The Dress Lodger (25 page)

“I will make it up to that poor woman by getting as many names as I can. She was never given the opportunity to volunteer.”

“It would please me if you did not make a spectacle of yourself, Audrey,” Henry calls as she steps down into the street. “I fear we both will be gravely embarrassed.”

She looks him steadily in the eye. “I wish you had as much faith in me as I have in you,” she says, then turns and walks away down Nile Street, as self-possessed as any Queen of Egypt.

Henry watches her until the crowd on High Street swallows her up. A tiny coster girl, her basket stacked high with fist-sized bundles of cress, rounds the corner and smiles at Henry, but seeing his abstracted scowl and blood-soaked apron, she quickly scampers on to the next house.

“Williams!” he bellows, leaning against the shut door. “Bring me a pen and paper.”

The servant materializes as instructed and Henry scribbles a brief note. Is any of this worth it? The sneaking around, lying to Audrey? He needs to know what is being said about him on the street, but it is impossible for him to leave his students right now. They will need to work all day and all night for the rest of the week to finish her, and that’s if that damned Mill Street landlord doesn’t take it into his head to send round the constables. “Do you know the pub the Labour in Vain?” Henry asks his servant curtly.

“Yes sir.”

“Here’s a shilling. Deliver this to the proprietor there.” Henry hands him the slip of paper and heads back upstairs to his waiting students. “And Williams,” Henry adds as the valet pulls on his coat. “It was unpardonable of you to allow Miss Place into my study. Do not bother coming back.”

Williams snorts—as if all the money in the world could get him to return to this charnel house! He buttons his coat and sets off for the Labour in Vain to lift a pint to his liberation. As soon as he’s out of sight of the house, he unpockets the note and reads it. G: I am counting on your silence, wrote his former master. Sunday, let me take you to the country. You would like that, wouldn’t you? And bring the baby. I know you are more familiar than you have said. H.

John Robinson is on a ladder with a paint pot, touching up his shovel-and-skull street sign, when Williams passes the note up to him. The outside is inscribed “Hold for the Woman in the Blue Dress,” so John Robinson, knowing full well Gustine can’t read, feels it his duty to review the contents. He sits on the top step, his paintbrush clenched between his teeth, narrowly studying the doctor’s letter.

“You don’t understand it either?” asks Williams.

The publican frowns and rights his tipping pot of paint. “Unfortunately, sir,” says he, “I fear I do.”

Audrey first tried her godfather Clanny’s house in Bishopwearmouth, but, poor thing, before she could even open her mouth to state her reason for visiting, Mrs. Clanny, her mother’s dearest friend, whisked her inside for a cup of tea. Have you picked your dressmaker? Chosen your flowers? Orange blossoms surely, for a June wedding, and camellias. Oh, we are so proud of you, like our own daughter, you are. Audrey didn’t have the heart to upset the kindly lady with her petition, so she kept it rolled up in her reticule while she nibbled an almond biscuit and listened to Mrs. Clanny’s opinions on fashion. One mustn’t wear a hat so large that dogs stop in the street to bark at it was the ultimate determination, and as Audrey shook hands good-bye, she vowed to keep that in mind.

She had no better luck with Dr. Haselwood’s wife, or Dr. Dixon’s either. Mrs. Haselwood was upstairs in bed, ill since this morning with a mysterious stomach complaint—they were all anxiously waiting the doctor’s return; and Dr. Dixon’s wife had been shipped off to her sister in Durham. Intrepid Audrey next set off to visit her old school friend Emily Peaverly, who was celebrating her first-year wedding anniversary with the birth of her first son. Audrey lifted the child from his mother’s arms—He looks just like you!—and planted kisses on both red cheeks. She knew she couldn’t possibly speak of death in the face of this promising new life, so once more she kept her petition hidden inside her reticule. She had thought it would be so much easier to bring up the subject with women, for women understand the importance of small heroic acts, and even if they would not themselves sign for fear of displeasing their husbands, they would applaud Audrey’s sacrifice for her own intended.

