Elijah’s Mermaid (42 page)

‘Mr Hall too much of a coward, then, to come and make the deal himself? Ah well, what’s the rush . . . all in good time. Pearl and I must be reacquainted first.’ Tip smiles down and drags me to my feet. He makes a jerky little bow, almost like a doll that is hinged at the waist, at which Monkey, less agile than before, despite scrabbling to cling at a fur lapel, is dislodged and falls heavily to the ground, screeching loudly in alarm as Tip tries to soothe him, murmuring softly, ‘Are we overexcited, my little friend . . . to see our queen bee buzzing back to the hive?’

I was Cruikshank’s queen. I have flown his nest. But Tip’s hold has always been stronger. His nails dig sharp through my black silk sleeve, dragging me forward, towards the divan from which Elijah struggles to stand, and Elijah’s brow is filmed with sweat when he attempts to counter Tip, gasping, ‘Don’t hurt her. Don’t you dare think to hurt her!’

‘Don’t you fret your posh noggin, sir.’ Tip laughs, pushing Elijah down again. A thing all too easily achieved. Can Elijah really be that weak? ‘Why, that is the very last thing on my mind. I intend to protect my investment well, though it’s clear that the same cannot be said for those who have cared for her of late.’

Almost tender Tip’s eyes when he looks at me, and no more than a tickle his grazing touch when he strokes the strands of hair at my brow, what little stubble now remains, poking out from beneath the heavy veils.

‘Ah, such a loss,’ he sighs heavily, ‘but then hair will always grow back again. We’ll soon find a wig . . . get you fattened up. Any damaged flesh we’ll stitch in place. In six months you’ll be luring the toffs back in. Why,’ he grins at Elijah lasciviously, ‘we might even let
this
gentleman visit . . . if he has sufficient to pay the fee.’ Tip chuckles. He tugs on one whisker and muses, ‘Now, how to do this most effectively, to send our hostage on his way?’

‘I won’t go without her.’ Elijah is wheezing.

‘Oh, but you really have no choice.’ Tip smiles, but his narrowed eyes are cold. ‘If I were you, I’d shut your trap. My patience is stretched to its limits tonight. Don’t push it. Who knows what Tip might do. He might think to stain you as red as a plum. He might slit your throat and be done with the fuss.’

His free hand digs into the folds of his coat and I see something glint in the pocket there, something metallic, protruding, sharp.

‘Elijah . . .’ I shout, knowing Tip’s threat is no pretence, ‘you must . . . you have to do as he says.’

My love struggles to stand, but falls again. What on earth is wrong with him?

Elijah keeps saying he will not go. He will not leave me here with Tip. He is coughing, a hand pressed hard to his chest, and when the brown-eyed man comes near, trying to lift him up again, the two of them fall against the divan, which rattles and squeaks when dislodged on the tiles, almost knocking me off my feet. I stumble hard against Tip’s side, and while he steadies me in his arms my fingers burrow in folds of fur and close around the shaft of the file that this creature uses to sharpen its claws.

I think the brown-eyed man has seen. He takes his chance, lunging forward to strike at Tip – who ducks very swiftly to one side, during which, with one wrist still firmly gripped, I find myself being whirled around, caught up in a frenzy of throwing fists. But being so encumbered Tip is too easily restrained, his breaths coming fast with frustration and anger when Mrs Hibbert shouts his name. ‘Tip . . . we have you. Let Pearl go free.’

Despite the quandary in which he is placed, his accomplice now his enemy, Tip thrusts out his chin and sneers his contempt. ‘Well, well . . . what is this caper? The madam turns thief and demander?’

‘As happy to be a thief as a whore . . . as happy to leave
you
here to rot, to condemn you as you condemned me before. And while on the subject of stolen things, give me that key around your neck.’

‘It won’t do you any good, you know. I’ve tried every lock in this house. Whatever the key is meant to fit has been hidden away too carefully. But I’ll find it. I’m like a dog with a bone. Try to take what is mine . . . I’ll tear your throat.’

She suddenly snaps. ‘Stop posturing! Give me the key and be done with it.’

‘And how am I to do such a thing, restrained as I am by your
gentleman
friend?’

