The Dress Lodger Read online

  Praise for The Dress Lodger:

  “Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while.”

  —Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes

  “The Dress Lodger is as unsettling as it is brilliant. Holman attempts Herculean feats of plot and character, and the resulting novel is seamlessly crafted and deserving of wide acclaim and readership.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “The Dress Lodger is not just a first-rate entertainment but a moving, enlightening one as well.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “In The Dress Lodger, Sheri Holman brings to new realms the ambition and gusto she exhibited so dazzlingly in her debut novel, A Stolen Tongue. … If she flirts with melodrama, it is only in the way that Wuthering Heights does, or the novels of Dickens: that is, it is merely the exuberance of an outstandingly generous and fertile imagination. The Dress Lodger is an even better book than Holman’s first, with prose that’s more limber and vivid—and with, appropriately enough, more heart.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “If Clive Barker ever writes a historical novel, he’ll be hard pressed to invent horrors more lurid than the rotting corpses and dangling viscera that grace, so to speak, this lurid and fascinating second novel from Holman. … An atmospheric tale that may have readers gasping for air … Another stun-ner from a gifted and versatile new master of historical fiction.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “With shades of Caleb Carr, Holman digs us up an atmosphere and character while she’s unwinding her merciless plot—should anyone really trust a surgeon with no heart?—and the results are both thrilling and, well, sort of yucky. A fine effort.”

  —The San Diego Union Tribune

  “Here’s a splendid novel to sink your teeth into—your heart and soul as well. … The Dress Lodger borders on revelation in the guise of a Dickensian thriller.”

  —Providence Sunday Journal

  “[A] brilliantly stark portrayal of nineteenth-century urban life, class warfare, cruel medicine and encroaching pestilence. … With remarkable breadth and depth, the narrative vividly portrays the human suffering spawned by the early Industrial Revolution. … [Holman] delivers a wealth of morbid, authentic detail, as well as an emotional pivot in her captivating Moll Flanders–like heroine. The major characters are buttressed by a vivacious cast of minors. … Holman’s style is risky and direct, treating scenes of Gustine’s quick, humiliating back-alley couplings as well as the doctor’s hypocritical sleaze, with unflinching emotional precision. This dazzlingly researched epic is an uncommon read.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The Dress Lodger is Dickensian in a truer sense. … In another hundred years, ‘Holmanian’ may be a short form for tragic thriller, or some such unhelpful subcategory. But for the time being, we can simply appreciate this fine novelist’s work on its own terms.”

  —The Globe and Mail (Canada)

  “Sheri Holman vividly and convincingly conjures a fully textured fictive past peopled with strange and true characters.”

  —Charles Frazier

  “A riveting read … literate, witty, intelligent, thoughtful.”

  —Kate Atkinson

  “The plot of The Dress Lodger deftly twists and then turns … Ms. Holman writes with a remarkable Dickensian flair. … The Dress Lodger is a remarkable book.”

  —Richmond Times Dispatch

  “This is one of those historical novels that has a passionate, angry feel to it, making it more than entertainment (though it is certainly entertaining).”

  —Margaret Forster

  “Sheri Holman writes with extraordinary assurance and style.”

  —Miranda Seymour

  The

  DRESS LODGER

  The DRESS

  LODGER

  Sheri Holman

  Copyright © 2000 by Sheri Holman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Holman, Sheri.

  The dress lodger / by Sheri Holman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-5558-4766-1 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  PS3558.035596D74 1999

  813’.54—dc21 99-18153

  CIP

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For my mother, my best friend.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the city of Sunderland, England, which was delightful in winter and a far cry from its grim portrayal in this book; the librarians in the Sunderland Local History section, Dr. Lesley Gordon, special collections librarian at Newcastle University, Michael North at the New York Academy of Medicine, and the members of the VICTORIA listserv for their help and guidance in researching this period. Ruth Richardson’s extraordinary book, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, was an early inspiration and invaluable source. Special thanks goes to the incomparable Molly Friedrich, my agent and great friend; Elisabeth Schmitz, as passionate and marvelous an editor as anyone could wish for; the gang over at the Aaron Priest Agency, Morgan and all the people at Grove/Atlantic. I’d like to shake a bone of thanks to my friend and early reader Dan Smetanka, and everyone else who suffered through early drafts: George Green, Julia Crowe, Bill Tipper, Lindsey Tate, my aunt Marilyn, and my mother who actually read things twice, just because she wanted to. Lara Farina and Matt Morgan kept me sane and well-fed through this process, Gary Morris, David Conrad, and Gini Sikes kept me maybe a little drunker than was absolutely necessary. Thanks, too, to my father, Gene, and my sister, Shannon, for their constant support.

  Like the book before it, and the books to come, The Dress Lodger owes everything to my cherished partner, Sean Redmond: bread maker, bird sitter, loving editor, and resident genius. I have my Eye on you …

  I

  WORK

  OCTOBER, 1831

  “Grave: A place where the dead are laid

  to await the coming of the medical student.”

