Sleep, Pale Sister

6

Knave of Hearts, dear fellow, of Hearts. Kindly give me my proper title. Even a knave has his pride, you know. And I have so many hearts! I gave one to the mistress and one to the dame, and one to the beggar girl who cries in the lane-only to stop her crying, mark you. But what did they give me in return? A few sighs, a quick tumble, and enough tears to fill my bathtub. Women! They’ve been the death of me and still I can’t do without them; in hell I’ll swear I’ll ogle the little diablesses-I like ’em hot.

What’s that?

Ah, the story, the story. I see you find me distasteful. Well, you’ve given me the limelight for a time, and I’m not about to give it back yet. So smoke your pipe, old man, and move over. Let me introduce myself.

Moses Zachary Harper, poet, sometime painter, sinner, philanderer, hedonist, Knave of Hearts and Ace of Rods, erstwhile lover and loser of Mrs Euphemia Chester.

What of the good Henry?

Let’s say there was a contretemps; maybe a woman (who knows?)…maybe a true word spoken in jest at the expense of the pious Mr Chester. Suffice it to say there was a coldness, but a professional coldness. Mr Ruskin had taken a fancy to my Sodom and Gomorrah and had written favourably of me. There was a canvas! Three hundred bodies in rapturous, tortuous embrace! And every inch of female flesh conquered territory! The parsonic Mr Chester despised me cordially, but envied me my connections. To tell the truth, I had none-on the right side of the bed, that is-but I had managed to eke a few poor favours along the petticoat-line.

Imagine the conversations between us at the tea-tray; poor Henry, Friday-faced as a maiden aunt. ‘Won’t you have a cup of tea, Mr Harper? I hear your exhibition met with some success…’ Yours truly négligé to a point with no hat, and shirt undone, uttering calculated insults (‘I think I see the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds in that last canvas, dear fellow…’). I confess, I was a thorn in his flesh. Poor Henry was never made to be an artist; he had none of the artistic temperament, exhibiting instead a distressing inclination for clean living, churchgoing and the like, which never failed to set my teeth on edge.

Imagine my surprise when, on returning from a long trip abroad, I heard he was married! My first reaction was hilarity, then disbelief. Oh, he’s good-looking in his way, but any woman with an ounce of sense can see he’s no more passion in him than a piece of ham. Which just goes to prove that most women don’t have an ounce of sense.

My second reaction was an intense curiosity. I wanted to see the specimen of misguided womanhood the man had snared. A plain girl, I imagined, no doubt a pillar of the local church, proficient in watercolours. I asked around the artistic circles and learned that Henry had been married for just under a year; that his wife was of frail constitution, and had given birth to a dead child in January. Opinion had it that she was rather lovely, in an unusual style. As it happened Henry, I was told, had planned an exhibition to coincide with the anniversary of their marriage, and, knowing that this was probably the only way I could get myself received by the old bluestocking, I determined to see it.

He had decided to hold the event at his house in Cromwell Square, Highgate-a mistake, I thought. He should have hired a small gallery; somewhere like Chatham Place, perhaps. But he would never have had the cheek to place himself beneath the very noses of his Pre-Raphaelite idols. Besides, from the start he had pretensions to exhibit at the Academy, and I knew him too well to expect him to compromise for anything less. An announcement duly arrived in The Times, followed up by a number of coy invitations to various influential critics and artists (myself not included, naturally).

I arrived at about twelve, having had lunch at a chop-house nearby, and as I approached the house I saw a small cluster of people lingering at the gate as if unsure of their welcome. I recognized Holy Hunt and Morris, scowling fiercely at some remark of Hunt’s-the woman with him was Mrs Morris: I’d have recognized her from Rossetti’s paintings any day, but personally I found her rather too much on the grand scale for my taste. Henry would be pleased, though, as long as he didn’t have to talk to them: he couldn’t abide anyone eccentric or abrupt-and from what I had heard of Morris, he wasn’t the type to suffer a pompous ass like Henry very kindly.

There were a couple of my friends arriving in the wake of the little party, and I joined them, wondering all the while why they should have bothered to come in the first place. He was a young wretch of a poet called Finglass, she his Muse, Jenny; I grinned to hear him introduce her to the tight-lipped old biddy of a housekeeper as ‘Mrs Finglass’-the housekeeper managed to look sceptical and polite at the same time-and we went in together.

As I entered the house it occurred to me how typical of Henry Chester it was to set up an exhibition à domicile just after his wife, by all reports, had been so ill. I am certain that he would have been most affronted if anyone had pointed it out. I knew what Henry was like: all his ex-models agreed, although he paid quite well, he was a ‘regular Tartar’ when he was painting, he fell into the most violent rages if a girl as much as shifted her posture, he forgot to allow his models to take a rest, and, on top of that, moralized most harshly to the unfortunate creatures-most of whom were on the street through no real fault of their own, and had turned to modelling as a rather better-paid and more respectable form of prostitution.

There were maybe a dozen people in all; some peering at the framed canvasses in the passageway, but most of them in the parlour, where the bulk of the work was exhibited, with Henry in their midst talking volubly to a rapt little circle of nonentities over glasses of sherry and ratafia. He glanced at me as I came in and acknowledged me with a curt little nod. I smiled winningly, helped myself to a glass of sherry and idled over to the paintings, which were every bit as bad as I expected them to be.

The man had no fire: his paintings were wan, limp and horribly whimsical, with the sentimentality of his commonplace soul as evident as his lack of passion. Oh, he could paint, I suppose, and the model I acknowledged to be interesting enough, but sadly lacking in colour. She was obviously his favourite, because her face stared out at me from almost all the frames. She was an odd little thing, far removed from modern standards of beauty, but with a certain mediaeval look in her childish figure and loose, pale hair. A favourite niece, perhaps? I scanned the titles inscribed on the frames: Juliet in the Tomb, Nausicaa, The Little Beggar Girl, The Cold Wedding…No wonder the girl looked so mournful: every canvas showed her in some macabre, gloomy role…dying, dead, sick, blind, abandoned…thin and piteous as a dead child, swathed in her winding-sheet as Juliet, in rags as the beggar girl, lost and frightened-looking in rich silks and velvet as Persephone.

I was roused from my critical reverie by the door opening, and was astonished to see the girl herself come into the room. I recognized her features, but Henry hadn’t done her justice by a long way. She was a delightful wraith of a thing, like a silver birch, with the sweetest slim waist, long delicate hands with pointed fingernails and a mouth that only needed a kiss to make it burst into bloom. She was demurely dressed in grey flannel and looked barely out of her teens. I supposed that she was the niece, or even some professional model he had picked up. The thought of Mrs Chester was far from my mind at that moment and it was in all innocence that I greeted the Stunner:

‘My name’s Mose Harper. How do you do?’

