The Crimson petal and the white

SIX

Just three words, if spoken by the right person at the moment, are enough to make infatuation flower with marvellous speed, popping up like a nub of bright pink from unfurling foreskin. Nor need those three magic words be "I love you". In the case of Miss Sugar and George W. Hunt, venturing out into dark wet streets after heavy rain, walking side by side under gas-lamps and a drained empty sky, the three magic words are these:

"Watch your step."

It's Sugar who utters them; she's taken hold of her companion's hand and, for a moment, steers him closer to her, away from a puddle of creamy vomit quivering on the cobbles. (it's probably brown, but the gas-light adds a yellowish tinge.) William registers everything at once: the vomit, barely visible inside his own sprawling shadow; his feet, stumbling, almost tripping on the hems of Sugar's skirts; the gentle tug on his hand; the faint hubbub of strangers' voices nearby; the sobering chill of the air after the boozy warmth of The Fireside; and those three words: "Watch your step."

Spoken by anyone other than Sugar, they would be words of warning, or even threat. But, issuing from her slender throat, modulated by her mouth and tongue and lips, they are neither. They are an invitation to be safe, a murmured welcome into a charmed embrace that wards off all misfortune, an affectionate entreaty to keep firm hold of the woman who knows the way.

William disengages his hand from hers, worried that a respectable person of his acquaintance might, even at this late and unlikely hour, chance upon him here. Yet his freed hand tingles, through the leather of his gloves, at the after-feel of her grip-strong as a cocky young man's handshake.

Watch your step. The words are still resounding in his head. Her voice… husky, yes… but such a musical tone, an ascending trio of notes, do re fa, an imperfect but delightful arpeggio of feminine breath, an air played on the fl@ute d'amour. What must a voice like that sound like in the crescendo of passion?

Sugar is moving faster now, gliding over the dark cobbles at a speed he would reserve for daytime. Beneath her skirts, she must be taking deplorably unfeminine steps, to move at the same pace as him: all right, granted, he may not be the tallest of men, but his legs are surely no shorter than normal-indeed, if the stunted lower classes were admitted into the equation, might his legs not be longer than average? And what's that sound? He's not… panting, is he? Christ Almighty, he mustn't pant. It's all the beer he's drunk, yes, and the exhaustion he's been suffering lately, mounting up. Even as Sugar beckons him, with an almost imperceptible gesture, to follow her into a dark, narrow close, he turns his head back into the fresher air and sniffs deeply, trying to snatch a second wind.

Maybe the girl is hurrying because she fears he'll grow impatient, or that he'll baulk at following her into a dark passage of uncertain length harbouring God knows what. But William has entered many pleasure houses from alleys as dark and narrow as this one; he has, in his time, descended stone stairwells so deep that he began to wonder if his paramour's boudoir was burrowed straight into one of Bazalgette's great sewers.

No, he is not unreasonably fastidious, and not the claustrophobic sort, although naturally he has a preference for bright, airy brothels (who wouldn't?). However, he's so smitten with Sugar that, to be honest, he'd willingly follow her into the rankest cloaca.

Or would he? Has he lost all reason? This girl is nothing more than a…

"This way."

He hastens after her, following the words like a scent trail. Oh my, her voice is like an angel's! An exquisite whisper leading him through the dark. He would follow that whisper even if there was nothing attached to it. But she is more than a whisper-she is a woman with a brain in her head!

He has never met anyone remotely like her, except himself. Like him, she thinks Tennyson isn't up to much lately and, like him, she believes trans-Atlantic cables and dynamite will change the world far more than Schliemann's rediscovery of Troy, despite all the fuss. And what a mouth and throat she has! "Anything you ask of me": that's what she promised him.

"We're here," she says now.

But where is "here"? He looks all about him, trying to get his bearings. Where is Silver Street? Is Mrs Castaway's address yet another of More Sprees' falsifications? But no: aren't those the lights of Silver Street shining on the far side of this modest Georgian house? This is just a back entrance, yes? It's not a bad-looking place, solid and without any evidence of decay, although it's hard to tell in the dark. But the contours of the house look straight and symmetrical, defined by the lights of Silver Street beyond, a haze of gaseous radiance around the gables and rooftop like a… what's the word he's looking for? an aurora? an aura?-one is spiritualist nonsense, the other a scientific phenomenon, but which?… aur-our-aur… The Fireside's deceptively frothy ale has numbed his brain's voice and given his thoughts a stutter.

