The Crimson Petal and the White (88 page)

‘But what danger can she be in?’ argues Sugar in her mildest, most reasonable tone. ‘If she succumbed to the cold on the night she ran away, she … well, she can’t come to any more harm now, and all that remains is to find her body. And if she’s alive, that can only mean someone has taken her in. Which means she’ll remain safe for a little while longer while discreet investi—’

‘She’s my w-w-
wife
, damn it!’ he yells. ‘My
wife
!’

Sugar bows her head at once, hoping his fury dies down before the servants or Sophie get wind of it. The page of Rackham stationery under her hands says ‘Dear Mr Woolworth’ and nothing more; a droplet of ink has fallen unnoticed off her pen and stained the letterhead.

‘Can’t you appreciate A-Agnes may be in urgent need of
rescue
?’ William rails, waving his good hand accusingly at the world outside.

‘But William, as I’ve just said …’

‘It’s not a simple ch-choice between her being dead or alive – th-there is a fate w-w-
worse
than death!’

Sugar raises her head, incredulous.

‘Don’t play the in-innocent with me!’ he rages. ‘Even as we speak, some f-foul old hag like your Mrs Castaway may be in-in-
installing
her in a f-filthy bawdy-house!’

Sugar bites her lip, and turns away from him, facing the tobacco-stained wallpaper. She breathes regularly and doesn’t wipe the tears off her cheeks, but lets them trickle down her chin and into the collar of her dress.

‘I’m sure,’ she says, when she can trust her voice not to betray her, ‘that Agnes is too frail and unwell to … to be made use of as you fear.’

‘Haven’t you read
More Sprees in L-London
?’ he demands, quick as a whiplash. ‘There’s a n-nice little trade in dying girls – or have you forgotten!’ And he utters a sharp groan of disgust, as though the eggshell of his innocence has only just this minute been smashed, allowing the offensive stink of human depravity to invade his nostrils.

Sugar sits silent, waiting for him to speak again, but his tantrum appears to have passed, his shoulders have slumped, and after a few minutes she begins to wonder if he’s slipped into a doze.

‘William?’ she says meekly. ‘Shall we reply to Mr Woolworth now?’

Farewell then, 1875.

If there are any rituals of celebration, in the Rackham house, on the 31st of December, they are conducted in secret, and emphatically do not involve the master. Other households all over the metropolis – indeed, throughout the civilised world – may be abuzz with New Year expectancy, but in the house in Chepstow Villas the commencement of a fresh calendar is of pale significance compared to the event everyone is waiting for. Life hangs suspended between two eras: the time before Mrs Rackham’s disappearance, and the time – whenever that may come – when her fate is discovered, and the house can exhale its painfully bated breath.

On the first day of January, 1876, the servants busy themselves with their tasks as though it’s a day like any other. Baking-pans are greased for loaves that may or may not be required; linen is ironed and added to stacks of superfluous bedding; a quantity of duck flesh which has sprouted maggots has had to be given to Shears for compost, but otherwise efficiency rules. Even Clara walks purposefully up and down the stairs, and in and out of Mrs Rackham’s bedroom, warning the other servants, with one scowl from her sour face, that they’d better refrain from asking why.

By contrast, no one could accuse the governess of being surplus to requirements; the first half of New Year’s Day finds her fully occupied with her new routine: lessons with Miss Sophie in the morning, a hasty lunch, and then two hours of work for the master in his study.

Sugar and William get down to business without niceties or preambles. The cogs of industry pause for no man or woman; there’s no use pleading that one’s fingers are broken or that one’s head hurts or that one’s wife is missing; accounts must be paid, errant suppliers must be pursued, the failure of Rackham’s Millefleur Sachets must be unflinchingly confronted.

Sugar writes letters to a number of So-and-So Esquires, gently counsels William to amend the often belligerent and wounded tone of his dictation, and does her best to ensure the letters don’t ramble into incoherence. Almost without thinking she translates phrases like ‘L-let him chew on that, the scoundrel!’ as ‘Yours, ever’, and corrects his arithmetic whenever his patience with numbers is exhausted. Already today he has indulged in one furious outburst against a lampblack manufacturer in West Ham, and now slumps on the ottoman, snoring stertorously through his swollen, blood-clogged nose.

‘William?’ says Sugar softly, but he doesn’t hear, and she’s learned that rousing him with a loud voice makes him very cross indeed, whereas if she lets him sleep he tends to absolve her with a mild reproach.

