The Crimson Petal and the White (74 page)

‘What if I bleed before he even comes into me?’

‘Do I have to teach you every little thing? Just keep yourself clean as a whistle! If he’s slow to start, bid him look at something amusing outside your window, and give yourself a quick wipe while his face is turned.’

‘Nothing outside my window is amusing.’

To which Sadie’s response was a raised eyebrow, as if to say,
I can see
why your mother calls you ungrateful
.

Sugar closes Agnes’s diary, irritated by the need to blow her nose. Watery snot dampens her handkerchief, along with the tears on her cheeks. It’s November the 30th, 1875, and Sadie’s been dead for years, murdered not long after she left Mrs Castaway’s for Mrs Watt’s.

‘Gone to a better place’ was Mrs Castaway’s arch comment when she got the news. ‘She did say she would, didn’t she?’

Sugar drops her sodden handkerchief to the floor and wipes her face on her sleeve, then wipes her forearm on the bed. This black dress she’s wearing hasn’t been washed since she came to the Rackham house. She, who until recently wore a different gown every day of the week, now wears the same weeds day in, day out. The fringe of her hair has grown long; she ought to have it cut, but for the moment combs and pins keep it under control.

Her little room is as modest as it was when she first arrived. Aside from a few toiletries – old gifts from William – she’s imposed nothing of her own. The prints and knick-knacks from Priory Close, as well as her favourite clothes, are still packed up in her suitcases, which in turn are stacked on top of the wardrobe. There are other clothes too, boxes full, whose whereabouts she doesn’t even know; William has them ‘in storage’ somewhere.

‘You need only ask,’ he assured her, in that distant part of her life, little more than a month ago, when she was his mistress in rooms that smelled of perfumed baths and fresh sweat.

Sugar stands to look out of her window. The rain has eased off, and the well-manicured bushes and hedges of the Rackham grounds glisten spinach-green and silver. Shears the gardener is patrolling the faraway fences, checking that his
Hedera helix
is fanning out nicely against the latticework, for there have been too many nosy folk peering at the house lately. It’s five to two in the afternoon, almost time for a governess to return to her pupil. What the master of the Rackham house is up to, and who he’s thinking of, God knows.

Sugar scrutinises her face in the mirror, applies a little powder to her nose and peels a fleck of dry skin off her lower lip. She has run out of Rackham’s Crème de Jeunesse, and doesn’t know how to ask for more, short of adding it to a list of books for Sophie.

On the landing, as she walks towards the school-room, she pauses first outside William’s door, then Agnes’s, and peeks furtively through the keyholes. William’s study is flooded with afternoon sunlight, but vacant; he must be out in the world at large, bending it to his will. Agnes’s bedroom is dark; Mrs Rackham’s day is either already over, or has not yet begun.

On impulse, Sugar peeks through the nursery key-hole, in case the child should be revealed, vignetted in an act of misbehaviour. But no. Sophie sits on the floor next to her writing-desk, tidying up the carpet’s tufted edges with her stubby fingers, staring down contentedly at the faded Turkish patterns.

‘Small guitar, small guitar, small guitar …’ she murmurs, to brand the words indelibly on her brain.

‘God bless Papa,’ says Sophie that evening, her hands clasped over the coverlet, casting a steepled shadow in the candlelight. ‘God bless Mama. And God bless Miss Sugar.’

Sugar shyly reaches out to stroke the back of the child’s hair, but the candle-flame enlarges the shadow of her hand grotesquely, and she withdraws with a jerk.

‘Are you cold, Sophie?’ she asks, when the child lies shivering in the crisp sheets.

‘N-not very m-much, M-miss.’

‘I’ll speak to Rose about getting you another blanket. Your bedding is quite wrong for this time of year.’

Sophie looks up at her in wonder: to the great inventory of things Miss Sugar understands, must now be added the precise relation between bed-linen and the seasons.

Half past eight. The Rackham house is muffled in darkness, quiet and orderly. Even Clara would be satisfied, if she weren’t already resting in her room, nose stuck in a periodical called
The Servant
. Mrs Rackham is downstairs in the parlour, re-reading a novel called
Lady Antonie’s Abduction
– not strictly a book of arcane philosophy, she’ll admit, but a rattling good read nonetheless, especially when one has a headache. William is in Plymouth – or Portsmouth – something-mouth, anyway. Overnight excursions of this kind – ever-more-frequent – are essential, my dear, if the Rackham name is to be spread far and wide.