"Home," he hears Sugar say.

A complicated knock-the tattoo of secrecy -admits Sugar and her companion into Mrs Castaway's dimly lit hallway. William expects to see a spoony-man holding the inner doorknob, a leering stubbly-faced ape such as ushered him out the back door in Drury Lane, but he is wrong. Standing there, a good eighteen inches lower than his first gaze, is a small boy, blue-eyed and as innocent looking as a shepherd's lad from a Nativity scene.

"Hello, Christopher," says Sugar.

"Please come into the front room, sir," says the boy, reciting his line primly, casting a glance of infant collusion at Sugar.

Intrigued, William allows himself to be led into the sombre but sumptuously papered vestibule, towards a door that stands ajar, emitting warmth and light. The child runs ahead, disappearing into the glow.

"Not yours, is he?"' William asks

Sugar.

"Of course not," she replies, her eyebrows raised, mock-scandalised, her lips curving into a grin. "I'm a spinster."

In the dimness of the vestibule, the glow of the door they're approaching illuminates Sugar's mouth strangely, outlining the rough, peeling texture of her lips in pure white.

William wants to feel those feathery lips closing around the shaft of his prick. More urgently, though, he wants to empty his bladder -no, not into her mouth, anywhere-and then lay himself down to sleep.

As he enters the parlour, it's as if he is already dreaming. An obscure female figure sits in a far corner, face turned away from him, smoke rising from her hair. A tentative violoncello is playing, invisible and plaintive, then stops with an asthmatic scrape of catgut. The upper parts of the walls, seamed with a dado rail, are painted lurid peach, and crowded with framed miniatures; the lower parts are papered with a dense design of strawberries, thorns and red roses. And, in the centre of the parlour, directly under a bombastic bronze chandelier, sits Mrs Castaway.

She is an old woman, or badly preserved, or both. Dressed for going out of doors, bonnet and all, she is clearly not about to do so, stationed snug as a judge behind a narrow desk. The desk is strewn with snippets of paper, cuttings from journals. A pair of oversized dressmaking scissors snickers in her hand, paring away an almost substanceless rind of paper which slips over her knuckles and flutters into her lap. She looks up, stops scissoring, in honour of her guest's arrival; carefully she disentangles the shears from her fingers and lays the gleaming metal to one side.

From head to hems she is decked out entirely in one colour: scarlet, which William has never seen on any other English woman in his lifetime. Her mouth, too, is painted the same hue, the hundred tiny wrinkles around her lips tainted, so that when she smiles in welcome the effect is disturbingly like a furry red caterpillar responding to stimulus.

At first William thinks she must be insane, a mad old witch compelled to make bizarrely manifest her status as a "scarlet" woman, but then he detects a certain dignity about her, a self-possession, that makes him more inclined to think her attire is an elaborate joke.

She wouldn't be the first madam he's met with her tongue planted in her cheek. In any case (he notices now) the scarlet is softened by one dissenting shade, that of the veil pinned back onto her bonnet. This is the same colour exactly as the Rackham Perfumeries emblem, the dusty pink rose.

"Welcome to Mrs Castaway's, sir," she says, white teeth seeming to revolve like cogs behind her cochineal lips. "I am Mrs Castaway, and these are my girls." She waves one hand vaguely about, but William cannot yet take his eyes off her. "The use of the room upstairs will cost you five shillings, though what happens there, and for how long, is for you and Sugar to put a value to. If you wish, there can be good wine waiting for you, for an additional two shillings."

"Wine, then," William says. Lord knows he has enough strong drink in him, but he doesn't wish to impress the madam as tight-fisted. As he stumbles forward to pay (what fool placed the edge of a rug just there, where a man must put his foot?) he surveys the old woman's body more analytically: she's an ugly old bird, he decides. And ugliness is not what he came here to see.

Freed from Mrs Castaway's spell,

William is able to take in the rest of the room.

