But as I was never intended to be their audience, what mattered my response? I thought of the artist, cross-hatching away
at his shady visions, and the models performing for his art. Were these personal masterpieces for him, and the height of his
aspirations? Or was he a hack-worker, scratching a meagre income from other people’s lusts? Did he see the luminous beauty,
the curious honesty, in these human forms, or were they as vile to him as the daylight world said they were? Possibly he was
just like me, in it for the money, and doing what he was told.
There was no place for shock, I learnt, if I was to get on with the work. The easiest were the tawdry novelettes and galanteries,
which soon left me untouched, but eventually even the more vulgar literature ceased to raise a flush in my face: I started
to find the endless litany of bodily parts rather tedious. The day soon came when I no longer had to wonder about euphemisms
such as ‘visits to the dumpling shop’ and ‘sewing the parsley-bed’. I learnt entire new languages: I accepted words such as
gamahuching
,
firkytoodling
,
bagpiping
,
lallygagging
, or
minetting
as if they were my mother tongue. My world became tinged with unreality; such literature placated with its tone, written with
such levity, good humour, civility and incoherence. It came to be endearing, childish, and meaningless. In fact, I came to
realise, it was rather like the whimsical poems filled with nonce words that I read to Lucinda at night, only a bit wetter.
But my amusement was my protection, for in truth I was deeply discomfited by some of what I was confronting. To justify my
role as Mistress Bindress in the obscene underworld of the book trade, I had to convince myself I was fashioning, as it were,
the pearl around the grit in the oyster; I was making something beautiful out of something ugly. And at times, what was so
ugly did not embarrass me, or shame me, but sometimes gently, sometimes forcibly, led me to my own ugliness, my own grit inside
my hard white exterior, to which I had little desire to go. They were places for which my upbringing and society had not prepared
me, and I was angry both at my ignorance and at this rapid acquisition of knowledge that was both against my will and counter
to my expectations. The books told me of strange spices and savoury fruits I yet knew not of; I read words of love uttered
by fortunate tongues that had tasted its bittersweet juices, and they led me into the dark caves of sin, and left me there
in torment and confusion.
Over the following weeks, we bound scores of books with the insignia of
Les Sauvages Nobles
, plus one or other of the inscriptions. I started to notice a pattern emerging: twelve English names cropped up amongst the
letters, the treatises and the accounts more often than others, and I could soon connect them to their particular Latinate
expressions. They were names that I had seen in the pages of newspapers or heard talk of in the streets: names of noblemen.
It did not take a genius to work out the correlation.
The first time I tried to go up to Peter to talk to him about them, I found him rocking in his chair, his pink legs trouserless,
flesh quivering in fear.
‘Leave me, leave me,’ he was moaning. ‘Go away, you vile woman! Get off me!’
‘Me, Peter? I’m not on you, love.’
He had to swallow the spittle in his mouth before he could say anything more intelligible. ‘Dora! Get her off me, Dora! Get
her away!’
‘No one’s there, Peter. Tell me what you see. Who is it?’
‘She’s monstrous! She’s the devil!’
‘No, she isn’t.’
‘Can’t you see her? Look at her red face, see how she drips blood. Clean them, clean these sheets. She’s dripping blood all
over them. Get them off! Get her off! Clean me! Look at her teeth, her fangs. Catch the blood. Catch the blood before it falls
on me. Catch it! Remove her! Scrub them clean!’
‘Peter, you’re not in bed. There’s no one here. There are no sheets. There’s no woman.’
But it was all in vain. His cries continued, so I raced to the dresser for the Black Drop. He guzzled at the bottle, then
wiped his mouth with the back of a swollen hand that appeared as one with his swollen arm. He laid his head back on the antimacassar,
and was calm for a while. He gazed out of the window to where our daughter was playing, but I doubt he saw her.
‘I need – I need a cup of tea.’
‘I shall bring you one.’ I made a pot, but Jack needed me to advise on margin widths and flyleaves, so I could not stay with
Peter much longer.
It was a few days later, when Peter expressed an interest in the activities of the workshop, that I decided to distract him
with my queries about these men.
The first one, ‘
Nocturnus
’ or ‘
Nightly
’ I kept to myself, for I already knew it to be Sir Jocelyn Knightley, our host to this strange biblio-ball. But I listed
the other guests to Peter.
‘Lord Glidewell.’
‘Ah yes, Valentine, Lord Glidewell. He is a judge. One of our finest.’
‘That’s right. I remember seeing his name on a broadsheet handed out after the hanging of Billy Fawn Baxter.’
