The Journal of Dora Damage (9 page)

‘I’m sorry for my leave, Mr Damage. Please –’

‘Hush your excuses, boy,’ Peter bellowed. ‘Get in here. Stop making your fuss so public. Have you no courtesy?’

I closed the door behind Jack, and turned the key in the lock again.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Damage,’ Jack started up once more. He certainly looked as if he had had a rough time. His eyes were dark and
sunken, and his hair was so lank and greasy it hardly looked red any more.

‘Sorry?’ Peter’s voice had calmed, which was possibly worse. Jack glanced over to the old birch cane in the umbrella stand,
on the receiving end of which he had been too many times. I winced at the thought, and knew I would have to excuse myself
before the walloping began. But Peter simply said, ‘No need to be sorry. A month’s wages is apology enough.’

Jack gasped, and looked with horror from Peter to me, and back again. He had only been gone eight days. I should say something,
I thought. I must defend the poor lad. But I had already taken all the power I dared from Peter. I was not boss of the workshop
yet. I stayed silent, coward that I was.

‘A month’s wages from the lad whose inefficiency has sorely cost my business. You’d better scrub your face and pull up your
socks, my boy, because of the trouble you’ve caused. Never let it be said that Damage’s isn’t good to you, giving you a second
chance and helping you mend your ways.’ Peter headed towards the curtain into the house. ‘I’m going to mix up some more paste,
and when I’m back I want you to make it clear you’re grateful, boy. It’s not often a master will take back a scrap who’s lost
him so much respect in the trade.’

Jack hung his head, but one eye peered up at me beneath his curls, before scanning his bench for the work I’d been doing.
We shared a small smile. I loved Jack, almost in the way I loved Lucinda. He wasn’t much younger than me, really, but he seemed
like a child still. He never seemed interested in girls, never had a sweetheart. He would have had a handsome face, really,
if it had only had a bit more meat on it. Poor little scrap, I couldn’t help thinking. He was too fine for the slums; he was
like a skeletal silver birch, which glows even in mid-winter, when all the rest of the trees look like dead twigs.

I handed him his apron, which he took from me without a word, then he ran his finger over the hinge I had been making on the
book in the press.

‘What’s this, Mrs D? You tryin’ to do my job?’ he said.

‘Needs must, Master Jack. What do you think?’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘It’s not the best I’ve seen.’

‘No, me neither,’ I rued. ‘I’m glad you’re back. I need to concentrate on the finishing, if we’re to make a go of things.’

‘Well, I’ll see if I can’t sort out the mess you’ve made, so you can at least use the spine to practise yer toolin’ on.’

‘Thank you Jack,’ I whispered, as Peter returned with the paste. ‘It’s good to have a friend in here.’

By nightfall a row of blank books of various sizes waited on the benches, drying out, and we were still on the bottom rung
of the ladder down to the poorhouse, but at least no lower. We knew we were racing against time, and the knock at the door
of the bailiffs, the debt-collectors, or the police, for whatever was in the house at the time of their arrival would legitimately
be theirs. Even Mrs Eeles was within her rights to claim her back rent by distraining everything we owned; she would then
have a mere five days to take it to the broker.

But I was determined that nobody would get their hands on my beautiful albums, nobody except Charles Diprose and his clientele.
Peter could go to prison first, I found myself thinking, before they would interfere with our work. That night, and every
night after, before I went to sleep, I took the books up carefully, one by one, and laid them out on a board under our bed,
until they were ready to take to my Mr Diprose.

The morning I was due to deliver them, the mud had finally dried on the skirts of my floral dress; I brushed the crusts off
into the garden, and then sponged the remaining patches where the dirt was ingrained. On my return today they would be just
as filthy, but I could not arrive at Mr Diprose’s with them already in such a state.

I wished I could have done the same with my hands, which were wrinkled, stained, red-raw, and clearly betrayed the fact that
I had been working. A pair of gloves would have hid them from Diprose, but I had not even a cotton pair. The family for whom
my mother was governess used to say that if one cannot afford kid gloves one should not wear gloves at all. They were right,
in a way, gloves being a menace to clean and costly to replace, so one should not wear them if one is the type of woman who
has to do even the smallest bit of dirty work, but today I would have settled for cotton. I would never look like a lady,
besides, kid gloves or no: I had no waist or hips to speak of, my arms were more built up than Jack’s, and I’d never seen
a society lady with my snub nose, my grey eyes, my brittle hair. And so my cold, chapped hands, red with work and yellow with
pressure, were clear for all to see as I carried the box of books back to Mr Diprose.

