Reckoning of Boston Jim (12 page)

In this month of April they are frantic with work. The Season is near to hand. The working hours stretch from twelve a day to fourteen, and then to seventeen. Mr. Haberdale orders restoratives of nutmeg and gin. He orders, as well, a clock that strikes each hour and releases a mechanical bird that belabours them with its cries.

“But do you know. I half-enjoyed it at first for all that.”

Boston nodded. Thought of the growing lateness of the hour. But he did not leave. It did not seem right to leave.

This is the closest she has yet come to the quality. She imagines that after all this frantic preparation she herself will be attending the balls, the teas, will be riding in Hyde Park, or calling on an acquaintance in the afternoon. It is as if she herself is preparing for the market of marriage. And she loves, indeed, the wondrous gowns heaping the table, the lush colours—apple greens, coral pinks, the purplish-reds of magenta and solferino, named so for battles of the Crimean and not out of fashion yet. And though her fingers may not be deft they have an astonishing knack for assessing say, whether a silk is from China or France, whether a lace is from Nottingham or Holland. She has won admiration for this, has won admiration also for keeping spirits up by telling stories and jokey tales, or did, until Mr. Haberdale commanded silence with the tone of a Reverend high in his pulpit.

At night she dreams of buttons—buttons of shell, buttons of bone, of ivory and silver, enamelled buttons painted with fabulous scenes. She dreams of lines of buttons that stretch to the sky or roll into cracks of the floorboards and then of Mr. Haberdale begging that they be gently prised out. She dreams as well of beads, a lustrous snow of them, delightful until the beads become the size of fists and begin to stun birds, shatter windows, until they find their way into her mouth and she chokes and wakes to a cold room, a pounding heart.

“Though sure I made the best of it. Do you know what I'm meaning?”

Boston muttered he supposed he did.

She is in bespoke tailoring, after all; she is not a slopper in the East End slaving at those treadle machines, making identical drab gowns for whomever chooses to buy them. She earns twenty pounds per year and is reasonably fed and has lodgings with the other seamstresses in a room down the stairs from the workroom. She shares a bed with only two others—Mrs. Tavenshaw of the gypsy-dark skin and the mumbling Miss Plamouth. And she has an admirer, doesn't she? Mr. Haberdale's son, no less. The elder Mr. Haberdale disapproves, but the younger Mr. Haberdale has an income of his own from investments of one sort or another and will not be deterred. Marriage into the family of the Haberdales! A moderate wealth. Puddings. Sweetmeats. Roasted pheasant. A wood fire in each room. A great step up indeed. And yet the other seamstresses are not as jealous as Dora wishes they could be. Nor is Dora as grateful as she wishes she could be. And why ever not? Well and so, because the young Mr. Haberdale is ugly as sin. No other, gentler expression will suffice. He has a sprouting of orange hair, eyes the shade of agates, and a mouth crowded with yellow teeth. He is a young man by the calculation of his two and twenty years but seems to Dora some creature born underground centuries ago and raised on sour mash. He does not engage in small talk but speaks in passionate spurts of politics and policies, and then lapses into ominous silences that Dora has to fill with words, as if she were a convict bargaining for her life. And why can he never look upon her face? Why fix his gaze on her throat? Still, she accepts his invitations once their hours decrease back to twelve, once Sundays are again a half-day free.

Inexplicably, their first outing finds them at the tanning factory where the men labour at noxious vats. The pure finders come in with their reeking buckets and carts. One lad boasts he has the pure not only of Lord so-and-so's mastiffs, but also that of the Lord himself, thus his offering is certain to tan a hide to the finest quality. The foreman cuffs him. Dora protests to Mr. Haberdale. She can barely breathe; her dress will become soiled. And what does Mr. Haberdale do? He takes her to a match factory and points out a woman, her jaw glowing palely green with the fossy. He takes her to watch the destitute men breaking granite for their bread. He takes her to the slave market at Bethnal Green though he has no intention of acquiring a servant. He points out the chimney sweeps, the crossing sweeps, a young girl holding out an orange as if she were holding out the world. Points out these things as if Dora has never seen them, nor known of them. In the vast market of Newcut he buys nothing and asks that she does not, that she merely observe. And so she observes a Punch and Judy show. Punch beats Judy with a stick and casts their baby into the oven. Judy leaps about in puppet fury. Dora laughs. Mr. Haberdale does not. Indeed, he frowns so hard it seems the points of his mouth might peg him to the ground.

