The Dress Lodger Read online

  She seems small.

  Is that all? Dainty is the fashion, my friend. Long gone is the tall, lithe, neo-Grecian look made popular by Boney and his Court in France. Give us the fantasy of the Romantics, frothy faux shepherdess frocks and Oriental accessories! We are a global power, and yet we are pastoral! We have fought in Egypt, we are marching across India; we have the technology to replicate the entire world in our clothing, and we yearn for a simpler time. Anyone would look small against such an empire. But stop, you say. If we are to tap you for a description of our heroine, we must trust your evaluation. Daintiness is bred and daintiness is manufactured. This girl—for surely she can be no more than sixteen—has had daintiness thrust upon her. She seems to you stunted and underdeveloped beneath that dress; her shoulders are painfully thin and her belt hangs loosely at the waist. Her shoes, the universal giveaway of poverty, peek out from under the skirt, revealing themselves as mud-spattered, worn-heeled work boots.

  Is it possible? Could we be mistaken in our choice of heroines? Perhaps we got the date wrong, or the address, or even the century. Is there no one behind her—one of her betters perhaps, coming to rescue our book from certain dullness? Look again, dear friend, leave the ticket booth and just peer around the corner to make sure we have not overlooked someone.

  Why do you draw back? What? What is it there in the shadows you see?

  Now you are rushing back to the theatre. Now you claim your duty is done? We have given you the opportunity to participate in our story, and you choose instead to hide yourself among the mass of anonymous theatregoers eating sandwiches from dirty handkerchiefs, pulling the corks from bottles of beer with their round yellow teeth. What is her name at least? Ask her name! But now the lights are come up, the first disoriented snow leopard bounds on stage decked in an alchemist’s cape and black cone hat; and you, dear matchstick painter, for we can see you hesitating in the aisle, are wrestling with yourself. It is Saturday night. You only wanted to see some chats savants, you wanted nothing to do with this infernal business. But you knew her, didn’t you? We could tell from your stricken face when you peered into the shadows, you recognized that girl. What is her name?

  A lioness teeters on her back paws wearing a mortarboard. A gray tabby, mangy and naked, runs figure eights through her unsteady legs, and the crowd roars.

  Gustine. Her name is Gustine.

  Thank you, kind matchstick painter. We have a certain sight, you know, but the fact is, we don’t always trust it for details. It’s a strange ability we have that allows us to see more clearly those who are closer to us, who perhaps are only a few weeks or a few months separated in time. Like for instance you. Or the turnip-fleshed woman who is trailing our heroine. The one you pulled back from in the dark. Her we see quite clearly, though perhaps she appeared to you as only a malevolent shadow along the ground.

  In front of us, Gustine and her shadow turn left onto High Street.

  A greasy drizzle has picked up, slicking cobblestones already slippery with fallen oak leaves. She heads away from the theatre toward dark linen and woolen shops, bakeries, booksellers and stationers shut up tight against the raw night. Hackney cabs clatter by, not pausing to see why a respectably dressed woman might be walking alone in a closed neighborhood without a cloak or umbrella at half past nine at night. A few merchants, reluctant to go home and face another night of boiled onions and Bible lessons, linger over their locks, peering into their dark windows as though sure of having forgotten something very important. They catch a glimpse of her, reflected by gaslight in their plate glass, and stay just a little longer, to watch and wish that one night, they might be coming out at exactly the moment she passes by, and might, by accident, brush against her tight hot snatch. Gustine lifts her skirt and shakes a frog loose from the hem.

  People are saying this explosion of river frogs is due to an atmospheric disturbance, the same that brought the lightning storms and unseasonably warm weather even through October. They say that cholera is certain to follow in its wake. Gustine looks up to where the atmosphere is supposed to be. She wonders if one night it will merely begin to rain cholera. She wonders if cholera could even make it through the heavy gray clouds on this moonless sky begot by Sunderland’s hardworking chimneys.

  Behind Gustine her shadow pauses, and it too cocks an eye at the sky.

  “Damn it!” Gustine turns and yells at the creature behind her. “Will you please just sod off?”

