Only then, we heard a quiet voice above us, saying, ‘Actually, sir, she’s right. I can’t read.’ From the corner of my eye
I saw Pansy, who flinched as she finished speaking as if waiting for the blow to fall on her next. ‘I got me brother Baz to
come and read it for me,’ she said quickly, still cowed. ‘I knew the word “wanted”, but only cos I’d seen it on a poster about
me dad.’ Pizzy lowered me gently to the floor. ‘An’ we lived round the corner, so it wasn’t far fer Baz to come read it fer
me. You can go an’ ask ’im if you like. ’E’s on the market, selling ches’nuts. Tall fella, scar on his face, inked-up arms,
by the Vic.’
Pizzy was standing straighter than a hat-pin, and his hands were curled by his side. I almost pitied him; men don’t like being
caught doing wrong, especially to a woman, and by a woman. And blow me if I didn’t even find myself wondering how I could
make it easier for him; we women have received an impeccable training in accommodation from our own mothers. We also know
the wrath of a man who has been shown up to be wrong, and it is often nastier than simple anger, so it was not surprising
that I feared what he might do next.
One of the men undid the rope, and I put my hands underneath me and pushed myself to standing; the pains in my side stung
sore.
‘Would you like a cup of tea, gentlemen?’ I asked, as calmly as I could. The other man picked up my cap and gave it to me;
I raised my arms to fasten it on to my head, but my sides wrenched at the movement, and my head went black at the pain.
‘No, tea will not be necessary,’ Pizzy finally said in a weak voice. Then, a bit stronger, he said, ‘Bill, Patrick, go, wait
outside. Pansy, you may leave too.’ She dared not look at me, but turned straightways and went back to the kitchen, ensuring
the curtain was fully across behind her.
Pizzy couldn’t look at me either, which was some small satisfaction.
‘I trust I did not hurt you too much, Mrs Damage,’ he said to the bench, not to me. ‘Although let me tell you, it was not
without due caution. In a business like ours, one cannot be too careful, and this must serve as a warning to you.’
‘I have had sufficient already, Mr Pizzy,’ I said.
‘Where is the nigger?’
‘He’s on an errand.’
‘He and Pansy are under your jurisdiction, along with whosoever else the fancy takes you to employ. If any of them reveal
anything to anyone about the trade at Damage’s, we will hold you personally responsible. I have been instructed to tell you,
yet again, that if you are not able to find a meaningful way to ensure the nigger’s loyalty to you, you must dismiss him without
further ado. Have you?’
I shook my head miserably. ‘Perhaps you could suggest to me how I should go about it.’
‘It is not that difficult, Mrs Damage,’ Pizzy said, exasperated. ‘You have women’s wiles. You must find a weak spot, a secret,
something you can use to blackmail him with. Use your charms. And if he is immune to those, you must use whatever means you
have. A little espionage, a little subterfuge.’ He walked out into the street, where Bill and Patrick flanked the carriage.
He ascended, buttoning up his coat as he climbed, then turned and said casually, ‘And Dora. Do something about that curtain.
It doesn’t do to be overheard by servant girls.’
I would not move from the door until I could be sure he and his men had left Ivy-street. I wanted to get to Lucinda and hug
her, and be sure she was safe, but only once I had ensured the carriage had departed.
But it stopped a little further up the cobbled street, and one of the two men – the one who had handed me my cap – got out,
and knocked on Mrs Eeles’s door, and when she came out he pressed something into her hands. Then he ruffled the hair of young
Billy, reached into his pocket, and gave him something else.
And then I realised, in an instant, that the old jade had been spying on me all this time. She had been their lookout, and
that miserable boy Billy must have been the messenger, reporting back to Holywell-street on the comings and goings at Damage’s.
No wonder they knew all about us, of Pansy’s arrival, of goodness knows what else. All of it, no doubt. And Billy – who would
have thought? Oh, I didn’t resent him his role, only her: at least I had been giving him, unwittingly, a chance to get out
of her house. I consoled myself with the thought of the motherless little boy with a twisted face and broken glasses, running
away from the House of Death, and the ghost, no doubt, of his mother, at full pelt. I was, in some small way, glad to be of
assistance.