“My father often took me to see these shows,” Dora says, “it's why I like them so,” and then tells him about her father's demise, his miserable half-life and then the fire that truly killed him along with her mother and all that they had worked for. Tears spill from her eyes as she tells him this. And his reply? He asks her opinions of the proletariat.

“The what?”

“The workers! That is, the labourers! The toilers!” he says, gesturing all about him.

“A fine lot for the most part,” Dora replies, bewildered.

Mr. Haberdale sighs, but then he is ever sighing like some benighted swain.

Dora supposes all this odd behaviour is in preparation for a mysterious business venture. Perhaps Mr. Haberdale is hoping to challenge his father. Certainly he has asked her to not mention, should his father ask, that they have been visiting low neighbourhoods and wretched factories. In the end, Dora hardly cares about Mr. Haberdale's purposes. She has only so much free time. She does not wish to waste it watching the labours of others, feeling their misery seep into her as if her skin were a sieve. “The Seven Dials is where I want to go,” she says. “You may come or not.” Mr. Haberdale trails her reluctantly, momentarily cowed. From one Mr. Cohen, an old acquaintance, Dora bargains for a matching bodice and skirt. The fabric is a damask with green and yellow stripes. The trimmings are of lace and crimped silk. She buys, as well, her first true hoops. She spends near the whole of her scanty savings, but the style is of only a decade past; the tears and stains are moderate and easy enough to mend and scrub. She is most pleased with her purchase, even though Mr. Haberdale asks how it is she can wear cast-off garments, that is, how she can become a rich woman's shadow, a tatterdemalion in fact. She barely attends him, insists now that they eat and drink and be among talking and laughter.

Mr. Haberdale acquiesces readily enough and takes her to an old-fashioned coffee shop with high-backed pews and tables pocked with burns and scattered with periodicals. Through the charry air Dora sees only one other woman and this a woman of dubious morals and so she smiles only from politeness when Mr. Haberdale introduces her to a group of youngish men in decent coats, all who greet him companionably enough. It seems the younger Mr. Haberdale is known here. Possibly even liked. She cannot recall the conversation, cannot recall their faces, only that the coffee dished from the vat was bitter and hardly warmed and the word
proletariat
rose up again and again. And then Mr. Haberdale stands and asks her to stand. She, apparently, is to be an emblem. She is of the exploited. “Look upon her hands,” he says. Dora lifts them up hesitantly and the men gasp as if she were holding up bloodied stumps. Mr. Haberdale clears his throat. Never has she heard him speak for so long and so passionately and with so little faltering. “This woman slaves in obscurity in poisonous rooms while below roll the carriages of the bloated rich and all about the shops are bursting with goods made of blood and ceaseless toil. In a year, that is, six months, her beauty will be gone. She will be hunched, her hands like claws. She will be consumptive! Blinded! She will descend to the slop trade and then, if still unmarried, she will supplement her wages with the wages of the street, will become, yes, a dollymop, and descend at last fully, that is, into that most degraded of trades.”

Dora protests. She will never become . . . how dare he suggest. . . . Her cheeks burn. She is of a sudden aware of the tawdry brightness of her gown here in the coal stained coffee-house. She dashes out. Mr. Haberdale catches her in the street. He shouts to be heard above the street callers and the clatter of wheels. “I am sorry, my dearest, that is, I apologize. I beg. Please. Do you not see? The workers, the labourers I mean, those in the street, that is, the people, yes the people, they must be told of, that is, they must be made aware of their own misery. Only then can the revolution begin.” That was all he was attempting. He did not wish to humiliate her. Soon such a word as humiliation will be forgotten in any case. His voice catches. Tears are glistening in his eyes, much to her astonishment.

“Made aware of their misery, that's what he said, Mr. Jim. How can a person not be aware of their own misery? That was the most absurd thing I'd ever heard. It is alike to not being aware you had a broken limb.”

Boston muttered some agreement and noted that a spider had woven half a web by this time, there in the join of her cabin door.

