The Crimson petal and the white

FROM

Sugar reads the greeting several times over, racking her brains for compliments. How strange it feels to be shown one of William's ideas as a fait accompli, without having been consulted beforehand!

"Very striking," she says. "And well-worded. Yes, awfully good."

"It's a way of getting my Christmas greeting in the newspaper well in advance," he explains, "before my rivals put theirs in, you see?"' "Mm," she says. "They'll be wishing they'd thought of it, won't they?"' Flaring in Sugar's imagination, over and over, is the sickening picture of Agnes thrusting a filthy spade downwards in the dark, and the blade gashing into the pale flesh of her feet.

"No doubt they'll be wise to me next Christmas," William is saying.

"But this year, the advantage is mine."

"You'll think of something even cleverer next year," Sugar assures him. "I'll help you."

They kiss again, and this time he seems ready to proceed. She slides her hand inside his trousers, and his cock is stiffening even as she gropes for it.

"When are you going to put me out of my misery?"' she purrs into his ear, managing to modulate a tremor of hysteria into a trill of lust. Yet, when she lifts her leg to climb onto him, she's surprised to feel how wet her sex is. William is behaving like a brute, it's true, but he's deranged by worry, and his heart's in the right place, she's sure, and-thank God-he still desires her. If she can only fuck him now, and hear his helpless groan of surrender as he spends, everything can still be all right.

Her pantalettes are around her ankles, she's lowering her arse into his lap, she gasps with relief as the head of his prick nudges into her- when suddenly there's a sharp rap at the door.

Without a moment's hesitation she catapults off his body, yanking up her drawers even as she regains her balance. William is busy likewise. Their mutuality, their synchronicity, as they straighten their clothing and rearrange their bodies into decorous poses, is as instinctive and fluent as any act of eroticism.

"Enter!" says Rackham hoarsely.

It's Letty again, looking embarrassed this time -not because of her master and the governess, whose interrupted discussion is plainly a model of propriety, but because of the onerous burden of the message she has to deliver.

"It's… Mrs Rackham, sir," she cringes. "She wants you, sir."

"Wants me?"'

"Yes, sir. As a matter of urgency, sir."

William stares across the room with his heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes, reluctant to concede the hardness of his luck.

"Very well, Letty," he says.

"I'll be there directly."

The servant retreats, and William steps out from behind his desk, fingering his tie and the collars of his shirt.

"How flattering," he murmurs sardonically to Sugar as he trudges past her,

"to be wanted by so many women at once."

Agnes's bedroom, so often darkened in the daylight hours, is ominously bright, its curtains parted to admit the maximum amount of sun. Mrs Rackham should be doped insensible, but she's fully conscious, sitting bolt upright in bed, a spotless fresh night-gown buttoned up to her chin, with a big bulge half-way down the bed, where her heavily bandaged feet are shrouded under the sheets. Her face is calm, although there are a few scratches on her cheek from her scuffle with her husband, Shears and Rose in their attempts to drag her back into the house. Her improbably blue eyes are rimmed with red.

All these things William notices the instant he walks into her room. These things, and the fact that Clara is standing sentinel by the bed-head, a guard of honour at her mistress's side.

"All right, Clara," says William,

"you may go."

The servant curtsies negligibly, a mere twitch of the torso.

"Mrs Rackham says I am to stay, sir."

"She's my maid, William," Agnes reminds him. "I think I'm entitled to one person in my house who has my best interests at heart."

William squares his shoulders. "Agnes …" he begins to warn, then thinks better of it.

"What would you like to discuss?"'

Agnes takes a long, deep breath. "I have just suffered a most humiliating rebuff," she says, "from my own coachman."

"Cheesman?"'

"I believe we have only one coachman,

William, unless you have others squirrelled away for your own amusement."

Was that a smirk on Clara's face? Damn her impudence, the snotty little minx. He'll see her on the street yet, for this…

"Has Cheesman been impertinent to you, my dear?"' enquires William with the utmost politesse.

"He's as well-bred as a creature of his sort can be," demurs Mrs Rackham. "My humiliation is your doing."

"My doing?"'

"Cheesman says that he's been forbidden to take me to church."

"It's Tuesday, my do-"'

"My church," snaps Agnes. "In

Cricklewood."

William shuts his eyes for a moment, the better to imagine Clara banished into destitution, or spontaneously combusting on the spot.

"Well…" he sighs, "it's actually on Doctor Curlew's orders, my dear."

Agnes repeats the words, giving each one the fastidiously disdainful attention it deserves.

"Doctor. Curlew's. Orders."