‘Must you mention that dreadful affair? He murdered his mother, didn’t he?’
‘Father.’
‘Unnatural,’ he shivered. ‘And so, Lord Glidewell must be . . .’
‘. . .
Labor Bene. Labor
– to slide, or glide.’
‘Ah, I see. That’s how it works. Who’s next?’
‘Dr Theodore Chisholm. I presume he’s an eminent physician; his name is all over a lot of these medical tracts. And on those
bottles they send you.’
‘Why, he’s on the board of the Royal College! To think, my prescriptions are personally authorised by such a man. And his
Latin name?’
‘I’m not sure. I can’t work it out. Let’s leave him until later. Now, Aubrey Smith-Pemberton. Who’s he?’
‘He’s a Member of Parliament. I bound for his office on the Yale affair, several years ago. He presides over the committee
that regulates the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens. The sooner he shuts it down, the better, as far as I’m concerned. It represents
all that’s loose about today’s society.’
‘But we had such fun, there, Peter, when we were courting!’
‘Child, must you?’
‘I’m sorry. So, Smith-Pemberton. This was the hardest one. It’s usually written “
P. cinis It
”. I only managed to work it out because I found it written at the end of a poem as “
Aubretia Malleus P. cinis It”
. “
Aubretia”
being the flower, which is obviously Aubrey, “
malleus
” is a hammer, so, I thought, related to a smith, then a “P”, followed by “
cinis
”, which is ash, or ember, and then “
It
” is not “it”, as I first thought, but one ton. So, Aubrey Smith-Pemberton.’
Peter seemed bored with my puzzle-solving; he was tired, and I feared I was wearing him further. Possibly I was being too
pleased with myself.
‘Next?’
‘Dr Christopher Monks.’
‘Headmaster of Eton – no, Harrow, actually.’
‘A-ha. And he, therefore, is . . .’ I pretended to fret over the Latin names in front of us, and waited for an age for Peter
to get there first.
‘
Monachus!
’
‘Oh yes, you are right, Peter! How clever!’
‘Next?’
‘Sir Ruthven Gallinforth.’
‘Governor of Jamaica.’
‘Ah, I thought as much. I have only recently bound some of his richly colourful accounts of the Caribbean islands; he has
some shocking tales to tell of the tensions between the British and the plantation workers.’
‘It must be hard, dealing with such indolence. They are not natural workers.’
‘Is that so? I was not . . . So, I struggle here too . . .’ And again I waited. ‘Hmm, I wonder. “
Vesica Quartus
”. I don’t know what “
vesica
” means, but “
quartus
” is “fourth”, so presumably . . .’
‘Next.’
‘Archdeacon Favourbrook. Jeremy, he is referred to in one of the letters.’
‘Yes, he is an archdeacon, of somewhere. A venerable man. So, let’s see, do you have any words there that mean favour, and
brook?’
‘I think we must. Do you suppose “
Beneficium Flumen
” would be that?’
‘Precisely. Next.’
‘Hugh Pryseman. I’ve heard of him. He’s heir to the Viscountcy of Avonbridge, and he must be . . . “
Praemium
Vir
”. Prize man.’
‘Next.’
‘Well, the rest don’t seem to be as important. They haven’t written anything I’ve bound, and they don’t feature as much in
the texts or correspondence. There’s Brigadier Michael Rodericks, of the Royal Artillery, the Reverend Harold Oswald . . .’
‘A clergyman.’
‘Indeed. Then there’s Captain Charles Clemence, of the Bombay army of the East India Company.’
‘
Clementia.
’
‘Of course! And finally, Benedict Clarke, who seems to be in industry.’
‘I know not of him. But the others are clearly all eminent individuals. Members of Parliament, churchmen, dignitaries, noblemen.’
I showed him the coat-of-arms.
‘Why, they must all be members of the same club,’ he said, not reading the inscription of
Les Sauvages Nobles
. He nodded heartily. ‘Oh, Dora, this is magnificent news. I’d been touting for the off-trade from White’s ever since I got
the Parliament contract. My dear wife, I must confess to underestimating you. You will save the Damage name yet. Keep up the
good work. Now, be a good girl and bring me my draught, for I must sleep.’
But I could not rest easily that evening, as I thought of Jocelyn, Valentine, Theodore, Aubrey, Jeremy, Christopher, Ruthven,
Hugh, Michael, Harold, Charles and Benedict. I could assume the intimacy of their first names in the dream-creations of my
workshop, as I, mistress of their dreams, knew their fantasies probably better than their wives. I thought of Sir Jocelyn,
with his beautiful, clean new wife, Sylvia, and wondered how he could leave her to breathe not just the fetid air of my Lambeth
but the miasma of sin emerging from these pages. I thought of the others: as I tooled the spines, I tried to imagine what
rooms they would look down on, from what shelves. And if the pages had faces, whose faces would they see looking back at them?