  The girl gathers her dress and sprints away down High Street. She takes a right and then a left and then another right, trying her best to shake the old woman who follows her every night. The old bitch who dogs her every bloody step. Truly, business is bad enough with the Quarantine. The last thing she needs is that hag on her tail.

  The shadow does not run after her, for shadows need never run; they are, by their very nature, inseparably, inexorably pulled along in the wake of their objects. They do not think, they do not argue. They never worry they will be lost or shaken. A shadow cannot be paid off or given the slip like some commonplace retainer; it is with you from the hour of your birth to the day of your death and beyond, following you even where no one else will, into the wooden box as they hammer down the lid.

  Wet blue rat.

  The old woman walks with her head down as though scenting prey, and yet, she has almost no sense of smell, nor of taste, and she is so old she can barely hear. The rain has plastered her gray hair to her cheeks like whiskers, but she doesn’t feel it. She walks with a bent head studying her own shoes, confident they will take her where she needs to go, and she walks quickly for a woman her age—which, depending on who you ask, is anywhere from sixty to eighty-three. She wears a loose-fitting brown wool dress with a dirty handkerchief tied over the bosom and her hair pulled back in that old-fashioned no-style style. Nothing about her, from her slightly hunched back to her hairy ape arms, would distinguish her from any other old woman in the East End—until you looked into her slack-skinned turnip-colored face. With a single glance you would realize what makes this abandoned shadow so assuredly calm and confident. What keeps Gustine afraid. What made poor matchstick painter pull back in horror outside the cheap theatre. You would see the shadow has an Eye.

  Not eyes, mind you, but an Eye: a single gray carbuncle that has, over the years, siphoned from her other four senses every bit of potency, redirected the diffuse sensations of sound and touch and even smell straight forward into a single supreme ability; into an Eye so aware, so magnified it never tires, needs no sleep, misses nothing. No one may steal an apple but the Eye sees it. No one may pick his nose or slap his wife or feed his dog under the table, but that it is noted. How happy Jeremy Bentham would be to discover a living, breathing Panopticon moving through Sunderland’s East End, kicking aside squabbling cats, splashing through black puddles of human waste and rotting food, its formidable sight turned upon a single prisoner only—that pretty young girl laced inside her bright blue dress.

  The Eye takes in the rain eddying between the uneven cobblestones of High Street, a lone green frog trapped on an island of brick, afraid to hop across the rushing gutter, and the slimy vegetable tops left over from the abandoned market closed two hours early because of the bad weather. She can detect the slightest disturbance in the puddles made by the mad splashing of Gustine’s boots as she ran away.

  Fast rat. Blue rat.

  People have told a hundred different stories about how the shadow lost her other eye. Only the oldest in town ever remembered her having a matched gray set instead of that twisted flap of purple skin to the left side of her nose, and they are all dead now. Now people who weren’t even born when she was grown imagine that her left eye was put out by a jealous boyfriend after he caught her looking at another man. Those less romantic say she caught an ember in the face during the New Theatre fire of 1781, but that it served her right for being there so late at night. People used to believe she sold her eye to the Devil for a bottle of gin, but now the dominant theory is that she had it
gored out by a wild pig while making water on the town moor. No one knows for certain how she came to be the Eye, no one but herself, and she hasn’t spoken in so long, most people suppose she doesn’t know how.

  All that is known of this woman—called Eyeball or Evil Eye or Gray Sister by boys who have read their Homer, but mostly called just plain Eye—is that she still lives at 9 Mill Street as she has since before the building was erected, and as she probably will long after it collapses around her; that her landlord suffers her to stay so long as she follows his expensive dress, making sure the girl inside does not steal it or pawn it; and that the night has never fallen these past two years which has not found the pair together—girl and her shadow, the dress and the Eye—plying the streets of Sunderland. All the other rumours, such as her having sold the recipe for human meat pies to the body snatchers Burke and Hare, or her being responsible for the Methodist Meeting House Panic back in ’75 when all those children were crushed … well, that is nothing but idle gossip and everyone knows it.