‘But Tip,’ her voice is different now, softer, exaggeratedly slow, as if speaking to a dullard child, ‘I will simply take the chain, and you will release your hold on Pearl, and Elijah . . .’ She pauses a little while, as if to ensure we comprehend. ‘Elijah
and Pearl will leave the house and wait in the carriage still outside.’

This is when Tip begins to laugh, a whinnying peal of derision, still refusing to loosen his grip on me. But the brown-eyed man is holding him fast, and when Mrs Hibbert steps forward her hand dips between his fur lapels, violently snatching the key from his neck. The links of that chain break easily. Metal clinks on the tiles around our feet and Mrs Hibbert retreats again – only just escaping Tip’s vicious kick, though it does find the groin of the brown-eyed man, who is winded and groaning, now on his knees – but in the confusion of this new assault I manage to twist and drag away, running at last to Elijah’s side.

Tip’s eyes are darting around the room – from me to Elijah – from Elijah to Mrs Hibbert again, to whom he is saying, ‘Oh dear, Mrs Hibbert . . . this infidelity breaks my heart. What is it makes women so fickle . . . so tricksy . . . so very ungrateful?’ He smiles, and creases appear in his cheeks, like the fissures on the muralled walls. ‘Pearl is mine. You
know
she is mine, the same as this house, the same as . . .’

I take a step forward, and now I am raging. ‘I am not yours! I never was!’

‘Ah, but you are, you always were. And before you are crowned in shells once more, shall I tell my sweet Pearl a fairy tale . . . one that never was written down in Mrs Hibbert’s Book of Events?’

‘Tip!’ Mrs Hibbert’s voice is low. She sounds less brave than she did before.

‘Hush, woman, she has the right to hear . . . to decide if she should stay or go.’

He lifts one foot on to the divan and by the means of that leverage propels his whole body upwards so that he is now towering over us all, standing there as if on a stage, and Monkey jumps on to the iron end and claps its little paws in delight, during which applause Tip’s story starts, and with those most clichéd of opening lines –

‘There was once a beautiful princess . . . Yes . . . I think we
should call her that, don’t you? Or shall we describe her for what she was . . . a pretty enough, respectable child who was raised in a pretty, respectable house, down by the docks, down Wapping way. It was shared with her doting parents, and a doting brother too. But everything changed when that girl was twelve, when her father was doomed to lose his luck, caught snitching and then imprisoned, deported off to Australia . . . after which, being so distraught at his loss, her every possession gone with the bailiffs, his wife cast herself into the Thames – or so the rumours went back then. But whatever the truth of the matter was, it was yet another downturn in luck for our siblings, our two little innocents, now left to fend for themselves in the world, and their only hope of survival to enter the doors of the poorhouse.

‘I tell you, it was a dreadful place, with the sexes forced to separate, and the girl very soon declining in health, her spirit impossible to raise. But he, the older brother, always being more resourceful by nature . . . he took to learning the ways of the world, educating himself in what had to be done to prosper in that godforsaken place. And soon he came to devise a way out of the bonds of poverty . . . which was to fall back on what was at hand, which was to exploit his sister’s looks, trading the gold that shone in her hair for that found in the pockets of wealthy men.

‘Yes, yes, I hear your condemning thoughts!’ Tip scans every one of us, hesitating when he notes that the brown-eyed man is standing again and glaring at our narrator, who, nevertheless, continues his tale: ‘You imagine that brother a rum sort of sinner. But, if not him, then surely another would pimp the girl, and doubtlessly less kindly. His plan was no more than to hire her out as a model for artistic types, her soul still as pure as the virgin snow – unlike his own, as slimy and black as the foulest toad. Oh, such cunning and expertise he’d acquired, acquainting himself with a brothel madam, a widowed lady, always veiled, who owned a house down Chelsea way. Quite a resort it was back then, with its quaint little teashops, and all
the bohemians clustered about . . . whose interests were well enough pandered to when that madam brought his sister in, and able to drum up considerable fees on account of her fey and languid looks, being what you might call a regular stunner. More than one of those sots declared his love before his sketch or painting done. But all in vain, for that fair maid set her heart upon the coldest soul – the one employed by the house madam to paint some murals on her walls.’

I gasp. ‘It was Osborne! He painted the murals.’

