The Dress Lodger (33 page)

“What are you doing?”

The door bangs wide and Eye jumps, so lost in the baby she missed the telltale raising of the latch. Gustine trembles in the doorway, streaked with wet clay like a statue wept to life.

“What in bloody hell are you doing?” she shrieks.

“I found him.” Pink bursts through the door behind Gustine, her small chest heaving from having chased the ferret down High Street until he made a dead-end turn onto Stamps Lane. “He almost got away, but I trapped him against a wall and—NO!” she screams, following Gustine’s horrified stare to where her responsibility rests in the crook of Eye’s arm. “Oh God! Give me that!”

Pink flings aside the guilty, shivering ferret and rushes the old woman. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she sobs, tugging on the Eye’s arm but begging Gustine’s forgiveness. “Mike ran away and I—I only left for a minute.”

But Gustine does not even hear. It’s over. The worst has happened. She stands transfixed in the doorway while Pink bites the Eye’s fleshy arm, pulling with all her might to release the baby. The Shadow of Death has fallen upon my child, thinks Gustine numbly. I am too late.

Pink tugs with all her strength, but the Eye, pressing the baby possessively to her breast, will not let it go. She shakes her head as hot tears drop from her single gray eye, though she scarcely knows what this water means. Don’t take it away. Don’t take the heart baby. Eye love it.

But Gustine has recovered herself and flies to the fireplace. She will not stand back and let the Eye destroy her child. She will not give up without a fight. She lunges for the hot poker andHvheels it around at the old woman’s head, feeling the shock of connection and the satisfying sizzle of burnt flesh and hair. In her moment of surprise, Eye loosens her hold on the baby and Pink quickly snatches it away.

“I will not let you finish what you started!” Gustine screams, her sobs finally getting the best of her. “You could not kill him then and you will not now. I am taking this baby away. You will never see either of us again!” She pulls the baby from Pink’s arms and rips his blanket from the swaying clothesline overhead. Her child already seems different to her, strangely cold and faintly trembling. She quickly wraps him tight.

“Where are you going?” Pink begs. “What do I tell Da?”

“Tell your Da I’ve broken out of his bloody jail.” Gustine throws her shawl over her head and, pressing the baby close to her body, darts out into the snow. She has nowhere to go, but she will not stay here. Not anymore.

The door slams behind her, and Pink watches a comet’s tail of snow slowly melt into the floorboards. She might as well melt with it, for Miss Audrey will never want her now that she’s lost the baby. The pressure in her chest is greater than anything she’s ever felt; worse even than last Christmas when gin-lit Da stumbled home and stepped on the straw birdhouse she made him. Over by the fireplace, Mike shakes his wet fur and contentedly settles down to sleep.

And what does Eye—numb to the poker welt even now blistering on her right temple—feel? Stunned and bleeding, she has only a conception of a thought. In her new confused haze of black and red, she wonders who let the rat into her heart, to gnaw at the place Gustine’s baby used to be?

Someone is pounding loudly on the door downstairs, but Henry is too involved to answer.

He squints through his microscope, set at its highest magnifying power, one eighth of an inch, puzzled by what he sees. The slide under the microscope, a culture taken from the cadaver Fos’s soiled winding sheet before he burned it, teems with strange annular bodies, what look to be corpuscles, the same size as blood globules, but whose walls refract light powerfully. What are these parasites? he wonders. Are they important? He has never seen such creatures in healthy human dejecta, and as a comparison, he takes a few drops from his own chamber pot and examines them. No. Perfectly normal. On the table beside him lies Bell’s just published Cholera Asphyxia; but if what Henry sees has any validity, Bell’s latest theory will go the way of so many others. Cholera may not breed along the sympathetic nervous system, as Bell theorizes; no, it could very well be the work of a parasite, some creature smaller than anything Henry sees with his microscope. He knows his uncle Clanny is even now at home penning a monograph on the atmospheric causes of cholera, based on his weather charts and his hunch that excess carbon is the culprit. Henry wants to invite him over to observe what breeds on the slide, but he doesn’t want to get into how he came by the patient.

More rapping from below. And more insistent this time. Henry storms over to the window and throws open the sash. “Leave me alone!” he shouts.

“Dr. Chiver, it’s me,” a high, frightened voice calls up. “Gustine. I need to speak with you.”

