The Dress Lodger (39 page)

Whilky stares at the triumphant Student of Life incredulously, then down at his drawing. It is vaguely himself set upon a horse, holding a pistol in one hand and a basket of ferrets in the other. For the first time in his life, Whilky Robinson is speechless.

“Is he not amazing?” asks elderly Mr. Mortimer, having sat enraptured by the story.

“I think you’d make a fine subject for a play,” interjects Mr. Eliot wickedly. “I imagine your character—played by myself—a virile highwayman and champion ratter, secretly loved by a thorny English rose of high family— naturally, played by Miss Watson—whom you spurn but ultimately enslave.”

“I like it! I like it!” Whilky nods. “My late wife was the natural daughter of the vestry treasurer.”

“If you want a subject for a play, here is a far more suitable one,” Miss Watson interrupts, folding the newspaper to display a printed petition, and imagining herself in the role of its authoress. “Here is theatre taken from real life: a woman sacrifices herself and her own reputation for the sake of her fiance, a struggling and misunderstood doctor. You could put one of your signature bad-taste touches upon it, Mr. Eliot, and torture it into a fine little melodrama.”

“Let me see that.” Whilky ungraciously rips the paper from Miss Watson’s hands. An appeal to the enlightened citizens of Sunderland, by Miss Audrey Place. This isn’t the Miss Audrey Pink has been mooning over, is it? The charity woman who is to marry the sawbones? He quickly scans the petition with its scant number of signatures and stalks away, leaving the actors and the Student of Life to wonder at his rude and abrupt behaviour.

“Give me the keys to upstairs,” Whilky demands of his brother John. “I need to check something.”

“There are people up there,” answers John.

“Just give “em.”

John hands over the skeleton key to Gustine’s former room and the two others he rents by the hour. Whilky storms upstairs and unceremoniously unlocks the door on a lace-maker’s upturned buttocks and a red-faced apprentice’s erection.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he says, and taking up the Argand lamp from the floor, sets about scanning the old papers John uses to line the walls. The lace-maker, apprentice, and Whilky are all in luck tonight, for Gustine’s former room was papered some six months ago, and the engagement announcements from last April are pasted horizontally below the window. Miss Barrows to wed Mr. Kenneth Kitely. Miss George to wed Mr. Theodore Barkes. Miss Place to wed Mr. Henry Chiver,
MRCS
. There it is! Dr. Chiver of Nile Street, Sunderland, son of the widowed Mrs. Edmund Chiver. Well, I’ll be damned.

“Henry Chiver!” Whilky bounds down the steps, waving the newspaper overhead, bellowing at the top of his lungs: “Henry Chiver!”

“Henry Chiver what?” asks John Robinson, as the bar falls silent.

“Henry Chiver’s the name of the man who violated me! Henry Chiver is a bloody body snatcher!”

“He’s the one who came after me with a knife,” shouts Robert Cooley, far along in his cups. “Put me mate Jack Crawford in a vat of acid and looked to flay me alive!”

“I’ll teach him to come into my house and take my lodgers!” Whilky roars. “I’ll set the constables on him so fast he’ll wish he’d never heard of Mill Street.”

“Sorry to tell you, my agitated friend, but the stealing of bodies is not illegal.” The Student of Life has flipped back in his notebook, and is looking over some notes. “I interviewed one of your fine constables a month back about thievery and petty vagabondage here in Sunderland, and I have a whole list of things that are and are not considered property. And a dead body is not considered property.”

“You are telling me these doctors can steal our dead as they please?”

“Well,” reads the Student, “you could prosecute for the theft of her winding sheet.”

“God bloody damn!” shouts Whilky. “What is this world coming to?”

“Heigh-ho!” cries the Student of Life. “Here are the rats!”

Though Whilky seethes, the subject of doctors must be dropped for the moment while the rest of the bar turns its attention to Franklin Hobbs, Sunderland’s beleaguered rat catcher. It’s difficult to hold Mike back when he catches the aroma of panicked vermin; Banquo, too, scents his enemy, and sets up furious barking, delighting his contingency. Even Miss Watson looks up from her piece of newspaper to take a sip of adulterated sherry and watch the contestants muster. “The barbarity of it!” murmurs she to the entranced Student. “The depraved blood lust!