Its giddying effect is not, he reassures himself, a symptom of his own inebriation: the whole parlour really is a grotesquerie. The framed prints, he notices now, all depict Mary Magdalen: a varied assortment of half-naked, half-clothed versions of her, repentant or otherwise, some of them painted by pious Christians, others sly caricatures intended as pornography. Dozens of replicas of that same expression of sad serenity, of renunciation of the all-too-wicked flesh, of surrender to a God who makes all other males redundant. Mary Magdalen in full colour, from Romish prayer cards; Mary Magdalen in black-and-white, from Protestant journals;

Mary Magdalen with halo and without; Mary Magdalen large as the frontispiece of a penny magazine; Mary Magdalen tiny as a locket miniature. It's like Billington and Joy in here!

In the armchair by the hearth, still ignoring everybody, sits the young woman William is later to know as Amy Howlett. She's a compact thing, sloe-eyed and sulky, with pitch-black hair and a figure rather like… well, rather like Agnes's really, packed into a smart if severe black, white and silver dress. He can see her face now; she is, shockingly, smoking a cigarette, without even the mitigation of a holder, and if she has any inkling that, in England at least, a man may more often have seen a penis in a woman's mouth than a cigarette, she betrays no sign. Instead, frowning, she sucks, her eyes focused on the little glow-tipped cylinder of rice-paper and tobacco between her pretty fingers.

In nonchalant defiance, she glances at him through a haze of smoke, as if to say, "So?"'

Nonplussed, William looks away towards the hearth, and catches sight of the polished neck of a violoncello, poking up over the back of an armchair facing the fire. There's a woman's neck showing, too, and a skull's-worth of mousy hair as thin as cobwebs.

"Do play on, Miss Lester," says

Mrs Castaway. "This gentleman appreciates fine things, I'm sure."

Miss Lester's head turns; she looks for William over the back of the armchair, her cheek resting on the antimacassar, her forehead wrinkled, her eyes deep-set in their sockets.

But locating where in the world he might be costs her too much effort, and she turns again, back to the fire. The see-sawing moan of the 'cello resumes.

Just as he begins to wonder what these peculiar people would do with his unconscious body if he were to fall to the floor, William is much relieved to feel Sugar's hand slip into his.

She squeezes once, to bid him come.

Mounting the stairs, William feels his ears burning red, his brow prickling with sweat. His bladder aches with every step, his balance is not the best, his vision requires regular eye-blinks to clear the gathering mists. Time is running out on his sexual coup.

"My room is the first upstairs," whispers Sugar at his side. She is lighting their way with a candle; her posture is ramrod-straight and her arm holds the spear of wax without a tremble.

The receding song of the 'cello provides the melody to the rhythm of their footfalls.

William, glancing back downstairs to make sure he is out of the madam's earshot, mutters,

"Your Mrs Castaway is a queer fish."

He has quite forgotten the claim made by the Drury Lane "twins", that Mrs Castaway is Sugar's own mother, though if reminded he would probably dismiss it as whores' claptrap anyway.

"Oh, very queer indeed," agrees Sugar with a smile, and sweeps her skirts over the last steps and onto the landing. "Try to think of her as a sort of Janus in red taffeta, and this door as… well, whatever door you most dearly wish to go through." She opens it wide and beckons him across the threshold.

William sways after her, blinking sweat from his eyes. If only he could turn her off for just a few moments, like a machine, while he took the opportunity to wash his face, run a comb through his hair, empty his aching bladder. Mercifully, Sugar's bed-chamber is bright and airy, free of that waxy smell which so sickened him in Drury Lane. Higher-ceilinged than most upstairs rooms, it is lit by gas rather than candlelight and, though there's a fire glowing in the hearth, there's also a blessed whiff of fresh, ice-cold air filtering through from somewhere.

As soon as he has cast off his coat and waistcoat, William heads for the bed, a queen-sized and much augmented edifice much more impressive than his own at home (that is, the one he sleeps in, not the conjugal one in what's become, over the years, Agnes's private bedroom). Sugar's has a canopy of green silk mounted on it, an awning fit for a king. The drapes hang slightly parted, gathered in with golden cords, and all around the base is a sumptuous valence in a (sadly) unmatching shade of… what would one call it?… mint.