  Up ahead, Gustine slows down when she reaches the intersection of High and Bridge Streets. Gaslights follow one another on evenly spaced blocks, the lanes widen into avenues the farther west she pushes. Since the building of the great Wearmouth Bridge thirty-five years ago, the geographic center of the city has pushed west to meet it; not long ago this was all pastureland—now, it is booming with shops under construction. Men walking over the bridge from Monkwearmouth, their faces hidden by umbrellas, measure her carefully. Is she what she seems or merely someone’s reckless younger sister caught in the rain without carfare? A paunchy mustachioed man in a green plaid woolen suit slows down and catches her eye.

  “Are you lost?” he asks.

  “I wonder, sir,” replies Gustine with an apologetic smile. “Can you tell me the way to Silver Street?”

  “Ach, you’re far away from there,” he says. “That’s the other way, back in the East End.”

  “Oh,” says Gustine, looking distressed.

  “Are you certain of the address, miss?” The gentleman clears his throat, and finds his cheeks growing hot. “Tha’s a rough part of town.”

  “Is it?” asks Gustine, now mightily distressed.

  “Oh yes, miss.”

  “My brother,” she falters. “My brother’s friends are having a birthday party for him there at ten o’clock. I told them I was usually in bed by ten o’clock; we have church tomorrow, you know. But they insisted I come.”

  The man in green plaid peeks at his watch and glances up at the threatening sky. The rain is falling harder now and the pretty miss is without an umbrella. He should offer to walk her. Still, he too has somewhere to be. There’s this new show in town featuring some awfully smart cats—he read about it in the newspaper—if he’s not already too late.

  “I’m sorry for troubling you,” Gustine says, sensing his confusion. “Thank you for your help.”

  She turns right and begins walking down toward the dark riverbank.

  “Miss!” shouts Green-plaid. “You are going the wrong way!”

  She obviously does not hear him, for she appears to speed up. How can she not know she is about to walk straight down into the river? Green-plaid gives chase and catches up to her at the stone pilings, in the shadow of the great Wearmouth Bridge.

  Every town in England is famous for something, whether it is a cathedral or a ghost or a blackberry jam recipe, and in 1796, a good twenty years before Gustine was born and thirty-five years before Sunderland became more famous as the first town in Britain stricken with cholera, we were drunk with love for our new cast-iron extension bridge, the longest and without a doubt the highest of its kind you’ll find in all of England. Our town had been getting by since the days of the Venerable Bede, who swore his vows at Saint Peter’s over in Monkwearmouth, but not until Napoleon reared his head had we come into our own. Suddenly all of England was on alert; ships were needed for the navy and men were needed to build them. In a matter of years Sunderland became the undisputed Queen of Shipyards—the river was clogged with every kind of ship, from worthy vessels to shod-dily slapped together carracks destined to go down for insurance money. Our Sunderland keelmen shoveled coal from Newcastle and Durham onto barges that would circulate it among the machines of the new Industrial Age. Hammers bounced off pliant timber; drying hemp, festooned on the wooden skirders of Rope Walk, perfumed the still wealthy East End of town. The town sprang up on both sides of the Wear: in Sunderland proper, bounded by rich Bishopwearmouth, and in Monkwearmouth, on the other side where the natural docks cut in at Potato Garth. Surely, a bridge was needed—a spectacular modern bridge, for a booming, prosperous town. It took an Act of Parliament and a highly clever engineer to erect the 240-foot-long, 80-foot-high cast-iron voussoir bridge, but now every child in Sunder-land, including Gustine, can recite the famous pledge buried inside the foundation stone: “At that time when the mad fury of the French citizens, dictating acts of extreme depravity, disturbed the peace of Europe with an iron war; we the people of Sunderland, aiming at worthier purposes, hath resolved to join the steep and craggy shores of the River Wear, with an iron bridge.”

  Beneath the great Wearmouth Bridge, the man in the green plaid suit is pushing Gustine’s pretty blue dress up around her neck and fumbling with his trousers.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this,” he is saying. “It won’t take a minute.”

  “Please don’t,” Gustine whispers, halfheartedly pushing him away. “I never have.”

