Date: 1994-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Historical; Horror; Romance; Fantasy; Mystery
Description: Before the sweet delight of Chocolat , before the heady concoction that is Blackberry Wine , and before the tart pleasures of Five Quarters of the Orange , bestselling author Joanne Harris wrote Sleep, Pale Sister -- a gothic tourde-force that recalls the powerfully dark sensibility of her novel Holy Fools. Originally published in 1994 -- and never before available in the United States -- Sleep, Pale Sister is a hypnotically atmospheric story set in nineteenth century London. When puritanical artist Henry Chester sees delicate child beauty Effie, he makes her his favorite model and, before lon
Publisher: Harper Collins

Sleep, Pale Sister

Joanne Harris

To Kevin, again

Contents

Introduction

The Hermit

1

Don’t look at me that way—I can’t bear it!…

The Star

2

‘This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye…

3

She lost our child, of course. Nursed by laudanum, she…

The Nine of Swords

4

I was ill for several weeks; the wintry weather hindered…

5

She’s lying, you know. I was never unkind to her,…

The Knave of Coins

6

Knave of Hearts, dear fellow, of Hearts. Kindly give me…

7

As the door opened and I saw him for the…

8

I never liked Moses Harper. A thoroughly dangerous and calculating…

9

For two weeks I was content to watch him and…

10

I’d been following her for nearly a week before I…

11

I was lucky that Henry was late home; it had…

12

I stopped at my club, the Cocoa Tree, for a…

13

You see, she needed me. Call me a villain if…

The High Priestess

14

It was hot inside the tent and what light there…

15

I was beginning to become impatient; she had been in…

16

I could tell that Mose was annoyed that we had…

17

The bitch. The bitch! Bitches, both of them. As I…

18

Before I met Mose I never knew how bleak my…

The Moon

19

I know, I know. I was deliberately cruel. And I…

20

Somehow I seemed to recognize the room. As I drifted,…

21

It was almost dawn when I reached Cromwell Square and…

22

I remember her cool, strong hand against my hair. Her…

23

I suppose a century ago they would have called me…

24

It was an accident, I tell you. I never meant…

25

I have little recollection of returning to Cromwell Square: it…

26

I didn’t see Effie the next day and, to tell…

27

I knew he would come: his greed and selfishness were…

28

I spent my entire day at the studio working on…

Change

29

Five days.

30

The clock on the mantelpiece said a quarter past eleven.

31

It’s a lie: I don’t dream. There are people who…

32

At first I was furious.

33

I knew he’d come back. I’d seen him watching us…

34

Strange, how time can fold in upon itself like linen…

35

When I awoke, the sunlight was streaming through the open…

36

Poor Mose! And poor Effie. I suppose I should have…

37

I saw less of my wife that week than ever…

38

We were alone together, quite alone as Henry rattled about…

39

Four weeks passed with the aching slowness of those summer…

The Ace of Swords

40

They came together now, like ghostly twins, their faces merging…

41

After that confrontation, my wife was the enemy: a soft…

42

As soon as I saw him leave Marta’s room and…

43

You have to understand that I was furious. I had…

44

I could not go home to Cromwell Square. The thought…

45

The more I thought about it, the more uneasy I…

The Two of Cups

46

Imagine a snowflake floating down a deep well. Imagine a…

47

She was lying on the bed with her hair loose,…

48

Behind the wall of the cemetery and the endless, exquisite…

49

Cursing inwardly, I tried to keep my voice soft and…

50

For a time beyond time there was nothing. I was…

51

As I watched Henry disappear along the High Street I…

52

Silence shrouded me as I made my way slowly back…

53

All right, all right. I had more than a couple…

54

Tabby came back from visiting her family early on the…

55

I awoke to the sound of bells: great clanging, discordant…

56

My euphoria lasted until I reached Cromwell Square. Then I…

57

It wasn’t till after seven that I decided to pay…

58

When he had gone, I paced the hall in a…

59

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how money disappears? I paid my…

60

From the moment I saw the opened present underneath the…

61

The snow began to fall as I left Henry’s studio.

62

A soft current bore me to a silent world of…

The Hanged Man

63

I was between the rapacious thighs of my latest inamorata…

64

You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? I can smell that…

65

It was Effie all right. They took me to identify…

Death

Epilogue

The black angel stirs restlessly and I look at the…

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Joanne Harris

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Manuscript, from the estate of Henry Paul Chester January, 1881

As I look at my name and the letters which follow it I am filled with a vast blankness. As if this Henry Chester, painter, twice exhibited at the Royal Academy, were not myself but some ill-defined figment of somebody’s imagination, the cork to a bottle containing a genie of delicate malevolence that permeates my being and launches me into a realm of perilous adventure, in search of the pale, terrified ghost of myself.

The name of the genie is chloral, that dark companion of my sleeping hours, a tender bedfellow now grown spiteful. Yet we have been wedded too long now for separation, the genie and I. Together we will write this narrative, but I have so little time! Already, as the last shreds of daylight fall from the horizon, I seem to hear the wings of the black angel in the darkest corner of the room. She is patient, but not infinitely so.

God, that most exquisite of torturers, will deign to give me a little time to write the tale which I shall take with me to my cold cell under the earth—no colder, surely, than this corpse I inhabit, this wilderness of the soul. Oh, He is a jealous God: pitiless as only immortals can be, and when I cried out for Him in my filth and suffering He smiled and replied in the words He gave to Moses from the burning bush: I Am That I Am. His gaze is without compassion, without tenderness. Within it I see no promise of redemption, no threat of punishment; only a vast indifference, promising nothing but oblivion. But how I long for it! To melt into the earth, so that even that all-seeing gaze could not find me…and yet the infant within me cries at the dark, and my poor, crippled body screams out for time…A little more time, one more tale, one more game.

And the black angel lays her scythe by the door and sits beside me for a final hand of cards.

I should never write after dark. At night, words become false, troubling; and yet, it is at night that words have the most power. Scheherazade chose the night to weave her thousand and one stories, each one a door into which time and time again she slips with Death at her heels like an angry wolf. She knew the power of words. If I had not passed longing for the ideal woman, I should have gone in search of Scheherazade; she is tall and slim, with skin the colour of China tea. Her eyes are like the night; she walks barefoot, arrogant and pagan, untrammelled by morality or modesty. And she is cunning; time and again she plays the game against Death and wins, reinventing herself anew every night so that her brutish ogre of a husband finds every night a new Scheherazade who slips away with the morning. Every morning he awakes and sees her in daylight, pale and silent after her night’s work, and he swears he will not be taken in again! But as soon as dusk falls, she weaves her web of fantasy anew, and he thinks: once more…

Tonight I am Scheherazade.

The Hermit

1

Don’t look at me that way—I can’t bear it! You’re thinking how much I have changed. You see the young man in the picture, his clear, pale brow, curling dark hair, his untroubled eyes—and you wonder how he could be me. The carelessly arrogant set of the jaw, the high cheekbones, the long, tapered fingers seem to hint at some hidden, exotic lineage, although the bearing is unmistakably English. That was me at thirty-nine—look at me carefully and remember…I could have been you.

My father was a minister near Oxford, my mother the daughter of a wealthy Oxfordshire landowner. My childhood was untroubled, sheltered, idyllic. I remember going to church on Sundays, singing in the choir, the coloured light from the stained-glass windows like a shower of petals on the white surplices of the choristers…

The black angel seems to shift imperceptibly and, in her eyes, I sense an echo of the pitiless comprehension of God. This is not a time for imagined nostalgia, Henry Paul Chester. He needs your truth, not your inventions. Do you think to fool God?

Ridiculous, that I should still feel the urge to deceive, I who have lived nothing but a life of deceit for over forty years. The truth is a bitter decoction: I hate to uncork it for this last meeting. And yet I am what I am. For the first time I can dare to take God’s words for myself. This is no sweetened fiction. This is Henry Chester: judge me if you wish. I am what I am.

There was, of course, no idyllic childhood. My early years are blank: my memories begin at age seven or eight; impure, troubled memories even then as I felt the serpent grown within me. I do not remember a time when I was not conscious of my sin, my guilt: no surplice, however white, could hide it. It gave me wicked thoughts, it made me laugh in church, it made me lie to my father and cross my fingers to extinguish the lie.

There were samplers on the wall of every room of our house, embroidered by my mother with texts from the Bible. Even now I see them, especially the one in my room, stark on the white wall opposite my bed: i am that i am. As I passed the summers and winters of my boyhood, in my moments of peace and the contemplation of my solitary vices I watched that sampler, and sometimes, in my dreams, I cried out at the cruel indifference of God. But I always received the same message, stitched now for ever in the intricate patterns of my memory: i am that i am.

My father was God’s man and more frightening to me than God. His eyes were deep and black, and he could see right into the hidden corners of my guilty soul. His judgement was as pitiless and impartial as God’s own, untainted by human tenderness. What affection my father had he lavished on his collection of mechanical toys, for he was an antiquarian of sorts and had a whole room filled with them, from the very simplest of counterweighted wooden figures to the dreamlike precision of his Chinese barrel-organ with its hundred prancing dwarves.

Of course, I was never allowed to play with them—they were too precious for any child—but I do remember the dancing Columbine. She was made of fine porcelain and was almost as big as a three-year-old child. Father told me, in one of his rare moments of informality, that she was made by a blind French craftsman in the decadent years before the Revolution. Running his fingers across her flawless cheek, he told me the story: how she had belonged to some spoiled king’s bastard brat, abandoned among rotting brocades when the Terror struck and godless heads rolled with the innocent. How she was stolen by a pauper woman who could not bear to see her smashed and trampled by the sans-culottes. The woman had lost her baby to the famine and kept Columbine in a cradle in her poor hovel, rocking her and singing lullabies until they found her, mad and starving and alone, and took her away to the asylum to die.

Columbine survived. She arrived in a Paris antiquarian’s the year I was born, and Father, who was returning from a trip to Lourdes, saw her and bought her at once, though her silk dress was rotten and her eyes had fallen into her head from neglect and rough handling. As soon as he saw her dance, he knew she was special: wind the key set into the small of her back and she would begin to move, stiffly at first, then with a slick, inhuman fluidity, raising her arms, bowing from the waist, flexing her knees, showing the plump roundness of her porcelain calves under the dancer’s skirt. Months of loving restoration gave her back all her beauty, and now she sat resplendent in blue and white satin in my father’s collection, between the Indian music-box and the Persian clown.

I was never allowed to wind her up. Sometimes, when I lay awake in the middlle of the night, I could hear a faint tinkle of music from behind the closed door, low and intimate, almost carnal…The image of Father in his nightgown with the dancing Columbine in his hands was absurdly disquieting. I could not help wondering how he would hold her; whether he would dare to let his hand creep beneath the foaming lace of her petticoats…

I rarely saw my mother; she was often indisposed and spent a great deal of time in her room, into which I was not allowed. She was a beautiful enigma, dark-haired and violet-eyed. Glancing into the secret chamber one day I remember a looking-glass, jewels, scarves, armfuls of lovely gowns strewn over the bed. Among it all lingered a scent of lilac, the scent of my mother when she leaned to kiss me goodnight, the scent of her linen as I buried my face in the washing the maid hung out to dry.

My mother was a great beauty, Nurse told me. She had married against her parents’ wishes and no longer communicated with her family. Maybe that was why she sometimes looked at me with that expression of wary contempt; maybe that was why she never seemed to want to touch or hold me. I idolized her, however: she seemed so infinitely above me, so delicate and pure that I was unable to express my adoration, crushed by my own inadequacy. I never blamed my mother for what she made me do: for years I cursed my own corrupt heart, as Adam must have cursed the serpent for Eve’s transgression.

I was twelve; I still sang in the choir but my voice had reached that almost inhuman purity of tone which heralds the end of childhood. It was August, and the whole of that summer had been fine: long, blue, dreaming days filled with voluptuous scents and languorous sensations. I had been playing in the garden with friends and I was hot and thirsty, my hair standing on end like a savage’s, grass-stains on the knees of my trousers. I crept into the house quietly; I wanted to change my clothes quickly before Nurse realized what a state I was in.

There was no-one there but the maid in the kitchen—Father was in church preparing for the evening’s sermon, and Mother was walking by the river—and I ran up the stairs to my room. Pausing on the landing, I saw that the door to my mother’s room was ajar. I remember looking at the doorknob, a blue-and-white porcelain thing painted with flowers. A scent of lilac wafted out from the cool darkness and, almost in spite of myself, I moved closer and peered through the door. There was no-one in sight. Looking guiltily around me, I pushed the door and entered, telling myself earnestly that if the door had been open, I could not be accused of snooping, and, for the first time in my life, I was alone in my mother’s private room.

For a minute I was content to stare at the rows of bottles and trinkets by the looking-glass, then I dared to touch a silk scarf, then the lace of a petticoat, the gauze of an under-dress. I was fascinated by all her things, by the mysterious vials and jars, and the combs and brushes with strands of her hair still caught in the bristles. It was almost as if the room was my mother, as if it had captured her essence. I felt that if I could assimilate every nuance of that room I might learn to tell her how much I loved her in the kind of words she could understand.

Reaching to brush my reflection in the mirror I accidentally knocked over a little bottle, filling the air with a heady distillation of jasmine and honeysuckle. My hurried attempt to pick up the bottle only resulted in my spilling a case of powder across the dressing-table, but the scent acted so strangely upon my nerves that, instead of being panic-stricken, I giggled softly to myself. Mother would not be back for some time; Father was in church. What harm could it do to explore? And I felt an excitement, a power, looking over my mother’s things in her absence. An amber necklace winked at me in the semi-darkness; I picked it up and, on impulse, put it on. A transparent scarf, light as a breath, touched my bare arm as I passed. I raised it to my lips, seeming to feel her skin, her scent against my face.

For the first time I began to feel an extraordinary sensation, a tingling in all my body focusing more and more strongly on a point of exquisite tension, a growing friction which filled my mind with half-recognized images of carnality. I tried to make myself believe that it was the room which was making me do it. The scarf wanted to coil lovingly around my neck. Bracelets found their way on to my arms on their own. I took off my shirt and looked at myself in the glass and, with hardly a second thought, I took off my trousers. There was a wrap lying on my mother’s bed, a delicate, transparent thing of silk and frothy lace: experimentally I draped it around myself, caressing the thin fabric, imagining it touching her skin, imagining how it would look…

I began to feel physically faint, disorientated, the potency of the spilled perfume assailing me like an invisible army of succubi—I could hear the beating of their wings. It was then that I knew I was the devil’s creature. Some inhuman instinct impelled me to continue and, although I knew that what I was doing was mortal sin, I felt no guilt. I felt immortal. My hands, knotting and clutching the wrap, seemed possessed by a demonic intelligence: I began to caper in a frenzied, ecstatic glee…then suddenly I was frozen in sublime paralysis, doubling up beneath the force of a pleasure I had never conceived of. For a second I was higher than the clouds, higher than God…then I fell like Lucifer, a little boy again, lying on the carpet, the silk wrap crushed and torn under me, the jewels and trinkets grotesque around my scrawny limbs.

A moment of stupid indifference. Then the enormity of what I had done broke upon my head like a hailstorm and I began to cry in hysterical terror, dragging on my clothes with shaking hands, feeling my knees buckle. I grabbed the wrap and rolled it into a ball, thrusting it into my shirt. Picking up my shoes I ran out of my mother’s room and into my own where I hid the wrap up the chimney behind a loose stone, promising myself to burn it as soon as Nurse lit a fire there.

Feeling my panic abating a little, I took the time to wash my face and change, then I lay on my bed for ten minutes to still my trembling. An odd sensation of relief overwhelmed me: I had escaped immediate discovery. Fear and guilt were metamorphosed into a sense of exhilaration: even if I were punished for having been into my mother’s room, the very worst thing would never be known. It was my secret, and I kept it coiled up in my heart like a serpent. There it grew with me—and, even now, continues to grow.

I did not escape entirely undiscovered, of course: the spilled powder and perfume gave me away—along with the theft of the wrap. I admitted that part to my father: that I had gone into the room because I was curious, that I had been clumsy and had trodden on the lace of the wrap by mistake, and had torn it, and that, to avoid punishment, I had thrown the wrap into the pond. He believed me, even commending my honesty (how the devil within me laughed and capered!), and, though I was whipped for my foolishness, the feeling of relief, even excitement, did not abate. From being all-powerful, my father had suddenly dwindled: I had fooled him, lied to him, and he had not known. As for my mother, maybe she guessed something, for I caught her looking at me with an odd expression once or twice, but she never spoke about the incident and it was soon, apparently, forgotten.

For myself, I never did burn the wrap I had concealed in the chimney. Sometimes, when I was alone, I would take it from its hiding-place and touch the silken folds, until years of handling and rising smoke from the chimney turned it brittle and brown as parchment and it fell to pieces of its own accord, like a handful of autumn leaves.

My mother died when I was fourteen, two years after the birth of my brother, William. I remember her lovely chamber transformed into a sickrooom, with heavy wreaths of flowers on every piece of furniture; she pale and thin, but still beautiful to the end.

My father was with her all the time, his face unreadable. One day, passing the room without entering, I heard him weeping in violent abandon, and my mouth twisted in derision; I prided myself in feeling nothing.

Her grave was placed in the churchyard just outside the entrance to the church, so that my father could see it as he greeted his parishioners. I had often wondered how such a stern, God-fearing man had come to marry such a delicate, worldly creature. That he might have passions I could not guess at made me uneasy, and I dismissed such thoughts.

When I was twenty-five my father died. I was completing my Grand Tour at the time, and did not hear of it until all was over. It seemed that during the winter he had caught a cold, had neglected it—he hardly ever lit fires in the house except in the bitterest weather—had refused to take to his bed and, one day in church, had collapsed. Fever set in and he died without recovering consciousness, leaving me with a tidy fortune and an inexplicable feeling that now he was dead he would be able to watch over all my movements.

I moved to London: I had a certain talent for drawing and wished to establish myself as an artist. There I discovered the British Museum and the Royal Academy, and steeped myself in art and sculpture. I was determined to make a name for myself: I rented a studio in Kennington and spent my first five years accumulating enough work for my first exhibition. I painted allegorical portraits especially, taking a great deal of my ideas from Shakespeare and classical mythology, working in oils for the most part, that medium being the most suitable for the meticulous, detailed work I liked. One visitor who came to see my work told me that the style was ‘quite Pre-Raphaelite’, which delighted me, and I took care to nurture this similarity, even taking subjects from Rossetti’s poetry—although I felt that the poet, as a man, was very far from the kind of person I should like to emulate.

My main problem was finding suitable models, for I had few friends in London and, after a most embarrassing experience near the Haymarket, did not dare to approach likely females with offers of work. I had no interest in painting men: I found more poetry in the female form, and a certain type of female form at that. I advertised in The Times, but found that from twenty or so applicants only one or two were even passably handsome, and that none of them could be termed ‘respectable’ women. As long as they didn’t open their vulgar mouths I did not complain, however, which is why, when I look back at some of my earlier works, I find it hard to trust my memory, recollecting that sweet-faced Juliet had an illegitimate child or innocent Cinderella an addiction to the gin-bottle. I learned more about women in those days than I ever wished to know. In spite of their pretty faces, listening to their conversations, their lewdness, their unclean thoughts, I despised them.

Several of them tried their cheap seductions upon me, but at that time the serpent within me was well under control: I went to church every Sunday, painted at my studio during the day and relaxed at a respectable club in the evenings. I had a small circle of acquaintances, but found little need for company. After all, I had my art. I even fancied that women had no power over me, that I had finally conquered the stirrings of my sinful flesh. Such conceit is the wheel upon which God breaks sinners; but time runs on a short leash, and I must skim over three more years to a time when I was just thirty-three, to the clear autumn day when I met my nemesis.

I had been painting children for some time: it was always easy to find a beautiful child whose mother was willing to spare her for a few hours a day. I paid them a shilling an hour, and it was more than some of these women themselves earned. Thus I was walking in the park as I often did when I happened to catch sight of a woman and a child: the woman a dowdy customer in black, the child a little girl of about ten with such unusual and striking features that I stopped to stare after her.

She was a thin child, wrapped in an ugly black cape which looked like someone else’s hand-me-down, but she moved with a grace unusual in one of her age, and her hair was a most troubling colour, a shade closer to white than gold, so that for an instant she looked like a little old crone, some changeling among the happy, rosy children around her. Her face was pointed and almost colourless but for her large, deep eyes; her lips were full for a child’s, but pale; her expression quaintly tragic.

I knew instantly that I had to have her as my model: there was an infinite promise of expression in her face; each movement was a masterpiece of definition. Looking at her I knew that child would be my salvation; her innocence moved me as much as her spectral beauty, and there were tears in my eyes as I ran towards the couple. For a moment my heart was too full for me to speak.

The girl’s name was Effie; the dowdy woman was her aunt. She lived with her aunt and her mother above a little milliner’s shop in Cranbourn Alley and they were of a respectable type: the mother, Mrs Shelbeck, was a widow, living in straitened circumstances. A shrill, annoying woman, I later found, with none of her daughter’s striking looks, and my offer of a shilling an hour was accepted without any of the modesty and reserve usually exhibited by genteel families. I suspect that if I had offered half the sum it would have been accepted with equal alacrity—as it was, I would have gladly offered double.

Effie came to my studio—respectably accompanied by the aunt—that very week, and I spent a whole morning simply drawing the child from various angles: profile, three-quarter, full-face, head high, head to one side…each more enchanting than the last. She was a perfect model: she did not shuffle and fidget as did other children, nor did she chatter or smile. She seemed overawed by the studio and by me, studying me covertly with an expression of respectful wonder. She came again; after the third time the aunt ceased to come with her.

My first painting of her was called My Sister’s Sleep, from the Rossetti poem, and it took two months to complete: only a small canvas, but I flattered myself that I had caught the look of Effie. I painted her lying on a little narrow bed such as children use, a cross on the white wall above her and a vase of holly on the bedstand beside her, the family’s concession to the Christmas spirit. Her brother was sitting on the floor beside the bed, his head buried in the coverlet, and her mother, in black, was standing at the foot of the bed with her face in her hands. The painting focused on Effie; the other figures were faceless and dark-clad, but she was all in white, wearing a ruffled nightdress I had bought for the painting, her hair spread out on the pillow all around her. Her arms were bare, one hanging limply by her side, the other tucked childishly under her cheek. The light from the window transfigured her, promising redemption in death, the purity of the innocent who dies young. It was a theme close to my heart and I was to repeat it many times in the next seven years. Sometimes I was reluctant to let her go home in the evenings for she was growing so fast that I was afraid to lose even an hour of her company.

Effie never spoke a great deal: she was a quiet little thing, untouched by the conceit and vanity exhibited by other girls of the same age. She read avidly—especially poetry, Tennyson, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare—hardly any of it suitable for a child, although her mother seemed to pay little attention to the fact. I ventured to point this out to Effie one day and was pleased to find her properly attentive to my advice. I told her that poetry, although unexceptionable reading for, say, a young man, was rather too difficult for a susceptible young girl. The subject matter was too frequently indelicate, the passions too violent. I offered to lend her some good, improving books, and was delighted when she read them dutifully. There was no wilfulness in her: she seemed created to embody all the feminine virtues without any of the perversity of that sex.

I had never wanted to be a bachelor, but my mistrust of women, born of my professional contact with them, had led me to doubt whether I would ever find St Paul’s ‘one in a thousand’, who is virtuous and obedient. However, as I saw more of Effie, as I was charmed by her beauty and her sweet ways, I realized that, after all, there was a way to achieve that ideal.

There was no taint on Effie: she was absolutely pure. If I could nurture her qualities, if I could keep a fatherly eye on her development, I was certain that I could make of her something rare, something wonderful. I would protect her from the rest of the world, educate her to be my equal. I would mould her, then, the work done…as I formulated the idea my mind threw back at me the memory of a small boy in a room full of forbidden marvels, and that fleeting, nostalgic scent of jasmine seemed to fill the air. For the first time the image brought no accompanying twist of guilt: Effie’s purity would redeem me, I knew it. There was nothing worldly, nothing sensual about her; hers was the cool indifference of the true innocent. Through her I would find salvation.

I engaged private tutors for her—I wanted her to have as little contact with other children as possible—I bought her clothes and books. I employed a respectable housekeeper for her mother and aunt so that Effie would not have to waste time helping around the house. I befriended her tedious mother so that I should have the excuse to frequent Cranbourn Alley and I kept the money flowing in.

I was painting Effie almost incessantly now, abandoning all my other models unless they were needed as secondaries in a canvas. I concentrated upon Effie: Effie at twelve, taller, in the pretty white dresses and blue sashes I encouraged her mother to buy; Effie at thirteen, fourteen, her dancer’s figure as graceful as a colt’s; at fifteen, her eyes and lips darkening, her face taking a more adult shape; at sixteen, her pale hair bound up in a tidy coronet around her brow, her mouth the tenderest of arcs, her lovely rain-coloured eyes heavy-lidded, the skin around them so fine that it seemed almost bruised.

I must have drawn or painted Effie a hundred times: she was Cinderella, she was Mary, she was the young novice in The Passion-Flower, she was Beatrice in Heaven, Juliet in the tomb, draped with lilies and trailing convolvulus for Ophelia, in rags for The Little Beggar Girl. My final portrait of her at that time was The Sleeping Beauty, so like My Sister’s Sleep in composition, showing Effie all in white again, like a bride or a novice, lying on the same little girl’s bed, her hair, much longer than it had been when she was ten—I had always urged her never to cut it—trailing on to the floor, where a century’s worth of dust lingers. Sunlight filters through the skylight on to the floor, and tendrils of ivy have begun to drop through the window into the room. A skeleton in armour, twined all over with the encroaching ivy, warns of the perils of disturbing the sleeping innocent. Effie’s face is turned towards the light; she smiles in her sleep, unaware of the desolation around her.