Gustine? He peers around the drapes and sees her standing unprotected in the snow, carrying a bundle in her arms. She’s come around at last, he sighs. She’s brought the baby. Quickly, he washes his hands, races down the stairs, and yanks open the door.

“Come inside,” he says. “And quickly, before someone sees you.”

She steps into the foyer, sloughing off a skin of mud and snow. What on earth has happened to so alter her? he wonders. Filthy and wet, she shivers around the baby, whose cheeks are waxen with cold. But there is something more. He sniffs the air uncertainly. Gustine stinks of alcohol.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says, unsteady on her feet. “I had to leave Mill Street.”

“Is that whiskey on your breath, Gustine?” Henry chides. “I thought you didn’t drink.”

“I didn’t before tonight.”

“Let’s get you dry,” he says, realizing that the only lit fire is in his anatomical study. Well, she helped him procure the bodies, she might as well know what he does with them. He opens the door that only days before he shut on Audrey, seeing through Gustine’s eyes the scummy specimen jars of eyes and hearts, the cabinet of saws, microscope, brown-jointed skeletons suspended from silk. She looks dully around, unimpressed by his collection, and Henry feels vaguely disappointed.

“Here is our handiwork,” he says, striding across the room and pulling away the cloth covering Fos’s naked body. Why am I doing this? he asks himself when she winces. Why am I punishing her for helping me? She turns away from the body of her fellow lodger and absently takes a seat on the raised hearth, rubbing the baby’s hands and feet, trying to warm him. Glassy-eyed and sluggish, the child looks unwell to Henry. She should have known better than to bring him out in this storm.

“I can’t seem to get him warm,” Gustine says.

“Let him rest near the fire,” Henry commands. “He needs to thaw out.”

He pours himself a glass of brandy and sets it on the library table next to his barely touched dinner of this afternoon. To his surprise, the dress lodger reaches for his glass and throws it back like a professional.

“That’s enough,” he says, taking the empty glass from her. “I don’t like to see you like this.”

She sits with one hand in her lap and the other on the baby’s foot, massaging it mindlessly. Her muddy hair hangs over her face, so that he has to lean down to see her. He could never have imagined her like this: disheveled and drunk like some abandoned dock whore. He finds it very disconcerting.

“So, Gustine,” Henry says at last to break what is becoming an awkward silence. “Have you had a change of heart?”

“I have,” Gustine whispers.

“Then you would like for me to keep and study this child?”

“Yes.” Again whispered.

“You’ve made the right choice,” he says. Poor miserable girl, she is crying into her lap, made more upset, certainly, by all the whiskey she’s consumed. She needn’t have done this to herself, Henry thinks; it’s not as if he’s a monster. He will be good to the child and raise it up almost like one of his own.

“Now please, you must let me give you something in return,” he says, digging into his pocket. “How much do you want?”

At his question, Gustine’s head comes up proudly. She has been rehearsing this speech for the past hour, wandering from pub to pub, searching for the courage to come here. She feels the strange thickness of whiskey on her tongue and hears her own words from far away.

“I want no money from you, only an exchange of services,” Gustine starts, and almost immediately falters. “I have come to make you an offer, Dr. Chiver. You may take my baby and keep him, but let me be close by, to watch over him and soothe him when he is frightened. Take me as a maid in your house. I will cook for you; I will clean and sew. I have worked a long time in the factory, so I have not mastered all the household skills, but I am a hard worker and I will learn. My potter collapsed today—” Her voice breaks with emotion, but she cannot stop before she’s gotten everything out.

“And the Eye has tried to kill my child. I cannot go back there. I have nowhere to go, no way to support him. For his sake, I will give you my baby, but please don’t ask me to part from him. Take me too, so that we may be together, at least until the time when he—I know you are to be married, and I swear to make a diligent and obedient maid to your new Henry has been listening in growing alarm. To even consider having her in the same house with Audrey—a street prostitute who has made her life picking through coffins for him—no, no, it is too much. He stares down at the half-naked, drunk young girl, holding her baby up to him like a sacrifice to the pagan gods, and shudders in revulsion. Why does she ask the impossible of him?

“Dr. Chiver, please,” she begs. “After all I have done for you.”