  —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  I

  A GIRL AND HER SHADOW

  The boys down on the Low Quay know a hundred ways to sell bad fish.

  They’ll mingle four dead eels with every one alive knowing full well the average man can’t tell which is which tangled inside a cloudy tub. They’ll polish up a stinking mackerel with a bit of turpentine and buff it with their shirttails until it gleams. Beneath the wharves late in the day, you can catch them blowing air into the bellies of cod to make their under-weight catch look fat and succulent. Poor hungry family, to puncture those flatulent fish and find them more air than meat. But a boy’s got to make a living, and when he is forced to feel around in the
mud at low tide, scrambling after sprats dropped overboard from a trawler, he may have to take a little advantage to earn his daily wage.

  You notice it most on Saturday nights when the markets are set up along Low Street. The orange sellers have secretly boiled their fruit to plump it up, though the practice causes it to turn black within a day; the cherry vendors have weighted their prepacked boxes with cabbage leaves to tip the scales. Not everyone is dishonest, but nearly every merchant prefers to sell his wares after dark when their imperfections are softened by candlelight and men’s eyes are less discerning after a full day’s work. Most workers are paid on Saturday night here in Sunderland, so they have money in their pockets for meat pies and jacket potatoes kept warm in barrel ovens; they buy two pennies’ worth of greasy herring and a roll to go with it. The young sons of public house owners crisscross the market delivering trays of ale to wives who’ve ordered it for their family dinners, and are stopped along the way by so many thirsty men, they have to run back for more. On Saturday night, when the streets are extravagant with stacked purple cabbages, ruby apples, bright green leeks fringing stalls iridescent with oyster shells, everyone feels rich. There will be meat on Sunday, and when a favorite customer comes to buy his chops the expansive butcher holds out a newly slaughtered pig’s heart like a present.

  It is Saturday night; work is another two days away. Sunday, you may play cards or walk out on the town moor or, if you are feeling guilty about something, wash your face and go to church. Perhaps you’ll just want to sleep, which is what happens most Sundays, when you take your tea on the stool by the fire and realize how good it feels just to sit and stare until your head drops down upon your chest and your cup slips from your fingers. But Saturday night you are alive and want some entertainment. Two new shows have come to town. One is about that disease everyone keeps talking about, the cholera morbus, but the second one sounds far more promising. The Spectacle Unique Les Chats Savants: Signior Capelli’s celebrated menagery of Sagacious Cats, well known in the principal cities of Europe, Whose Docility and Intelligence Never Fail to Astonish. You could certainly stand to be delightfully astonished, since the astonishment you’ll receive tomorrow when you learn half the plums you bought tonight are rotted through will be decidedly less pleasant. You push your way between the stalls along Low Street headed toward the theatre on Sans. On your right, the River Wear makes a snaking black ribbon between Sunderland proper and well-lit Monkwearmouth on the opposite shore. There are fewer ships on the river because of the Quarantine, you think, and it is killing everyone, from the keelmen who load Newcastle coal to the potteries that need imported Dorset clay. Your back room matchstick factory is safe, at least, no matter what happens. For ten years you’ve painted phosphorus tips on little wooden splinters and you’ve never, for a day, done without supplies. The phosphorus is slowly rotting your jawbone and turning you into a freakish mess, you can’t bear to look in the glass, but tonight, Saturday night, you want only to see some sagacious cats, and not think about how your hands and face glow in the dark.

  Outside the cheap theatre, where children and domestics get in half price—as if life weren’t easy enough for them anyway—you come upon a stampede. Housemaids leap squealing into coachmen; little boys stomp, stomp, stomp like Indians in a rain dance. It’s those damn frogs. They’ve come up from the riverbed, where they’ve been fucking and spawning, fucking and spawning all this wet, warm autumn until they’ve overflowed the steep banks and invaded the town. Merchants along Low Street have found moist green frogs suffocated in their flour, the pastor of Trinity Church found them floating in the Communion wine. Just last night, your landlord cursed the chorus of frogs yowling in his basement and sent down his ferret to rip through them. Now it seems the frogs are headed toward the nicer part of town. They are advancing on Bishopwearmouth, the third and by far the most affluent section of Sunderland, built on higher ground to the south. Good, you think. Let a little of the river bottom come up in the world. Let a lawyer or two lie awake and worry, like you have on too many nights, that the Lord has sent a modern plague of Egypt to destroy this town.

