I watched her as she wrote, this woman, who allegedly worked hard to secure the freedom of the most exploited race on earth,
and yet delighted in making them her own slaves – sexual slaves – of sorts. What a perfect match she was with her contradictory
Sir Jocelyn.
And then we heard Nathaniel awaken upstairs, and start to holler.
‘Oh, Dora. Do go and look in on him, for I am quite weary.’
What did you do to Din?!
I wanted to scream at her. But, to save myself from any rash action, I willingly fled upstairs and picked up Nathaniel, and
placed him on my shoulder. I tried to angle him in the moonlight, to see what colour his skin really was, but we are all shades
of grey at night.
‘Are you my Din’s baby?’ I cooed at him. ‘Are you my little Din? Ooh, what a din you are making. Ooh, what a din Din made
here. Ooh, and do you want some din-dins? Din-din-din-da-din-dindin.’ And so it became a silly song, pounding though my heart
was, and he was soon quiet but alert, and looking round at the dark shapes thrown by the moonlight around the room. I placed
him back in his drawer. ‘Din-din-da-dindin.’
What with Jack, and me and Din, and Sylvia here too, I was indeed running a veritable atelier of transgression. I should have
written on Pansy’s advertisement that those who trod the straight path in life need not apply. Was the road to Damage’s really
such a crooked one? The streets outside looked straight and Roman, but Roman indeed was the dwelling to which it brought one.
The following morning I did not unlock the workshop at all. I knew I could not face Din now, were he to show, yet neither
could I face another day without him. Curses on him. Was I really no better than all the other Ladies of the Society, in my
desire for the man?
I wanted better things from today. I put the money for Lizzie, and some to buy leather, into my purse under my skirt, and
then thought again, and took the bookmark with me too. I went to the grocer and ordered four weekly deliveries of food to
Lizzie’s house, which cost the equivalent of a month of Jack’s wages. Then I went up to the river, and gave the other month
to Lizzie in cash, with the futile plea that she didn’t spend it all on gin. And finally, I headed off to Bermondsey once
more, to the tanners.
I did not go to Select Skins and Leather Dressings, but went instead to Felix Stephens. It was smaller than Select Skins,
with only a handful of customers, and I waited by a stack of hides to be served. Curious, I thought, how being a women renders
one both conspicuous and invisible at the same time. But soon, visibility won out, and a man came over to ask me my business
there.
‘I’ve come to settle the account of Mr Peter Damage,’ I said, and was led into the office at the back. The man showed me into
a chair, then went to the other side of the desk, from which he pulled out two large ledgers. He rifled through the first,
then the second. He did not hurry, but was efficient and calm, and I warmed to him. Eventually he turned both ledgers round
to me, and talked me through each item and the date of purchase, before ringing the totals owed in red ink, and adding them
up.
‘You can pay half plus five per cent, or a quarter plus seven per cent, now. Up to you. How’d you like it?’
‘I’d like to pay it all, please,’ I said, handing over the full amount. He seemed surprised at first, but happily counted
through the notes and coins, placed the cash in to a money-box, and wrote PAID IN FULL across both pages of the ledgers.
‘And now, I was hoping you could have a look at this for me.’ I pulled out the bookmark and gave it to him.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. That’s where I need your expert eye.’
He fingered it with courteous disdain. ‘It’s a botch job, that’s for sure,’ he said dourly. ‘Look at this flay mark. Done
by an amateur, I can tell you that much.’
‘I thought that was a vein.’
‘No. This line, here, is a vein, which shows me that it wasn’t bled immediately after slaughter. It must have been left for
quite some time – means the blood had time to putrefy in the veins.’
‘So possibly it had died naturally, and was chanced upon in the wild, by someone who thought its skin would be nice to use
for a book.’
‘Possibly. Whatever happened, it was left for some time. The skin should have been removed and cured within minutes, especially
in a hot climate.’
‘And how would they cure it?’
He started to relax a little, with the chance to show off his skill. ‘You’d hope the leather you’d buy over here would be
brined, or wet-salted. But brining is expensive and you need quantities of hide to wet-salt. So I think this has been dried.