A shame. He looks across the room at Sugar, who stands by the door still, hesitating to remove her gloves, waiting for his approval or the lash of his tongue. He smiles, signalling that she needn't fret; he'll overlook the mint valence. It's a mere hiccup of taste, a regrettable touch of "make-do", no doubt forced upon the house by economy. Even in this, he and Sugar are soulmates of a kind: why, think of the humiliating hat he would have been wearing, if he'd met her only a few days earlier!

"Everything to your liking, Mr Hunt?"' "It will be," he grins, narrowing his eyes meaningfully, "soon enough."

He reclines on the mattress, tests its firmness and softness with his elbows. Thirty seconds later he is fast asleep.

To fall asleep in the bed-chamber of a prostitute, unless you are the prostitute herself, is, as a general rule, either impossible or impermissible. Rackham has, in the past, been roughly taken in hand and brought to orgasm or, if that wasn't practical, to the brothel's back door and discharged into the chill of the night, shoved towards his own bed, however far away that might be.

Yet, Rackham sleeps on.

Sugar does not sleep with him. She sits at an escritoire near the window, fully dressed (though she has removed her gloves), writing.

Her cracked and peeling fingers grip the pen tight. A journal not unlike a business ledger is scratched quietly, with long silences between certain words.

Rackham snores.

Just before dawn, Rackham wakes. He is sprawled on his back, his head sunk unpillowed into the soft surface of the undisturbed bed. He cranes his head further back, looking up towards the bed-head. Alarmingly, another man stares back at him, a wild-eyed, tousle-haired fellow reaching towards him across the sheets, keen (it would seem) to recommence abominable acts.

William sits up with a start, and so does the stranger. Mystery solved: the entire bed-head is a massive mirror.

The bed's drapes have been fully drawn, veiling him inside. Just as well: to his shame and consternation, he finds that his trousers are sodden with urine. This is what's woken him-not the emission from his bladder per se, which must have happened hours ago, but a maddening itch in his clammy groins.

He peers into the mirror again, compiling a mental inventory of the damage. He doesn't seem to have vomited, nor is he queasy now. His head throbs considerably less than he expected (the Fireside's ale must agree with him-or perhaps he's still drunk… What time is it? Why the devil hasn't he been expelled?). His hair has come loose again, standing up from his scalp like greasy sheep's wool. He digs into a trouser pocket for a comb, finds only a tangle of sopping undergarments.

God Almighty, how is he going to get out of this?

He crawls to the foot of the bed, peeks through a gap in the drapes. A cast-iron stand is right outside, cradling a pewter ice bucket. The neck of a full wine-bottle rests against the rim, re-corked with the screw still in. On the floor, well out of his reach, lies the waistcoat that contains his watch. He can even see its silver chain, trailing out of the flaccid fob-pocket. (if this had been France, he wouldn't be seeing that chain, he has to admit.) Where is Sugar? He holds his breath, listening hard. All he hears, apart from an unidentifiable scratching, is the sudden rustle of the hearth's contents, the sound of unstable half-burnt coals and embers collapsing.

Only one wall is visible through the slit in the veil. Fortunately it's the one with the window in it, offering valuable clues to the time of night. The panes are almost opaque with frost-thick frost such as accumulates over many hours. Beyond the frost, the sky is black and indigo, or seems so in contrast to the undimmed interior. The curtains stir almost imperceptibly: despite the freeze, Sugar has left the window open just the tiniest crack. But where is she? William leans further forward, nudging the fabric with his nose, insinuating one eye into the open.

Sugar's room is… homely.

The walls are simply painted, a uniform flesh-pink as opposed to the rococo excesses of the parlour downstairs. A few small, framed prints, much faded from exposure, hang at strategic intervals. The furnishings are decent, comprising a freshly upholstered couch, two armchairs that don't quite match, and (he pushes his face further forward still) an escritoire complete with pens, inkwell, and… (he blinks in disbelief) Sugar herself, hunched over, lost in concentration.

"Ah… forgive me," he announces.

She looks up, lowers her pen, and smiles-a disarming, companionable smile. She's dog-tired, he can tell.