‘Well, well, Mrs Damage. What a delight it is to see you.’ Pizzy greeted me at the door, and relieved me of the box. Diprose
came through from the back room.

‘I presume by this return visit that Peter’s foot is still ailing him?’ he said, and he and Pizzy shared a smile that excluded
me. I cannot say how long we chit-chatted, for all I remember was the moment I was asked to open the box and reveal its contents,
and Charles Diprose’s first, ‘very nice’, followed by an, ‘I’m impressed’. And I could see at last that the books were indeed
very nice, and impressive. Possibly I had known it all along; but his verdict allowed me to believe it. Similarly, I cannot
remember how much he paid me for the books, but it felt like both a king’s ransom and an insult to a pauper. Simply to have
earned the smallest amount of money in those days was a great achievement, and yet reminded me of how much more we needed
in order to harbour in a safe place. I was pleased, and proud, and scared, all at once.

When I left him, I walked due north-east through unfamiliar streets, through heckles and shouts, for close to an hour, to
Clerkenwell, where I found my way to James Wilson, fabric merchants. Emboldened by Diprose’s favourable receipt of my cloth
bindings – or rather, his lack of complaint – I was going to investigate whether it would be worth our binding the Bible in
weave rather than in hide, to save a few pennies. The smell of dyes and fabric treatments got up my nose in the warehouse
as I fingered the samples of cambrics and buckrams. I stroked the leather-look cloths, and listened as the assistant told
me how suitable they were for use on everything from books to bonnets, curtains to coffins, but the prices startled me.

‘You want cloth, you gotta pay for cloth, love,’ he told me. ‘It’s the Yankees. The cotton famine. There ain’t no cotton to
be had, scarce as honour right now. What you are, then? A hat-maker? A seamstress?’

‘My husband’s a bookbinder. Too busy to come out today. Apprentice is sick, you know what it’s like.’

‘Well what’s he doing sending you ’ere then, when he could’ve told you ‘isself and saved you the journey? Didn’t he know?
What’s he been using all this time, then? Papyrus?’ He chuckled at his own joke while I flushed at my ignorance. Damages was
not an industrial binders mass-producing cloth bindings. ‘It’s worse than the bloody Crimean, now, I’ll tell you,’ he went
on. ‘See this. This is best quality Charles Winter-bottom cloth. Used to be seven pence a yard. In the war, it cost you four
shillings sixpence. Now you can’t get it for less than six shillings. Why else do you think they’ve all had to go back to
binding in plain boards? Nothing to fret about. They’ll become historic artefacts in a few years, them books.’

But I realised, as I mulled over bindings becoming casualties of war, and the prospect of Damages suffering the same fate,
that I also had been frightened to go where I really needed to go. It was safe for me, a woman, to buy cloth. Leather was
different; the tanneries terrified me.

But I set off again, this time due south-east, through the heart of the City, and over London Bridge. Each strike of my feet
on the pavement was sending aches up through the very bones of my legs, and I was weary, and in need of a sit-down. The houses
were miserable here, and as much in a state of disrepair and despair as their inhabitants. The closer I got to the broad,
low tannery buildings, the more the cobbles beneath my feet were stained gules, and matted with clumps of fur, trod-in gristle
and wool, like a peculiar red and brown moss.

This bloody carpet thickened underfoot as one neared the source of the vile smell, which had a pungency that stirred the guts
with the fearsome rawness, not of death, but of the slow, putrid rot that follows. It stuck to the wheels of the wagons and
vans, and to the wooden clogs of the workmen; one dared not slip, for fear of closer contact with the decaying, deathly slime.
There were rickety wooden bridges over the series of tidal streams that condemned this district of London to its awful trade,
providing sufficient new – one could not say clean – water twice daily for the tanners and leather-dressers. And where the
river did not reach, pools of greasy brown water bubbled menacingly with poisonous gas, like pustulous, open wounds, and reeking
of putrefying animal. Small boys with red legs squatted amongst them with sharpened sticks, scavenging for meat, which I hoped
they would sell to the cat-meat man, and not the pie-man. Wandering amongst them were some older boys carrying buckets of
dog turds, to take to the tanneries to cleanse the skins once they were out of the lime-pits; they’d get eight pence for a
bucket of pure. The boys’ faces were sunken, their noses pinched, as if they had been bred to minimise the mephitic air entering
their bodies.

