It was not as if I had any choice but to agree. Under Diprose’s gaze, I placed the leather in the strong-box, and locked it.
Then I followed him out into the street.
‘There’s three guineas in this for you,’ Diprose said quietly as he climbed into his carriage.
Three guineas? I was not sure whether he was playing with me. I raised an eyebrow at him. Three guineas? He spoke the words
in little more than a hissed whisper, but I felt the wind carry his words through every open window on the street. I was dumbfounded.
This was what men like Knightley paid for a volume like this; what could Diprose be charging him now?
Three guineas.
Yes, I’m Sir Jocelyn’s whore, didn’t you know?
Really? And I’m Patience Bishop.
And this is my pimp, Mr Charles Diprose.
Would you care for some goat’s milk, Mr Diprose? Fresh from the tit, and sweeter than a baby.
A curse on you, Charlie Diprose, and your loathsome money. And the rest of you, with your vile eyes and ears.
Virtus post nummos
, indeed. I am no longer proud of virtue, and I can no longer be shamed by vice; neither impress me. Is not such insistence
on virtue only another vice? May you be deafened and blinded by your own filth, if you are not already.
Later that week, I was cleaning the oil-lamps in the bindery in order to start the new commission, when the door opened: I
hadn’t locked it, as it was after hours. Sylvia glided in silently.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
She approached me with reserve. Although I was wearing Jack’s grubby apron, she did not look at me with anything like disdain
or reproach. She seemed, possibly, somewhat shy.
‘I have brought you a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘I wanted to apologise to you, actually, Dora. You must think me a frightful
pig. I have been here well over a month now, and all I have done is dwell in my own misfortune.’
‘You have been rather preoccupied, Sylvia,’ I said consolingly. ‘It does not matter.’
‘But I haven’t once asked after you, or your work. Your husband passed away, your apprentice gone, you must be struggling
so.’
‘I keep going,’ I said, ‘for Lucinda’s sake.’
‘Tell me about the slave; tell me about Dun.’
‘His name is Din.’
‘Silly me! I must have got confused with his colour! Oh, Dora, I do feel awful about it. We knew we were stretching decorum
when we asked you to take him on, but I had no idea of the proximity it would involve. Are you frightened at times? You seem
so brave.’
‘He is a nice man. He is quiet, and well behaved.’
‘Yes, but one never knows what they are thinking. You will be careful. You must make sure you never have to be alone with
him. I should not like to encounter him.’
‘Encounter him? You saw him, here, just the other day.’
‘I did? I have been very distracted, Dora. I forget these things.’
‘You have also met him before. Or do you not remember that either?’
‘Excuse me? When have I met him?’
‘He told me you went all the way to Limehouse to find him, at the address he gave to Lady Grenville’s maid.’
‘Not I! What a ridiculous notion!’ We looked at each other as if to await comprehension. And then suddenly, she said, ‘Ah!
I sent Buncie! With a chaperone, of course. I would not make such a perilous journey. Buncie did it. She’s a good girl like
that. Goodness, did he think Buncie was me?’
‘He did,’ I said, and bit my lip. Should I say I knew about the evenings at Berkeley-square?
‘Is he of solid build, or is he slight?’
Goodness, I thought, maybe they had a rota of slaves, and she was trying to ascertain his identity through his physique.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I will have words with the Society to get him moved from here.’
‘Really, Sylvia, he’s no trouble.’
‘Oh, Dora, you may think that you are safe, with your inelegant features, your drab clothes, but to such a one as he, it will
not matter if you are suffering from the pox and have lost your nose to the syphilis!’ She burst into tears, and covered her
eyes with her hands. ‘My dear, dear husband. What can he have been thinking of? As if I would betray him – and betray
nature
– like that. As if I would do that a . . . a . . . man of
colour
.’
‘Excuse me? I do not follow you, Sylvia.’
‘He said I had had an affair! That I must have had! With a – with a – with a man of – colour! That, goodness knows, I had
opportunity enough under the auspices of what he called my Dreadful Society. His son, his baby Nathaniel, is a – a –’ here
Lady Knightley’s voice was reaching a strained high pitch. ‘A half-caste!’
‘He is?’