  “You’re a flighty little thing. It’s bound to happen sooner or later.” He pulls back the skin of his prick and jabs about her thighs. Behind him, the bottle-work furnaces fire; along the bank, the black, dead-fish sewer stink rises on the fog. He finds his mark and Gustine turns her head to watch the river lazily carry downstream a bloated sheep, the poor thing bobbing like someone’s comfortable, upended ottoman, dead of the scrapie.

  When he’s done, he shakes his cock and wipes it on his linen handkerchief.

  “C’mon,” he says, “I’ll walk you to Silver Street.”

  “I don’t need to go to Silver Street,” she says.

  “Aw, come on now,” he whines. “Don’t be like that.”

  “I just need you to pay me so I can be on my way.”

  “I knew it!” Green-plaid spits and kicks the ground. “You haven’t gone an’ given me a disease, have you?”

  “Pay up,” she says, holding out her hand. “I’m not a charity.”

  “All dressed up like a lady,” the man snaps, and feels in his trousers for his purse. “A person can’t even tell who’s who anymore.”

  Observe, friends, how a man of honor conducts his business transactions. If Gustine had came into his accounting office, say, and asked for an advance of an equally small sum as she now demands, Green-plaid with great gallantry would have counted it out, dropped each shiny penny into her palm, and sent her off with a pleasant little wink. He loves helping out pretty women, and if the door is shut and she doesn’t mind a quick feel-up, well, he loves that, too, and has been known on occasion to count out an extra penny from his private pocketbook. But when a woman demands honest remuneration for an honest job performed, how does he then behave? Observe: he extends two dull coins churlishly, makes Gustine reach for them, and when she is off-balance, gives her a furious push that sends her reeling down the riverbank.

  “I’ll not be taken advantage of, you little slut!” he yells, scampering up the hill, soiling his green plaid knees each time he slips on the muddy slope. Damn these whores. All dressed and perfumed. How is a man supposed to know? He has almost made it to the road when a heavy shadow falls across his neck and stops him cold.

  Sad, stupid rat to think he could escape the Eye. She saw plaid rat sink his teeth into blue rat’s neck, mount her, and tear at her fur while he furiously humped himself dry. Now he scurries away, back to his hole. Bad rat, thinks Eye. To run away.

  The red flames of the furnaces hellishly light her face. Know, rat,
she is warden and guard. She watches the dress. She watches herself grab you around the throat and shake you until you surrender your rat-skin purse. From it she takes four shillings, the dress’s fee, no more, no less, and tosses the rest back to you. She watches you scamper up the hill, choking and coughing, humiliated, crying for the constable, for any bloody cop, goddammit, and she sees, just as surely, there is not one to hear you for miles.

  Eye walks heavily down the bank. She spies a puddle of blue under the bridge, half in the water, half in the black mud. The dress is dirty. Their landlord won’t like that. When she gets a little closer, she sees the blue rat is not hurt. She is staring intently at something laid out beside her.

  A dead rat, about six feet tall, wearing a wool cap, brown trousers, and a mud-stained white shirt. His wide sightless eyes are turned upstream, watching for ships trapped on the far side of Quarantine.

  “Look what I found!” Gustine leaps up, clapping her hands. “Let’s go tell Henry!”

  II

  HENRY

  Henry says, though perhaps it’s not strictly true, that he frequents the cramped pub on narrow Union Lane for no better reason than its name. Not long after he came to town, he accompanied his uncle, our illustrious Dr. William Reid Clanny, on a scarletina fever case. When they arrived at the flat, they found the young girl tossing in a caul of red rash upon a filthy bed she shared with four other siblings ranging in age from six to fourteen. Their parents and the youngest child slept on flea-infested ticking in the same claustrophobic room; only the day before the mother had given birth and was too weak to stand up. The walls, not having been whitewashed in years, were furred with soot from the clogged fireplace. They had no cupboards in which to store their food, so a month’s supply of rotting potatoes was stashed under the bed. At least they have a floor, Clanny had whispered to his nephew; many here in Sunderland sleep on cold, pestilent earth.