The oldest way known to man, but it’s an uneven, unpredictable, uncontrollable process. This has probably been laid over stones,
as it’s dry in patches. Done by a cheapskate, that’s for sure. ’Straordinary, really, that you’ve got it at all – leather
like this usually stays in the poor countries, as no right-minded man here would buy it. Good tanning is a hard job, madam,
that’s the truth, if you think about it; it ain’t easy, drying a hide just enough to stop it rotting, without making the leather
all hard and inflexible. But this is plain shoddy; whoever did this should be brought to task. Brings the industry into disrepute,
if you think about it.’
‘I’m sorry to trouble you with it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I’ve brought it to you at all, really, only that I’d never seen
the like before. I’ve already pressed my procurer about it, but he told me precious little about where it came from. I thought
at first that it could be a type of pigskin.’
‘Yes, you are right there, tanned pigskin is notoriously poor. But it’s not pig.’ Here he seized his magnifier. ‘Look, them
follicles are not arranged in that distinctive triangular pattern, and they don’t go all the way through to the reverse, like
the holes left by pig bristles. No, it’s not pig.’
‘And the follicles are random, so I knew it wasn’t goatskin,’ I added. ‘And it’s not dense enough for cowskin either, or oily
enough for sealskin. Although that could be to do with the inferior tanning, which I had not considered before you mentioned
it.’
‘No, it’s not sealskin.’
‘Could it be lambskin?’
‘Possibly. But what a waste of a good lamb, to spoil it so in the tanning.’
‘Could it be doeskin?’
‘Unlikely. Look how irregular the grain is. It’s a puzzle, really it is. Leave it with me. I like puzzles.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t. But I thank you for your time. While I am here, may I trouble you for some morocco? I will pay now; I
don’t want to keep the account open.’
And so he helped me to some more leather, and I bought four fine hides, which he rolled and tied nicely for me, and I was
grateful for his help and attention, although I was even more grateful to be leaving behind the bloody streets of Bermondsey
and the stink of pure.
When I got back that afternoon I set about paring the leather and cutting the boards for several more books. I could no longer
afford to be nervous about the forwarding process. I had just started to hammer the spine of one particularly loathsome edition
of
Venus School Mistress
, when Sylvia glided in. I had not thought to lock the door.
‘Come, Dora. You work so hard. Another hot flannel is in order, I think.’
‘No, Sylvia, I do not feel like it today. Oh, don’t . . . !’ But it was too late. Sylvia had picked a book out of one of the
crates, and was opening it. ‘No, Sylvia! Please.’
‘Dora,’ she retorted, holding the book loosely in one hand, but looking straight at me. ‘Don’t “please” me. I know all about
Jossie’s books.’ And you know all about my Din, too, you bitch, I wanted to shout. She turned back to the book, opened it
properly, and said, ‘Oh! Oh my!’ before snapping it shut. She eased herself down onto Din’s chair by the sewing-frame, and
flapped the pages of the manuscript over her face like a fan. ‘I thought I knew. One has to excuse a lot when married to a
medic. Still, I suppose these are not a million library shelves away from his anatomical text books, are they?’
‘Sir Jocelyn has a fine collection of anatomies, indeed,’ I concurred. Could she really have slept with my Din? She seemed
so prim. I didn’t want to believe it. ‘I wish my Peter had had the chance to peruse them,’ I said, to shake my thoughts off
their coupling. ‘Peter bound some of the great anatomies, but the Galen, and the Bourgery, why, he had not seen the like.’
I could see Sir Jocelyn’s shelves in front of me as I spoke.
‘Jossie loves his books. He loves me too, Dora.’
‘Of course he does,’ I reassured her. She couldn’t have done it, could she? Something was awry, here.
She had started to hug herself, and stroke her shoulders as if imagining his caresses. ‘He always loved my shoulders so, my
back.’
I could see the title of Sir Jocelyn’s finest anatomical tract, Vesalius’s
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem
.
‘I miss his kisses, Dora. I miss being loved.’
Something was tapping at my brain. Vesalius. Anatomies. What was it? Or was it just Din?
‘How do you cope without it, Dora?’
Without what? Without Peter? Or without Din? What was she saying? Anatomies, weren’t we talking about?
Then suddenly the fog lifted. I riffled on the bench for the paper on which I had scribbled my musings about the anagram.
