The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (13 page)

‘I knew it,’ said Sophie.

‘Just don’t breathe a word to Lettice.’

‘Only if you promise not to give him any more books without me.’ She still hadn’t forgiven Madeleine for giving him
The Downfall of the Dervishes
when she wasn’t there.

‘I promise,’ said Madeleine.

Sophie nodded, and picked at the buckle on her splint.

She doesn’t look ill, thought Madeleine. Panic rose in her throat. How can she be ill?

It had begun with that bump on the knee, and then a touch of feverishness in the evenings. Lettice had put it down to growing pains, and dosed her with calomel. It was only when she became languid in the mornings that they became alarmed.

Old Dr Bostock had made a brisk diagnosis and said that the leg must come off. Even Lettice had been shocked. Madeleine had thanked him, and found another doctor. Dr Wray, thirty years younger, had confirmed the diagnosis, but prescribed prolonged rest in the famous splint along with plenty of fresh beef, a daily half-pound of mutton suet boiled in milk, and lots of sunshine and fresh air in a sanatorium in the country. The fresh air was critical. Sophie must practically live outside if she was to survive.

He had explained to Madeleine that the disease was not inherited, as Lettice believed, but caused by thousands of invisible organisms called bacilli. That night, Madeleine had lain awake and pictured them as a procession of tiny tombstones in her sister’s blood, like the little grey blotches she had imagined as a child.

What if Dr Wray was wrong and Lettice was right? What if the disease
was
the taint, working its way out? What if her parents had made Sophie ill?

She slammed the door on that hard. Slam the door. Don’t think about them.

‘What are you and Ben going to do?’ asked Sophie.

Madeleine took her jacket from the bed. ‘We’re going to get some money.’

‘How? Are you going to rob a bank?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Are you going to break the law?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘Sophie—’

‘Does Ben break the law?’

‘All the time, I should imagine.’

Buttoning her jacket, she caught sight of herself in the looking-glass. Her mother’s dark eyes stared back at her.

Are you doing this because of her? she wondered. Because you’re her daughter, and therefore prone to vice?

But if that were true, did it mean that Sophie was also prone to vice? Or was it like shuffling cards? Had Sophie inherited all the good, while Madeleine had got all the bad?

She kneaded her temples. She couldn’t think about that now. Today was Friday, and by Monday she needed twelve pounds. Twelve pounds for food, a month’s rent in advance, and a carter to take them to the dingy little rooms she had found in the North Wharf Road.

The
Dictionary of Employment Open to Women
said that waitresses at the ABC started on nine shillings a week, a shopgirl on twelve, a card-leaver twenty-five (with considerable outlay for being ‘well turned out’), and a dog-walker (Sophie’s favourite) received one and six an hour – provided she could find enough dogs to walk.

In other words, it was impossible to come up with twelve pounds in three days by honest means. But according to Ben, and for some bizarre reason she believed him, they could make
twenty guineas
for her first time (‘premium rate in a good house’), and twenty-five a week thereafter.

Sophie was still picking at the buckle on her splint. ‘What do dead people look like?’

Madeleine drew a deep breath. ‘You know what Dr Wray said about morbid talk.’

Sophie scowled. ‘What did Mama look like when she was dead?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. It wouldn’t do any good.’

‘What will
I
look like when I die?’

‘You’re not going to die.’

‘But if I
do
.’

Madeleine straightened the sheets, retrieved Pablo Grey from the floor, and placed him firmly on her sister’s chest.

Sophie was still scowling. ‘Will I still be able to see you when I’m dead?’

Madeleine put Sophie’s hands one on top of the other on the donkey’s fat, furry stomach. ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows. But you’re not going to die. I won’t allow it.’

Ben was waiting for her on the corner of Titchfield Street and the Portland Road. He was leaning against a barrel outside a fruiterer’s, flirting with a pock-faced little laundress with a basket of washing on her hip.

Madeleine liked Ben. She didn’t know why. He was filthy, amoral, foul-mouthed and pitiable. He was like a disgraceful younger brother. Thin as a whippet and quick as a stoat, he wore the stink and grime of the gutter with careless panache. He spat out profanities in a voice still husky with childhood, and his green eyes were sharp with a knowledge gained far too soon. But she liked him. She understood his loneliness and his mistrust, and his passionate attachment to a younger brother who trusted too much.