She blushed and murmured something, looking around with those big, hunted eyes as if afraid to be seen with me. Maybe Henry had warned her about me. I smiled.

‘Henry should never have tried to paint you,’ I said. ‘I find it’s always a mistake to try to improve on Nature. May I ask your name?’

Another sideways glance at Henry, still absorbed in conversation.

‘Effie Chester. I’m…’ The nervous glance again.

‘A relation of friend Henry? How interesting. Not the sober side of the family, I hope?’

Again the glance. The Stunner resolutely put down her head and mumbled, not at all coyly. I realized that I had really embarrassed her and, detecting a soupçon of the bluestocking, changed my tack.

‘I’m a great admirer of Henry’s work,’ I lied valiantly. ‘You might say I was a colleague…a disciple of his.’

The violet eyes flickered for an instant, with amusement or scorn. ‘Is that true?’

Confound the minx, she was laughing at me! The light in those eyes was definitely laughter, and suddenly her face was illuminated, irrepressibly. I grinned.

‘No, it isn’t true. Are you disappointed?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s his style I dislike. I have no fault to find with the raw material. Poor Henry is a painter, not an artist. Give him a nice, ripe apple and he’ll put it against a silk screen and try to paint it. A pointless waste. Neither the apple nor the public appreciates the gesture.’

She was puzzled, but intrigued; and she had stopped looking at Henry every time she spoke.

‘Well? What would you do?’ she ventured.

‘Me? I think that to paint from life you have to know life. Apples are for eating, not for painting.’ I winked slyly and grinned at her. ‘And lovely young girls are like apples.’

‘Oh!’ She clapped her hands to her mouth and her eyes left mine and flew to Chester who had just discovered Holman Hunt among his guests and was engaged in earnest, pedantic conversation. She turned away, almost panic-stricken. No, she was not a flirt: far from it. I took her arm, gently turning her back towards me.

‘I’m sorry. I was only funning. I shan’t tease you again.’ She looked into my face to see if I was telling the truth. ‘I’d say “on my honour”, but I don’t have any,’ I said. ‘Henry should have warned you against me. Did he?’

She shook her head dumbly, entirely withdrawn.

‘No, I don’t suppose he did. Tell me, how do you like modelling? Does Henry share you with any of his friends, I wonder? No? Wise Henry. Oh, what’s the matter now?’ She had turned away again, and I read a deep, sincere distress in her face.

Her hands clenched the soft fabric of her gown, and her voice was low and violent. ‘Please, Mr Harper…’

‘What is it?’ I was caught between irritation and concern.

‘Please don’t talk about modelling! Don’t talk about the wretched paintings. Everyone asks about the paintings. I hate them!’

This was getting interesting. I lowered my voice, conspiratorially. ‘Actually, so do I.’

She gave an involuntary chuckle, and the stricken look went out of her eyes. ‘I hate having to play the same part every day,’ she went on, almost dreamily. ‘Always to be good, and quiet, to do my embroidery and sit in attractive poses, when inside I want to…’ She broke off again, perhaps realizing that she was about to pass the bounds of propriety.

‘But he must pay you quite well,’ I suggested.

‘Money!’ Her scorn was evident, and I dismissed any notion of her being a professional.

‘I wish I had your healthy disregard for it,’ I said lightly. ‘Or, at least, that my creditors did.’

She chuckled again.

‘Yes, but you’re a man,’ she said, sobering abruptly. ‘You can do what you like. You don’t…’ Her voice trailed off miserably.

‘And what would you like?’ I asked.

For a second she looked at me, and I almost saw something in her expression…like the promise of a bleak passion. Then, nothing. The wan look returned to her face.

‘Nothing.’

I was about to speak, when I became aware of a presence at my elbow. Turning, I found that Henry, with impeccable timing, had finally left Hunt to mingle with his other guests. The girl at my side stiffened, her face rigid, and I wondered what hold Henry had over her to make her so much in awe of him. And it wasn’t just awe: there was something like horror in her eyes.

‘Good day, Mr Harper,’ said Henry with his punctilious courtesy. ‘I see that you have been looking at my canvasses.’

‘Certainly,’ I replied. ‘And fine though they are I could not help but notice that they fail to entirely capture the charm of the model.’

It was the wrong thing to say. Henry’s mellow gaze narrowed to an icy pinprick. It was in colder accents that he introduced me to her at last.

‘Mr Harper, this is my wife, Mrs Chester.’

I possess, you may have noticed, some degree of charisma: I exerted all of it to negate my earlier faux pas and create a good impression. After a few minutes of shameless flattery Henry thawed again; I caught the birch-girl looking at me a few times, and there and then I swore I’d give her my heart. For a while, anyway.

The first thing I needed was access to the beauty. It takes patience and strategy, believe me, to seduce a married woman, as well as a solid footing in the enemy camp, and for a while I was at a loss as to how I could insinuate my lecherous self into her life and her affections. Patience, Mose, I thought. There was a world of small-talk to be done before that!

During the course of the conversation I made every effort to seduce, not the wife, but the husband. I spoke of my admiration of Holman Hunt, whom I knew Henry admired; deplored the newly decadent tendencies of Rossetti; spoke of my experiences abroad, expressed an interest in Henry’s newest canvas (a vile idea to cap all of his previous vile ideas), then finally voiced the desire to be painted by him.

‘A portrait?’ Henry was all attention.

‘Yes…’ hesitantly and with the right degree of modest reserve,

‘or a period piece, Biblical, mediaeval…I haven’t really thought much about it, yet. However, I have been an admirer of your style for some time, you know, and after this very fine exhibition…I was mentioning it to Swinburne the other day-he was the one who suggested the portrait idea, in fact.’

Easy to say: I knew that a Puritan like Henry would hardly be likely to exchange words with a man like Swinburne to verify the fact, and he knew as well as I did the relationship between Swinburne and the Rossettis. Conceit puffed him up like a teacake. He scanned my face carefully.

‘Fine features, if I may say so,’ he said ponderously. ‘I should not be ashamed to transfer them to canvas. Full-front, would you say? Or three-quarter profile?’

I began to grin, and quickly transformed the vulgar leer into a smile.

‘I’m in your hands,’ I said.

7

As the door opened and I saw him for the first time, I was certain that he had seen me. Not this body, but the essential me, in my most naked, helpless form. The thought was terrifying and, at the same time, powerfully exciting. For an instant I wanted to strut and dance before this stranger in a display of shamelessness which transcended the pale envelope of flesh I could discard at will, as my husband stood by unseeing.

