“What do we do now?” asked Arabella, when Bowser once again looked the dignified civil servant.
“Roll him up in the carpet and shove him under the bed,” I said. “We’ll move him after dark.”
“Move him where?”
“Down by the river. Someone will find his body by morning.”
Arabella recoiled in horror. “And what am I supposed to do until dark? I’m not staying here with a corpse under my bed.”
“You can stay in Nancy’s old room.”
“Why can’t we move the old geezer up to Nancy’s room, and I can have my own room back?”
Bints are so thoughtless. “Because Nancy’s room is on the third floor, and I don’t fancy hauling Bowser up and down stairs a dozen times today. He stays here.”
Bowser made an unwieldy bundle, stuffed into the carpet like a sausage in its casing. We pushed and shoved (with Mrs. Drinkwater exhaling copious clouds of gin-scented breath) until we’d managed to wedge our visitor under the four-poster. We emerged, huffing like we’d run the length of Great Russell Street with a bobby on our heels.
“Weighs a bloody ton,” Mrs. Drinkwater said, between gasps. “We’ll be lucky to get him down the stairs without dying ourselves.” The same thought had occurred to me.
I was pondering my predicament when the bell rang to announce a visitor to Lotus House. The three of us froze, Mrs. Drinkwater wheezing faintly and all of us gaping and looking guilty as hell, rather like a bad painting by Edwin Landseer entitled
The Quarry Hears the Pursuit
, or some such rot. I regained my composure first and poked Mrs. Drinkwater in the ribs.
“Go answer the door,” I said. It seemed the sensible thing to do. I didn’t think the local plod would be on the doorstep, as there wasn’t any reason yet for anyone to be suspicious, and it might be a paying customer.
Mrs. Drinkwater lurched off, mumbling something about fair wages for additional and extraordinary duties, which I ignored. Arabella and I waited for a considerable period of time while the cook plodded down the staircase. I heard the front door open and the murmur of low voices, then the ponderous tread of Mrs. Drinkwater ascending the stairs.
“Well?” I demanded in a whisper, when she’d reeled into the bedroom.
“It’s Reverend Calthorp, ma’am. He was hoping for a word with the young ladies.”
I groaned. I’ve no objections to clergy as a rule; some of my best customers are members of the cloth. But Reverend Charles Calthorp was no customer. He was a Low Church do-gooder of Gladstone’s ilk who’d committed his life to helping those less fortunate than himself, whether they wanted his assistance or not, and he’d decided that the girls in my house were ripe for conversion. He spent a good deal of time loitering about the place on Sunday afternoons, passing out tracts, staring at the décolletage surrounding him and blushing like a maiden aunt at the mention of unmentionables.
“Bloody hell,” I muttered. “Why me, Lord?” But as no answer was forthcoming from the Deity, I had to take matters into my own hands. “Show him into the salon, and give him a glass of sherry,” I instructed Mrs. Drinkwater. “Not the good stuff,” I added, as she exited. Calthorp wouldn’t know the difference between amontillado and giraffe piss.
I recinched my dressing grown and trotted off down the hall to find Mary, whose dewy, blond, virginal façade concealed a veteran
fille de joie
overly fond of the essence of juniper berry and laudanum. Her bedroom smelled like a gin palace and was dark as a tomb, the curtains drawn against the grey English sky. She was sleeping soundly, wrapped in a cocoon of quilts, snoring louder than a company of the Queen’s Own Highlanders.
I nudged her, none too gently, in the ribs. “Wake up, Mary. You’ve got a visitor.”
She stirred, mumbled, then burrowed farther into the pillows.
I prodded the bundled bedclothes with more force. “Come on, you lazy cow. He’s waiting.”
“I ain’t got no customers on the Sabbath.” Her voice was muffled by goose down. “Who is it?”
“Calthorp.”
Mary bolted upright, and the bed erupted, quilts ballooning into the air and tiny feathers wafting to the floor. “
He
ain’t no customer,” she said, nose quivering indignantly. “You’ve got a nerve, waking me up so I can entertain Charles Calthorp. Go spin the plates for him yourself.”
Ungrateful wench. Disrespectful, too. I should turn her out on the doorstep, but I needed a favor.
“I’d ask one of the other girls, but nobody is as good as you at handling him.”
