The Crimson petal and the white

THIRTY-FIVE

William Rackham, head of Rackham Perfumeries, slightly the worse for the several stiff brandies he drank after the departure of the police, stands in his parlour staring out at the rain, wondering how many bits of paper are still unaccounted for: how many are still fluttering through the evening air, or plastered to the windows of his Notting Hill neighbours, or being read by astounded pedestrians when they pluck them off hedges and fence-railings.

"This is all we could find, sir," says Letty, raising her voice to compete with the howl of the wind and the susurrating din of the downpour. She adds a handful of muddy pages to the sodden heap in the middle of the parlour carpet, then straightens up, wondering if her master really means to dry out all these wet sheets of paper and read them, or whether he's merely concerned to keep the streets of his neighbourhood clean.

William waves her away, a gesture of grudging thanks and dismissal all in one. These last few salvages from the writings Sugar strewed so spitefully to the wind can't add anything to what he's read already.

Outside the parlour door, a musical murmur of feminine apology suggests that the departing Letty has collided, or almost collided, with Rose. What a household! A full complement of women scurrying upstairs and downstairs, and no one left for them to serve but William Rackham, a man disconsolately circling a mound of muddy paper. A man who, in the space of a year, has gained an abundance of onerous responsibilities, but lost his wife, his brother, his mistress and now-God grant that it not be true!-his only-begotten daughter.

Is there nothing more effectual he can do in the circumstances, than scour the streets for lost pages of a tale in which men are tortured to death?

Maybe he was remiss not to have shown Sugar's scribblings to the police, but it seemed a waste of time, in such an urgent case, to delay the search by even a minute. The absurdity of the thought: to keep barely literate policemen sitting in his parlour, frowning in earnest concentration over the feverish fictions of a madwoman, when they could be out there, in the streets of London, hunting for her in the flesh!

William falls into an armchair, and the whuff of air sends one of Agnes's intricately embroidered squares of fabric flying off the armrest. He retrieves it from the floor and replaces it on the chair, useless though it is.

Then he fetches up a page of Sugar's writings, the page he read first of all, when the first armful of this bizarre debris was delivered to the house. It was flaccid and fragile then, dripping with water, and liable to tear in his hands, but the warmth of the parlour has since dried it, so that it crackles between his fingers like an autumn leaf.

All men are the same, declares the thin, evil-looking scrawl. 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!

Again William purses his lips in distaste at this admission of Sugar's promiscuity. Again he frowns at the accusation that follows, where he is denounced as Vile man, eternal Adam. Yet, fascinated by the sleazy charisma of slander, he reads on.

How smug you are, Reader, if you are a member of the sex that boasts a scrag of gristle in your trousers! You fancy that this book will amuse you, thrill you, rescue you from the horror of boredom (the profoundest horror that your privileged sex must endure) and that, having consumed it like a sweetmeat, you will be left at liberty to carry on exactly as before! Exactly as you have done since Eve was first betrayed in the Garden! But this book is different, dear Reader.

This book is a KNIFE. Keep your wits about you; you will need them!

Oh God, oh God: how is it possible that his daughter has fallen into the clutches of such a viper? Ought he to have guessed sooner than today?

Would another man have come to his senses faster?

It's so obvious now, so terrifyingly self-evident, that Sugar was a madwoman: her unnatural intellect, her sexual depravity, her masculine appetite for business, her reptilian skin… Oh God, and what about the time she crawled, crablike, in pursuit of him, squirting water from her quim!

What was he thinking of, to take this for an arousing bit of tomfoolery, an erotic parlour frolic, when any fool would recognise it as the bestial cavortings of a monster!

How is it possible, though, that God saw fit to install two madwomen in the bosom of his household, when other men are altogether spared? What has he done to deserve-his But no, such questions are a self-indulgence, and fail to solve the problem at hand. His daughter has been abducted, and is being conveyed, likely as not, towards a pitiful fate. Even if Sophie manages to slip out of her captor's grasp, how long can a defenceless innocent survive in the nefarious maze of London? There are predators on every street corner… Not a week goes by that The Times doesn't print reports of a well-dressed child being lured into an alleyway by a kindly-looking matron, then "skinned"-stripped of its boots and clothes-and left for dead. Better by far if Sugar holds Sophie to ransom; whatever she asks, short of ruining him altogether, he will gladly pay!

William presses his thumbs against his eyes, and squeezes. Haunting his brain like a lurid lantern-slide is his recollection of his daughter weeping, her face contorted with grief as she beseeched him not to send Miss Sugar away.