‘He is! Or at least, Jossie says he is. He said he is . . . he is . . . an unusual hue. To which I protested that he merely
bears the sun-flushed cheeks of his father! His colleagues said it was jaundice. But no, Jocelyn was not happy with that.
He said the baby’s skull sutured closed much more quickly than a white skull should have done, and that this is a feature
of the Negroid race, which has a retarded forebrain, and is therefore less intelligent. And he said other things too, which
I can’t remember. Only he couldn’t prove them, and he was driven sick with lack of proof, and locked himself up in his study
to find the answer amongst his books and notes, until he threw me out!’ Her chest heaved, and she burst into sobs. ‘I protested
my innocence. I have only been faithful and true to my darling husband. My soul, I said to him, is lily-white,’ here her voice
rose to a shout, ‘and so is the child’s!’
‘Calm yourself, Sylvia. Don’t take on so, dear. It is not the first of Sir Jocelyn’s monstrous theories I have heard. You
have more sense than that; you know your own heart, your own actions.’ I tried to remember if I had ever noticed anything
unusual about Nathaniel’s colouring. He was a lovely colour, I thought, like a freshly baked pie-crust. Nothing out of the
ordinary.
A suspicion tried to cross my mind, but I dismissed it before it had taken so much as a step. Din would have told me, wouldn’t
he? The thought attempted to re-enter my head despite my dismissal, but I wilfully restrained it at the edges of my reason.
She dropped her hands to the bench and started fiddling with the tools, as if they might distract her.
‘Are these how you make the patterns?’ she said, sniffing loudly.
I nodded, vigilant and wary. She weighed one in her hand, and traced her fingertips over the brass acorn at the tip. Then
she picked up a rose, then a teardrop, the one I used for angels’ wings. Finally, her hands moved over to a large, heavy tool.
‘I thought you’d returned the Society’s coat of arms.’
I waited for her to peruse it further, and when realisation set in, she cried, ‘Oh!’ then sighed heavily.
‘What do you know about that crest?’ I asked her.
In a whisper, she said, ‘
Les Sauvages Nobles
.’
‘Who are they, Sylvia?’ I enquired. The woman, might, at least, be of some use to me, no matter what she had done with my
Din.
‘It’s a club. A private club. It started with the inner circle of the Scientific Society; now it includes some of their immediate,
their most like-minded, colleagues. They meet for dinner every Monday evening, in chambers, or at St James’s, or at White’s,
or sometimes at Berkeley-square.’
‘Lord Glidewell is one of them, isn’t he?’
‘Indeed. You know him? His family has several plantations in the West Indies, three stars to their name in the East India
stockholders list, and a mansion in Hampshire.’
‘What do they discuss?’
‘Oh, this and that. Mostly tedium. The higher speciali-sations of their scientific and creative endeavours. Theories that
may or may not gain acceptance in wider circles. I must confess that I was never entrusted with further confidences about
their activities, but neither did I express an interest.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Well, they didn’t play parlour croquet, if that’s what you are asking,’ she snapped.
And I didn’t ask you to come to live with me, I was about to scream, you and your nigger child! But instead, I waited for
her to continue.
‘I fear they found me somewhat disapproving,’ she said, more subdued now, ‘along with all the other wives. Why, even the poor
servants disapprove of their Monday evenings. There has been many a valet working for Valentine – that is, Lord Glidewell
– who has handed in his notice on Tuesday morning and left without reference by the afternoon. He can never keep them.’
‘What else do you know about them?’
‘My dear, very little. They mean next to nothing to me. You should hear the way they ridicule the Anti-Slavery lobby, indeed,
the Anti-Anything lobby. I overheard them one evening, and my ears still burn at the memory. They were discussing the forthcoming
marriage of Aubrey’s daughter, Herberta, to a Romanian prince, or a Bavarian count, I forget which, and they were debating
amongst themselves about how far East was too far to accept in a son-in-law. Then they moved on to our more Western brethren,
when I distinctly heard Jossie say, “My wife, lamentably, is a negrophile; give her a nigger over a Yankee any day,” to which
Ruthven replied, “Rather an African Negro than an Irish Catholic.” And they laughed, Dora, all of them.’
I started to rub at the lamps again, with vigour, my cheeks burning.
