The Crimson Petal and the White (107 page)

He tears open a letter with an unfamiliar name and address on the back: Mrs F. De Lusignan, 2, Fir-street, Sydenham.

Dear Mr Rackham,
the good lady hails him,

My hair went grey through trouble and sickness, but one bottle of your Raven
Oil brought it back to a splendid black, as nice as it was in my young days. All my
friends remark upon it. You may make what use you like of this letter.

William blinks stupidly, poised on the brink of laughter and convulsive weeping. This is the sort of devout testimonial he and Sugar have invented out of thin air for Rackham advertisements, and here it is: 100 per cent genuine. Mrs F. De Lusignan, admiring her dyed hair in a looking-glass in Sydenham, God bless her! She deserves a whole box of Raven Oil – or perhaps that’s what she’s tickling him for.

The remainder of the mail is strictly business, yet he forces himself to chew through it, each finished letter wearying him a little more like a spoonful of ash swallowed with the greatest difficulty. But then, in the middle of replying to Miss Baynton in the Toilet Department of Harrod’s, he suddenly realises, in a blinding flash of revelation, where Sugar must have gone, and where, even now, his daughter tremblingly awaits her fate.

By the time William finally reaches Mrs Leek’s house in Church Lane, St Giles, the sun is low in the sky, casting an incongruous golden glow on the ancient, ramshackle buildings. The convoluted exoskeletons of iron piping shine like monstrous necklaces, the poultices of stucco are butter-yellow on the walls, the clothes-lines flap their ragged burden like courtly pennants. Even the cracked attic windows tilting skew-whiff under the roofs blaze with reflected light – a light that’s doomed to fade in a matter of minutes.

However, William is not inclined to admire the view. His immediate concern is whether the address from which a coachman, once upon a time, was instructed to pick up an old man in a wheelchair for the onward journey to Rackham’s lavender farm in Mitcham, is the self-same address at whose door he stands now, rapping the blistered wood with his fist. He only has Sugar’s word, after all, that the old man really lived here, and this is not the sort of street where a well-dressed man can safely ask for directions.

After an eternity, the door swings open, and there, squinting through clouded pince-nez in the gloom, sits Colonel Leek.

‘Forgotten something?’ he wheezes, taking William to be a recently departed customer. Then: ‘Oh, it’s
you
.’

‘May I come in?’ says William, concerned that even now, Sugar may be shepherding Sophie through the filthy interior of this house towards a back exit.

‘Oh, by all means, by all
means
,’ declares the old man, with exaggerated
politesse
. ‘We’d be honoured. A man as exalted as you, sir. Mr Forty Acres! Glorious, glorious …’ And he spins on his axles, then wheels himself along a rancid runway of carpet that sighs with damp. ‘1813: prospects for farmers never better! 1814, 1815, 1816: frosts the like of which was never seen before, ruined crops from shore to shore, bankruptcy aplenty! Adam Tipton, of South Carolina, known in 1863 as the Cotton King! In 1864, after the coming of the weevil, found with a bullet in his brain!’

‘I’ve come to see Sugar,’ blurts William, following on behind. Maybe if he states his wish forthrightly, like a no-nonsense requisition, he’ll jolt the old blackguard into divulging more than he should.

‘She never came back for me, the trollop,’ scoffs Colonel Leek. ‘A woman’s promise is like a Pathan’s ceasefire. I never got my snuff, never got a second look at your
glorious
lavender farm, sir.’

‘I thought you disliked the experience,’ remarks William, momentarily peering up the ill-lit stairwell before stepping across the threshold of the parlour. ‘I seem to recall you complaining you were as good as …
abducted
.’

‘Och, it made a nice change,’ bleats the old man, showing neither discomposure nor inclination to nibble at the bait. He has come to rest in a snug corner of the room, adding his shabby bulk to the general clutter of outmoded china and military junk. ‘My very first lavender farm! Powerful educa-
a-ay
tional.’ He bares dark ruminant teeth in an ingratiating leer.

A woman has descended the creaking stairs and now pokes her face into the room. She’s a pretty little thing, no spring chicken but well-preserved, with a good-humoured kindly face and a shapely body, clad in the fashionable colours of two Seasons ago.

‘Was you lookin’ for me, sir?’ she enquires of the stranger, somewhat surprised at the phenomenon of trade coming to her rather than she soliciting it.

‘I’m looking for Sugar,’ says William. ‘A regular visitor to this house, I believe.’

