingles inside hers, that this high-minded and upright woman, knocked flat on her back by the brutal hand of disease, still inspires in him lusts worthy of the Devil.

‘God grant, Mrs Fox,’ he whispers hoarsely.

‘Church Lane, back entrance of Paradise, fankyerverymuch!’

Having delivered a well-dressed lady to this repugnant quarter of the Old City, the cabman utters a snort of sarcasm; his like-minded horse dumps, as a parting gesture of disdain, a mound of hot turd on the cobbles. Resisting the temptation to tick him off, Sugar keeps her mouth shut and pays the fare, then tiptoes towards Mrs Leek’s house with the hems of her skirts lifted. What a morass of filth this street is! – the fresh fall of horseshit is the least of its hazards. Did it always stink like this, or has she been living too long in a place where nothing smells but rose-bushes and Rackham toiletries?

She knocks at Mrs Leek’s door, hears the Colonel’s muffled ‘Enter!’ and lets herself in, as she did so many times during her girlhood. The smell is no better inside, and the view, what with the grisly old man and the ever-increasing clutter of grimy junk in the parlour, no more heartening than the squalor out in the street.

‘Ah, the concubine!’ crows the Colonel maliciously, without any other greeting. ‘Think yerself blessed by good fortune, eh?’

Sugar draws a deep breath as she removes her gloves and stuffs them into her reticule. Already she bitterly regrets bumping into Caroline in New Oxford Street yesterday and promising, in her mad hurry to be released from what threatened to turn into a long conversation, to pay her a visit. What a freakish coincidence, that Caroline should spot her twice in the same year, in a city of several million people – and at just the moment when she was hurrying to Euston Station to spy on the arrival of the Birmingham train! Looking back on it, it would’ve been better to spend a few more minutes with Caroline in the street, for William wasn’t on that damned train anyway, and now there’s the risk of him coming back this morning, and knocking at the door of her rooms, while
she
is here, wasting her time in a bawdy-house that smells of old man’s piss!

‘Is Caroline free, Colonel Leek?’ she asks evenly.

Delighted to be the privileged withholder of information, the old man leans back in his wheelchair, and the topmost coils of his scarf fall away from his mouth. He’s about to regurgitate something from his festering store of disasters, Sugar can tell.

‘Good fortune!’ he sneers. ‘I’ll give you good fortune! Yorkshire woman, name of Hobbert, inherited her father’s estate in 1852: squashed by a falling archway three days later. Botanical sketch-maker Edith Clough, chosen out of thousands to accompany Professor Eyde on his expedition to Greenland in 1861: devoured by a big fish at sea. And only November last, Lizzie Sumner, mistress of Lord Price: found in her Marylebone maisonette with her neck—’

‘Yes, very tragic, Colonel. But is Caroline free?’

‘Give her two minutes,’ growls the old man, and sinks once more into his scarves.

Sugar surreptitiously brushes the seat of the nearest chair with her fingertips, then sits. Blessed silence descends, as the Colonel slumps in the thickly-veiled sunlight and Sugar stares at the rust-flecked muskets on the wall, but after thirty seconds the Colonel spoils it.

‘How’s the perfume potentate, then?’

‘You promised not to speak about him to anybody,’ she snaps. ‘It was part of our agreement.’

‘I’ve said nowt to
this
lot,’ he spits, rolling his eyes up towards the rest of the house, that pigeon-warren of rooms he never ascends to, where men perform athletic acts with their young limbs and organs, and three loose women lodge and sleep, and Mrs Leek reads tuppenny books in her den. ‘How little trust you have, trollop, in a man’s word of honour.’

Sugar stares down at her fingers. The scaling on her flesh is bad at the moment, painful. Maybe she’ll ask Caroline if she has any bear’s grease.

‘He’s very well, thank you,’ she says. ‘Couldn’t be better.’

‘Slips yer a big cake o’ soap every so often, eh?’

Sugar glances up into his inflamed eyes, wondering if this remark was intended to be grossly bawdy. She hadn’t thought libidinous acts were of the slightest interest to Colonel Leek.

‘He’s as generous as I could wish for,’ she shrugs.

‘Don’t spend it all in the one place.’

The dull sound of the back door slamming stumbles through the musty air. A satisfied customer has been discharged into the bright world.

‘Sugar!’ It’s Caroline, appearing at the top of the stairs, dressed only in a shift. At this angle and in this light, the scar from the hat factory is alarmingly livid on her chest. ‘Push the Colonel out the way if ’e won’t go:’ e’s on wheels, aint ’e?’

Colonel Leek, rather than submit to this indignity, wheels clear of the stairs.

‘—found with her neck cut almost in two by a silk scarf,’ he concludes, as Sugar trots up to her friend.

Having offered Sugar her room’s one and only chair, Caroline hesitates to sit on the bed. Sugar understands the problem at once, and offers to help change the sheets.

‘There’s no clean linen,’ says Caroline, ‘but we can ’ang this one up for a bit, so’s the air can get to it.’

Together they pull the sheet from the bed and try to drape its wettest parts in front of the open window. As soon as they’ve managed it, the sun shines twice as bright.

‘I’m in luck today, eh?’ grins Caroline.

Sugar smiles back, embarrassed. In Priory Close, she has a much simpler solution to this problem: every week, when no one’s looking, she carries a large parcel of her soiled sheets through the gates of a small park and, shortly afterwards, emerges without it. Then she goes to Peter Robinson’s and buys new bed-linen. Well, what’s she to do without a washerwoman? A vivid picture of Christopher, his small red arms ringed with soap-suds, flares in her brain …