I walked past the warehouse of Felix Stephens, for I knew we owed him, and found the sign of Select Skins and Leather Dressings.
I hesitated at the door, then sidled in, to find thousands of hides stacked ceiling-wards, and a considerable number of men
shouting prices, writing notes, and exiting briskly with rolls of leather under their arms.

‘You lookin’ for summink?’

‘I am,’ I said with false confidence. The man’s voice may have been youthful, but his skin was as leathered as his wares,
and his arms as strong as an ox. I told him my purpose, and he pulled out for me several fine moroccos, some pigskin, and
some calf, and let me peruse them all.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing at a line running across the hide.

‘Prob’ly a vein. Too reg’lar to be a scar.’ He pulled out some inferior hides from another stack, and showed me flay marks,
fighting scars, trap scars.

‘Is it cheaper like this?’ I asked.

‘Depends,’ he shrugged. ‘These are beasts, wild beasts, who’ve lived their lives, and all the better for it. Might seem imperfeck
to you, but it’s beau’iful to summun else.’

‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing at a white patch on one of the moroccos, which was otherwise relatively unblemished.

‘We call that a kiss mark,’ the youth said, without relish. ‘It’s where the hides have touched each other in the pits, so
the tanning agent couldn’t get there. Just meant someone didn’t rock the frames properly, didn’t do their job. Prob’ly a Paddy.’

‘Will you accept less for it?’ I asked. It was of a lovely quality besides, and I knew I could disguise it somehow.

He thought for a while. ‘A’right.’

I bought just the one skin: a skin of such quality, without a kiss mark, would have cost me two shillings and four pence,
but I took it away for just one shilling and sixpence, which I estimated would be sufficient to bind eight crown octavo books.

My journey home was not far, through the fog and the Borough, and as I walked I wondered how much I dared spend on food tonight,
or whether it would only be scraps again for supper. I buried my nose in the scroll of leather – it smelt better away from
the tannery – and let the magnificent smell of dead beast nourish me. Would that I could have bought its flesh, too. But Diprose’s
coins still danced in a pouch beneath my skirts, and I felt something akin to, but not exactly like, hope.

Jack marked round the Bible, and cut out the leather. He snipped the corners and spine spaces off as accurately as a surgeon,
laid it on the marble slab, and pared away the dermis, grading it thinly towards the corners and top and bottom of the spine.
It must have been hard for Peter, watching Jack’s hands on the knife he would not have been capable of gripping, paring with
precision the leather he could only have destroyed.

‘A pea of paste, a pea, no more!’ Peter ordered, as Jack damped the leather on the front and worked the paste into the reverse,
then smoothed it firmly but not tightly across the millboards. He folded the leather over around the tops of the boards, and
tucked it in around the head-band, using the bone folder, then started to form the head-cap on to the leather, when I had
to leave to settle Lucinda for her nap, and collect the water in the pails, before it was turned off again. When I returned,
Jack had repeated the whole process with the bottom of the boards and spine, then the sides, and finally the angles of the
corners, which met in a perfect mitre. Jack was skilled, but he had learnt from an expert. Then he inserted the boards and
books between flannel and tin, and put them into the press.

At least twelve hours had to pass before it was ready for finishing; I needed as many of those hours that Lucinda and the
house could spare me, and then I would need to be ready for the finishing, too. Its permanence daunted me: unlike a hearth
or a doorstep that could be gone over repeatedly should one miss a mark or a stain, gold-tooling cannot be erased or painted
over. The finishing announces excellence and nobility, from the gold itself to the pleasing hand-tools, which, like dainty
but solid bits of jewellery, feel satisfying in one’s hand. I heat Peter’s hand-tools on the stove, and my spoons and pans
look dirty and ugly by comparison. I whisk up egg white and water to make bookbinder’s glair, and I am an alchemist; I whisk
up the remnant egg yolks to make omelettes, sauces, custards, and I am a curmudgeon. Finishing is the way the book presents
itself to the world and gets noticed; the forwarding is more like women’s work, for one never notices it unless it has been
shoddily done. Twelve hours, and the task, the honour, the responsibility, would be mine.