It was true. Mary was a vicar’s daughter and had a great deal of experience at fending off the inquisitive paws of prebenderies and curates. And, being a vicar’s daughter, she can spout Old Testament claptrap with the best of them.
“Keep him occupied for an hour, and I’ll send Mrs. Drinkwater for a bottle of the finest for you.”
I left Mary happily contemplating an evening spent with her favorite companion, and headed back down the passage to Arabella’s room. I stopped short at the sight of the slight figure standing hesitantly in the hall outside Arabella’s door, hand reaching for the knob.
My heart gave a lurch. “Reverend Calthorp,” I sang out, a bit shrilly.
The figure started. “Miss Black,” Calthorp said, gesturing vaguely at the door to Arabella’s room. “I was told you were in here.”
Damn Mrs. Drinkwater. “You’re mistaken, sir. I asked that you be shown into the salon. Won’t you accompany me there now?”
He bowed stiffly. He looked the very image of the impoverished clergyman, in his ill-fitting suit of rusty black broadcloth and his seedy white collar, sleek brown hair brushed back over a high forehead, his brown eyes vague and doe-like behind gold-rimmed glasses.
We traipsed downstairs, me leading the way and sashaying my hips for the good vicar’s benefit and praying Mary wouldn’t take too long with her toilette
.
Mrs. Drinkwater had preceded us into the salon with a silver tray in her hands bearing a cordial glass and a decanter of the swill I offer the non-regulars, and was gazing round her with an air of bewilderment. Her face cleared when I ushered Calthorp into the room. She plonked the tray on a side table and sloshed a little of the sherry into the glass.
“Wondered where you’d got to,” she said to Calthorp, handing him the glass. “Here you are, Your Grace.”
Calthorp coloured at the elevation in rank. “Just plain ‘Reverend Calthorp’ will do, Mrs. Drinkwater.” He took the glass, nodded his thanks and seated himself on the sofa, after a careful inspection of the cushions and the antimacassars.
“I was hoping I’d find you in, Miss Black.”
I was at the window, staring at the leaden sky and calculating the hours until dusk. “I don’t provide services myself, Mr. Calthorp. It’ll have to be one of the girls.”
He blushed a fiery red, extracted a large, threadbare handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his brow. “I’d no intention of availing myself of your ‘services,’ as you so delicately phrased it, as I’m sure you well know.”
“Church need a new steeple, then?” My anxiety about the lifeless Bowser made me snappish. I made an attempt to rein in my irritation and be polite: even a Calthorp could turn into a customer. There may be men who pant after tarts for the purpose of saving their soul (that great booby Gladstone likes to prowl the cobbles for that very purpose, or so he says, but we all know better), but I’ve yet to meet any.
Calthorp had recovered himself. “I have come to ask you for money, Mrs. Black, but not for something trivial.” Here he stole a glance around the room, making sure I noted him gazing at the Turkey carpet, the crystal glasses on the bar, the silver candle-sticks. “I’ve no doubt you could easily afford to share generously with those in need, should you so choose.”
“Charity begins at home, Reverend. I’m doing my bit to keep myself out of the parish workhouse, so as not to burden the well-to-do members of your flock.”
He brightened considerably. “Why, that’s the very thing I’ve come about. Seeing that these young women have some alternative to the life they live now; a way to earn a wage and support themselves so they needn’t debase themselves as, as ... ” Here he coughed delicately, though he needn’t have concerned himself with my feelings.
“Sluts?” I suggested. “Whores, prostitutes, bints?”
No actor was ever more punctual. Calthorp blushed, right on cue.
It is wearying to converse with a young man with an exaggerated sense of modesty. I’d be here all day, trying to winkle out what Calthorp wanted, while he tried to avoid calling attention to the fact that he was talking to a madam about prostitution. I had other things on my mind, such as disposing of that oversize corpse laid out in Arabella’s room.
“What is it you’ve come about, Mr. Calthorp?” I asked.
He composed himself, not without difficulty, and without meeting my eye, launched into a hurried exposition of his scheme for the bints, which amounted to finding a place for them with dressmakers, milliners and seamstresses and such, serving as apprentices to the trade while earning a small wage. This would provide them a living and allow them to enter the “society of decent citizens” (as Calthorp called it—I could have disillusioned him on that score, as dozens of those “decent citizens” regularly passed through the doors of Lotus House).