"Good morning, Mr Hunt," she says.

"Oh Lord…" he sighs, awkwardly running his hands through his hair. "What… what time is it?"'

She consults a clock beyond his range of vision. Her own hair, he suddenly notices, is absolutely glorious, a lush corona of golden-orange curls: she has taken the trouble to brush and shape it while he slept.

"Half past five." She pouts roguishly. "If anyone else is still up, they'll be much impressed by your prowess."

William moves to dismount from the bed, then stiffens, blushing.

"I… I hardly know how to tell you this.

I… I have… suffered a most regrettable, a most shameful loss of… ah… control."

"Oh, I know," she says, matter-of-factly, getting to her feet.

"Don't worry, I'll take care of it for you."

She pads over to the hearth, where a kettle has been gently simmering on a grate above the embers. She sloshes a brilliant arc of steaming water into an earthenware tureen which, by the sound of it, is already partly filled, and carries it over to the bed. The skin of her hands, he notes, is dry and cracked, like peeling bark, yet the fingers are exquisitely formed. Michelangelo fingers, ringed with an exotic blight.

"Take your wet things off, please, Mr

Hunt," she says, kneeling on the floor, her skirts spreading out all around her. The tureen is almost brimfull of sudsy liquid, a sea sponge bobbing around in it like a peeled potato. Apparently Sugar has been waiting for this moment.

"Really, Miss Sugar," William mumbles. "This is quite beyond… How can I possibly expect you-"'

She looks up at him, half-closes her eyes, shakes her head slowly, mimes the swollen-lipped supplication:

"Shu-us-us-shall."

Together they manage to remove his trousers and underbreeches. The sharp stink of stewed piss wafts up, inches from Sugar's nose, but she doesn't flinch. For the all the effect the stench has on her unblinking gaze, her serene brow, her secret half-smile, it might as well be perfume.

"Lie back, Mr Hunt," she croons.

"Everything will be set to rights soon."

With the utmost gentleness, she washes him while he reclines, astounded, on the bed. A touch of her rough-textured knuckles is enough to make him part his legs wider, as she dabs the warm soapy sponge into his groin. She frowns in sympathy, to see excoriation in the clefts.

"Poor baby," she murmurs.

The bed-sheets beneath him are soaked, so she nudges him to wriggle further up. Then, with a brushed cotton cloth wrapped around one hand like a mitten, she mops and dabs him dry. Nothing escapes her attention, even the ticklish hollow of his umbilicus. His penis she squeezes gently in her soft cottony palm, progressing in tiny increments as if its sheer length calls for a measure of patience.

"Really, Miss Sugar…" he protests again, but he has no words to follow.

"No "Miss" needed," she corrects him, tossing the cloth aside. "Just Sugar."

And she lowers her face to his perfumed belly and kisses his navel. He gasps as one of her knuckles pushes between the powdered cheeks of his arse, gently corkscrewing into him. A moment later, she lays her cheek on his thigh, hair sprawling all over his stomach, and secretes the whole of his sex into her mouth. Once she has it there, she lies still, neither sucking nor licking: just still, as if keeping him safe. All the while, she massages his anus, using her free hand to stroke his belly. His prick grows hard against her tongue, and when it's nestling snug she begins to suck, placidly, almost absentmindedly, as a child might suck its own thumb.

"No," groans William, but of course he means the opposite.

Minute upon minute she lies on his thigh, milking him, slyly inserting her middle finger into his anus, deeper and deeper, pushing past the sphincter. When he comes, she feels the contractions squeezing her finger first, then clamps her lips firm around his cock as the warm gruel squirts into her throat. She swallows hard, sucks, swallows again. Slowly she extracts her finger, sucking still, sucking until there's nothing left to suck.

Later, the two of them discuss remuneration.

Dawn is on the horizon, a tarnished halo over Soho. The first horses are passing along Silver Street, their harnesses jingling, their hooves drubbing on the cobbles. Inside Sugar's bed-chamber, the gas-lamps are beginning to cast the faintly unreal hue so characteristic of artificial light when a natural alternative lies in wait. A subtle haze of steam is rising from a dark wad of male clothing, suspended on a rack near the fire.