≈  ≈  ≈

To atone, to explain, Mr. Haberdale takes her to the library of the British museum and after some searching, finds a man at a table, scratching at a notebook, a barricade of books about him. He is dark of hair, well-featured and weary-eyed, his accent hushed and heavy. Dora is introduced and then Mr. Haberdale and the man whisper and nod as if the keepers of some great knowledge. The man is an exile of some sort. “He has written a great Manifesto,” Mr. Haberdale later tells her in the green shade of Hyde Park. “It will revolutionize the world, that is, I mean to say, we shall all be equal. The workers will have control of the profits of their labour and then all of mankind will eat and drink their fill and have clothing enough and then, only then, will they practice the high arts, music, that is, and poetry.”

Dora had never heard such nonsense and tells him so. Why should the quality want to be equal to the lower orders? Why indeed should Mr. Haberdale? And what of the organ grinders, are not they making music and on a scrap of bread a day? What of the tract sellers? “There's your music, sir, there's your poetry.”

“You do not understand, no, not at all. I will teach you, that is, instruct you, and you will become a champion, indeed, a paragon, a gleaming light for the cause.” He kisses her cheek then and it is like being rubbed with a mollusc. She tells him she will no longer see him. She will no longer step out with him of an evening nor a Sunday, unless . . . unless perhaps it is to the Cremorne Gardens? Mr. Haberdale calls it a gross leviathan built on the backs of the poor or some such thing and yet in the end he acquiesces, daring as he does so to look at her face, her eyes.

“Ah, but it were grand, Mr. Jim. You have never seen the like here. Imagine you are in a dozen countries at once. Imagine China temples and Swiss houses and snake charmers and a great maypole and dancing, 'course, and fireworks, oh, like a fiery garden in the sky.”

They are watching an operetta when a voice at Dora's elbow says, “Ah, it is this I missed some.” Another voice agrees wholeheartedly.

Both are dark-eyed, plump and bustling, both have a wealth of black glossy curls. They are identical, in fact, excepting the fine scar on the cheek of one, the plumper figure of the other. Their dresses are splendidly ornate, multi-coloured affairs with skirts round as tabletops. Dora falls into conversation with them while Mr. Haberdale frowns, once again.

“A seamstress for the quality! Ah, where we live seamstresses are rare indeed.”

“Rare as coal fires and starlings.”

“Yes, sister. Oh, the things I do not miss. Oh!”

“I must ask, and begging your pardon . . .”

“From the Antipodes!”

“Oh, the other end of the world!”

“We are from Australia! Australia!” they say in unison.

“How delightful!” Dora says, and claps her hands. Mr. Haberdale takes Dora's elbow. But Dora cannot be spun like a top. She firmly plants her feet. “And what is it like there? You must tell me.”

“The birds make you think of a painter gone mad.”

“Gone quite mad. And there is an animal that hops instead of runs, truly.”

“Hops, yes. Oh, it makes me laugh each time I see them. And there are men so black they seem made of night.”

“Oh, and so many marvels, endless marvels.”

“But no fine seamstresses, very few!”

“Oh, and such a scarcity of good lace.”

Dora can hardly tell which is speaking. She fears that if she continues to look from one to the other her neck might snap. Their sentences stack upon one another and build, eventually, their story—twin orphan girls sent off to the Antipodes by the parish priest. In their possession are letters of betrothals to two stalwart brothers, not twins, but close enough in age and temperament and happy to live close to each other for all their days. The Placterton Brothers are brewers with a thriving business. Famous in Melbourne, truly. They are not convicts, nor bolters, nor descended of either, the sisters make this clear, turning sombre ever so briefly.

“There's some here who look down on us.”

“Oh, but we hardly care, hah.”

“Not a whit, no. Let them rot here in soggy old England.”

“Are you married then?”

“Yes, are you?”

“No,” says Dora, not looking at Mr. Haberdale who is grimacing and fidgeting.

The plumper sister's gaze passes over him, expresses sympathy. “We have heard that Miss Burdett-Coutts is once again planning to send good women off to the colonies.”

“Oh, yes, sister. It is one of her great causes. To the Americas this time!”

“No, it is the Canadas.”