Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Read online

  Confidential papers I do keep there at times; recently the Education and Workhouse reforms. Untouched, yes. The point is that this is a matter of state security. And your blasted Sergeant Lawless kept badgering me about the automaton. The details of what has been taken I will confirm anon: private papers, certainly, and rare books. Is that not detail enough?

  No, the money has not been took, nor the jewels. Nor has the rare engraving of Venus and Mars après l’amour—which shows the thieves are fools. Except that the papers… Their value is not financial, exactly, not intrinsically financial. Only that they could prove an embarrassment to me. And to my wife, yes. She knows of their contents. Some of their contents, rather. The rest, if you must insist, yes, there may be potential for blackmail. I’m sure I speak in confidence, as man to man? I have, as many gentlemen do, recorded amatory highlights of my life. A life such as mine is lived with passion. Besides the pleasure in recording such passions, there is instruction for posterity. I am proof men of our generation, whom some think bloodless and dispassionate, are the equal of the great lovers of the past: Byron, Casanova, Catullus. Good God, no! I would not want the papers made public. Not in my lifetime. Do you want to ruin me?

  No, I see that it’s difficult for you, of course, without details. One feels so angry. Violated.

  To prove these memoirs were mine? It would be a stretch, I suppose. They will seem the wildest fiction. Only I would know, and my wife, if they were published, and I feel shamed. If anything should come before the courts, with my being a minister, such is public prurience these days…

  No, as I told you, no sign of a break-in. Which made your idiot Lawless claim that the thieves must have been already inside, dash my wig. He examined the little pull-down bed—for when I fall weary over cabinet papers, you understand.

  Not the bloody automaton again? Yes, I borrowed it. Brodie lent it me temporarily. It only runs for a couple of days, then must needs retune or rewind; recharging, that’s what he calls it. Bloody Yank plays his cards close to his chest. It’s a marvel, all right. Beat me in nineteen moves. Tired of it then. I should have returned it to Brodie, but the Justice Bill has occupied me totally. I’ll call Brodie’s cronies to fetch it. No, no, a few urchins delivered the thing. Yes, they helped me bring it inside the Secret Cabinet, but they were there only moments. What do they matter? Catch the blasted thieves, won’t you? Of course you have something to look for: my blasted amatory memoir. Is my signature on this report not example enough?

  I see. I see the obstacle. True, I shouldn’t want it divulgated among the republic of thieves and dirty booksellers that such a document is afoot. We’d be doing their blackmail work for them. I see. No rewards, then, for God’s sake.

  This Lawless fellow, though: unacceptable impudence. I would wish him dismissed. See to it.

  THE PATH OF FILTH

  “Get ’em off,” cried a man nearby. We were in the Argyll Assembly Rooms, entrance fee waived.

  Darlington grinned. “Watch this, Watchman.”

  It never ceases to amaze how much fiercer is the hold of the partly clad body than its naked counterpart. Mask a face, veil an upper arm, and the suspense begins. Cover a thigh in satin, adumbrate a bosom with tassels, and any man who is a man falls prostrate, and many women besides.

  I have friends, educated friends, who assert that any woman earning her living through parading her form is a prostitute. She is a corrupt tool of the system, corrupt economically and morally, whether actress, dancer or courtesan. Using her God-given form to expedite lusts, she is culpable for furthering the spiral of sin and decay.

  The actresses, dancers and courtesans I know tend to disagree. Many speak of the thrill of performance, when they hold so many souls in their hand, delighting and frustrating with the hem of a skirt or the fringe of a corset.

  “Get ’em off.” Another catcall.

  I kept my head low.

  “You’ll get the feel for it.” Darlington’s dirty fingernails described curvaceous shapes. “Allow me to show you the lay of the land, and I shall open your eyes—and a few doors.”

  Darlington had grandiose notions that he could lift the lid on the hotpot of vice broiling beneath the West End. I, and innocents like me, might pass evenings ignorant of the temptations on offer; but the flash gent saw opportunities on every corner, and he could show me how. I might as well humour him.