And she had to admire anyone who had grown up where he had, and survived.

Seeking him out the previous day, she had made her way with increasing trepidation through a warren of stinking courtyards and tenements of unrelenting dereliction. Children swarmed like rats, consumptive and deformed, with grey, pinched faces.

For a ha’penny, a woman had told her where to find him. In
The Gentlewoman
, the Poor were either good-natured types who made the best of their lot, or murderous villains who coshed innocents to death; but this woman had looked both murderous
and
good-natured. Her enormous breasts lolled unrestrained beneath her sweaty petticoat, and her arms were a patchwork of bruises. But she gave Madeleine a gap-toothed grin and pointed out the Kellys’ place, up three flights of stairs, and watch out as there ain’t no banisters.

Ben’s ‘place’ was little more than a cupboard, its crumbling walls smeared with generations of bedbugs. The tiny window was stopped with cardboard, the air so fetid that Madeleine’s gorge rose.

When she entered, Ben shoved
The Downfall of the Dervishes
under the pile of straw on which he was curled up, and sprang to his feet, as wary as when she’d cornered him with the imitation gun. He was naked to the waist, his skinny chest covered in glistening scabs. She guessed at vermin bites and furious bouts of scratching.

How, she wondered, has he survived?

And now she stood in the sun in the Portland Road, and watched him cracking jokes with the skivvy. She noticed that although he was making the girl screech with laughter, he wasn’t joining in himself. In fact, she had rarely seen him smile, and when he did it was just a quick feral snarl, with no mirth behind it.

As she watched, he put his hand behind the girl’s head and drew her face close to his, and kissed her. The girl sank her fingers into his greasy black hair, and her body arched against his. Their jaws worked.

Madeleine’s cheeks flamed. Was this what Lettice called vice?

When they drew apart, both were breathing fast. The girl’s eyes were glittering, her lips moist and bruised. Ben studied her for a moment, his face expressionless and sharply beautiful. Then he looked round and caught sight of Madeleine, and nodded to her, and left the skivvy without a backward glance.

‘What’s up, Madlin,’ he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Thought you wasn’t coming.’

Her hands tightened on her reticule. ‘What do we do now?’

He threw her an appraising glance. ‘Little tour. Help you get your bearings.’

They crossed the road, then walked down Riding House Street and into tranquil Langham Place. Stuccoed townhouses frowned down at them with drawn blinds and impeccable black doors. Ben cocked his head at Number Seven. ‘One of the better ones.’

She glanced at the well-scrubbed steps, then back to him. ‘You don’t mean this is a—’

He nodded.

‘But it’s practically round the corner from where we live.’

‘Little story about that. Turns out your Cousin Septimus was a regular.’

She gazed at the blank façade. She ought to be shocked, but she wasn’t. She had known since she was ten that there are two separate worlds which coexist side by side, like a ghost-image on a photograph. There is the safe world of the surface, and then the secret world underneath: the world of pain and ugliness, which everyone knows about but no-one ever mentions. The dead woman lying in the scarlet butterfly of blood.

Ben misread her expression for trepidation. ‘We’re not going in. Just wanted to show you that it’s more respectable than you think. Lots of women do it part time, and it don’t stop them being respectable again, after.’

She was touched at his attempt to reassure.

They started south, and as they walked he gave her a rapid-fire lesson in geography. At the bottom of the pile were the night-houses in Betty Street, which handled ‘the youth trade, that’s five and up’, and were despised for giving the profession a bad name. Then there were the accommodation houses around Seven Dials, Devil’s Acre and the Haymarket, where business was transacted in doorways at sixpence a time. Above that was Great Windmill Street, which had been ‘bang-up’ a decade ago, but was now well past its best; and above that was Marylebone, and then the pinnacle of Mayfair, where the houses were fearsomely discreet, and the girls never went out unaccompanied. Word would simply go out of a new arrival, and an interested client would have it sent round to his rooms in a cab. No scandal and no disease. All clean and topper and nice.