The owner of those trousers and the owner of that rack are engaged in polite dispute over what the night's transpirations, considered in toto, have been worth. Rackham is inclined to be generous; he fears he has imposed on her while he slept.

"A man needs his sleep," demurs Sugar. "And it would have been cruel to condemn you to the streets in such a state. Besides, I occupied myself quite usefully while I was waiting."

"You were waiting?"' "Of course I was waiting. You are a very interesting man, Mr Hunt."

"Interesting?"' William can scarcely believe his ears.

She smiles, exposing pearly-white teeth.

Her lips are red now, no longer so dry. "Very interesting."

"Nevertheless I feel I must pay you for the time I lay here like a drunken fool. And for my disgraceful… incontinence. Unintentional though it was."

"Whatever you wish," she concedes graciously.

But Rackham is unable to divide the night's events into discrete services; to categorise them thus cheapens them somehow. Instead, gauchely, he fingers a number of coins out of his purse, heavy coins of a greater value than some of this city's inhabitants-say, the denizens of Church Lane-ever set eyes on.

"I-is this enough?"' he asks, conferring the silver pieces into her palm.

"Exactly right," she replies, closing her hand. "Including a little extra" (she winks) "for the sleeping."

Outside, something massive is being delivered to the rear of a shop. Weary male voices chant "One, two, free!", followed by a chain-clanking thump. William walks over to the window, naked from the waist down, and tries to descry through the frosty panes what's happening out there, but he can't make it out.

"You know," he muses, "I haven't even seen you naked."

"Next time," says Sugar.

He knows he ought to go home, but he's loath to leave. Besides, his trousers may not be dry yet.

Solemnly, to buy another few minutes, he examines the prints on Sugar's walls, dawdling past them as he might at a Royal Academy exhibition. They are pornographic, depicting eighteenth-century gentlemen (his father's grandfathers, so to speak) contentedly fucking the harlots of their day. The men are amiable duffers, ruddy-faced and fat; the women are plump too, with Raphael breasts, puff sleeves, and faces like sheep.

Phalluses twice the size of his are shown entering freakishly extruded vaginas, and yet the effect is no more erotic than a Bible illustration. In Rackham's judgement, these pictures are (what's the word he's looking for?) … feeble.

"You don't like them, do you?"' Sugar's husky voice, at his shoulder.

"Not much. They're rather second-rate, I think."

"Oh, without a doubt, you're right," she says, wrapping one arm around his waist.

"They've been hanging there forever. They're insipid. In fact, I know the right word for them: feeble."

He gapes at her, dumbfounded. Are his thoughts as naked to her as his legs and genitals?

"I'll replace them with something better," she promises wistfully, "if I can ever afford it." Then she turns away, as though discouraged by the yawning gulf that separates her from being able to afford top-notch pornographic prints.

All of a sudden a far more vivid image springs into Rackham's mind: a recollection of Sugar just as she was when he first woke from his sleep: Sugar sitting hunched at the escritoire, scribbling, at half past five in the morning. His heart is jabbed with the awareness of her poverty-what could she possibly have been doing? Sweated labour of some kind, but what? Is there such a thing as secretarial piece-work?

He's never read of it (it surely merits an article in one of the monthly reviews, along the lines of Outrage Uncovered in the Very Heart of Our Fair City!) but why else would a girl be toiling over a copy-book in the middle of the night? Doesn't she earn enough as a… as a prostitute, to keep body and soul together? Perhaps she's undervalued; perhaps most men spurn her, on account of her small breasts, her skin ailment, her masculine intellect. Well, it's their loss, thinks Rackham. Honi soit qui mal you pense!

This stab of sympathy he feels for Sugar he could never feel for the Drury Lane "twins", much less for the shabby trollops who accost him in alleyways; those creatures are indivisible from the muck that surrounds them, like rats. One's heart does not go out to rats. But to see Sugar-this clever, beautiful young woman who shares his own low opinion of Matthew Arnold, and many things besides-slaving over an ink-stained ledger late at night, pricks his conscience. If the accounts of Rackham Perfumeries are cruel drudgery for a man of his temperament, what must this girl, barely past adolescence, brimful of life and promise, be suffering as she scribbles? How difficult Life is for those who deserve better!