‘Unfathomable, isn’t it?’ Sylvia said glumly, presuming to read my thoughts about her husband. Indeed it was, if I thought
about it. Here was a man whose fascination with Africa and India was both personal and professional, whose scientific endeavours
drove him to calibrate, study and truly endeavour to understand the African and other racial groups, and yet who read
The Lustful Turk
, took Turkish baths, and was more savage than noble in his racial and sexual attitudes. ‘But Jossie is by no means the worst
of them,’ she continued. ‘The Noble Savages is, I have always felt, a club based on a shared understanding of – how best to
put it? –
cruelty
. It is hard for me to say this, but I believe my husband and his contemporaries have a fundamentally evil streak that needs
to be manifested in some way. I must confess to you, Dora, that I have over time grown to be grateful for his Monday nights
of hellfire and savagery, for his vicious excesses, for he returns to me on Tuesday morning with a merriness and a levity
that is sweeter than sugar.’
When I finally slept that night, the nightmares that visited me could have come straight out of the pages of the books I had
bound. First, I was roaming along a row of female body parts suspended in spirits of wine in glass jars, trying to find my
own heart. When I found it, I discovered a bite had been taken out of it, and next to it, on either side, were the two castrated
organs of the Dey in
The Lustful Turk
. I seized my bitten heart, and ran with it along a corridor into a green room, where Lord Glidewell, clad only in tight black
leather breeches, was standing on his desk, underneath a noose. Only it was not Lord Glidewell, but Sir Jocelyn. He asked
me with great civility whether I would care to play his favourite game of cut-the-cord, and instructed me to put my heart
into his mouth. I did as I was told, but with difficulty, for his mouth was small and my heart over-large, but the effect
on limiting his breathing was excellent. Then he handed me a knife; I was to sever the rope just before the moment of ejaculation.
I awoke in horror as he was twitching and thrashing above me, his teeth clenching around my heart, and I stared into the darkness
of the box-room, stifling my panicked breathing so as not to wake the others in the house, not knowing if I had killed him
or spared him.
The following morning I took myself into the gold-tooling booth in order to prepare the ‘case’ for Diprose’s peculiar commission.
His instruction that I should not work on it in the presence of others suited me, for it took me away from Din for the day
in both body and mind. The mechanics of attaching the cords to the boards would be complicated: I would have to construct
the boards out of one thick and one thin piece of strawboard, instead of one single piece of millboard. Strawboard was softer
and less durable, but this approach would enable me to sandwich the cords in between for a secure finish. It was a blessed
relief to be preoccupied with something other than my feelings for the man.
It was not hard to prepare, but I found the leather strangely unwieldy. It was stiff to work with, and did not take stretching
or glue well. Either it had been very badly tanned – which would have been surprising, given the previous quality of Diprose’s
materials – or it was indeed the skin of an exotic animal. I traced my fingers over it. It had a strange beauty, and the light
played beguilingly on its uneven surface. Several pastings were required.
I did not work on Sunday during daylight hours, but once the household was asleep I started the finishing process. It was
very simple – just the Noble Savages’ arms and Knightley’s Latin pseudonym – but the leather did not respond well to heat
and glair, and I had to work long into the night to get a decent finish. I was tired, and worried that I was about to get
a cold, or the dreaded influenza. There was also an ache in the pit of my stomach. It did not feel like something I had eaten,
or not eaten, akin to hunger though it was.
The church bells rang three times, and I was finished. I wrapped the casing in a piece of red velvet, and placed it back in
the strong-box. I cleared up the remnants of leather. There was one particularly wide strip that appealed to me, and I placed
it in the drawer of my desk, thinking that I would use it to make a novelty bookmark for Lucinda out of it. The rest of the
leather went into the calico bag of scraps. I swept the floor, blew out the candles, and locked up.
And then I recognised the feelings for what they were. I had felt like this before, on Christmas Day. I was lonely: I craved
company, gentleness and honesty. I craved Din.
As I was going by Charing Cross,
I saw a black man upon a black horse;
They told me it was King Charles the First –
Oh dear, my heart was ready to burst!
T
he next day had scarcely begun in the bindery for Din and me, when we were disturbed by a scuffle in the parlour. I opened
the thick wooden door to find Pansy and Sylvia having a loud argument, with Lucinda standing anxiously between them, clutching
Mossie.