Her tiny hands, too fearful to clutch at him, clutched instead at the edges of her little writing-desk, as if it were a flimsy boat being tossed upon a tumultuous sea. Is this the picture he must carry with him to the grave? The photograph of Sophie taken at Scholefield and Tovey's studio, which he offered to hand over to the police for the purposes of a "WANTED" poster, is nowhere to be found-stolen by Sugar, evidently. Instead, he's had to take scissors to the "family" portrait, and snip Sophie's face from it, despite knowing from his own photographic experience that an image of such tiny dimensions, when enlarged and retouched by careless strangers, is unlikely to bear much resemblance to his daughter…

But again, these are secondary considerations, mere details and distractions, which skirt around the central horror of his predicament. Yesterday his daughter was safely present and accounted for, shyly playing a tune on the piano, taking her first hesitant steps towards forgiving him, towards understanding that he did have her best interests at heart after all; today, she is gone, and his skull resounds with the memory of her weeping.

It's beyond belief, how easily Sugar has committed this crime! Was there really no one to stand in her way? He's interrogated his entire household, interrogated them no less thoroughly than the police, he'll wager. The female servants know nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, swear they were too busy with their appointed tasks to notice the abduction. How can they have the temerity, the gall to assert this? The house is virtually unpeopled, yet it's swarming with servants-what do they do all day, if not laze in armchairs and read tuppenny books in front of the kitchen fire? Could not one of their number be spared from these arduous activities to make sure that the last female Rackham didn't get spirited away by a lunatic?

The males were only marginally more helpful.

Shears confirmed that Miss Sugar didn't leave by the front gate: a thousand thanks, Mr Shears, for this vital information! Cheesman said that he saw, at a distance, Miss Sugar and Miss Sophie go out for a walk, but thought nothing of it, since they often did so in the afternoons. Hearing this, William was sorely tempted to berate the fellow for his lack of imagination, especially since Cheesman knew damn well that this governess was no governess at all. Ah, but there's the rub: Cheesman's illicit knowledge. As the only Rackham employee with a prior awareness of Sugar's true origins, Cheesman could make things damn awkward for him now that the police are involved. So, instead of suggesting that any man with a grain of sense would have asked Sugar a few penetrating questions, William contented himself with enquiring if Cheesman had happened to notice how the governess was dressed, and if she was carrying any luggage.

"I ain't much of a one for noticing the clothes on a woman, sir," said Cheesman, scratching his sandpapery chin. "An' as for luggidge… I didn't see none o' that, neither."

A search of Sugar's bedroom confirmed the coachman's impression: a full suitcase was found standing abandoned near the door. Its contents, when disgorged all over the floor by an incensed William, proved to be everything a woman might need if leaving home: grooming utensils, nightgown, underwear, toiletries (rackham's), the green dress she wore when first she met him. No clue, however, to where she might have gone.

William's hand has begun to tremble, and he hears the fluttery rustle of paper in his lap-the maiden page of Sugar's manuscript he still holds gripped between his fingers. He casts it from him, and butts his head back on the armchair.

Another of Agnes's embroidered trifles-an antimacassar decorated with robins and ornamental R's in honour of her new husband -is nudged off its perch and falls onto his shoulder. Irritably, he tosses it aside; it lands on the piano lid and slips off the lustrously polished wood. A pretty tune it was, that issued from that piano yesterday-and today the body that sat upon that stool has been sucked into a terrifying vacuum.

He grits his teeth, fighting back despair. Sugar and Sophie are out there somewhere. If only he could be granted, for just one hour, a God's-eye-view, an aerial perspective far above the city's rooftops but short of the obscuring clouds; and if only Sugar could be carrying on her person, unknowingly, a halo of guilt, an incandescent mark of criminality that made her glow like a beacon below, so that he could point down from the sky and cry:

There! There she goes!

But no, such fantasies are not the way the world is. An unspecified number of policemen are dawdling through the streets, seeing no farther than the next corner, distracted by brawling hawkers and scurrying thieves, keeping their eyes half-open for a lady with a small child who, unlike all the hundreds of innocent respectable ladies with small children strolling the metropolis, must be arrested. Is this the best they can do, when the daughter of William Rackham is in danger of her life?

He leaps up, lights a cigarette and sucks on the smoke, pacing the room. His fury and agitation are worsened by his awareness that there's nothing to distinguish him from any other man in this situation: he is behaving exactly the same as they would, pacing and smoking, waiting for other people to bring him news that's unlikely to be good, and wishing he hadn't drunk so much brandy.

The muddle of wet papers on the carpet is starting to steam faintly. With a grunt of disgust, he skims a page off the top, finds it unreadably blurred by rain, snatches up another.

"But I am a father!" is what his eyes light upon. "I have a son and a daughter, waiting for me at home!"

"Better you had thought of that before," said I, cutting through his shirt with my razor-sharp dress-making shears. Very intent I was upon my work, swivelling the scissors back and forth across his hairy belly.