To help time pass until William’s discomforts wake him, or until she must return to Sophie, Sugar reads
The Illustrated London News
, turning the pages in silence. She’s aware that the police have by now been alerted to Agnes’s disappearance, but William’s request for utmost discretion has evidently been honoured, for the newspaper makes no mention of Mrs Rackham. Instead, the sensational news of the day is what’s dubbed (as if already legendary) The Great Northern Railway Disaster. An engraving, ‘based upon a sketch hastily made by a survivor of the accident’, depicts a squad of burly men in thick coats congregating around an overturned carriage of
The Flying Scotsman
. The engraver’s lack of skill, or perhaps his surfeit of delicacy, makes the rescuers look like postmen offloading sacks of mail, and conveys nothing of the true horror of the event. Thirteen persons dead, twenty-four severely injured, in a dreadful collision at Abbots Ripton, north of Peterborough. A signal frozen into the ‘Off ’ position signal is blamed. A calamity to make Colonel Leek’s juices surge!

Sugar thinks of Agnes, of course; pictures her being extracted, broken and disembowelled, from the wreckage. Is it conceivable that Agnes took so long to make the journey from Notting Hill to the city, and that she would then have boarded this Edinburgh-bound train? Sugar is at a disadvantage, having no idea what destination Agnes chose once she arrived –
if
she arrived – at Paddington Station; ‘Read the boards, and the right name will reveal itself to you’ was the only advice the ‘Holy Sister’ gave – the only advice she
could
give, given Sugar’s ignorance of railways and where they go. What if Agnes was charmed by the ecclesiastical ring of ‘Abbots Ripton’, and made up her mind to alight there?

Printed underneath the article is a footnote entitled ‘The Safety of Rail Travel’:

In 1873, 17,246 persons met with violent deaths, averaging 750 per million.
Of these 1,290 were due to railways, 990 to mining, and 6,070 to other
mechanical causes; 3,232 were drowned, 1,519 were killed by horses or
conveyances, and 1,132 by machinery of various kinds; the rest by falls,
burns, suffocation, and other events to which we are liable daily.

While William snores and groans in uneasy dreams, Sugar pictures Agnes falling down a mine-shaft, Agnes floating face-down in a filthy pond, Agnes being scooped screaming into a threshing-machine, Agnes disappearing under the trampling hooves and grinding wheels of a horse and carriage, Agnes pitching headlong off a cliff, Agnes writhing in agony as her body is consumed by flames. Perhaps she would’ve been better off in Labaube Sanatorium, after all …

But no. Agnes wasn’t on that train, nor has she suffered any of these gruesome fates. She has done exactly what her Holy Sister told her to. By the evening of the 28th, she was already far out of harm’s way, safely housed in a pastoral sanctuary. Imagine a simple farmer toiling in his field, doing … doing whatever it is that farmers do in their fields. He spies a strange woman coming through the corn, or wheat, or whatever; a shabbily dressed, limping woman on the point of collapse. What does she seek? The convent, she says, and swoons at his feet. The farmer carries her to his house, where his wife is stirring a pot of soup …

‘Nff! Nff!’ moans William, fighting off phantasmagoric attackers with his free hand.

Sugar imagines an alternative story for Agnes: a bewildered Mrs Rackham stumbles out of a rural railway station, by the light of the moon, into a sinister village square, and is instantly set upon by a gang of ruffians, who rob her of the money Sugar gave her, then rip the clothes from her body, wrench her legs apart, and …

The clock chimes two. It’s time for Sophie Rackham’s afternoon lessons.

‘Excuse me, William,’ she murmurs, and his whole body jerks.

As the days pass, and the new year that dare not speak its name ventures uneasily forward, it seems the only member of the Rackham household to remain unaffected by Agnes’s absence is Sophie. No doubt the child has feelings on the matter, hidden somewhere within her compact, tightly-buttoned frame, but in her articulate responses she betrays nothing more than curiosity.

‘Has my Mama still run away?’ she asks each morning, with somewhat blurry grammar and an unreadable expression to match.

‘Yes, Sophie,’ her governess replies, catechism-style, whereafter the day’s work begins.

