The Silk Thief (37 page)

‘I’m pretty sure we’ve buggered our chances of going back,’ Friday said. ‘Well, at least of getting anywhere near Charlotte. She’ll be watching us like a hawk now, that woman.’

Sarah nodded. ‘I’m glad I never said anything to Harrie about adopting her. It would have been cruel to get her hopes up and then have to tell her that Adam said no.’

‘D’you think she would have been happy about it? If you had adopted her?’

Sarah waved a mosquito away from her face. ‘I don’t know. Probably not.’

‘You didn’t really want her, though, did you?’

‘I did so.’

‘Are you sure?’ Friday said. ‘Because that day when you and Harrie had that tiff going out to the Factory, and you said in the end you would adopt her, I sort of felt it was only to settle her down.’

Sarah looked uncharacteristically guilty. ‘Oh, I suppose it was, really. Look, I love Charlotte, I do. But it wouldn’t just be me, would it? It’d be Adam, too. And it isn’t what he wants.’

‘Or you.’ In the moonlight Friday noted that Sarah’s expression was rapidly changing from guilty to shitty.

‘Look, Harrie’s desperate to have Charlotte. She’d make a much better mother than I would. She’s getting better, she’s gone back to work, and if she stopped being such an idiot about James, she could
have
Charlotte. I mean, he’s asked her to marry him, for God’s sake. He’s far more likely to impress the bloody Duffs than Adam and I are. And Harrie’s said no!’

‘You know why she won’t marry him.’

‘Well, it’s time she got past that,’ Sarah declared.

‘Well, what a stupid thing to say. You know she can’t. You’re the one who said she’s still suffering because she’s a better person than you and me. Not everyone’s as tough as you, you know.’

‘You are.’

Friday considered how often she’d cried — and drunk — herself to sleep since Aria had gone, and thought, no, I’m not, Sarah. I’m nowhere near as tough as you.

‘Oh, it’s you two,’ a voice said.

Friday almost leapt out of her skin, and whirled to face the sound.

James appeared out of the shadows of a wattle bush. ‘Sorry. I heard talking. I came to see who it was.’

Fucking hell. Friday shot Sarah a glance. Had he heard any of that?

‘We’ve come to see Harrie,’ she said.

‘Well, come in, then,’ James said, slapping at a mosquito. ‘You’ll get eaten alive out here.’

The bamboo curtain rattled as someone entered the shop.

Leo said, ‘Be with you in a few minutes.’

Harrie looked up from her work, eyed the man briefly, then focused herself and reapplied the needles. She only had half an inch to go and the outline would be complete. The customer, a sailor, had chosen one of her designs — a small version of an angel with bat wings — and when the swelling from the outline had settled in a few days, and providing there was no infection, Leo would start on the shading.

At last she finished, wiped away the blood and applied some salve. The sailor thanked her and paid, and left the shop gingerly shrugging into his canvas jacket.

The stranger sat himself down in the tattoo chair. He looked faintly familiar, though Harrie couldn’t think why, and was a little above average height for a man, dark-haired, rough-shaven, thin but obviously very fit. He wore a workman’s clothing — trousers, shirt, jacket, boots — and a hat, which he took off and set on his lap. She thought he was probably about thirty-five.

‘You need to book if you’re wanting a tattoo,’ Leo said sharply.

‘I don’t,’ the man said. ‘The name’s Jonah Leary.’

‘Ah.’ Leo crossed his arms. ‘I’ve been on the lookout for you.’

Wiping down her needles, Harrie nodded to herself. So that’s where she’d seen an echo of those facial features — on Malcolm Leary.

‘So I’ve heard,’ Jonah Leary said.

‘Look, I’m sorry to tell you this,’ Leo said, ‘but your brother’s passed on.’

Jonah Leary looked faintly disbelieving. ‘Is that so? How would you know? Me brother, both me brothers, are living in England.’

‘No, I’m afraid at least one of them was here in Sydney last week.’

Stony-faced now, Jonah Leary said, ‘Which one?’

‘Malcolm.’

‘And?’

‘He’d come in for a tattoo, obviously. He was sitting in that very chair, and, well, he had some sort of seizure and died.’

Leary cocked his head. ‘Who says it was me brother?’

‘He did. He told us he’d come to New South Wales to look for you. He showed us a tattoo of a map on his back. Asked if we’d seen you — another cove with ink like his.’

Leary was suddenly listening very hard.

