The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (13 page)

The man on Harristown Bridge was less horrible than this
, I thought. There had been sharpness and quickness to that danger, not this sanctioned, havering, prolonged unwholesomeness.

A long shudder ran through my body. The pink hand was gone but I still wanted to shake the haze of Mr Rainfleury off my hair and skin. On a warning glance from Darcy, I stayed motionless, rejoicing in the clean fresh air around my hair where his hand had been and was no longer, while the man recovered himself down there on the floor. Some moments passed before he was capable of rising to his feet.

‘A curl sometimes does that to a man,’ he murmured. ‘You can taste, touch, smell and even hear a curl. It is the essence of Romance. Such a curl is, after all, what makes a woman different from a man. The softness of your hair has surpassed my most roseate expectations, Miss Manticory, being that red hairs are the stoutest individuals. There is nothing so pleasant for a man to run a finger down as a red curl – it always gives a teasing bit of resistance, so delightful to overcome.’

He smiled at Oona. ‘Your blondes have the finest kind of hairs, each with a fairy diameter compared to those on redheads like Manticory here. And those fairy hairs grow in the densest number, do they not, my dear?’

She nodded silently.

‘But red hair! Red hair is the rarest kind. It’s fashionable to say that redheads are hot for conflict, and that among highwaymen and murderers you’ll find a disproportionate number of that persuasion. More red-haired witches were burned at the stake than any other variety. Judas Iscariot, they say, couldn’t help his crimes: he was a redhead. Cleopatra and Nellie Gwyn were red in tooth, lip, claw and hair.’

Of course, he knew his hairs and his hair histories. In that moment, the humour was on me – again to cut every one of my curls off. I would never think of him as ‘Mr Chops’ again. It was too good for him. Furiously, I experimented with other titles in my mind: ‘Mr Disgustator’, ‘Mr Flittergoblin’ and ‘Mr Fingerlimp’.

‘Business proposal, is it, your honour?’ drawled Darcy, her eyes tricksily downcast. ‘There is nothing so pleasant as a pot of money, as we say in Harristown.’

‘There is nothing so pleasant.’ He tore his eyes from my hair, and reached inside his case for a roll of closely written paper.

Then he stood up, announcing, ‘Miss Darcy, aged twenty, sixty-two inches of hair; Miss Berenice and Miss Enda, aged eighteen, sixty-eight inches of hair apiece; Miss Manticory, aged almost fifteen, sixty-nine inches of hair; Miss Pertilly, aged thirteen, sixty-four inches; Miss Oona, twelve, sixty inches; Miss Idolatry, eleven, sixty-three inches.’

He nodded to each of us in the correct order – of course, in attending all our performances he had long since matched face to name, and inches to ages.

‘No doubt there are desires and yearnings in you ladies for bettering your lovely selves,’ he began.

‘We’re not free of desires and yearnings,’ conceded Darcy acidly.

‘No more you need be, my dear young ladies, because God’s gifts to you can be turned into a fortune, if skilfully rendered through the mill of industry.’

‘Mill? I don’t want—’ whimpered Ida.

‘It’s nothing to me that you don’t want—’ Darcy began.

‘I speak metaphorically, my dears,’ he intervened. ‘The Swiney Godivas shall never toil in a menial manner, not when they have in superabundance exactly what the world craves. The world is starving for hair!’ he cried. ‘Starving!’

‘Yes, yes, yes and—’ Darcy tapped her foot impatiently.

‘Which part of his adored wife may a man gaze at equally in public and in private?’ demanded Mr Rainfleury. ‘
Only
her hair.’

There are whole religions and whole continents
, I thought,
where the men would not agree with you, Mr Pig-Eared Ignorant
.

But my sisters were staring with their mouths open as Mr Rainfleury continued. ‘So how highly charged with
looking
is this softest part of her that a husband shares with others? How that hair soaks up the looks of men . . . Other men see it bound up, coiled on the head – but all may own the
fantasy
of it let loose, rippling over the shoulders in private. But what need I teach the Swiney Godivas about
that
? Your gifts have already been showered on thousands of men. But you need to understand that a certain kind of man needs to see only one curl . . . ahem . . . This is why women must cover their hair in chapel. There is so much more to explain to you blessedly, magnificently endowed girls—’

‘I hope not,’ interrupted Darcy. ‘That was already quite sufficient. Ida and Oona are still children, you know.’