I could wait no longer. I had woven the enchantment which had kept her waiting for me all these years: now was the time to break it. She was still very young, I knew, but to wait another year might be to risk losing her for ever.

Her mother did not even seem surprised that I should want to marry her daughter. Indeed, the eagerness with which she welcomed the offer made me suspect that she had already envisaged the possibility. I was a rich man, after all: it was certain that if Effie married me I would be obliged to help her relatives, and I was almost forty while Effie was seventeen. When I died, all my fortune would be hers. The maiden aunt—a sour-mannered creature whose only redeeming feature was an overpowering devotion to Effie—disapproved. Effie was too young, she said, too sensitive. She did not understand what would be required of her when we were married. I did not care about her objections. Effie was my only concern. She was mine: trained to grow along me like ivy on the trunk of an oak.

She married me in the same antique embroidered dress she had worn for the Sleeping Beauty.

The Star

2

‘This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred…’

The black caravan of his words lurched onwards, and I was glad I had taken laudanum before the service. My migraine was quite gone, leaving in its place a cool dark cavity into which all my thoughts receded, remote as stars.

‘“wrath, strife, sedition, heresies…”’

In my own quiet space I smiled to myself.

The rhythm of the verses was cruel, but poetry nevertheless, compelling as the pagan lilt of the skipping-songs I sang in the street all those years ago, in the days before I married Mr Chester:

The higher we jump

The higher they’ll grow.

Around and around and around we go.

Remembering the song I felt suddenly sick at heart at the terrible remoteness of that lost time when Mother was well, and Father alive and we used to read poems together in the library of our old house, before Cranbourn Alley; a time when going to church was an occasion to celebrate, to sing and be happy. My hands clenched abruptly as the sick feeling intensified, and I bit down on my lip to quell my faintness. William, sitting to my left, gave me his rueful grin, but I kept my face lowered; Mr Chester would not like me to smile in church. Over the minister’s head the sunlight illuminated St Sebastian, shot with arrows.

The higher we jump…

St Sebastian’s face was cool and passive, like Henry’s.

Suddenly I was falling, pinwheeling my arms in panic, my mouth open in a great silent O of terror…but I was falling upwards, towards the high vault of the church ceiling, and I could see the gilt paint and the scrollwork and the cold gleam of St Sebastian’s eyes…As my fall slowed I looked dizzily on to the bowed heads of the congregation, my terror giving way to awe and euphoria. How could I be here? Had I died and left my body without realizing it? Was I dreaming? I skipped and danced in the air, whooping as I spun around the bald head of the minister like an angel on the head of a pin. No-one heard me.

Testing my new-found ability, I swooped invisibly over the tide of dark heads, realizing as I did so that my vision and hearing were sharper than ever before, each detail a miracle of precision. I could actually see the minister’s words mounting heavenwards like smoke from a factory chimney. I could see the gloom of the congregation, occasionally broken by the clear beam of a child’s inattention; looking closely I found that somehow I could see right into people; I could see their essence like sunlight through stained-glass. Behind a mask of flesh, an old woman with a sour face and a sharp tongue blossomed with a spectral radiance; a child radiated simple joy; a young, dark-haired woman was a terrifying pit of blackness and death. What I saw in the dark-haired woman chilled me, and I sped upwards as fast as I could.

From the vault I inspected my own discarded body; pale little face lost in the dark hollow of my bonnet, lips white, eyelids closed and blue as bruises. I was inclined to feel contempt at myself; such a thin little slip of a thing. Better to watch Mr Chester with his stern, handsome face, or William, his fair hair hanging over his eyes.

‘Marta!’

The voice rang out across the chapel; I looked curiously, but the rest of the congregation failed to react.

‘Marta!’ The call was peremptory this time, but the minister did not halt once in his delivery. Only I heard. Looking down, I could see nothing but bowed heads and crossed hands.

At the very back of the chapel stood a woman, her face tilted upwards at an attentive angle. I had time to glimpse a face, a wealth of brassy curls beneath a frivolous gold hat, then I heard someone call my name.

‘Effie!’ William had turned towards my lifeless body and, perceiving me to be in a deep faint, was engaged in untying my bonnet-strings. Disembodied, I watched him with some amusement as he fumbled for smelling-salts in my purse. Dear William! So clumsy and sincere. So unlike his brother.

Henry stood up too, causing a ripple of interest to run down the line of people sitting in the pew, his mouth set in a harsh line. He said nothing, but lifted me into a standing position and, followed by William, began to propel me down the aisle. A few people stared after the group, but others simply smiled indulgently at each other and returned their attention to the sermon. In Mrs Chester’s condition, after all, fainting was hardly abnormal.

The higher we jump…

I suddenly felt unaccountably dizzy; meeting the eyes of poor arrow-shot St Sebastian again I became aware of a sick, spinning sensation in the pit of my stomach, something like falling. Around and around and around…

I realized what was happening and fought it vainly.

‘I don’t want to go back!’ my mind protested. ‘Don’t want to…’

In the instant I fell I dimly remembered meeting the eyes of the woman in the gold hat. I saw her lips moving, mouthing the unfamiliar name ‘Marta’…Then there was blackness.

Henry’s face glowered over me as his hands moved to loosen the fastenings of my bodice and, as I drifted between dream and consciousness, I had time to appreciate the purity of the clear planes of his face, the straight brows and appraising eyes, his hair rather darker than that of his brother and cropped severely short. William was hovering uncertainly in the background. As he saw my eyes open he jumped forwards with the smelling-salts.

‘Effie? Are you—’

Henry turned on him in a cold fury. ‘Don’t stand there like a fool!’ he snapped. ‘Go and call a hack. Hurry up!’ William went, with a last glance over his shoulder at me. ‘That boy thinks far too much of you,’ added Henry. ‘And he shows it…’ He broke off. ‘Can you stand now?’

I nodded.

‘Is it the child?’

‘I don’t think so.’ It did not occur to me to tell him about my strangeness in the church; I knew from experience how much my ‘fanciful notions’ annoyed him.

I tried to climb into the carriage; for an instant nausea overwhelmed me again and I almost fell. Henry put his arm around me, hoisting me easily in and up; but glancing sideways at his tense profile I guessed his disgust, his fear. In that instant I half realized that he was afraid of me, sensed the depth of his turmoil, but the intuition faded almost before I could comprehend it as I felt myself swoon again.

3

She lost our child, of course. Nursed by laudanum, she was sleeping when it was taken away by the midwife and sewn into the sheet. I never asked to see my son. I waited to learn that my wife would make a complete recovery before leaving for my studio to paint. Our house was in Highgate and I had deliberately chosen to rent a studio some miles away. It gave me the feeling of isolation I needed when I was working and the light was very clean and cold, monastery light, so that my paintings, sparsely hung against the bare white walls, shone like trapped butterflies beneath the glass. Here I was High Priest, with Effie as my handmaiden, her sweet face glancing out from bright canvasses and pale pastels and thick folders of brown vellum; my soul’s Effie, untouched by the curse of our heat and our flesh. That night—not for the first time—I slept in the studio on the little bed she had used for My Sister’s Sleep and Sleeping Beauty and, with the crisp linen sheets cool against my fevered skin, I was able at last to feel content.

I returned at ten o’clock the next morning, learning from the servants that the doctor had left in the early hours. Tabby Gaunt, our housekeeper, had kept watch over Effie for most of the night, dosing her with laudanum and warm water. She looked up as I came into the sickroom, laying down the shirt she had been hemming. She looked tired and red-eyed, but her smile was open as a child’s as she rose hastily to her feet, straightening her cap over her unruly grey hair.

‘Young lady’s sleeping now, Mr Chester, sir,’ she whispered. ‘The doctor says she’s a little weak, but it isn’t the fever, thank the Lord. A few days in bed, he said.’

I nodded. ‘Thank you, Tabby. You may bring some chocolate for Mrs Chester.’

I turned towards the bed in which Effie lay. Her pale hair was unbound, spilling over the coverlet and the pillows, and her hand was at her cheek as she slept, like that of a little girl. I found it difficult to believe that she was eighteen and had just been delivered of her first baby. In spite of myself, I shuddered at the thought. Remembering the look of her, the feel of her pregnant flesh under her clothes as I touched her made me feel unclean, uneasy. Better by far to see her like this, in bed, one thin arm flung over her eyes, the tiny curve of her breasts (the word troubled me even in thought, and I dismissed it angrily) almost invisible in the rapid rise and fall of her nightdress.

Sudden tenderness overwhelmed me and I reached to touch her hair, chastely.

‘Effie?’

She made a little sound as she began to struggle towards wakefulness. Her scent reached me, a poignant scent of talcum and fever and chocolate, like her childhood. Her eyes opened, focused sharply on mine, and she sat up abruptly, guiltily, like a schoolboy caught daydreaming in class.

‘I…Mr Chester!’

I smiled. ‘It’s all right, my dear. Don’t move. You’re still weak. Tabby will bring you a warm drink presently.’

Effie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered. ‘About fainting…in church, you know.’

‘It’s all right. Just sit back and be quiet. Here, I’ll sit beside you and hold you. Isn’t that better?’ I moved on to the bed, pushing a pillow into the small of Effie’s back. As I slipped my arm around her shoulders, I saw her face relax into a little dreamy smile. Still half-asleep, she murmured:

‘That’s nice, that’s very nice. Just like before…like before we were married.’ I stiffened involuntarily and, as the implication of what she had said penetrated her feverish thoughts, she jerked in panic.

‘The baby! Is the baby all right?’

In spite of myself I pulled away: I could not bear to think of it.

‘Please, Henry, tell me! Please, Henry!’

‘Don’t call me that!’ I snapped, leaping to my feet, then, with an effort at self-control, I forced my voice back into gentleness. ‘Try to understand, Effie. The child was sick. It couldn’t have lived. It was too small.’

Effie’s voice rose uncontrollably, a high, wordless wailing. I took her hands, half pleading, half scolding.

‘You were too young to have a child! It was all wrong. It was a mistake. It was—’

‘No-oooo!’

‘Stop that noise!’

‘Noo-oh-ooh-oooh!’

‘Stop it!’ I shook her by the shoulders, and she raised her hands instinctively to her face, eyes wild and cheeks marbled from crying. For a moment I found her tears deeply erotic, and I turned away, flushing angrily.

‘It’s for the best, Effie,’ I said more gently. ‘Now we can go back to what we used to be, my dear. Don’t cry, Effie. It’s just that you’re too delicate to bear a child, that’s all. You’re too young. Here.’ Reaching for the laudanum bottle and the glass, I poured six careful drops into the water. ‘Drink this to calm your nerves.’

Patiently, I held the glass as Effie drank, clinging to my arm and gulping tears and medicine in equal quantities. Little by little I felt her body relax against mine until she was quite subdued.

‘That’s my good girl. Isn’t that better?’

Effie nodded sleepily and turned her head towards the crook of my arm. As she drifted once more in my arms I was momentarily aware of a sudden scent of jasmine—real or imagined? The impression was too fleeting to tell.

The Nine of Swords

4

I was ill for several weeks; the wintry weather hindered my convalescence, for I caught a chill which confined me to my bed for some time after the premature birth of my child. I remember faces coming and going over me, with fixed grimaces of sympathy, but my heart was frozen inside me and, although I wanted to thank them for their concern, I could find no meaning in words. Tabby, who had been with me in Cranbourn Alley since I was a little girl, nursed me and shook her head over me and fed me thin broth as I lay in bed; my little maid, Em, brushed my hair and dressed me in pretty lace nightdresses and gossiped about her family and sisters in distant Yorkshire; Edwin the gardener sometimes sent a handful of early crocuses or daffodils from his precious beds with a gruff assurance that ‘they’d bring a bit of colour to the young lady’s cheeks’. But, in spite of their kindness, I could not bring myself to stir from my lethargy. I would sit by the fire with a thick shawl around my shoulders, sometimes working at my needlepoint, but more often simply staring into the fire.

William, who might have roused me, had returned to Oxford where a junior fellowship awaited him, torn between pleasure at this acknowledgement of his years of study, and unease at leaving me in so low a state.

Henry was all solicitude: for nearly a month I was permitted no visitors—no-one was to be allowed to distress me, he said—and he did not go to his studio once. Instead, he worked at home, making dozens of sketches of me, but I, who had once been enchanted by his work, cared nothing for it now. Once, I had loved the way he drew me, always emphasizing my eyes and the purity of my features, but now his art left me indifferent and I wondered that I had ever thought him talented.

The pictures sickened me, spread out like trophies over every available surface of wall in every room; and worst of all, in the bedroom, The Little Beggar Girl, painted when I was only thirteen, haunted me like the ghost of myself. A London slum, reproduced in minutest detail, from the sweat on the pavements to the ‘blacks’ drifting down from the muddy sky. A scrawny cat sits sniffing a dead bird in a gutter. Next to it sits a dying child, barefoot and clad only in a shift, her long hair touching the stones around her. Her broken begging-bowl lies on the street, and a stray shaft of light plays on her uplifted face. The frame, designed by the artist, bears a stanza from his poem of the same title:

Thou Innocent, untouch’d by worldly care,

Defil’d not by the fleshly taint of Love,

Surrender now these mortal limbs so fair

Yet feeble; clad in radiance soar above.

Among the lowliest of all wert thou

And yet, to thee the hosts of Heaven bow

Their humble heads; as by th’ Almighty’s side,

Enthron’d in ecstasy, thou art His bride.

Once I had been filled with admiration for the Mr Chester who could write real verses with so little effort. I had borne no criticism of him, had wept with frustration at the unkind words of Mr Ruskin on the occasion of his first exhibition. I could still vaguely remember the time when I had worshipped him, treasured every word he wrote to me, every sketch he discarded. I remembered my awed gratitude when he had offered to pay for my tutors, the leap of joy in my heart as I overheard my mother and Henry as they spoke together in the library. Aunt May had mistrusted the idea of my marriage to a man so much older than I. But my mother had been blinded by the thought of all the opportunities Mr Chester could give her daughter—and I, I was blinded by Mr Chester himself. At seventeen I had married him.

Married him!

I dug furiously at my needlepoint, tent-stitch one, cross-stitch two, suddenly bloated with hate and fury. The embroidery was half finished, the design an invention of Henry’s in rich, glowing colours: the Sleeping Beauty on her couch, all twined round with climbing roses. Even in its unfinished state, the face of the sleeping girl looked like mine.

Cross-stitch one, tent-stitch two…I stabbed at the needlework, making no effort to stitch now, simply digging at the fabric in mounting rage, tearing at the delicate stitchery, the gold thread. All unaware, I was crying aloud, without tears, a hoarse, primitive sound which, at any other time, would have terrified me.

‘Why, Miss Effie!’ It was Tabby’s voice, shocked into improper address.

Jolted out of my furious trance, I started and looked up. Tabby’s plump, good-natured face was twisted with distress.

‘Oh, what have you done? Your poor hands…and all your pretty ’broidery, too. Oh, ma’am!’

I looked down in surprise and saw my hands bleeding from a dozen stab wounds. A bloody handprint branded the needlework, obliterating half of the sleeping girl’s face. I surrendered the spoiled tapestry and tried to smile.

‘Oh dear,’ I said mildly, ‘how clumsy of me.’ Then, as Tabby began to say something, tears springing to her eyes, ‘No, Tabby, I am quite well, thank you. I will go to wash my hands.’

‘But ma’am, you’ll take a drop of laudanum, surely! The doctor—’

‘Tabby, if you would be so kind as to put away my sewing-things? I will not be needing them again today.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ said Tabby woodenly, but she did not move to obey the order until she had watched me stumble vaguely out of the room, fumbling at the doorknob with my bloody hands like a murdering sleepwalker.

I was poorly for almost two months before the doctor at last pronounced me fit enough to receive visitors. Not that I saw many people; Mother came once to talk about her toilettes and to reassure me that I still had plenty of time to start a family, and Aunt May came twice to sit quietly with me, discussing commonplaces with a gentleness very far from her usual style. Dear Aunt May! If only she had known how much I longed to talk to her, but I knew that once I opened the floodgates I would have to tell her everything—things I was not even prepared to admit to myself—so I remained silent, pretending that I was happy and that this cold, meticulous house was home. Not that Aunt May was deceived for a moment, but for my sake she tried to hide her dislike for Henry, conversing in stiff, brittle phrases, her back very straight against the chair.

Henry liked her as little as she did him, sourly commenting that her visits always seemed to leave me looking exhausted. She made a tart rejoinder to that comment. Triumphantly, Henry suggested that she should perhaps refrain from frequenting the house until she learned a more genteel conversational style; he would not have his wife subjected to this kind of talk. Aunt May was drawn into unguarded utterances and left beneath a cloud of recriminations. From my window I watched her leave, very small and grey beneath the cold sky, and I knew that Henry had his wish. I was his alone, for ever.

It was March, and, although the weather was still very chill, the sun was shining and there was a hint of approaching spring in the air. The parlour enjoys a fine view of the garden with its pond and meticulous flowerbeds, and that morning I was sitting for Henry in front of the wide bay window. I was still very wan, but with the bright sunlight warming my cheeks and my loose hair, I was conscious of a feeling of satisfaction and well-being.

I wished I were in the garden now, with the cool air against my skin and the damp of the grass against my ankles. I wanted to smell the earth, to lie down and bite it, to roll in the greenery like a cat at play…

‘Effie, do keep still!’ Henry’s voice jerked me back to reality. ‘Three-quarter profile, please, and don’t let the dulcimer slip. I paid enough for it, you know. That’s better. Remember, if at all possible, I want the picture ready for the exhibition, and there isn’t much time.’

I corrected my position, shifting the instrument in my lap. Henry’s latest idea, A Damsel with a Dulcimer, was already four weeks under way and was to feature myself as the mysterious lady in Coleridge’s poem. Henry envisaged her as ‘An adolescent girl, all dressed in white, sitting upon a rustic bench with one foot curled up under her body, charmingly intent upon her musical study. Behind her lies an arboreal landscape, with, in the distance, the mythical mountain.’

I, who knew the poem by heart, and had often dreamed about it myself, had ventured to say that I felt ‘an Abyssinian maid’ should be someone rather more colourful and exotic than the insipid damsel I was to portray, but Mr Chester’s reply had left me in no doubt as to his own poor opinion of my taste, graphic, literary or otherwise. My own efforts at painting and poetry were proof enough of that. And yet, I remembered certain moments, before Henry had forbidden me to waste my time in areas in which I had no talent; I remembered looking into a canvas like an angry vortex of stars and feeling joy—joy and something like the beginnings of passion.

Passion?

The first night of our marriage, when Mr Chester had come to me with guilt and excitement in his eyes, had taught me all I needed to know about passion. My own innocent ardour had cooled his at once; the sight of my body had sent him to his knees, not with joy but with repentance. Thereafter his act of love was an act of contrition for both of us; a cold, comfortless joining, like that of two locomotives. After the baby was conceived, even this ceased.

I never understood it. Father had always told me that there was no harm in the physical act between a man and a woman in love; it was God’s reward, he said, for procreation. We are feeling beings, he used to tell me, innocent until evil thoughts take our innocence away. Our original sin was not the search for knowledge, but the shame that Adam and Eve had of their nakedness. It was that shame which sent them from the garden, and keeps us from the garden now.

Poor Father! He could never have understood the icy contempt in Henry’s face as he pulled away from my arms.

‘Is there no shame in you, woman?’ he had demanded.

Shame? I never knew it before I knew Henry.

And yet, there was a fire in me which neither the death of my child nor the coldness of my marriage could entirely quell; and sometimes, through the chill, clinging veils of my life, I felt the stirring of something more, something almost frightening. Watching Henry’s face as he sketched me I was seized by a sudden sharp revulsion. I wanted to throw the dulcimer to the ground, to leap up, to dance naked and without shame in the spring sunlight. The desire overwhelmed me, and before I knew it I was on my feet, crying aloud in a harsh and desperate voice…But Henry never heard me. He continued to frown contentedly over his paper, looking up for a second at an object just behind me, then returning to his sketch. I turned abruptly and saw myself, my position unchanged, holding the dulcimer in my lap.

I was conscious of a feeling of intense relief and elation. I had spoken to no-one of the episode in the church, although I had thought of it often, with a mounting conviction that it must have been the effect of the laudanum and would likely not be repeated. But this time it had been a whole day since I had last taken my drops, I was not ill, and there had been none of the sickening, spiralling sensation of the last occasion. Warily I looked down at myself; my new ‘body’ was a white, naked replica of the one I had temporarily vacated. A faint, silvery light seemed to emanate from it and I could feel the pile of the carpet beneath my feet and the freshness of the air against my skin. I was vibrant with energy and excitement, all my senses enhanced and given new dimension outside the clutter of my body.

Carefully I approached my physical body, wondering whether, when I touched it, I would be forced back inside; my hand passed through clothes and flesh without resistance. For an instant I was aware of the peculiar sensation of being in neither state, my body like a half-discarded nightdress around my real, living self; then I forced myself back. The world readjusted itself listlessly around me for a moment, then I leaped out again, overwhelmed with elation at the thought that now I could seemingly perform this feat at will. Rapidly gaining in confidence, I moved lightly across the room. Impelled by a new sense of mischief I lighted on the crown of Henry’s head and pirouetted, but he was in no way distracted from his sketching. Leaping down, I ran to the window and looked out, halfminded to jump through the glass but wary of leaving my body too far behind. A quick glance behind me told me that all was well and, throwing caution aside with the rest of my earthly burdens, I passed through the glass and into the garden.

So may the caterpillar dream of flight, or the chrysalis dream in her dark silken cradle.

And I? Into what frail murderous being will my chrysalis hatch?

Will I fly?

Or sting?

5

She’s lying, you know. I was never unkind to her, never. I loved her more than any woman has the right to be loved: I worshipped her, gave my soul for her. I gave her everything she wanted: the white wedding, my fine house, my art, my poetry. The day she married me I was the happiest man alive.

She was the one who spoiled it, like Eve before her in Eden. The seed was in her, in spite of my careful nurturing. I might have known.

What has she told you? That I rejected her? That I was cold? I remember her waiting for me in our room after the wedding celebrations were over: all in white, with her hair loose and spread over the pillows and the bedstead, brushing the floor. For a moment I thought she was asleep. I crept to the bed, afraid to wake her, a terrible tenderness spilling over into every part of my body. Above all else I wanted to lie down next to her, to breathe her scent, the lilac of her hair. At that moment I was blessed: there was no lust in me but for sleep, for the sweetness and innocence of her, and it was with tears in my eyes that I laid my face on the pillow beside hers.

For a second, there was a quiescence, then her eyes opened. I saw my face as in a witch’s crystal, a tiny pinprick against the fascia of her pupils. Her cold, pale hands crept around my neck. I felt my own responding in spite of myself. I had never so much as kissed her before and, as her lips met mine, I was submerged in her, my hands full of her hair and the softness of her breasts…

I should have died then: no man was made to endure the bliss and the torment of her as I was. I could feel her heat through the thin fabric of her nightdress; the awakened response in myself—and suddenly I was transported back to that day in my mother’s room, the scent of jasmine in my nostrils, felt again the hot, sulphurous excitement which had possessed me, which possesses me still. I could not move. I did not trust myself even to turn away. Maybe I cried aloud in despair and self-loathing. Effie clung to me like a Fury: when I tried to shake her from me she twisted on top of me and pinned me to the pillow, her long legs entwined around me, her mouth pressed against mine.

I tasted salt on her lips and I was drowning in her, with her hair in my mouth and in my eyes and all around me like the web of some fiendish spider-goddess. She had shed her nightdress as a snake sheds its skin, and was straddling me like a terrible centaur-woman, head thrown back in defiance of all decency and modesty. For a moment I could not help but respond: there was no thought in me but lust.

When I could think again I was pinned to the mattress in horror: where was my beggar girl, my sleeping beauty, my pale sister? Where was the child I had nurtured? She was all adult now in the dark heat of her desire. As she closed her eyes I managed to escape her mesmerism and I pushed her away with as much violence as my weak limbs could muster. Her eyes snapped open and it was all I could do to prevent myself being lost in their depths again, but I held on to the last of my sanity and turned my face away.

There was no shame in her. The last hope of salvation had been denied me in this girl, and the realization was bitter in me. Her kiss still salted my mouth, the memory of her touch beguiling against my skin, and I cursed my weak, sinful flesh. I cursed her too, this Eve of my downfall: cursed her white skin and her cavernous eyes and her hair which had made me mad with longing for her. With tears streaming down my face, I went down on my knees and prayed for forgiveness. But God was not there for me and, in the darkness, the demons of my lust pranced all around. Effie did not understand why I had withdrawn from her, and for a time she tried to drag me from my penance with tears and caresses.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked softly, and if I had not known that she, too, was tainted to the core by the same demon which possessed me, I could have sworn she was pure. Her voice was unsteady, like that of a little girl, and her hands around my neck were as soft and loving as they had been when she was ten years old.

I dared not answer, but pushed her away, my hands clenched furiously.

‘Please…Henry…’ It was the first time she had called me by my first name, and the intimacy that it implied froze me with remorse.

‘Don’t call me that!’

She was confused, and her hand crept into mine, whether to comfort herself or me I was unsure.

‘But—’

‘Be quiet! Haven’t you done enough harm already?’

Perhaps she really didn’t know what irreparable damage she had already caused: I sensed her confusion and, in her troubled, tainted innocence, I hated her. She began to cry, and I hated her even more. Better that she should be dead than this carnal wrestling in the hot night! Better that she should be dead, I repeated fiercely. Her shamelessness had killed my little girl on the very night she was to have been mine. She had damned us both, and now she would be with me for the rest of her life, a living reminder of the death of all my illusions.

‘I don’t understand. What have I done wrong?’ Effie’s voice was so sincere, so vulnerable in the dark.

I laughed bitterly.