I cannot explain the strange wantonness which possessed me. Perhaps it was the heightened perception lent to me by my recent illness, perhaps the laudanum I had taken earlier for my headache, but the first time I saw Moses Harper, I knew that this was a truly physical being, governed by his own desires and pleasures. Watching him and speaking to him under the heedless eye of my husband I understood that he was everything I was not; he radiated energy, arrogance, independence and self-satisfaction like the sun. Best of all, there was no shame in him, no shame at all, and his lack of shame drew me irresistibly. As he touched my arm, his voice low and caressing, charged with the promise of sensuality, I felt my cheeks flush, but not with shame.

I watched him covertly throughout his conversation with Henry. I cannot recall a word he spoke, but the tone of his voice made me shiver with pleasure. He was maybe ten years younger than Henry, with an angular figure, sharp features and a satirical expression. He wore his hair long and tied in the nape of the neck in an eccentric, old-fashioned style. His dress, too, was deliberately informal, even for a morning visit, and he was hatless. I liked his eyes, which were blue and rather narrow, as if he were laughing all the time, and his easy, mocking smile. I am certain he noticed me watching him, but he only smiled and continued his conversation.

I was astonished that he should have commissioned a painting from my husband; from the little I had previously heard of him, Mose Harper was an impudent good-for-nothing, fit only for painting filth, with no sense and less taste. Now, Henry was telling me, in an indulgent voice, that Mose was ‘a young rogue’ whose travels around the world had ‘much improved him,’ and he would no doubt one day make a ‘fine painter,’ as he showed ‘excellent draughtsmanship and a certain originality of style.’

For some time Henry propounded his ideas on the portrait, suggesting, then rejecting, various subjects such as Young Solomon and The Jacobite. Mose had written a list of his own ideas, including Prometheus, Adam in the Garden (rejected by Henry because of what he called ‘the degree of modesty which must be accorded to such a subject’) and The Card Players.

This last title intrigued Henry, and he met Mose later at his studio to discuss it. Mose told him that the idea had come to him while reading a poem by the French poet Baudelaire (I have never read any of his work, but I am told he is very shocking, and it does not strike me at all odd that he should be a favourite of Mose’s), in which:

Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique

Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.

Mose thought the phrase most evocative, and visualized a canvas ‘set in a greasy Parisian café, with sawdust on the floor and bottles of absinthe on the table. Sitting at the table is a young man holding the Knave of Hearts; next to him a beautiful lady has played the Queen of Spades.’

Henry was not immediately enthusiastic about this subject, which he found rather sordid. He himself had a notion to paint Mose in mediaeval dress, perhaps as The Minstrel’s Lament, ‘sitting beneath a rustic sundial and holding a viol, whilst behind him the sun sets and a procession of veiled ladies, carrying various musical instruments, passes by on horseback.’

Mose was politely unenthusiastic on the subject. He did not see himself as a mediaeval minstrel. Besides, there was the background to be thought of. To paint the mediaeval landscape with the ladies on horseback might take months. Surely it would be simpler to choose the dark interior and concentrate upon the portrait itself?

There was some sense in that argument, and Henry’s reluctance lessened. There would be no harm in the subject, he decided, as long as it was tastefully executed. He did draw the line at having the French poem engraved on the picture-frame, but Mose assured him that that would not be necessary. Henry began to make plans for the new canvas, abandoning A Damsel with a Dulcimer for the time being, to my immense relief.

What price Mose had promised Henry for the picture I do not know, but my husband was filled with hopes for it; Mose, with his connections, would no doubt have it hung at the Royal Academy and this might well be the making of Henry’s career. I paid little attention. Henry and I were not dependent upon Henry’s paintings for income. Any money he made was for him a matter of personal satisfaction, a proof of his talent. For myself, the only interest I had in his new painting was that the long and frequent sittings meant that I would have the opportunity to see Mose nearly every day.

8

I never liked Moses Harper. A thoroughly dangerous and calculating individual, rumour had it that he had been involved in countless shady enterprises from forgery to blackmail, although none of the rumours-which inexplicably led to even greater success with the ladies-were ever proved.

For myself, I found him a very inferior type, with no morals and fewer manners, except when he chose to exert himself to please. He was an artist of sorts, though the work I had seen, both painting and poetry alike, seemed calculated only to shock. His work was neither harmonious nor true to life; he delighted in the grotesque, the absurd and the vulgar.

Despite my dislike for low company, I realized that the connections he had acquired might be of use to me: besides, my idea for his portrait was an excellent one, and might even attract the attention of the Academy. I had already submitted my Little Beggar Girl along with the Sleeping Beauty: the critical response was encouraging, although The Times condemned my choice of model as being ‘insipid’ and suggested that I expand my choice of subject-matter. For this reason I abandoned my current project and began on the sketches immediately although I disliked having to deal so closely with Harper-his reputation was such that I did not want Effie to come into contact with him: not that she would have encouraged the fellow, you understand, but I hated to think of his eyes on her, demeaning her, lusting after her.

However, I had little choice: Effie had been ill again, and I arranged a small studio on the top floor from which I could work. More often than not, Harper would sit in the garden or in the living-room while I sketched him from various angles, and Effie would work at her stitchery or read a book, seemingly quite content with our silent company. She showed no interest in Harper at all, but that afforded me little comfort. In fact, I might have been more patient with her if she had shown a little more animation.

Effie could think of nothing but her books. I had discovered her reading a most unsuitable novel a couple of days previously, a hellish thing by a certain Ellis Bell, called Wuthering Heights, or some other such nonsense. The wretched book had already driven her into one of her megrims, and when I took it away-for her own good, the ungrateful creature-she dared to fly into a violent tantrum, crying: How dare I take her books! weeping and behaving like the spoiled child she was. Only a strong dose of laudanum was sufficient to calm her, and for several days afterwards she kept to her bed, too weak and pettish to move. I told her, when she had almost recovered, that I had long suspected that she read too much; it gave her fanciful notions. I did not like the kind of morbidity, bred of idleness, that it encouraged. I told her that there could be no objection to improving, Christian works, but forbade any more novels, or anything but the lightest kind of poetry. She was unstable enough as it was.

Whatever she told you, I was not unkind: I saw her instability and tried to control it, encouraging her to take up activities appropriate to a young woman. Her needlework lay untouched for weeks and I obliged her to take it up again. Not for myself-no-but for her. I knew she desired to have talent such as I had: when she was a child she used to try and paint scenes from her favourite poets, but I always dealt honestly with Effie; I did not flatter her to gain her affection but told her the sober truth: women are not, as a rule, made for artistic activities; their talents are the gentle, domestic ones.

But she was wilful; she persisted in her daubs, saying that she painted what she saw in dreams. Dreams! I told her she should dream less and pay more attention to her duties as a wife.

You see, I did care for her. I loved her too much to allow her to delude herself with vanities and conceits. I had kept her pure for so long, had lived with her imperfection, had forgiven her for the seed of wickedness she, like all women, carried within her. And what did she give me in return? Megrims, fancies, foolishness and deception. Do not be deceived by her innocent face as I was! Like my mother she was diseased, the bud of her unfurling adolescence blackened from the core. How could I have known? God, in His ferocious jealousy, threw her in my path to test me. Let a single woman, just one, into the Kingdom of Heaven itself, and I swear she will throw down the blessed one by one-angels, archangels and all.

