The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (25 page)

Ida began to cry.

‘That is enough right there, Tristan Stoker,’ said Darcy. ‘If that is not an outrage, get me one! Step along with yourself! Go! And take your excreting with you! Look at Ida crying fit to fall in pieces from your botherations.’

Tristan’s smile never faded. ‘Ida’s tears merely prove what can be done by way of stimulation of the imagination. I am sorry I let the poetry take me a bit beyond myself there. It is for Corporation reasons that we must remind your audiences that hair is a risky object. We must alert them to the consequences of not dealing with it! We want them to hate their own hair! Then they will buy the liquid solution for the destruction of what they hate and fear about it.’

He gestured to a sketch on his desk, showing a wife with tangled lank locks watching helplessly while her husband leered at a luxuriantly tressed beauty. The caption was simple:
Will he dispense with your services?

When his sketch was turned into a photograph, Tristan was perceptive and cruel enough to have the spurned wife modelled by Enda and the coveted mistress by Berenice.

Having exhausted every moral shade of blonde and black, Tristan turned his attention to red hair, and to me. He had seen what I wished not to see – that red might sell and that I might sell red.

Red hair had been licensed for popularity by the disorderly young men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I suppose Millais started it, even painting the young Christ himself as a redhead, but Mr Rossetti was mostly to blame with his lubricious flame-haired heroines. Until then redheads had been decried as rare and unfortunate ‘carrots’.

Once we were endowed with licentiousness, redheads became irresistible. This prompted the novelists to turn us evil. Mr Collins created Lydia Gwilt, the wicked, bigamous, rotten, bloody, heart-shattering redhead in
Armadale
. Within a year of her appearance, flaming heroines were ubiquitous in novels. So of course, I was Lydia Gwilt’s impersonator, uttering terrifying monologues of her letters, in which she joked of how she craved a child to beat and loved to watch summer insects killing themselves in the candle flame.

And, just as I had always feared, Tristan had me ‘do’ Lizzie Siddal. In 1869, Lizzie, Mr Rossetti’s late wife and model, had been exhumed at her husband’s request. He had buried a book of his poems with her. But the poet had changed his mind and wanted his valuable work back.

‘As poetic as Tristan then,’ I muttered when I heard this.

There had arisen a rumour that Lizzie’s opened coffin had overspilled with luxuriant curls that kept growing at a furious pace even as the corpse decomposed. One copper curl had twined itself around the book of poems. The creeping curl was cut off and lifted from the grave along with the book.

Tristan decreed that I must re-enact Lizzie’s posthumous part using the coffin that Darcy carried around on all our tours. The coffin was too large for me, adding to the pathos of the sight of me inside it, clutching my husband’s poems jealously to my breast. The mahogany box was mounted on a gurney that slowly raised it upright while my sisters chanted funereal hymns. I kept my eyes shut until the last moment, when I opened them on a terrified audience, and recited a Rossetti love poem, as if I were the artist’s plundered wife lamenting in her grave.

The women screamed dutifully. The men gaped greedily at my hair as if they longed to stuff it into their open mouths.

There was no one to tug their sleeves and tell them not to. According to Tristan’s handbills, every look they bestowed on our hair was an education for their minds, even if they
felt
us with their bodies. It was not the Swiney Godivas’ fault if evil passions were aroused in men who thereby rendered themselves self-evidently unworthy to be present at such an exclusive and culturally irreproachable event as a Swiney Godiva performance.

With Tristan back from a second private view he’d finagled of Mr Leyland’s ‘stunners’, I was set to impersonating the woman in Mr Rossetti’s
La Pia de Tolomei
, the russet-haired wife left to die in staring melancholy in the malarial swamps of Maremma while the slow crows wheeled around her and the sundial’s shadow chased an eternity of trapped torment.

But I knew that no one cared a handkerchief for the Pia’s or my own suffering. They just wanted my hair, eyefuls of it, and if their eyes could have performed the feat, they would have torn my red hair out of my head.