‘I thought you were so pure. I thought that even though all other women—even my own mother—might be whores, you at least had been spared the taint.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Listen!’ I snapped furiously. ‘I watched you grow. I kept you from the other children. I protected you. Where did you learn it? Who taught you? When I was painting you as Mary and Juliet and the Convent Flower, were you already twisting on your bed at night, dreaming of your lover? Did you look into your glass on May Eve and see him there, watching you?’ I took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Tell me!’

She pulled away from my grasp, trembling. Even then the sight of her body aroused me, and I threw a blanket at her.

‘Cover yourself, for God’s sake!’ I shouted, biting down on my lips to stop the hysteria.

She drew the blanket tightly around her shoulders, her eyes huge and unreadable. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last. ‘I thought you loved me. Why are you afraid to make me your wife?’

‘I’m not afraid!’ I snapped angrily. ‘We could share so many things together. Why demean it, for the sake of this one act? My love for you is pure, pure as the love of a child for his mother. You make it something shameful.’

‘But something which gives pleasure—’ began Effie.

‘No!’ I interrupted. ‘Not the true unsullied joy of a pure marriage. That can only exist in God. The flesh is the Devil’s domain, and all his pleasures are filth and corruption. Trust me, Effie. We are above this. I want to keep you innocent. I want to keep you beautiful.’

But she had turned her face to the wall, the blanket tight around her.

The Knave of Coins

6

Knave of Hearts, dear fellow, of Hearts. Kindly give me my proper title. Even a knave has his pride, you know. And I have so many hearts! I gave one to the mistress and one to the dame, and one to the beggar girl who cries in the lane—only to stop her crying, mark you. But what did they give me in return? A few sighs, a quick tumble, and enough tears to fill my bathtub. Women! They’ve been the death of me and still I can’t do without them; in hell I’ll swear I’ll ogle the little diablesses—I like ’em hot.

What’s that?

Ah, the story, the story. I see you find me distasteful. Well, you’ve given me the limelight for a time, and I’m not about to give it back yet. So smoke your pipe, old man, and move over. Let me introduce myself.

Moses Zachary Harper, poet, sometime painter, sinner, philanderer, hedonist, Knave of Hearts and Ace of Rods, erstwhile lover and loser of Mrs Euphemia Chester.

What of the good Henry?

Let’s say there was a contretemps; maybe a woman (who knows?)…maybe a true word spoken in jest at the expense of the pious Mr Chester. Suffice it to say there was a coldness, but a professional coldness. Mr Ruskin had taken a fancy to my Sodom and Gomorrah and had written favourably of me. There was a canvas! Three hundred bodies in rapturous, tortuous embrace! And every inch of female flesh conquered territory! The parsonic Mr Chester despised me cordially, but envied me my connections. To tell the truth, I had none—on the right side of the bed, that is—but I had managed to eke a few poor favours along the petticoat-line.

Imagine the conversations between us at the tea-tray; poor Henry, Friday-faced as a maiden aunt. ‘Won’t you have a cup of tea, Mr Harper? I hear your exhibition met with some success…’ Yours truly négligé to a point with no hat, and shirt undone, uttering calculated insults (‘I think I see the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds in that last canvas, dear fellow…’). I confess, I was a thorn in his flesh. Poor Henry was never made to be an artist; he had none of the artistic temperament, exhibiting instead a distressing inclination for clean living, churchgoing and the like, which never failed to set my teeth on edge.

Imagine my surprise when, on returning from a long trip abroad, I heard he was married! My first reaction was hilarity, then disbelief. Oh, he’s good-looking in his way, but any woman with an ounce of sense can see he’s no more passion in him than a piece of ham. Which just goes to prove that most women don’t have an ounce of sense.

My second reaction was an intense curiosity. I wanted to see the specimen of misguided womanhood the man had snared. A plain girl, I imagined, no doubt a pillar of the local church, proficient in watercolours. I asked around the artistic circles and learned that Henry had been married for just under a year; that his wife was of frail constitution, and had given birth to a dead child in January. Opinion had it that she was rather lovely, in an unusual style. As it happened Henry, I was told, had planned an exhibition to coincide with the anniversary of their marriage, and, knowing that this was probably the only way I could get myself received by the old bluestocking, I determined to see it.

He had decided to hold the event at his house in Cromwell Square, Highgate—a mistake, I thought. He should have hired a small gallery; somewhere like Chatham Place, perhaps. But he would never have had the cheek to place himself beneath the very noses of his Pre-Raphaelite idols. Besides, from the start he had pretensions to exhibit at the Academy, and I knew him too well to expect him to compromise for anything less. An announcement duly arrived in The Times, followed up by a number of coy invitations to various influential critics and artists (myself not included, naturally).

I arrived at about twelve, having had lunch at a chop-house nearby, and as I approached the house I saw a small cluster of people lingering at the gate as if unsure of their welcome. I recognized Holy Hunt and Morris, scowling fiercely at some remark of Hunt’s—the woman with him was Mrs Morris: I’d have recognized her from Rossetti’s paintings any day, but personally I found her rather too much on the grand scale for my taste. Henry would be pleased, though, as long as he didn’t have to talk to them: he couldn’t abide anyone eccentric or abrupt—and from what I had heard of Morris, he wasn’t the type to suffer a pompous ass like Henry very kindly.

There were a couple of my friends arriving in the wake of the little party, and I joined them, wondering all the while why they should have bothered to come in the first place. He was a young wretch of a poet called Finglass, she his Muse, Jenny; I grinned to hear him introduce her to the tight-lipped old biddy of a housekeeper as ‘Mrs Finglass’—the housekeeper managed to look sceptical and polite at the same time—and we went in together.

As I entered the house it occurred to me how typical of Henry Chester it was to set up an exhibition à domicile just after his wife, by all reports, had been so ill. I am certain that he would have been most affronted if anyone had pointed it out. I knew what Henry was like: all his ex-models agreed, although he paid quite well, he was a ‘regular Tartar’ when he was painting, he fell into the most violent rages if a girl as much as shifted her posture, he forgot to allow his models to take a rest, and, on top of that, moralized most harshly to the unfortunate creatures—most of whom were on the street through no real fault of their own, and had turned to modelling as a rather better-paid and more respectable form of prostitution.

There were maybe a dozen people in all; some peering at the framed canvasses in the passageway, but most of them in the parlour, where the bulk of the work was exhibited, with Henry in their midst talking volubly to a rapt little circle of nonentities over glasses of sherry and ratafia. He glanced at me as I came in and acknowledged me with a curt little nod. I smiled winningly, helped myself to a glass of sherry and idled over to the paintings, which were every bit as bad as I expected them to be.

The man had no fire: his paintings were wan, limp and horribly whimsical, with the sentimentality of his commonplace soul as evident as his lack of passion. Oh, he could paint, I suppose, and the model I acknowledged to be interesting enough, but sadly lacking in colour. She was obviously his favourite, because her face stared out at me from almost all the frames. She was an odd little thing, far removed from modern standards of beauty, but with a certain mediaeval look in her childish figure and loose, pale hair. A favourite niece, perhaps? I scanned the titles inscribed on the frames: Juliet in the Tomb, Nausicaa, The Little Beggar Girl, The Cold Wedding…No wonder the girl looked so mournful: every canvas showed her in some macabre, gloomy role…dying, dead, sick, blind, abandoned…thin and piteous as a dead child, swathed in her winding-sheet as Juliet, in rags as the beggar girl, lost and frightened-looking in rich silks and velvet as Persephone.

I was roused from my critical reverie by the door opening, and was astonished to see the girl herself come into the room. I recognized her features, but Henry hadn’t done her justice by a long way. She was a delightful wraith of a thing, like a silver birch, with the sweetest slim waist, long delicate hands with pointed fingernails and a mouth that only needed a kiss to make it burst into bloom. She was demurely dressed in grey flannel and looked barely out of her teens. I supposed that she was the niece, or even some professional model he had picked up. The thought of Mrs Chester was far from my mind at that moment and it was in all innocence that I greeted the Stunner:

‘My name’s Mose Harper. How do you do?’

She blushed and murmured something, looking around with those big, hunted eyes as if afraid to be seen with me. Maybe Henry had warned her about me. I smiled.

‘Henry should never have tried to paint you,’ I said. ‘I find it’s always a mistake to try to improve on Nature. May I ask your name?’

Another sideways glance at Henry, still absorbed in conversation.

‘Effie Chester. I’m…’ The nervous glance again.

‘A relation of friend Henry? How interesting. Not the sober side of the family, I hope?’

Again the glance. The Stunner resolutely put down her head and mumbled, not at all coyly. I realized that I had really embarrassed her and, detecting a soupçon of the bluestocking, changed my tack.

‘I’m a great admirer of Henry’s work,’ I lied valiantly. ‘You might say I was a colleague…a disciple of his.’

The violet eyes flickered for an instant, with amusement or scorn. ‘Is that true?’

Confound the minx, she was laughing at me! The light in those eyes was definitely laughter, and suddenly her face was illuminated, irrepressibly. I grinned.

‘No, it isn’t true. Are you disappointed?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s his style I dislike. I have no fault to find with the raw material. Poor Henry is a painter, not an artist. Give him a nice, ripe apple and he’ll put it against a silk screen and try to paint it. A pointless waste. Neither the apple nor the public appreciates the gesture.’

She was puzzled, but intrigued; and she had stopped looking at Henry every time she spoke.

‘Well? What would you do?’ she ventured.

‘Me? I think that to paint from life you have to know life. Apples are for eating, not for painting.’ I winked slyly and grinned at her. ‘And lovely young girls are like apples.’

‘Oh!’ She clapped her hands to her mouth and her eyes left mine and flew to Chester who had just discovered Holman Hunt among his guests and was engaged in earnest, pedantic conversation. She turned away, almost panic-stricken. No, she was not a flirt: far from it. I took her arm, gently turning her back towards me.

‘I’m sorry. I was only funning. I shan’t tease you again.’ She looked into my face to see if I was telling the truth. ‘I’d say “on my honour”, but I don’t have any,’ I said. ‘Henry should have warned you against me. Did he?’

She shook her head dumbly, entirely withdrawn.

‘No, I don’t suppose he did. Tell me, how do you like modelling? Does Henry share you with any of his friends, I wonder? No? Wise Henry. Oh, what’s the matter now?’ She had turned away again, and I read a deep, sincere distress in her face.

Her hands clenched the soft fabric of her gown, and her voice was low and violent. ‘Please, Mr Harper…’

‘What is it?’ I was caught between irritation and concern.

‘Please don’t talk about modelling! Don’t talk about the wretched paintings. Everyone asks about the paintings. I hate them!’

This was getting interesting. I lowered my voice, conspiratorially. ‘Actually, so do I.’

She gave an involuntary chuckle, and the stricken look went out of her eyes. ‘I hate having to play the same part every day,’ she went on, almost dreamily. ‘Always to be good, and quiet, to do my embroidery and sit in attractive poses, when inside I want to…’ She broke off again, perhaps realizing that she was about to pass the bounds of propriety.

‘But he must pay you quite well,’ I suggested.

‘Money!’ Her scorn was evident, and I dismissed any notion of her being a professional.

‘I wish I had your healthy disregard for it,’ I said lightly. ‘Or, at least, that my creditors did.’

She chuckled again.

‘Yes, but you’re a man,’ she said, sobering abruptly. ‘You can do what you like. You don’t…’ Her voice trailed off miserably.

‘And what would you like?’ I asked.

For a second she looked at me, and I almost saw something in her expression…like the promise of a bleak passion. Then, nothing. The wan look returned to her face.

‘Nothing.’

I was about to speak, when I became aware of a presence at my elbow. Turning, I found that Henry, with impeccable timing, had finally left Hunt to mingle with his other guests. The girl at my side stiffened, her face rigid, and I wondered what hold Henry had over her to make her so much in awe of him. And it wasn’t just awe: there was something like horror in her eyes.

‘Good day, Mr Harper,’ said Henry with his punctilious courtesy. ‘I see that you have been looking at my canvasses.’

‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘And fine though they are I could not help but notice that they fail to entirely capture the charm of the model.’

It was the wrong thing to say. Henry’s mellow gaze narrowed to an icy pinprick. It was in colder accents that he introduced me to her at last.

‘Mr Harper, this is my wife, Mrs Chester.’

I possess, you may have noticed, some degree of charisma: I exerted all of it to negate my earlier faux pas and create a good impression. After a few minutes of shameless flattery Henry thawed again; I caught the birch-girl looking at me a few times, and there and then I swore I’d give her my heart. For a while, anyway.

The first thing I needed was access to the beauty. It takes patience and strategy, believe me, to seduce a married woman, as well as a solid footing in the enemy camp, and for a while I was at a loss as to how I could insinuate my lecherous self into her life and her affections. Patience, Mose, I thought. There was a world of small-talk to be done before that!

During the course of the conversation I made every effort to seduce, not the wife, but the husband. I spoke of my admiration of Holman Hunt, whom I knew Henry admired; deplored the newly decadent tendencies of Rossetti; spoke of my experiences abroad, expressed an interest in Henry’s newest canvas (a vile idea to cap all of his previous vile ideas), then finally voiced the desire to be painted by him.

‘A portrait?’ Henry was all attention.

‘Yes…’ hesitantly and with the right degree of modest reserve,

‘or a period piece, Biblical, mediaeval…I haven’t really thought much about it, yet. However, I have been an admirer of your style for some time, you know, and after this very fine exhibition…I was mentioning it to Swinburne the other day—he was the one who suggested the portrait idea, in fact.’

Easy to say: I knew that a Puritan like Henry would hardly be likely to exchange words with a man like Swinburne to verify the fact, and he knew as well as I did the relationship between Swinburne and the Rossettis. Conceit puffed him up like a teacake. He scanned my face carefully.

‘Fine features, if I may say so,’ he said ponderously. ‘I should not be ashamed to transfer them to canvas. Full-front, would you say? Or three-quarter profile?’

I began to grin, and quickly transformed the vulgar leer into a smile.

‘I’m in your hands,’ I said.

7

As the door opened and I saw him for the first time, I was certain that he had seen me. Not this body, but the essential me, in my most naked, helpless form. The thought was terrifying and, at the same time, powerfully exciting. For an instant I wanted to strut and dance before this stranger in a display of shamelessness which transcended the pale envelope of flesh I could discard at will, as my husband stood by unseeing.

I cannot explain the strange wantonness which possessed me. Perhaps it was the heightened perception lent to me by my recent illness, perhaps the laudanum I had taken earlier for my headache, but the first time I saw Moses Harper, I knew that this was a truly physical being, governed by his own desires and pleasures. Watching him and speaking to him under the heedless eye of my husband I understood that he was everything I was not; he radiated energy, arrogance, independence and self-satisfaction like the sun. Best of all, there was no shame in him, no shame at all, and his lack of shame drew me irresistibly. As he touched my arm, his voice low and caressing, charged with the promise of sensuality, I felt my cheeks flush, but not with shame.

I watched him covertly throughout his conversation with Henry. I cannot recall a word he spoke, but the tone of his voice made me shiver with pleasure. He was maybe ten years younger than Henry, with an angular figure, sharp features and a satirical expression. He wore his hair long and tied in the nape of the neck in an eccentric, old-fashioned style. His dress, too, was deliberately informal, even for a morning visit, and he was hatless. I liked his eyes, which were blue and rather narrow, as if he were laughing all the time, and his easy, mocking smile. I am certain he noticed me watching him, but he only smiled and continued his conversation.

I was astonished that he should have commissioned a painting from my husband; from the little I had previously heard of him, Mose Harper was an impudent good-for-nothing, fit only for painting filth, with no sense and less taste. Now, Henry was telling me, in an indulgent voice, that Mose was ‘a young rogue’ whose travels around the world had ‘much improved him,’ and he would no doubt one day make a ‘fine painter,’ as he showed ‘excellent draughtsmanship and a certain originality of style.’

For some time Henry propounded his ideas on the portrait, suggesting, then rejecting, various subjects such as Young Solomon and The Jacobite. Mose had written a list of his own ideas, including Prometheus, Adam in the Garden (rejected by Henry because of what he called ‘the degree of modesty which must be accorded to such a subject’) and The Card Players.

This last title intrigued Henry, and he met Mose later at his studio to discuss it. Mose told him that the idea had come to him while reading a poem by the French poet Baudelaire (I have never read any of his work, but I am told he is very shocking, and it does not strike me at all odd that he should be a favourite of Mose’s), in which:

Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique

Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.

Mose thought the phrase most evocative, and visualized a canvas ‘set in a greasy Parisian café, with sawdust on the floor and bottles of absinthe on the table. Sitting at the table is a young man holding the Knave of Hearts; next to him a beautiful lady has played the Queen of Spades.’

Henry was not immediately enthusiastic about this subject, which he found rather sordid. He himself had a notion to paint Mose in mediaeval dress, perhaps as The Minstrel’s Lament, ‘sitting beneath a rustic sundial and holding a viol, whilst behind him the sun sets and a procession of veiled ladies, carrying various musical instruments, passes by on horseback.’

Mose was politely unenthusiastic on the subject. He did not see himself as a mediaeval minstrel. Besides, there was the background to be thought of. To paint the mediaeval landscape with the ladies on horseback might take months. Surely it would be simpler to choose the dark interior and concentrate upon the portrait itself?

There was some sense in that argument, and Henry’s reluctance lessened. There would be no harm in the subject, he decided, as long as it was tastefully executed. He did draw the line at having the French poem engraved on the picture-frame, but Mose assured him that that would not be necessary. Henry began to make plans for the new canvas, abandoning A Damsel with a Dulcimer for the time being, to my immense relief.

What price Mose had promised Henry for the picture I do not know, but my husband was filled with hopes for it; Mose, with his connections, would no doubt have it hung at the Royal Academy and this might well be the making of Henry’s career. I paid little attention. Henry and I were not dependent upon Henry’s paintings for income. Any money he made was for him a matter of personal satisfaction, a proof of his talent. For myself, the only interest I had in his new painting was that the long and frequent sittings meant that I would have the opportunity to see Mose nearly every day.

8

I never liked Moses Harper. A thoroughly dangerous and calculating individual, rumour had it that he had been involved in countless shady enterprises from forgery to blackmail, although none of the rumours—which inexplicably led to even greater success with the ladies—were ever proved.

For myself, I found him a very inferior type, with no morals and fewer manners, except when he chose to exert himself to please. He was an artist of sorts, though the work I had seen, both painting and poetry alike, seemed calculated only to shock. His work was neither harmonious nor true to life; he delighted in the grotesque, the absurd and the vulgar.

Despite my dislike for low company, I realized that the connections he had acquired might be of use to me: besides, my idea for his portrait was an excellent one, and might even attract the attention of the Academy. I had already submitted my Little Beggar Girl along with the Sleeping Beauty: the critical response was encouraging, although The Times condemned my choice of model as being ‘insipid’ and suggested that I expand my choice of subject-matter. For this reason I abandoned my current project and began on the sketches immediately although I disliked having to deal so closely with Harper—his reputation was such that I did not want Effie to come into contact with him: not that she would have encouraged the fellow, you understand, but I hated to think of his eyes on her, demeaning her, lusting after her.

However, I had little choice: Effie had been ill again, and I arranged a small studio on the top floor from which I could work. More often than not, Harper would sit in the garden or in the living-room while I sketched him from various angles, and Effie would work at her stitchery or read a book, seemingly quite content with our silent company. She showed no interest in Harper at all, but that afforded me little comfort. In fact, I might have been more patient with her if she had shown a little more animation.

Effie could think of nothing but her books. I had discovered her reading a most unsuitable novel a couple of days previously, a hellish thing by a certain Ellis Bell, called Wuthering Heights, or some other such nonsense. The wretched book had already driven her into one of her megrims, and when I took it away—for her own good, the ungrateful creature—she dared to fly into a violent tantrum, crying: How dare I take her books! weeping and behaving like the spoiled child she was. Only a strong dose of laudanum was sufficient to calm her, and for several days afterwards she kept to her bed, too weak and pettish to move. I told her, when she had almost recovered, that I had long suspected that she read too much; it gave her fanciful notions. I did not like the kind of morbidity, bred of idleness, that it encouraged. I told her that there could be no objection to improving, Christian works, but forbade any more novels, or anything but the lightest kind of poetry. She was unstable enough as it was.

Whatever she told you, I was not unkind: I saw her instability and tried to control it, encouraging her to take up activities appropriate to a young woman. Her needlework lay untouched for weeks and I obliged her to take it up again. Not for myself—no—but for her. I knew she desired to have talent such as I had: when she was a child she used to try and paint scenes from her favourite poets, but I always dealt honestly with Effie; I did not flatter her to gain her affection but told her the sober truth: women are not, as a rule, made for artistic activities; their talents are the gentle, domestic ones.

But she was wilful; she persisted in her daubs, saying that she painted what she saw in dreams. Dreams! I told her she should dream less and pay more attention to her duties as a wife.

You see, I did care for her. I loved her too much to allow her to delude herself with vanities and conceits. I had kept her pure for so long, had lived with her imperfection, had forgiven her for the seed of wickedness she, like all women, carried within her. And what did she give me in return? Megrims, fancies, foolishness and deception. Do not be deceived by her innocent face as I was! Like my mother she was diseased, the bud of her unfurling adolescence blackened from the core. How could I have known? God, in His ferocious jealousy, threw her in my path to test me. Let a single woman, just one, into the Kingdom of Heaven itself, and I swear she will throw down the blessed one by one—angels, archangels and all.

Damn her! She has made me as you see me now, a cripple, a fallen angel with the seed of the serpent in my frozen entrails. Slice an apple and you will find the Star, bearing the seeds of damnation in its core: God knew it even then, He who knows everything, sees everything. How He must have laughed, as He drew the rib from Adam’s sleeping body! Even now I seem to hear His laughter…and in my darkness spit and curse the light. Twenty grains of chloral to buy Your silence.

9

For two weeks I was content to watch him and wait. Mose haunted my dreams with visions of delightful abandon; waking, I saw him every day. I existed in a warm and lovely dream-state, like some sleeping princess waiting for her kiss, and I trusted in him implicitly. I had seen him watching; I knew he would come for me.

Days passed, and Henry moved back to his studio to work. He already had enough studies of Mose, and was eager to transfer his initial idea on to canvas. He was vaguely considering using me as the model for the Queen of Spades, but Mose, with a hidden wink in my direction, had said abruptly that I was ‘not his type’. Henry was not sure whether to be offended or relieved; he settled for a thin-lipped smile and promised to ‘think about it’. Mose accompanied him to the studio and for some time I did not see him, though his face never left my thoughts.

My health improved daily and I began to take fewer and fewer of the doses of laudanum Henry brought me. One night he found that I had thrown away my medicine, and was very angry. How could I expect to get better, he demanded, if I wilfully disobeyed him? I must drink my medicine three times a day, like a good girl, or I would become morbid and fanciful again, my nightmares would return and I would be good for nothing but idleness. My health was frail, he said, my mind weakened by illness. I must at least try to make an effort not to be a burden to him, especially now that his work was at last being recognized.

Meekly, I acquiesced; I promised to take a daily walk to the church and back and to take my medicine regularly. From then on I made sure that the number of drops in the bottle diminished at a steady pace—and with it I watered the araucaria on the stairs three times a day. Henry never suspected a thing. In fact, he was almost cheerful when he returned from the studio. His painting was progressing very well, if slowly, he told me, with Mose sitting for him maybe three hours a day. Henry worked till the early evening and, as the weather grew fine, I took the habit of going for a long walk to the cemetery in the afternoons. Once or twice Tabby came with me, but she had too many things to do in the house to act as a permanent chaperone to me. Besides, I told her, I was only going as far as the church; I could come to no harm, and I was feeling much better now that the winter was over. Three or four times I took the same walk from Cromwell Square, down Swain’s Lane, down the hill, into the cemetery to St Michael’s. Since the day I had my vision in that church, the day I lost the baby, I had felt an odd link with St Michael’s, a desire to go in there alone and try to recapture the sense of purpose I had felt that day, the sense of revelation. But I had not been back, except on Sundays, with Henry on one side of me. Since William had gone to Oxford I had felt even more closely watched than ever. I dared not allow my mask to slip for an instant.

But now I felt almost as if I were on holiday. I enjoyed my trips out of the house more than I dared admit, and led Henry to believe that I walked only because he had ordered me to do so. If he had known how much those outings meant to me, he would surely have cut them short. So I nursed my secret and my joy, while inside me something wild and frenzied capered and grinned. I tried the church several times, but each time there were too many people for me to dare enter: sightseers, baptisms, weddings…and once a funeral, with row upon row of black-clad mourners, intoning the dark hymns to the howling of the organ.

I drew back from the half-open door, embarrassed and somehow afraid as the wave of sound struck me. In my confusion I almost knocked over the vase of white chrysanthemums which was standing by the entrance. One woman turned at the noise and fixed her gaze on me insistently, almost threateningly. I made a helpless little gesture of apology and continued to back away, but suddenly I felt my legs begin to buckle under my weight. I looked up and saw the vault spiralling towards me uncontrollably, the face of St Sebastian suddenly very close to mine; St Sebastian smiling, showing his teeth…

Not now! I thought urgently, struggling to regain control. Looking wildly around me I caught sight of the woman, still watching me with that insistent look of recognition. From afar I thought I heard a voice calling a half-familiar name. Unreasoning panic seized me and I turned, abruptly released from my trance, and ran, slamming the heavy door. I stumbled, tried to retain my balance and cannoned headlong into a black-clad figure standing at the bottom of the steps. His arms locked tightly around me. By now I was thoroughly unnerved, and I was on the point of screaming aloud when I looked into the face of my assailant and saw that it was Mose.

‘Mrs Chester!’ He looked surprised to see me, and let go of my arms immediately with a show of apology which might have seemed genuine had it not been for the mischief in his eyes. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have alarmed you like that. Do forgive me.’

