The Dress Lodger Read online

  “Have you anyone to help you?” he asks.

  “My husband.” Gustine looks around the empty room. Where the hell is he? Mag Scurr has not seen the gentleman who accompanied her since Dr. Clanny first called from the back. What sort of husband leaves his wife to cry on the shoulder of a stranger, when he has two capable ones himself? What honest husband would even think to bring a woman to a place like this?

  “My husband is driving our carriage around,” Gustine says.

  “I’ll send for the constables and let them decide the matter,” Mag says firmly.

  “We have no need of the constables, Mrs. Scurr,” Clanny says, stroking Gustine’s damp blonde hair more confidently now. “Let them get on with the business of arresting the thieves and prostitutes of this city. I’ll release this body upon my own authority.” With a little reluctance, he detaches Gustine from his frock coat and offers her a clean linen handkerchief. As Gustine gratefully blows her nose, Dr. Clanny reaches for the death certificate he was drafting when she arrived and dips his pen in ink. “What was your father’s name?”

  His name? Gustine looks over at the corpse. Mag Scurr has discreetly positioned his hands over his private parts; stiff, swollen, filled-with-cold-black-swamp-water fingers and two huge padded thumbs eclipse whatever he might have had down there. But look at that hideous tattoo. Jack Crawford, British Hero, with his legs wrapped around a thick black pole. If Gustine knows anything about men, she knows what an oversized tattoo means.

  “Dick Liss,” Gustine says without even the shadow of a smirk. Dr. Clanny dutifully writes it down.

  Henry has made four trips to his rig and back, determined each time to abandon Gustine to her fate. Of all the bloody luck, to nearly run headfirst into his uncle Clanny. To have his respected uncle learn how he spends his time—cavorting with prostitutes and sniffing around back alleys for corpses like a pig after slop. What if Audrey found out? He paces feverishly up and down the wet, cobbled street. He must have been mad to put his school, his reputation, the reputation of his innocent fiancée in Gustine’s filthy hands.

  Calm down, my boy, calm down. Lean your head against the wall, take a deep breath. Henry closes his eyes and tries to still his furious, unreformed heart. This pounding monster in my breast is nothing but an organ; knowable, controllable. Look, now I enter the great venous system bound for the right auricle of the heart. I move to the ventricle, from the ventricle to the lungs, from the lungs to the left side of the heart, and from thence to the general arterial system to be elastically sped through the entire body. Uncle Clanny did not see me, he thinks, flushing his panic down a million tiny capillaries until it is so broadcast and attenuated it is easily absorbed. Gustine will not betray me. All will be well.

  That is better, he thinks after a few minutes, feeling his agitation drain until he is calm enough to crave a cigarette. He strikes a friction match and cups it around the hand-rolled tobacco paper he’s removed from the case Audrey gave him as an engagement present. It is awkward with his bandaged hands; his fingers are bound tightly together like flippers, and twice he drops the match. He flings the cigarette to the ground and unwraps his left hand, unfurling a long white streamer of gauze. His palm is pink and tender, but the blisters healed weeks ago. He’d only continued to wrap his hands as a precaution, and now, he realizes, as an excuse. If he could not hold the scalpel, he could not cut. If he could not cut, he would have no need of a body. Impatiently, he releases his other hand from its soft prison. Tonight, perhaps. Tonight will decide it.

  He lights another cigarette, leans against the wall, and slowly smokes it. He can only imagine what Gustine is saying to his uncle Clanny. He knows he should have turned to his uncle months ago, when the trouble first began, but he could not bear to do it. Uncle Clanny has been so generous already, and Henry is not even his flesh and blood. He is Dr. Clanny’s wife’s sister’s son, the fearful, introverted only child of a widowed mother. He wants—no, he needs—to prove to his uncle (and to Audrey and to all of Sunderland) that he can make it without assistance. He wants to prove it so badly, he has thrown in his lot with this bold, blue prostitute. She is in there now, doing what he was not man enough to do.