The stomach within William's own hairy belly churns in horror and he can read no further. Glowing in his mind is a vision of Sugar as she was when they first met, a gently smiling advocate of the bloodiest revenges.

"Titus Andronicus, now there's a play," she cooed to him across the table in The Fireside, and he failed to hear the warning bell, thinking only that she was making conversation.

Bewitched by her precocious intellect, he imagined there was more to her than that-he took her to be a tender soul, cursed with loneliness, genuinely eager to please. Was he altogether mistaken? Pray God that some of what he saw in her was real; pray God she has a streak of kindness in her, or Sophie is doomed!

Letting the page fall, William stares at the French windows, whose panes rattle and stream with rain. A trickle of water has entered the room through the join, and trembles on the periphery of the floorboards. The carpenter gave his solemn oath that would never happen again! He said those windows were "sealed snug as a lady's locket", damn him! William still has the blackguard's business card; he'll call him back and make him do the job properly!

"If you please, sir," says Letty, rousing him from his impotent wrath with a jolt. "Will you be having any supper?"'

Supper? Supper? How can this imbecile imagine he has the stomach for supper on a night like this? He opens his mouth to scold her, to let her know that it's precisely her numbskulled inability to understand there's more to the world than plum-cake and cocoa that's allowed this calamity to happen in the first place. But then he observes the look of fright on Letty's face, and perceives her honest, canine desperation to please him. Poor girl: she may be a half-wit, but she means well, and the wickedness of women like Sugar isn't her fault.

"Thank you, Letty," he sighs, rubbing his face with his palms. "Some coffee, perhaps. And some bread and butter. Or… or asparagus on toast, if you can manage it."

"No trouble at all, Mr Rackham," chirps Letty, pink with gratitude that here, at last, is something that's in her power to deliver.

Next morning, Rose brings William the silver tray of post, and he rifles through the envelopes, searching for ransom notes. In amongst the business correspondence, there are only three letters without a return address on the back. Too impatient for the nicety of the paper-knife, he rips them open with his fingernails.

One is an appeal on behalf of India's lepers who, according to a Mrs Eccles of Peckham Rye, can be wholly cured if each businessman in Britain earning in excess of a thousand pounds per annum donates just one of those pounds to the post office box address below. Another is from the William Whiteley emporium in Bayswater, expressing confidence that every Notting Hill resident will by now be aware that Whiteley's has added ironmongery to its cornucopia of departments, and that ladies shopping without a male escort and requiring luncheon can safely visit the refurbished refreshment room. The third is from a gentleman living a few hundred yards away in Pembridge Villas, enclosing a filthy sheet of paper decorated with hollyhock emblems and an ornate letterhead too damaged by muddy shoeprints to decipher. Inscribed in faux-Gothic calligraphy is the following list:

Minuet: 10

Gavotte: 9-1/2

Cachucha: 8-1/2

Mazurka: 10

Tarantella: 10 Deportment during engagementsstpartings: 10 Deportment during lulls: 9-1/2 Well done, Agnes!

To which the gentleman from Pembridge Villas adds, on a separate clean sheet:

My wife is of the opinion that this may once have belonged to you.

Rose, when she brings her master the second mail, is discomposed to find him hunched over his study desk, sobbing into his hands.

"Where is she, Rose?"' he groans.

"Where is she hiding?"'

The servant, unaccustomed to such intimacy from him, is caught off-guard.

"Could she have gone home, sir?"' she suggests, nervously fingering the empty silver tray.

"Home?"' he echoes, removing his hands from his face.

"To her mother, sir."

He stares at her, open-mouthed.

Having made himself sweaty and breathless by running from where he left Cheesman's carriage ensnared in the Regent Street traffic, William Rackham knocks at the door of the house in Silver Street-the house that never was, despite the claims of More Sprees in London, in Silver Street proper.

After a long pause, during which he inhales deeply and attempts to calm the beating of his heart, the door is opened a crack. A beautiful brown eye peeps out at him, the focal point of a long, thin plumb-line vignette of alabaster skin, crisp white shirt, and coffee-coloured suit.

A woman's silky voice speaks. "Have you an appointment?"' "I will-wish to see Mrs Castaway."

The eye half-shuts, displaying a luxurious eyelash. "Whether you'll see her or not," replies the voice, honeyed with insolence,

"depends on how bad a boy you've been."

"What!" William cries. "Open the door, madam!"

The strange woman widens the slit until the steel chain that's hung across it is stretched taut. Her mannish hair, oiled flat to her scalp, her coat and trousers-as smart as any swell's-and her Mornington shirt collar complete with cravat, send a chill of disgust down William's spine.

"I will-want a few will-words with

Mrs Castaway," he reiterates.