‘You think so?’ Tip’s red lips purse into a kiss, simultaneously drawing his talons down over the length of one drooping moustache. ‘Does this also sound familiar – that even when surrounded by cunny and offered his pick of the best of them, this artist’s inclinations were not drawn to the pleasures of the flesh, preferring to look but not to touch, preferring his passion to be daubed in the images on these brothel walls . . . scenes which became quite the talk of the town. But then his painting brush was proud, unlike that other flaccid thing always buttoned in his kecks . . . though some sort of prigging must have occurred, the jolly todger raising the flag at least on one occasion before he went and disappeared. Some trip to study art in France.

‘Well, you know the saying, the devil goes away when he finds the door shut against him. The abbess who ruled that brothel would gladly have barricaded hers, for being around the place so much, working all through the day and night, that artist’s sour and charmless demeanour had been causing offence to the clientele. But, ah . . . the little princess, how she wept, how desolate she was, yearning to hear from the man she loved, who sent no word for months on end, during which time her belly swelled and our beauty hid herself away, refusing to see a living soul, even her loving brother, who feared for her very life when she threatened to follow their mother’s lead by throwing herself into the Thames.

‘How glad he was when her spirits revived when, around the time of the child’s birth – and a child so fair she was doted on by everyone who saw her face – a letter arrived from the artist,
returned from his travelling abroad, writing to the sister here and suggesting a visit down Chiswick way.

‘Oh, yes,’ Tip arches a teasing brow, ‘we have another coincidence there! But I’m sure you’re impatient to hear the rest, and our tale is almost at its end.’

He grins at me, and then goes on. ‘They say absence makes the heart grow fond. The sister had hopes of becoming a wife – to live in a pretty, respectable home and raise her pretty, respectable child. And it seems that when first reunited, she might have had some cause to hope, for the gentleman claimed to have missed his muse, asking to paint her there and then. She dithered. She had not mentioned the child. She knew her body to be much changed, her belly still large from the pregnancy, milky breasts swollen, scarred and stretched. But she had not expected such blatant disgust, the contempt when he saw that his muse was flawed . . . and presuming, because of where she lived, that her morals must be as loose as jam. He told her to leave and never return. He said he would never look again on a body so wrecked by debauchery.

‘By the time she returned to Cheyne Walk she was beside herself with grief, though after some hours she grew calmer again, as if by then resigned to her fate – which was to raise her child in a brothel and to take up the trade of a ladybird, with lustful men less discriminating than those prim and priggish aesthetic types.

‘Well . . .’ Tip exhales a long sad sigh, whether heartfelt or acted I cannot tell, hardly daring to draw a breath myself, being hooked on his every cunning word. ‘She
was
resigned, but
not
to that. She tricked us all when late that night she donned her black cloak with the ostrich plumes and left the house by the kitchen doors and made her way to Battersea Bridge, her baby bundled in her arms. And it’s quite a way to jump, you know. Even in May the water is cold, as cold as the smack of a dead man’s fist. We must hope he knocked her out for the count, and then . . . down, down, down for the swirling dance, with all
of the other dead drowned souls in the unmourning ride of the River Thames.’

At that pronouncement, Tip lifts a hand. He looks like a preacher who stands in his pulpit, warning of fire and brimstone to come. ‘But that brother of hers would not give up, rowing out on the Thames that night, desperately searching for signs of her body . . . and granted the blessing of finding her child when, by some God-sent miracle, that treasure still lived and breathed fresh air . . . and the rest you know . . . and how she grew and then came to be sold to the very man who had thrown her mother off before, and who has now reneged on the oath he swore to cherish and care for our precious Pearl. And,’ I am fixed in his gloating eye, ‘that is why she must now return to those of us here in the House of the Mermaids, to live once again with her own flesh and blood – for isn’t it true what the adage says, blood is much thicker than water?’

There is a moment’s silence, through which Elijah speaks at last, and Elijah’s voice is full of shock. ‘Osborne is Pearl’s father? Could any man be more unnatural?’

I feel as if I am paralysed, unable to move when Tip winks at him, hunching his narrow shoulders high, as if to say ‘
who knows?
’

‘What was her name, my mother’s name?’ I croak like a frog. I have to know. And it is more than I can bear when Tip licks his tongue across his lips as if to lubricate the ease with which he now declaims, ‘What
is
true is that I am your uncle. Your mother . . . my sister . . . my beloved Stella . . . Stella . . . our star, our sun, our moon . . . the very first mermaid in Cheyne Walk. The first, but no longer to be the last.’