‘Indeed, I was coming to children. The little dears. Who doesn’t love a long-haired little girl?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ snapped Darcy. ‘And?’

‘And this brings me to the subject in hand, that is, children’s playthings that even a grown person may love and fondle. In this climactic epoch of hair-love, there is no more perfect and economical way of a lady possessing her private acreage of hair than to own it in miniature on her very own doll. For every hair-love, there is doll-love – for what woman or girl does not want an immortally tressed beauty on her dressing table? What husband or father does not long to purchase it for her?’

Darcy snatched the paper from him and read aloud, ‘
Rainfleury & Masslethwaite
—who’s Masslethwaite?’

‘My late partner.’

Darcy nodded and continued, ‘
Rainfleury & Masslethwaite shall, on payment of an agreed fee
—’

Darcy interrupted herself, ‘What fee? No! Whisper to me alone.’

Mr Rainfleury leaned over and gave her a breathy sentence in her ear.

Clearly, he didn’t affront her by that sentence. Indeed Darcy looked like a woman in receipt of a bouquet. Wordless, she handed him the contract and waved at him to continue with the reading:

‘Rainfleury & Masslethwaite shall, on payment of an agreed fee, produce a set of seven different dolls, each to the full likeness of one of the Swiney Godivas, complete in verisimilitude as to the eye colour, comparative height and the colour and texture of the hair. The dolls, named for their muses, shall be sold separately so that they may be collected by an enthusiastic feminine public.’

He lowered the paper and let his eyes pass over us again. ‘There is, ahem, also an opening for the gentleman collector in this new line.’

I imagined a gentleman, not dissimilar to Mr Rainfleury, gazing avidly at a long-haired naked doll seated on his grand mahogany desk. Surely, I thought, Darcy would never allow this obscenity, but she nodded as Mr Chops continued, ‘
The Swiney Godivas shall agree to show these dolls in all their future acts, and to endorse them at every opportunity.
’

‘Endorse?’ asked Pertilly.

‘Personally recommend, associate yourselves and generally show admiration of,’ supplied Mr Rainfleury.

Pertilly began to weep in earnest. ‘I don’t want to cut my hair off for to have it stuck upon a doll so. You cannot make me—’

‘Neither I need, you ass,’ bellowed Darcy. ‘Will you stop battering the ears of our man here and listen? He’ll not take a hair off
our
heads. Will you, Mr Rainfleury? You’ll need hundreds of heads of hair. Your men’ll cut something off a silky old horse, no doubt. Or buy it from a French maid. Am I not right, Mr Rainfleury? You’d not shave our heads and spoil our show for us, is it? Not when there’s hair being sold by the bale in every poor street on the Continent.’

My mental teeth ground out, ‘Mr Scissorthief!’ ‘Mr Despoilerator!’ For everyone knew about the trade in women’s hair. There were even hair markets where impoverished girls lined up to sell the only treasure they had. Poor women’s hair was refashioned by other poor women – the lowly
posticheurs
and boardworkers – into convincing fake pieces to amplify heads of rich ladies of fashion. If you read the newspaper editorials, the hair trade was generally considered shameful – a kind of capillary cannibalism – and it was also deemed filthy, as if poverty endowed the sold hair with disease and vermin.

Yet the hair trade was outstandingly profitable – so much so that there were regular outbreaks of hair crime in London. Girls with visibly abundant hair had been set upon in the street and barbered by men who sold their booty for profit. I flinched from our supposed benefactor. Didn’t Darcy realise that by making us famous he would also be making us targets for ‘hair despoilers’, as these thieves were known?

Mr Despoilerator stammered, ‘Well, of course the bulk will be from . . . a special source of my own. I’d not for the world compromise your own personal splendours. I am . . . in the process of . . . patenting a new form of artificial hair spun from silk and extracts of rare plants. It imitates real hair to a nicety and totally obviates the need to dabble in the unwholesome human hair trade, where a respectable businessman like myself would never in any case dip a finger.’