The woman shrugs sadly. ‘That was a long time ago, sir. Sugar’s found a rich man to take care of ’er.’

William Rackham stands straight and balls his fists. ‘She has stolen my daughter.’

Caroline ponders a moment, wondering if this man means what he says, or if ‘stolen my daughter’ is one of those fancy turns of phrase that educated people use to signify some loftier notion.

‘Your daughter, sir?’

‘My daughter has been abducted. Taken by your friend Sugar.’

‘Did you know,’ interjects Colonel Leek with lugubrious enthusiasm, ‘that of every ten persons drowned in England and Wales, six will be children aged ten years or less?’

Caroline watches the well-dressed stranger’s eyes widen in offence, and just as she’s thinking how much he reminds her of someone she once knew, she twigs that this fellow is the perfumer Rackham, the brother of her gentle parson. The memory of that sweet man fetches her a sly blow in the pit of her stomach, for she’s had no warning, and memories can be cruel when they give you no warning. She flinches, claps one hand protectively to her breast, and cannot meet the accusing glower of the man who stands before her.

‘I’ll not be taken for a fool!’ yells Rackham. ‘You know more than you admit to, I can tell!’

‘Please, sir …’ she says, turning her head away.

As surely as if a lid had been lifted from a vat, William detects the heady stench of a secret that can no longer be kept hidden. At last he’s on the right track! At last this affair is moving towards the explosive dénouement he has been craving – the revelation, the release of tension, that will shake the universe in one fierce convulsion, and then allow everything to fall back into its rightful place, restored to normality! With a grunt of determination, he pushes past the woman, strides out of the parlour, and begins to stamp up the stairs.

‘Yaaarrr! Sevenpence!’ shouts Colonel Leek, clawing the air after him.

‘Watch yer step, sir!’ shouts Caroline. ‘Some o’ them stairs—’

But already it’s too late.

Night has fallen over St Giles, over London, over England, over a fair fraction of the world. Lamp-lighters are roaming the streets, solemnly igniting, like an army of Catholic worshippers, innumerable votive candles fifteen feet in height. It’s a magical sight, for anyone looking down on it from above, which, sadly, no one is.

Yes, night has fallen, and only those creatures who are of no consequence are still working. Chop-houses are coming to life, serving ox cheeks and potatoes to slop-shop drudges. Taverns, ale-houses and gin palaces are humming with custom. The respectable shop-keepers are shutting up their premises, locking the stanchions and bolting the latches; they snuff out the lights, condemning their unsold merchandise to the penance of another dismal night of self-contemplation. In the lower reaches of society, poorer, shabbier creatures labour on in their homes, gluing matchboxes, sewing trousers, making tin toys by candlelight, pushing neighbours’ washing through the mangle, squatting over basins with their skirts rucked up to their shoulders. Let them toil, let them grub, let them disappear into obscurity, you haven’t time to see any more.

Refined society basks in a warm atmosphere of gas and paraffin, and its servants are stoking fires for the comfort of those souls who’ll now while away the remaining hours till bedtime with embroidery, dining, scrapbook-pasting, letter-writing, novel-reading, parlour games, prayers. Formal calls of an intimate nature have ended with the toll of a bell, and the conversations thus interrupted, however interesting they may have grown, cannot be resumed until the appointed time tomorrow. Well-behaved infants are being led by nurses into the presence of their mothers, to be petted for an hour or two before being whisked upstairs again to waiting beds. Unmarried gentlemen like Bodley and Ashwell, not in the least disadvantaged by not having wives, are spreading napkins over their knees in the Café Royal, or reclining into armchairs at their clubs with a sherry. In the grandest houses, cooks, kitchenmaids and footmen are limbering up for the complicated challenge of delivering piping hot food through long draughty corridors to dining-rooms at exactly the correct junctures. In humbler households, small families accept what is set down before them, and thank God for it.

In Church Lane, St Giles, where no Gods are being thanked, and no children are being bathed, and gas-lamps are few and far between, William Rackham is being led along in near-blackness, stumbling and limping on wet, mucky cobble-stones. He has his arm slung around the shoulder of a woman, and with every step, he groans in pain and mortification. One trouser-leg is torn and sopping-wet with blood.

‘I’m all right!’ he cries, rearing away from the woman, only to seize hold of her again when his injured leg fails to support him.

‘Just a little further, sir,’ pants Caroline. ‘We’re almost there.’