"You're behind the times, sir," says the Sapphist, bringing a cigarette holder into view, and taking a puff on it, quick as a kiss. "Mrs Castaway is dead. Miss Jennifer Pearce is the proprietress here now."

"It's… it's a-actually news of Sugar that I'm after."

"Sugar's gone, and so are the rest of last year's girls," the woman retorts, smoke leaking from her nostrils. "Out with the old, in with the new, that's our philosophy." And indeed, what Rackham can see of the house's interior is renovated beyond recognition. An unfamiliar face peeks out of the parlour, followed by a body: an exquisitely dressed apparition in blue and gold Algerine.

"It's more-most important I find Sugar," he insists. "If you have any inkling of her will-will-whereabouts, I implore you tell me. I'll pay you will-whatever you ask."

The madam dawdles nearer, lazily swinging a tightly-furled fan as if it were a whip.

"I have two things to say to you, sir," she declares, "and you needn't pay for them. Firstly, the girl you call Sugar has renounced the gay life, as far as we know: you may care to rummage around for her in the kennels of the Rescue Society. Secondly, in our opinion, your soaps and ointments are not improved by having your image stamped upon them. Lord grant us some places where we don't have to see a man's face. Close the door, Amelia."

And the door closes.

For a few moments following this outrage, William considers knocking afresh and this time demanding satisfaction, on pain of police escort. But then he cautions himself that these vile creatures may well be telling the truth about Sugar. She isn't in this house, that's clear enough; and if not here, then where? Is it really conceivable that Sugar might throw herself on the mercy of the Rescue Society? How else to explain the curious coincidence of Emmeline Fox sending Sugar a parcel only a few days ago? Is this yet another example of a clammy collusion between two tragically misguided females?

Determined not to let anger cloud his reason, he wanders away from Mrs Castaway's, back to the hurly-burly of Silver Street.

"Missis play the piano, sir?"'

After an excruciating omnibus ride, in which he sat face to face with a smirking dowager-she with an advertisement for Rackham's Damask Rose Drops above her head, he with an advertisement for Rimmel's Eau de Benzoin above his-William disembarks in Bayswater, and proceeds directly to the long row of modest little houses in Caroline Place. There he steels himself for his next struggle against the tightening bonds of tragedy.

Having received no answer the first time, William knocks louder and more insistently at the door of Mrs Emmeline Fox. The front window is shrouded with curtains, but he has seen two auras-auroras?-of lamplight glowing through the layers of faded lace. Henry's cat, roused by the commotion, has leapt onto the sill and now butts and strokes his furry snout against the cobwebby cross-piece of the window-frame. He looks fully twice the size he was when Mrs Fox first bore him away from the Rackham house.

"Who is it, please?"' Through the wooden barrier comes Mrs Fox's voice, sounding sleepy, although it's two in the afternoon.

"It's William Rackham. May I speak with you?"'

There is a pause. William, windblown and conspicuous in the street, fidgets in frustration; he's well aware that a visit of this kind-unaccompanied man upon lone woman-offends propriety, but surely Mrs Fox, of all people, ought to be prepared to bend the rules?

"I'm not decent," comes her voice again.

William blinks at the brass number on her door, dumbstruck. At the street corner, a dog yaps joyously at a mongrel companion on the other side, and a boy in shirtsleeves casts a suspicious glance at the tubby bearded man with the angry face.

"Couldn't I come to see you," Mrs Fox goes on, "a little later this morning? Or afternoon?"' "It's a matter of great urgency!" protests William.

Another pause, while Henry's cat stretches himself to his full height against the window-panes, revealing a heroic girth and two downy balls.

"Please wait a minute," says Mrs

Fox.

William waits. What the devil is she doing? Ushering Sugar and Sophie out of her back door? Stowing them in a wardrobe? Now that he's made the effort to come here, his initial suspicion that Mrs Fox might hold a clue to Sugar's whereabouts has swollen into the manic conviction that she's harbouring the fugitives herself.

After what seems an age, Mrs Fox opens up to him, and he steps inside her vestibule before she has a chance to object.

"How can I help you, Mr Rackham?"'

With a glance he appraises the state of her house-the musty smell, the subtle patina of dust, the iron bed-frame leaning against the wall, the piles of books on the stairs, the burlap sack marked GLOVES FOR IRELAND blocking access to the broom-cupboard. Mrs Fox stares at him tolerantly, only the slightest bit shamed by her poorly kept house, waiting for him to offer her an explanation for his boorish imposition. She's dressed in a calf-length winter coat with a black fur collar and cuffs, buttoned up to the breastbone. Under that, instead of a blouse or a bodice, she's wearing a man's shirt that's none too clean and far too big for her. Her boots are buttoned only so much as will prevent them sagging like black banana peels off her naked ankles.