The key-holes on the landing, should Clara feel inclined to inspect them, reveal nothing that would annoy her. All the rooms are dark except the governess’s, whose light is demure and static. That’s how Clara prefers the inhabitants of the Rackham house: asleep, like Miss Sophie, or reading in bed, like Miss Sugar.

Sugar rubs her eyes, determined to finish another of Agnes’s diaries. If nothing else, the task will keep her awake until midnight, when she’ll put Sophie on the pot as usual. The child needs less and less prompting each time; before long, a whisper from the doorway will do it, and soon after that, perhaps just the memory of a whisper. The history of the world and the function of the universe may take a little longer for Sophie to grasp, but Sugar is determined to get her house-trained before the year is out.

In the diaries, Agnes Unwin has just turned sixteen.

How proud Mama should have been of me
, she reflects wistfully.
Although I
suppose she looks down upon me from Limbo – if she can recognise me from the top of my
head, at such a distance
. Exactly what Mrs Unwin might be proud of in her daughter is left unspecified, though Agnes has become (if she does say so herself) very beautiful.

Whenever I am tempted to despair
, she declares,
by the cruelty of Fate and my loneliness
in this God-forsaken house, I count my blessings. Principle among which, my hair and
eyes …

Grief and menarche have made of Miss Unwin a most peculiar little creature, demented and conventional by turns. When not bleeding, she divides attention more or less equally among clothes, garden parties, balls, shoes, hats, and secret rituals for maintaining a spotless Catholic soul while going through the motions of Anglican observance. She shuns the sun, avoids all but the feeblest exercise, eats like a bird, and seems in good health, mostly.

Each time she’s struck down by her ‘affliction’ – which comes at erratic intervals – she regards it as a life-threatening illness caused by evil spirits. The day before the bleeding starts, she’ll be complaining that there was
indisputably
a finger-mark on the inside of the soup tureen at the Grimshaws; the day after, she bids farewell to all earthly affairs and devotes her few remaining hours to fasting and prayer. Demons creep out from wherever they have been hiding, hungry for her blood. Agnes, terrified they’ll crawl into bed with her, keeps herself awake with smelling-salts (
‘I think I may
have sniffed too deeply and too often last night, as I began to imagine I had twenty fingers
and a third eye’)
. She refuses to allow her servants to dispose of the soiled napkins, for fear the demons will scavenge them; instead she burns the bloodied wads of cotton in the fireplace, causing an almighty stench which Lord Unwin is forever summoning chimneysweeps to investigate.

Lord Unwin, for all Agnes’s efforts to malign him, fails to live up to his reputation for monstrosity; indeed, to Sugar he appears an innocuous enough step-father. He doesn’t beat her; he doesn’t starve her (she does that for herself, while he cajoles her ‘most cruelly’ to put some meat on her bones); he chaperones her to concerts and dinner parties. An indulgent if not attentive guardian, he funds his step-daughter’s most wanton extravagances without objection.

On one matter only he will not bend: Agnes is to attend Anglican worship. And not only that: she’s to attend as the sole representative of the Unwins, for he himself is disinclined to put in an appearance. ‘Faith is a woman’s province, Aggie dear,’ he tells her, and she must go and suffer horrid songs that aren’t even in Latin.

I mouth the words, but don’t sing them
, she assures her diary, like one prostitute assuring another that she’ll suck but not swallow.

Aside from this weekly humiliation, and the curse that attacks her innards every few months, Agnes’s sense of herself as the miraculous survivor of a million horrific onslaughts seems rather at odds with reality. She is constantly being invited to garden parties, balls and picnics by the all the right people, and having an ‘immensely pleasant’ time there. By her own account, she has at least half a dozen suitors, whom Lord Unwin neither encourages nor opposes, so she maintains a coy flirtation with all of them. None of these suitors, as far as Sugar can tell from the scanty descriptions, is a professional man: rosy-cheeked aristocrats all.

Elton is sweet, and manly too,
says Agnes at one point.
He took off his coat
and rolled up his sleeves, in order to punt our little Boat. He did frown terribly, but we
went almost in a straight line, and when we chose our spot, he helped us all back onto the
bank
.

To read one of these accounts is to have read them all. It’s a high-born world, a world in which ambitious merchants who arrange meetings with sweaty dock-workers in Yarmouth, or argue over the cost of burlap, simply don’t exist. That is to say, a world in which men such as William Rackham are inconceivable.

From downstairs, in the world of November 30th, 1875, comes the muted toll of the doorbell, then:

‘Willi-a-a-am, you blackguard, show yourself!’