"I must be going," he says, brushing her cheek with his hand. "But before I do, I… I have something more to give you."

"Oh?"' She raises her eyebrows, raises her own hand to grasp his.

"On the bed." Explanation or command, her response is the same; she clambers onto the bed, boots and all, on her knees.

William climbs after her, gathering up the skirts of her dress in big soft handfuls, tossing the silken greenery onto her back. The horse-hair hump of her bustle makes the pile absurdly large, so bulky it obscures her reflection in the bed-head.

"I can't see your face," he says.

Even as he pulls her pantalettes down, she lifts her head high, straining as if for a Lamarckian feat of evolution, her jaw trembling slightly, her mouth falling open with effort. Over the mound of scrumpled dress material, he sees all this and more reflected back at him in the glass.

Her cunt is tight, and surprisingly dry.

This girl's flesh needs more moisture altogether, it seems; perhaps her diet is lacking in oily foods or an essential nutrient. How strange that when she had him in her mouth, it felt as if she had no teeth, whereas now, inside her vagina, the tender nub of his prick is being nipped by unyielding tucks of flesh. However, he pushes through the discomfort, wincing once or twice, persisting until his organ and hers are accommodating each other perfectly, and he comes like a piston.

Minutes later, when he has already donned his hot, dampish trousers and is handing Sugar an additional coin, he is suddenly plagued by an anxiety that he'll never see her again. (not without cause, either: wasn't there that girl in Paris, the one who liked rough treatment, who promised him "A demain!" and then was gone the next morning?) "You'll be here tomorrow?"' he asks.

Her brow furrows, as if he has just rekindled their Fireside conversation on the subject of Death, Fate and the Soul. "God willing," she concedes, with a glimmer of a smile.

He's standing in the threshold of her door now, lingering, knowing that if he stays any longer he's liable to make an ass of himself.

"Goodbye then, Mr Hunt." She kisses him on the cheek, her lips dry as paper, her breath sweet as scented soap.

"Yes… I… but… but I must tell you… the name George Hunt. It's-I'm ashamed to tell you-a fiction. A white lie. To keep those nosy girls at The Fireside from becoming bothersome."

"A man must be careful with his name," Sugar agrees.

"Discretion is a much abused virtue," says Rackham.

"You needn't tell me anything."

"William," he volunteers immediately.

"William is my name."

She nods, accepts the intimacy with mute good grace.

"However," he goes on, "I would be most grateful if you could, at all times when you're in mixed company, refer to me as Mr Hunt."

She opens her mouth to speak, stifles a yawn with the back of her hand. Forgive me please, I'm so terribly sleepy, her eyes plead, as she nods again. "Anything you please."

"But do call me William-here."

"William," she repeats.

"William."

Rackham smiles, a beam of satisfaction that is still on his face when, a mere sixty seconds later, he's standing out in the street, alone, two guineas the poorer, horses snorting to his left, flakes of snow stinging his face. A stiff wind alerts him to the fact that his trousers needed more time in front of the fire; the odour of faeces at his feet reminds him that the sweet scent of a woman can be expunged all too soon.

Of course this is not the first time William Rackham has been smoothly and swiftly swept out into the street as soon as his tryst with a prostitute has been concluded. But it's certainly the first time he arrives at that juncture feeling perfectly content, begrudging not a penny of the expense, wishing not an instant of the experience undone. God, what a night! Nothing transpired as he imagined it might, and yet everything surpassed his dreams! Who would believe it! He feels like telling someone the whole exciting story, feels like rushing home and… well, perhaps not.

The snowfall thins and dwindles, and is abruptly gone, but this narrow street is a draughty place and William begins to shiver.

Still he's reluctant to leave the scene of his remarkable adventure: it can't be over yet!

Craning his head back, he stares up the rear of Mrs Castaway's, wondering which of those windows is Sugar's. Half-way up the building, a brightly lit window shows some movement: a silhouette passing. But it isn't Sugar, it's a child, moving slowly and haltingly, humping a large burden up a flight of unseen stairs.

"Excuse me, master," says a voice behind him.

William almost jumps out of his skin, whirls round to face whoever dares intrude on his reverie.