"My daughter has been abducted,"

William declares, "by Miss Sugar."

Mrs Fox's eyes widen, but not nearly as much as such shocking news ought to widen them.

Indeed, she looks half-asleep.

"How… extraordinary," she breathes.

"Extraordinary!" he echoes, bewildered at her sang-froid. Why the devil doesn't she swoon, or drop to her knees with her hands clasped to her bosom, or lift her feeble fist to her brow and cry "Oh!"?

"She impressed me as such a nice, well-meaning girl."

Her placid leniency provokes him to anger.

"You were deceived. She's a madwoman, a vicious madwoman, and she has my daughter."

"They seemed fond of each other …"

"Mrs Fox, I don't wish to argue with you.

I-I…" He swallows hard, wondering if there's a way to broach his intentions that doesn't make him out to be an utter barbarian.

There isn't. "Mrs Fox, I wish to satisfy myself that Sugar-that Miss Sugar and my daughter are not in this house."

Emmeline's lips part in astonishment.

"I cannot consent to that," she murmurs.

"Forgive me, Mrs Fox," he replies hoarsely, "but I must." And, before her glare of disapproval can unman him, he stumps past her, into the kitchen, where he immediately collides with an interlocked bale of Henry's chairs. The room, small to begin with, is bizarrely cluttered with two of everything: two stoves, two crockery cupboards, two ice pails, two kettles, and so on and so on. There's a bread-loaf with a knife stuck in it, and fifteen, twenty tins of salmon and corned beef, lined up like soldiers on a bench that's been sponged clean but still shows rosy-yellow stains of blood.

There's barely room to stand, let alone conceal a tall woman and a substantial infant. The garden, clearly visible through the rain-washed kitchen window, is a wilderness of lush, inedible greenery.

Already knowing himself to be in the wrong, but unable to stop, William lurches out of the kitchen and inspects the other rooms. Henry's cat follows at his heels, excited by so much physical activity in a house whose pace is usually so sedate. William dodges the ricks of dusty furniture and does his best to avoid kicking boxes, mounds of books, neatly addressed parcels awaiting only postage stamps, bulbous sacks. Mrs Fox's parlour shows evidence of devoted industry, with dozens of envelopes filled and ready for sending, a map of the metropolis spread open on the writing-desk, and numerous receptacles containing glue, ink, water, tea, and a dark-brown substance with a milky scum on top.

He thunders up the stairs, blushing as much from shame as effort. At the door of the bedroom, a cardboard box is littered with cat turds.

Inside, Mrs Fox's bed is rumpled, and a pair of male trousers, much sullied by cat fur, lies prone on its coverlet.

Hanging from a hat-stand is an immaculate and neatly ironed outfit of bodice, jacket and dress, in the sober colours that suit Mrs Fox best.

William can bear it no longer; his fantasy of wrenching open a wardrobe and, with a cry of triumphal relief, pulling Sugar and his terrified daughter into the light has withered utterly. He returns downstairs, where Mrs Fox stands waiting for him, her face upturned, her eyes gleaming with reproach.

"Mrs Fox," he says, feeling dirtier than the contents of the cardboard box on the landing.

"I-I… How… This violation of your people-privacy. How can you ever from-forgive me?"'

She folds her arms around her chest, and squares her jaw.

"It's not for me to forgive you, Mr

Rackham," she remarks coolly, as though merely reminding him that the Christian faith they nominally share is not of the Catholic brand.

"I was… not in more-my right more-mind," pleads William, shuffling towards the front door, worried that-on top of everything else- he'll step on Henry's cat, which is cavorting around his ankles, biting his trousers. "I-is there not-nothing I can do to redeem more-more-myself in your estimation?"'

Mrs Fox blinks slowly, hugging her bosom harder. Her long face has, William notices belatedly, an odd beauty about it, and-God in heaven, can it be?-is that a smile teasing the corners of her lips?

"Thank you, Mr Rackham," she says suavely. "I'll give your offer serious thought. After all, a man of your resources is ideally matched with the many worthy things that need doing in this world." She gestures towards the philanthropic jumble of her house. "I've taken on more work than I can manage, as I'm sure you've noticed. So… Yes, Mr Rackham, I look forward to your assistance in the future."

And, unorthodox to the last, she-not he-opens the door, and bids him good day.

"Miaow!" concurs Henry's cat, prostrating himself happily at his mistress's feet.

Chastened to the point where he would welcome a thunderbolt from heaven to blast him painlessly to a cinder, William returns to his own house. Have the police called? No, the police haven't called. Does he want his luncheon warmed? No, he does not want his luncheon warmed. Coffee, bring him coffee.

