The Crimson petal and the white

TWENTY-ONE

In a few ticks of the clock, it will be

September 29th, in the year of Our Lord 1875. Trapped with no hope of escape in the House of Evil, a fortnight after the twin calamities of Henry Rackham's death and the unspeakable misfortune that befell her own person under the same malignant moon, Agnes sits up in bed and pulls the bell-cord. More blood has flowed: Clara must come at once, to wash her and change the bandages.

The servant responds promptly, and knows what she's wanted for; she carries a metal bowl of steaming water. In it, soap and sponge float like dead sea creatures removed from their natural element.

"There's more coming," whispers Agnes anxiously, but Clara is already pulling back the bedclothes to expose her mistress's swaddled nappy. Hers is not to question why Mrs Rackham behaves as though the common female curse requires the sort of attention one might give to a mortal wound; hers is but to serve.

"This is the sixth day, ma'am," she says, rolling the blood-stained cloth into a wad. "It will surely be over tomorrow."

Agnes sees no justification for such optimism, not with the fabric of the universe torn asunder.

"God willing," she says, looking away from her stigma in disgust. How sure she'd been that she was cured of this affliction, imagining it to have been a disease of girlhood that passes when one becomes mature: how much joy it must be giving the Devil, to disillusion her!

Agnes looks away while the only part of her body that she has never examined in a mirror is washed and dried. She, who is intimately acquainted with each and every hair in her eyebrows, who keeps every incipient facial freckle under daily surveillance, who could, if required, draw accurate sketches of her chin from a number of angles, has only the vaguest notion of what she calls her "nethers". All she knows is that this part of her is, by a deplorable fault of design, not properly closed, and therefore vulnerable to the forces and influences of Evil.

Doctor Curlew is undoubtedly in league with these forces, and can barely conceal his delight at her fall: and just when William had begun to take a dislike to him, too! All through the Season, the doctor's visits were mercifully restricted, but yesterday, William allowed him to stay a full hour, and the two men even retired to the smoking-room and spoke at length-about what?

In nightmares, Agnes pictures herself fettered in the courtyard of a mad-house, molested by ugly crones and grunting idiots, while Doctor Curlew and William walk slowly out of the gates. She also dreams of bathing in a tub filled with warm, pure water, and falling asleep, and waking to find that she's up to her neck in cold blood, thick and sticky as aspic.

Exhausted, she falls back against her pillow. Clara has gone and she's clean and snug inside the bedclothes. If only sleep would carry her to the Convent of Health! Why has her Holy Sister forsaken her? Not a glimpse, not a fingerprint… At Henry's funeral, Agnes looked and looked for her guardian angel to appear, even distantly in the trees beyond the graveyard. But nothing. And, at nights, even when the dream starts promisingly, she never gets farther than the railway station; instead, she waits anxiously inside a train that vibrates ominously but never moves, patrolled by porters who never speak, until it becomes horrifyingly clear that the train is not intended as a vehicle at all, but as a prison.

"Sister, where are you?"' cries Agnes in the dark.

"Right nearby, ma'am," responds Clara through a crack in the bedroom door a few moments later-rather bad-temperedly, if her ears do not deceive her.

"The mail, Mr Rackham, if you please," says Letty next morning, hesitating to enter the master's study. She holds a silver tray piled high with letters and condolence cards.

"Only the white letters, thank you,

Letty," says William, not rising from his seat behind the desk, and beckoning the servant inside with a single flick of his fingers. "Take the cards to Mrs Rackham."

"Yes, Mr Rackham." Letty separates the business correspondence-the "wheat", so to speak-from the black-bordered chaff, deposits the harvest on a small clear area of the master's cluttered desk, and leaves the room.

William rubs his face wearily before he tackles what the day has brought; he's red-eyed with lack of sleep, the grief of losing his brother, the sorrow of wounding his wife, and… well… the ordeal of inconvenience. Nothing, he finds, causes more inconvenience than a death, unless it be a marriage.