Suddenly I could see, all around me, the disintegration of my place in the community. I had tried to ignore the details: that
Lucinda no longer went to play in the streets with the other children; that people had stopped knocking on my door with a
loaf of bread or a basket of eggs; that neither did I make a large stew and take it to someone else’s door like I used to;
that people had even started to turn away from me in the street. I wondered what they had heard from Mrs Eeles, or Agatha
Marrow, or others, and what they knew of my running the workshop, and even whether they knew of the books that I bound.
Then I saw myself as if from a distance, and wondered what I would think of myself, a young woman with a crippled husband,
who received a regular train of different, well-dressed male visitors, and her resultant new-found wealth. I did not flaunt
it – I had never worn those fine scarves, kid boots, the parasol and the fan – but Lucinda’s lovely blue coat can’t have escaped
their notice. And if what had happened to Pansy were true, in the spirit of self-preservation, no decent woman could have
afforded to know me any more.
I closed the door and found Pansy peeping into the workshop from behind the curtain. When she saw I was alone, she pulled
the curtain right back and swung herself inside. She was holding a warm bread-and-water poultice in a damp flannel.
‘Y’all right? Let me have a look at ya.’ I lifted my smock, and she put the pack on the worst of my bruises. ‘Maybe we should
get the doctor in to put some leeches on ya. Could do with half a dozen. Look at the state of ya.’
She wiped my nose with a handkerchief, and I saw that it was bleeding.
‘No doctors, Pansy.’
‘Nah? Don’t blame ya.’ She rubbed some pure extract of lead on each of the larger injuries, and set about covering the worst
of them with bandages. She had a big grin on her face. ‘I knew you was all right, mum, straight from when I saw the parsley
in your pots.’
‘Parsley, Pansy? I didn’t know I had any.’
‘ ’Swot me mam always said. “Where the missus is the master, the parsley grows the faster.” ’
She had nearly finished when Jack returned, having finished delivering our cards.
‘Crikey, Mrs D, what happened to you?’
When I told him, he hung his head wretchedly. ‘I shoulda been ’ere, Mrs D. I shoulda. You need me to pertect you, in this
line o’ work. You mustn’t be alone without a man again, Mrs D.’ The tattooed skull on his arm grimaced up at me, and seemed
to nod in agreement as Jack hammered his fist on the table. For all his gentleness, there was strength and meanness in his
skinny arms.
‘No, Jack,’ I protested. ‘It won’t happen again. And Jack, this is Pansy. She’s working with us now. She’ll help me in the
house too. She’s fresh from Remy’s.’
‘How d’y do?’
‘How d’y do?’
They could have been brother and sister, I thought, as I watched them bob up and down nervously at each other. Both had brittle,
bony exteriors, but there were wounded birds inside those cages that needed more careful handling than either of them had
been used to.
The other wounded fellow, by which I mean Din, did not return that day, or the next, which troubled me somewhat. Could Diprose
have meant what he said about capturing him and sending him back? Had he been killed by some nigger-hater, or a gang of youths,
in a back-street in the Borough? Had he been ravished to death by Lady Knightley and her lustful ladies? Given that she would
be nearly eight months’ pregnant by now I doubted it, but the thought at least brought a sorry chuckle to my throat.
At least I had Pansy now, I thought, if Din never returned to sew and fold for me.
Pansy’s worth, however, was so immediately apparent in the house over her first week with us that I started to doubt she would
ever get close to the workshop. She found for me a pail of cheap enamel paint and set about banishing the staleness and soot
from the dingy kitchen. She wrapped brown paper around a hot coal, and applied it to the candle-wax; then she made up a mixture
of fuller’s earth and turpentine, and rubbed them over the remaining candle-grease stains, and where the oil-lamps had spilt.
She cleaned the oven and the flue, polished the steel with bathbrick and paraffin, and black-leaded the iron. And she waged
war on the bugs by scrubbing the floors with carbolic, and filling up all the holes in the mortar and cracks in the floor
with cement. (She got the cement from the road-diggers laying new sewers outside; I watched her with fear as she strutted
over to them, but the way those men obeyed her, no one would have thought she was so recently the victim of unsupervised lust.)
She bathed my wounds daily and rubbed my bruises, just as she saw to my smocks, aprons and floral dress. Lucinda watched her
in wonder and interrogated her all the while on what she was doing.