I struggled to regain my composure. ‘It’s quite all right,’ I said. ‘It…wasn’t you. I went into the church, and walked straight into a funeral service. It…I hope I didn’t hurt you,’ I finished lamely.

He laughed, but almost immediately narrowed his eyes in an expression of some concern.

‘You have had a shock, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘You look quite pale. Here, sit down for a moment.’ He eased an arm around my shoulders and began to move me towards a bench a few yards away. ‘Why, you are so cold!’ he exclaimed as his hands found mine. Before I could speak he had pulled off his own coat and thrown it over my shoulders. I protested half-heartedly, but he was cheerfully proprietary and, besides, it felt very comfortable to be sitting on the bench with his arm around me, the woolly tobacco-smell of his overcoat in my nostrils. If he had kissed me then, I would have responded with all my heart; I knew it—and felt no guilt at all.

10

I’d been following her for nearly a week before I made my move; she was difficult game, and I had to tread carefully if I was not to frighten the girl away. As it was, she was touchingly trusting; I met her every day after that and within the week she was calling me Mose and holding my hand, just like a child. If I hadn’t known better I’d have sworn she was a virgin.

Not my usual tipple, I hear you say? Well, I couldn’t have explained it either. I suppose it was the novelty of playing the prince, after being so many times the knave…Besides, she was beautiful.

A man could fall in love. But not me.

Still, there was something about her, something at the same time cool and deeply carnal, something beyond that girlishness which sparked off some latent emotion in me. She was an entirely new experience; I felt like an alcoholic, his palate jaded with heady intoxicants, tasting for the first time one of those sugary children’s drinks. Like him, I paused to relish the newness, the unfamiliar sweetness. She was without any sense of right or wrong; she followed me wherever I wished to lead her, shivering with pleasure when I touched her, hanging on my every word. We talked far more than I ever did with any other woman; I forgot myself in her presence and told her about my poetry and art, my dreams and longings. I mostly saw her in the cemetery—it had the advantage of being huge and rambling, with plenty of enclosed places to hide. One cold, dull evening when Henry was working late we met by the Circle of Lebanon; there was no-one around, and the devil was in me. Effie smelled so good, like roses and white bread, and her face was flushed with the cool air. Her hair had been blown by the wind and little tendrils of it fell all around her face.

For a moment I was all hers.

It was the first time I had kissed her on the mouth, and I forgot everything I had planned about not alarming her. She was standing beside a vault, and I pushed her right up against the wall. Her hat fell off—I ignored it—and her hair came half unpinned around my face. I pulled the rest of it down and ran it through my hands, gasping for breath like a diver before I prepared to plunge again. I don’t suppose it was the kind of kiss she expected, because she clapped her hands to her mouth with a little cry and stared at me, her face scarlet and her eyes like saucers. I realized that my hasty impulse had probably wrecked all my careful planning and I swore, then swore again at myself for swearing.

Recovering, I pulled away from her and fell to my knees, playing the part of the Repentant Lover. I was sorry, more sorry than I could say, for having alarmed her; no punishment could be too bad for me. I had succumbed to a momentary weakness, but I loved her so much; I had so longed to kiss her, ever since I first saw her, that I had lost control. I was not made of stone; but what of that? I had frightened her, insulted her. I deserved to be horsewhipped.

Maybe I overdid it a trifle, but it was a technique which had worked well enough before with married women; I had researched it carefully in the pages of The Keepsake and, God help me, in this case some of it was nearly true. I peered up cautiously to see if she had taken the bait and, amazingly, she was rocking with laughter, not unkindly but uncontrollably. As she saw me looking at her she burst out again.

Little Eff rose rapidly in my estimation. I stood up and grinned ruefully.

‘Well…it was worth a try,’ I said with a shrug. Effie shook her head and laughed again.

‘Oh, Mose,’ she said. ‘You are a hypocrite! You should be on the stage.’

I tried another tack: the Unrepentant Lover.

‘I’ve often thought that,’ I said. ‘Still, it usually works, you know.’ I ventured a disarming smile. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m not sorry.’

‘That’s better,’ said Effie. ‘I believe that.’

‘Then believe this,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ How could she not believe it? At the time, I nearly did myself. ‘I love you, and it’s killing me to see you married to that pompous ass. He doesn’t think of you as a woman, he thinks you’re his thing, his beggar girl, his sick little fallen angel. Effie, you need me; you need to be taught how to live, how to enjoy life.’

I was almost sincere. Indeed, I practically convinced myself. I looked at her to see how she was taking it and her straight gaze fixed mine. She took a step towards me and such was the intensity of her expression that I nearly backed away. Almost abstractedly she lifted her cold hands to my face. Her kiss was soft and I tasted salt on her skin. I held back, allowing her to explore my face, my neck and hair with her fingers. Gently she pushed me towards the vault. I heard the gate open behind me and allowed myself to be manoeuvred inside. It was one of many family monuments in the cemetery, shaped like a tiny chapel, with a gate to protect it from the curious, a chair, prayer-stool and altar, and a little stained-glass window at the back. There was just enough space for two people to enter, shielded from view. I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms for her.

The gate slammed shut in my face.

I opened my eyes quickly and there she was, the minx, grinning at me through the bars. At first I laughed and tried to push the door open, but the catch was on the outside.

‘Effie!’

‘It’s frightening, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Effie, let me out!’

‘Being locked up, unable to get free? I feel that with Henry all the time. He doesn’t want me to be alive. He wants me to be quiet and cold, like a corpse. You don’t know what it’s like, Mose. He makes me take laudanum to keep me quiet and good, but inside I want to scream and bite and run naked through the house like a savage!’

I could feel the passion and the hatred in her; you can’t imagine how exciting that was to my jaded taste. But I was uneasy, too. For a moment I contemplated abandoning the whole campaign, asking myself whether she wasn’t too hot for me to handle, but the appeal was too much. I growled at her like a tiger and bit at her fingers through the bars. She laughed wildly, a bird’s mad scream across the marshes.

‘You won’t betray me, Mose.’ It was a statement. I shook my head.

‘If you do, I’ll bring you back here and bury you here for ever.’ She was only half joking. I kissed her knuckles.

‘I promise.’

I heard her push the catch open in the gloom, and she stepped into the vault with me. Her cloak fell to the floor and her brown flannel dress with it. In her underclothes she was a wraith, and her touch was burning brimstone. She was all untutored, but made up for that in her enthusiasm. I tell you, I was almost afraid. She tore at me, bit me, scratched me, devoured me with her passion, and in the dark I was incapable of telling whether her cries were of anguish or of pleasure. She returned my careful gentleness with a violence which tore at the heart. The act was quick and brutal, like a murder, and afterwards she cried, but not, I think, with any sorrow.

There was a mystery in her which left me with a feeling of awe, of sanctity, which I never felt with any other woman. In some incomprehensible way I felt that she had purified me.

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking I fell in love with the chit. Well, I didn’t. But that evening—only that evening, mind you—I thought I felt something deeper than the brief passions I had had for other women. As if the act had opened up something inside me. I wasn’t in love with her; and yet, when I returned to my rooms that night, all aching and scratched and feeling I had been in a war, I couldn’t sleep; all night I stayed beside the fire thinking of Effie, drinking wine and looking into the flames as if they were her eyes. But however much I drank I did not manage to quench the thirst which her burning touch had begun in me, nor could a whole brothel full of whores have stilled the ache of wanting her.

11

I was lucky that Henry was late home; it had been past seven when I arrived, and he usually came back from the studio for supper. As I came in by the back door I could hear Tabby singing to herself in the kitchen and knew that Mr Chester had not yet returned. I crept upstairs to my room to change my crumpled dress, choosing a white dimity with a blue sash which I had almost outgrown but which was a favourite of his. As I hastened to put it on I wondered whether Henry would see the difference so clearly written in my face, the rending of that veil which had kept me so long apart from the world of the living. My whole body was shaking with the violence of it, and I sat for a long time in front of my mirror before I was reassured that the marks of my lover’s touch—marks which I could feel scarlet over every inch of my skin—existed only in my imagination.

I looked up at the wall where The Little Beggar Girl hung, and could not repress my laughter. For a moment I was almost hysterical, fighting for breath, as I met the mild, sightless gaze of the child who had never been me. I was never Henry’s beggar girl; no, not even before I outgrew my childhood. My true portrait was hidden at the bottom of my work-basket, the face branded with scarlet. Sleeping Beauty, now awake and touched with a new kind of curse. Neither Henry, nor anyone else, would ever be able to put me to sleep again.

At the knock on the door I started violently and turned to see Henry standing there, an unreadable expression on his face. I could not suppress a shudder of apprehension. To hide my confusion I began to brush my hair with long, smooth strokes, Low adown, low adown…like the mermaid in the poem. The feel of my hair in my hands seemed to give me courage, as if some remnant of my lover’s strength and assurance still lingered there, and Henry walked right into the room and spoke to me with unusual bonhomie.

‘Effie, my dear, you’re looking very well today, very well indeed. Have you taken your medicine?’

I nodded, not trusting my voice. Henry nodded his approval.

‘I can see definite improvement. Definite roses in those cheeks. Capital!’ He patted my face in a proprietary fashion, and I had to make a real effort to stop myself from drawing away in disgust; after my lover’s burning touch, the thought of Henry’s cool caresses was unspeakable.

‘I suppose supper is almost ready?’ I asked, parting my hair and beginning to braid it.

‘Yes, Tabby has made a game pie with buttered parsnips.’ He frowned at my reflection in the mirror. ‘Don’t pin up your hair,’ he said. ‘Wear it as it is, with ribbon through it, as you used to.’ From my dressing-table he chose a blue ribbon, gently threading it through my hair and tying it in a wide bow at the back. ‘That’s my good girl.’ He smiled. ‘Stand up.’

I shook out my skirts in front of the mirror and looked at my reflection, still so like that other, unmoving reflection in the frame of The Little Beggar Girl.

‘Perfect,’ said Henry.

And though it was May, and there was a fire in the grate, I shivered.

Over supper I managed to regain much of my composure. I ate most of my piece of pie, some vegetables and a small dish of rhenish cream before announcing with fake good cheer that I could not possibly eat another morsel. Henry was in fine spirits. He consumed almost a whole bottle of wine over supper, although it was not his habit to drink a great deal, and he drank two glasses of port with his cigar afterwards, so that, without actually becoming inebriated, he was certainly in a very jolly mood.

Inexplicably this disturbed me, and I would have much preferred his indifference to the attentions he lavished upon me. He poured wine for me which I did not want to drink, complimented me a number of times on my dress and my hair, kissed my fingers as we rose from table and, as he smoked his cigar, he asked me to play the piano and sing to him.

I am not a musician; I knew maybe three or four little pieces by heart, and as many songs, but tonight Henry was charmed by my repertoire and caused me to sing ‘Come with me to the Bower’ three times before I was allowed to sit down, pleading fatigue. Suddenly Henry was all solicitude; I was to put my feet up on to his knees and to sit with my eyes closed, smelling at my lavender bottle. I insisted that I was quite well, simply a little tired, but Henry would have none of it; and presently, feeling quite oppressed at his attention, I pleaded a headache and asked permission to go to bed.

‘Poor child, of course you must,’ replied Henry with unimpaired good cheer. ‘Take your medicine, and Tabby shall bring you up some hot milk.’

I was glad to be gone, hot milk or not, and, knowing that I should not sleep otherwise, took a few drops of laudanum from the hated bottle. I took off the white dress and changed into a ruffled nightgown, and was brushing out my hair when I heard a tap on the door.

‘Come in, Tabby,’ I called without looking round, but on hearing the heavy tread on the boards, so different to Tabby’s light scuttling footsteps, I turned abruptly and saw Henry standing there for the second time that evening, holding a tray with a glass of milk and some biscuits.

‘For my darling girl,’ he said in a jocular tone, but I was quick to see something in his eyes, a shifting, shameful expression which froze me where I stood. ‘No, no,’ he said as I moved to get into bed, ‘stay a while with me. Sit on my knee as you drink your milk, just as you used to.’ He paused, and I saw the furtive expression again behind his wide smile.

‘I’ll be cold,’ I protested. ‘And I don’t want any milk, my head aches so.’

‘Don’t be peevish,’ he advised. ‘I’ll make a nice fire, and you shall have some laudanum in your milk, and very soon you’ll be better.’ He reached for the bottle on the mantelpiece.

‘No! I’ve taken some already,’ I said, but Henry did not pay any attention to my protest. He poured three drops of the laudanum into the milk and made to hand me the glass.

‘Henry—’

‘Don’t call me that!’ For a moment the jocular tone had disappeared; the tray with the glass and the biscuits wavered, and a dribble of milk slopped over the rim of the glass on to the tray. Henry noticed it but did not comment; I saw his mouth tighten, for he hated waste or untidiness of any kind, but his voice was still mild.

‘Clumsy girl! Come now, don’t make me lose my temper with you. Drink your milk, like a good girl, and then you shall sit on my knee.’

I tried to smile.

‘Yes, Mr Chester.’

His mouth remained narrow until I had finished the milk, then he relaxed. He put the tray carelessly down on the floor and put his arms around me. I tried not to stiffen, feeling the sickly, indigestible weight of the hot milk resting in the pit of my stomach. My head was spinning and the hundred marks of Mose’s embrace were like burning mouths on my body, each one screaming out its fury and outrage that this man should dare to lay his hands on me. My body’s reaction at last corroborated what my mind had been too afraid to admit; that I hated this man whom I had married and to whom I was bound by law and duty. I hated him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered, his fingers tracing the pattern of my vertebrae through the linen nightdress. ‘There’s my good girl. Sweet Effie.’

And as he began with an eager and shaking hand to unfasten the buttons of my nightdress, a wave of nausea submerged me and I submitted passively to his touch, all the while praying to the wild, pagan god Mose had awakened in me that it should be over soon, that he should be gone, so that I could fall into the well of laudanum and the memory of his sickly, guilty embraces would be extinguished.

I awoke from a kind of thick swoon to find daylight filtering through my curtains, and stumbled weakly out of bed to open the windows. The air was fresh and damp as I stretched out my arms to the sun and felt some strength return to my shaking limbs. I washed carefully and completely and, after dressing in clean linen and a grey flannel gown, I felt brave enough to go down to breakfast. It was not yet half past seven; Henry was a late riser and would not be at table; I would have some time to compose myself after what had happened the previous night—it would not do for Henry to realize how I felt, nor what power he wielded over me.

Tabby had prepared eggs and ham, but I could not eat anything. I did drink some hot chocolate, more to please Tabby than myself, for I did not want her to tell Henry that I was unwell; so I sipped my chocolate and waited by the window, scanning a book of poems and watching the sun rise. It was eight when Henry made his appearance, dressed severely in black as if he were going to church. He went past me without a word, seating himself at the breakfast-table with the Morning Post and serving himself lavishly with ham, eggs, toast and kidneys. He took his meal in silence except for the occasional rustle of the paper and, leaving most of it untouched, he stood up, folded the paper meticulously and glanced towards me.

‘Good morning,’ I said mildly, turning a page.

Henry did not reply except for a tightening of the mouth, a trick of his when he was angry or when someone contradicted him. Why he should be angry I did not know, except that he often had abrupt changes of mood which I had long since ceased to try to understand. He took a step towards me, glanced at the book I was reading and frowned.

‘Love poems,’ he said in a bitter tone. ‘I should have expected you, ma’am, with the education I have lavished on you, not to waste whatever sense God gave you on reading such trash!’

Hastily I closed the book, but it was too late.

‘Do I not give you anything you want? Are you lacking in anything in the way of gowns, cloaks and bonnets? Have I not stayed with you when you were ill, borne with your megrims and your hysterics and your headaches…?’ The bitter voice was rising in pitch, sharp as piano-wire.

I nodded warily.

‘Love poems!’ said Henry sourly. ‘Are all women the same, then? Is there not one female who has escaped the taint of all womankind? “One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.” Am I such a poor teacher, then, that the pupil I thought was the most untouched by the weaknesses of her sex should waste her time in fanciful contemplation? Give that to me!’ Reaching for the book he tossed it vengefully on to the fire.

‘Of course,’ he added spitefully, ‘your mother is a milliner, used to pandering to the vanities of the fashionable world. I suppose no-one thought to instruct you. A fine clergyman your father must have been to allow you to fill your brain with fanciful notions. I suppose he thought such dangerous rubbish romantic.’

I knew I should have remained silent to avoid a quarrel, but my disgust of the previous night still lingered and, watching my book, with Shelley and Shakespeare and Tennyson curling up among the flames, I felt a great, rushing anger.

‘My father was a good man,’ I said fiercely. ‘Sometimes I feel he is with me, watching. Watching us together.’

I saw Henry stiffen. ‘I wonder what he is thinking,’ I continued in a soft voice. ‘I wonder what he sees.’

Henry’s face clenched like a fist and I burst out, uncontrollably, ‘How dare you burn my books! How dare you preach to me and treat me like a child! How can you, when last night…’ I broke off, gritting my teeth with the effort of not crying my secret hatred out loud.

‘Last night…’ His voice was low.

I put up my chin defiantly. ‘Yes!’ He knew what I meant.

‘I am not a saint, Effie,’ he said in a subdued voice. ‘I know I am as weak as other men. But it’s you—you drive me to it. I try to keep you pure; God help me, I do try. Last night was all your doing. I saw the way you looked at me while you were combing your hair; I saw the colours in your cheeks. You set out to seduce me and, because I was weak, I succumbed. But I still love you: that’s why I try to keep you clean and innocent, as you were when I first met you that day in the park.’ He turned to me and grasped my hands. ‘You looked like an angel child. Even then I guessed you were sent to tempt me. I know it wasn’t your fault, Effie, it’s your nature—God made women weak and perverse and full of treachery. But you owe it to me to fight it, to deny sin and let God into your soul. Oh, I do love you, Effie! Don’t fight against the purity of my love. Accept it, and my authority as you would that of a loving father. Trust my deeper knowledge of the world, and respect me, as you would your poor dead father. Will you?’

Grasping my hands, he looked into my face most earnestly and such was the power of years of obedience that I nodded meekly.

‘That’s my good girl. Now, you must ask my forgiveness for the sin of anger, Effie.’

For a second I hesitated, trying to recapture the rebellion, the shamelessness, the certainty I had felt with Mose in the cemetery. But that had gone, along with my brief moment of defiance, and I felt weak, easy tears pricking at my eyelids.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was rude to you, Mr Chester,’ I mumbled, the tears coursing down my cheeks.

‘Good girl,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘What, still crying? Come now. You see that I was right about those poems—they make you peevish and melancholy. Dry your eyes now, and I’ll ask Tabby to bring you your medicine.’

Half an hour later Henry had gone and I was lying on my bed, dry-eyed but heavy with a listless despair. The laudanum bottle was on the bedstand beside me and, for a moment, I contemplated the greatest sin of all, the sin against the Holy Ghost. If there had not been Mose and the knowledge of love and hatred in my heart I might have committed that blackest of murders there and then, for I saw my life stretching out in front of me like a reflection in a fairground Hall of Mirrors, saw my face in youth, in middle age, in old age, adorning the walls of Henry’s house like dim trophies as he took more and more of myself from me. I wanted to tear off my skin, to free the creature I had been when I danced naked in a shower of light…If it had not been for Mose I would have done it, and with joy.

12

I stopped at my club, the Cocoa Tree, for a late breakfast—I couldn’t bear to eat with Effie staring at me with those dark, wounded eyes; as if I was somehow guilty of something! She had no idea of the sacrifices I made for her, the torments I endured for her sake. Nor did she care. All she cared for were her wretched books. I narrowed my eyes at The Times and tried to concentrate, but I could not read the closely spaced paragraphs; her face intruded, the image of her lips, her eyes, the grimace of horror which had come over her features when I kissed her…

Damn her games! It was too late for her to pretend that she was chaste; I knew her to the cheating core. It was for her sake that I visited that house in Crook Street—for her. To safeguard her tainted purity. A man could visit such places and need feel no compunction; after all, it was only the same as visiting a club, an exclusive gentleman’s club. I had instincts, damn her, like any man: better that I should slake them on some Haymarket whore than on my little girl. But last night there had been something about her, something different; she had been rosy-cheeked and sensual, elated and warm, the scent of grass and cedar on her skin and in her hair…She had wanted to seduce me. I knew it.

Ridiculous, that I should be the one to be made to feel unclean. Ridiculous that she should try to accuse me. I sipped my coffee, liking the smell of leather and cigar-smoke in the warm air, the muted sounds of voices—men’s voices—in the background. This morning, the very thought of women sickened me. I was glad I had burned her stupid book. Later I would go through the bookshelves and find the rest.

‘Mr Chester?’

I started, spilling coffee into the saucer in my hand. The man who had addressed me was slim and fair, with round spectacles over sharp grey eyes.

‘I’m so sorry to have disturbed you,’ he said, smiling, ‘but I was at your exhibition the other day and I was most impressed.’ He had a clipped, precise delivery and very white teeth. ‘Dr Russell,’ he prompted. ‘Francis Russell, author of The Theory and Practice of Hypnotism and Ten Case Histories of Hysteria.’

The name did seem familiar. Now I came to think of it, so did the face. I assumed I must have seen him at the exhibition.

‘Perhaps you’d care to join me in a drink of something stronger?’ suggested Russell.

I pushed aside the half-empty coffee-cup. ‘I don’t usually touch spirits,’ I said, ‘but a fresh cup of coffee would be welcome. I’m…a little tired.’

Russell nodded. ‘The pressure of the artistic temperament,’ he said. ‘Insomnia, headaches, impaired digestion…many of my patients exhibit these very symptoms.’

‘I see.’ Indeed I did; the man was simply offering his services. The thought was somehow reassuring; for a moment I had wondered whether his apparently friendly approach might conceal something more sinister. Angry with myself at the very thought, I smiled warmly at the man.

‘And what would you usually recommend in these cases?’ I asked.

For some time we spoke together. Russell was an interesting conversationalist, well versed in art and literature. We touched upon the subject of drugs; their use in symbolist art, their necessity in cases of highly strung temperaments. I mentioned Effie and was reassured that the use of laudanum—especially for a sensitive young female—was the best method of combating depression. A very sound young man, Francis Russell. After an hour of his company I found that I could begin to touch delicately upon the subject of Effie’s strange moods. I was not explicit, of course, merely hinting that my wife had odd fancies and unexplained illnesses. I was gratified to find that the doctor’s diagnosis was much like my own. My feeling of unfocused guilt—as if I had somehow been responsible for Effie’s actions of last night—receded as I learned that such feelings were not uncommon; the correct term, he informed me, was empathy and I must not allow myself to be depressed by my natural reactions.

We left the Cocoa Tree on the best of terms; we exchanged cards and promised to meet again, and it was in a far more optimistic mood that I finally made my way to the studio to meet Moses Harper, secure in my knowledge that in Russell I had an ally, a weapon against the spectres of my guilty fantasy. I had science on my side.

13

You see, she needed me. Call me a villain if you like, but I made her happy, which was more than your preaching ever did. She was lonelier than anyone I have ever known, trapped in her ivory tower with her cold prince and her servants and everything her heart desired except love. I was what she needed—and however much you might despise me, I taught her everything I knew. She was a quick enough pupil and quite without inhibitions. She accepted everything without reserve, without shame or coyness. I never corrupted her—if anything, she corrupted me.

We met as often as we could, mostly in the afternoons when Henry was working and I had finished the day’s sitting. His canvas was progressing very slowly and he worked until about seven every evening. This gave me plenty of time to see Effie home safely before he got back, so that he never knew how long she had been gone—and if the old Tabby suspected anything, she never said so.

This went on for about a month, with me meeting Effie either in the cemetery or at my rooms. She was moody—sometimes highly strung and tense, sometimes recklessly bright; never twice the same. Her lovemaking reflected this, so that she gave the illusion of being many different women and I suppose that was why she held on to me so long; I’m terribly easy to bore, you know.

She told me she had dreams in which she travelled all over the world; sometimes she described the strange and distant places she had visited and wept at the lost beauty of the dream. She also said that she could step out of her body at will and watch those around her without their knowledge; she described the physical pleasure of this act and urged me to try it. She was certain that if I were to learn how to perform this feat too, we could make love outside our bodies and be joined together for ever. Needless to say I never managed, although I did try, using opium, feeling rather foolish at believing her. She believed it, however, just as she believed everything I told her. I could make her shiver and grow pale, cry, laugh or flush with rage at my stories, and I took some innocent pleasure in doing this. I told her tales of ghosts and gods, witches and vampires dredged up from my earliest childhood, amazed at her childish hunger for all that knowledge, at all her wasted potential for learning.

I told you, she was a new experience, disarming me from one moment to the next. However, her real talent, like all women, was for emotion, and I sometimes pitied Henry Chester who had not been able to use and appreciate the reserves of passion in his poor little Effie.

The change came the day I decided to take her to the travelling fair which had camped on the Islington road. All women like fairs, with the little knick-knacks on sale, the Tunnel of Love and the fortune-tellers predicting dark handsome men and large families. For myself, I had heard that there would be on display a large collection of human grotesques, something which, since my earliest childhood, I have scarce been able to resist. They have always been a subject of fascination for me, these poor wretches, playthings of an uncaring God. In China, apparently, such shows are so lucrative that natural occurrences are not thought common enough, and parents of large families often sell young babies to fairs at birth to be used as freak attractions. The babies—usually the despised girls—are deliberately deformed by being kept in a small cage, in which their limbs are not allowed freedom to grow. The result, after some years of this treatment, is the comically atrophied creature so much loved by young children, the dwarf.