What acts would they bear witness to? These were not the sort of novels to be read around the hearth by father or mother to
the rest of the family. These were solitary pleasures, not read at bedtime or in one’s chair, but under the bed covers, or
with the chair in front of the door, yet such precautions would never suffice. It was as if safety could only be had if the
head that read them could be sliced open, and the books secreted inside the cavity of the skull itself before suturing the
incision shut, for these books were temporary balm and permanent antagonist to the needs, twists and wounds of an already
tortured mind.
But until medical science had progressed to this point, the books would have to be held in furtive hands, which no doubt would
have preferred to have been free to whip the nether regions into a similar torment as the mind. Was it really, I had to ask,
possible to have
fun
in this manner?
Who’s that ringing at my door bell?
A little pussy cat that isn’t very well.
Rub its little nose with a little mutton fat,
That’s the best cure for a little pussy cat.
M
easurements and weights of paper, margins and gutters, rectos and versos marched across my brain even while I was sweeping
the floor, shaking the mattresses and banging the rugs. Crimson orifices and their myriad descriptions, endless and ever more
extraordinary plays on the word ‘cock’, and the more absurd euphemisms for sexual congress danced round my head as I served
supper, aired our nightgowns, and shooed the beetles out of their dusty hideyholes in the kitchen. My husband slumped in his
bed, my daughter frolicked in the street, and my hands, feet and shoulders permanently ached; I never sat, except to sew.
But I did not complain, even when Jack found me asleep among the paper-shavings as he lit the candles at seven the next morning.
For this pestle-and-mortar existence, hard though it sounds as I write it, was not in fact grinding me down. It was refining
me.
The summer was over before we even realised, and the first cold, foggy, September day meant the leather started to feel more
supple in the workshop. But otherwise it was a day like any other. I rose at five, riddled the cinders, drew up the fire,
unpegged the linen, put the kettle on, cleaned the range, whipped around a sweeping-cloth, steeped the washing, made the breakfast,
and set to soaking and boiling enough ingredients to cover the day’s meals.
Then I ran into the workshop, and cleaned it thoroughly, making sure to collect every last grain of gold-dust to sell back
to Edwin Nightingale, and to continue my war against mites and silverfish. I ran a wet cloth over the windows, but the autumnal
fog hung like a pall around the house, so I might as well have left them alone for all the light we gained. I let Jack in
at seven, but my chores still weighed over me, so I returned to the house. I counted out twenty grains of bromide for Lucinda,
which she took before her bread and milk.
‘Mama, I’m still hungry,’ she said once she had finished. She had taken to saying this, since starting the bromide.
I took Peter his porridge, tea and toast in bed, but he would not eat until he had had his first dose of Dr Chisholm’s laudanum.
While he toyed with his food, I emptied the slops, cleaned the outdoor privy, and rinsed the chamber-pots with hot water and
soda, before returning them to the bedrooms, when I collected Peter’s tray, and handed it over to Lucinda to finish. His appetite
was decreasing as hers was growing, which at least balanced the household bills.
Throughout the morning I would go into the workshop to sew a few signatures, but run back at times to stir the copper, to
check the row of bottles of Black Drop fermenting by the fire, and to turn and shake the mattresses. At eleven, Lucinda and
I went to the market, but through the soupy yellow fog we could scarcely make out the market stalls, and we returned with
only a basket of milk, eggs, bread, butter, ham, apples, and cheese, and our mood was as dark as the day itself.
As we walked slowly back up Ivy-street through the dingy mist, we could just make out the shape of the perambulating pot-man
and his large wooden frames, pulled by a mule, by the workshop door. ‘D’ya want any, lady?’ he said to me as we approached.
‘Jack?’ I asked, who had joined us at the door. Peter had never allowed alcohol on the premises, nor drank it himself, being
temperately inclined, but I couldn’t help but worry at all the water in his tissues. I knew it was a practice in most of the
other binding workshops to wet their whistle daily. The men had to have some perks, I thought.
‘Up to you, Mrs D.’
‘What have you got?’ I asked, peering at the frames through the gloom.
‘English Burgundy, heavy brown, porter and stout.’
‘I think we’ll have a jug of the burgundy and one of porter, please.’
‘Regular, or just today?’