Damn her! She has made me as you see me now, a cripple, a fallen angel with the seed of the serpent in my frozen entrails. Slice an apple and you will find the Star, bearing the seeds of damnation in its core: God knew it even then, He who knows everything, sees everything. How He must have laughed, as He drew the rib from Adam’s sleeping body! Even now I seem to hear His laughter…and in my darkness spit and curse the light. Twenty grains of chloral to buy Your silence.

9

For two weeks I was content to watch him and wait. Mose haunted my dreams with visions of delightful abandon; waking, I saw him every day. I existed in a warm and lovely dream-state, like some sleeping princess waiting for her kiss, and I trusted in him implicitly. I had seen him watching; I knew he would come for me.

Days passed, and Henry moved back to his studio to work. He already had enough studies of Mose, and was eager to transfer his initial idea on to canvas. He was vaguely considering using me as the model for the Queen of Spades, but Mose, with a hidden wink in my direction, had said abruptly that I was ‘not his type’. Henry was not sure whether to be offended or relieved; he settled for a thin-lipped smile and promised to ‘think about it’. Mose accompanied him to the studio and for some time I did not see him, though his face never left my thoughts.

My health improved daily and I began to take fewer and fewer of the doses of laudanum Henry brought me. One night he found that I had thrown away my medicine, and was very angry. How could I expect to get better, he demanded, if I wilfully disobeyed him? I must drink my medicine three times a day, like a good girl, or I would become morbid and fanciful again, my nightmares would return and I would be good for nothing but idleness. My health was frail, he said, my mind weakened by illness. I must at least try to make an effort not to be a burden to him, especially now that his work was at last being recognized.

Meekly, I acquiesced; I promised to take a daily walk to the church and back and to take my medicine regularly. From then on I made sure that the number of drops in the bottle diminished at a steady pace-and with it I watered the araucaria on the stairs three times a day. Henry never suspected a thing. In fact, he was almost cheerful when he returned from the studio. His painting was progressing very well, if slowly, he told me, with Mose sitting for him maybe three hours a day. Henry worked till the early evening and, as the weather grew fine, I took the habit of going for a long walk to the cemetery in the afternoons. Once or twice Tabby came with me, but she had too many things to do in the house to act as a permanent chaperone to me. Besides, I told her, I was only going as far as the church; I could come to no harm, and I was feeling much better now that the winter was over. Three or four times I took the same walk from Cromwell Square, down Swain’s Lane, down the hill, into the cemetery to St Michael’s. Since the day I had my vision in that church, the day I lost the baby, I had felt an odd link with St Michael’s, a desire to go in there alone and try to recapture the sense of purpose I had felt that day, the sense of revelation. But I had not been back, except on Sundays, with Henry on one side of me. Since William had gone to Oxford I had felt even more closely watched than ever. I dared not allow my mask to slip for an instant.

But now I felt almost as if I were on holiday. I enjoyed my trips out of the house more than I dared admit, and led Henry to believe that I walked only because he had ordered me to do so. If he had known how much those outings meant to me, he would surely have cut them short. So I nursed my secret and my joy, while inside me something wild and frenzied capered and grinned. I tried the church several times, but each time there were too many people for me to dare enter: sightseers, baptisms, weddings…and once a funeral, with row upon row of black-clad mourners, intoning the dark hymns to the howling of the organ.

I drew back from the half-open door, embarrassed and somehow afraid as the wave of sound struck me. In my confusion I almost knocked over the vase of white chrysanthemums which was standing by the entrance. One woman turned at the noise and fixed her gaze on me insistently, almost threateningly. I made a helpless little gesture of apology and continued to back away, but suddenly I felt my legs begin to buckle under my weight. I looked up and saw the vault spiralling towards me uncontrollably, the face of St Sebastian suddenly very close to mine; St Sebastian smiling, showing his teeth…

Not now! I thought urgently, struggling to regain control. Looking wildly around me I caught sight of the woman, still watching me with that insistent look of recognition. From afar I thought I heard a voice calling a half-familiar name. Unreasoning panic seized me and I turned, abruptly released from my trance, and ran, slamming the heavy door. I stumbled, tried to retain my balance and cannoned headlong into a black-clad figure standing at the bottom of the steps. His arms locked tightly around me. By now I was thoroughly unnerved, and I was on the point of screaming aloud when I looked into the face of my assailant and saw that it was Mose.

‘Mrs Chester!’ He looked surprised to see me, and let go of my arms immediately with a show of apology which might have seemed genuine had it not been for the mischief in his eyes. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have alarmed you like that. Do forgive me.’

I struggled to regain my composure. ‘It’s quite all right,’ I said. ‘It…wasn’t you. I went into the church, and walked straight into a funeral service. It…I hope I didn’t hurt you,’ I finished lamely.

He laughed, but almost immediately narrowed his eyes in an expression of some concern.

‘You have had a shock, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘You look quite pale. Here, sit down for a moment.’ He eased an arm around my shoulders and began to move me towards a bench a few yards away. ‘Why, you are so cold!’ he exclaimed as his hands found mine. Before I could speak he had pulled off his own coat and thrown it over my shoulders. I protested half-heartedly, but he was cheerfully proprietary and, besides, it felt very comfortable to be sitting on the bench with his arm around me, the woolly tobacco-smell of his overcoat in my nostrils. If he had kissed me then, I would have responded with all my heart; I knew it-and felt no guilt at all.

10

I’d been following her for nearly a week before I made my move; she was difficult game, and I had to tread carefully if I was not to frighten the girl away. As it was, she was touchingly trusting; I met her every day after that and within the week she was calling me Mose and holding my hand, just like a child. If I hadn’t known better I’d have sworn she was a virgin.

Not my usual tipple, I hear you say? Well, I couldn’t have explained it either. I suppose it was the novelty of playing the prince, after being so many times the knave…Besides, she was beautiful.

A man could fall in love. But not me.

Still, there was something about her, something at the same time cool and deeply carnal, something beyond that girlishness which sparked off some latent emotion in me. She was an entirely new experience; I felt like an alcoholic, his palate jaded with heady intoxicants, tasting for the first time one of those sugary children’s drinks. Like him, I paused to relish the newness, the unfamiliar sweetness. She was without any sense of right or wrong; she followed me wherever I wished to lead her, shivering with pleasure when I touched her, hanging on my every word. We talked far more than I ever did with any other woman; I forgot myself in her presence and told her about my poetry and art, my dreams and longings. I mostly saw her in the cemetery-it had the advantage of being huge and rambling, with plenty of enclosed places to hide. One cold, dull evening when Henry was working late we met by the Circle of Lebanon; there was no-one around, and the devil was in me. Effie smelled so good, like roses and white bread, and her face was flushed with the cool air. Her hair had been blown by the wind and little tendrils of it fell all around her face.