Granted, Black Peter Robinson provisioned the household in double-quick time.

Barely twenty-four hours after the order was put in, the boxes of crape dresses, mourning bonnets, jackets, shawls et cetera, were delivered, sped through the post by those magic words "immediately for funeral". But that was the beginning, not the end, of the brouhaha. No sooner were the servants shrouded in black, than they were rushing about shrouding furniture and fixtures, hanging up black curtains, tying black ribbons to bell-pulls and God knows what else. Then the absurdity of choosing a coffin… It's one thing to have had fifty kinds of coat-stand to choose from when furnishing Sugar's rooms, but what manner of man would have the appetite, upon the death of his own brother, to peruse five hundred designs of coffin? "A gentleman with your own high standards, sir, such as we can see from the quality of Rackham's own manufacture, will see the difference immediately, between the Obbligato Oak and the Ex Voto Elm…" Vultures! And why must William be the one responsible for this orgy of otiose expenditure? Why couldn't Henry Calder Rackham have organised it? The old man has little enough to do nowadays. But: "People will be looking to you, William. I've been put out to pasture; in the world's eyes, you're "Rackham" now." Wily old blackguard!

First tyranny and bullying, now flattery!

To what end?-that William Rackham should be the poor devil who must plough through reams of paperwork detailing coffins and coffin mattresses and wreaths and hatbands and God knows how many hundred things else, to be arranged on top of all his other tasks, and in the grip of brotherly grief.

As for the funeral itself…! If there's one thing he would gladly have paid an outrageous sum for, that thing would be a miraculous drug to erase the whole lamentable ceremony from his mind. It was a lugubrious sideshow, an empty ritual to no one's benefit, presided over by the insufferable Doctor Crane in the driving rain. What a shuffling herd of sanctimonious hypocrites attended, with MacLeish-a man Henry couldn't stand while he was alive-foremost among them!

Honestly, the only person outside the family who had any bona fide claim to be there was Mrs Fox, and she was in hospital at the time.

Yet there were two dozen mourners at the graveside. Two dozen surplus dullards and pompous make-weights! The whole performance, what with all the coaches-and-fours, pages, feather-men, et cetera, will have cost William, when all the accounts are settled, no less than l100. And for what?

Not that he begrudges his brother the money; he would gladly have given Henry three times that sum, to buy a decent house, instead of the shabby fire-trap in which he perished. It's just that…

God damn it, what good does it do Henry, to be mourned with so much bother? This mania to bedeck every person and every object in black: what's the point of it? The Rackham house is now as gloomy as a church-gloomier! Servants creep about like sacristans… the bell is muffled, so he can't even hear the damned thing half the time… the whole ritual has a Papist flavour. Really, this kind of doleful charade ought to be left to the Romish Church: just the sort of foolishness they'd imagine might bring a man back from the dead!

Remembered with fondness by all who were blessed to know him-the world's loss was Heaven's gain-that's what William composed for Henry's tombstone, with a little help from the stone-mason. The mourners craned their heads to read it-were they thinking brother could have done better credit to brother? Sentiments look different when they're in cold hard print-the coldest, hardest print imaginable.

William gathers the morning's letters into his hands and shuffles the envelopes, noting the names of the senders: Clyburn Glassmakers; R.t.

Arburrick, Manuf. of Boxes, Crates

Greenham and Bott, Solicitors;

Greenham and Bott, Solicitors; Henry

Rackham (snr); The Society for the Advancement of Universal Enlightenment; G.

Pankey, Esq.; Tuttle and Son,

Professional Salvagers.

This last one William slits open first, and extracts eight folded pages each bearing the letterhead TUTTLE and SON, PROFESSIONAL SALVAGERS. The covering note says:

Esteemed Mr Rackham,

Herewith a list of the items salvaged from 11 Gorham Place, Notting Hill, on September 21, 1875, following the partial incineration of those premises. All items not included in this list may be presumed destroyed or else stolen by unscrupulous persons arriving at the site before Tuttle and Son.