"Yes," says William, marvelling at how it can be, that he, William Rackham, a man who has no difficulty turning aside the wrath of a loutish dock-worker, should so lose his nerve when faced with the displeasure of his elfin wife. How did the sweet nature with which she once delighted him turn so bitter?

"Doctor Curlew feels that it's not good for your health to be pursuing… ah… to be of a faith other than… ah…"

"I need a miracle, William," she says, speaking very distinctly, as though to an exceptionally slow-witted child. "A miracle of healing. I need to pray in a church which God recognises, and which Our Lady and Her angels are known to visit. Do you recall ever witnessing a miracle in your church, William?"'

Clara's hands, until now folded behind her back, move to her front-an innocuous fidget which nonetheless strikes William as a gesture of mockery.

"I…" (he gropes for a rueful quip to steer the conversation into less turbulent waters) "I probably wasn't paying enough attention, I must confess."

"Confess?"' hisses Agnes, her eyes opening to their widest circumference. "Yes, I agree you must confess. But you never will, will you?"' "Agnes…" Once more he braces himself for a quarrel; once more he resists the goad.

"Can't we discuss this after you're better? Whether your church is Catholic or Anglican, you're in no fit state to visit either of them now. Your poor feet need rest and cosseting."

A shrewd line of reasoning suddenly occurs to him: "And after all, how would you feel, Agnes, being carried into church like a piece of heavy baggage, with everyone watching?"'

This appeal to Agnes's social sensibilities evaporates in the air, blasted by a look of indignation. "I shouldn't feel like a piece of baggage," she quavers. "I should feel… divine. Anyway, I'm not heavy: how dare you say so."

William realises that his wife, for all her apparent composure, is in the grip of delirium. Arguing further with her is futile, and will only prolong Clara's entertainment.

"Agnes," he declares gruffly, "I…

I will not allow it. You'd be a laughing stock, and me along with you. You're to remain at home, until-"'

With a cry of anguish, she casts the bed-sheets aside, and crawls along the mattress to the foot of the bed, with the scurrying agility of an urchin. She grips the brass curlicues of the bed-frame, and wails to him, tears springing onto her cheeks.

"You promised me! To love, cherish and honour me! "I don't care a fig for what the world thinks," you said. "Those other girls are dull to the bone," you said. "My odd little sprite," you used to call me! "What our society fears, it calls eccentric"-that was another of your fine sayings. "The future can only be interesting if we have the courage to be interesting-and that means putting the world's nose out of joint!"

William stands slack-jawed with astonishment.

He'd thought the night he's just endured was the bizarrest ordeal of his life, but this… this is worse. To have his youthful pretensions, his callowest pronouncements, resurrected from oblivion, and flung back at him from his wife's mouth!

"I… I'm looking after you as best I can," he pleads. "You're ill, and I want to take care of you."

"Take care of me?"' she exclaims.

"When have you ever taken care of me? Look!

Look! What do you propose to do about this?"'

She throws herself back on her rear, lifts her night-dress, and frantically starts unwrapping the bandages from her feet.

"Agnes! No!" He lurches over to her, and seizes her wrists, but her hands continue to squirm and writhe near her ankles.

Tentacles of bloodstained bandage unfurl from her feet, and there's a glimpse of bruised blue flesh, and a sticky occlusion of crimson.

He also can't help glimpsing, between the stick-thin legs that Agnes has so unthinkingly uncovered, the blonde wisps of her sex.

"Please, Agnes," he whispers, striving to remind her, with furious nods of his brow, the mute witness of Clara behind them. "Not in front of a servant…!"

She laughs hysterically, a terrible, bestial sound.

"My body is turning into… raw meat," she cries, in outrage and disbelief,

"my soul is almost lost, and you are concerned about the servants?"' She struggles desperately against his restraining grip, while her feet churn into the bed-clothes and blood begins to smear the snowy linen. Her bosom presses against his arm; he's reminded of the fullness of her breasts compared to Sugar's, the cherubic compactness of her body, how fervently he once anticipated the blessed day when he could have it in his arms at last…

Abruptly Agnes stops fighting him. They are shoulder to shoulder, almost nose to nose.

Panting and red-faced, spittle on her chin, she fixes him with a stare of righteous disgust.

"You are hurting me," she says softly.

"Go play with someone else."

He releases her wrists, and she crawls to the head of the bed, trailing ribbons of tainted bandage. In the wink of an eye, she's back under the covers, her head on the pillow, her cheek resting on one palm. She sighs stoically, like a child being pestered after bedtime.

"I…" he stammers, but no words come.

He turns to Clara, imploring her, with a gesture of impotence, not to misuse the power this incident has delivered into her hands.