‘Make it regular. We could do with a bit of liquid to keep us going in the evenings.’
‘Right-ho, Mrs?’
‘Mrs Damage.’
‘Alrighty, Mrs Damage.’
A train rattled past us, and as the man started to fill the jugs he asked, ‘That the stiffs’ express?’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said, and could not help but laugh.
Truth be told, and I never would have said it to Peter, but I was all in favour of a spot of beer. The pump in Broad-street
from which my mother contracted cholera also served Golden-square, Berwick-street and St Ann’s, which is why mother caught
it from the water at the Ragged-school where she had started to teach, for in Carnaby-street we never would send to Broad-street
for water. It impressed me that none of the seventy men working at the Broad-street brewery died; most of them confessed to
never drinking water at all, only beer. And when one remembers that over six hundred died then, there’s a lot to be said for
never drinking water again. They opened up the pump-well and found a cess pool was leaking into it. Since then, I’ve always
had a sneaking suspicion that water wasn’t good for one, but I could never say this to Peter.
Lucinda and I took our purchases inside. I put the apples in a bowl, and the eggs, cheese and ham on the marble slab, then
poured the milk into a pan and left it to scald on the stove to keep it fresh. Once I heard the pot-man rattling his frames
over the cobbles, I nipped back into the workshop to instruct Jack about the brown diamond shapes I wanted him to inlay into
some black morocco.
And then it was that there was a knock at the door, and there, when I opened it, stood a small, nervous gentleman. The fog
was so dense I could not see if there was a carriage behind him; but out of a darker-seeming patch of fog looming below the
lintel, a tall shadow stepped forward, revealing itself to be another man. The man in front cleared his throat, but made no
introduction of himself. Instead, he announced his companion, with a certain flourish and a swelling of pride.
‘I present to you,’ he said in a high voice, like the scratching of an insect’s wings, ‘Mister Ding.’ Mister Ding did not
step forward, but waited as the smaller man continued. ‘Who is also, of course you need no prompting to remember, both a man
and a brother to us all.’
‘Er. My name is Din. Din Nelson.’ His voice was deep and coarse; his accent cut through the fog like the tolling of an unfamiliar
bell.
‘Ding,’ said the little man in front.
‘Din. As in noise. Din. With a “nuh”.’
‘Din-nuh.’
It was as if the fog around Mister Din cleared as the words passed over me, and my skin prickled with shock. It was not because
I had forgotten all about his impending arrival – which I had, things being as busy as they were – but because I had not quite
appreciated, strange though this must sound, that the ex-slave, to be stationed at Damage’s bindery by Lady Knightley’s Ladies’
Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery, would be black.
Oh, of course my rational mind knew that he was a slave, and that slaves were Africans, and Africans were Negroes and Negroes
were black, but when I had agreed to take him on and settle him in the workshop, my brain had not taken the necessary step
of envisaging a black face behind the sewing-frame. Fortunately the shock did not paralyse my movements or my manners, and
I managed to smile politely and extend my hand to him. The little man nodded approvingly, and the black man took my hand and
bowed deeply, as if I were a lady.
As he stepped into the workshop his nose twitched, just like everyone else’s.
‘It’s leather and glue. It always smells like that, especially when we’re busy. Books only smell nice when they’re done up.’
I started to gabble as he was not looking at me, so I could not tell if he understood. But then I saw Jack’s nose wrinkle,
and I smelt it too, and I was abashed, for it had to be our visitor himself who smelt so horrible.
‘ ’Ave yer left summink on the stove, Mrs D?’ Jack said, as Lucinda ran in through the curtain.
‘Mama, Mama, the milk!’
‘Oh, Lord! The milk!’ And I twisted my way between the stranger and the bench, pushed aside the billowing curtain, and snatched
the pan away. Where the milk had scorched on the hot surface, it looked as if it were caustic, as if the metal had bubbled
and rusted underneath.
‘That’s another pan for the rag-and-bone man,’ I sighed.
‘Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll clean it up,’ Lucinda said.
‘No, don’t
you
worry, little one,’ I said as I kissed her on the nose. ‘I’m afraid it’s ruined.’ But in truth, I felt like crying, for I
was tired, and I wasn’t able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and I didn’t know how to get rid of that strange
man in my workshop. I was tight like a string, stretched between the worlds of domesticity and commerce, and blurred in the
centre, too, from the constant twanging. But I fingered my mother’s hair-bracelet, and kept it all in; I hadn’t cried since
she died, and I wasn’t going to start now.