“Oh, but it is a necessary evil,” whispers the Student of Life, leaning in a little too close for Miss Watson’s comfort. “Did you know our scientific community estimates a typically lascivious rat pair, over the course of a year, mates no less than ten times, producing in each litter an average of twelve healthy offspring. If their libertinism be not disrupted, either by the male’s frenzied cannibalism of his young or through humankind’s intervention, within four short years the original pair of rats could claim nearly three million progeny. Imagine! And we speak only of Adam and Eve. What of all the other Romeos and Juliets, Paolos and Francescas scampering through the sewers of Sunderland? Would they not soon overrun the earth? Rat baiting is philanthropic, miss, it is merciful; why, it ranks right up there with capital punishment for the greater human good.”

Miss Watson bows to the Student’s superior wisdom, but feels the topic of rat procreation too beneath her to pursue.

Meanwhile, John Robinson, as master of ceremonies, has climbed into the pit and, without fear or disgust, plunged his hand into the cage. Two at a time he pulls fifty rats out by their tails, leaving them dazed and disoriented inside the brightly lit circle. Some of the poor gray creatures wander the ring, sitting up upon their hind legs and sniffing at the spectators; some scale John Robinson’s pant legs until he must shake them loose. Most surge together into hillocks, forcing the master of ceremonies to blow little avalanches apart, for rats hate nothing so much as being blown upon, and will scatter at human breath. Banquo strains against his collar, thrusting his long pointy snout between the pickets of the ring, for which liberty he is soundly bitten.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Rat fanciers and curious spectators!” John Robinson shouts, and the place falls somewhat silent. “Tonight, contending for the title of Crown Prince of Ratters, the collie Banquo, seconded by Tom Brown.” (Wild applause). “And Sunderland’s current champion, Mike the ferret, seconded by his owner, Whilky Robinson.” (Applause even wilder).

“Lay your wagers one and all!” calls John as the crowd tosses its meagre shillings and pennies into a corner of the ring. “Times are tight, but don’t hold that against the poor contestants.”

As challenger, it is Banquo’s privilege to go first. Fat Tom drops him in the ring and much to the audience’s delight (and his owner’s horror), the posh collie immediately retreats in terror. The lights, the noise, the mound of rats: he sniffs and retreats, jerking back in alarm when several large sewer rats break from the pack and leap for his already lacerated snout. His fear lasts only moments, though. More like the Scottish Douglas than Macbeth’s pitiful rival, he is soon seized by battle-madness and quickly becomes a fury of barking, yelping, lunging mayhem. At the side of the pit, his second, Fat Tom, shouts instructions—Drop it, don’t shake it like a rag doll, you damned dog! It’s dead! It’s dead! Move on to the next!—until his five minutes are up. Blood drips from the collie’s long matted fur, and he licks his paw where a vindictive rat locked on and wouldn’t let go. Fat Tom takes his dog in his arms, rubbing his mouth with peppermint water to ward off any abscesses, while the remaining wounded rats are dispatched and pushed aside. John Robinson tallies the dog’s official kill. Thirty-nine in all. It is a fair showing and the number to beat.

“Please, Mr. Eliot, Mr. Mortimer, Mr. Webster,” Miss Watson pleads. “May we go?”

“Go now?” asks Eliot incredulously. “Before the Highwayman Ratter Robinson has had a chance to show his stuff? Avert your eyes if you will, Miss Watson, but I would not miss this for the world.”

The dead rats swept into a corner, John Robinson counts out another fifty. All the more panicked for having witnessed their brothers’ demise, these rats tear around the ring, bouncing off one another and trying desperately to scale the sides. John calls Whilky and the current champion Mike to the ring.

“You love me, boy, don’t you?” Whilky demands, massaging his ferret’s coarse white coat. “It’s us against them, right? I want you to think of every rat like a sawbones. You get every last one,” he growls, and tosses the sleek white weasel into the fray.

In squealing terror, the rats flee Champion Mike, but he, like the dutiful son, performs exactly as commanded. One doctor. Two. In seconds, ten doctors decapitated. With the ferret’s first strike, the Student of Life’s hand flies over his pad, but as fast as he draws, his talents just aren’t up to the whiplash speed of the champion. So much closer to the rats in height, Mike does not have to stoop, but lashes forward for the strike, then is instantly on to the next. Fifteen. Twenty sawbones dispatched. Whilky shouts with glee.

Sheri Holman

“Kill ‘em, Mike!”

“Crown Prince! Crown Prince!”

“Off with their heads!”