‘I en’t ’er slave, I en’t. I’m working for you, aren’t I, mum, an’ not ’er. I do what I can to make ’er day a bit nicer, an’
I’ve ’eaved ’er into ’er stays and tugged and primped and preened ’er for hours, but I en’t gonna do everyfin’ like a friggin’
lady’s maid. I’m sorry, mum. Your notice said sew an’ fold an’ nurse an invalid an’ a child. Not a toff an’ a baby as well.
I’m sorry mum, I am. I’ll try and do better, I will. D’you want me to leave nah? I’m sorry. I won’t mind lookin’ after the
baby, I won’t.’
I looked at Sylvia. Her face was clean, her hair was immaculate and high under the bonnet she had been wearing when she arrived,
and her extraordinarily firm figure revealed that she was wearing a corset again. As she put on her white kid gloves, she
flashed her eyes up to me from below the feathered brim. Oh yes indeed, the lady was ready to be looked at again; she was
back to something resembling her old self.
‘We were a mere five minutes upstairs, altering my toilette. The girl is full of untruths.’ Then she said, more softly, ‘I’m
going back to Jocelyn. I simply asked her to look after Nathaniel for the morning. I will return, of course, in time for his
next feed. If he gets hungry, she can give him a paste. That’s all I asked. Don’t look at me so, Dora.’
‘You’re going back to Jocelyn? Will he take you back?’
‘Your insolence is uncalled for. He needs to see me. He will be missing me, regretting his actions, and desperate for news
of me and his son. I will tell him that the jaundice has passed, and that his son has skin no darker than his own.’
‘So take Nathaniel with you, to prove it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It would be a hindrance. I must be able to speak lucidly. And to show him unencumbered how my figure
has returned. Besides, it will increase his curiosity, to make him wait.’
I paused, before assuring her that we would indeed look after Nathaniel today. ‘It will just be for this morning,’ I soothed
Pansy. ‘I will be able to help you this afternoon, once I have taken care of some business. Mr Diprose is due this morning,
you see.’ Pansy curtsied. Then I went over to the tea-caddy, and took out half a crown. ‘Here you are,’ I said as I gave it
Sylvia. ‘I think you’ll need to take a cab, looking as beautiful as that.’ I kissed her, and whispered ‘good luck’ into her
ear.
She looked at the coin, and said a quiet ‘thank you’. She planted a kiss on Nathaniel’s brow, and stroked his forelock with
her gloved finger, then left the house.
‘Nobody’s asking you to leave, Pansy,’ I said. ‘And don’t you dare go considering it. I need you, and I will ensure your happiness
so as you stay with me. Why don’t you take Lucinda and Nathaniel out to buy some sherbet?’ I gave her some pennies. ‘There
might be some spring greens in the market, even. Take some air for yourself.’
As I waved them out of the door, I could see an old hansom turning into the street. I shut the door, smoothed my hair and
adjusted my cap, then hastened through the door into the bindery and locked it behind me.
Diprose seemed unusually pert and dapper this morning, albeit in his habitual ungainly way.
‘Tell the nigger to go,’ was the first thing he said to me,
sotto voce
.
‘Good day to you too, Mr Diprose,’ I retorted as I went over to Din to tell him he could leave for the morning.
We watched as he hung up his apron and left. I locked the door behind him, and made a show of checking that the door into
the house was locked. Then I pulled the strong-box out from under the tooling-bench, unlocked it, unwrapped the casing from
the red velvet, and laid it on the bench.
It certainly did not rank as the best binding I had ever produced. The design was too simple, and the leather was not special
enough to warrant such lack of ornament. Still, Diprose proceeded with a ceremonious air. He removed the manuscript from its
muslin bag; he kept it closed throughout, so I could only see the spine and end-papers, which were marbled vellum.
Together we fixed the book onto its binding. It was intricate work, and our hands worked closely, holding tension here and
tying cords there, but it only served to remind me of the lack of intimacy I had with this man who brought me so much wealth,
and so little true happiness, and of the power in the air in this exact same spot when Din held some leather for me here so
recently. But the book, when finished, did look remarkably good, and in certain lights, the leather was beautiful, welcoming,
and touchable.
Then Diprose reached into his pocket, and pulled out a long, thin strip of metal, like a ruler, which had a small square cut
out of the centre.