‘Hail me a cab,’ says William, blundering forward in a haze of his own spent breath. ‘All I need is a cab.’

‘Cabs don’t come ’ere, sir,’ says Caroline. ‘Just a little further.’

A sudden gust of wind is seeded with sleet, stinging William’s cheeks. His ears are throbbing, swollen, as though he’s been boxed across them by an angry parent.

‘Let me go!’ he groans, but it’s he who’s hanging on.

‘You need a doctor, sir,’ Caroline points out, taking his peevishness in her stride. ‘You’ll go to a doctor, won’t you?’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he groans, incredulous at how one rotten stair could have reduced him to this state.

The lights of New Oxford Street shine up ahead. Muffled voices swirl through the wind, weary babble from the Horseshoe Brewery’s workers being discharged into the night. Their scarecrow silhouettes loom through the drizzle as they cross the boundary from Bloomsbury to where they belong.

‘Oi, parson!’ someone shouts, and there’s raucous laughter.

Caroline escorts William Rackham to the edge of the great thoroughfare, under a street-lamp, then tugs him back so that he doesn’t stumble into the gutter.

‘I’ll stay with you, sir,’ she says matter-of-factly, ‘till a cab comes. Else you’ll get yerself killed.’

In the brighter light, William takes stock of his leg – ragged and revoltingly clammy with blood – and then of the woman beside him. Her face is impassive, a mask; she has every reason to despise him; yet here she is, showing him charity.

‘Here – take this,’ he says, clumsily pulling a handful of coins from his pocket – shillings, sovereigns, small change – and pressing them upon her. Wordlessly she accepts, and secretes the money in a slit in her skirts, but still she stays by his side.

Shamed, he tries to stand on both feet, and a shock of pain shoots up through one leg, as if a vengeful phantom lurking underground has fired a bullet straight through his heel towards his heart. He reels, and feels the woman’s arm hard around his waist.

Tears spring to his eyes; the lights of New Oxford Street blur to an ectoplasmic shiver. His body shivers too, in fear of its own injuries: what sort of shape will he be in when this is all over? Is he destined to be a cripple, a figure of fun who lurches lamely from armchair to armchair, who writes like a child, and stutters like an imbecile? What has become of the man he once was? A wraith-like shadow passes by on the opposite side of the street, purposefully fleet, pallbearer-black.

He shuts his eyes tight, but the apparitions continue to come: a tall thin woman wrapped in green silk, hurrying through the rain without a bonnet or umbrella. For an instant, as she passes under a street-lamp, her luxuriant surplus of hair glows orange like a flame, and he fancies her smell is flicked towards him on the breeze, like no other odour on earth. Even as she passes, she trails her fingers behind her, wiggling them as if inviting him to take hold.
Trust me
, she appears to be telling him, and Lord, how he longs to trust her again, to press his feverish face between her breasts. But no: it’s Sophie she’s beckoning to – his daughter, unrecognisably filthy, dressed in rags, a barefoot guttersnipe from a cautionary slide-show. Steady, steady: it’s only a fantasy, a trick of the imagination: he’ll have her back yet, safe in the bosom of the family.

Next to pass is a grisly female phantasm, a naked corpse of white flesh much disfigured with crimson gashes and lavender bruises. Her chest gapes open, revealing a palpitating heart between her full breasts, and she dances gracefully on the smutty cobble-stones. Though his eyes are still shut, William turns his face away and buries it in the soft shoulder beside his cheek.

‘Don’t go to sleep on me, sir,’ Caroline warns him amiably, adjusting her stance, squeezing him hard until he rouses. He looks into her face again; it’s not quite so impassive now; he detects a weary half-smile. Her shawl has slipped, and the sweat of exertion twinkles in the hollows of her collarbones; her flesh, though firm, reveals some wrinkles at the neck. Peeping up from the swell of her left breast is a vivid scar, an old burn or scald, shaped like an arrowhead. There’s a story behind that scar, no doubt, if she had a mind to tell it.

Ach, how warm she is, and how firmly her hand is pressed in the small of his back! How thick and glossy her hair is, for a woman no longer young! Now that they’ve been at rest here for a while, he’s aware of her body breathing against his own – how divinely she breathes! Helplessly, he adjusts the rhythm of his own inhalations to coincide with hers. They stand together under the street-lamp, veiled inside a gently swirling column of light, their short shadows joined indistinguishably, a strange black chimera cast upon the cobbles, female on the left side, male on the right.