I told this story to Effie as we set off for the fair and it was a full fifteen minutes before I could stop her tears. How could they, she was crying, how could they be so cruel, so inhuman? To deliberately create something like that! Could I imagine the inconceivable hatred which such a creature would feel…Here she broke down hysterically and the coachman glared accusingly at me through the glass. It took all of my arguments to persude her that none of the freaks in this fair were so obtained; they were all of them honest errors of Nature, doing well for themselves in their chosen trade. Besides, there would be other things to occupy her mind: I would buy her some ribbons from the pedlar, and maybe some hot gingerbread if she wanted it. Inwardly I grimaced and made a mental note not to tell her any more stories about China.

At the fair, Effie’s despondency lifted, and she began to take an interest in what was going on around her. Pedlars with brightly coloured wares; an old man with a barrel-organ and a dancing monkey in a scarlet coat; some jugglers and acrobats; a fire-eater; and some gypsy girls dancing to pipes and tambourine.

She lingered for some time in front of the dancers, her eyes fixed especially upon one girl of about her own age, but with the dark skin and loose blue-black hair of the gypsy race, her feet bare and her ankles—nicely turned ankles, I noticed—ringed about with jangling bracelets. She was wearing a gold-embroidered skirt, scarlet petticoats, and a multitude of necklaces. Effie was enchanted.

‘Mose,’ she whispered to me as the girl ceased her dance, ‘I think she must be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’

‘Not as beautiful as you,’ I said to reassure her, taking her hand.

She scowled and shook her head irritably. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’

Women! Sometimes there’s no pleasing them.

I was ready to move on; the freak-show had begun, and I could hear a crier extolling the marvels of ‘Adolphus, the Human Torso’, but Effie was still watching the gypsy. She had moved towards a faded blue-and-gold tent by the side of the path, and a crier now began to announce that ‘Scheherazade, Princess of the Mystic East’ would tell fortunes using the ‘Magickal Tarot and the Crystal Ball’. I saw Effie’s eyes light up, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Summoning up a smile, I said: ‘I suppose you want to know your fortune?’

She nodded, her face vivid with eagerness. ‘Do you think she’s really a princess?’

‘Almost certainly,’ I said with great seriousness and Effie sighed with rapture. ‘She has probably been cursed by a wicked witch and is reduced to living in poverty,’ I continued. ‘She has lost her memory and disguises her magical powers as fairground charlatanry. But at night she turns into a silver swan and flies in her dreams to places no-one but she has ever travelled to.’

‘Now you’re laughing at me,’ she protested.

‘Not at all.’

But she was hardly paying attention. ‘Do you know, I’ve never had anyone tell my fortune? Henry says that kind of thing is witchcraft in disguise. He says that in the Middle Ages they would have been hanged for it, and a good thing too.’

‘Pious Henry,’ I sneered.

‘Well, I don’t care what Henry says,’ said Effie with determination. ‘Would you stay out here and wait for me? I won’t be long.’

Anything to keep the lady happy. I sat down on a stump and waited.

The High Priestess

14

It was hot inside the tent and what light there was came from a small red lamp on the table in front of me. The gypsy was sitting on a stool, shuffling her pack of cards, and she smiled as I came in, beckoning me to sit down. For a moment I hung back; surprised that she was not the woman who had danced, but an older woman, a scarf drawn over her hair and a thick layer of kohl outlining her tawny eyes. Something covered in black cloth stood on the table beside the lamp and as my eyes lingered upon it, trying to decide what it was, ‘Scheherazade’ indicated it with one strong, still-beautiful hand.

‘The crystal ball,’ she explained. Her voice was light and pleasant but accented. ‘I have to keep it covered or it loses its power. Please cut the cards.’

‘I…Where is the girl who danced?’ I asked hesitantly. ‘I thought that she would be telling the fortunes.’

‘My daughter,’ said the gypsy curtly. ‘She and I work together. Please cut the cards.’

She handed me the pack of cards and I held them for a moment. They were heavy and looked very old, with a shine to them born not from grime but from much respectful handling. I gave them back with reluctance, for I would have liked to look at them more closely, and she began to spread them in a spiral pattern around the table.

‘The Hermit,’ began Scheherazade. ‘And the Ten of Wands. Oppression. This man speaks of virtue, but he has a shameful secret. The Seven of Cups: debauch. And the Nine of Swords: cruelty and murder. I play the Lovers, but they are covered by the Knave of Coins. He will bring you joy and despair, for in his hands he bears the Two of Cups and the Tower. But who is here, riding atop the Chariot? The High Priestess, bearing the Ten of Swords, which spells ruin, and the Ace of Cups, great fortune. You will trust her and she will save you, but the cup she offers is filled with bitterness. Her chariot is driven by a Knave and a Fool, and beneath her wheels lie the Ace of Wands and the Hanged Man. In her hands she brings Justice and the Two of Cups which spells Love, but hidden inside the cups are Change and Death.’ She paused, as if she had forgotten that I was there, and spoke softly to herself in Romany.

‘Is there more?’ I asked after a time, as she seemed lost in thought.

Scheherazade hesitated, then nodded. She looked at me for some time with an unreadable expression, then she stepped towards me, kissed me quickly on the forehead and made a sign with three fingers of her left hand.

‘You have a strange and magical destiny, ma dordi,’ she said. ‘Better to look for yourself.’ And she carefully unwrapped the crystal ball from its black covering and pushed it towards me.

For a moment I was unsure of where I was; the ball reflected the light so that I had the illusion of being out of my own body looking downwards. The scene was familiar, stylized like the figures on the Tarot: a girl sitting at a table where a gypsy watches over a hand of cards. Suddenly I was light-headed, almost dizzy, overflowing with unreasoning laughter, but feeling dislocated somehow, as if struggling with lost memories.

When shall we three meet again? I said to myself, and I laughed aloud, uncontrollably, as if in recollection of some wild and ridiculous farce.

Then a depression, as abrupt as the hilarity, seized me, and I was close to tears, the image of the crystal blurring before my eyes. I was afraid, disorientated and without memory of what had frightened me, looking into the clouded surface of the crystal and trembling.

Scheherazade was singing gently, almost idly under her breath:

‘Aux marches du palais…

Aux marches du palais…

’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà…

’Y a une si belle fille…’

I tried to stop myself from falling out of my body towards the crystal, but the pull was too strong. I could no longer feel my limbs, no longer see beyond the clouded surface where, at last, some of the cloud was beginning to disperse. Scheherazade was singing softly in a rhythmic, lilting voice, three notes rising and falling compulsively. As I followed the coaxing beat I found myself leaving my body without effort, my senses warping, spiralling out of control. I allowed myself to drift, guided by the sound, and was conscious of drifting through the darkness right out of the tent and high into the air like a child’s balloon.

From far away I heard Scheherazade’s voice, gently coaxing: ‘Shh, sshhh…that’s right. See the balloons. Watch the balloons.’

Vaguely I wondered how she could have known what I had been thinking, then remembered, with a childish, absurd delight: she was Scheherazade, Princess of the Mystic East. I giggled.

‘Sleep, little girl,’ she whispered. ‘It’s your birthday, and there will be balloons, I promise. Can you see them?’

They were drifting around me, all colours, shining in the sun. I nodded. From a great distance I heard my voice in sleepy reply.

I saw the tent from above, saw Mose sitting on his stump, heard the pedlars selling their wares.

‘Hot gin’erbread’ and ‘Ribbons and bows’ and ‘Liquorice laces’. I smelled the mingled confusion of hot pies, candyfloss and animals. I hovered, directionless, for a few moments like some fairy-tale sky-ship, then I felt myself being drawn gently down towards a scarlet tent across which was stretched a banner which read: ‘happy birthday marta’. All around the banner were strings of balloons, and I thought I could hear music from inside the tent, the music of a barrel-organ, or maybe a child’s clockwork toy. I began to float down towards the tent.

As I touched the ground I realized that the sun had disappeared. It was cold, and the bright banner had vanished; in its place I saw a small, tattered poster, advertising:

The Gallery of the Grotesque!

A most Admirable Display of

Murderers, Monsters
and Freaks of Nature Depicted in Wax

I felt myself moving towards the tent-flap, my elation dimming rapidly. I had begun to feel cold, with a dull, sickly chill which pulled me from my delightful dream of flying into an earthy darkness. I saw the tent-flap open by itself and, although I struggled, I was not able to escape the malignant attraction of that opening. I could smell stale straw, kept for too long out of the sunlight, the musty reek of damp old clothes and the sharp scent of wax; and as I entered the tent, and my eyesight began to adjust to the darkness, I saw that I was alone and that all around the sides of the tent—which now seemed very much larger than I had first thought—were placed wooden pens or enclosures, housing the life-sized exhibits. I wondered why I had felt such a sensation of dread as I first entered; these figures were wax, their limbs held together with horsehair and whalebone, their clothes glued on to their bodies. The blood was red paint; even the gallows in the famous hanging scene had never been used for a real execution. But I was suddenly convinced that they were all real, that Burke and Hare in the corner were waiting there just for me, assessing me greedily from under thin masks of wax…

I moved backwards, angry at myself and my childish, unreasoning terror, and cried out aloud as I ran straight into the exhibit at my back. Even in my discorporate state I felt a moment’s tension as I touched the wood of the pen, and I whipped round to face the thing behind me. An enclosure of wire and planks surrounded a still scene; tacked on to the wood was a sign which read:

THE HERMIT

Please do not touch the exhibits

I moved a little closer, squinting against the troubling light, and saw that the scene was a tiny bedroom, like a child’s, with a narrow bed covered with a patchwork quilt, a small stool, bedside table and a couple of coloured prints of the type I had had when I was a girl. There were flowers on the bedside table, marigolds in a glass jar, and by the bed a small stack of wrapped presents. Beside the open window a bunch of balloons swayed in the draught.

But why had I thought it was dark? The light was streaming in from the window on to the bare floorboards; evening light which reflected a warm rosy radiance on to the bright little room. A man was sitting on the side of the bed, no doubt to say goodnight to his little girl, who was in her nightdress, a stuffed toy frozen in one hand. She looked about ten, long black hair hanging down dead straight around a solemn, pointed face. The man’s face I could not see, as he had his back to me, but I could guess at a certain heaviness of build, a square jawline, a stiffness in the posture which I found faintly familiar. I moved forwards curiously, wondering vaguely why this comfortable domestic scene had been included in the Gallery of the Grotesque.

As I moved, the girl’s head snapped towards me and I jumped back with a stifled scream. The girl froze again, her eyes fixing me with a stare so intense that I found it difficult to believe she was merely a thing of wax and horsehair. Reluctantly I stepped forwards again, angry at myself for having been startled so by a piece of machinery; at the London Waxworks there had been similar devices, triggered by pressure on a plate in the floor, enabling the exhibits to move as the onlookers passed by. I found myself scanning the floor for the concealed plate.

There! As I passed a certain point she moved again, turning her head towards the man with a fluid, boneless movement that could surely not be mechanical. Her hair fell across her face and she brushed it back with a nervous little gesture, the other hand clenching at the thick cotton of the nightgown. I was suddenly convinced that despite the misleading term ‘exhibit’ these were real actors, playing out some ghastly charade for my benefit, and I was suddenly angry at my nervousness, angry but, at the same time, filled with a dreadful sense of predestination. I knew what I was about to see as if it were a memory from my own past and, impelled with a growing sense of urgency, I touched the wire which separated me from the scene and called urgently to the child.

‘Little girl!’

The child did not react but moved warily towards the bed. I raised my voice.

‘Little girl! Come here!’ I heard my voice rise shrilly, but the child might as well have been clockwork. I tried to call again, but found myself moving instead right into the enclosure and into the scene. Suddenly I began to feel dizzy; half falling, I reached out towards the figure of the little girl as if to ask for help…

And I was ten once more, ten and coming to see my mother, as I did every Sunday. I loved my mother and wished I could be with her every day, but I knew it wasn’t possible; Mother had work to do, and didn’t want me in the way. I wondered what her work was. I liked Mother’s house, so grand and full of pretty things—elephant statues from India and hangings from Egypt and carpets from Persia, like in the Thousand and One Nights. When I was grown up, maybe I could come and live with Mother all the time, instead of at Aunt Emma’s—except that Aunt Emma wasn’t my aunt at all but a schoolteacher, and she didn’t like Mother very much. Not that she said anything, but I could tell from the funny face she used to pull when she said ‘your poor mother’, as if she had just swallowed cod-liver oil. Mother would never give me cod-liver oil. Instead she always let me eat at the table with her, instead of in the nursery with the babies, and there would be cake and jam and sometimes red wine with water in it.

Sometimes the pretty young ladies who lived in the house with Mother would come down and talk to me; I liked that because they were always so kind, giving me gingerbread and sweets, and they always wore the most lovely dresses and jewellery. Aunt Emma must never know about that; years before, when I was still a baby, I had let something slip, and she had been terribly angry, saying, ‘Surely the woman has no shame, allowing a child into that place, and with those abandoned creatures!’ I tried to say that they weren’t abandoned, that they had plenty of company every day, but she was too angry to listen, so now I don’t say anything at all. It’s safer that way.

But tonight Mother said that I would have to go to bed early, because she’s expecting company. I don’t mind; I sometimes pretend to go to sleep and then, when she thinks I’m in bed, I creep down and watch the pretty ladies and the guests through the gap in the banisters. I’m very quiet; no-one ever sees me. Well, hardly ever. Not till tonight.

He was very kind, though, the gentleman; he said he’d not tell Mother. He didn’t even know Mother had a daughter at all and he seemed surprised, but he was very kind; he said how pretty I looked in my nightgown, and that, if I was a good girl, he’d come and put me to bed and tell me a story.

But now I’m not so sure. He looks funny, staring at me like that, and I wish I’d never asked him here. He frightens me. I said, ‘What about my story?’ but he didn’t even seem to be listening. He just keeps looking at me in that funny way, and suddenly I wish Mother were here. But if I call her she’ll know I was out of my room…Now he’s coming forwards, with his arms held out; maybe he’ll just give me a goodnight kiss and leave me alone.

‘Like mother, like daughter,’ he whispers as he pulls me towards him, but I don’t understand what he means. He smells funny, salty, like the river after the rain, and his mouth is very cold. I try to push him away; I don’t understand why, but he frightens me—he’s kissing me the way grown-up men kiss ladies.

I say ‘No’ but he just laughs and says ‘Come here’ and some other things I don’t understand. He’s so strong that I can’t move my arms to push him away; I’d like to bite him but I know he’s Mother’s guest, and I do so want Mother to love me and to want me to live with her for good. I don’t want to be a baby. But I can hardly breathe; I try to say, ‘Stop, you’re holding me too hard,’ but the words won’t come out. Suddenly he pushes me on to the bed; he’s so heavy on top of me that I’m afraid he’s going to squash me, and he’s beginning to take off my nightgown; this time I manage to give a little scream, but he puts his hand over my mouth. I begin to struggle; never mind about being a baby, I don’t care if Mother finds out, I don’t care if Aunt Emma…I manage to get my teeth into his hand and I bite down hard; he tastes horrible, of sweat and perfume, but he swears, and lets go. I take a breath and scream.

‘Mother!’ He swears again and slaps me hard across the face. I scream again and he grabs me by the neck. He’s cursing all the time, saying ‘Bitch bitch shut up bitch shut up shut up…’ but my face is against the pillow and I can’t breathe. My head is so tight, like a balloon. It feels as if it’s going to burst and I can’t scream, I can’t breathe, I can hardly move with him on top of me and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. He seems to be moving away, so far away into the distance, and I can hardly feel the pillow over my mouth, hardly taste the starch and the lavender scent in the thick linen. In the background I can hear Mother’s voice calling me:

‘Marta?’

Then nothing.

15

I was beginning to become impatient; she had been in there for long enough to have her fortune read a dozen times, and I was the one who was going to have to pay the gypsy bitch when she finally did come out. I was getting cold, sitting there with nothing to do, so I got up and walked into the tent.

For a moment I was disorientated; the tent seemed cavernous, filled with the reflections of torches like some dead Pharaoh’s pyramid. Then, as my eyes adjusted, I realized that it was after all just a small tent, strewn with the usual trappings of the fairground charlatan, the sunlight streaming in through the tent-flap on to the array of gilt and paint and glass, showing it to be just that. Effie did not flinch as I threw back the tent-flap, but remained sitting with her back to me, her head hanging loosely to one side. Of ‘Scheherazade’ there was no sign.

The suspicion of foul play crossed my mind at once, as I leaped to Effie’s side in one step. I shouted her name, shook her by the shoulders, but she was limp as rags, her eyes open but blank. I cursed and lifted her from her chair, carrying her outside into the sunlight, where the noise I had made had already attracted a small knot of curious onlookers. Ignoring their bleating I laid Effie on the grass and, after having checked that she had no visible injury, I tipped out the contents of her purse to look for the smelling-salts. Some woman screamed in the background—I suppose the bitch thought I was robbing the unconscious lady—and I snapped a vulgar rejoinder which made another woman gasp faintly and reach for her own smelling-bottle. An officious type with a military moustache demanded explanations while a vapid youth suggested brandy, but failed to produce any, and a female with dyed hair attempted to compete for attention by having an unconvincing fainting spell of her own. Oh, the scene was high vaudeville, all right; someone had already summoned the constable and I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t time for Mose to take a bow and leave when Effie’s eyes suddenly focused sharply on mine with an expression of horror, and she screamed, a high, demented wail of unreasoning terror.

At that moment the constable arrived.

A babel of voices greeted him: a woman had been robbed; the man here had been attacking the poor lady in broad daylight; she had had a fit; one of the animals in the wild beast show had escaped, frightening the ladies—it shouldn’t be allowed…I saw the constable’s eyes light up as he reached in his pocket for his notebook.

Effie managed to sit up with my help and was rubbing her eyes confusedly.

‘It’s all right,’ I shouted above the din. ‘I’m the lady’s…husband. She fainted because of the heat.’ But I could tell that the tide of popular opinion was against me and, foreseeing the necessity of lengthy and unpleasant explanations at the police station, wondered again whether I should not simply disappear now while there was still time and confusion enough to do so. As for Effie, she’d be all right; after all, she was in some way responsible for the situation; if she hadn’t screamed in that idiotic way I should have been able to carry it off well enough. As it was she made me look like a rapist. Besides, there was Henry to think about. I had almost made up my mind when I became aware of a female figure at my side, and a crisp, familiar voice rang out over the hubbub:

‘Marta, dear, are you all right? I told you not to exert yourself so much! Here!’ I caught a glimpse of a pair of narrow, bright eyes levelled at mine and heard her whisper fiercely, ‘Be quiet, you idiot! Haven’t you done enough?’ I moved aside dazedly, and she took my place beside Effie, holding a smelling-bottle and uttering coaxing words.

‘Fanny!’ I said blankly.

Again the hiss. ‘Shut up!’

‘Now, Marta my love, can you stand? Let me help you. Hold on to Mother, now. That’s right. That’s my lovely darling.’ Still holding the bemused Effie by the waist Fanny turned on the constable, who was by now looking decidedly confused.

‘Officer,’ she said sharply, ‘perhaps we might ask you to do your duty and disperse this…this herd before they alarm my daughter any further?’

The constable hesitated; I could see him wrestling with his dwindling self-assurance, still suspicious, but intimidated by the stronger personality.

‘Well?’ Fanny demanded impatiently. ‘Must we be importuned by these vulgar onlookers? Is my daughter an exhibit to be stared at?’ With a superb and righteous fury she turned on the crowd.

‘Go away!’ she commanded. ‘Go on, move! I said move!’ A number of people at the edge of the scene began to shift uneasily and drift away; only the military gentleman held his ground.

‘I demand to know…’ he began.

Fanny set her hands on her hips and took a step forwards.

‘Now look here…’

Fanny took another step. Their faces were nearly touching. She whispered something, very quietly.

The military gentleman jumped as if he had been stung and moved away hurriedly, pausing only to look back over his shoulder at Fanny with an expression of almost superstitious alarm. Then she joined us again, a smile of sublime unconcern on her face.

‘That, officer,’ she said, ‘is how it is done.’ Then, as the constable seemed dissastisfied, she continued: ‘My daughter has a delicate constitution, officer, and is upset by the slightest thing. I warned my son-in-law not to take her to the fair, but he would go against my advice. And because he is most ill equipped to deal with a young lady in her condition…’

‘Ah?’ said the constable.

‘Yes. My daughter is expecting a child,’ said Fanny sweetly.

The constable blushed and scribbled something meaningless in his notebook. Struggling to maintain his dignity, he turned to Effie.

‘I’m very sorry, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Just doin’ my duty. You are this lady’s daughter?’

Effie nodded.

‘And this gentleman’s wife?’

‘Of course.’

‘Would you mind giving me your name, please, ma’am?’ Effie flinched almost imperceptibly. I noticed, but did not think the constable did, so quick was her recovery.

‘Marta,’ she said, continuing in a stronger voice, ‘Marta.’ And, turning towards Fanny with a smile, Effie put her arm around the older woman’s waist and began suddenly, inexplicably, to laugh.

Fanny Miller had been a part of my life for years, and I respected her as I have done no other woman. She was ten years older than I, good-looking in a heavy kind of style, with a razor-sharp intelligence and a masculine, devouring ambition. Like myself, she was a Jack-of-all-trades; her mother was a country girl turned Haymarket slut and had given Fanny to that oldest of professions by the time she was thirteen. Four years later the mother was dead and Fanny was on her own, all teeth and claws against the world into which she had been thrown. She was avid to get on and, in the years which followed, she learned how to read, to write, to pick pockets and locks, to fight with a razor or with her fists, to make medicines and poisons, to talk like a lady—though she never quite lost her mother’s West Country burr—and drink like a man. Above all she learned to despise men, to ferret out their weaknesses and use them, and soon enough she was able to graduate from selling herself to selling others.

Fanny had earned her money in a dozen ways, both honest and dishonest: by singing in the vaudeville, by telling fortunes in a travelling fair, by selling fake rheumatism cures, by blackmail, by theft, by fraud. When I met her she was already in charge of her own establishment, with maybe a dozen girls in her stable. Pretty, all of them; but none of them could have competed with Fanny. She was tall, almost as tall as I am, with strong, rounded arms, broad shoulders and rolling curves all free from corsets and stays. She had bright amber eyes, like a cat’s, and a profusion of brassy hair which she wore in a complicated knot at the back of her head. But Fanny wasn’t for sale, not at any price. Foolishly, I insisted—there’s a price and a line for every woman, or so I thought—and she struck at me just like a cat, the arc of her ivory straight-razor leaping towards me with a fluid grace, deliberately missing me by half an inch. She was quick—I never even saw her pull the razor from her pocket—and I still remember the way she looked at me, snapping the wicked blade shut again and returning it to her skirts, saying, ‘I like you, Mose. I really do. But forget yourself again, and I’ll take your face off. Understand?’ And all that without a tremor in her voice or a quickening of the heart.

Sometimes I think that if Fanny Miller ever had a heart she must have left it along the way with all the rest of the useless flotsam of her life; certainly, by the time we met, she was steel through and through. I never saw her falter. Never. And now she had returned, my personal daemon, unchanged but for a streak of grey in her luxuriant hair, to take in hand my little crisis.

I was not altogether pleased, although Fanny had undoubtedly saved me from some unpleasantness; I suppose I simply don’t like being indebted to a woman. Besides, I was already running my own masquerade with Effie, and it disturbed me that Fanny knew it; she was the type to turn every situation to her own advantage, and I did not like the almost instinctive way in which Effie had clung to her, almost as if she were indeed Fanny’s daughter. However, I said nothing until we had left the green and were back on the Islington Road where I could hail a fly and be off before I had to give any tedious explanations. I glanced at Fanny, still arm-in-arm with Effie, and cautiously began to search for my role.

‘A long time since we last met, Fanny,’ I said idly. ‘How are you faring nowadays?’

‘Come-day, go-day,’ she replied, with a smile.

‘Business?’

‘I’d say business were fine.’ Still the smile, mocking, as if she knew she was hiding something from me. Turning to Effie, she levelled the smile at her, their faces intimately close. ‘You’ll excuse me, miss, if I alarmed you back there,’ she said cheerfully, ‘but I could see you didn’t want the commotion, and I guess you might not want anyone to recognize you.’ A knowing, sidewards glance at me. I shifted uneasily before it. What did she know? What game was she playing?

‘Our guardian angel,’ I commented, trying to keep the sourness out of my voice. ‘Effie, this is Epiphany Miller. Fanny, this is Effie Chester.’

‘I know. I know your husband well,’ said Fanny. That made me start, but Effie did not react.

‘Oh, modelling,’ she said. She was still staring at Fanny with a kind of stupid intensity and, for the first time, I found myself out of all patience with her. I was about to make a sharp comment when she roused herself abruptly.

‘Why did you call me that?’ she asked.

‘Call you what, my dear?’ said Fanny comfortably.

‘Marta.’

‘Oh, that? It was just the first name which came into my head.’

I’m damned if I knew what her game was. I could see no reason why she should want to befriend Effie, who was as unlike her as a woman can be, nor why she should invite us to her house; but she did and, despite the black looks I levelled at her, Effie agreed. I was beside myself; I knew where Fanny lived; she had a house in Maida Vale, near the canal, consisting of her own rooms and the lodgings of the dozen or so girls who lived under her protection—not the kind of place I wanted to be recognized in with Effie, unless I wanted all my careful liaising with Henry to be wasted.

‘Really, Effie, I think we should be getting you home, don’t you think?’ I said pointedly.

‘Rubbish!’ answered Fanny. ‘It’s only three o’clock. There’s plenty of time for a cup of tea and a bite to eat.’

‘I really don’t think—’

‘I’d like to come,’ interrupted Effie with a defiant look in her eye. ‘If Mose wants to leave now, let him. I’ll come home presently.’

Damn her impudence!

‘I can’t let you jaunt about London on your own!’

‘I won’t be on my own. I’ll be with Miss Miller.’