Unendurable though the tension is, he has no choice but to endure it, and to carry on his business as normal. More mail has arrived, none of it regarding Sugar or his daughter. One letter is from Grover Pankey, Esq., calling him ill-bred, and severing all connexion with him. So deranged are William's spirits that he considers challenging Pankey to a duel: the ugly old cur is probably a crack shot, and would put William out of his misery with one puff from his pistol. But no, he must keep his head about him, and make overtures to that Cheadle fellow in Glamorgan. Cheadle's ivory pots are light as sea-shells, but strong enough to survive being squeezed hard in one's fist. William knows: he's tried it.

He tears open a letter with an unfamiliar name and address on the back: Mrs F. De Lusignan, 2, Fir-street, Sydenham.

Dear Mr Rackham, the good lady hails him, My hair went grey through trouble and sickness, but one bottle of your Raven Oil brought it back to a splendid black, as nice as it was in my young days. All my friends remark upon it. You may make what use you like of this letter.

William blinks stupidly, poised on the brink of laughter and convulsive weeping. This is the sort of devout testimonial he and Sugar have invented out of thin air for Rackham advertisements, and here it is: 100 per cent genuine. Mrs F. De Lusignan, admiring her dyed hair in a looking-glass in Sydenham, God bless her! She deserves a whole box of Raven Oil-or perhaps that's what she's tickling him for.

The remainder of the mail is strictly business, yet he forces himself to chew through it, each finished letter wearying him a little more like a spoonful of ash swallowed with the greatest difficulty. But then, in the middle of replying to Miss Baynton in the Toilet Department of Harrod's, he suddenly realises, in a blinding flash of revelation, where Sugar must have gone, and where, even now, his daughter tremblingly awaits her fate.

By the time William finally reaches Mrs

Leek's house in Church Lane, St Giles, the sun is low in the sky, casting an incongruous golden glow on the ancient, ramshackle buildings. The convoluted exoskeletons of iron piping shine like monstrous necklaces, the poultices of stucco are butter-yellow on the walls, the clothes-lines flap their ragged burden like courtly pennants.

Even the cracked attic windows tilting skew-whiff under the roofs blaze with reflected light-a light that's doomed to fade in a matter of minutes.

However, William is not inclined to admire the view. His immediate concern is whether the address from which a coachman, once upon a time, was instructed to pick up an old man in a wheelchair for the onward journey to Rackham's lavender farm in Mitcham, is the self-same address at whose door he stands now, rapping the blistered wood with his fist. He only has Sugar's word, after all, that the old man really lived here, and this is not the sort of street where a well-dressed man can safely ask for directions.

After an eternity, the door swings open, and there, squinting through clouded pince-nez in the gloom, sits Colonel Leek.

"Forgotten something?"' he wheezes, taking William to be a recently departed customer.

Then: "Oh, it's you."

"May I come in?"' says William, concerned that even now, Sugar may be shepherding Sophie through the filthy interior of this house towards a back exit.

"Oh, by all means, by all means," declares the old man, with exaggerated politesse.

"We'd be honoured. A man as exalted as you, sir. Mr Forty Acres! Glorious, glorious…" And he spins on his axles, then wheels himself along a rancid runway of carpet that sighs with damp. "1813: prospects for farmers never better! 1814, 1815, 1816: frosts the like of which was never seen before, ruined crops from shore to shore, bankruptcy aplenty! Adam Tipton, of South Carolina, known in 1863 as the Cotton King! In 1864, after the coming of the weevil, found with a bullet in his brain!"

"I've come to see Sugar," blurts William, following on behind. Maybe if he states his wish forthrightly, like a no-nonsense requisition, he'll jolt the old blackguard into divulging more than he should.

"She never came back for me, the trollop," scoffs Colonel Leek. "A woman's promise is like a Pathan's ceasefire. I never got my snuff, never got a second look at your glorious lavender farm, sir."

"I thought you disliked the experience," remarks William, momentarily peering up the ill-lit stairwell before stepping across the threshold of the parlour. "I seem to recall you complaining you were as good as… abducted."

"Och, it made a nice change," bleats the old man, showing neither discomposure nor inclination to nibble at the bait. He has come to rest in a snug corner of the room, adding his shabby bulk to the general clutter of outmoded china and military junk. "My very first lavender farm!

Powerful educ.a-a-aytional." He bares dark ruminant teeth in an ingratiating leer.

A woman has descended the creaking stairs and now pokes her face into the room. She's a pretty little thing, no spring chicken but well-preserved, with a good-humoured kindly face and a shapely body, clad in the fashionable colours of two Seasons ago.

"Was you lookin' for me, sir?"' she enquires of the stranger, somewhat surprised at the phenomenon of trade coming to her rather than she soliciting it.