‘The bulk?’ Darcy glanced down the contract. ‘Oh, I see. “
Rainfleury & Masslethwaite will guarantee to customers that each doll contains one genuine hair from the head of a Swiney Godiva
.” ’

She sneered. ‘And is it also an unmentioned condition that Mr Rainfleury himself must choose that single hair?’

He nodded eagerly.

‘In other words,’ said Darcy, ‘he may spend as long as he likes handling the full lengths of our hair while he chooses those single strands at leisure. Is that it, Mr Rainfleury? Do I have it nutshelled here, is it?’

I mentioned quickly, ‘But we can collect the hair ourselves in our hair-receivers whenever we comb it. There’s always plenty there, especially after a wash. He doesn’t need to—’

Ida said, ‘And what about the Day of Judgement? When we must assemble all our lost hairs? How will we get them back then? Mam will—’

‘We won’t be plaguing Mam with such details,’ said Darcy firmly. ‘And God will be too busy to account for every single Swiney hair on Judgement Day.’

I thought,
No, He’ll be busying Himself with looking into how
PS
got buried in the clover field
.

Now Berenice and Oona were crying. ‘We don’t want to have our hair handled either.’

‘So much the worse for you, then. You’ll be made into a doll, and you’ll be handled if I tell you to,’ rapped Darcy. ‘In fact, Mr Rainfleury, please help yourself to another head of hair just to see if it’s satisfactory. Whom shall you be having next?’

Now Ida too erupted into tears. ‘Will I not be getting a doll at all? But doll men will be getting
me
? I don’t understand! And will the gentleman be putting nits in the dolls so they are really Swineys?’

Darcy clapped one hand over Ida’s mouth, and slapped her rump hard with the other. ‘Just Ida’s idea of a joke,’ Darcy guffawed. ‘You’ll find nothing living above the neck here.’

‘That’s a lie of you!’ Ida struggled free.

‘Do not speak of the nits,’ whispered Berenice. ‘It will just remind them to come back. There is nothing a nit likes better than to be spoke of.’

‘An unfortunate plague upon decent girls,’ burbled Mr Rainfleury, ‘and no doubt provoked by the low company you’ve been obliged to keep while your talents have been so underexploited. Small blame to you on that score, of course. One does not hear of nits and worms in genteel, prosperous circumstances in Dublin Town. Such as you shall soon – with my help – be among.’

Darcy muttered, ‘Company does not get lower than the Eileen O’Reilly.’

Dublin Town. I thought of the freckled muzzle of the butcher’s runt pressed against our window. Mr Rainfleury’s plans would remove us from her view, perhaps without my ever having a chance to forgive her and be forgiven.

‘Dublin Town itself!’ breathed Oona.

‘To be dolls so,’ said Ida sadly.

My face was reddening and my fists were clenching because I knew Mr Rainfleury should never dare to ask a decent girl to be a doll. Would Mr Rainfleury bring his shiny case and his contract up the grand steps of Harristown House to ask the ladies there for their likenesses in bisque? Would he be so tranquilly sure of carrying all before him?

No, at Harristown House he’d be slung out on his porky ear for insulting the ladies so.

But we Swineys were his for the asking.

Part Two

Dublin

Chapter 13

No matter how much he winked and gargoyled at Darcy with his tufty head on one side, Mr Rainfleury got no more than one sister to handle at a time until the doll contracts were signed.

We were presently following a season of Fleadh Cheoils around the country, learning the old Gaelic songs for our own turns on the stage. Mr Rainfleury and his avid mouth were there as often as they ever could be. Having myself limp-fingered by Mr Flittergoblin felt worse to me than exposing my hair onstage, but I dared not say against it. To my relief, although I had been his first choice, Mr Rainfleury soon made a firm favourite of Berenice, who indeed began to show a precocious liking for his breathy attentions. Whenever I ballyragged her about Mr Rainfleury’s near-baldness, she reproved me, ‘And be quiet yourself, Manticory. The mighty brain on him has worn out the poor hair roots. You know what they say: “Grass does not grow on a busy street.” ’