Mr Rainfleury never protested on our behalf. Just once, I asked him to intervene – when Tristan deemed it necessary for me to lie in a bath with my hair flowing over the edges, like Lizzie Siddal posing for Mr Millais’
Ophelia
.

I stayed as close as possible to the door to his study to put my case.

‘But you wear your chemise and are entirely hidden by the bath! Apart from your head and one arm, that is. You show nothing, or show it in a Christian manner.’ Mr Rainfleury’s tone was even. ‘And do you know what it costs to warm the water?’

‘I do not wish the rest of me to be
imagined
lying in my own bath, naked,’ I explained. ‘You know that is what they are thinking down there in the audience. Your dolls have stolen our identities, and now our whole bodies have been appropriated by Tristan for his advertising.’

Those words had looked so eloquent in my notebook but had come out prissily.

‘What piffle, my dear,’ Mr Rainfleury said tranquilly. ‘You’re a great girl for the suspiciousness, Manticory. I believe it has worn a furrow between your brows that is not at all flattering to one of your colouring. I think I see the permanence of a wrinkle in that shadow. I would not like you to be forgetting that the bit of talent that you have would scarcely be enough to live on, were you to grow ugly. Remember your contractual obligations to the Corporation.’

‘The contract does not say anywhere
Denature yourselves
,’ I muttered. ‘Or
Sell yourselves for money like whores
.’

‘Manticory,’ Mr Rainfleury sighed. ‘You are losing the run of yourself. Surely
you
would not be the mad creature who would put the Corporation in ruins with scruples you certainly weren’t born with? What do you think pays for your home, the steaming platters of food, your books that pile up like ingots of gold all over the house?’

This spiteful tongue
, I thought,
is what we see in Mr Rainfleury’s mouth when one of his dolls deviates from the game he wants to play with them. What will he do to win that game?

He smiled again. ‘Don’t you see that the Swiney Godivas
cannot
stop doing what they do? There must be seven Swiney Godivas or none at all.
You
may be able to earn yourself a pittance as a governess with the great literary genius on you, if only you can keep your stage past a secret – but what of your sisters? Do you think any of them capable of survival without the Corporation to pay their dress accounts? Would you abandon them to destitution? What would they do with themselves back in Harristown, penniless? Would you really leave them to that?’

I was dismissed. I stood outside the door, hating myself and Mr Rainfleury in equal measure.

I marched back in. ‘I will not wear the hairpieces onstage. And neither will my sisters.’

He laughed, as well he might, at the reduced scale of my protest. ‘We’ll see what Darcy says, shall we?’ A shadow fell over the threshold and Darcy slithered into the doorway.

‘Ah, Darcy,’ said Mr Rainfleury, ‘we were just speaking of you. Please to come in.’

He explained what I had said, making it sound like a childish tantrum.

Darcy frowned. ‘Rebellion, is it? A touch of the old foxy red-haired rebel?’

And she swished her hand in front of her, to Mr Rainfleury’s bemusement.

‘Do you think it makes any difference whether we wear Rainfleury’s hair or not?’ she asked me. ‘Do you think that is your problem? Do you think throwing the hairpiece on the ground and stamping on it will make you a girl who never wore a hairpiece? Who never danced on the stage? Who never sold a bottle of scalp food? You’re as moonstruck as Ida if you think that.’

‘I say poor Manticory is not herself,’ said Mr Rainfleury. ‘Indeed it may be a touch of Ida’s malady that she has, spreading between sisters? The blood of the old mad King Swiney himself in your veins? I’ll have Standish O’Mealy mix her a powder.’

Bitter, it was, the powder, and I suspect that its purpose was punishment rather than cure. But I took it, to punish myself, for not having succeeded in my little revolution. Mr Rainfleury and Darcy had found its weak points in a moment.

Ida was not herself most of the time now. At home in Pembroke Street, Mrs Hartigan tied a copper flask to Ida’s middle and kept it filled with hot water. If you asked Ida what ailed her, she would take a hank of hair into her mouth and weep, ‘It is the cold creeping in my bones. Yet I burn.’