For a moment I was all hers.

It was the first time I had kissed her on the mouth, and I forgot everything I had planned about not alarming her. She was standing beside a vault, and I pushed her right up against the wall. Her hat fell off-I ignored it-and her hair came half unpinned around my face. I pulled the rest of it down and ran it through my hands, gasping for breath like a diver before I prepared to plunge again. I don’t suppose it was the kind of kiss she expected, because she clapped her hands to her mouth with a little cry and stared at me, her face scarlet and her eyes like saucers. I realized that my hasty impulse had probably wrecked all my careful planning and I swore, then swore again at myself for swearing.

Recovering, I pulled away from her and fell to my knees, playing the part of the Repentant Lover. I was sorry, more sorry than I could say, for having alarmed her; no punishment could be too bad for me. I had succumbed to a momentary weakness, but I loved her so much; I had so longed to kiss her, ever since I first saw her, that I had lost control. I was not made of stone; but what of that? I had frightened her, insulted her. I deserved to be horsewhipped.

Maybe I overdid it a trifle, but it was a technique which had worked well enough before with married women; I had researched it carefully in the pages of The Keepsake and, God help me, in this case some of it was nearly true. I peered up cautiously to see if she had taken the bait and, amazingly, she was rocking with laughter, not unkindly but uncontrollably. As she saw me looking at her she burst out again.

Little Eff rose rapidly in my estimation. I stood up and grinned ruefully.

‘Well…it was worth a try,’ I said with a shrug. Effie shook her head and laughed again.

‘Oh, Mose,’ she said. ‘You are a hypocrite! You should be on the stage.’

I tried another tack: the Unrepentant Lover.

‘I’ve often thought that,’ I said. ‘Still, it usually works, you know.’ I ventured a disarming smile. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m not sorry.’

‘That’s better,’ said Effie. ‘I believe that.’

‘Then believe this,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ How could she not believe it? At the time, I nearly did myself. ‘I love you, and it’s killing me to see you married to that pompous ass. He doesn’t think of you as a woman, he thinks you’re his thing, his beggar girl, his sick little fallen angel. Effie, you need me; you need to be taught how to live, how to enjoy life.’

I was almost sincere. Indeed, I practically convinced myself. I looked at her to see how she was taking it and her straight gaze fixed mine. She took a step towards me and such was the intensity of her expression that I nearly backed away. Almost abstractedly she lifted her cold hands to my face. Her kiss was soft and I tasted salt on her skin. I held back, allowing her to explore my face, my neck and hair with her fingers. Gently she pushed me towards the vault. I heard the gate open behind me and allowed myself to be manoeuvred inside. It was one of many family monuments in the cemetery, shaped like a tiny chapel, with a gate to protect it from the curious, a chair, prayer-stool and altar, and a little stained-glass window at the back. There was just enough space for two people to enter, shielded from view. I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms for her.

The gate slammed shut in my face.

I opened my eyes quickly and there she was, the minx, grinning at me through the bars. At first I laughed and tried to push the door open, but the catch was on the outside.

‘Effie!’

‘It’s frightening, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Effie, let me out!’

‘Being locked up, unable to get free? I feel that with Henry all the time. He doesn’t want me to be alive. He wants me to be quiet and cold, like a corpse. You don’t know what it’s like, Mose. He makes me take laudanum to keep me quiet and good, but inside I want to scream and bite and run naked through the house like a savage!’

I could feel the passion and the hatred in her; you can’t imagine how exciting that was to my jaded taste. But I was uneasy, too. For a moment I contemplated abandoning the whole campaign, asking myself whether she wasn’t too hot for me to handle, but the appeal was too much. I growled at her like a tiger and bit at her fingers through the bars. She laughed wildly, a bird’s mad scream across the marshes.

‘You won’t betray me, Mose.’ It was a statement. I shook my head.

‘If you do, I’ll bring you back here and bury you here for ever.’ She was only half joking. I kissed her knuckles.

‘I promise.’

I heard her push the catch open in the gloom, and she stepped into the vault with me. Her cloak fell to the floor and her brown flannel dress with it. In her underclothes she was a wraith, and her touch was burning brimstone. She was all untutored, but made up for that in her enthusiasm. I tell you, I was almost afraid. She tore at me, bit me, scratched me, devoured me with her passion, and in the dark I was incapable of telling whether her cries were of anguish or of pleasure. She returned my careful gentleness with a violence which tore at the heart. The act was quick and brutal, like a murder, and afterwards she cried, but not, I think, with any sorrow.

There was a mystery in her which left me with a feeling of awe, of sanctity, which I never felt with any other woman. In some incomprehensible way I felt that she had purified me.

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking I fell in love with the chit. Well, I didn’t. But that evening-only that evening, mind you-I thought I felt something deeper than the brief passions I had had for other women. As if the act had opened up something inside me. I wasn’t in love with her; and yet, when I returned to my rooms that night, all aching and scratched and feeling I had been in a war, I couldn’t sleep; all night I stayed beside the fire thinking of Effie, drinking wine and looking into the flames as if they were her eyes. But however much I drank I did not manage to quench the thirst which her burning touch had begun in me, nor could a whole brothel full of whores have stilled the ache of wanting her.

11

I was lucky that Henry was late home; it had been past seven when I arrived, and he usually came back from the studio for supper. As I came in by the back door I could hear Tabby singing to herself in the kitchen and knew that Mr Chester had not yet returned. I crept upstairs to my room to change my crumpled dress, choosing a white dimity with a blue sash which I had almost outgrown but which was a favourite of his. As I hastened to put it on I wondered whether Henry would see the difference so clearly written in my face, the rending of that veil which had kept me so long apart from the world of the living. My whole body was shaking with the violence of it, and I sat for a long time in front of my mirror before I was reassured that the marks of my lover’s touch-marks which I could feel scarlet over every inch of my skin-existed only in my imagination.

I looked up at the wall where The Little Beggar Girl hung, and could not repress my laughter. For a moment I was almost hysterical, fighting for breath, as I met the mild, sightless gaze of the child who had never been me. I was never Henry’s beggar girl; no, not even before I outgrew my childhood. My true portrait was hidden at the bottom of my work-basket, the face branded with scarlet. Sleeping Beauty, now awake and touched with a new kind of curse. Neither Henry, nor anyone else, would ever be able to put me to sleep again.