"I'm looking for Sugar," says William. "A regular visitor to this house, I believe."

The woman shrugs sadly. "That was a long time ago, sir. Sugar's found a rich man to take care of "er."

William Rackham stands straight and balls his fists. "She has stolen my daughter."

Caroline ponders a moment, wondering if this man means what he says, or if "stolen my daughter" is one of those fancy turns of phrase that educated people use to signify some loftier notion.

"Your daughter, sir?"'

"My daughter has been abducted. Taken by your friend Sugar."

"Did you know," interjects Colonel Leek with lugubrious enthusiasm, "that of every ten persons drowned in England and Wales, six will be children aged ten years or less?"'

Caroline watches the well-dressed stranger's eyes widen in offence, and just as she's thinking how much he reminds her of someone she once knew, she twigs that this fellow is the perfumer Rackham, the brother of her gentle parson. The memory of that sweet man fetches her a sly blow in the pit of her stomach, for she's had no warning, and memories can be cruel when they give you no warning. She flinches, claps one hand protectively to her breast, and cannot meet the accusing glower of the man who stands before her.

"I'll not be taken for a fool!" yells Rackham. "You know more than you admit to, I can tell!"

"Please, sir…" she says, turning her head away.

As surely as if a lid had been lifted from a vat, William detects the heady stench of a secret that can no longer be kept hidden. At last he's on the right track! At last this affair is moving towards the explosive d@enouement he has been craving-the revelation, the release of tension, that will shake the universe in one fierce convulsion, and then allow everything to fall back into its rightful place, restored to normality! With a grunt of determination, he pushes past the woman, strides out of the parlour, and begins to stamp up the stairs.

"Yaaarrr! Sevenpence!" shouts Colonel

Leek, clawing the air after him.

"Watch yer step, sir!" shouts Caroline.

"Some o' them stairs-"'

But already it's too late.

Night has fallen over St Giles, over London, over England, over a fair fraction of the world. Lamp-lighters are roaming the streets, solemnly igniting, like an army of Catholic worshippers, innumerable votive candles fifteen feet in height. It's a magical sight, for anyone looking down on it from above, which, sadly, no one is.

Yes, night has fallen, and only those creatures who are of no consequence are still working. Chop-houses are coming to life, serving ox cheeks and potatoes to slop-shop drudges.

Taverns, ale-houses and gin palaces are humming with custom. The respectable shop-keepers are shutting up their premises, locking the stanchions and bolting the latches; they snuff out the lights, condemning their unsold merchandise to the penance of another dismal night of self-contemplation. In the lower reaches of society, poorer, shabbier creatures labour on in their homes, gluing matchboxes, sewing trousers, making tin toys by candlelight, pushing neighbours' washing through the mangle, squatting over basins with their skirts rucked up to their shoulders. Let them toil, let them grub, let them disappear into obscurity, you haven't time to see any more.

Refined society basks in a warm atmosphere of gas and paraffin, and its servants are stoking fires for the comfort of those souls who'll now while away the remaining hours till bedtime with embroidery, dining, scrapbook-pasting, letter-writing, novel-reading, parlour games, prayers. Formal calls of an intimate nature have ended with the toll of a bell, and the conversations thus interrupted, however interesting they may have grown, cannot be resumed until the appointed time tomorrow. Well-behaved infants are being led by nurses into the presence of their mothers, to be petted for an hour or two before being whisked upstairs again to waiting beds. Unmarried gentlemen like Bodley and Ashwell, not in the least disadvantaged by not having wives, are spreading napkins over their knees in the Caf`e Royal, or reclining into armchairs at their clubs with a sherry. In the grandest houses, cooks, kitchenmaids and footmen are limbering up for the complicated challenge of delivering piping hot food through long draughty corridors to dining-rooms at exactly the correct junctures. In humbler households, small families accept what is set down before them, and thank God for it.

In Church Lane, St Giles, where no Gods are being thanked, and no children are being bathed, and gas-lamps are few and far between, William Rackham is being led along in near-blackness, stumbling and limping on wet, mucky cobble-stones. He has his arm slung around the shoulder of a woman, and with every step, he groans in pain and mortification. One trouser-leg is torn and sopping-wet with blood.

"I'm all right!" he cries, rearing away from the woman, only to seize hold of her again when his injured leg fails to support him.

"Just a little further, sir," pants

Caroline. "We're almost there."

"Hail me a cab," says William, blundering forward in a haze of his own spent breath.

"All I need is a cab."

"Cabs don't come 'ere, sir," says

Caroline. "Just a little further."

A sudden gust of wind is seeded with sleet, stinging William's cheeks. His ears are throbbing, swollen, as though he's been boxed across them by an angry parent.

"Let me go!" he groans, but it's he who's hanging on.