  He extinguishes his cigarette and flexes his restored hands. Henry is a little vain of his tapered fingers, long and white like the winter-stripped limbs of a birch tree. He stretches them out before him and peers at Sunderland through their thicket. On the bank, severed fish heads gape at the muddy feral cats who snatch them up and streak away. Stunted sea crabs pick at what the cats leave behind. Our fog, finger-proud itself, curls upstream, filching the cooking fires of poor beggar families along the piers. It is an accomplished thief, this fog, for stray cats, derricks, and even entire houses disappear as it moves past. Henry watches the fog’s progress up and around Crach Rock, where the Wear makes a sharp bend and widens into the tidal harbour. If he could see far enough, he’d spy a pug-faced little boy leaving the Life Boat up there on Pottery Bank, dragging behind him a short, suety sort of woman. It would be Mag’s boy he sees, who spent his evening shaking the coattails of every labourer and labourer’s wife in the crowded Life Boat pub, doggedly reciting his description, until at last he was passed on to an angry, barely sober laundrywoman. She’d spent a full hour at the Life Boat tap, railing against her no-count Irish drunk of a husband who’d not come home with his paycheck again; probably out with his mate Jack Crawford, Hero of Nothing-but-Sots as far as she was concerned, drinking himself bloody stupid; and here she was, having to go from bar to bar to search him out, and when she found him, by God, she would bite that damned tattoo right off and spit it back in his face.

  A very different laundrywoman Henry would see leaving the bar. Her eyes are red and her nose is pinched and her jiggling arms, which only half an hour before were aching for a melee, hang limply at her sides. The gin she drank in retaliation for her husband’s beering has up and gone, leaving her with a dull ache behind her plain, wide face. She did not even kiss him good-bye this morning when he left for another fruitless day at the docks. She even begrudged making his lunch.

  But Henry cannot see that far; in fact, he has dropped his hands and shrunk back into the shadows of Mag Scurr’s establishment. The door bangs open beside him and his uncle Clanny steps out.

  What has she done to him? Henry wonders. His uncle, adjusting his hat, buttoning his coat, is humming a little tune. He has a noticeable bounce in his usually decorous walk, and an adolescent’s smile on his respectable face. His uncle trots up steep Long Bank, headed back toward the center of town. Henry does not move until he sees his uncle tip his hat to a stout lady and a little boy, out very late, and disappear around the corner onto High Street.

  He jumps when Gustine puts her hand on his shoulder.

  “I got him,” she says.

  She got him. By God, they’ve succeeded! Now that it is real, Henry’s mind races through the long night before him—getting the body home, preparing it, making the first cut before daybreak. His students are probably asleep by now, but he will wake them with this glorious body. So much to do! He glances down at brave Gustine, who is watching him with that searching look on her pointed, serious face. He can’t help himself—he pulls her to him and hugs her tight.

  She is so small in his arms, he can feel each catlike rib under its silk. She is so frail, and as cool as if she’d taken the blue of her dress into her very bloodstream. I don’t care if she tries to blackmail me, he thinks. I am reborn tonight.

  “Dr. Chiver,” asks Gustine, murmuring against his chest. “Do you study a man from the inside or the outside?”

  “Both,” replies Henry.

  “Do you study all of the inside?” she asks, inching her cheek across his chest, searching out the thing she suspected but could not prove. I was right, thinks Gustine. Oh God, I was right.

  “Yes,” says he.

  “The heart?”

  “I’m especially interested in the heart,” replies Henry, smiling at her childish
understanding of anatomy science. He releases her and takes a step away.

  “I should bring the rig around,” he says. “Wait here.”

  Gustine watches Henry sprint around the corner to where he left his horses and carriage tied up. John Robinson was wrong about Gustine—she does not have a crush on Henry Chiver, though she did feel her whole body go soft when she felt that miraculous spot. No, the young girl feels something far stronger for the doctor, something that would make Henry’s blood run cold if he even suspected it. She thinks of him as something like her own personal god, and as she is barely acquainted with the one in Heaven, lays all her offerings at his very mortal feet. You see, that night a month ago, when she discovered him furiously washing his hands, blistering and singing on laudanum under the public water pump, Gustine took the time to undress him. Before he even saw her, she had slipped off his pants and found beneath them strong, hairy legs branching off from a half-erect, square-dealing penis. Without his being aware, she’d lifted away his white-powdered jacket, checked his arms for twists and scars, crept up his spine, and burrowed beneath his hair. Gustine had stood back, still not showing herself, and undone each delicate ivory button of his bloodstained shirt, peeling the sheer cotton from his shoulders, inching it down his biceps, letting it drop around his waist, as the final button pulled away from the last straining slit. And there, between the second and third fastenings, before she even knew his name, Gustine had discovered the key to Dr. Henry Chiver. Tonight she confirmed it. In that moment by the pump, she saw neither his hands nor his face, noticed not whether he seemed kind or mean; all parts of him retreated except for the key: that shadow in his chest, the sunken hollow beauty of it. They are a fit, she said to herself. This is the one to save us.

