‘Doubt it. I think ’tis about Our Lord Jesus.’
Nell made a face. She cringed if someone showed her a crucifix, and couldn’t bear to hear the name of Christ. Mary Jane still went to church when she could. She had been told God was forgiving. After all, the Lord returned from the grave and encouraged folk to drink His blood. Just like Miss Lucy.
Mary Jane put the book back. Algernon started gulping and Mary Jane held his head up. There was something in his throat. She burped him like a baby and let his head drop. A reddish stain seeped into his pillow.
‘Come down and relieve us from virtue, Our Lady of Pain,’ he said, clearly. Then he slumped insensible again, and started snoring.
‘Don’t sound dead, does he?’
Nell laughed. ‘Garn, yer Irish cow.’
‘Silver and stake my heart will break, but names’ll never hurt me.’
The other woman fastened her chemise over furry breasts.
‘Doesn’t all that hair tickle?’
‘Never ’ad any complaints.’
The poet had just wanted a whipping. When his back was bloody, he had let them bite him. It had been enough to finish him off. After that he had been as harmless as a baby.
Since she turned, Mary Jane had been opening her legs less. Some men wanted the old-fashioned mixed in, but a lot only liked to be bitten and bled. She remembered with a thrill of nasty pleasure what it had been like when Miss Lucy was at her throat, tiny teeth worrying at the wound. Then the taste of Lucy’s blood, and the fire running through her, turning her.
‘Ladies of Pain, are we?’ Nell said, belting her dress around thick red flanks.
Mary Jane’s warm life was hazy in her mind. She had been to Paris with Henry Wilcox; that she knew. But she remembered nothing of Ireland, of her brothers and sisters. She knew from what folk who knew her said that she had come to London from Wales, that she had buried a husband, that she had been kept in a house in the West End. Once in a while she would have a glimpse of memory, seeing a face she knew or coming across an old keepsake, but her old life was a chalk picture in the rain, running and blurring. She had been seeing clearly since her turning, as if a dirty window had been wiped clean. Occasionally, when she was full of someone else’s ginny blood, her former self would flood back, and she’d find herself puking in a gutter.
Nell was bending over Algernon, mouth to a bite on his shoulder, sucking quietly. Mary Jane wondered if the poet’s blood was richer than a normal man’s. Perhaps Nell would start spouting verses and rhymes. That’d be something to hear.
‘Leave him be now,’ Mary Jane said. ‘He’s had his guinea’s-worth.’
Nell straightened up, smiling. Her teeth were yellowing, and her gums were black. She’d have to go to Africa and live in the jungle soon.
‘I can’t believe ’e’s payin’ a guinea. There ain’t that much tin in the world.’
‘Not in our world, Nell. But he’s bein’ a gentleman.’
‘I knows gentlemen, Mary Jane. They is, as a rule, cheap as week-old pigsblood. And tight as a rat’s arse-hole.’
They left the room arm in arm and went downstairs. Theodore, Algernon’s friend, was waiting. He must be a good friend, to bring Mary Jane and Nell all the way out to Putney and to stand by all this time. A lot of folk would be disgusted. Of course, Theodore was a new-born and must be broad in the mind.
‘How is Swinburne?’
‘He’ll live,’ she said. Most girls had a fierce sort of contempt for customers like Algernon. They liked to look at a perfectly dressed gent and think of him wriggling naked in pain, sneering at them for preferring a whipping to a good shag. Mary Jane felt different. Maybe her turn had changed the way she felt about what folk did with each other. Sometimes she dreamed of opening the throats of angels as they sang, then straddling them as they died.
‘How he loves you women,’ Theodore said. ‘He talks about your “cold immortal hands”. Strange.’
‘He knows what he likes,’ Mary Jane said. ‘No shame in bein’ partial to something out of the ordinary.’
‘No,’ Theodore agreed, unsure. ‘No shame at all.’
They stood in the reception room. There were portraits of famous men on the walls and still more books. Mary Jane had a picture of the Champs-Elysées, cut out of an illustrated paper, pasted to the wall of her room in Miller’s Court. She saved up for a frame once when she was warm, but Joe Barnett, her man at the time, found the pennies in a mug and drank them away. He’d blacked her eye for holding back on him. When she turned, she’d thrown Joe out, but not before she had repaid him with interest for the bruises.
Theodore gave them a guinea apiece and escorted them out to the carriage. Mary Jane tucked her guinea safe into her poke, but Nell had to hold her coin up to catch the moonlight.
Mary Jane remembered to bid Theodore a good night and to curtsey as Uncle Henry had taught her. Some gentlemen had inquisitive neighbours, and it was only polite to act like a proper lady caller. Theodore didn’t notice and turned back into the house before she had straightened up.
‘A guinea, blimey,’ Nell exclaimed. ‘I’d ’a bitten ’is balls fer a guinea.’
‘Get in the coach with you, you embarrassin’ tart,’ Mary Jane said. ‘I don’t know of what you’re thinkin’.’
‘I do believe I will, Duchess,’ she said, squeezing through the door, wiggling her rump from side to side.
Mary Jane followed and settled down.
‘Oi you,’ Nell shouted to the driver, ‘’ome, an’ don’t spare the ’orses.’
The carriage lurched into motion. Nell was still playing with her gold coin. She had tried to bite it. Now she was shining it against her shawl.
‘I’ll be off the streets fer a month,’ she said, licking her fangs. ‘I’ll go up West an’ find myself a guardsman with a knob like a firehose, an’ suck the bastard dry.’
‘But you’ll be back in the alleys when the money’s gone, on your back in the muck while some drunkard wobbles all over you.’
Nell shrugged. ‘I ’ardly think I’ll be marryin’ royalty. Yer neither, Marie Jeanette de Kelly.’
‘I’m not on the streets any more.’
‘Just ’cos there’s a roof over the bed yer shag in don’t make it a church, girl.’
‘No strangers, that’s my rule now. Just familiar gentlemen.’
‘Very familiar.’
‘You should be listenin’ to me, you know. It’s not healthy on the streets these nights. Not with the Ripper.’
Nell was unimpressed. ‘In Whitechapel, ’e’d ’ave to kill an ’ore a night til kingdom come til ’e got to me. There’s thousands of us, an’ there will be long after ’e’s rottin’ in Hell.’
‘He’s killin’ them two at a time.’
‘Garn!’
‘You know ’tis true, Nell. ’Tis over a week since he did for Cathy Eddowes and the Stride woman. He’ll be out and about again.’
‘I’d like to see ’im try anythin’ with me,’ Nell said. She snarled, a mouthful of wolf-teeth glistening. ‘I’d rip ’is ’eart out, an’ eat the blighter.’
Mary Jane had to laugh. But she was being serious. ‘The only safe thing is familiar gentlemen, Nell. Customers you know, and are sure of. The best thing would be to find a gentleman to keep you. Especially if he wants to keep you outside Whitechapel.’
‘Only place that’d keep me is the zoo.’
Mary Jane had been kept once. In Paris, by Henry Wilcox. He was a banker, a colossus of finance. He had gone abroad without his wife, and Mary Jane had travelled with him. He told everyone she was his niece, but the French understood the arrangement all too well. When he travelled on to Switzerland, he left her behind with an old frog rakehell to whom she did not take. ‘Uncle Henry’, it turned out, had lost her on a hand of cards. Paris had been lovely but she still came back to London, where she knew what folk were saying and she was the only person gambling with her life.