‘Now, finally, I need you to tool an inscription for me. It must be here.’ He turned to the back of the book, and pointed
to the thin strip of folded leather at the bottom of the inside cover, below the end-paper. ‘Let me see . . .’ He perused
my lettering tools. ‘Your smallest font, lower case . . .’ He pulled one out of the rack, and experimented with pushing the
tool through the square in the metal. ‘These will do. A perfect fit. I will need you to tool an inscription, but you must
not know what it says.’
‘How am I to do that, then?’
‘You will draw a grid on the leather according to my instructions, then I will tell you which letter you must tool through
this hole in each square; the metal will cover up the words, so you shall only see the letter you are working on.’
‘But I shall be able to work out what it says according to the order of the letters.’
‘I shall instruct you to tool the letters in a random order.’
‘Mr Diprose, forgive me, but it will be impossible to align the letters perfectly like that. Letters are never spaced according
to a square grid; I always position them by eye.’
‘Mrs Damage,
impossible n’est pas français
,’ Diprose cajoled. ‘My other bookbinders accept this occasional practice. Do not cause trouble for me, now. Of course I accept
some inevitable loss of aesthetic. Come, come, girl. It is the only way.’
So, despite myself, I marked out a grid of twenty-six identical squares, to fit the selected tool size, and Diprose held the
metal over the grid, revealing only one square at a time – first in the middle, then close to the beginning, then right at
the end, and so on, in random order – instructing me on the letters to use in each square. Having tooled blind, we then had
to do the same with the gold.
It was a droll undertaking; its laboriousness amused me. I wanted to tell Diprose that I really did not care what his tawdry
little inscription said. But the more we continued, the more intrigued I became. Ironic, I thought, that the procedure only
drew attention to what it sought to diminish.
I left out each tool after using it, rather than returning it to the rack, in order to clean them later. I made a mental note
of how many times I had used each of them, and those that I had only used once. I would work it out, I reckoned, after he
had gone. I would not be hoodwinked.
At length we were finished. My back was aching from the effort involved, and so was Mr Diprose’s. I stretched and bent forwards
to ease out my back; Mr Diprose grimaced, held on to his waist, and attempted to do the same. He was trying to adjust something
at the back of his trousers. I did not look.
‘It’s just this damn brace I have to wear,’ he explained. ‘It rubs sometimes.’
‘A brace?’
‘I would be
un invalide
without it. I have soft bones, bones that bend. I was fitted with it when I first worked in Paris, in my twenties. I met Sir
Jocelyn there. It’s a fine contraption – steel and leather – but it does cause dreadful pain. I do not complain.
Vincit qui se vincit
.’ He stretched his chest out, and released his hands. ‘There, that is much better.’ Breathing deeply, he returned to the
book. ‘I am delighted, despite myself. You have excelled yourself, and I am proud of you. It is a particularly splendid day,
today.’ He placed the book with similar ceremony into the muslin bag, then dug into his pockets, and presented me with three
shining sovereigns and a crown. ‘
Gardez la monnaie
. And now, the remnants, please.’
I was reeling from the coins, shining like three suns and a moon in the palm of my hand, and the instruction to keep the change.
‘Mrs Damage? The remnants?’
I placed the coins quickly on the bench, before tipping out the contents of the scrapbag. Mr Diprose and I picked out the
remains of his leather from the scraps. I had no spare bag to put them in, but Diprose seemed happy to stuff them into the
pockets of his trousers, his frock coat, and his waistcoat.
‘You may wonder why I want these back,’ he said defensively. ‘What I gave you was my only stock of that particular hide; I
may wish to re-source it at some point, depending on how well received the binding is. And now, I will bid you farewell, Mrs
Damage.
Au revoir
.’ He lifted his hat, and was about to go, when he seemed to remember something. He leaned stiffly towards me, a stiffness
I now knew was due to his back brace, and I moved my ear towards his mouth.
‘This has been one of our more sensitive operations. Tell but a single soul of what you have been doing, and Sir Jocelyn shall
not hesitate to undertake another such –
sensitive
– operation, for your epileptic daughter.’
And then he was gone.