  She hears horses’ hooves clatter on the pavement behind her and she knows he is returning. She is not prepared for the headlights of his carriage, with their wicks turned up to cut through the fog, and as they swing around the corner, their sudden intensity momentarily blinds her. When her sight returns, Gustine can hardly believe what she sees coming toward her, trailing thick black mud across the quay like some antediluvian creature just born from the river. It is the old woman advancing on her, her dress steeped in mud, her square-toed boots mud-caked, even her hair dripping mud as if she had burrowed for miles underground only to surface in the glare of Henry’s lantern, a brown pupil born from a blinding Eye.

  False blue rat. To run so far away.

  When Henry reins in his horses and calls softly for Gustine, he cannot find her anywhere. He gets out and looks around the corner, walks down to the water, even searches through the bulging racks of clothes in Mag’s shop, before giving up and finally carrying away the dead body Gustine found for him. Five minutes after he has gone, the bell jangles at Mag’s front door. She is restacking the pile of framed Wearmouth Bridges that careless husband knocked over with the stiff corpse’s legs.

  “Who is it?” she asks, thinking, Damn him, what does he want now?

  “It’s me, Ma!” Mag’s boy shouts through the wood. “I found the lady. The wife of the tattoo.”

  Mag opens the door on a thick-waisted woman stuffed like a sausage into a pea green dress. Her sleeves are rolled down over chapped red arms, her mobcap flops tiredly, her face, pitted and sallow, tells Mag everything she needs to know.

  The laundrywoman says, “I’ve come to take my husband home.” She chokes on her words, but it is Mag who wants to cry.

  IV

  9 MILL STREET

  Mike’s got a frog.

  It’s beneath his talents, Whilky knows, but goddamn it, he can’t stand that ribbut, ribbut all bloody night long. Rats he could live with; they steal, they smell, but at least they let a man sleep of an evening. Frogs, though. Christ, they bring their slimy omens down upon a household and give you warts as if the ones you have aren’t bad enough. God damn them, thinks Whilky, pulling the rubbery green legs from between Mike’s sharp teeth. Let go!

  “I’ve got one too, Da!”

  Now Pink’s got a frog. What did he do to deserve this? His six-year-old daughter skittering about the house on all fours, biting after filthy creatures. She looks up at him with her glittering black, pink-rimmed eyes, reptilian-scaly from years of infection, her pink-tipped nose twitching over the flailing frog in her mouth. It’s no occupation for a champion ferret, let alone a little girl.

  “Drop that, you nit,” roars Whilky, and the little girl reluctantly complies. The long white ferret, seeing his chance, pounces on the frog Pink dropped and bites it in half.

  “Da! Look!”

  “Shut up, the both of you!”

  As if a man don’t have enough on his mind without the dual plagues of vermin and stupidity. He doesn’t know what to do with Pink. She is too daft to be sent out to work, yet she is too fanciful for him to bear having at home. He’d hoped setting her to tend the baby would settle her down, but it’s only made her more intent on playing the ferret. Just look at her: down on her hands and knees, sniffing the air alongside Mike. He stretches out his arm to his prize pet and Mike scampers up on tiny feet, curling himself around Whilky’s neck. Pink, watching jealously, pretends to lick her fur.