  How those dainty domestics and little children carry on, jabbing their umbrellas at flailing rubbery legs, frightening the frogs far more than they themselves are frightened! You roll your eyes and dig into your pocket for the 5 d. they extort from you at the box office, reach across to hand the rouged ticket vendor your money—but if you please, wait just a moment. …

  Before you duck inside, dear matchstick painter, and disappear from view for what will be at least two hours, we beg leave to ask what might at first seem a frivolous question, but which will eventually make sense: if you were to compose your own story—forgetting for a moment the small fact that you cannot exactly write—would you choose this Saturday night, outside of this cheap theatre, through this veil of frogs in which to introduce your heroine? If you might have at your command the entire globe, any moment of historic confluence, if you might in the writing of a humble book bring back to life a Queen of Sheba or an Empress Josephine, would you strew her path with frogs here in dirty Sunderland when you might pluck from your imagination green emeralds to scatter before her in Zanzibar? No, we thought not. You are a personage of refined taste. Left up to you, who is to say this book might not evolve into a tender tale of a match-stick painter whose matches so delight the King of Sicily that he dedicates his palace to her private use, festoons it with pearls and causes the British royal family to hold her quartz and lapis phosphorus pots? If the story were in your hands, we might expect no unpleasantness, no murder or blackest betrayal, for you are not of a punishing nature. And yet, dear matchstick painter, your growing suspicions are correct—this is not your story. This is ours, and you have been summoned, led through the marketplace, encouraged to see this entertainment over the tedious play on cholera morbus down the street for solely that purpose: to provide us with an introduction to our true heroine, who, if you’ll turn around, is walking down Sans Street toward you, carefully picking her way across the unctuous carpet of frogs.

  Don’t be upset, dear friend; we can’t all of us be heroes. Though we met you first, we shouldn’t feel compelled to follow your tiresome life. From the factory. Home. To the public house for a warm beer every third night—the whole process repeating itself ad nauseam. You have a purpose in the machinery of this book, and though it is not large, it is necessary. We have brought you here to describe her to us, we being too far away in time and space to form a clear impression. Please, dear friend, keep us in suspense no longer. Is she lovely? Plain? Young? Old? First impressions are difficult to shake, dear friend, so please, be precise.

  Begin with her face.

  It is thin, you say, but well formed? Has she not the snub nose and round cheeks of so many Sunderland girls whose raw ancestors tramped down from Scotland or washed ashore lo those many centuries ago from pork-fed Saxony? Oh, hers is a more Gaulish beauty—if you dare to use the term as a compliment barely fifteen years after Waterloo—with delicate arching brows, a reasonably straight nose, and large, dark, almost navy blue eyes. Her slightly sunken cheeks are drizzled with light freckles—hereditary, you would wager, for surely freckles coaxed out by a pleasant day at the shore would not sit so starkly against white skin. And she is very pale. Her face and exposed arms are the color of cooling milk, faintly blue in the bucket; they possess the sort of pallor that scatters light, the sort of luminescence that great ladies, it is rumored, take small tastes of arsenic to achieve. Hers is the skin of a girl who never sees the light of day.

  And her hair, what of her hair? Such skin must set off a deep brunette mane or a fiery halo of red. No, you say? She is blonde? With hair almost as pale as her skin, worn in a complicated style (known in fashionable circles as an “apollo”); her tresses braided and wrapped into a topknot at the crown, while little blonde ringlets are left to frizz at her temples. An ornament which if decorating the tresses of a lady would be a gilt arrow to honor the slayer of Python but o
n our heroine is a pigeon-feather-dyed red, bisects the knot and completes the apollo.

  But we are confused. Is our heroine not a lady? Are we to go through this novel in the company of some commonplace Sunderland slut—not invited to any fancy parties, fed on boiled potatoes and beer when we might, in some other novel, have prawns and champagne? You said she has the pallor of a lady, wears her hair after the fashion of the day. How is she dressed, pray tell? By her clothes, surely we will know her.

  Her dress is blue. How descriptive. But of what color blue?

  Yes, of course in better years we too attended spectacles where nymphs and water sprites yearned for mortal men, where mermaids brushed their hair and admired themselves in flashing mirrors. You would have us picture, then, the backdrop of that theatrical Sea: the billows of cyan silk, the azure pasteboard waves, the ultramarine netting, tangled with sea horses and starfishes, flung to represent an aquatic paradise. We will close our eyes and do as you command. Ah, how cool they look while we sweat in the theatre of a hot summer’s night, spying on their underwater world with its hierarchy and despot king and chorus of rebellious daughters; a world so rich and foreign, yet so happily fraught with the politics of our own. Now, to that cool, blinding blue, we are to add the color of our play’s artificial sky, appreciating the scene painter’s ability to reach back into his childhood and extract the extinct shade of cerulean that floated over the River Wear before the factories were built. Yes, we are old enough to remember that color. We are old enough, certainly, to remember a good many other things besides.

  To the complex blue body of her dress, you would have us add wide-blown gigot sleeves swelling from bare shoulders and a matching belt cinched at her narrow waist, creating the inverted-triangle look so popular among fashionable women of today. Festoon the entirety with tulle and white bouffant in three puffy tiers from knee to ankle-length hem. Tie her up with a handful of bows down the bodice. She is a sumptuous, fantastical wedding cake. A walking confection. A tasty morsel. And yet, still you hesitate. Certainly no one other than the finest lady might afford such a singular dress. So what is wrong?