The Crimson petal and the white

ELEVEN

Sugar's forehead lands with a soft thud on the papers she has been toiling over. Half past midnight, Mrs Castaway's. Musty quiet and the smell of embers and candle-fat. The cobwebby mass of her own hair threatens to stifle her as she comes back to life with a gasp.

Raising herself from her writing-desk, Sugar blinks, scarcely able to believe she could have fallen asleep when, only an instant before, she was so seriously pondering what word should come next.

The page on which her face landed is smudged, still glistening; she stumbles over to the bed and examines her face in the mirror. The pale flesh of her forehead is branded with tiny, incomprehensible letters in purple ink.

"Damn," she says.

A few minutes later she's in bed, looking over what she has written. A new character has entered her story, and is suffering the same fate as all the others.

"Please," he begged, tugging ineffectually at the silken bonds holding him fast to the bedposts. "Let me go! I am an important man!"-and many more such pleas. I paid no heed to him, burying myself with my whet-stone and my dagger.

"But tell me, exalted Sir," I said at last. "Where is it your pleasure to have the blade enter you?"'

To this, the man gave no reply, but his face turned gastly grey.

"The embarassment of choices has taken your tongue," I suggested. "But never fear:

I shall explain them all to you, and their exquisite effects…"

Sugar frowns, wrinkling the blur of backwards text on her forehead. There's something lacking here, she feels. But what? A long succession of other men, earlier on in her manuscript, have inspired her to flights of Gothic cruelty; dispatching them to their grisly fate has always been sheer pleasure. Tonight, with this latest victim, she can't summon what's needed -that vicious spark-to set her prose alight.

Faced with the challenge of spilling his blood, she hears an alien voice of temptation inside her:

Oh, for God's sake, let the poor fool live.

You're going soft, she chides herself.

Come on, shove it in, deep into his throat, into his arse, into his guts, up to the hilt.

She yawns, stretches under the warm, clean covers. She has slept here alone for days now; it smells of no body but hers. As always, there are half a dozen clean sheets on the bed, interleaved with waxed canvas, so that each time a sheet is soiled she can whip it off, revealing a fresh layer of bedding. Before William Rackham came into her life, these layers were stripped off with monotonous regularity; now, they stay in place, all half-dozen of them, for days at a time. Christopher climbs the stairs every morning to collect soiled bedding, and finds nothing outside her door.

Luxury.

Sugar slides deeper under the covers, her manuscript weighing heavy on her breast. It's a rag-bag of a thing, made up of many different sized papers, sandwiched in a stiff cardboard folder on which are inscribed many titles, all crossed out. Underneath this inky roll-call of erasures, one thing survives:

"by "Sugar"."

Her story chronicles the life of a young prostitute with waist-length red hair and hazel eyes, working in the same house as her own mother, a forbidding creature called Mrs Jettison.

Allowing for a few flights of fancy-the murders, for instance-it's the story of her own life-well, her early life in Church Lane, at least. It's the story of a naked, weeping child rolled into a ball under a blood-stained blanket, cursing the universe. It's a tale of embraces charged with hatred and kisses laced with disgust, of practised submission and the secret longing for vengeance. It's an inventory of brutish men, a jostling queue of human refuse, filthy, gin-stinking, whisky-stinking, ale-stinking, scabrous, oily-nailed, slime-toothed, squint-eyed, senile, cadaverous, obese, stump-legged, hairy-arsed, monster-cocked-all waiting their turn to root out the last surviving morsel of innocence and devour it.

Is there any good fortune in this story? None!

Good fortune, of the William Rackham kind, would spoil everything. The heroine must see only poverty and degradation; she must never move from Church Lane to Silver Street, and no man must ever offer her anything she wants-most especially, rescue into an easier life.

Otherwise this novel, conceived as a cry of unappeasable anger, risks becoming one of those "Reader, I married him" romances she so detests.

No, one thing is certain: her story must not have a happy ending. Her heroine takes revenge on the men she hates; yet the world remains in the hands of men, and such revenge cannot be tolerated. Her story's ending, therefore, is one of the few things Sugar has planned in advance, and it's death for the heroine. She accepts it as inevitable, and trusts that her readers will too.