At the knock on the door I started violently and turned to see Henry standing there, an unreadable expression on his face. I could not suppress a shudder of apprehension. To hide my confusion I began to brush my hair with long, smooth strokes, Low adown, low adown…like the mermaid in the poem. The feel of my hair in my hands seemed to give me courage, as if some remnant of my lover’s strength and assurance still lingered there, and Henry walked right into the room and spoke to me with unusual bonhomie.

‘Effie, my dear, you’re looking very well today, very well indeed. Have you taken your medicine?’

I nodded, not trusting my voice. Henry nodded his approval.

‘I can see definite improvement. Definite roses in those cheeks. Capital!’ He patted my face in a proprietary fashion, and I had to make a real effort to stop myself from drawing away in disgust; after my lover’s burning touch, the thought of Henry’s cool caresses was unspeakable.

‘I suppose supper is almost ready?’ I asked, parting my hair and beginning to braid it.

‘Yes, Tabby has made a game pie with buttered parsnips.’ He frowned at my reflection in the mirror. ‘Don’t pin up your hair,’ he said. ‘Wear it as it is, with ribbon through it, as you used to.’ From my dressing-table he chose a blue ribbon, gently threading it through my hair and tying it in a wide bow at the back. ‘That’s my good girl.’ He smiled. ‘Stand up.’

I shook out my skirts in front of the mirror and looked at my reflection, still so like that other, unmoving reflection in the frame of The Little Beggar Girl.

‘Perfect,’ said Henry.

And though it was May, and there was a fire in the grate, I shivered.

Over supper I managed to regain much of my composure. I ate most of my piece of pie, some vegetables and a small dish of rhenish cream before announcing with fake good cheer that I could not possibly eat another morsel. Henry was in fine spirits. He consumed almost a whole bottle of wine over supper, although it was not his habit to drink a great deal, and he drank two glasses of port with his cigar afterwards, so that, without actually becoming inebriated, he was certainly in a very jolly mood.

Inexplicably this disturbed me, and I would have much preferred his indifference to the attentions he lavished upon me. He poured wine for me which I did not want to drink, complimented me a number of times on my dress and my hair, kissed my fingers as we rose from table and, as he smoked his cigar, he asked me to play the piano and sing to him.

I am not a musician; I knew maybe three or four little pieces by heart, and as many songs, but tonight Henry was charmed by my repertoire and caused me to sing ‘Come with me to the Bower’ three times before I was allowed to sit down, pleading fatigue. Suddenly Henry was all solicitude; I was to put my feet up on to his knees and to sit with my eyes closed, smelling at my lavender bottle. I insisted that I was quite well, simply a little tired, but Henry would have none of it; and presently, feeling quite oppressed at his attention, I pleaded a headache and asked permission to go to bed.

‘Poor child, of course you must,’ replied Henry with unimpaired good cheer. ‘Take your medicine, and Tabby shall bring you up some hot milk.’

I was glad to be gone, hot milk or not, and, knowing that I should not sleep otherwise, took a few drops of laudanum from the hated bottle. I took off the white dress and changed into a ruffled nightgown, and was brushing out my hair when I heard a tap on the door.

‘Come in, Tabby,’ I called without looking round, but on hearing the heavy tread on the boards, so different to Tabby’s light scuttling footsteps, I turned abruptly and saw Henry standing there for the second time that evening, holding a tray with a glass of milk and some biscuits.

‘For my darling girl,’ he said in a jocular tone, but I was quick to see something in his eyes, a shifting, shameful expression which froze me where I stood. ‘No, no,’ he said as I moved to get into bed, ‘stay a while with me. Sit on my knee as you drink your milk, just as you used to.’ He paused, and I saw the furtive expression again behind his wide smile.

‘I’ll be cold,’ I protested. ‘And I don’t want any milk, my head aches so.’

‘Don’t be peevish,’ he advised. ‘I’ll make a nice fire, and you shall have some laudanum in your milk, and very soon you’ll be better.’ He reached for the bottle on the mantelpiece.

‘No! I’ve taken some already,’ I said, but Henry did not pay any attention to my protest. He poured three drops of the laudanum into the milk and made to hand me the glass.

‘Henry-’

‘Don’t call me that!’ For a moment the jocular tone had disappeared; the tray with the glass and the biscuits wavered, and a dribble of milk slopped over the rim of the glass on to the tray. Henry noticed it but did not comment; I saw his mouth tighten, for he hated waste or untidiness of any kind, but his voice was still mild.

‘Clumsy girl! Come now, don’t make me lose my temper with you. Drink your milk, like a good girl, and then you shall sit on my knee.’

I tried to smile.

‘Yes, Mr Chester.’

His mouth remained narrow until I had finished the milk, then he relaxed. He put the tray carelessly down on the floor and put his arms around me. I tried not to stiffen, feeling the sickly, indigestible weight of the hot milk resting in the pit of my stomach. My head was spinning and the hundred marks of Mose’s embrace were like burning mouths on my body, each one screaming out its fury and outrage that this man should dare to lay his hands on me. My body’s reaction at last corroborated what my mind had been too afraid to admit; that I hated this man whom I had married and to whom I was bound by law and duty. I hated him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered, his fingers tracing the pattern of my vertebrae through the linen nightdress. ‘There’s my good girl. Sweet Effie.’

And as he began with an eager and shaking hand to unfasten the buttons of my nightdress, a wave of nausea submerged me and I submitted passively to his touch, all the while praying to the wild, pagan god Mose had awakened in me that it should be over soon, that he should be gone, so that I could fall into the well of laudanum and the memory of his sickly, guilty embraces would be extinguished.

I awoke from a kind of thick swoon to find daylight filtering through my curtains, and stumbled weakly out of bed to open the windows. The air was fresh and damp as I stretched out my arms to the sun and felt some strength return to my shaking limbs. I washed carefully and completely and, after dressing in clean linen and a grey flannel gown, I felt brave enough to go down to breakfast. It was not yet half past seven; Henry was a late riser and would not be at table; I would have some time to compose myself after what had happened the previous night-it would not do for Henry to realize how I felt, nor what power he wielded over me.

Tabby had prepared eggs and ham, but I could not eat anything. I did drink some hot chocolate, more to please Tabby than myself, for I did not want her to tell Henry that I was unwell; so I sipped my chocolate and waited by the window, scanning a book of poems and watching the sun rise. It was eight when Henry made his appearance, dressed severely in black as if he were going to church. He went past me without a word, seating himself at the breakfast-table with the Morning Post and serving himself lavishly with ham, eggs, toast and kidneys. He took his meal in silence except for the occasional rustle of the paper and, leaving most of it untouched, he stood up, folded the paper meticulously and glanced towards me.

‘Good morning,’ I said mildly, turning a page.

Henry did not reply except for a tightening of the mouth, a trick of his when he was angry or when someone contradicted him. Why he should be angry I did not know, except that he often had abrupt changes of mood which I had long since ceased to try to understand. He took a step towards me, glanced at the book I was reading and frowned.