‘Stop,’ said Madeleine. They were outside the Coliseum, and she had to raise her voice above the rattle of the trams and the screech of carriage wheels against the kerb. ‘I need you to tell me something.’

‘Yeh? What?’

‘I need you to tell me what this involves.’

He frowned. ‘That’s what I been—’

‘No. I mean what one actually does. What one – does.’

He blinked. ‘Shit. You mean you don’t know?’

‘If I knew, I should hardly be asking you.’

He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Well bugger me.’

She waited, but he continued to shake his head. She said, ‘Can’t you just show me?’

A bark of laughter. ‘I don’t think you’d like that!’

Just then, a commotion of yelps erupted down a side street. Ben told Madeleine to wait, and ran off. Moments later he returned, grabbed her hand and dragged her after him.

She found herself in an alley lined with shops of the poorer sort. A pawnbroker’s, a small shoddy agent for Imperial Gas, Light & Coke. Outside a pub stood a brewer’s dray with four black shire horses between the shafts, their ears pricked in mild curiosity at a pair of mongrels mating in the gutter.

The larger dog, a wolfish red cur with a bad attack of mange, had mounted the smaller – which clearly had some greyhound in its ancestry, although not enough to have secured its escape. It was yelping piteously while the larger dog panted and clutched its scrawny flanks.

The commotion was attracting a good deal of raucous laughter. Two respectable women in straw boaters hurried past Madeleine with flaming cheeks.

Ben pointed at the dogs. ‘There you are.’

Madeleine looked at him, then back to the dogs. ‘That?’

He shrugged. ‘Give or take.’

She contemplated the wiry haunches pumping away like some bizarre mechanical toy. It wasn’t the first time she had seen two dogs thus engaged, but she had always supposed that such behaviour was confined to animals. She had never imagined it applied to people. Lettice and Septimus? Her father and mother?

Two dogs mating in a gutter. Is that all there is?

But in a way, she thought, what’s so surprising about that? If giving birth means blood and sweat and pain, why should ‘connexion’ be any different?

As they made their way back to the main road, she found herself scrutinizing every man she passed. A telegraph runner in a blue uniform and a pillbox hat; a butcher’s assistant with a tray of faggots; a plump, perspiring attorney. She tried to picture herself doing ‘it’ with them.

I can’t, she thought in sudden panic.

Why not? said another voice inside her head. It’s in your blood.

I can’t I can’t I can’t.

‘I can’t do this,’ she told Ben. ‘Not now. Not – today.’

Ben flicked her a glance. ‘I know. Got a better idea.’

‘Ben—’

‘It’ll work. You’ll see. You won’t have to touch nobody.’

He led her along the Strand and into a narrow street overshadowed by apartment buildings and criss-crossed with telephone wires. Relief washed over her. The street was silent and respectable. Gas-lamps stood guard like tall policemen, and at the end she could see St Clement’s reassuring spire.
Bookseller’s Row
, said the soot-encrusted street sign.

Ben snorted. ‘Real name’s Holywell Street. They changed it to make it respectable, but it’s still the same sodding place.’

He stopped outside a little shop whose sign proclaimed it in cracked gold lettering to be
Venables & Co., Specialist Books & Photographs, Domestic & Imported
. The windows revealed shelves of dusty volumes and padlocked glass cabinets, while outside a table held secondhand books –
The Perfumed Garden
,
The Pearl
,
The Young Wife’s Confession
– and a tray of cabinet cards at a shilling a time.

Ben rifled through the cards and pulled out a handful. He passed one to Madeleine.

It showed a girl a couple of years older than Sophie, straddling a young man. The young man wore the ill-fitting suit of a minor clerk, and an appreciative smirk. The girl wore striped stockings and nothing else. Her expression was preoccupied, as if she had just detected a shred of bacon between her teeth.

Madeleine’s heart began to pound. ‘You want me to do that.’

‘Whoops,’ said Ben. ‘Wrong picture.’ He snatched the card from her hand and gave her another. This one showed a plump girl with wavy blond hair lying on a couch. She was completely naked, and dreamily contemplating a single rose laid across her dimpled thighs.

‘Pays well,’ said Ben. ‘Bloke that runs this place takes the photos. My sister Lily made good money till she got too thin.’