  Darlington was a buffoon. True, he and Jeffcoat had dealt with the corpse that night at Brodie’s. The corpse turned out to be the very woman Payne had been asked to find by the Prime Minister. But this grim news somehow seeped out beyond the walls of Scotland Yard.

  “A conspectus.” He sketched it out in the air. “Your typical swell’s passage round the nether nightspots.”

  Conspectus, indeed. The 1857 conspectus of prostitution counted eight thousand, six hundred prostitutes. If I was to follow Payne’s demand that I annotate each unfortunate woman’s age and trade, where to start? This was our sixth stop, and we’d annotated bugger all. At the Royal Opera House, Darlington had pointed out boxes empty but for a bottle on ice; the ladies were not the prettiest, he said, but the retiring rooms were famed for excellent locks. At the Alhambra, I had never noticed all the women in the circle. Wives wouldn’t be seen in such places; these could only be mistresses. On to Barnes’s, where oysters were served before we sat, with rump steak to follow; I would have been more grateful, if not for the toothache.

  Nowhere did we wait for admission; nowhere did we pay. Though not in uniform, we were known as policemen. Darlington revelled in the respect shown him, and the perquisites. At the Cyder Cellars, the chorus warmed up with profane chants:

  Mother H, she lodges

  The best fillies of the nation:

  A tidy passage down below

  A hairy situation.

  Beneath the Alhambra, gents crowded to express admiration to the dancers. The waiter whispered. Darlington grinned but sent him away. Tonight, at least, he was resisting the darker treats on the menu.

  Now we had removed to the gilded upper chamber of the Argyll. Artistically clad women held poses plastiques in velvet alcoves, temples of voluptuousness based on classical art, though stirring the psyche rather more directly.

  The lights dimmed. The ensemble struck up an exotic rhythm. Onstage chugged a miniature train, driven by the famous Chouchoute. She sweated as she stoked the furnace, the orange glow glistening on her brow. She bent over, flesh gleaming through choice gaps in her attire, as the train-rhythm grew hotter.

  What was he hoping to show me? Did he think my Edinburgh upbringing so provincial I should never have seen the like? True, Edinburgh is small: that makes the louche night spots closer and affordable to frugal apprentices such as I; my schoolfriends were well acquainted with the Cowgate, beneath the castle, notorious for explosive displays.

  My irritation with Darlington was hard to disguise. They’d done competent work that night, he and Jeffcoat: identified the dead woman; traced her to a Kensington side street well known to flash gents; found the boarding house she’d most recently worked in (an address familiar to Lord Palmerston, amongst others). Jeffcoat’s report was painstaking; he even credited me for finding her. Yet the Bugle picked up the story, giving it disproportionate coverage, given that fallen women met unfortunate ends all the time. It wasn’t long before all the papers were nosing around. Nobody said she was the PM’s mistress, but the scurrilous slurs were obvious. These articles infuriated Payne, marring his political ambitions when he had promised the PM discretion. I wished I had dealt with it myself. Brodie had asked me to find a murder a day for his scandal rags, but after my lukewarm reaction, I never heard from him: maybe I wasn’t the only one to whom he made overtures that night. Darlington was an incompetent; Jeffcoat was the one I suspected of selling stories to the Bugle.

  Chouchoute threw off another garment. Hat, jacket, shawl, chemise. She stood before us, gleaming golden in her bodice, gloves and new-fangled bloomers. She looked up at us and wip
ed her brow.

  “Get ’em off.”

  She squared up to us, much as a navvy might look at a pile of dirt. A flutter flew through the audience; the separation between viewer and viewed seemed flimsy. Chouchoute threw down an immaculate white gauntlet. The music faltered, the house lights rose; she peered out from the stage, offended, and raised a finger.

  “Who?” she said abruptly, gazing down lasciviously. “Who has spoke?”

  “Him there!” Jocular voices called, and the guilty gent was shoved toward her outstretched finger.

  Chouchoute drew a cane from her high boot. She leant down, catching the hapless fellow’s chin with the tip of the cane. His gaze was directed onto the twin orbs above him, brightly lit, swelling beneath the bodice. There was no escape. The music resumed. She kneeled on the edge of the stage, drawing him forward in rhythm, until his face was against her muscular thighs. The fellow’s eyes were bulging.