‘Love poems,’ he said in a bitter tone. ‘I should have expected you, ma’am, with the education I have lavished on you, not to waste whatever sense God gave you on reading such trash!’

Hastily I closed the book, but it was too late.

‘Do I not give you anything you want? Are you lacking in anything in the way of gowns, cloaks and bonnets? Have I not stayed with you when you were ill, borne with your megrims and your hysterics and your headaches…?’ The bitter voice was rising in pitch, sharp as piano-wire.

I nodded warily.

‘Love poems!’ said Henry sourly. ‘Are all women the same, then? Is there not one female who has escaped the taint of all womankind? “One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.” Am I such a poor teacher, then, that the pupil I thought was the most untouched by the weaknesses of her sex should waste her time in fanciful contemplation? Give that to me!’ Reaching for the book he tossed it vengefully on to the fire.

‘Of course,’ he added spitefully, ‘your mother is a milliner, used to pandering to the vanities of the fashionable world. I suppose no-one thought to instruct you. A fine clergyman your father must have been to allow you to fill your brain with fanciful notions. I suppose he thought such dangerous rubbish romantic.’

I knew I should have remained silent to avoid a quarrel, but my disgust of the previous night still lingered and, watching my book, with Shelley and Shakespeare and Tennyson curling up among the flames, I felt a great, rushing anger.

‘My father was a good man,’ I said fiercely. ‘Sometimes I feel he is with me, watching. Watching us together.’

I saw Henry stiffen. ‘I wonder what he is thinking,’ I continued in a soft voice. ‘I wonder what he sees.’

Henry’s face clenched like a fist and I burst out, uncontrollably, ‘How dare you burn my books! How dare you preach to me and treat me like a child! How can you, when last night…’ I broke off, gritting my teeth with the effort of not crying my secret hatred out loud.

‘Last night…’ His voice was low.

I put up my chin defiantly. ‘Yes!’ He knew what I meant.

‘I am not a saint, Effie,’ he said in a subdued voice. ‘I know I am as weak as other men. But it’s you-you drive me to it. I try to keep you pure; God help me, I do try. Last night was all your doing. I saw the way you looked at me while you were combing your hair; I saw the colours in your cheeks. You set out to seduce me and, because I was weak, I succumbed. But I still love you: that’s why I try to keep you clean and innocent, as you were when I first met you that day in the park.’ He turned to me and grasped my hands. ‘You looked like an angel child. Even then I guessed you were sent to tempt me. I know it wasn’t your fault, Effie, it’s your nature-God made women weak and perverse and full of treachery. But you owe it to me to fight it, to deny sin and let God into your soul. Oh, I do love you, Effie! Don’t fight against the purity of my love. Accept it, and my authority as you would that of a loving father. Trust my deeper knowledge of the world, and respect me, as you would your poor dead father. Will you?’

Grasping my hands, he looked into my face most earnestly and such was the power of years of obedience that I nodded meekly.

‘That’s my good girl. Now, you must ask my forgiveness for the sin of anger, Effie.’

For a second I hesitated, trying to recapture the rebellion, the shamelessness, the certainty I had felt with Mose in the cemetery. But that had gone, along with my brief moment of defiance, and I felt weak, easy tears pricking at my eyelids.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was rude to you, Mr Chester,’ I mumbled, the tears coursing down my cheeks.

‘Good girl,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘What, still crying? Come now. You see that I was right about those poems-they make you peevish and melancholy. Dry your eyes now, and I’ll ask Tabby to bring you your medicine.’

Half an hour later Henry had gone and I was lying on my bed, dry-eyed but heavy with a listless despair. The laudanum bottle was on the bedstand beside me and, for a moment, I contemplated the greatest sin of all, the sin against the Holy Ghost. If there had not been Mose and the knowledge of love and hatred in my heart I might have committed that blackest of murders there and then, for I saw my life stretching out in front of me like a reflection in a fairground Hall of Mirrors, saw my face in youth, in middle age, in old age, adorning the walls of Henry’s house like dim trophies as he took more and more of myself from me. I wanted to tear off my skin, to free the creature I had been when I danced naked in a shower of light…If it had not been for Mose I would have done it, and with joy.

12

I stopped at my club, the Cocoa Tree, for a late breakfast-I couldn’t bear to eat with Effie staring at me with those dark, wounded eyes; as if I was somehow guilty of something! She had no idea of the sacrifices I made for her, the torments I endured for her sake. Nor did she care. All she cared for were her wretched books. I narrowed my eyes at The Times and tried to concentrate, but I could not read the closely spaced paragraphs; her face intruded, the image of her lips, her eyes, the grimace of horror which had come over her features when I kissed her…

Damn her games! It was too late for her to pretend that she was chaste; I knew her to the cheating core. It was for her sake that I visited that house in Crook Street-for her. To safeguard her tainted purity. A man could visit such places and need feel no compunction; after all, it was only the same as visiting a club, an exclusive gentleman’s club. I had instincts, damn her, like any man: better that I should slake them on some Haymarket whore than on my little girl. But last night there had been something about her, something different; she had been rosy-cheeked and sensual, elated and warm, the scent of grass and cedar on her skin and in her hair…She had wanted to seduce me. I knew it.

Ridiculous, that I should be the one to be made to feel unclean. Ridiculous that she should try to accuse me. I sipped my coffee, liking the smell of leather and cigar-smoke in the warm air, the muted sounds of voices-men’s voices-in the background. This morning, the very thought of women sickened me. I was glad I had burned her stupid book. Later I would go through the bookshelves and find the rest.

‘Mr Chester?’

I started, spilling coffee into the saucer in my hand. The man who had addressed me was slim and fair, with round spectacles over sharp grey eyes.

‘I’m so sorry to have disturbed you,’ he said, smiling, ‘but I was at your exhibition the other day and I was most impressed.’ He had a clipped, precise delivery and very white teeth. ‘Dr Russell,’ he prompted. ‘Francis Russell, author of The Theory and Practice of Hypnotism and Ten Case Histories of Hysteria.’

The name did seem familiar. Now I came to think of it, so did the face. I assumed I must have seen him at the exhibition.

‘Perhaps you’d care to join me in a drink of something stronger?’ suggested Russell.

I pushed aside the half-empty coffee-cup. ‘I don’t usually touch spirits,’ I said, ‘but a fresh cup of coffee would be welcome. I’m…a little tired.’

Russell nodded. ‘The pressure of the artistic temperament,’ he said. ‘Insomnia, headaches, impaired digestion…many of my patients exhibit these very symptoms.’

‘I see.’ Indeed I did; the man was simply offering his services. The thought was somehow reassuring; for a moment I had wondered whether his apparently friendly approach might conceal something more sinister. Angry with myself at the very thought, I smiled warmly at the man.

‘And what would you usually recommend in these cases?’ I asked.