Pansy also treated us to home-cooked, love-cooked food. With friends in the highest parts of the market in New Cut, she was
soon dishing us up breakfasts of eggs, bacon, kidneys and mushrooms, and for supper we would have kedgeree, or grilled fish
with potatoes, or a nice piece of tongue. Even I had thought that poor folk didn’t know how to cook, that they were happy
to make do with stale bread and cold meat, even when warm soup was not hard to come by. And it was not without misgivings
that I ate her lovely food, for I wondered what the rest of her family at home had to eat, in what little time she had left
over from her chores here to cook it.
But even Pansy couldn’t reduce my load of washing to one wash-day a week, although she breathed new life into my stale linen.
She cut and sewed the bed sheets sides to middle, and made sure Peter had a fresh set every other day, and Lucinda and I every
week.
She arranged for a carpenter too, to come in and build a door to replace the flimsy curtain separating the house from the
workshop. He came straightways – Pansy had an impressive knack of getting people to do what she wanted – with his tools and
several large planks of wood, and was sawing and banging and fixing into the evening. I expected the Noble Savages and Holywell-street
would be informed of his arrival and activities, but I was only carrying out their instructions. I also ensured that the door
had a strong lock on it too, and only one key, which I kept round my waist between my skirts.
And Pansy blackleaded the grate and whitened the front steps, and as Jack arrived at work one morning he whistled in wonder
that the establishment had been made to look so respectable once more. ‘If only they knew, mum, if only they knew!’
‘Are you calling this place a whited sepulchre?’ I said, and he winked impudently at me.
‘No, Mrs D, wouldn’t dream of it.’
Din returned on Saturday morning, a week and four days after his disappearance. I should have been angry at him; an employer
would have stamped his foot, interrogated him, and demanded suitable recompense for his absence. But I wanted instead to throw
my arms around him, to make sure he was well and that he had not had some dreadful misfortune or accident, and to express
my relief that he had not been deported by Diprose. And so, of course, caught between shoulds and wants, I did nothing more
than offer him a polite welcome, present him with some Bible manuscripts for mending, and slip inside the house to fix my
hair more neatly under my cap.
‘Oos that fella, mum?’ Pansy asked me in low tones as she wiped the dust off the banisters. ‘That coloured fella?’
‘That’s Din, Pansy. Din Nelson. He helps me out with sewing and stuff.’
‘American?’
‘Yes. He was a slave. He was bought by the Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery, and they asked me
to give him a job.’
‘Only I know him.’
‘Do you? How?’
‘Not sure. ’Is face looks familiar, but I can’t fink where from. Never mind. It’ll come to me.’
I had to wonder how many men of colour she was familiar with; I knew so few I would not misplace their faces. But our distant
thoughts were interrupted by Peter, giggling in his armchair, and reciting to himself, ‘ There was an old man from Tobago,
Who lived on rice, gruel and sago . . . ’, before collapsing into such paroxysms of mirth he was unable to finish the limerick.
By mid-morning I felt as if my cool welcome and immediate removal from Din’s vicinity had not been terribly polite. I attempted
to rectify this by going over to the sewing-frame and asking, ‘I trust you achieved your business during your absence?’
‘Thank you, ma’am, I did. And I trust my absence didn’t overly inconvenience y’all at the bindery.’
‘Bindery?’ I said. ‘What an interesting expression.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s what we call it, back home.’
‘Bindery,’ I mused. ‘I like it. I have always found “workshop” to be rather functional. And “atelier” is too pretentious.
“Bindery.” How simple. Like a bakery, or a brewery. Yes, I shall call it that from now on. Thank you, Din.’
‘Pleasure, ma’am.’
I watched as his fingers threaded the sewing-frame, and wondered again what it would feel like to touch his skin. Mere intellectual
curiosity, I persuaded myself, like wondering what hay might be like to sleep on. It was something that I might idly muse
over, but never actually consider doing.
‘Mrs D, we’re short of boards. Shall I run to Dicker’s and get some?’ Jack called.
‘Of course,’ I said. I rummaged in the drawer for some coins for him.
‘Nah, he’ll give you credit now,’ Jack said.
‘Really? What good news.’
And I watched Jack take off his apron and leave, before realising that I actually needed an extra pair of hands to hold the
leather down while I pasted.