"You need a doctor, sir," Caroline points out, taking his peevishness in her stride.

"You'll go to a doctor, won't you?"'

"Yes, yes, yes," he groans, incredulous at how one rotten stair could have reduced him to this state.

The lights of New Oxford Street shine up ahead. Muffled voices swirl through the wind, weary babble from the Horseshoe Brewery's workers being discharged into the night. Their scarecrow silhouettes loom through the drizzle as they cross the boundary from Bloomsbury to where they belong.

"Oi, parson!" someone shouts, and there's raucous laughter.

Caroline escorts William Rackham to the edge of the great thoroughfare, under a street-lamp, then tugs him back so that he doesn't stumble into the gutter.

"I'll stay with you, sir," she says matter-of-factly, "till a cab comes.

Else you'll get yerself killed."

In the brighter light, William takes stock of his leg-ragged and revoltingly clammy with blood-and then of the woman beside him. Her face is impassive, a mask; she has every reason to despise him; yet here she is, showing him charity.

"Here-take this," he says, clumsily pulling a handful of coins from his pocket-shillings, sovereigns, small change-and pressing them upon her. Wordlessly she accepts, and secretes the money in a slit in her skirts, but still she stays by his side.

Shamed, he tries to stand on both feet, and a shock of pain shoots up through one leg, as if a vengeful phantom lurking underground has fired a bullet straight through his heel towards his heart.

He reels, and feels the woman's arm hard around his waist.

Tears spring to his eyes; the lights of New Oxford Street blur to an ectoplasmic shiver. His body shivers too, in fear of its own injuries: what sort of shape will he be in when this is all over? Is he destined to be a cripple, a figure of fun who lurches lamely from armchair to armchair, who writes like a child, and stutters like an imbecile? What has become of the man he once was? A wraith-like shadow passes by on the opposite side of the street, purposefully fleet, pallbearer-black.

He shuts his eyes tight, but the apparitions continue to come: a tall thin woman wrapped in green silk, hurrying through the rain without a bonnet or umbrella. For an instant, as she passes under a street-lamp, her luxuriant surplus of hair glows orange like a flame, and he fancies her smell is flicked towards him on the breeze, like no other odour on earth.

Even as she passes, she trails her fingers behind her, wiggling them as if inviting him to take hold.

Trust me, she appears to be telling him, and Lord, how he longs to trust her again, to press his feverish face between her breasts. But no: it's Sophie she's beckoning to-his daughter, unrecognisably filthy, dressed in rags, a barefoot guttersnipe from a cautionary slideshow. Steady, steady: it's only a fantasy, a trick of the imagination: he'll have her back yet, safe in the bosom of the family.

Next to pass is a grisly female phantasm, a naked corpse of white flesh much disfigured with crimson gashes and lavender bruises. Her chest gapes open, revealing a palpitating heart between her full breasts, and she dances gracefully on the smutty cobble-stones.

Though his eyes are still shut, William turns his face away and buries it in the soft shoulder beside his cheek.

"Don't go to sleep on me, sir,"

Caroline warns him amiably, adjusting her stance, squeezing him hard until he rouses. He looks into her face again; it's not quite so impassive now; he detects a weary half-smile. Her shawl has slipped, and the sweat of exertion twinkles in the hollows of her collarbones; her flesh, though firm, reveals some wrinkles at the neck. Peeping up from the swell of her left breast is a vivid scar, an old burn or scald, shaped like an arrowhead. There's a story behind that scar, no doubt, if she had a mind to tell it.

Ach, how warm she is, and how firmly her hand is pressed in the small of his back! How thick and glossy her hair is, for a woman no longer young! Now that they've been at rest here for a while, he's aware of her body breathing against his own-how divinely she breathes! Helplessly, he adjusts the rhythm of his own inhalations to coincide with hers.

They stand together under the street-lamp, veiled inside a gently swirling column of light, their short shadows joined indistinguishably, a strange black chimera cast upon the cobbles, female on the left side, male on the right.

"You really are more-more-most kind," he tells her, longing to be lying down in a cosy bed. "I don't know how to-"' "Here's yer cab, sir!" Caroline says cheerfully, patting his arse as rescue comes trundling into view at last. And before he has a chance to make her life too complicated, she nimbly slips from his embrace and hurries back towards Church Lane, out of his reach, out of yours.

"Goodbye!" sings her voice, for her body is already gone, blotted into the unreadable darkness.

And to you also: goodbye.

An abrupt parting, I know, but that's the way it always is, isn't it? You imagine you can make it last for ever, then suddenly it's over. I'm glad you chose me, even so; I hope I satisfied all your desires, or at least showed you a good time. How very long we've been together, and how very much we've lived through, and still I don't even know your name!

But now it's time to let me go.