  “Such close inspection.” She spoke in a faux French accent. “One really should have shaved.” Her eyes flashed. She whirled around and knelt, the stays of her corset within his reach. The fellow gaped upward, practically panting. Chouchoute gave a quizzical frown. “Is he trying to see what I ate last night?”

  This show, I admit, was more shameless than Edinburgh’s equivalents.

  “Get ’em off,” cried Darlington.

  Chouchoute glanced over her shoulder, right at us.

  I froze. My worst fear was to be dragged onstage. Of this danger Darlington seemed heedless. He was heedless of so many dangers, I would realise soon enough.

  Holding our gaze, she untied the bow on her corset lace with a flourish. The fellow’s hands were trembling as he reached for the lace. She grabbed his hands and had him pull the stays asunder. Inch by inch, the ivory skin of her back was revealed, arching up from her waist. The crowd bayed for satisfaction. The corset loosened; her milk-white breast was sure to be revealed; she winked at me.

  The lights went out.

  A flash of light. We caught our breath. The show unfolded in a series of photographic flashes. Flash: she turned. Flash: his face against her bosom. Flash: her legs wrapped round him. We gasped.

  Flash: the bloomers—gone.

  Pandemonium.

  KATE HAMILTON’S

  At midnight, as the music halls emptied and the dancing salons cleared, we passed through the throng. Where next? Night house or accommodation house? Maison de convenance, maison de tolérance? Or straight to the finishes, like so many before us, hoping to clinch the deal.

  Blazing lamps illuminated the Haymarket, its Turkish divans peopled by troops of elegant courtesans: the girl fresh in from the north, the bloom of her cheek not yet dimmed; the pale milliner in her lace; the prima donna’s rustling silks; the haggard old fury in a doorway.

  A woman slumped into the dirty slush, dizzy, and bloated with disease.

  Felix sprang into my mind. I recalled his distress, seeing the dead woman that night, and my heart juddered. Londoners pass by horrors every day, and remain unmoved. His distress cut me deep. Had I ever seen someone so unhinged by grief? So changed in a moment? And for someone he didn’t know?

  In front of us, a girl lifted her skirts from her ankles as she stepped from the pavement. It was an innocent-enough gesture, to keep the hems out of the dirt. Darlington quickened his pace. What was he trying to do? Impress me with his worldliness? And his ridiculous long coat, as if playing the part of a stage detective.

  I was tired of his posturing. “Jimmy, what does this sauntering around the West End achieve?”

  “Achieve, Watchman? What did you think to achieve?”

  “I asked you to show me the ropes, before handing over. Payne demands that I reckon up every last prostitute and every blasted brothel. All you’ve shown me is that there are more at the trade than I ever imagined.”

  “That’s lesson enough, ain’t it?” Barely heeding me, he feigned a furtive look, as if stopping for a stolen moment when he ought to be somewhere else. “Others have made this reckoning before you.”

  “They certainly have.” I pulled out my pocket book. “Fifty thousand in 1791; eighty thousand in 1839; Dr Acton reckoned two hundred and ten thousand in ’51.”

  “Acton did well,” Darlington said, grinning, “to interview so many.”

  “But Payne’s last return, in ’57, counts just eight thousand six hundred.”

  “An oddly precise figure. I’ve been at this game a year, Watchman. Thankless. You ask yourself, in the end, what is a prostitute? Observe.” He whistled at the girl ahead of us, to my embarrassment, for she looked quite respectable.

  Sure enough, the girl looked back over her shoulder. She turned a sultry gaze on each of us in turn, weighing up which had whistled. Darlington smirked. He pulled open his coat, just enough to show his police truncheon protruding, and winked.

  The sultry pose gave way to a scowl, and she vanished into the night.