But her appeal to his conscience serves only to make him ashamed and defensive. Henry was prepared to offer her a good sum of money for her very painful sacrifice, but this is simply too much. Of course she can go home; that miserable one-eyed old woman has no power over life and death. Could she truly know his character so ill that she would suggest the obscene arrangement of living here? She is a prostitute, after all, first and foremost; he knows what sort of services she is offering.

“I never asked your help the first time,” Henry says hotly. “In fact, I actively refused it. And as for this woman here”—he gestures toward Fos— “she needed to be removed for purposes of sanitation. Frankly, I am surprised at you, Gustine. While I know it’s impossible we should be friends, I had come to think of you with affection and respect. I had never imagined you a parasite.”

His words sting her far more deeply than he knows. She would never, never have come expecting charity from him. She has always expected to work, she knows no other life. What has she done to make him treat her this way?

“Oh, Gustine. Don’t cry,” he says, exasperated, as the fat tears she tries to master splash upon the hearth. Look at her, on her knees, suppliant, miserable. She is drunk, poor thing, and brokenhearted at the loss of her child. He is stronger than she, after all; he shouldn’t be so harsh.

“Gustine.” He reaches out hesitantly and strokes her matted hair. She has drunk so much even her tears smell of whiskey. He wipes them away with the back of his hand, feeling them burn, like molten drops of snow.

Like shall cure like. Henry hears the words of his uncle Clanny as clearly as he hears Dr. Knox saying to them at Surgeons’ Square, It is perfectly natural to feel as you do. This perfect whore, so freshly dead. It is better to acknowledge the lust than to be so consumed by it you sneak in one night and enact something perverse. Why is he thinking about this now? Henry tries to shake off the memories of two years ago, the night they laid Mary Paterson beneath her yellow pane of whiskey. But all he can smell is Gustine’s tears, sweet like the taste of gin on her lips when she kissed him the night he pulled away. He had shut his eyes and tried to think of his mother, but it had been too much for him when Knox cupped the girl’s breast appreciatively, murmuring, Beautiful, isn’t it, my boy? Just beautiful. For three months, he’d had to fight his feelings for a sinful, whiskey-drowned woman with her thighs parted and her mouth open, as if daring him to take her, as he didn’t dare when last they met.

And if only he had lain with her, perhaps Burke would have passed her by. Chosen her friend Janet or one of the other broken-down Canongate whores. But because he ran away, she is here, looking up at him through her yellow eyes, accusing him. You could have had me, and kept me alive. Instead now you want me, and you cut me to pieces.

Like shall cure like. If a body wants to purge, supply it with an emetic to push the poison out faster. He tells himself this as he watches his hands, the same soft white hands that had been seared by grave dust back at the Trinity pit a month ago, reach out shakily and move her shawl. Tonight she could meet his depravity with depravity. They are both so wicked, so unnatural. And he wants her; he has wanted her for three long, whiskey-soaked months. Her skin is mud-scurfy and cracked, except where the snow has melted it into slicks. She looks at him confused and frightened by his strange behaviour, but it is why she came, is it not? To call this out in him? His soft white hands slip into the neckline of her soiled shift and peel the fabric from her shoulders. They are just as he remembered them; he sighs, rubbing his face against her mud-sweaty breasts, smearing his cheeks with her filth.

“No,” Gustine whispers. “What are you doing?”

“Mary … ,” Henry breathes.

Gustine struggles. “Please, Dr. Chiver, my child …”

“He is thawing. He is thawing,” Henry murmurs, pushing the skirt of her shift higher and higher up her thighs. She is naked beneath, her legs goose-pimply around the mud, and locked tight. Why does she pretend? His soft white hands pry those lying legs apart, cracking the seal of mud between. He fumbles with the buttons on his trousers, never in his life so excited and terrified at once.

Yes. With a moan, he drives into her sump, letting himself wallow, rut like the depraved animal he is. He is where he belongs, at last, splashing himself with swill. He breathes in her hair, smelling the perfume of worms and cold earth, of rotted wood and human decay. Her tiny cunt is loamy with dirt, this little whore. Henry pounds and pounds, driving six feet deep inside her. Not yet. Not yet. He moans, and from the corner of his eye sees the baby staring at him, his heart beating like a slow blue dirge. No. Henry tears his eyes away, the terror, the excitement too great to bear. The sweet, vicious stench of whiskey. The deep peaceful feeling of suffocation. She is his fever and his cure, and he is falling. Falling. He cries, and with a shudder spends as into his own grave.