‘Just before he died,’ Leo went on, ‘he asked us, he asked me, to find you and give it to you.’

‘What, exactly, did he say about it?’ Leary demanded.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that he wanted you to have it. I put the word out but nobody seemed to know anything about you.’

‘I been working out Parramatta way. Where’s me brother now?’

‘He died a week ago. It’s been hot. I had to fetch the undertaker.’

Jonah Leary was out of the chair in a flash, fists clenched, but Leo was even faster, darting between Harrie and their visitor, a knife suddenly in his hand.

‘Settle down. I’ll have no temperamental behaviour in my shop.’

Reluctantly, Leary sat. ‘Where’s he buried? You had no right to do that. Burial’s a job for next of kin.’

‘We had no choice.’ Leo went to the cabinet that held his books and papers and took out the jar containing Malcolm’s skin. ‘I took it off him before the undertaker arrived.’

Harrie glanced at the jar then quickly away. She hadn’t known he’d done that. Thank God she hadn’t been here when he had.

Leary took the jar, held it up to the glow of a Sinumbra lamp, and shook it to make the skin unfurl in the solution. After a minute or two of intense study, he lowered the jar to his knee. ‘You did a good job.’ He stood and walked to the door, where he turned, nodded once and said, ‘I’m obliged to you for salvaging it for me.’

‘I thought you wanted to know where your brother was buried?’ Leo said.

‘No need, now. I’ve got what I wanted,’ Leary said. ‘What was the name of the undertaker?’

‘Brownlow and Son. Up the street.’

Leary nodded again and walked out.

Harrie said, ‘God, how heartless.’

‘I’ll say,’ Leo agreed. ‘Not a lot of love lost there, I suspect. Not from his side, anyway. Lucky we’ve seen the last of the bugger.’

Jonah Leary wasn’t happy. He tucked the jar containing his brother’s skin awkwardly under his coat so passers-by wouldn’t gawp, and returned to deposit it in the room he’d rented for a couple of nights at the George Inn on Market Street. Then he strode purposefully back along George Street, keeping an eye open for the premises of an undertaker called Brownlow, which he located not far from the gaol.

Peering through the window, past a display of wooden and black crepe-covered coffins, he saw that the cove behind the counter was occupied with a woman in black weeds snivelling into a handkerchief, and waited until she’d finished carrying on. He raised his hat and held the door open for her as she left, then went in himself.

‘Brownlow, is it?’ he asked, approaching the man.

The cove looked him up and down. ‘Mr Lionel Brownlow, undertaker, yes.’

‘I’m told you buried me brother a couple of days ago: Malcolm Leary.’

Lionel Brownlow looked blank for a moment, then said, ‘Oh, yes. The man who died while being tattooed,’ in a tone that implied that he considered getting a tattoo was the same as being voluntarily sodomised. ‘The tattooist called us in. Most, er, unfortunate.’

The tattooist had also, Mr Brownlow recalled, paid a bribe of two pounds to secure his silence as, under the Murder Act of 1752, it was a criminal offence to interfere with any corpse other than that of an executed murderer, and that particular corpse had been neither entirely whole nor fresh from the gallows.

‘Where’re his things?’

‘His effects?’

‘His clothes, his purse. The things he had with him.’

‘The trousers we had to, ah, burn. They were soiled. I believe we have everything else. In cases such as this we keep items for three months. One moment, please.’ The undertaker disappeared out the back, returning almost immediately with a cloth-wrapped bundle.

Leary took a folding knife from his pocket, startling the crap out of Mr Brownlow, flicked it open, and cut the string. Grasping one end of the cloth, he gave it a yank, dumping everything on the counter. There were a pair of boots, socks, a jacket, a shirt, a waistcoat, a neckerchief, a flattened hat, a pipe and fixings, and a purse, all accompanied by a powerful waft of meat gone over. No room key. That was odd. His brother must have been staying somewhere. Leary opened the purse.

‘Is this all the money there was?’

Mr Brownlow looked at him as though he’d farted. ‘I have no idea. We never interfere with a deceased person’s effects.’

‘What was he buried in?’

‘A shroud. I’m afraid your brother was buried as a pauper, in the Devonshire Street cemetery.’

Leary put the purse in his pocket. ‘Just the shroud? Not with any other possessions?’

‘No. What you see here was all he had on his person.’

Waving his hand over the pile of clothing, Leary said, ‘You can keep all this. I don’t want it.’