  Darlington put an unwelcome arm around my shoulder. “Here on the streets, Watchman, you’d be surprised how many women will answer a whistle. Would you have counted that girl? In the Burlington Arcade on long winter afternoons, where all the men in London walk before dinner, must you count every shop girl? What of courtesans, from Kensington to Ship Alley? Are they prostitutes, or employees? Or simply unwed mistresses? The sailors’ wives, with five husbands each. The milliner augmenting her stitching with irregular antics. The upright lady whose licentious urges may bring profit, my friend, or simply pleasure.”

  I pulled my coat tighter, eyeing the streams of night people around us. This city of strangers, unknowable, innumerable. “So what am I to do?”

  “Do the rounds. Give the impression that we police keep count of this flesh heap, and it will regulate itself, mostly. Then go home, stop thinking and try to stay in your right mind.”

  * * *

  Two steps from the dens of Soho, a dark entranceway was fringed by two ill-trimmed laburnums. You do not feel the eyes watching you as you approach. You imagine slipping from view into the passageway that leads to the silken palace. A moment of uncertainty, then you push your way in. The passage envelops you with a steamy warmth: the welcoming embrace of Kate Hamilton’s.

  Darlington went to push aside the heavy plush curtains, his truncheon tucked beneath his winter coat. A voice accosted us. “Not on duty,” he replied, “but rather attending personal business. By appointment with Kitty H. herself.”

  The bell was rung, velveteen drapes pulled aside, champagne thrust into his hand. It dawned on me, Darlington wasn’t trying to shock. He wanted me to know that he knew everyone. That champagne, before we were seated, meant he had done his job.

  At the heart of this pageant of bodies, nestled in the palace of ottomans and pale rouge divans, beneath a soft dome illustrated with lurid Olympian daubings, sat a vast ungovernable whale of a woman, a queen of the Orient, enthroned above her minions. Kate Hamilton herself.

  Darlington winked.

  “Long tempo, nanty vader, Jimmy Darlington,” she crooned. “Roll up, roll up, my lover boy. Choose between Lila, layer of lords, Cora, comfort of commodores, and Sabine, saviour of seamen.”

  “Nah, Kitty,” a pale woman with ample bosoms piped up, lolling on a gent’s knee. “I never saves none of it.”

  Kate Hamilton erupted, a blancmange Vesuvius. “Cora, kindly entertain the gentlemen. Jimmy does respond to your particular endowments.”

  In a recess off the main chamber, illustrated with the judgement of Paris and more pretexts for nudity, Darlington drew out a set of chessmen, but disdained the board laid into the table. Instead Cora shed her gown and lay back on the ottoman. The Oriental lamplight threw enticing shadows on her. Scarves wrapped around chest and hips, her stomach lay bare. Neatly inscribed, from hipbones to ribcage: a chessboard tattoo.

  Darlington swiftly laid the pieces on her tum, flat as an ironing board and walnut brown. As he advanced his pawn, Cora lay quite still, draped in diaphanous silks. I would normally look
away from such an exhibition of flesh—but one must stare intently at the chessboard.

  “Excuse Watchman, Cora. He’s admiring your artwork.”

  “This in’t nothing,” said Cora, her pronunciation a mélange of East End and the Orient. “Lila’s got a map of the world on her back.”

  “You always know where you are,” Darlington nodded, “with Lila.”

  We played out a King’s Gambit (accepted, Berlin Defence). Cora had to hold in her laughter, for she spotted illegal moves before we did, and anticipated my checkmate, pinning Darlington’s bishop against his king. As his fingernails lingered vainly over the puzzle, I asked him what we could glean from these girls.

  “Hard to get a straight answer.” He gestured towards Cora and her remarkable form. “Observe. Cora, how did you come to be whatever you are?”

  “Moi?” She stretched carefully. “Oh, I’m a ruinated daughter of a priest.” This tale seemed as likely as any, but she would elaborate no further.

  Darlington shrugged. “See?”

  Hearing my Scottish accent, Kate Hamilton sent over a whisky.

  A sterner bell rang: an alarum. Glasses were swept into crates, bottles hid under carpets and false walls. The lights rose. Whatever had been going on moments before was reimagined, with an earnest air. Cora sat up, disrupting my victorious position, to make her attire respectable. Before I could protest, she proceeded to set up the position again on the table, the pieces exactly as they had been on her stomach.