Miss Miller be damned! I could see Fanny was enjoying the whole scene vastly, and so I was forced to hold my tongue and accompany them both. Dealing with Effie could wait. I’d make her pay later.

16

I could tell that Mose was annoyed that we had encountered Fanny; he dragged his feet, scowled, made impatient gestures and made it clear that he wanted us both to be gone as soon as possible. I could understand why: despite her spirited performance at the fair, Fanny had soon abandoned her high tone and, although her clothes were of excellent quality, there was in the richness of the mulberry velvet dress, the matching plumed hat and the rope of baroque pearls around her long neck, more than a suspicion of the adventuress. I knew what Henry thought of women who dressed, walked and talked as she did; but, if anything, that only added to her attraction.

For there was an attraction; I’d felt immediately drawn to Fanny. As soon as I set eyes on her I felt that there was some secret in Fanny, some bold message writ in her flesh for me to read, and, as I walked beside her, I was sure that she had recognized something inside me as I had in her.

Fanny’s house was on Crook Street, quite near the canal, at the intersection of four alleys which led out from the house like the points of a star. In that part of town there were a number of old Georgian houses, once very fine and fashionable, now receding into shabby-gentility, some derelict, with the rags of ancient curtains hanging at the toothy mouths of their broken windows, others fresh painted and spotless as the false fronts of a theatre backdrop.

Fanny’s house was larger than the rest, built of the same soot-grimed London stone, but respectably clean, with bright, heavy curtains at the windows and pots of geraniums on all the sills. In that neighbourhood the house stood out with a kind of countrified incongruity. The door was painted green, with a bright brass knocker and, at the doorstep, sat an enormous striped ginger cat, which mewed when we approached.

‘Come in, Alecto,’ said Fanny to the cat, opening the door, and the big tabby rolled her boneless weight silently into the hall. ‘Please…’ Fanny gestured for me to follow, and the three of us—Fanny, Mose and I—entered the house. I was struck immediately by the scent; something like sandalwood and cinnamon and wood-smoke, a scent which seemed to come from the furniture and the walls all around us. Then there were the flowers, great vases of them, crimson, purple and gold, on stands in every corner. Tapestries in jewel colours hung on the walls and rich rugs covered the parquet floors.

It seemed to me that I had been magically transported to some Aladdin’s cave; in this setting Fanny, as she unpinned her hat, took off her gloves and loosened her hair, was a beauty of awesome, mythical proportions, a giant Scheherazade with no hint of the Haymarket now in her appearance or her bearing, a creature entirely at ease. She guided us through a passageway and past a great sweeping staircase into a cosy drawing-room where a fire had already been lit. Two more cats rested, Sphinx-like, before it.

As I slid into one of the huge, overstuffed armchairs I slipped momentarily out of my body and saw myself, alien in this warm and sensual setting, as pallid as a creature from beneath a stone, and I almost screamed. As the world focused again I saw Mose’s face looming towards me like something seen in a fishbowl and I drew away in a kind of inexplicable loathing, with the room spinning about me like a crystal ball and his eyes locked mercilessly into mine.

‘Dear girl, you look ill. Drink this.’ I clung to Fanny in desperate gratitude as she handed me a drink in a brass goblet; it was warm and sweet, like wine punch, with a distinct aroma of vanilla and allspice.

I tried to smile. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I…’

Mose’s voice, sharp with suspicion: ‘What’s that?’

‘One of my own recipes,’ answered Fanny lazily. ‘A restorative, that’s all. Don’t you trust me?’

‘I…feel much better,’ I said, realizing with some surprise that it was true. ‘I…I’m sorry I…’

‘Nonsense!’ Fanny’s tone was crisp. ‘No apologies in this house. Henry may like that kind of foolish submissiveness, but I can’t conceive of anything more tiresome.’

‘Oh!’ I was for a moment unsure whether I should laugh or take offence at Fanny’s bluntness; and she had called my husband by his Christian name. And yet, there was a certain rightness in the way she responded to me, a warmth in her familiarity which, in spite of myself, I welcomed. I laughed uneasily and drank the rest of the restorative in one draught. The cats, a white one and a thin brown tabby, left their places at the hearth and came to sniff the hem of my skirts, and I reached out cautiously to stroke them.

‘Megaera and Tisiphone,’ said Fanny, indicating the cats. ‘They seem to like you. You’re honoured—they don’t usually get on very well with strangers.’

I repeated the names, ‘Megaera, Tisiphone and Alecto. What strange names. Do they mean anything?’

‘Oh, I have a liking for ancient mythology,’ said Fanny carelessly.

‘May…may I call you Fanny?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘Please do. Don’t stand on ceremony with me,’ she advised. ‘I’m old enough to be your mother, though not as respectable, no doubt. Have another drink.’ And she refilled the goblet and handed it to me. ‘What about you?’ She turned to Mose, who had been sitting in the only straight-backed chair in the room, looking like a thwarted child. ‘You look as if you could do with a drink.’

‘No.’

‘I think you should,’ insisted Fanny lightly, ‘if only to mend your temper.’

Mose forced himself to grin sourly and accepted the proffered glass. ‘Thanks.’

‘You don’t seem very pleased to see me,’ said Fanny. ‘Doubtless you now have a reputation to uphold. And yet I would never have thought that Henry Chester was your tipple, Mose dear. You must be getting respectable in your declining years!’ Mose shifted uneasily and Fanny winked at me and smiled.

‘I am, of course, forgetting your new position as Mr Chester’s sponsor,’ she added. ‘Fancy you and Henry becoming friends. I vow you’ll be quite sober before the year’s out.’

Abruptly she turned to me. ‘You’re so pretty, my dear,’ she said. ‘What a tangle you have yourself in, with Henry Chester on the one side and Mose on the other. Scylla and Charybdis. Be careful: Mose is a villain through and through, and Henry…well, we both know Henry, I hope. You can be my friend. It would infuriate them both, of course—men have such odd notions of propriety! Imagine Henry’s astonishment if he knew! But Henry sees no further than his own canvasses. Even in those eyes of yours, so deep and clear, he sees nothing.’

Her tone was light, her words a shoal of bright fish spelling meaningless patterns around me. The tabby jumped on my lap, and I was happy at the distraction it offered, allowing my hands to move idly in the cat’s fur. I tried to concentrate on what Fanny was saying, but my head was spinning. I took another drink to clear my head and, through the veil of unreality through which I perceived the world, I was aware of Mose watching me with an ugly look on his face. I struggled to say something, but my grasp upon drawing-room manners was weak, and instead of the polite comment I had intended I said the first thing which came into my head.

‘Is this a bawdy-house?’ For a second I froze, appalled at what I had said, then I felt a hot blush sweep me from head to toe. I began to stammer, spilling my drink across my skirts, almost in tears. ‘I…I…I…’

But Fanny was laughing, a rich, deep laugh of the kind you might expect from a genie in a bottle. For a moment I was aware of her looming over me and I lost all grasp of scale; she was a giantess, terrifying, awesome in her rich velvet robes, the scent of musk and spices from her generous flesh overwhelming me as she took me in her arms. I could still hear her laughter as the world stabilized around me and my hysteria receded.

‘You’re quite right, my dear,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘How refreshing you are! “Is this a bawdy-house?” Mose, the child’s a treasure.’ I shifted, my face against her shoulder, protesting.

‘You’ve given her too much punch. She’s not used to it.’ Mose was still disapproving, but I could see that he was smiling in spite of himself. Nervously, through half-shed tears, I too began to laugh.

Suddenly, a thought struck me and, made reckless by the alcohol in the punch and the hilarity of my unshakeable hostess, I voiced it: ‘But…you said you knew my husband,’ I said. ‘I…Was it modelling?’

Fanny shrugged. ‘I’m not his style, my love. But from time to time I can find him someone who is. Not always for modelling, either.’

‘Oh…’ It took some time for the implications of what she had told me to settle into my mind. Henry was unfaithful to me? After all his posturing and preaching, Henry had visited Fanny’s house in secret? I was not certain whether to laugh or scream at the bitter farce; I imagine I laughed. To think that during all those years when he was my hero, my Lancelot, he was creeping to her house in Crook Street like a thief in the night! I laughed, but there was a bitterness in my laughter.

Mose, too, had been taken by surprise. ‘Henry came here?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Often. He still does. Every Thursday, just like clockwork.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned! I’d never have thought that the old hypocrite had it in him. And he goes to church every Sunday, the devil, and proses and preaches as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth! What’s his taste, Fanny?’

Fanny smiled scornfully, but I cut off what she was about to say. Suddenly I knew the answer already.

‘Children,’ I said in a colourless voice. ‘He likes children. He sits me on his knee and makes me call him Mr Chester. He—’ I stopped, feeling sick, and broke into an ecstasy of sobs. For the first time I had voiced some of my hatred, my shame and disgust and, as I clung to Fanny Miller, drenching her mulberry velvet with my tears, I felt an inexplicable sense of release.

We talked for some time, Fanny and I, and I learned more of the story she had begun to unfold. She had met Henry—or Mr Lewis, as he called himself to the other visitors—many years ago, and since then he had been coming regularly to her house. Sometimes he would sit in her parlour and drink punch with the other guests, but more often he avoided the rest of her ‘company’ and went off with one of the girls—always the youngest and least experienced. He usually came on a Thursday, the day he supposedly went to his club.

I listened to this account of Henry’s betrayal with an almost indifferent calm. I felt as though all the world had collapsed around me, but instinctively I hid it, holding out my goblet recklessly to be refilled.

‘Don’t drink any more of that,’ said Mose irritably. ‘It’s getting late. Let’s get you back home.’

I shook my head.

‘I’d like to stay here for a moment longer,’ I said with assumed calm. ‘It will be hours before Henry gets back from his studio—and even if I am late, he’d never guess where I had been.’ I laughed then, with a bitter recklessness. ‘Maybe I should tell him!’

‘I hope that was an attempt at humour,’ said Mose, with a dangerous calm.

‘I’m sure you do.’ I heard the brittle note in my voice and tried to adopt Fanny’s light, confident tone. ‘But then, you do have an interest in Henry’s continued goodwill. After all, you’re seducing his wife, aren’t you?’

I saw contempt and anger in his face, but was unable to stop. ‘You have an odd notion of propriety,’ I added. ‘I dare say you think a man can get away with any crime, any betrayal, as long as appearances are safeguarded. I don’t suppose it matters at all to you whether I suffer or not.’

‘You’re overwrought,’ he snapped coldly.

‘Not at all!’ My laugh was shrill. ‘I expect you to know all about pretence—after all, you’re an expert.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Suddenly I was no longer sure. For a moment I had felt such overwhelming rage that I had allowed it to overflow…but at this moment the rancour seemed not to be my own but someone else’s—someone much braver and stronger than myself…some stranger.

What had I wanted? It seemed nebulous now, like the vestige of some dream, dissolving into nothing as I awoke.

‘I…I’m sorry, Mose: I didn’t mean it. Please, let’s not go so soon.’ My voice was pleading, but he was not moved. I saw his blue eyes narrowed into slits like razors and he turned away rather abruptly, his voice icy.

‘You knew I didn’t want to come here,’ he said. ‘I came for your sake. Now, leave for mine or, by God, I’ll leave without you.’

‘Mose…’

‘Try to have a little understanding, Mose my dear,’ said Fanny in her mocking tone. ‘Effie has had rather a rude awakening, wouldn’t you say? Or would you rather have had her kept in blissful ignorance?’

Mose turned to both of us with an ugly expression. ‘I won’t let two whores give me orders!’ he spat. ‘Effie, I bear with your tears and tantrums. I was the one who almost got arrested today because of your hysterics. I love you as much as I have ever loved any woman, but this is the outside of enough. I won’t be defied, especially not under this roof. Now, will you come home?’

Two whores. The words sank like stones, silently into the darkness of my thought. Two whores…He reached for my arm to steady it and I knocked his hand aside. The cat hissed wildly at him and sprang out of the chair to hide under the dresser.

‘Don’t touch me!’

‘Effie—’

‘Get out!’

‘Just listen to me a moment…’

I turned to him and looked at him flatly. For the first time I saw the lines of tension around his mouth, the cold blankness at the back of his eyes.

‘Get out,’ I said. ‘You disgust me. I’ll get home on my own. I never want to see you again.’

For a moment his face was slack, then his mouth twisted.

‘Why you impudent little—’

‘Get out, I said!’

‘There’ll be a reckoning for this,’ he said in a soft and ugly tone.

‘Get out!’

For an uneasy time he was frozen, his arms folded defensively, and in some way I sensed that he was afraid, as if some lap-dog had suddenly learned to bite, and the knowledge of his fear was rapturous in me, so that the sickness receded, elation flooded my body and some savage voice in me sang bite, bite, bite, bite, bite…Then he turned with a shrug and left the room, slamming the door behind him. I collapsed, all my triumph dissolving into wretched tears.

Fanny let me cry for a minute, then, very gently, she put her arm around my shoulders.

‘You love him, don’t you?’

‘I…’

‘Don’t you?’

‘I think so.’

She nodded. ‘You’d better go after him, my dear,’ she told me. ‘I know you’ll be back. Here…’ And, lifting up the tabby, who had returned to sit next to me as soon as Mose had left the room, she placed it in my arms. ‘Tizzy seems to like you. Take her with you—look after her and she’ll be a good friend to you. I can see in your eyes what a lonely thing it is to be married to Henry Chester.’

I nodded, holding the cat tightly against me.

‘Can I come and see you again?’

‘Of course. Come whenever you like. Goodbye, Marta.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, “Goodbye, my dear”.’

‘I thought you said…’

‘Shh,’ she interrupted. ‘You go now, and remember what I said. Be careful.’

I looked into her strange eyes and saw nothing there but reflections. But she was still smiling as she took me by the arm and pushed me gently out on to the street.

17

The bitch. The bitch! Bitches, both of them. As I made my way back to my own lodgings seething with the injustice of her treatment of me, I nearly resolved to abandon the whole thing, to leave her to her Puritan husband and good riddance to them both. Or maybe a nice little anonymous letter, packed with intimate details…that might put a few pigeons in with the cat. That would teach her. But behind my anger there was unease. It was not simply a question of revenge, was it? No. It was the fact that I had been wrong about her, that the Ace of Wands had proved himself a Fool of the first water, that I had underestimated my little Eff, that I had been utterly, indubitably wrong in thinking that I had her under my thumb…And she had chosen to defy me in front of Fanny, Fanny, of all people!

Well, if she wanted Fanny, I’d give her Fanny. The right word in Henry’s ear and he’d divorce her like a shot. What? You don’t believe it? A few selected details and he’d not bear to look at her again. She’d be penniless, with no-one to turn to—don’t think her mother would have her back after the mess she made of the fine marriage she had arranged. Vulgar? Yes, let’s be vulgar. Alone and penniless, I said; and with no-one to turn to but friend Fanny. She’d be filling a room for her in a month, along with the other girls. And all I had to do…Well, maybe I’d do that when I tired of her. But for the moment I still wanted the chit. She was a stunner, after all, and besides, the news that she did have a bit of spirit was not altogether unwelcome. But Fanny!

That was what hurt.

Oh, she came back quickly enough. I knew she didn’t have the character to stand up to me for long, and I wasn’t surprised when she came running out of the house a couple of minutes after I had left it. It wasn’t her silly little hysterical outburst which bothered me, but the way she and Fanny had joined together against me, almost instinctively, like members of some secret sisterhood. We drove back to Cromwell Square in silence, she watching me warily from under the brim of her bonnet, I staring straight ahead, immersed in my bitter thoughts. By the time we reached Highgate she was sniffling furtively and I was feeling much better.

Never mind, I thought, Fanny wouldn’t be there to influence her for ever. Once Effie was mine again I’d frighten her a bit, make her cry and the whole episode would be forgotten. For a while, anyway.

For a day or two I played a cool game. I missed our meetings in the graveyard and I let her hear me drive past the house as I returned from the studio. At the end of the week, Henry invited me over to dinner and I stayed aloof, talking a great deal about art and politics to Henry and almost ignoring poor little Eff. I noticed that she was rather pale and that she sometimes looked at me anxiously, but I ignored that and continued monstrously cheerful for the rest of the evening, drinking deep, laughing loud and yet allowing her to guess at my broken heart. Kean could not have acted the part with more virtuosity.

For some reason Henry seemed out of all temper with Effie. On the rare occasions she hazarded a comment on some subject at dinner he showed himself impatient and sarcastic, tolerating her simply because I was there. If I had not been present, I am certain that he could not have been in her company without starting a quarrel. I pretended to notice nothing, deliberately failing to catch her eye.

Over the meal Henry again voiced his desire to see Effie model for the figure of the woman. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I really wanted a dark model. I think a fair-haired model would lack substance in this type of canvas.’ He hesitated. ‘Of course, Effie could sit for the basic outline, the position and the face,’ he said. ‘And I could paint the hair from some other model.’ He seemed to consider this for a time. ‘I dare say that might be the answer. What do you think, Harper?’

I nodded, studying Effie appraisingly, to her obvious discomfort. ‘I noticed a fair down by the Islington Road,’ I said innocently. ‘Likely you could find some gypsy girl with the right kind of hair who could sit for you.’ Out of the corner of my eye I saw Effie wince at the reference to the fair, and grinned inwardly.

‘I want to make a start on the woman’s figure as soon as possible,’ continued Henry. ‘For the present the weather is cool enough but when the heat of high summer comes, Effie’s health suffers if she has to sit for hours in the studio.’

Effie stirred restlessly, picking up her fork, then laying it down without touching her food. ‘I thought…’ she said, almost in a whisper.

‘What is it?’ His impatience was palpable. ‘Speak up, girl.’

‘I thought you said that I didn’t have to go to the studio any more. My headaches…’

‘I said that you were not to go there when you were ill. You are not ill, and I don’t see why I should have the expense of a model to bear, along with all our other expenses, when I have you.’

Effie made a vague, aimless gesture with her hands, as if to ward off the suggestion.

‘And, as for your headaches, there’s nothing there that a little laudanum could not cure. Come now, Harper,’ he said, turning to me with renewed good cheer, ‘I’ve a damned fine claret in my cellar today. You shall have some and tell me what you think of it.’ And at that he turned and left us together. No sooner had the door closed than she was on her feet, her eyes swimming and her hands clapped to her mouth. I knew then that she was all mine again.

‘Meet me tonight, Effie,’ I whispered urgently. ‘By the Circle of Lebanon at midnight.’

Her eyes widened. ‘But, Mose…’

‘If you care for me, be there,’ I hissed, narrowing my eyes at her. ‘If you’re not there I’ll take it that you don’t—and believe me, I’ll live.’ Though I was still grinning inside I manufactured a sneer and looked away as Henry walked in again, just on cue. Effie turned her face away, white to the lips, and I wondered for a moment whether she really was ill. Then I caught her watching me, and realized that she was simply playing another of her games; oh, believe me, Effie wasn’t the simple little innocent you all thought she was; none of you saw through to the dark, hidden core of her heart. Effie made fools of us all in the end. Even me.

18

Before I met Mose I never knew how bleak my life was; now that it seemed I might lose him, I felt I might go mad. My memory of what had provoked the quarrel at Fanny’s house was so vague that I felt as if it had happened to some other girl, someone assured and strong. I waited for Mose in vain in all our usual meeting-places and I spent hours at the windows watching the street—but he did not come. Even my poetry was no consolation to me then; I was restless, twitching like a cat, unable to spend more than a minute or two at any occupation so that Henry swore that I was driving him out of his mind with my constant fluttering.

I took laudanum, but instead of calming my nerves the drug seemed to induce a kind of dim paralysis of the senses, so that I wanted to move but could not, wanted to see, smell, speak, but could only sense the world through fantasies and waking dreams.

Tabby made chocolate and cakes for me which I would not touch; irritably I snapped at her to leave me alone and immediately regretted it. I put my arms around her and promised to drink her chocolate. I was only tired, I didn’t mean to snap; surely she knew that? She smelled of camphor and baking and, shyly, her hand crept up to stroke my hair. I could almost have imagined myself back at Cranbourn Alley again, with Mother and Tabby and Aunt May baking cakes in the kitchen. I clung to her sleeve, shaking with loneliness.

Henry believed that I was feigning illness to avoid modelling for him. My headaches were the result of idleness, he said; my embroidery was neglected; I had not been seen in church on a weekday for over a sennight; I was wilful and ill-tempered, stupid in my vague responses to his questions, ridiculously awkward with guests. He disapproved of Tizzy, too, saying that it was ridiculous that I should bring in a stray cat to the house without his permission, childish folly to let it lie on my bed at night or in my lap by day.

As if to prove to me that no concession would be made to my imaginary illness, Henry invited guests to dinner twice in a week—though this was an unusual occurrence as a rule—the first time a doctor named Russell, a friend from his club, a thin, clever-faced little man who looked at me with odd intensity from behind the wire frames of his spectacles and talked at length about manias and phobias; the second time Mose, his eyes hard and bright, his smile a razor’s edge.

By the time he set me that dreadful ultimatum my nerves were so ragged, my loneliness so intense that I would have done anything to win him back to me, whether he loved me or not.

Very likely you think me a feeble, contemptible creature. I do myself, I know. I was quite aware that I was being punished for my brief revolt against him at Fanny’s house; if he had wanted to see me he could easily have done so by day, or at least in his rooms; no doubt he thought that the cemetery at midnight, with its shadows, its prowlers, was the ideal setting for the scene of cruel reconciliation I was to share with him. Guessing this, I could not help hating him a little in some hidden part of my heart, but the rest of me loved and wanted him with such a bitter longing that I was prepared to walk into the fire if he asked me to.

Leaving the house was easy; Tabby and Em slept under the roof in the old servants’ quarters—Edwin had his own cottage down the High Street and stopped work when night fell—and Henry slept deeply as a rule, going to bed quite early. At half past eleven I crept out of my room, shielding the candlelight with my hand. I had taken care to wear only a dark flannel dress, with no petticoats, so that I would be silent in the passageway, and so it was in almost total quiet that I drifted down the stairs and into the kitchen. The keys were hanging by the door and, holding my breath, I took the heavy housekey, opened the door and slipped out into the night.

Tizzy was sitting by the door and wound her way around my ankles, purring. For a moment I hesitated, reluctant to leave, feeling oddly comforted by the cat’s presence and half inclined to bundle her in my cloak and take her along. Then, inwardly chiding myself, I pulled the hood of my cloak over my head, shivering, and began to run.

I saw few people as I made my way up Highgate to the cemetery; a child running from the public-house with a pint of ale in a pitcher, a beggar woman wrapped in a ragged shawl wandering listlessly from door to door. At the corner of the street a group of men passed me, smelling of ale, talking in loud voices and clinging to each other as they made their way home. One of them shouted something at me as I ran past them, but they did not follow me. As the streetlamps became wider spaced I tried to merge into the darkness, and after about ten minutes I found myself in front of the great black shape of the cemetery, sprawling against the glowing London sky like a sleeping dragon. It was very quiet, and I was conscious of a quickening of the heart as I moved towards the gates. There was no sign of the night-watchman, and no reason for me to delay, but I stayed fixed to the spot for some time, helplessly watching those gates with the same morbid fascination I had felt as I watched the flap of the red tent open, that day at the fair.

A fleeting memory awakened at the thought, and I imagined those thousands of dead sitting up at my approach, their heads poking out of the stony ground like clockwork toys. The image, there in that thick darkness, was almost too much for me to bear, but remembering that Mose was waiting for me barely a few hundred yards away gave me courage; Mose was not afraid of the dead, nor even the living—he positively revelled in stories of the grotesque and terrifying. He had told me the tale of the woman buried alive; of how she had been found suffocated, her stiff hands clawing the air, her face only a few inches away from the surface, her fingers worn down to the bone as she had tried to dig her way out. And in the year of the cholera epidemic the dead were so many that they had to be buried in mass graves, unmarked and covered with quicklime. The corpses were so numerous that the heat of their decomposition had driven some of them to the surface, where they had been discovered later by two lovers in the cemetery, four heads sticking up out of the ground like huge mushrooms, stinking of death. Mose knew how much I hated his stories; I think that was why he told them, to make fun of my weakness; and I had never before thought how much cruelty there was in his laughter.

The darkness here was almost complete; there were no gaslamps in the cemetery and the moon was a poor, shivering thing, casting a dim corpse-light on to the stones. The scent of earth and darkness was overwhelming; I could pick out the trees by their smell as I passed them: the cedars, laburnums, yews, rhododendrons. From time to time I stumbled against a broken stone or a stump, and the sound of my footsteps terrified me even more than the dense, threatening silence. Once I thought I heard footsteps somewhere behind me and I shrank behind a vault, my heart’s pounding shaking the whole of my body. The footsteps were heavy and, as I remained motionless in the black shadow, I thought I could hear the sound of someone breathing, a thick asthmatic sound like a bellows.

I was almost at the Circle of Lebanon now, with only the long alley of trees to navigate before I reached its safety, but I could not move, sick with terror. For an instant my sanity spiralled away into the night like a shower of confetti; I was left in a timeless wilderness, horribly far from the light. Then, as my power of thought returned, I felt the world stabilize a little. I slipped to my knees, feeling my way along the side of the vault with fingers which had suddenly become miraculous points of sensation. Silently I crawled. As the footsteps moved closer I froze again, straining my eyes in vain for any sign to identify the intruder. I felt mud and water seep through my skirts, but flattened myself against the ground regardless, pulling my hood over my hair so that its whiteness should not betray me. The footsteps came closer still; now they were almost upon me. I held my breath, tasting eternity. The footsteps had stopped. Glancing over my shoulder like Orpheus, in spite of myself, I saw a man’s shape against the dim sky, impossibly huge and menacing, his eyes two points of brightness in the eye of the night.