This bellowing male voice, bursting the silence of the Rackham household, makes Sugar jump.

‘Coward! Poltroon! Draw your sword and come out of hiding!’

A different, but equally loud, male voice. There are intruders downstairs! Sugar slips out of bed and kneels at her bedroom door, opening it a crack to peer through. She can see nothing except the silhouetted bars of the landing’s balustrade, and the gaudy glow of the chandelier. Still, the voices are more distinct: Philip Bodley and Edward Ashwell, uproariously drunk.

‘What d’you mean, he’s in Yarmouth? Hiding under his bed, more like! Avoiding his old friends! We demand shatish … shatisfaction!’

For another thirty seconds or so, Rose’s flustered pleas are intermingled with Bodley and Ashwell’s jovial blustering, then – to everyone’s surprise – Mrs Rackham arrives on the scene.

‘Do let Rose take your coats, gentlemen,’ she says sweetly, her breathy lilt amplified by the acoustics of the receiving hall. ‘I’ll try to entertain you as best I can, not being my husband.’

A remarkable invitation, given how fastidiously Agnes has avoided Bodley and Ashwell in the past. It certainly has the effect of quietening the two men, reducing them to snorts and mumbles.

‘I hear,’ says Agnes, ‘that you have another book about to … ah … issue forth?’

‘Tuesday next, Mrs Rackham. Our best yet!’

‘How very gratifying for you, I’m sure. What’s it called?’

‘Oh, um … its title is p’raps not fit for the ears of a lady …’

‘Nonsense, gentlemen. I’m not quite the fragile flower William thinks I am.’

‘Well …’ (self-conscious clearing of throats)
‘The War with the Great Social Evil – Who is Winning?’
(inebriated snigger).

‘How interesting,’ coos Agnes, ‘that it should be possible for you to have so many books published, and none of them novels, but merely your own opinions! You really must tell me how you manage it. Is there a particular publisher who likes to help you? You know, I’ve become awfully interested in this subject lately …’

The voices grow more muffled; Agnes is leading the men towards her parlour.

‘The subject of … the Great Social Evil?’ enquires Ashwell incredulously.

‘No no no,’ trills Agnes coquettishly, as she passes under the stairs, ‘the subject of
publication
…’

And they are gone.

For a couple more minutes Sugar kneels at her bedroom door, but the house is quiet again, and cold air is draughting through the crack, bringing gooseflesh to her barely covered arms and chest. Scarcely able to believe what she’s just witnessed, Sugar returns to bed and takes up Agnes Unwin’s diaries where she left them.

She reads on, with one ear cocked for further developments down below, breathing shallowly in case one of the men should raise his voice. She tries to be disciplined and read every word, but her patience with Agnes’s exhaustive cataloguing of balls and dressmakers has snapped, or perhaps the presence of Bodley and Ashwell downstairs has spoiled her concentration. Whatever the reason, she skims, looking for tell-tale signs of something more interesting: the clotty, minuscule handwriting of madness, for instance.

Pages rustle over one another, full of words, empty of meaning, and the months flutter by. It’s not until July 1868 that Agnes Unwin first mentions William Rackham. Ah, but what a mention it is!

I have today been introduced to the most extraordinary person,
the seventeen-year-old writes
. Part barbarian, part oracle, part swell!

Yes, much to Sugar’s bafflement, here is William, the dashing young dandy, fresh from continental travels, flamboyant and full of mystery. Tall, too! (Although, to a woman as tiny as Agnes, perhaps all men are tall). Still, whatever William’s true height in inches, he stands out signally from those pea-brained sons of the peerage to whom Agnes is more accustomed.

This vigorous young Rackham moves in Miss Unwin’s circle with presumptuous nerve, apparently fearless, despite his dubious credentials, of being snubbed. He has the knack of strolling through a crowd and disarranging it so that it regroups in half-reluctant crescents around him, whereupon he pushes (by means of superior wit) the other males to the periphery, leaving a preponderance of young females for him to entertain with tales of France and Morocco. It’s from within this covey of ladies that Agnes prefers, at first, to experience him, to prevent his fierce aura shining exclusively on her blushing face. But, in a turn of events that Agnes bemoans as
tellement gênant!
, Rackham selects her out of all her set, and finds ways of getting her alone. Lest her dear diary accuse her of complicity in this, Agnes emphatically denies any, complaining that whenever William Rackham is about, her companions abruptly move off without her, and there he’ll be, grinning like the cat that got the cream!