‘Now, dear, you must feed,’ Mrs Amworth said. She looked around, at him.
Beauregard loosened his cravat, and undid his collar. Then, he froze. He felt the pulse in his neck against his knuckles. A shirt-stud came loose and wriggled between his shirt and waistcoat. Geneviève was sitting up, a wall against her back. Her face calmed down, losing the demon rictus, but her teeth were still enlarged, jutting like sharp pebbles. He imagined her mouth on his neck.
‘Charles?’ someone said.
He turned around. Penelope stood by a stack of cabbage crates. In a fur-collared travelling coat and gauze-clouded hat, she was as out of place as a Red Indian in the House of Commons.
‘What are you doing?’
His instant reaction was to redo his cravat, but he fumbled and his collar flew absurdly loose.
‘Who are these people?’
‘She must feed,’ Mrs Amworth insisted. ‘Or she might collapse. She’s all used up, poor thing.’
Morrison had rolled up his sleeve and presented his wrist, which bore several tiny scabs, to Geneviève’s mouth. She held her hair out of the way and suckled.
Penelope looked away, nose wrinkling up in disgust. ‘Charles, this is filthy!’
She nudged a head of cabbage aside with a pointed boot-toe. The loafers clustered behind Penelope exchanged inaudible jokes. The occasional explosion of rude laughter washed by without touching her.
‘Penelope,’ he said, ‘this is Mademoiselle Dieudonné...’
Geneviève’s eyes rolled up to look at Penelope. A dribble of blood emerged from the corner of her mouth, ran down Morrison’s wrist, and dripped to the cobbles.
‘Geneviève, this is Miss Churchward, my fiancée...’
Penelope did everything possible not to say ‘ugh’ out loud. Geneviève finished, and returned Morrison’s arm to him. He wrapped a handkerchief around his wrist, and refastened his cuff. Red-mouthed, she stood up. Her torn sleeve flapped away from her bare shoulder. She held half her bodice to her chest, and curtseyed, wincing somewhat.
There were policemen in the crowd now, and the loafers dispersed. Everyone in the market found something to do, picking through stalls, hefting crates, bartering prices.
Mrs Amworth put an arm around Geneviève to steady her, but Geneviève gently eased her away. She smiled at her own ability to stay upright. Beauregard thought she was light-headed, her feeding following so close upon her injuries.
‘Lord Godalming said you might be found in the vicinity of the Café de Paris in Whitechapel,’ Penelope said. ‘I had hoped his information misleading.’
To attempt an explanation would be to admit a defeat, Beauregard knew.
‘I have a cab,’ she said. ‘Will you return with me to Chelsea?’
‘I still have business here, Penelope.’
She smiled with half her face, but her eyes were blue steel specks.
‘I shall not enquire as to your “business”, Charles. It is not my place.’
Geneviève wiped her mouth on a scrap of her dress. Sensibly, she faded into the background with Mrs Amworth and Morrison. Clayton stood about bewildered, a cabby without a cab. He would have to wait for the knacker to come for his horse.
‘Should you wish to call on me,’ Penelope continued, laying out an ultimatum, ‘I shall be at home tomorrow afternoon.’
She turned and left. A porter whistled and she turned, cutting him into dead silence with a stare. The cowed man slunk into the shadows behind a row of beef sides. Penelope walked off, taking tiny steps, her veil drawn low over her face.
When she was gone, Geneviève said ‘so that’s Penelope.’
Beauregard nodded.
‘She has a nice hat,’ Geneviève commented. Several people, including Mrs Amworth and Clayton, laughed, not pleasantly.
‘No, really,’ Geneviève insisted, gesturing in front of her face. ‘The veil is a pretty touch.’
Inside himself, he was exhausted. He tried to smile but his face felt a thousand years old.
‘Her coat is good, too. All those little shiny buttons.’
31
THE RAPTURES AND ROSES OF VICE
Don’t s’pose we done ’im in, does yer?’ Nell asked, squatting on the bed, prodding the naked man with a long finger. He was face-down in a pillow, wrists and ankles loosely tied with scarves to brass bedposts. The nice white cotton sheets were spotted and stained.
Mary Jane was preoccupied with dressing. It was hard to set a bonnet without a mirror.
‘Mary Jane?’
‘Marie Jeanette,’ she corrected, loving the sound like music. She had tried to be rid of her brogue, until she realised men found it pleasing. ‘I’ve been tellin’ you for close on a year. ’Tis Marie Jeanette. Marie Jeanette Kelly.’
‘Yer Kelly don’t go with yer “Marie Jeanette”, Duchess.’
‘Tish-tush. And pish-posh too.’
‘That bloke what took yer to Paree didn’t do the rest of us no favours.’
‘Any favours.’
‘Pardon me fer suckin’, Duchess.’
‘And don’t you be talkin’ unkindly of my “Uncle Henry”. He was very distinguished. Probably still is very distinguished.’
‘Unless ’e’s a-rottin’ from the pox yer give ’im,’ Nell said, without real meanness.
‘Be away with the cheek of you, now.’
Mary Jane was finally happy with her hat. She was careful about her appearance. She might have turned vampire and she might be a cocotte, but she wasn’t going to let herself go and become a fox-face horror like Nell Coles.
The other woman sat on the bed, and felt around the poet’s neck, still sticky with his own blood.
‘We done ’im, Mary Jane. ’E’s bleedin’ dead, an’ ’e’ll turn for certain.’
‘Marie Jeanette.’
‘Yeah, an’ I’m Contessa Eleanora Francesca Muckety-Muck. Come ’ave a butchers.’
Mary Jane looked Algernon up and down. There were tiny bites, old and new, all over his body. His back and bottom were striped with purple welts. He had provided his own rods and encouraged them to put their backs into the whipping.
‘He’s an old hand at this, Nell. It’d take more than a flogging and a few love-bites to finish off this old cocker.’
Nell dipped a finger into the blood pooling in the small of Algernon’s back and touched her rough lips. She got hairier with every moonrise. She had to brush her cheeks and forehead now, sweeping her thick red hair back into a flaring mane. She stood out in a crowd, which had been good for business. Customers were peculiar. She wrinkled her wide nose as she tasted the blood. Nell was one of those who got ‘feelings’ with her food. Mary Jane was glad that didn’t happen to her.
Nell made a face. ‘That’s bitter,’ she said. ‘Who is the cove, anyway?’
‘His friend said he was a poet.’
A square-rigged gent had sought them out, and paid for a carriage from Whitechapel to Putney. The house was almost in the country. Mary Jane understood Algernon had been sick and was taking the air for his health.
‘Got enough books, ain’t ’e?’
Nell couldn’t read or write, but Mary Jane had her letters. The small bedroom was lined with bookshelves.
‘Did ’e write ’em all?’
Mary Jane took a beautifully bound book down from a shelf, and let it fall open.
‘“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath,”’ she read aloud. ‘“We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.”’
‘Sounds lovely. Yer reckon it’s about us?’