The Moon

19

I know, I know. I was deliberately cruel. And I enjoyed it, too, stalking her through the graves as panic overtook her, watching her trying to hide, falling, slipping, and finally running her to earth, picking her up from the muddy path and having her cling to me like a child, her tears soaking the loose hair which straggled around her face. Now I could afford to be generous; she was mine once more.

As I comforted her, I began at last to understand a little of Henry Chester; the power I had over her was fundamentally erotic, her tears the strongest of aphrodisiacs. For the first time in my dissolute life a woman was mine, body and soul. She was poignantly eager to please, devouring my face with her lips in sweet repentance. She swore she would never try to defy me again and in the same breath vowed she would die if I abandoned her, spinning me in a carousel of different sensations. I fell in love with her all over again; the moment I had begun to think I might tire of her she had come to me, renewed.

Wild words gasped in darkness against my salt hair: ‘Oh, Mose…it tears me body from soul…I need you…I’ll never let you go, never let you leave me…I’d kill you, rather…’ She took a ragged breath, her pale face turning towards mine. For a moment, a trick of reflection from the distant streetlamps revealed her features in dramatic light and shade; her huge eyes black and stark, her lips bruised with shadow, her lovely face distorted in such a grimace of thwarted passion that for a moment I felt uneasy. She looked like some vengeful black angel with madness and death in her outstretched arms. She had already shed her outer clothing and her skin glistened livid in the strange light. She took a step forwards, my name in her mouth like a curse, then she was in my arms with a scent like lavender and earth and sweat clinging to her skin. We made love where we stood, she murmuring her mad nonsense all the time. Afterwards I felt convinced that somehow, in the black climax of my passion, I had made a promise which later I might be required to keep.

Effie was sitting on a gravestone, curled up like a child and shivering; putting my hand on her forehead I realized that she was feverish, and I tried to persuade her to dress quickly, so that she should not catch cold. She hardly responded, looking at me with blank, tragic eyes, and I felt my earlier irritation returning.

‘Can’t you help me, for God’s sake?’ I snapped as I struggled with the fastenings on her dress.

Effie continued to stare at me through the blackness like a drowned girl under a lake.

‘Come on, Effie, you can’t stay here all night,’ I said in a gentler tone. ‘You’ll have to get back home before Henry finds out you’ve been gone.’

But Effie just sat. She looked ill, her skin white and burning as sulphur. I could not send her back to Cromwell Square in such a state unless I wanted the whole scandalous affair made public; equally, I could not let her stay in the churchyard; it was cold—even I had begun to shiver—and she was already feverish. On top of that she needed a change of clothes; her own were muddy, the hem of her dress torn. There remained only one option and, as I examined it, I felt a hot grin forming around the region of my stomach; there was a certain poetry in the idea…

‘Come on, my dear,’ I said briskly, hoisting Effie to her feet. ‘I’m taking you to see Fanny. I’ll see that she lets you wash and gives you some clean clothes, then you’ll be able to get home before the servants are up.’

Impossible to tell whether she had heard me; but she allowed herself to be manoeuvred along the path towards the street. Once she started at a sound from behind us, her pointed fingernails scoring the flesh of my wrists, but for the most part she was passive. I left her standing by the gate as I found a hackney and I saw the coachman’s brows twitch as I lifted her in—a guinea in the hot palm of his hand soon put stop to his curiosity—but otherwise the few passers-by did not spare us a glance. All the better.

The house in Crook Street was lit up, of course, and the door was answered by a remarkably pretty red-haired girl who beckoned me in. Effie followed me without protest, and I left her with the pretty girl as I went in search of Fanny.

I have to say that Fanny always kept a genteel house: a card-room, a smoking-room, a parlour in which gentlemen relaxed in the opulent surroundings and talked to the ladies. She never allowed lewd behaviour in these rooms—for that there were private rooms on the first floor—and anyone failing to meet her standards was politely barred from the establishment thereafter. I have known gentry who were not so discriminating as Fanny Miller.

I found her in the smoking-room—she had always had a taste for those thin black cigars—fetchingly if eccentrically clad in a tasselled purple hat and matching smoking-jacket. Her tawny curls, barely restrained by a couple of amethyst clasps, glinted against the dull velvet. One of her cats stared coldly at me from her knee.

‘Why, Mose,’ she said with sweet composure, ‘what brings you here?’

‘A trifling problem,’ I replied lightly, ‘and a mutual friend. Could I impose for a moment?’ This last remark addressed Fanny’s smoking companion, an elderly gentleman with a wavering hand and a roguish expression.

Fanny’s agate eyes travelled from my muddy shoes to my face and back. ‘Do excuse me,’ she said to her elderly friend and, leaving her cigar in a china ashtray and removing her cap and jacket, followed me into the passageway. ‘Well, what is it?’ she demanded, rather less sweetly.

‘Effie’s here.’

‘What?’ Suddenly the eyes were hard pinpoints of fire. ‘Where is she?’

I did not understand her sudden fury, and I began to explain briefly what had happened. She cut me off with an angry gesture. ‘For God’s sake, be quiet!’ she hissed. ‘Where is she?’ I mentioned the girl with whom I had left Effie, and without another glance at me Fanny was off up the stairs, her beautiful mouth set in a furious line.

‘What’s the problem?’ I called after her, grabbing the sleeve of her velvet gown. She spun round, her hand raised to strike mine away; it was with a great effort of will that she did not. When she spoke it was with a venomous calm.

‘Henry’s here too,’ she said.

20

Somehow I seemed to recognize the room. As I drifted, my spirit coiling half in and half out of my body like a genie from a bottle, I seemed to see the little bed with its patchwork quilt, the table, the stool, the pictures on the wall, with the eyes of memory. Mose, Henry, the strange insanity which had overpowered me in the graveyard were reduced to the level of dreams, myself a dream’s dream in the floating dark. I vaguely remembered arriving at the house in Crook Street, being led upstairs…friendly hands in mine; faces; names. A girl about my own age with bright copper hair and emeralds in her ears: Izzy. A plump, good-natured lady, bodice cut very low over opulent white breasts: Violet. A tiny Chinese girl with hair like jet and a jade ring on every finger: Gabriel Chau.

I remembered their names, their voices, the soft mingling of scents on their powdered skin as they undressed me and washed my face in warm scented water…then all was blank for a time, and now I was clean and comfortable in the narrow white bed, wearing a child’s ruffled linen nightdress, my hair combed and braided for sleep. I dozed for a while and awoke calling for my mother, aged ten again and afraid of the dark. Then Fanny came to bring me a drink of something warm and sweet; but in my mind Fanny became confused with my mother, and I began to cry weakly.

‘Don’t let him come back…’ I begged. ‘Don’t let him in, don’t let the Bad Man in!’ For some reason I was afraid Henry would come in and hurt me, though Henry was in bed miles away, and in my feverish confusion I clung to Fanny and called her ‘Mother’ and cried. There must have been laudanum in the drink, because I slept again for a while, and when I awoke, my head ringing and my mouth dry and slack, I was afraid. I sat up abruptly in bed, thinking I heard someone standing outside the door. A floorboard creaked and, looking at the thin seam of light under the door, I saw the shadow of somebody standing there, heard his low, harsh breathing against the panels. A huge, delirious panic seized me then, and I tried to flatten myself against the foot of the bed, the quilt around my face, but even in the sounds of the bedclothes the breathing continued in my head, and I thought I could hear a creak of metal against wood as the predator began to turn the door-handle. In spite of myself I had to look as the seam of light became a broader and broader ribbon, revealing a man’s square outline in the doorway.

Henry!

For a moment, I was not sure whether the drug I had taken was giving me delusions; all rational thought was suspended by stark terror, and again I began to lose my knowledge of my own identity. I was no longer Effie, but someone younger, a child, a wraith…

‘Who’s there?’ His voice was sharp, but not with anger; I could almost fancy he sounded uneasy. When I did not answer I heard his voice rise, almost shrilly. ‘I said, who’s there? I can hear you. Who is it?’

I shifted helplessly and Henry took a step forwards.

‘I can hear you, you little witch. I can hear you in the dark. Who are you?’

In a voice which was not my own I uttered the first name which came into my head.

‘Marta…Marta Miller. Please—leave me alone, go away.’ But Henry had taken a step forwards when he heard the name. He was three feet away from me and, although he could not see me, I could see his face in the landing-light, staring and distorted with something like fear.

‘Let me see you.’ There was more than urgency in his voice. ‘Come into the light so that I can see you!’ He grabbed at me, and I pulled away, sliding over the bedpost so that I was hidden in its deeper shadow. I hit my foot against the bed as I fell, and I cried out sharply. ‘Please! Leave me alone! Go away!’

Henry cursed softly and took another step into the dark.

‘I won’t hurt you. I promise.’ His voice was ragged, pretending softness. ‘I just want to see your face. Damn!’ he cursed as he kicked blindly against the bedstand. ‘I said come here, by hell!’

Suddenly there was a sound of hurried footsteps on the landing; I glanced over the bedpost, and there was Fanny, a tray of milk and biscuits in one hand, one eyebrow cocked in cool astonishment. Henry was out of the room in a second; as I saw them together on the landing for the first time I was amazed at how tall Fanny appeared; she dwarfed Henry gloriously, dazzling as some Egyptian goddess. He almost visibly shrank from her, holding out his hands, placatingly.

‘Who’s that in there?’ he asked, his tone almost apologetic.

Fanny’s smile was as bright and cold as broken glass.

‘My niece, Marta,’ she said. ‘She’s ill with the fever, delirious. Why do you ask?’ There was a challenge in the question, but Henry shifted his gaze uneasily, unwilling to take it up.

‘I heard sounds…’ he began vaguely. ‘I…They made me nervous. And she wouldn’t show herself, the naughty thing. I—’ He broke off with a forced laugh. ‘I never knew you had a niece.’ There was a question in the remark.

‘You’ll see her one day,’ promised Fanny. She stepped into the room, put the tray on the bedstand and closed the door.

‘Come now, Henry,’ she said firmly as he seemed to linger, and I heard their footsteps grow fainter as they walked down the passageway towards the stairs.

21

It was almost dawn when I reached Cromwell Square and I was exhausted, my mind clouded with drink and the savage perfume of that house, a sultry combination of incense, smoke and the feral reek of cats and women. As a penance I had forbidden myself to take a cab home but in spite of it all I felt a continuing sense of filthy satisfaction which no amount of walking could obliterate. She had been young—about fifteen, by no means as young as Fanny had promised—and pretty, with curling brown hair and vivid rosy cheeks. She was no virgin, but was prepared to enact the part for me, pretending her reluctance and even crying real tears for me.

Don’t look at me like that! She was only a whore, paid to do my bidding; if she hadn’t enjoyed it she would have looked for some more decent profession. As it was, a golden guinea soon dried her tears, and it was not ten minutes afterwards that I saw her cheerfully going back upstairs with another customer. Your sympathy is entirely wasted on such creatures, I assure you: from the earliest age they are corrupt beyond belief. At least I was able to slake my guilty thirst upon them, rather than upon Effie. It was for her sake that I did as I did: believe me when I say that in my heart I did not betray her. She was my icon of purity, my sleeping princess…I knew she had the seeds of debauchery in her, but it was up to me to ensure that they should never be allowed to grow. My love could keep her chaste and whatever sacrifices that entailed I was willing to make them for her sake.

Oh, there were lapses. At times her latent sensuality was such that I could not help a momentary weakness, but forgave her her nature, even though she cheapened herself in my eyes, just as I forgave my mother for causing that first unforgivable lapse of mine.

I crept past Effie’s room and opened the door to my own. It was dark and I could barely make out the shapes of the washstand, the bed and the wardrobe in the candlelight. I pulled the door closed behind me and set the candle on the mantelpiece. I stripped off my clothes and turned towards the bed—then caught my breath in shock. In the glimmering shadows I could see a child’s face against my pillow: eldritch green eyes glinting in a fierce and vengeful expression of hatred.

It was nonsense, of course: there was no child. How could it have come into my bed at dead of night? There was no child. To prove it I forced myself to look closer. The livid gaze fixed mine once again; this time I caught sight of needle-sharp teeth bared in a snarl. Recoiling, I grabbed the candle. Dragging the long flame in a streamer of smoke behind me I thrust it at the apparition, spraying hot wax on to the bedclothes and on to my naked skin. The creature leaped at me, jaws open in sibilant defiance—and with a mixture of anger and desperate relief I recognized the thin brown shape of Effie’s cat as it slashed past me into the darkness, vanishing between the curtains and out through the open window.

My face in the wardrobe mirror was mottled with livid marks, and my mouth was bracketed with tension.

I was furious with myself that a mere cat should have caused me such unreasoning terror, and even more furious with Effie, who had taken in the stray on some ridiculous whim. What name had she given it? Tisiphone? Some outlandish nonsense from one of her books, I supposed: I knew I had not found them all. In the morning, I promised myself, I would give her room a thorough search to find what she had been hiding from me. And as for that cat…I shook my head to dispel the image of the face on my pillow, green eyes glaring rank hatred into mine…Only a cat. All the same, I took ten grains of chloral, a new drug recommended by my new friend Dr Russell, before I could bear to lay my head on that pillow.

22

I remember her cool, strong hand against my hair. Her face in the lamplight, white as the moon. The sounds of her dress; the scent of her perfume, warm and golden with amber and chypre. Her voice, low and calm, singing without words in time to her rhythmic stroking of my hair. Low adown…low adown. Henry was a bad dream, melting away now into a million little teardrops of light. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away a heartbeat stronger than my own: my heart was light as a dandelion clock, counting off moments into a warm summer night like silken seeds. My eyes were closed, gentle dream-thoughts spindling away into the welcome darkness of sleep. Fanny’s voice was speaking very gently, very sweetly, every word a caress.

‘Shh…sleep. Sleep, little girl…so sleepy…shhh…’ I smiled and murmured as the fronds of her hair brushed against my face.

‘That’s right. Shh…Sleep, my darling, my Marta, my love.’

Rocked in the cradle of her arms I allowed myself to drift gently. As she stroked my hair I watched my memories drift away like floating balloons. Mose…the graveyard…the exhibition…Henry…However bright the memory I could will it to float away and, after a time, I saw the bright cloud of balloons, strings entwined, colours glowing in the setting sun. It was such a beautiful sight that I think I spoke aloud, in a lost little-girl’s voice.

‘Balloons, Mother, all floating away. Where are they going?’

Her voice was barely audible against my hair. ‘Far, far away. They’re floating up into the sky, right into the clouds…and they’re all different colours, red, yellow, blue…Can you see them?’

I nodded.

‘Float with them for a while. Can you do that?’

I nodded again.

‘Feel yourself going up…up into the air with the balloons. That’s right. Shh…’

I realized I was beginning to rise without momentum simply by thinking about it. I rose right out of my body, drifting, the peaceful image of the balloons still in my dreaming mind.

‘You floated like this before,’ said Fanny gently. ‘Do you remember?’

‘I remember.’ My voice was no more than a wisp, but she heard.

‘In the fairground,’ insisted Fanny.

‘Yes.’

‘Could you go there again?’

‘I…I don’t want to. I want to go with the balloons.’

‘Shh, darling…it’s all right. Nothing can hurt you. I just need your help. I want you to go back and tell me what you can see. Tell me his name.’

I was floating in a sky so blue that it hurt to look. Over the horizon I could see balloons rising. Beneath me, a long way down, I could see the tents and the awnings of the fair.

‘Tents…’ I murmured.

‘Go down. Go to the tent and look in.’

‘N-no…I…’

‘It’s all right. Nothing can hurt you. Go down. What do you see?’

‘Pictures. Statues. No, waxworks.’

‘Closer.’

‘No…’

‘Closer!’

Suddenly I was there again. I was ten years old, curled up against the wall of my bedroom as the Bad Man came towards me with lust and murder in his eyes.

I screamed. ‘No! Mother! Don’t let him! Don’t let the Bad Man come! Don’t let that Bad Man come!’

In the red haze of my drumming blood I heard her voice, still very calm: ‘Who, Marta?’

‘No-oh-ohh!’

‘Tell me who?’

And I looked into his face. The terror peaked, a frozen eternity…then I knew him. The terror fell away and I awoke, Fanny’s strong arms around me, my tears soaking into the crushed velvet of her gown.

Very gently she repeated, ‘Tell me who.’

After a moment I told her.

My mother held me close.

23

I suppose a century ago they would have called me a witch. Well, I’ve been called worse things, some of them true, and what people think has never been a worry to me. I can make up a broth that will calm a fever or brew a posset for dreams of flying, and sometimes, in my mirror, I can see things which aren’t reflections. I know what Henry Chester would call that: but then again I have my own terms for the likes of Henry Chester, and not ones you’d find in the Authorized Version, either.

If it hadn’t been for Henry Chester, Marta would have been twenty years old this July. I’m rich enough to have left her a tidy fortune: there’d have been no danger of her walking the streets. I’d have found her a house, a husband if she wanted one; anything she asked for I’d have given her. But when she was ten years old Henry Chester took her from me, and I waited ten years to take his Effie from him. I’ve not had much time in my life for poetry, but there’s fearful symmetry in that pattern, and that’s justice enough for me. Cold, to be sure, but none the less bitter for that.

I was young when I gave birth to Marta, in as much as I was ever young. She might have had thirty fathers but I didn’t care. She was all mine…and, as she grew, I took pains to shelter her from the kind of life I was living. I sent her to a good school and gave her the education I never had; I bought her clothes and toys and gave her a respectable home with a schoolteacher, a distant relative of my mother. Marta came to see me as often as I dared invite her—I did not want her to be exposed to the kinds of people who came to my house, and I never allowed any of my clients up to the little attic I made into a bedroom for her. I invited her to my house for her birthday and, although that evening I was expecting guests, I had promised I would make up for neglecting her. I kissed her goodnight…and I never saw her alive again.

At ten o’clock I heard her calling me and I ran up to her room…but she was already dead, lying sprawled across the bed with her nightdress around her face.

I knew the murderer had to be one of my clients, but the police simply laughed at me when I demanded they investigate. I was a prostitute, my daughter a prostitute’s daughter. And the clients were wealthy, respectable men. I was lucky not to be arrested myself. As a result my daughter was buried under white marble in Highgate cemetery and her murderer was allowed to forget her for ten years.

Oh, I tried to find him out. I knew he was there: I smelled his guilt behind his respectable façade. Do you know what hate is? Hate was what I ate and drank. In my dreams hate walked alongside me as I stalked my daughter’s murderer and painted the streets of London with his blood.

I kept Marta’s room just as she had left it, with fresh flowers on the bedstand and all her toys in a basket in the corner. Every night I crept up there and I called her—I knew she was there—begging her to give me a name: just a name. If she had given me a name in those early days I would have killed him without the slightest remorse. I would have gone to the gallows in Biblical glory. But in ten years my hate grew hungry and lean, like a starving wolf. It grew clever and slinking, watching everyone with the same suspicious amber eye: everyone, and one man in particular.

Remember, I knew him: I knew his eager, shameful appetites, his abrupt self-loathings, his guilt. The girls he asked for were always the youngest, the unformed ones, the virgins. Not that there were many of them, but I’d seen him watching the beggar-children in the street, and I’d seen his paintings, the old hypocrite: sick longings fit to make an honest woman choke. But he wasn’t the only one I suspected and I couldn’t be sure. I tried to reach my little Marta; at first with candles and the mirror, then with the cards. Always the same cards: the Hermit, the Star, the High Priestess, the Knave of Coins, Change and Death. Always the same cards in differing order: always the Hermit flanked by the Nine of Swords and the Death card. But was Henry Chester the Hermit?

He was clever, you understand. If he’d run I would have known for sure; but he was a cold one. He kept coming, not often, maybe once a month; always polite, always generous. I followed other quarry: men who, too abruptly, had stopped visiting after Marta’s death. A doctor, one of my long-standing clients, suggesting that my little girl had died of some kind of a fit; epilepsy, he said. I didn’t believe it for a minute. But pain and time eroded my conviction; I began to doubt the purity of my hate. Maybe it had been a fit, or an intruder, lured by the prospect of easy pickings. Inconceivable that one of my clients could have committed such an act and remained hidden for so long.

My vengeance slept. Then I learned that Henry had married. A child scarcely out of the schoolroom, they said. A girl of seventeen. Suspicion woke again in me—I’d never been sure of him, never—and my hate went out to them both like a swarm of wasps. What right had they to happiness when Marta was rotting in Highgate? What right had anyone?

I followed them to church one day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bride, but she was all swathed in black, like a mourner, and I could only see her thin little face under her bonnet. She looked ill and I could not help but feel a drawing-towards her, something which was almost pity. She looked so like my poor lost Marta.

I’ve no liking for preachers: I’d come to see Chester and his wife, not to listen to the sermon, and so I was the first one to see her go. One minute she was listening, the next she was gone, her head tilting forwards like a child saying her prayers. Now, I’ve long had the knack of seeing things that most of you don’t, or won’t see, and as soon as Mrs Chester fell I could see that it was no ordinary faint. I saw her pop out of the body, naked as the day she was born, bless her, and, judging by the look of surprise on her face, I’d guess it was the first time it had happened to her.

A pretty thing she was too, not a bit like Henry Chester’s ethereal paintings, with a beauty natural to herself, like a tree or a cloud. No-one else could see her—and I don’t wonder, in all that army of churchgoers. No-one had taught her that trick: she must have learned it all by herself, and I guessed she had other talents she didn’t know about. Right there and then I wondered whether she might not know something that could help me…I called her, in my mind, and she looked at me sharp as a needle: I knew then that she was the answer to all my questions. All I had to do was bring her to me.

Her name was Effie and I watched her many times without her knowledge, calling her to me from Marta’s little room at the top of my house. I saw she was unhappy, first with Henry, then with Mose. Poor, lonely little girl: I knew it would only be a question of time before I brought her to me and I began to care for her like a daughter. I knew her mind, her haunts…and when I saw her at the fair I knew that this was my chance to talk to her alone.

The crystal-gazer was happy enough to give me her place for the price of a guinea: I sat in the shadows with a veil across my face and Effie didn’t suspect a thing. She was so sensitive to my thoughts that I didn’t even have to put her to sleep: she did it herself…but even so, it was not until she began to speak to me in my daughter’s voice that I truly realized how unique, how precious she could be to me. If she could bring back the voice so clearly, what else might she be capable of? My head was spinning with the possibilities: to see my little girl again, to touch her…why not? Believe me, I wished Effie no harm, but her reaction on being jolted out of her trance astonished even me. The girl was too precious to lose; I couldn’t let her go.

Sure enough, before I had to delve too far, she gave me the name I wanted. Henry Chester, the Hermit, the murderer of my daughter…

I was past the age now of wanting to scream my rebellion on the scaffold. If there was to be a sacrifice, this time it would not be me.

24

It was an accident, I tell you. I never meant to kill her. I was going to tell you about it, but it was so long ago…

Her mother always made me feel uneasy: she was too solid. I felt dwarfed by her, fascinated and repelled by the abundance of her. She seemed barely human: as if beneath her rosy skin I should find, not the blood and muscle of an ordinary woman but some strange compound of black earth and granite, like an Egyptian idol with agate eyes. Her scent was a corrupt sweetness, like a million flyblown roses; a lingering, occult caress from all the secret places of her woman’s body to the shameful longings of my heart. And that woman had a daughter!

I saw her peering out at me through the banisters. Eyes as green as glass fixed me in the half-light from the landing and, as my own gaze focused upon her, she gave a little laugh and jumped to her feet, ready to disappear up the stairs if I moved. She was barefoot and the light outlined her body through the fabric of her nightdress. She had none of her mother’s fearful solidity: the little changeling was almost insubstantial, with straight black hair falling over a hungry, pointed face…and yet, there was a resemblance. Something in the eyes, maybe, or in the fluid grace of her movements: so might golden Ceres have been mirrored in pale Persephone.

I asked her name.

She tilted her head at me; her eyes filled with lights. ‘I’m not supposed to tell.’ The Cornish accent was light, almost imperceptible, like her mother’s, a soft blurring of the syllables.

‘Why not?’

‘I shouldn’t be here. I promised.’ If it had not been for her smile and the way her body stood out against the light I might have believed in her innocence, but I knew that, standing there above me, like a parody of Juliet on the balcony, whatever her age she was her mother’s creature, conceived in sin and bred to pray upon sinners like myself. I could almost smell her perfume from where I stood: a troubling, deceitful combination, like amber and swamp water.

‘I promised,’ she repeated, drawing away from the banister. ‘I have to go.’

‘Wait!’ I could not control my response. Hastily I began to climb the stairs, sweat prickling my temples. ‘Don’t go. I won’t tell. Look’—fumbling in my pockets—‘I’ll give you some chocolate.’

She hesitated, then reached out her hand for the sweet, which she unwrapped immediately and began to eat. Pushing my advantage, I smiled and put my hand on her shoulder.

‘Come now,’ I said kindly. ‘I’ll take you back to your room and tell you a story.’

She nodded solemnly at this and ran quietly up the stairs in front of me, her bare feet like white moths in the darkness. There was nothing I could do but follow.

Her room was tucked away under the eaves of the house, and she jumped on to the bed, legs tucked beneath her, and pulled the bedspread around her. She had finished the chocolate and I watched as she licked her fingers clean in a gesture so potent that my knees almost gave way beneath me.

‘What about my story?’ she asked pertly.

‘Later.’

‘Why not now?’

‘Later!’

The perfume was overwhelming now. She shook it from her hair like a fall of flowers, and in the midst of it I detected the rank smell which might have been my own lust.

I could bear it no longer. I stepped forwards and seized her in my arms and buried my face in her, drowning in her. My legs gave way and I fell with her on to the bed, holding on to her in desperation. For an instant she seemed awesomely powerful, her eyes widening like ripples into the darkness, her open mouth screaming silent curses. She began to struggle and kick, her hair like a flight of black bats fanning out over my face, smothering me with its weight. At that moment, with her lithe, serpentine body coiling against mine, her hair in my mouth and the sickly smell of chocolate in my nostrils, I was certain she was going to kill me.

