She was six when Mrs. Alloway arrived. Mrs. Alloway explained to her that ladies were meant for hoops and finery, for accomplishment in verse and music and other anodynic arts, that ladies above all else were ladies, the fleece and plumage of society. Ailie cut her hair at the shoulder in protest. She’s worn it that way ever since.
But now her mother is a memory, indistinct, loose at the edges, and Mrs. Alloway has shrunk into insignificance, an old woman, her bulk loose on the bone, death’s pensioner in a leaking cottage. There’s always an homage to pay to this old tub, memories caught in a scent or the feel of the roughened wood, but today is a celebration of life, and she squeezes her eyes shut and summons Mungo, his face drifting in a thousand guises, smiling, winking, the pitch of his upper lip as he begins a funny story, the look of befuddlement as he steps in a bucket or tumbles from his horse. The water is hot, comforting and sensuous. It flushes her skin. She’s in Iceland, Norway. A hot spring, snowflakes melting on the water and a figure looming through the mist, naked and athletic, her name on his lips — but dammit, she’s forgotten the washcloth. It crouches on the table, just out of reach.
The water sucks back as she rises, her breasts boyish and tight, body glowing with wet, the dark bush like a hole cut through her. At that moment the door swings back and her father bursts into the room, dogged by his apprentice, Georgie Gleg. She freezes for an instant, then drops into the water like a stone. Incidental waves break over the lip of the tub to slosh the floorboards.
“Bairns!” her father shouts, blustering to hide his embarrassment.
“Bairns, bairns, bairns! They maun crawl out of the womb in a blizzard.” He is at the closet already, shrugging into his mackintosh and boots. “The third call! Third! Two months it’s been since I’ve delivered a child and now Beelzebub himself has got hold of the weather they’re birthing all over the county.”
She is up to her neck in hot water. Her ears are red. Gleg, lank and unctuous, two years her junior, his teeth like the teeth of a horse, stands mooning at a spot over the tub as if he’d just caught a glimpse of a burning bush or a ladder dropped from the sky. His mouth hangs open, his nostrils quiver.
“Gleg!” her father roars. “Stop gaping like a hyena and get into your coat, boy. We’ve got a housecall to make!”
Gleg flings himself at the closet as if he were flinging himself over a cliff, fumbles into his greatcoat and begins grappling with the doorlatch. Impatient, Dr. Anderson sweeps the door open and shoves him through. The door slams. There is the sound of scuffling on the back porch, then the wheeze of the outer door, and they’re gone.
The fish stir in their tank. The turtle doves preen their wings. The fire hisses. And Ailie, buoyed up by the penetrating warmth of the bath, begins to rub at her legs with the washcloth, her mind gone blank, rubbing and scrubbing, working at the process of purification.
♦ NOT TWIST, NOT COPPERFIELD, NOT FAGIN HIMSELF ♦
Not Twist, not Copperfield, not Fagin himself had a childhood to compare with Ned Rise’s. He was unwashed, untutored, unloved, battered, abused, harassed, deprived, starved, mutilated and orphaned, a victim of poverty, ignorance, ill-luck, class prejudice, lack of opportunity, malicious fate and gin. His was a childhood so totally depraved even a Zola would shudder to think of it.
He was born out back of a twopenny flophouse in what the wags called “The Holy Land”—cribs of straw that went for a penny a night. The year was 1771, the month February. His mother didn’t have the price of a bed, and so she crept into the outbuilding, the labor pains coming like blows to the groin, a bottle of clear white Knock-Me-Down clutched in her fist. The straw was dirty. Pigeons dropped excrement from the rafters. It was so cold even the lice were sluggish. She selected a crib in the rear because of its proximity to the horses and what little warmth they generated. Then she settled down with her bottle.
She was a souse, Ned’s mother. A sister in the great sorority of the sorrows of gin. At this time in British history, the sorority — and its brother fraternity — were flourishing. When gin was first introduced in England at the close of the seventeenth century (some claim it was brought over from Holland by William III, others say it was distilled from bone and marrow by the Devil himself), it became an overnight sensation among the lower classes. It was cheap as piss, potent as a kick in the head. They went mad for it: after all, why swill beer all night when you can get yourself crazed in half an hour — for a penny? By 1710 the streets were littered with drunks, some stripped naked, others stiff as tombstones. When Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, introduced legislation to curb the pernicious influence of gin through licensing and taxation, a mob gathered to stone his house and chew the wheels from his carriage. There was no stopping it. Gin was a palliative for hard times, it was sleep and poetry, it was life itself. Aqua vitae. Ned’s mother was a second-generation ginsoak. Her father was a tanner. He drank two pints a day and flayed hides. He sold her into service at nine, she was out on the streets at thirteen, a mother at fourteen. She died of cirrhosis, brain fever, consumption and green sickness before she reached twenty.
There were three other lodgers in the Holy Land that drear winter’s night. The first was a tribeless patriarch who coughed like dice in a box and died before first light. The landlord discovered him next morning: clots of blood frozen to his lips, his neck, buried deep in the sere white nest of his beard. Then there was the stone mason — granite monuments and markers — on the tail end of a three-day drunk. He retched in the straw and lay down to sleep in it. Lastly, there was the old woman wrapped in tattered skirts like a dressmaker’s dummy, who scraped in after midnight and pitched headlong into the next crib over from the pregnant girl. She lay there, the old woman, her breathing like the friction of rusted gears, listening to the moans of Ned’s mother. Moans. They were nothing new. She closed her eyes. But then there was a cry, and then another. The old woman sat up. In the next crib lay a girl of fourteen or fifteen. Her brow was wet. The neck of a bottle peeked out from her jacket. She was in labor.
The harridan crept closer, snatched up the bottle and held it to her lips.
“ ‘Ere,” she keaked. “Wot’s the trouble, little cheese: birfin’ a babe, is it?”
The girl looked up, heart in mouth.
“Eeeeeee!” screeched the old woman, scattering the pigeons in the rafters. “I’ve done it meself, done it meself, oh yes. There was a time the babbies dropped from these old loins like pippins from a tree.” Her face was a shed snakeskin, ageless. Who could say how much flesh she’d molded within her? Or count the years she’d languished in a Turkish seraglio or a Berber hut? Who could guess what twisted paths and dark alleys she’d been down, or what she was thinking when that ring of hammered gold was struck through her lip?
“ ‘Elp me,” the girl whispered.
♦ ♦ ♦
It was a breech birth. First the wrinkled legs and buttocks, then the shoulders and chin, the smooth slick dome of the head. The hour of the wolf came and went, and the old woman yanked Ned from his mother’s womb. Her fingers were dry and crabbed. She tied off the cord and slapped him. He wailed. Then she wiped the blood and mucus from his body with the hem of her skirt and tucked him inside her coat. She glanced round, sly and secretive, then made for the door. Babysnatch!