  Whilky Robinson, perched on his stool before the fire, resplendent in luxurious weasel collar, laced tight with watch fobs and jangling with hocked medals, surveys with royal displeasure his little kingdom here on Mill Street. Our ruler is not so fair of face as the Plantagenets, nor does he turn so fine a calf as the Stuarts, no, sitting with his left gouty leg thrust out before him, brooding upon his subjects (Pink, his daughter; Eye, his faithful retainer); listening to his thirty lords and ladies shuffle about upstairs preparing for their day’s employment, he resembles no one more closely than a burdened, pensive Henry the Eighth. He scratches his expansive belly, over which is stretched a bottle green coat giving at the armseyes. He rests his elbow on the leg of his soiled tan knee breeches that trail off into once-white stockings that terminate in scuffed oxblood leather shoes. His carroty red hair, growing behind his ears and down the back of his neck without troubling itself about the rest of his head, curls into sweaty little question marks at the nape. His brow is knit, his countenance stormy. What is to be done about this infestation?

  That it’s come to this, thinks he. Even Eye, methodically brushing Gustine’s bit of blue frippery, has frogs worrying her thick ankles. She pays them no mind, intent as she is on her work, but our ruler is a sensitive man, and frets over the welfare of those entrusted to his care. He wants only the best for his boarders. Why, just look how he recently handled the windows. Whilky knew the view from his second story overlooking the slaughterhouse was troubling to some of his tenderhearted tenants, so without a word to anyone, he took it upon himself personally to board up all the offending windows. But then he got to thinking—how unfair it would be for him, who spends most of his day on the first floor, to have fresh air when his tenants had none. That might cause bad blood on Mill Street, and if nothing else, his is a harmonious household. To keep the peace, Whilky unselfishly boarded up the windows on the first floor as well, and if, in the process, he managed to save the window tax this bloodthirsty government has leveled on each and every goddamned pane of glass in Britain, well, so be it. His tenants come first.

  So what that from the outside 9 Mill Street sags a bit along the roof, crumbles a bit along the foundation, and like a tenemental Oedipus, is blinded with cheap nails driven into mouldering shutters? So what that it appears from the outside a thoroughly condemned back alley rookery? We all know it is the inside that counts. Inside Whilky keeps a tip-top house. Mike the ferret is a championship ratter, and 9 Mill Street is one of the few boardinghouses in the East End completely (or as near to complete as an industrious ferret can make it) rat-free. It is, after its master’s taste, cheerfully and tastefully decorated. The main room sports a majestic gilt-framed Wearmouth Bridge (East View) over the long table against the right-hand wall. A pastoral likeness of Dick Turpin, cutpurse, hang
s to the left of it; Sunderland’s own Jack Crawford, hero of Camperdown, hangs to the right. The fireplace takes up most of the back wall, where, lined up on its mantel in order of height, sit tasteful mementos of Mike’s exploits in the ratting ring, trophies for besting some of the most ferocious terriers in Sunderland, and a few more Wearmouth Bridges. Whilky has a second East View transferred onto a spittoon and a Wearmouth West View 25-Year Commemorative stamped onto a milk pitcher. Beneath the mantel, he makes sure, the fire always roars. Our landlord is not cheap with his coal and, with no windows to open, the house is snug sometimes to the point of tropicality. The steaming laundry of his thirty tenants completes the interior decoration; stockings and soiled underwear dangle from pins and Mike the ferret enjoys nothing more when rat-killing is slow than to vault up a lodger’s plaid shawl and pad along the clothesline.

  But what gains such careful decoration if only to be spoiled by the strewn carcasses of frogs? Whilky has been sweeping up three dozen a day; mangled by Mike, stomped upon by Eye, gummed by his zealous daughter Pink. It is to drive us mad, thinks our landlord, leaning forward so as not to scorch his august back. Another facet in the Grand Plot that began with this summer’s “census,” during which the frog eggs were insinuated, and which will culminate in this so-called cholera morbus they’ve imported to eliminate us all. Did they honestly think we wouldn’t catch on?

  “Da? Coffee?”

  Whilky nods abstractedly to Pink as she wrestles the heavy coffeepot onto the fireplace trivet. The price of a cup is included in the night’s rent, but if the establishment occasionally forgets to put it on before the first lodgers are tramping downstairs, is it the establishment’s fault they don’t have time to drink it? The tin clock on the wall is striking four-thirty. It is Monday morning, most have to be at work by five, but spoiled by Sunday’s lolling, they barely leave themselves time to get there.