But now it is three o’clock and she has no new names upon her petition. She has watched the other women of Sunderland drink tea, dandle babies, fret the servants with their mysterious ailments, and she has begun to worry she is less a cynosure than she is, perhaps, unnatural. Maybe Henry is right. What business does she have imagining herself dead when others are getting on with life? Her last visit (to her second cousin, who broke down in tears when she broached the subject, and begged her not to speak of such horrible things) has put her out not far from East Cross and Low Street, where among the confusion of corporation offices, her father headquarters his shipping business. Perhaps she might feel comfortable speaking to his old employees, who have known her from girlhood and might sign their names out of personal regard and loyalty to her father. Yes, she’ll give it one last try. She turns her steps toward the muddy, inelegant corporation complex, where the shade falls heavy and mobs of gulls scold from red-tiled roofs.

Place Shipping, her father’s company, prides itself on having the lowest ratio of shipwrecks to years in operation. Only 6 of its clippers have gone down in the last decade, with a loss of life amounting to 114, while Sunderland as a whole has accumulated a far worse record (the unofficial count standing at 107 ships wrecked out of 600 in the last two years alone). Most of Sunder land’s overcrowded, leaking, slapped-together vessels are destroyed along the coast route ferrying coal from the Tyne and Wear down to the Thames; but all of Place Shipping’s accidents have occurred in the rough waters of the German Ocean, sailing to or from Riga, where the ships take iron rails and return with large clouds of Baltic flax. Audrey’s father, Captain Place, is one of the least hated shippers in Sunderland; he racks up the fewest fines for overcrowding, serves the least adulterated coffee, and has consistently had the lowest mortality from phthisis of any mogul in town. Though an owner, once every year or two Captain Place even takes command of his fleet to prove that he has not lost his feel for the sea. He set sail for Riga in late May of this year, despite reports of the cholera there, and was due back in early September. The Audrey Eliza, his ship, got trapped behind the Quarantine and neither the company nor the family has had news of it in over a month.

Audrey climbs the narrow stairs to the third floor, where Mr. Harrison, the company’s bookkeeper, answers her knock. She smiles wanly, for of all her father’s employees, including the rough-and-tumble sailors who load the ships, Audrey has always liked this man least. He has a round billiard ball face and a waxed mustache, and wears the most hideous green plaid suits.

“Miss Audrey Place!” Mr. Harrison exclaims, unctuously bowing her into the office. “We haven’t had the honour of yer presence in ages.”

She’s only come to her father’s office a handful of times, to drag him off to lunch or scold him for working too late on a Saturday. It is strange to be here without him. Four desks, three of them empty, are crowded with crates and ledger books. Cobwebs flutter from the beamed ceiling as Mr. Harrison closes the door behind her; sunlight, where it angles in from the windows, bleaches a stack of old newspapers swimming with silverfish. It smells masculine in here, but in a sour day-after-a-bender sort of way. Audrey is certain her father would disapprove.

“I am surprised to find you alone, Mr. Harrison,” Audrey replies politely. “Where are the others?”

“Left early today, miss,” he replies, helplessly shrugging his shoulders. “Little to do wi’ yer father and the fleet still away.”

“So you’ve had no letter either?” she asks.

“Not a word.”

“Mother tells me not to worry,” Audrey says with a sigh, absently removing her bonnet and gloves, “but I confess, Mr. Harrison, I am growing concerned.”

“I’m sure there’s no need for alarm, miss,” he says, taking her things and pressing her into a dusty chair. “Sit! Sit! We’ll be hearing from him any day now.”

Mr. Harrison pulls a chair out for himself, catching a glimpse as he does so of the bottle of mercury pills he’s left sitting on his desk. That stinging in his privates had meant exactly what he feared it meant, and the apothecary has put him on yet another course of quicksilver. God damn that night under the bridge, thinks Mr. Harrison, whisking the bottle of pills into his coat pocket before his boss’s daughter sees. What he wouldn’t give to get his hands around that little whore’s throat.

“So, what brings you down here among us working folk?” asks Mr. Harrison, scooting his chair around and crossing his legs so that one of his green plaid knees is just touching Audrey’s. It’s a harmless game he likes to play, and hasn’t Miss Audrey grown into a fine-looking young woman? She sits with the low winter sun behind her, igniting the red in her molten gold ringlets. Yes, indeed, how fetching the boss’s daughter looks, thinks Mr. Harrison naughtily.