There was nothing here. Shit.

‘You may wish to consider making a contribution towards the costs of your brother’s burial,’ Mr Brownlow suggested, but Leary was already halfway out the door.

In Friday’s opinion, Minnie Thompson’s brothel on York Street wasn’t half as nice as Mrs H’s. It was smaller, for a start, but then Mrs Thompson’s girls only catered to a very specific sort of customer. It was dramatically decorated in dark colours and heavy fabrics, with furniture of rich rosewood and paintings everywhere depicting naked women. Also, there was no salon and only two work rooms, both upstairs. Friday was in the largest, having her first lesson. The walls of the chamber were papered with a pattern of black lilies on an oxblood-red background, swathes of heavy black velvet framed the windows, and the floorboards were polished to a high sheen. There were no hooks and pulleys in the ceiling with which to hoist customers, the likes of which Friday had seen in several of London’s flogging brothels, but there was a set of wrist irons bolted to a wall, an iron bedstead and mattress draped with oilcloth, a sort of wide leather stool over which a body could be bent for flogging, and a glass-fronted cabinet displaying assorted whips, birches, straps, paddles, manacles and ropes, and beautiful little cut crystal bottles containing smelling salts. If Mrs Thompson’s house were ever raided, Friday thought, she’d be for it. On the other hand, perhaps she was immune; she could just see Clement Backhander Bloodworth creeping in through the back door, quivering with excitement.

At the moment, one of Mrs Thompson’s girls, named Violet, was bent naked over the stool, and Friday was practising her whipping on her. Violet enjoyed being flogged, and was paid extremely well by the men who visited Mrs T’s house for allowing them the privilege to do so. She felt, however, that Friday hadn’t quite got the hang of it, and that she was also holding back.

‘Well, I don’t want to hit you too hard,’ Friday said.

Though the sight of Violet’s bare and lushly round bum presented over the stool really was quite appealing, the idea of thrashing her silly with the whip wasn’t. Violet, however, was proving to be physically very tough, belying her appearance. Her name suited her. She was fair-haired and very pale-skinned, and had genuinely violet eyes with mauve shadows beneath them. She looked imminently bruisable, and Friday imagined some men would thoroughly enjoy laying into her.

‘You’re not supposed to beat the living shit out of ’em,’ Mistress Ruby said, puffing on her pipe and taking a swig from her tumbler of gin. ‘That’s not the point. You’re supposed to “tickle” ’em with the very end of the thong, so it’s just painful enough to drive ’em mad with excitement. You don’t want to send ’em home lookin’ like a side of raw beef. ’Course, some coves want you to go real hard, and that’s fine, long as they say so first. But there’s more skill needed when you’re going soft.’

Mistress Ruby’s name, Friday had discovered, really was Ruby — Jones — and she was a bonded convict originally from Wales. Ruby was about four feet ten inches tall, stocky and well muscled; and she could wield a whip like a professional bullocky. Her very long hair was dyed the colour of pitch except for a single white stripe, had the texture of straw, and was piled up, making her look as though she had a badger dozing on her head, though she said she usually wore it down when she was working.

She was the only professional flagellant in Sydney Town, and Friday had been wary of meeting her, aware of just how vicious the jealousy among women in the sex trade could be. She and Molly had had a nasty fight with a handful of tarts from Nellie McShera’s bawdyhouse in the Black Rat Hotel the year before. But she’d been pleasantly surprised by both Ruby’s and Violet’s open and generous natures. As far as Ruby was concerned, Sydney was no different from London: it was full of Englishmen, and Englishmen were always wanting someone to beat and humiliate them. Another female flagellant hanging out her shingle wasn’t going to make much difference to her.

Friday laid the whip on the floor and flexed her right arm. Whipping was hard work and her shoulder muscles were aching. She was sweating heavily, too, and had already stripped down to her skirt and shift, the tattoos on her bare arms gleaming. It didn’t help that the day was warm and the drapes across the windows were stifling the meagre breeze.

Ruby put aside her pipe and drink. ‘I’ll show you again. It’s a bit like pullin’ your punches. Pay attention to my wrist this time.’

She picked up the whip handle, the leather thong trailing on the floor like a skinny black snake, positioned herself behind Violet, and raised her arm. A crack rent the air; the thong flew out and connected with Violet’s buttock, once on the left, then again on the right, leaving two marks like slashes of crimson wax on the pale flesh.

‘See?’ she said, and handed the whip to Friday.