‘And look at the face on you as long and green as a thin reed!’ complained Darcy. ‘And a red nose you could see from the Matterhorn! Who’ll pay to see that miserable muzzle on the stage? Couldn’t you pretend, just for our sakes, to be happy? What is it you are golloping down your throat there?’

She wrested the bottle of scalp food out of Ida’s hands.

‘You’re drinking
this
? For your
unhappiness
?’

Ida keened, ‘Yet I must have been happy at one time because presently I know that I am not. I think I was happy with Mam in Harristown. Perhaps we should—’

‘Don’t even think about it! Who says you have a right to be happy?’ grumbled Darcy. ‘All anyone’s got a
right
to is mixed middling at best.’

She cast her black eyes over Enda and Berenice wretchedly rehearsing a duet, at Oona staring sadly at Tristan, at Pertilly grimacing as she forced her ankles into cruelly tight boots for her next solo. Finally, Darcy’s eyes came to rest with satisfaction on me, disconsolately scripting my own next humiliations on the stage. In front of me were Tristan’s scribbled instructions. Below my sheet of paper was the blotter and below that the wax-smeared contract that bore Darcy’s signature in crow-black ink, indelible as a dose of her contempt.

Chapter 22

Tristan insisted there was something missing from the wallpapered, swagged, ruched first-floor parlour, crowded with brutal-looking mahogany furniture and seven different tastes in knick-knacks competing for every polished surface. It was here that Mr Rainfleury and Tristan held meetings with important clients from the big pharmacies and grand shops. The room was also a place where we Swiney Godivas delivered short, colourful public lectures on the art and science of the hair to a select paying audience.

‘Can you imagine anything more appropriate here than a dignified portrait in oils of the Swiney Godivas in their glory?’ Tristan pointed to the mirror above the fireplace. The glass showed our faces arranged in characteristic expressions of worry and doubt. As with any new idea that was not her own, Darcy began to cavil. ‘What’s wrong with a photograph? We have plenty of those!’

Tristan smiled. ‘Art, by virtue of its engagement with the soul, confers respectability, reality and luxury, whereas photography is considered by many to be a cheap, shallow record or a mere meretricious tool.’

‘Oh and indeed,’ I muttered. I had hated to be photographed ever since the first time we’d been surprised by an explosion of magnesium at the Poulaphouca Falls.

‘You’re talking to us, Tristan, not your precious general public,’ Darcy reminded him. ‘Away with your meretricious tool and tell me what you mean to be saying.’

Our male muse now explained in simple terms that he and Mr Rainfleury deemed an oil painting more conducive to profitable negotiations than the commercial kind of photograph we used to promote our show and the Swiney pharmaceuticals. That jade-green parlour, Tristan declared, was not a place to put individual bottles into trembling, confiding hands. ‘It is a place to situate, perpetuate and congratulate the Swiney Godiva
phenomenon
– and to sign agreements for shipments of
a thousand bottles at a time
.’

Darcy nodded thoughtfully.

‘And it will be helpful to the people who come to hear you speak. In that the vision of your miraculous hair shall be supplied twice over, in your seven persons and on the wall as well. It shall be as if the painting endorses and reinforces the reality of the seven living sisters.’

‘So as to ensure they don’t think that we are faking the hair?’ I asked pointedly.

There had been some murmurs against us in the press about hairpieces and supplementary plaits recently, which had us nonplussed and helpless, until Mr Rainfleury had explained that such rigmaroling was merely confirmation of our success. ‘The secret of my spun-silk artificial hair still eludes my competitors. So naturally they spread these clumsy lies that the Swineys are using hair from the human trade. Think nothing more about it, my dears.’

Exchanging a hard glance with Mr Rainfleury, Tristan said, ‘Indeed. We must act fast to undermine any slander that would contaminate our sales. And there is also the all-important element of entertainment, for which the general public is so greedy. Of course, your little lectures impart knowledge without excessive fatigue to the brain, but a portrait would give the audience something to look at if their attention wanders.’