Most reformers are well-intentioned idiots, and Calthorp was a prime example of the species. My girls made more in a night at Lotus House than they could make in a month as a dressmaker’s apprentice, which is why so many of those very seamstresses and dressmakers moonlighted on the side as whores (“dollymops,” they’re called). Not to mention that a bint’s work involved no more than lying on her back (or in other positions) for a few hours each night, instead of working fourteen hours a day to deliver a dress to an arrogant biddy who would never, under any circumstances, admit a former whore to “decent society.” Ah, well. It’s not my allotted purpose in life to correct the Calthorps of this world; better to let them blunder along in their righteous idealism, having meetings, drinking tea and writing tracts: it gives them something to do.
Mary came flouncing in then and I escaped from Calthorp, leaving him earnestly expostulating his grand plan to her while she listened sympathetically and stroked his knee from time to time, to soothe him. I made a discreet little tippling motion to Mary to remind her of her reward and retreated to my study.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and the early evening hours pacing a slow circle in the carpet. The body upstairs exerted an unsettling influence on me. I had the oddest feeling that Lotus House was being watched, yet each time I drew aside the curtains and peered into the street, I saw nothing unusual. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that an unknown watcher waited outside. The fog thickened throughout the day, until visibility was restricted to only a few feet. The conditions were perfect for moving a corpse, but they also provided ample cover for anyone to observe the removal in secrecy.
I was much too nervous to eat anything, but I fortified myself for the night’s work with copious amounts of tea and the odd whisky and soda, and whiled away the hours behind the closed door of the study, leafing through the papers and eyeing the clock on the mantle. At last, the damned thing struck eleven, with a soft whirring of chimes, and I gathered a cloak, pinned on a hat and slipped out the back door into the alley.
Under less trying circumstances, I’d have sent one of the girls to fetch a cart and horse from the ostler down the lane, but I trusted no one else with this errand. The mist that had been falling most of the day still drifted down in a gauzy veil, and one of the city’s famous fogs had risen, so that walking through the streets felt like walking through a cloud. The moisture beaded on my cloak and dripped off my hat. The flaring gas lamps made a valiant, but feeble, effort to cut the gloom, but their light was limited to the few square feet below their posts, and great black shadows engulfed the distances between them.
I walked briskly, keeping a wary eye. I was known in this street, but that was no guarantee against a knock on the head, or worse. It’s a shame, isn’t it, when a mostly law-abiding citizen and woman of property doesn’t feel safe to walk the streets of London? And after all the publicity that little snoop Dickens had brought to the needy and the homeless, not to mention the criminal class. You think something would have been done by now about the crime rate and the appalling condition of the poor, but the politicians kept waving their Union Jacks, fretting over Ireland, swilling champagne and stuffing themselves with oysters, and couldn’t be bothered. In these circumstances, the astute madam entertained no illusions about the police being within a thousand yards of the neighborhood, and protected herself. An acquaintance of mine had provided me (at an exorbitant price, I might add) with a fine Webley British Bulldog, along with a number of lessons in its use, conducted in the forest a few miles from London and prying eyes. You may think the .442 caliber of the Bulldog to be too much to handle for a woman of my size, but I’m wiry (not to mention stubborn), and I had conquered the massive kick of the firearm. It is amazing what a woman can do if only she ignores what men tell her she can’t. If I do say so myself (and I seldom refrain from doing so), I’m a deuced fine shot, and if anyone feels inclined to meddle with me, he can expect some hot lead for his hubris. Consequently, while I was cautious, I was not frightened. The cold weight of my pistol in my purse comforted me.
I traversed a lonely stretch of pavement lined with shops that sold used clothing, mutton pies, secondhand furniture, and cheap tobacco, all shuttered for the night, with the faint glow of candles or lamps from the living quarters above leaking feebly into the street. The sidewalks were piled with rubbish, and the air smelled of horse dung, soot and grease. Most of the citizenry had retired for the night, but occasionally a shadow crossed a lighted window or a dim figure passed by on the opposite side of the street, appearing and disappearing like a conjurer’s phantom through the swirling mist. In the distance, a dog barked once, sharply, then fell silent. My footsteps echoed on the pavement.