“And have the suspicion of murder hanging about us like smoke around a foundry chimney?” asked Ceely. “Oh, no.”
“I will make sure he is listed as pressed and on the roster.”
“I want Richard Morgan done for too,” said Trevillian.
“It is not necessary!” wailed Thomas Cave. “Richard Morgan is well connected—the other is a nobody. Let Bill have Insell taken on a slaver, then let me go back to the Excise, please. I am not asking you to pay the fine, Ceely, but until it is paid the threat of trial hangs over all of us. We are being watched.”
“Look,” said Ceely Trevillian slowly and carefully, “I am too well-born to earn a living, and my late father, Devil take him, disinherited me. Knowing that I must live on my wits has sharpened them something brilliant. M’mother does what she can, including housing me and donating gold when m’brother is not looking, but I needed that excise money, and I am not pleased to be deprived of it. Nor will I be pleased to be deprived of either my freedom or my breathing and swallowing apparatus. Morgan and Insell have put a stop to my income, and I want to put a stop to them.” His face twisted. “Insell is a nothing, I agree. It is Morgan who will send us down. Besides, I
need
to ruin Richard Morgan.”
When Richard
woke, the first thing he did was go to look in William Henry’s cubicle. The bed was empty. Tears stung at his eyes, the first since William Henry had disappeared, but they did not fall. His sleep had been long enough to banish bodily aches, though his penis felt raw and he could feel her bites and scratches. A shocking word, bitch, but Annemarie Latour was a first-rate bitch.
The habits of the household at dawn went back past his very earliest memories. Dick descended to the kitchen and carried a kettle of hot water and a bucket of cold water up to Mag for her small tin bath. When Peg had been alive the two women had shared it, and after them the servant girl got it. While they washed upstairs, Dick and Richard washed downstairs.
Dick passed through to his bedroom with Mag’s kettle and bucket, cast a glance in Richard’s direction on his way out and ascertained that his son had finally come to. Leaving his slept-in clothes for the servant girl to deal with, Richard found more in his chest and ran down the stairs, naked, to join his father, who had already shaved and was standing in the small bath trickling water over himself with a tin dipper and slicking his wet skin with soap.
Dick gaped. “Christ! Where have you been?”
“With a woman,” said Richard, preparing to shave.
“About time too.” The soap was sloshed away with the dipper. “A whore, Richard?”
Richard grinned. “If she is, Father, then she is a very rare sort of a one. By that I mean that I have never seen her like.”
“A strong statement from a tavern man.” Dick stepped out of the oversized dish and rubbed himself vigorously with an old linen sheet while Richard stepped into his father’s used water.
“Finished?” came Mag’s voice from upstairs.
“Not yet!” Dick yelled, and dragged Richard, still drying himself, to the bullioned window and a shade more wan light. There he looked his son over grimly. “I hope ye’re not clapped or poxed.”
“I would bet I am not. The lady is particular.”
“What happened?”
“I met her at Insell’s place.”
“She’s
Insell’s
leavings?”
“Nay! She’d as soon cut her throat. Very high and mighty.” He frowned, shook his head. “Truth to tell, I know not why she fancied me. There is little enough between Insell and me.”
“Ye’re no more like Insell than a silk purse is a sow’s ear.”
“I am to see her again at eight o’clock this morning.”
Dick whistled. “’Tis hot, then?”
“Like a fire.” Richard finished tying his stock and combing his damp hair. “The thing is, Father, that I dislike her hugely, yet I cannot get enough of her. Ought I go? Or stay away forever?”
“Go, Richard, go! When it is a fire, the only way out is to walk through it to the other side.”
“And if it consumes me?”
“I will pray that it does not.”
At least, thought Richard at a quarter to eight, shutting the Cooper’s Arms door behind him, I have my father’s approval. I never dreamed he would understand. I wonder who was
his
fire?
He still had very little idea why he was going, whether it was as complex as sexual enslavement or as simple as sexual starvation. In Bristol “sex” and “sexual” were not words employed in the context of the act—too brutally explicit for a godfearing small city, not mealy-mouthed about many things. “Sex” stripped the act of love or morality. “Sex” made the act an animal event. In which case, sex and sex alone was why he walked to Jacob’s Well for more Annemarie.
But it was William Henry he thought about. Alive out there in someone else’s world, unable to get home. Which meant that he had been taken as a ship’s boy. It happened, especially to beautiful boys. Oh, dear God! Not my lad in that life! Please, dear God, let him be dead first! While I go to copulate with a French bitch who transfixes me the way I once saw a hooded snake transfix a rat at the Bristol Fair. . . .
The fire
burned more fiercely each time Richard met her, which was every day for the next week. But the pain of it and the pain of deserting William Henry, of imagining William Henry as a ship’s boy, forced him back to the rum; his days became a muddled blur of Annemarie, of his father’s worried face, of William Henry crying out from a great distance amid a vast sea, of sex and music and hooded snakes and rum, rum to find oblivion at the end of each hideous bout. He hated her, the French bitch, yet he could not get enough of her. Worse than that, he hated himself.
Then out of the blue she sent a note with Willy Insell that she could not see him for some time—but she gave no reason. Dazed at the affair, Insell could provide no reason either, save that the knocker was off her garret door and he fancied she was staying with Mrs. Barton. I cannot deal with losing both of them, Richard thought as he wandered in search of either of them. What I feel for her is base metal, heavy and dull and dark as lead, so how can I mourn at losing her? The fire still consumes me.