In a topsy-turvy contrast that’s not lost on Sugar, Sophie’s behaviour is the very epitome of studious calm, patience and maturity, while William Rackham sulks and stammers and bawls, and falls asleep in mid-task, like a querulous infant. Sophie applies herself to the study of Australia with the earnestness of one who might expect to live there shortly, and she memorises the prejudices of ancient English monarchs as though this is quite the most useful information a six-year-old girl could arm herself with.

Even in play, she seems determined to atone for her sinful excesses at Christmas. The gorgeous French doll, which might have expected a busy schedule of social activities, is made to spend a great deal of its time standing in a corner, meditating upon its own vanity, while Sophie sits quietly at her desk drawing with her crayons, producing sketch after sketch depicting a brown-skinned menial mounted on an elephant, each more lovingly rendered than the last.

She’s working her way through
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
too, a chapter at a time, re-reading each episode over and over until she has either memorised it or understood it, whichever comes first. It’s quite the strangest tale she’s ever read, but there must be a reason why her governess has given it to her, and the more she reads it, the more accustomed she grows to its terrors, until the animals seem
almost
as friendly as Mr Lear’s. Judging from the illustrations in the later parts she hasn’t read yet, the story may be heading for a violent end, but she’ll find out when she gets there, and the final three words are ‘happy summer days’, which can’t be too bad. Some of the drawings in it she likes very much, like the one of Alice swimming with the Mouse (the only time her face looks carefree), and also the one which has the power to make her laugh out loud every time she sees it, of the uncommonly fat man spinning through the air. It must surely have been executed by a wizard, that drawing – a pattern of inky lines that works as a magic spell, acting directly upon her belly to call forth a hiccup of laughter no matter how hard she tries to resist. As for the part where Alice says ‘Who in the world am I? Ah,
that’s
the great puzzle!’, Sophie must take a deep breath whenever she re-reads it, so alarmed is she by this quotation from her most secret thoughts.

‘I’m so glad you’re enjoying your Christmas book, Sophie,’ says Miss Sugar, catching her at it once again.

‘Very much, Miss,’ Sophie assures her.

‘You are being a very good girl, doing all this reading and sketching while I help your father.’

Sophie blushes and bows her head. The desire to be good is not what impels her to draw her poor nigger doll riding on an elephant, nor is it why she reads Alice’s adventures and mouths ‘EAT ME’ and ‘DRINK ME’ when no one is listening. She does these things because she is powerless to do otherwise; a mysterious voice, which she doubts is God’s, urges her to do them.

‘Is it New Zealand’s turn yet, Miss?’ she enquires hopefully.

On the eighth day of Agnes’s absence, Sugar notes that Sophie doesn’t bother to ask if her Mama has still run away. A week, it seems, is the maximum time that the child believes a person could possibly remain missing before being discovered. No game of hide and seek could be drawn out to such length, no naughty deed could escape punishment so long. Mrs Agnes Rackham has gone to live in a different house, and that’s that.

‘Is Papa’s hand still sore?’ Sophie asks instead, when she and Sugar have finished eating their lunch and Sugar is about to leave for the study.

‘Yes, Sophie.’

‘He should kiss it and then hold it like
this
,’ the child says, demonstrating the manoeuvre with her own right hand and left armpit. ‘That’s what
I
do.’ And she gives Sugar an odd suppliant look, as if hoping that her governess will dutifully pass this remedy on to her grateful father.

* * *

Sugar does no such thing, of course, when she reports for work in William’s study. His visible injuries may be healing quickly, but his temper is worse than ever, and his stutter – to his utter fury – shows no sign of diminishing. Quaint advice from his daughter is not what he wants to hear.

With third and fourth posts still to be delivered, a daunting pile of correspondence has already accumulated, but precious little work gets done today, for William digresses constantly, bemoaning the treachery and disloyalty of his business associates. He also reminisces about Agnes – one moment asserting that the house is a mere shell without her, and that he’d give anything to hear her sweet voice singing in the parlour; the next that he has endured seven long years of suffering, and is surely entitled to an answer now.

‘What answer, my love?’ says Sugar.

‘Do I have a w-w-wife, or don’t I?’ he groans. ‘Seven years I-I’ve been a-a-asking myself that q-question. You cannot know the torment, of w-w-wishing only to be a husband, and being taken f-for everything else under the sun: an ogre, a f-fraud, a f-fool, a gaoler, a w-well-dressed prop to be s-seen w-with in the S-S-Season – God
damn
this s-stutter!’