Certain Mr. Harrison must not realize his proximity, Audrey tucks her legs a little farther under her skirt. She glances uneasily around the office; the chairs at the other desks are dusty too, as though they have not been sat upon for days.

“I was hoping to have a word with all of my father’s employees,” she says, setting her reticule on her lap. “About something very dear to my heart.”

“Well now, you might have a word wi’ me and I’ll certainly pass whatever it is along,” says Mr. Harrison with a little pat to her knee.

I will speak of it, she decides, flinching at the pat. It is time to be brave. Audrey snaps open her reticule and draws forth the petition. She sets it on the desk before her, then folds her trembling hands primly back in her lap.

“As you probably know,” she begins, colouring slightly, “doctors have an imperfect understanding of the human body. They might learn a great deal from books, but it is the intensive study of physical anatomy that advances Science. How unfair it seems to me that the burden of such study must fall, as it does now, solely on the backs of the poor. …”

Mr. Harrison is better with numbers than he is with words, but as he labours over the handwritten petition, a strange flush comes upon him. His mouth goes suddenly dry, his groin grows hot, and he is forced to rearrange his coat so as not to embarrass himself. To dispel superstition and light the lamp of anatomical inquiry, I hereby will my body to Sunderland Hospital for respectful dissection, so that it may be of use… Be of use? He glances up swiftly at the boss’s daughter. He can just imagine what sort of use a lovely body like hers would be put to—stretched out naked upon a table, alone in a roomful of men. Why, what’s to stop a randy medical student from fondling those parts of hers that—from climbing up and—from doing whatever he desired, with no resistance whatsoever! To be of use? Does she realize what she is suggesting with this petition? All the names set upon it are men, he sees, except for hers.

“Miss Audrey, when did that pretty little head of yours turn so morbid?” He laughs nervously. “Your papa needs to come back and speak sense to you.”

“I assure you I am in great earnest, Mr. Harrison,” Audrey says, a little offended by his laughter.

“You expect the people of Sunderland to line up for a carving? Just because of this piece of paper?” He cannot look at her now, too afraid she’ll read the rush of lust in his face. “I don’t like to imagine those dirty little boys hacking up such a fine figure as yours. As for myself, I can think of a hundred better things to do with it.”

The silence is oppressive in the empty room, broken only by a solitary gull landing awkwardly on the wmdowsill. My God, thinks Audrey, my father’s employee is making an advance at me. His knee is pressed against her own, and when she moves, his leg follows. This is wrong, thinks Audrey, rising swiftly. I must get out of here.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Harrison,” she mutters, moving for the door.

“What’s the hurry, miss?” asks Harrison, leaping up when she does.

“I made a mistake in coming here when my father was away,” says Audrey, shaking. “I’ll see he’s apprised of the fine way you are conducting business in his absence.”

Harrison, realizing his harmless little game might get him dismissed, reaches out to stop her.

“Wait!” he cries. “I’d like to sign this petition of yours.” He grabs the quill off his desk, dunks it in his inkwell, and scribbles his name next to number 6. He thrusts the petition back at her, hoping this will be enough.

Audrey looks down at the paper, feeling soiled beyond words. This is how she is supporting her fiance? By submitting to the advances of low and awful men? She folds the paper and hides it in her reticule, then leaves without another word.

“If you hear from yer Da,” shouts Harrison of the green plaid suit, “send him my very sincerest regards. Let him know I’d do anything to help a lady. Anything at all for a lady!”

But Audrey doesn’t hear him. She is halfway down the block, fighting back her tears. Her father’s employee. Whatever made him believe he could look at me like that? She rages, angry after the fact. If Henry were here, he would never have dared raise his eyes to me, let alone voice his obscene thoughts. Overhead, seagulls dart from roof to roof, squalling at her. This world is so ugly, thinks Audrey, having for the first time in her life snagged a thread of the world’s great tapestry of ugliness. It is impossible to do good in the world without having it perverted.

She walks for some minutes aimlessly, following the bank of the river. It is beginning to grow dark, but Audrey is unaware of her surroundings, sunk in disillusionment as she is. She wishes she’d never thought of this wretched petition, had not made herself vulnerable with it. But how must poor women feel, with absolutely no choice in the matter? If it is improper for Audrey to make herself available to medical science, why do doctors think nothing of using the bodies of lower-class women? Why is there one rule for them and another for me?