For some time we spoke together. Russell was an interesting conversationalist, well versed in art and literature. We touched upon the subject of drugs; their use in symbolist art, their necessity in cases of highly strung temperaments. I mentioned Effie and was reassured that the use of laudanum-especially for a sensitive young female-was the best method of combating depression. A very sound young man, Francis Russell. After an hour of his company I found that I could begin to touch delicately upon the subject of Effie’s strange moods. I was not explicit, of course, merely hinting that my wife had odd fancies and unexplained illnesses. I was gratified to find that the doctor’s diagnosis was much like my own. My feeling of unfocused guilt-as if I had somehow been responsible for Effie’s actions of last night-receded as I learned that such feelings were not uncommon; the correct term, he informed me, was empathy and I must not allow myself to be depressed by my natural reactions.

We left the Cocoa Tree on the best of terms; we exchanged cards and promised to meet again, and it was in a far more optimistic mood that I finally made my way to the studio to meet Moses Harper, secure in my knowledge that in Russell I had an ally, a weapon against the spectres of my guilty fantasy. I had science on my side.

13

You see, she needed me. Call me a villain if you like, but I made her happy, which was more than your preaching ever did. She was lonelier than anyone I have ever known, trapped in her ivory tower with her cold prince and her servants and everything her heart desired except love. I was what she needed-and however much you might despise me, I taught her everything I knew. She was a quick enough pupil and quite without inhibitions. She accepted everything without reserve, without shame or coyness. I never corrupted her-if anything, she corrupted me.

We met as often as we could, mostly in the afternoons when Henry was working and I had finished the day’s sitting. His canvas was progressing very slowly and he worked until about seven every evening. This gave me plenty of time to see Effie home safely before he got back, so that he never knew how long she had been gone-and if the old Tabby suspected anything, she never said so.

This went on for about a month, with me meeting Effie either in the cemetery or at my rooms. She was moody-sometimes highly strung and tense, sometimes recklessly bright; never twice the same. Her lovemaking reflected this, so that she gave the illusion of being many different women and I suppose that was why she held on to me so long; I’m terribly easy to bore, you know.

She told me she had dreams in which she travelled all over the world; sometimes she described the strange and distant places she had visited and wept at the lost beauty of the dream. She also said that she could step out of her body at will and watch those around her without their knowledge; she described the physical pleasure of this act and urged me to try it. She was certain that if I were to learn how to perform this feat too, we could make love outside our bodies and be joined together for ever. Needless to say I never managed, although I did try, using opium, feeling rather foolish at believing her. She believed it, however, just as she believed everything I told her. I could make her shiver and grow pale, cry, laugh or flush with rage at my stories, and I took some innocent pleasure in doing this. I told her tales of ghosts and gods, witches and vampires dredged up from my earliest childhood, amazed at her childish hunger for all that knowledge, at all her wasted potential for learning.

I told you, she was a new experience, disarming me from one moment to the next. However, her real talent, like all women, was for emotion, and I sometimes pitied Henry Chester who had not been able to use and appreciate the reserves of passion in his poor little Effie.

The change came the day I decided to take her to the travelling fair which had camped on the Islington road. All women like fairs, with the little knick-knacks on sale, the Tunnel of Love and the fortune-tellers predicting dark handsome men and large families. For myself, I had heard that there would be on display a large collection of human grotesques, something which, since my earliest childhood, I have scarce been able to resist. They have always been a subject of fascination for me, these poor wretches, playthings of an uncaring God. In China, apparently, such shows are so lucrative that natural occurrences are not thought common enough, and parents of large families often sell young babies to fairs at birth to be used as freak attractions. The babies-usually the despised girls-are deliberately deformed by being kept in a small cage, in which their limbs are not allowed freedom to grow. The result, after some years of this treatment, is the comically atrophied creature so much loved by young children, the dwarf.

I told this story to Effie as we set off for the fair and it was a full fifteen minutes before I could stop her tears. How could they, she was crying, how could they be so cruel, so inhuman? To deliberately create something like that! Could I imagine the inconceivable hatred which such a creature would feel…Here she broke down hysterically and the coachman glared accusingly at me through the glass. It took all of my arguments to persude her that none of the freaks in this fair were so obtained; they were all of them honest errors of Nature, doing well for themselves in their chosen trade. Besides, there would be other things to occupy her mind: I would buy her some ribbons from the pedlar, and maybe some hot gingerbread if she wanted it. Inwardly I grimaced and made a mental note not to tell her any more stories about China.

At the fair, Effie’s despondency lifted, and she began to take an interest in what was going on around her. Pedlars with brightly coloured wares; an old man with a barrel-organ and a dancing monkey in a scarlet coat; some jugglers and acrobats; a fire-eater; and some gypsy girls dancing to pipes and tambourine.

She lingered for some time in front of the dancers, her eyes fixed especially upon one girl of about her own age, but with the dark skin and loose blue-black hair of the gypsy race, her feet bare and her ankles-nicely turned ankles, I noticed-ringed about with jangling bracelets. She was wearing a gold-embroidered skirt, scarlet petticoats, and a multitude of necklaces. Effie was enchanted.

‘Mose,’ she whispered to me as the girl ceased her dance, ‘I think she must be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’

‘Not as beautiful as you,’ I said to reassure her, taking her hand.

She scowled and shook her head irritably. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’

Women! Sometimes there’s no pleasing them.

I was ready to move on; the freak-show had begun, and I could hear a crier extolling the marvels of ‘Adolphus, the Human Torso’, but Effie was still watching the gypsy. She had moved towards a faded blue-and-gold tent by the side of the path, and a crier now began to announce that ‘Scheherazade, Princess of the Mystic East’ would tell fortunes using the ‘Magickal Tarot and the Crystal Ball’. I saw Effie’s eyes light up, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Summoning up a smile, I said: ‘I suppose you want to know your fortune?’

She nodded, her face vivid with eagerness. ‘Do you think she’s really a princess?’

‘Almost certainly,’ I said with great seriousness and Effie sighed with rapture. ‘She has probably been cursed by a wicked witch and is reduced to living in poverty,’ I continued. ‘She has lost her memory and disguises her magical powers as fairground charlatanry. But at night she turns into a silver swan and flies in her dreams to places no-one but she has ever travelled to.’

‘Now you’re laughing at me,’ she protested.

‘Not at all.’

But she was hardly paying attention. ‘Do you know, I’ve never had anyone tell my fortune? Henry says that kind of thing is witchcraft in disguise. He says that in the Middle Ages they would have been hanged for it, and a good thing too.’

‘Pious Henry,’ I sneered.

‘Well, I don’t care what Henry says,’ said Effie with determination. ‘Would you stay out here and wait for me? I won’t be long.’

Anything to keep the lady happy. I sat down on a stump and waited.