There was a rushing in my ears and a terrible panic seized hold of me. I began to scream aloud in terror and disgust. I was the sacrifice, she the granite death-goddess gasping for my blood. With the last of my sanity I grabbed at her throat and tightened the grasp as hard as I could…the little witch fought like a demon, screaming and biting, but I found that my strength had returned…

God was with me then: if only I had had the courage to leave the house and never return, perhaps He would not have turned His face away from me…but even in the trembling aftermath of that dreadful battle I felt a kind of unholy excitement, a triumph, as if, instead of quelling the rising tide of lust within me, I had simply opened up the door to a lust of a different kind, one which could never entirely be slaked.

25

I have little recollection of returning to Cromwell Square: it was almost daylight and in a few hours the servants would be about, but Henry was not yet home. I was able to let myself into the house, to undress by myself and to slip into bed. I slept a little, but I had to take more laudanum to combat the evil dreams which threatened my sleep. I could no longer distinguish between reality and imagination so that I wondered whether or not I had dreamed the events I thought had taken place in Crook Street…Had I spoken to Henry? Had Fanny come to me as I slept? At about six o’clock I fell into a deep sleep, and I awoke two hours later when Tabby came in with my chocolate. My head ached dreadfully, I was feverish and, although I tried to show a cheerful face, Tabby guessed immediately that something was amiss.

‘Why, Mrs Chester, you don’t look well at all!’ she observed, pulling the curtains open and drawing closer to the bedside. ‘You’re as pale as can be!’

‘No, Tabby,’ I protested, ‘simply a little tired. I’ll be all right presently.’

‘I’ll tell Mr Chester you’re not well, ma’am,’ said Tabby firmly.

‘No!’ I hastily softened my tone: it would not do for her to sense my panic. ‘No. That won’t be necessary.’

She looked doubtful. ‘Maybe you’d like a drop of laudanum, ma’am?’ I shook my head.

‘Please, no. It’s only a little headache. I’ll be better for this excellent chocolate.’ I forced myself to sip it, even though it was scalding hot, and I smiled reassuringly. ‘Thank you, Tabby, you can go now.’

She left the room with some reluctance, looking over her shoulder as she went, and I told myself that I could not count on her to keep my illness a secret from Henry. Sure enough, ten minutes later he came into the room with a glass and the laudanum bottle.

‘Tabby tells me you won’t take your medicine,’ he said. His eyes flicked to where Tizzy was sitting on my bed, and his mouth twisted sourly. ‘I’ve told you before that I don’t like that cat in your room at night. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was what was causing your illnesses.’

‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that both Tabby and you are far too concerned with my health!’ My sharp reply startled me as much as it did Henry, and I flushed and mumbled something apologetic and confused. I tried to remember why I should feel such sudden hostility towards Henry…and then I remembered the dream—was it a dream?—in which I had witnessed…It was at the back of my mind, tantalizingly close to recollection, but I could not remember it fully. Only the impression remained: that feeling of disgust and hatred, a thirst for vengeance which did not seem to be my own. The violence of the emotions shook me all the more because I could not remember why I should feel them, and it was with a trembling voice that I continued: ‘I’ll be all right. Please, don’t give me any more laudanum.’

He gave me a look of contempt and began to measure drops from the bottle into the glass.

‘You’ll do as I say, Effie. I’m in no mood for your temper this morning. Take your medicine now, and another dose with your midday meal, or you’ll make me angry.’

‘But I don’t need any medicine. Just let me go for a walk in the fresh air…’

‘Effie!’ His tone was cold. ‘I will not allow you to cross me. I know your nerves are bad, but you put me out of all patience with you! If you were a real wife…’ He bit off the rest of the sentence. ‘If you persist in this wilful behaviour,’ he went on in a quieter tone, ‘I shall wash my hands of you and refer you to Russell. He has plenty of experience with hysterics.’

‘I am not an hysteric!’ I protested. ‘I…’ But, seeing the expression in his eyes, I submitted and took the drink, hating him but unable to resist.

‘That’s better.’ His eyes were hard and somehow triumphant. ‘And remember, a less patient man would soon have had done with your tantrums. I promise you that if you cause any more disorder with your tears and your stubbornness I will call Russell to see you. If you won’t drink your medicine I’ll make you drink it; and if you won’t behave as a good wife should, I’ll expect the doctor to tell me why. Is that understood?’

I nodded, and I saw a smile flicker behind his eyes; a malicious, furtive smile.

‘I made you what you are, Effie,’ he said softly. ‘You were nothing before I discovered you. You are what I say you are. If I want you to be an hysteric, an hysteric is what you will be. Don’t think the doctor would believe you rather than me; if I told him I thought you were mad, he would agree. I can say it when I like, Effie. I can make you do what I like.’

I tried to speak, but as his exultant face swam in and out of focus before my tired eyes. I was conscious only of a terrible urge to cry. Perhaps he saw it; because the hard line of his mouth softened and he leaned to kiss me gently on the lips.

‘I love you, Effie,’ he whispered, his tenderness even more frightening than his anger. ‘I do these things because I love you. I want you to be mine, to be safe, to be well. You have no idea what filth there is in the world, what dangers for a lovely girl like you…You have to trust me, Effie. Trust and obey me.’ Gently but firmly he turned my face to look at his. His expression was concerned, but in his eyes I could still see that dancing, cruel glee. ‘I’d do anything to protect you, Effie.’ His intensity was almost unbearable.

‘Even lock me away?’ My voice was barely a whisper. His gaze was steady, his flat voice almost disguising the malice.

‘Oh yes, Effie. I’d kill you rather than see you spoiled.’

He left me then, and as I lay on the bed, my mind a drugged haze of confusion, I tried to remember what I knew about Henry Chester—but all I could recall was the image of Fanny’s calm face, the feel of her hand against my hair, and an image of balloons…

I awoke at about twelve o’clock, feeling less tired, but very dull and confused. I washed and dressed myself and went downstairs to the parlour. Henry had already gone out. I decided to walk to Highgate to clear my head and to escape the oppressive air of the house. I was about to put on my cloak when Tabby came in carrying a tray: seeing me dressed to go out, she started in surprise.

‘Why ma’am! Surely you’re not going outside, after you were so ill this morning!’

‘I feel much better now, Tabby,’ I replied mildly. ‘I believe a walk will do me good.’

‘But you’ve not eaten a thing! Here, look; I’ve got some nice gingerbread in the oven—it won’t be more than a few minutes—and you always used to like a piece of warm gingerbread in the old days.’

‘Tabby, I’m not hungry, thank you. Perhaps I’ll take something later, when I get back. Please don’t worry.’

Tabby shook her head. ‘Mr Chester wouldn’t be at all pleased if I let you go out today. He said that you mustn’t go out for any reason, with the state you were in, ma’am.’ She flushed slightly. ‘I know you’d like to go, ma’am, but try and see the sense of it. There’s no point in causing the poor gentleman any more worry…and he did say, ma’am.’ There was a crease between her eyes. She was fond of me…but Henry was master of the house.

‘I see.’ For an instant I was flushed with rebellion: what did Henry’s instructions matter? Then I remembered what he had said about Dr Russell, and Tabby’s artless repetition of his words: ‘the state you were in’. I felt a sudden chill.

‘Perhaps I’ll stay in after all,’ I said with pretended nonchalance, taking off my cloak and forcing myself to sit down.

‘I think you’d better, ma’am,’ said Tabby in a motherly tone. ‘Perhaps you’d like some tea? Or some chocolate? Or some of that gingerbread when it comes out?’

I nodded, my forced smile cramping my jaw. ‘Thank you.’

I strained to maintain my calm as Tabby tidied the parlour. It seemed that she spent an eternity lighting the fire, plumping the cushions, making sure I had everything I needed. I could have told her I wanted to be alone, of course: but her devotion to me was real and touching—and besides, I didn’t want her to report to Henry that I had been at all nervous or unbalanced. His threat had been clear…The very thought of it filled me with a hysteria I struggled to overcome: if I was judged too ill or unstable to leave the house alone, when could I see Mose? When could I see Fanny?

I sprang to my feet and ran to the window. I looked out at the garden, where the rain had just begun to fall. I opened the window, stretching my arms out, feeling the moisture on my face, my hands. The rain was warm, the scent of the wet garden sharply nostalgic, like the churchyard at night, and I felt some of my panic diminish. Leaving the window wide behind me I returned to my seat and tried to think clearly, but the more I tried to marshal my thoughts the deeper I drifted into that half-world of the previous night, where every memory seemed touched with a narcotic deceit. Perhaps Henry was right; perhaps I was going mad. If only I could see Mose…

No! Not yet. First I had to convince Henry that I was well enough to be allowed out alone. He was the enemy, I told myself firmly; he was the guilty one, not me. I had a right to hate him. I had a right to be unhappy.

It was the first time I had admitted as much to myself; in a quiet way I declared war on Henry that day, a war filled with hate and cunning. He might think he had all the weapons, but I was not the pretty idiot he thought me: I would prove that. I, at least, had the advantage of surprise…

26

I didn’t see Effie the next day and, to tell the truth, I didn’t miss her: I had serious things on my mind. For a start, a volley of creditors had seen fit to descend upon me en masse demanding payment. If I had had the advantage of Fanny’s crystal ball, no doubt I would have arranged to be elsewhere when they called, but the melancholy fact was that I was obliged, after some small unpleasantness, to pay out a sum of almost a hundred pounds. This left me sadly depleted and I spent a dreary afternoon poring over my accounts, after which I was forced to admit that I was in debt to the tune of over four hundred pounds, a sum that even I found difficult to make light of. A pleading note from Effie did nothing to cheer my mood: her maid—Em, wasn’t it?—brought it at six in the evening, by which time I was pleasantly castaway over a bottle of wine and most unwilling for a repetition of our tryst of the previous night. I opened the note (heavily sealed) and by the light of my candle attempted to decipher Effie’s laboured scrawl.

Dearest Mose,

I must see you as soon as possible; I am in a Desperate Situation. Henry will not let me leave the House and threatens me with the Doctor if I do not obey. I must escape, but I have nowhere to go. Please call when Henry is working. You must help me. I love you.

E.

I read the artless missive with no great relish. I could tell from the handwriting and the heavy underscoring that Effie had been in a state of great agitation when she wrote it, but I thought nothing of that. I knew how easily Effie could be thrown into hysterics and, as there is none of the Sir Galahad about me, I dismissed the whole thing with the minimum of thought.

I make no apologies: I’ll not be at the beck and call of any woman, especially one in distress; I’ll leave the fairy stories for the likes of Henry Chester. Tales in which the handsome prince runs off with the princess always seem to end with a sentence of marriage for the handsome prince—and I sensed a desperate threat in Effie’s little note. So I ignored the letter. It was the kindest thing to do, I told myself, make a quick end to the whole affair, leave her to her daydreams, and soon enough she’d find another man to pin her hopes on. I was fond enough of her to be glad that no scandal would come to her through me.

Scandal. Now that was an idea.

I had been so absorbed in making my decision over Effie that for a few minutes I had actually forgotten my own financial problems. In my moment of philanthropy I had missed an opportunity which shone out at me sweet and clear as sunlight…and which might indeed solve my problems, and Effie’s, too. Through the mist of the wine my mind began to make rapid calculations.

Don’t call it blackmail: that’s such an inelegant word. Call it creative investment if you wish. I had no love for Henry Chester. If he was fool enough to prefer girls in brothels to his ravishing wife he might as well pay for the privilege. He had plenty of money; I, on the other hand, had none. He was steeped to the eyes in his scruples; again, I had none. God was on his side—what more could he want?

I picked Effie’s note out of the waste basket, smoothing the creased page reflectively. I hated to deceive her, but for the moment I would play her game.

I reached for a pen, sharpened it and wrote a quick note to Effie. Then I put on my coat and called a cab to take me to Crook Street. I had the feeling that Fanny could give me a great deal of help if I asked her.

27

I knew he would come: his greed and selfishness were the strongest and best things in him and I knew he would not disappoint me. If he had not, I suppose I would eventually have fed him the idea, but it was much better that he should come to me with it himself. He played all his charm to me that evening, little knowing that our aims were similar. He needed me, he said, to set the stage for a scandalous little scene which would ruin Henry if it were exposed. His Academy exhibition, his marriage, his standing in the church…all would be at an end if even a hint of the pious Mr Chester’s secret activities were whispered in the right ears. And there was Effie, of course: Henry seemed to be holding the threat of a nerve doctor over her to ensure her obedience. If she were to reveal her knowledge to him, Henry would be powerless to frighten her again.

Mose was quick to point out that he would not be the only one to benefit from the plot: Effie would be freed from tyranny, he would earn a little much-needed tin (only a little, for he was not a greedy man) and I…Well, there I had him at a disadvantage. He could not understand why I refused the money; was it affection for Effie which prompted me? Was it some undisclosed grudge against the good Henry? I could tell he was itching to be told, but I laughed and told him nothing. He was too clever and unscrupulous to be trusted even with a truth he would not believe.

‘No, no, Mose,’ I said, smiling, ‘I’ll not say a word. Call it a grudge if you like, or simply a woman’s love of mischief. Besides, Effie’s a good girl and I hate to see her made unhappy by that hypocrite. What’s your plan?’

Mose grinned. ‘You tell me when Henry is expected at your house,’ he explained. ‘Arrange for me to watch him with one of your girls. After that, all I have to do is to write a nice little letter, with quotes and references and a promise to reveal details to all interested parties, and I promise you Henry will pay what I ask him when I ask him, as often as I please. And all that without any risk at all.’

I frowned. ‘But how will any of that help Effie?’ I asked. ‘I can see how it would benefit you, but before I agree to any such plan I want to be certain that Effie will be happy.’ I feigned puzzlement for a moment. ‘I suppose you could write to her, too…’ I suggested tentatively.

‘No!’ Mose’s face lit up. ‘I have a much better idea. I arrange for her to be there with me. Then, if Henry calls my bluff and refuses to pay, I have a much more reliable witness—who better than his wife? If she reveals that she saw him in a brothel, which of his fine, churchgoing friends will ever speak to him again?’

I looked at him with some admiration. What an apt pupil he was! So high on his arrogant pinnacle that he never realized how easily he was being manipulated.

‘Effie here too…’ My voice trailed off. ‘I would never have thought of that. But I like it,’ I decided, more forcefully. ‘I think it will work. Tell Effie that Henry will be here again next Thursday at midnight. Tell her to be here at eleven. I’ll hide her before Henry arrives. You be there at twenty past twelve, giving Henry time to prepare himself. I’ll see to the rest.’

28

I spent my entire day at the studio working on The Card Players. I was very satisfied with the canvas; it was a powerful piece, with Harper sitting slouched against the wall with his elbows on the table and his face half tilted into the light, watching his hand with that expression of clever nonchalance which so typified him. A greenish oil-lamp guttered uncleanly above him, highlighting the greasy walls and the unvarnished table and throwing into sharp relief the thick glasses filled with milky absinthe.

I had sketched in the figure of the woman in charcoal, using a town model for the posture only: I wanted her to be in half-profile, one hand on the table in front of her, the other holding the Queen of Spades playfully to her lips…Soon I would need finer material, some dark-haired unknown. Not Effie, I decided; definitely not Effie. First, I hated to see her sitting so intimately with Harper, even in my own painting, and secondly…It was a vague, nebulous refusal, a sensation of unease as I envisaged her in my studio. Why should I be uneasy? I asked myself. She had sat there for me a thousand times. Why not this time? I could not answer. Instead my memory threw me a brief image, cold and intense as a brush with a ghost…a thin face staring at me in the dark, a voice like lace and frost whispering together, a scent of chocolate…

From where had that rogue memory surfaced? And that face, unformed and yet familiar, the white blur of little Persephone’s face in the gloom of the underworld? I clenched my fists in frustration: I had seen her before, my Queen of Spades. Who was she?

Who?

When I arrived home, Effie was working at her embroidery, demure as a good child. The silks were spread about on the ottoman, on the footstool, on the grey flannel of her dress, and the threads and the long panel of tapestry were the only colour about her. She might have been a nun with her hair loose like a coif around her shoulders and, for a moment, her seeming purity was spectral, terrifying, like a vision of the Holy Virgin. Then she looked up, and in that instant I saw her face like that of a vengeful crone, grimacing in hate and fury, a white-haired Norn older than time with my life held by a thread in her knotted fingers. I almost screamed.

Then the light shifted again and she was Effie, her expression as meek and innocent as that of the Sleeping Beauty in her tapestry. I wondered what spiteful thoughts had been playing in her head and, seeing her smile, I determined to take care. There was something knowing about her smile, something which belied her timid voice when she greeted me. Had she been out? Had she been reading the forbidden books? Had she searched my room?

I forced a smile in return. ‘Are you feeling better now, Effie?’ I asked.

‘Yes, thank you, much better. My headache is quite gone now, and I have been working at my embroidery all afternoon.’ As if to underline that, she put the tapestry aside and began to wind the silks into a tidy plait.

‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘However, bearing in mind your condition this morning I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to go out for a few days at least.’ I expected her to protest at this, knowing from Tabby how she liked to go for walks, but Effie did not flinch.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I think it best to stay in the house while I am unwell: I should not like to catch a chill in the cemetery.’

‘And no reading,’ I added, thinking that if anything was going to shake her composure it would be a reference to her precious books. ‘I’m certain that for a girl of your fanciful temperament, novels and poetry can only do incalculable harm. I have several improving books, as well as a store of tracts for you to read if you wish, but I have taken the rest of your books from the library and would ask you not to purchase any more.’ I fully expected an outburst at that, but she merely nodded—and was that the tiniest smile on her pale lips?—and began to lay away her embroidery in her work-basket.

‘I want to try and finish this tapestry this year, if I can,’ she said. ‘I think it might be pretty as a fire-screen, or maybe the centrepiece for a bedspread. What do you think?’

‘As you wish,’ I said coolly. ‘I’m no judge of such things.’

I was surprised and rather disturbed. She had been helpless and hysterical that morning, wailing and crying like a spoilt child; now she was cool and self-possessed, her politeness almost a form of contempt. What secret was she keeping from me?

I watched her carefully over supper. As usual she ate little, but consented to take some bread and butter when I commented upon her loss of appetite. She was docile, sweet, and charming—why then did my stomach clench at the thought of her docility, her sweetness? My unease and dissatisfaction grew and eventually I retired to the smoking-room and left her alone.

I told myself that I was simply nervous: I had hardly slept the previous night, I had worked all day in the studio and I was tired. That was all. But somehow that was not all. While I was away something had happened to Effie, something secret, perhaps even something dangerous. In a strange, undisclosed way, I felt that Effie was no longer alone, no longer mine. I stayed awake late into that night, smoking and drinking, racking my brain to discover what had finally awoken my pale little sister.

Change

29

Five days.

For five days I waited. I could hardly eat; I was afraid to sleep in case I screamed my thoughts aloud in the night, and laudanum was the only rest I dared allow my disordered brain. I could see Henry was suspicious: sometimes I caught him staring at me and sometimes his eyes met mine with an air of calculation. Even a month ago I could not have borne the pressure of his questioning gaze; but there was a new strength in me, a sensation of change, a new darkness in my heart which filled me with terror and rejoicing. I felt protected by it as the formless butterfly gropes in the darkness of its hard chrysalis, as the wasp shifts in its silk cocoon and dreams uneasy vengeful dreams of flight.

And I? Would I fly? Or would I sting?

In my dreams I flew, floating among endless, shifting skies with my hair dragging behind me like a comet’s tail. And in my dreams I saw Henry Chester in a child’s room filled with balloons and the uneasy half-memories which had assailed me as I slept in Fanny’s house came back to me with a startling clarity. Voices spoke to me from the dark and I saw faces, heard names and welcomed them like old friends; there was Yolande, hair cropped short and figure straight as a boy’s, smoking her endless black cigars; there was Lily, the sleeves of her man’s shirt pushed up to reveal her thick red forearms; there was Izzy and Violet and Gabriel Chau…and, clearer than all the rest, I remembered Marta, floating through the dim air with balloons in her hands, floating closer and closer as Fanny stroked my hair and sang…I had been there that night as Henry came to me with black and guilty lust in his eyes…I knew I had been there and I welcomed the subtle change which was coming over me with a fierce joy.

There were times I was afraid of losing my mind. But I always held firm: when laudanum was not enough to combat the onset of hysteria and when I ached with loneliness for Mose and Fanny and when my fingers trembled to shred the almost-finished Sleeping Beauty tapestry to bloody rags, then I crept to my room where, at the bottom of one of my drawers, I had hidden the letter from Mose and the note from Fanny. Reading them again and again I knew that I was safe, that I was sane: that soon I would be free of Henry’s influence and his threats…I would be with friends who loved me.

On Thursday, I pleaded a headache in order to go to bed early and, at half past ten, I crept out of the house. At a reasonable distance from the house I hailed a cab to Crook Street, arriving there at about eleven as instructed. As soon as I passed the threshold I began to feel that spiralling, floating sensation again, the elated terror of my laudanum-dreams, the naked formlessness of my nocturnal flights. A girl opened the door, gaping, her face oddly distorted in the greenish gaslight; another girl’s face appeared behind hers, and behind hers another, until there were a multitude of disconnected features fanning out down the passage…I stumbled against the step, keeping my balance by leaning on the door-jamb; a dozen hands reached for me and, as they drew me into the passage, I caught sight of my face in the mirrors bracketed to the wall on either side of the doorway: a line of images receding into infinity; white face, white hair, cronelike among the pretty faces, painted lips and bright ribbons of the other girls. A door opened abruptly to my left and Fanny was at my side.

‘Hello, my dear,’ she said, taking my arm to lead me into the parlour. ‘And how are you?’

I grasped the stiff green satin sleeve of her gown to steady myself. ‘Oh, Fanny,’ I whispered. ‘Just hold me for a moment. I’m so frightened. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’

‘Shhh…’ She pulled me towards her in a rough, one-handed embrace, and I could smell tobacco and amber and Pears’ soap on her skin, a strangely reassuring combination which somehow reminded me of Mose. ‘Trust me, my dear,’ she said softly. ‘Do as I say and you’ll be safe. Trust no-one else. You may not understand yet what we are doing but, believe me, I do. Henry Chester has done enough—I’ll not let him hurt you again. I’ll give you your vengeance.’

I was hardly listening: it was enough to feel her strong arm around my shoulder and her hand smoothing my hair. I closed my eyes and for the first time in many days I felt I might be able to sleep without fear of my dreams.

‘Where’s Mose?’ I asked sleepily. ‘He said he’d come. Where is he?’

‘Later,’ promised Fanny. ‘He’ll be there, I promise. Here. Sit down for a while.’ I opened my eyes as she pushed me gently but firmly towards a small couch in front of the fire. Gratefully, I leaned back against the cushions.

‘Thank you, Fanny,’ I said. ‘I’m so…tired.’

‘Drink this,’ she suggested, handing me a small goblet filled with a warm, sweet liquid fragrant with vanilla and blackberry, and I drank, feeling a pleasant relaxation spread through my shaking body.

‘Good girl. Now you can rest awhile.’

I smiled and allowed my gaze to wander lazily around the little parlour. It was a tiny room, furnished all in shades of red, with the same Oriental opulence as the rest of Fanny’s house. There was a fine Persian rug on the floor, fans and masks hanging on the wall and a Chinese fire-screen half shielding the glow from the chimney. The furniture was of cedar and rosewood, upholstered in damask and scarlet. Megaera and Alecto were sitting in front of the screen on a mat, and on the table stood a tinted glass vase of red roses. For a moment, as I raised my hands to my face, I saw that, miraculously, I too had become a part of the change: my skin was tinted a glorious shade of flame, my hair a scarlet sunrise in the lamplight. I was filled with warmth and well-being. Almost unconsciously I reached for another drink of Fanny’s punch, feeling new energy trail thin fire down my throat. A sense of sudden, intense clarity came over me.

‘I do feel much better now, Fanny,’ I said in a stronger voice. ‘Please, tell me what we are going to do.’

She nodded, sitting down on the sofa beside me in a rustle of skirts. The two cats immediately came to her, pressing their soft faces into her hands and purring. She clucked and chirrupped at them, calling them by name.

‘How is Tizzy?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Is she treating you well?’

‘Yes,’ I replied with a smile. ‘She sleeps on my bed at night and sits with me when I’m alone. Henry hates her, but I don’t care.’

‘Good.’ For a second Fanny’s generous mouth seemed to tighten, almost cruelly, and she watched the cats on her lap with a fierce, hard intensity. I felt that she had completely forgotten my existence.

‘Fanny!’

‘My dear!’ The smile was back, her expression as serene as ever. I began to doubt I had ever seen it change.

‘What am I to do when Henry comes? Will I hide, as Mose said?’

She shook her head. ‘No, my dear, you will not hide. For the moment you will trust me, knowing that I care for you and would not allow you to be hurt. But you will have to be brave and you will have to do exactly as I say. Will you?’

I nodded.

‘Good. No questions, then. Promise?’

‘I promise.’

For an instant my eyes strayed from hers and were caught by something at the back of the room, something which from the corner of my eye seemed to be a bunch of balloons. I started, glancing involuntarily at the spot, and I felt Fanny’s grip tighten, just a little, on my arm.

‘What’s that?’

There were no balloons. Simply a circular stain in the top far corner of the room, next to the door.

‘Shh, my dear,’ said Fanny coaxingly. ‘Don’t fret. You’re quite safe here.’

‘I thought I saw…’ My words were heavy, each syllable a formless shape pushing its way through the decaying fabric of my exhaustion. ‘I saw balloons. What…what do balloons…?’

‘Shh. Close your eyes. That’s right. Shh…That’s right. Sleep, my dear. Sleep. It’s your birthday, and there will be balloons. I promise.’