I paced into the house, wishing I had not sent Pansy out with Lucinda so I could keep her at closer quarters. I tried to distract
myself by returning to the bindery and writing down the letters of the tools I had used before clearing them away. I was angry,
I suppose, that he had excluded me from the text, while exploiting my labour to achieve it. So, I noted that
a
,
i
and
r
were used three times,
c
and
o
were used twice, and the single letters were
b
,
d
,
e
,
f
,
h
,
m
,
n
,
p
,
s
and
u
. I also jotted down a reminder that the grid I had marked out was of twenty-six squares: two letters, followed by a one-letter
space, then six letters, a space, eight letters, a space, and seven letters. If I had been really bothered, I could have troubled
myself over the anagram right then, but it was a sport I would save for another day.
At length, Pansy came through the front door with Lucinda and Nathaniel.
‘Mama, Mama,’ Lucinda cried as she bounded towards me. ‘We saw a puppet show! We saw a puppet show!’
‘Well, not quite, Lou, love,’ Pansy said. ‘We saw them arrive, didn’t we? We was comin’ back to ask if we could go back for
the show, which’ll start any moment, but we need some more pennies for them, an’ we was wondrin’ if that was not too much
to ask, mum.’
I looked at my precious daughter and wondered if I dared let her out of my sight again. I knew not of how idle that threat
really was. But her eager face could not be disappointed. ‘Of course not, Pansy,’ I said, as I turned to the tea-caddy. I
took out another half-crown, and pressed it into Pansy’s hand. ‘Take them to the baked-potato man too; we haven’t done that
for a while. And pick up something nice and easy for tea – some sheeps’ trotters, or some oysters or stewed eels.’ I looked
at her hard, and said, ‘Are you sure you can manage this, Pansy? I’m happy to stop and help you this afternoon, with Nathaniel.’
‘No mum. We’re fine. I just came over funny when she started all them orders at me. Thanks, though. It’ll be best to take
’em out anyways, give ’em a nice time.’
I embraced Lucinda again. ‘Have a lovely time, darling. Make sure you listen hard to the story, so as you can tell it me later.’
Then I turned to Pansy once more, and said in a low voice, ‘Keep a close eye on her, won’t you?’
I waved them off up Ivy-street. The clock struck twelve, and Din was striding towards them, and me, grinning and waving. He
stopped to exchange a word with Pansy, and pulled a flower from behind his back which he presented to Lucinda. Then he tickled
Nathaniel in the tummy, waved good-bye to them and started up again with his jaunty saunter towards the workshop. I pulled
inside before he reached the house; I did not want to talk to him. I heard him go into the workshop through the outside door.
The house was silent, but I was troubled. I was tired, oh, so tired: the exertions of the past year were catching up with
me, along with the strain of Peter’s death, and now this constant warring of heart and head. I sat in the Windsor chair, and
closed my eyes. I hated Din for an instant. I could hear him in the distance, rigging up the sewing-frame, but once he started
to sew all was quiet once more. I could sleep here, now.
Instead, I unlocked the door into the workshop and drifted in noiselessly, towards the chair next to Din’s, where we used
to sit and sew side by side on his earliest days with us.
‘I’m sorry Mr Diprose is always so rude to you, Din,’ I said.
He shrugged, and turned the sewing-frame that was in front of my chair towards him, so he would not have to reach too far
across me, and started to dismantle the set-up.
‘He applies unnatural scrutiny to me. It was why I followed you to Whitechapel. He pressured me to find out more about you,
and to find some way of binding you to me.’
‘You had no need, ma’am,’ he replied, before adding softly, ‘for I am bound to you already.’
‘I do not mean by dint of the Ladies’ Society.’
‘Neither do I.’
We fell into each other’s silence, only Din tried to clamber out again by passing me an old manuscript that was on the sewing-frame.
I took it, and placed it on the table next to me. Then I started to wind the cord onto the sewing-frame. I did not know why
I was doing his job, only that I was not tired any more, and I needed something to distract me. His hand went up to meet mine,
but still I wound the cord, so he wrapped his entire hand over mine, and kept winding with it for a few turns. Eventually
I could bear it no more, and pulled my hand back, and all the way up the length of his arm, and spun round to face him. We
kissed – he pulled me towards him with his empty hand, while the hand still holding the thread went to the back of my neck
– and I smelt him up close at last.