De humani corporis fabrica
. It was a perfect fit.
‘The things he used to say when he touched me. He could have been a poet.’
I felt as if some invisible hand were strangling me as I struggled to make sense of it. The casing could not have been a binding
for an anatomy text, could it?
De humani corporis fabrica.
‘
Le peau de ma femme
,’ Sylvia said softly, and my blood froze.
‘What?’
‘
Le peau de ma femme
,’ she repeated. I remembered the words in amongst some letters I had bound, in Glidewell’s hand. Glidewell to Knightley.
De humanis corporis fabrica
. Literally, on the fabric of the human body. Bodies. Mine, Din’s, Sylvia’s. I went back to the Latin, but I knew enough of
how the brains of these gentlemen worked now to sidestep logic and accuracy. I knew what the inscription was trying to say
about the binding. I turned to Sylvia, and said softly, ‘Tell me about the
peau de ma femme
.’ Don’t talk to me about Din, now. Something more horrific is afoot.
‘My shoulders, Dora. I was telling you. Jossie used to kiss them and tell me that no woman had finer skin. My skin was the
nonpareil of everything. He even corresponded with Valentine about the smoothness of my skin: this Dutch paper, he would write,
is smoother than the
peau de ma femme
. This perfume smells like the
peau de ma femme
. These flower petals are as soft as the
peau de ma femme
.’
‘To be so prized . . .’ I murmured. Comprehension was a painful thing. My suspicions about Din and Sylvia were only that –
suspicions. Here, I was facing something more indisputable about her husband, something I knew to be true.
De
humani corporis fabrica
.
‘Oh, how he would kiss them!’ She giggled. ‘Oh, Dora, he would say, oh, he would say, that he wanted to bind a volume of the
finest love poetry in the skin from my shoulders after my death, so he would never have to be parted from their smoothness.
Never be parted! He never wanted us to be parted, Dora. Dora!’
De humani corporis fabrica.
The defiance I had been feeling no longer supported me, and I finally crumbled.
‘Dora!’ I heard Sylvia scream. ‘Dora!’
The sobs heaved out of my chest, and I lurched and stumbled into Sylvia’s horrified, outstretched arms. She held me close,
but her thin arms offered little succour, and besides they might have wrapped around Din once upon a time. It was my mother’s
arms I wanted, and my sobs were tearless. I felt my supper rise in my throat, my body revolting at myself, and at the world
to which I was so inescapably chained.
De humani corporis fabrica.
I tore myself away from Sylvia, and, shaking with anger and grief, I grabbed the book she had put down and threw it at the
wall, as if it stood for all the ignoble books for which I had been responsible. I strode up and down, grasping my hair, and
wrenched my face from side to side as if searching for a way out.
‘Dora!’ I heard Sylvia scream again. I saw her as if through a veil; she reached out for me again, but I could not stand her
or myself any more. I wanted to bathe myself, to scrub myself with the toughest brush from head to foot, but the water would
not run again until tomorrow morning, and even then I knew I would never feel clean again, not until I had ripped every inch
of skin off my sinful flesh.
And then, in the far recesses of my troubled soul, I heard a distant knocking, and I was dragged up from the depths of my
misery into the present moment and to the awareness of a call from behind the outside door of the bindery. I stared like a
horrified animal at Sylvia, and watched as she made to open it, but I flew to it before her, and threw the door open.
I saw Din standing there, as in a far-away dream. He was excited. He started to talk at me. He spoke so quickly, I could not
hear him.
‘Dora. Mrs Damage,’ he said, uncertain how to address the lover from whom he had absented himself. Sylvia is here too, I could
have said, to taunt him. Who would you prefer?
I shook my head, as if to dislodge the water in my ears after a swim, like when I was a child back in Hastings, but it did
not help. Still I could not hear him clearly, only through glass, through worlds, or dream-states.
‘It’s happenin’, now. War is breakin’ in my country. I have to . . .’
And then his words screamed clearly into my ears as if the water had cleared, the glass had shattered, the dream had broken.
‘I have to . . .’ he repeated.
‘Go!’ I screamed back at him, as if completing his sentence for him. ‘Go away!’
His face faded from me, and then swam back into focus.