She nods, inscrutable.

"I'll attend to her, Mr Rackham," she assures him, and with that, it appears he's dismissed.

Numb with wretchedness, William shambles back to his study. There's no one to receive him there, Sugar having evidently returned to the school-room when she could wait for him no longer.

Well, so be it. He sniffs the air.

Cigar smoke. Burning coal from the hearth.

Sugar's sex.

He stands in front of the flickering hearth, leans his forehead against the wall, opens his trousers, and abuses himself, moaning in distress.

Within a few seconds, his seed is spurting out, falling directly onto the sizzling coals. His belly is fat; the hairs on it are prematurely grey; what a ridiculous creature he is; no wonder he is despised.

Orgasm over, his penis shrivels to a slimy scrag, and he stows it away.

Shoulders slumped, he turns and, at the sight of his paper-strewn desk, his heart sinks further. So much to do, and his life is falling apart at the seams! He sits heavily in his chair, and covers his face in his hands.

Steady, steady. Nothing will be gained if he loses his grip now.

Hardly conscious of what he is doing, he slides open the capacious bottom drawer of his bureau, where he keeps the correspondence that's been answered but which he feels unable to discard. In amongst it is other flotsam-More Sprees in London, for example, and… this. He pulls it out, with trembling fingers.

It's a much-thumbed photograph of Agnes -Agnes Unwin, as she was then-taken by him at a summer picnic on the banks of the Thames.

A fine photograph, and quite well printed too, given his inexperience in the darkroom at the time.

What he particularly likes is the way Agnes (on his instruction) kept absolutely still, thus ensuring that her serenely lovely face was captured in sharp detail, while her companions -sons of the aristocracy, idiots all-fiddled with their trouser-cuffs and gossiped amongst themselves, thus condemning their faces to a blur of anonymity. This fellow here, with the carnation in his buttonhole, is possibly that jackass Elton Fitzherbert, but the others are grey, murky phantoms, serving only to highlight William Rackham's radiant beloved.

Countless times he's stared at this photograph, reminding himself that it captures an incontestable truth, a history that cannot be rewritten.

Unaware that he's weeping, he continues to scrabble through the papers in his bottom drawer.

Somewhere here, unless he's very much mistaken, he still has a perfumed letter Agnes wrote to him, mere days before their marriage. In it, she tells him how she adores him, how each day that she must wait before she's his wife is an agony of delicious anticipation-or words to that effect.

He rummages and rummages, through handbills of forgotten theatre performances, invitations to art galleries, unread letters from his brother quoting Scripture, threats from creditors long repaid.

But the scented proof of Agnes's passion for him … this eludes him. Is it really possible that all trace of her devotion has vanished? He bends his face down and sniffs. Old paper; the soil on his shoes; Sugar's sex.

Losing heart, he pulls a crumpled sheet of paper from the very bottom of the drawer, just in case it's the one. Instead, he finds it to be written in his own hand, an abandoned draft of a letter from a few years ago, to Henry Rackham Senior:

Dear Father,

In the fluster occasioned by the birth of my daughter and the emergency medical attentions required by my wife subsequently, I have naturally had little time to devote to the Responsibilities which await me. Of course I intend to embrace these with my customary enthusiasm as soon as the first opportunity arises; in the meantime, however, I am the unhappy recipient of a letter from our Solicitors…

With a grunt of pain, William crushes the page in his fist, and casts it to one side.

Christ, he's twice the man he was then! How can Fate be so cruel as to rob him of Agnes's admiration, when he was once a weak-chinned groveller, and is now the master of a great concern?

Is there no justice?

Stung to action, he hunches over his desk, lays a fresh sheet before him, and dips pen in ink. William Rackham, head of Rackham Perfumeries, doesn't wallow in self-pity: he gets on with his work. Yes: his work! What was he attending to, before…? Ah yes: the Woolworth question…

To Henry Rackham, Snr., he writes, knuckling his brow to summon forth the details that were so clear to him twelve hours ago, when the nightmare had yet to begin.

It has come to my attention that, in 1842, Rackham Perfumeries leased to a certain Thomas Woolworth a large tract of arable land in Patcham, Sussex, the concern having been judged (by yourself, I presume) too bothersome to cultivate. I have found but slender documentation of this transaction, and trust that more exists. I therefore request that you convey to me whatever papers may relate to this matter or any other Rackham matter, for that matter, which you may hitherto have withheld…

William frowns at the unfortunate cluster of matters in this last sentence. It's the sort of thing Sugar could help him with, if she were here; but she, too, has slipped from his grasp.