Her readers? Why, yes! She has every intention of submitting the manuscript for publication once it's finished. But who on Earth would publish it, you may protest, and who would read it?

Sugar doesn't know, but she's confident it has a fighting chance. Meritless pornography gets published, and so do respectable novels politely calling for social reform (why, only a couple of years ago, Wilkie Collins published a novel called The New Magdalen, a feeble, cringing affair in which a prostitute called Mercy Merrick hopes for redemption… A book to throw against the wall in anger, but its success proves that the public is ready to read about women who've seen more than one prick in their lives…) Yes, there must be receptive minds out there in the world, hungry for the unprettified truth-especially in the more sophisticated and permissive future that's just around the corner. Why, she may even be able to live by her writing: A couple of hundred faithful readers would be sufficient; she's not coveting success on the scale of Rhoda Broughton's.

She snorts, startled awake again. Her manuscript has slid off her breast, spilling pages onto the bed-clothes. Page one is uppermost.

All men are the same, it says. If there is one thing I have learned in my time on this Earth, it is this. All men are the same.

How can I assert this with such conviction?

Surely I have not known all the men there are to know?

On the contrary, dear reader, perhaps I have!

My name is Sugar…

Sugar sleeps.

Henry Rackham removes the wrapping-paper from the red hearts, dark livers and pale pink necks of chicken he has bought from the pet-meat man, and throws a few morsels to the kitchen floor. His cat pounces instantly, seizing the meat in her mouth, her sleek shoulders convulsed with the effort of swallowing. Once upon a time, Henry would murmur pleas of restraint, for fear she'd make herself sick; now he looks on, acquiescent in the ravenous face of Nature.

He knows that in a few minutes, she'll be lying in front of the fire, as serene and innocent as the moon. She will purr at his touch, licking his hand which, although he has washed it, still smells-to her-of his gift of bloody flesh.

What is there to be learned from cats? thinks Henry. Perhaps that all creatures can be peaceable and kind-if they're not hungry.

But how to explain the iniquity of those who have sufficient to eat? They hunger in a different way, perhaps. They are starving for grace, for respect, for the forgiveness of God. Feed them on that, and they will lie down with the Lamb.

Henry walks noiselessly in his thick knitted socks, into his sitting-room, and kneels at the hearth. Sure enough, no sooner has he stirred the fire than his cat comes to join him, purring and ready for sleep. Out of the blue he finds himself remembering, as he often does, his first meeting with Mrs Fox-or at least the first time he became aware of her. Inconceivable though it now seems that he could have failed to notice a woman of her beauty, she claims she was worshipping alongside him for weeks before the incident he so clearly recalls.

It was in 1872, in August of that year. She shone a bright fresh light into what had until then been the camera obscura of the North Kensington Prayer and Discussion Assembly.

She was like the answer to his prayers, for he harboured in his heart the conviction that Christ never intended Christianity to be quite as Jesuitical as the N.k.p.d.a. would have it.

It was Trevor MacLeish who provoked her to make herself manifest on that day in August. A Bachelor of Science, and always abreast of the most recent developments in that sphere, he voiced his misgivings on the manner of receiving Holy Communion. "It has been conclusively proven," he said, "that disease may be communicated from person to person when utensils and especially when drinking vessels are shared." He argued for a new procedure of drinking Communion wine out of a number of individual cups, as many as there were Communicants. Someone asked if the wiping of a cup's rim were not sufficient to remove the Bacteria, but MacLeish insisted that it was impervious to such measures.

In fact, MacLeish had brought to the Assembly a petition on this matter, addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury no less, and lacking only signatures. Henry was glum at the prospect of signing, believing the whole affair to be ridiculous, but fearing to say so, in case he were accused of Papist primitivism.

Then up spoke a young lady, new to their midst, a Mrs Fox by name, saying,

"Really, gentlemen, this is a quibble, refuted by the Bible."

MacLeish's countenance fell, but at Mrs Fox's direction, Bibles were opened to Luke,