Back in the workshop, the little man was buzzing and fussing with envelopes of money and contractual papers, which I counted
and signed, but soon he disappeared and all was quiet again. I closed the door behind Mister Din Nelson, and did not know
what to do with him. It was hard to look him directly in the eye for a while, until I realised that so I must, in order to
establish my place in the workshop to him, but once I did, he was not able to reciprocate. One eye seemed to be interested
in the air around my left ear, and the other drooped.
I did not even know where to put him. I could only think of the milk on the stove, and the glue that needed making up, and
the dirt on the oil lamps that prevented us from working efficiently.
‘Come over here, mate. Let’s have a look at you,’ Jack said, and he reached for Din’s arm, and led him over to his bench.
The man walked with a limp. ‘Tell me, what’re your skills? What can you do with those ’ands then?’
Din shrugged, and his eyes seemed to straighten up a little. ‘I been woodworkin’.’
‘What did you make?’
‘Wagons. Furn’ture. Fences. Gates. Houses.’
‘You good?’
Again he shrugged.
‘What else?
‘Tree fellin’. Fruit pickin’.’
I tried to catch Jack’s eye and roll my own at him, as if to say, what have we taken on? But Jack wouldn’t engage with me.
He listened and nodded his head, and started to show Din around the workshop. He gave him a hammer, showed him the boards,
opened a press for him. The man wasn’t clumsy. He looked at home behind the bench. He was a good listener. But I didn’t want
him there. I wanted him to leave Damage’s and never come back.
But I wasn’t being honest with myself, for this was nothing to do with Din. I wanted to find fault with him, but only because
I found too many in myself. The presence of the stranger was forcing me to accept the transgressive nature of my business.
I could not simply announce to the poor man that he was now working for someone who bound rude books for rich men; neither
could I let him discover the fact on his own. That he had come from Knightley’s wife was irrelevant, especially as I wasn’t
even allowed to mention that to Knightley in my defence. Oh Lord, the secrets I was keeping from both husband and wife; I
was bound to them both.
And, lingering behind these thoughts was everything I had heard about the African; he would, I feared, be idle, servile, lacking
in loyalty and discipline, and, in short, nothing but trouble in the workshop. My only consolation was the envelope of money
I still clutched from Lady Knightley’s Society, which I tucked into my waist before joining Jack in his instructions of the
strange new fellow.
We started with sewing, but Din’s thick fingers and one slightly maimed hand did not respond naturally to my demonstrations.
I was a little irritated, and anxious at the hours I would waste teaching him. We needed another sewing-frame, so I could
continue to work while he watched and practised. I chewed my lip in thought, then ran through into the parlour and collected
a dining chair.
‘Where are you taking that?’ Peter growled.
My haste was an excuse not to answer him, for how was I to explain the new arrival to the man who was still the proprietor?
It was not for me to make changes to our staff without his say-so; and who was to say how skin colour and background would
prejudice his reaction further? Lowering the tone of Ivy-street, indeed. I would be in great disfavour; from him, and from
Mrs Eeles, too, no doubt.
‘Some more brew, my love?’ I asked, uncorking the bottle for him, before fleeing with the chair.
Back in the workshop, Din watched as I tied four lengths of binding string tightly from the cross-bar above the seat to the
cross-bar beneath it, the same distance apart as the cuts Jack had made in the back of the book. I took a flat board from
the laying press and placed it on the seat of the chair against the cords, laid the first section of the book on it, and fitted
the four cords into the cut lines. I showed Din – on his frame, with what would be his needle – how to open the pages and
put the needle through from back to centre, between the pages, and bring the needle out again to the back at the next cut,
pass it behind the string, and reinsert it, and so on. He then laid a new section on top, and reinserted the needle directly
above where it emerged from the first section, and repeated the process. When he had finished this, I showed him how to tie
the two loose ends above each other together, and to start the third section with a completely new thread, and how to make
a kettle-stitch between the second and third sections, before placing the fourth section on top. And I made sure, always,
that he sewed textual manuscripts only; those with mischievous prints I reserved for myself.
His hands moved well with the needle, and he learnt quickly how to pass it through the paper without scuffing, and the exact
tension required on the strings for optimum page-turning. I relaxed in direct proportion to his gaining prowess, and peculiarly,
found my churning anxieties about the reactions of Sir Jocelyn, Mr Diprose, Peter and Mrs Eeles being replaced with one overwhelming
curiosity. What, I kept wondering, as I watched every move of his fingers, the backs of his hands, his wrists, doing the job
that I had done for so many years, what did it feel like, to have skin like that? To see that colour on one’s outstretched
hands? And how different would it feel from my own?