Giving up the search, he spent his days inside the Cooper’s Arms drinking rum, talking to nobody, the quill and paper he had taken to write to Mr. James Thistlethwaite lying dry and blank.
“Jim, please tell me what to do,” Dick begged of Cousin James-the-druggist.
“I am an apothecary, not a doctor of the soul, and it is poor Richard’s soul is sick. No, I do not blame it on the woman. She is merely a symptom of his disease, which has been coming on ever since William Henry drowned.”
“D’ye really think he drowned?”
Cousin James-the-druggist nodded emphatically. “I have not the slightest doubt.” He sighed. “At first I thought it was better for Richard to cherish hope, but when he took to rum I changed my mind. His soul needs a doctor, and rum is no cure.”
“Except,” Dick objected, “that the Reverend James is such a—a
fizzing
sort of minister. ’Tis you has good sense and can see all sides, not the other James. Imagine trying to tell him about this French whore—he would be off with his prayer book in one hand and a Roman crucifix in the other to do battle with one of Satan’s imps! For so he would regard her. Whereas I think she is just a meddler, and very attracted to Richard. Why can he never see that women fancy him? They do, Jim! You must have seen it for yourself.”
As both his bracket-faced spinster daughters had been in love with their cousin Richard for years, Cousin James-the-druggist had no hesitation in nodding emphatically a second time.
By the
27th of September Richard was soaked to the core in rum; when he received a note from Annemarie Latour saying that she was back in residence and dying to see him, he floundered from his chair and was off at a run.
“Richard! Oh, how marvelous to see you! Mon cher, mon cher!” She drew him inside, covering his face with kisses, took his hat and coat from him, purred and murmured and cooed.
“Why?” he asked, hanging back, determined this once to be his own man. “Why have I not seen you for a week?”
“Because Mrs. Barton has been ill and I have been with her—Willy should have told you. I asked him to tell you.”
“So far you have not dropped a single aitch,” he said.
“Because I have been with Mrs. Barton, ’oo—
who
—hates it when I speak the bad English. I have had to nurse ’er—
her,
” said Annemarie, looking injured.
Richard slumped onto the bed, feeling the rum. “Oh, what the hell does it matter, girl? I have missed ye and I am glad to be back. Kiss me.”
So they played at sex with lips, tongues, hands, wetness and fire, the sodden ecstasies of utter shamelessness. Hour upon hour, he upon her, she upon him, upside down, right way up, she fertile of imagination, he consumed to go in whichever direction she pointed.
“You are astonishing,” she said at the end of it.
His eyes were closing, but he summoned up a huge effort and kept them open. “In what way?”
“You stink of rum, yet you can still fuck—that is a
good
word—like a boy of nineteen.”
“You would know, my dear.” He grinned and did close his eyes. “It takes more than a few pints of rum to knock the stuffing out of me,” he said. “I have lasted a great deal longer than John Adams and John Hancock.”
“What?”
He vouchsafed no answer; Annemarie lay back against the soft pile of pillows and gazed at the ceiling, wondering how she was going to feel when this was over. When Ceely had persuaded her—assisted by several rouleaux of golden guineas—to seduce Richard Morgan, she had stifled a sigh, taken the money and reconciled herself to however many weeks of boredom. The trouble was that she had not been bored. For one thing, Richard was a gentleman. Which was more than she could say for that two-faced, double-gaited monster Ceely, who by profession called himself a gentleman yet would not have recognized one on the street.
What she had not counted upon was the victim’s attractiveness (to herself, however, she called it beauty). On the surface, a drab and genteel ordinary man of Bristol with no pretensions to fashion and no ability to turn heads. Then when first he smiled at her he seemed to whip a veil from his face, was suddenly strikingly handsome. And beneath the clothes of the time, designed to make all men look paunchy, round shouldered and sway backed, lay the physique of an ancient Greek statue. He hides, she thought, groping after the English adage, his light under a bushel. It is there only for those with the eyes to see. What a pity that he has never valued himself enough to stand forth. A superb lover. Oh yes, superb!
How then might she feel when all this was over? Not long now, depending upon how malleable Richard was—Ceely wanted it done soon, and the rum would be a great help. Her own part, she suspected, was a minor one, and she would never know the outcome. But playing that part meant goodbye to Ceely and to England. Her looks were still at their peak, she could pass for twenty even though she was thirty; between what Ceely would pay her shortly and what he had already paid her over the course of four years, she would be able to quit this country of dirty pigs and go home to her beloved Gironde, there to live like a lady.
For an hour she dozed; then she leaned over and shook Richard awake. “Richard! Richard! I ’ave an idea!”
His head felt swollen and his mouth was parched; Richard got off the bed and went to the white pitcher in which Annemarie kept small beer. A good beaker of that and he felt a little better, though he knew it would be several days before he cleared the rum from his system. If he stopped drinking it. But did he want to?
“What?” he asked, sitting on the bed, head in his hands.
“Why do we not set up house together? Mrs. Hale downstairs is moving out and the rent for two floors is only half a crown a week—we could move our bedroom down so there are not as many steps, and put Willy up here or in the cellar. His rent would be a help—he pays a shilling. Oh, it would be so nice to ’ave a proper establishment—do say yes, Richard, please!”
“I have not got a job, my dear,” he said through his hands.
“But I ’ave—
have
—with Mrs. Barton, and you will soon get one too,” she said comfortably. “Please, Richard! What if some horrible man moves in? How would I protect myself?”
He took his hands away from his face and looked at her.
“I could say we were married, that would make it respectable.”
“Married?”