Where Banquo was all frenzy and zeal, Mike is calm precision, swiftly decapitating and moving on to the next. He spares no thought for the crowd of wildly cheering patrons, feels not the rain from their sloshing mugs of beer. A champion if there ever was one; no creature alive could be more methodical and determined in the kill. The rat is my enemy, therefore the rat must die. This is how Mike dispenses justice—with no thought and no hesitation.

The Student sketches: boggling eyes and gummy snarls. An elbow in a woman’s back. A sharp knee pointing to money changing hands beneath a table. The Student sketches everything he sees. There a swinging red uvula; across the pit, flying spittle; sweat-stained armpits beside him; the arched eyebrows of the distressed actress. Like the French Revolution, so a ratting at the Labour in Vain, postulates the Student, pausing to jot a note. The poor taking their revenge on those who terrorize them. And at their center, La Guillotine Mike!

Five minutes seem like only so many seconds before the last rat concedes. All fifty destroyed! The ferret sits down in a pool of blood to calmly lick his paws. John Robinson leaps into the ring, lifting the startled white creature high over his head.

“I hereby bestow the silver crown and the sum of five pounds upon Mike the ferret,” yells John Robinson over the crowd. “Long live the Prince!”

“Long live the Prince!” the shouts go up. “Long live Prince Mike!”

“Long live the Devil!” comes a hysterical cry from the front door, pitched with such vehemence, the entire bar turns to look. Red in the face from running and shouting, her hair unbraided and stays undone as if she’d been dragged from her house in the process of climbing into bed, the Low Quay pawnbroker Mag Scurr waves her arms and shouts, “The Devil moves among us! Everyone come! There’s been a resurrection at Trinity Churchyard!”

“A resurrection?” The .word is flung around the pub like a hot potato, and instantly, all sport is forgotten. Men knock over chairs, their wives trample the makeshift ring in their mad stampede to get out. High-strung Banquo, knowing no other frenzy but rats, shakes the poor limp carcasses until Fat Tom yanks him away and pulls him out the door, while Robert

Cooley, standing upon his chair, bursts into drunken tears and sobs. “They’re coming for me! Oh, dear God, they’re coming for me!”

“To Trinity!” shouts Whilky, scooping up His Royal Highness the Crowned Prince and racing for the door. Maybe they can’t put that sawbones in jail, but by God, just wait till he feels the fiery fist of the crowd’s justice!

“A resurrection?” asks Miss Watson, alarmed. “What does that mean?”

“Means someone has been dug up from the graveyard, miss,” cries the Student of Life, snatching his pad and racing after the rest. “How rich! What else could possibly top a ratting?”

When the crowd has cleared and the barking has faded, the only patrons who remain seated in John Robinson’s pub are the bemused players of “Cholera Morbus.” Well, well, thinks Mr. Eliot, he has gotten his riot after all; not perhaps in the way he intended, but those who aim to stir the public conscience cannot always be particular in their methods. So long as there is turbulence, the auteur will consider himself well served. And as if to show just how very satisfied he is, Mr. Eliot leans back in his chair, snaps for the barkeep, and triumphantly orders another round.

Though it is perhaps the most inevitable of all divisions, few care to dwell on the Quarantine that separates the living from the dead. What is there, after all, to say about the Grave? On one side health; on the other, disease and death. On one side hope; on the other, inevitable certainty. You think you know which side is which, yet we ask you to look at it from our perspective. There can be no death for those already dead, and disease belongs only to flesh alive enough to support it. It is certain you will die; we might still hope for life everlasting. Just walk through any filthy modern town: are you any less crowded in your tenements than we are in our jumbled pits? Who then does this grave protect? You from us or us from you?

To every story there is a narration and there is a greater narration.

Perhaps it never occurred to you to ask who it is that tells this story, whether or not the narrators are truthful and kind or wish their characters well. Maybe one or two of you have paused and wondered at the voices behind the voice—who is this “us” who knows so much and yet claims not to know all—but most, we would wager, have given us no second thought. Perhaps by now you have guessed that this is not the inspiring story of medical heroism and scientific breakthrough. No one will discover the cure for or even the cause of cholera morbus here. No, there are books enough written on the great leaps forward in medical knowledge, on the dedication and bravery of those that cure. This is the story of those whose peace was sacrificed so that your tonsils might be disposed of and your septums no longer deviated. This is the story of those who serve.