It's a filthy old crone clutching a rusted bucket, her dark face like driftwood eaten away by the Thames, her lifeless hair indistinguishable from the threadbare shawl that covers it, her back bent like a rusted sickle wrapped in oily black rags. Her free hand is dangling low, an inch or two from the ground, her gnarled fingers clutching near his trouser-bottoms as if hoping to stroke them.

"Excuse me, master," she says again, in an ancient, sexless voice that seems to issue from an abscess inside her scum-encrusted clothing. She smells repulsive. William steps aside.

Immediately she waddles forward and reaches down to the exact spot where he was standing, or damn near.

With her blackened claws she picks up a large dog turd, fingering it carefully so that it doesn't crumble, and transfers it into her bucket, which is a quarter-full with ordure of the same kind, destined for the Bermondsey tannery where it will be used to dress morocco and kid leather. Rackham stares down at her, and the old woman mistakes his disbelief for pity; she looks up to him, wondering if the eight pence she hopes to get for her pail of "pure" can be supplemented with an early-morning godsend.

"Ha'penny for a crust, master?"'

Galvanised by disgust, Rackham fumbles in his purse and tosses her a coin. She knows better than to grasp his gloved hand and kiss it. Instead, bowing to his wish, she melts away into the first rays of the sun.

At the door of Sugar's bedroom, a knock.

She opens it, her face arranged into her best "serene" expression in case it's Mr Hunt -William-Prince Glorious, whatever his name is, coming back for a lost garter or a grope at her bosom. "It suddenly occurs to me I haven't seen your breasts yet."

But no, it's not Mr Hunt.

"Up already, Christopher?"'

The boy stands, veiled in steam, behind the great pail of fresh hot water he has carried up to her. He's only partly dressed, his mop of blond hair is disordered, and he has crystals in the corners of his eyes.

"I saw yer light," he says.

Such a sweet boy, anticipating her needs like this. Unless he's just trying to get a chore out of the way.

"But weren't you asleep?"'

"Amy wakes me," he sniffs, flexing his tiny pink fingers to get the blood back into them.

The dull iron rim of the pail reaches his knees and its circumference, Sugar estimates, equals his height.

"So early? What does she wake you for?"' "Nuffink. She yells in 'er sleep."

"Really?"' As a rule, Amy dispatches her last customer much earlier than Sugar, and doesn't rise again until the following noon.

"I never hear it."

"She yells soft," says Christopher, brow knitting. "But I'm right up close.

Next to 'er mouth, like."

"Really?"' From the way Amy talks when awake, it's difficult to believe she would tolerate her son in the same bed with her. "I thought you had your own little closet to sleep in."

"I do. But I come out when Amy's finished, an' get in next to 'er. She don't mind me when she's asleep. She don't mind nuffink."

"She does-'n't mind any-thing,

Christopher."

"What I said."

Sugar sighs, lifts the pail and carries it inside her room, careful to acknowledge in her posture how heavy it is. What a little champion! She'd been resigned, at this irregular hour, to going down to the boiler room herself, no sign of life being evident by the time William-Mr Hunt-Emperor Pisspants-finally departed. She'd already dragged the hip-bath, and sundry other necessities, from their hiding-place inside the wardrobe, and was just trying to persuade herself to fetch the water when Christopher came knocking.

"I really am grateful," she says, tipping the contents of the bucket into the tub.

"It's what I should be about," he shrugs.

"I earn me keep."

Looking back at him standing on the landing, Sugar notices the telltale marks of his struggle with the pail, lugged over-full up far too many stairs in his effort to save an extra trip. There are livid red crescents on his forearms, and his bare feet and trouser-cuffs are wet and steaming with hot spillage.

"Man of the house, you are," she praises him, but she's forgetting that flattery rubs him up the wrong way. With a peevish twitch he turns from her, and runs back downstairs.

Shame, she thinks, but then again there are only so many hours on end that a woman can keep in mind all the needs and preferences of males. In the bleary light of dawn, Sugar is ready to be excused.

For the first time in thirty-three hours, she removes all her clothes. Her green dress smells of cigar smoke, beer and sweat. Her corset is stained with dye from the bodice, which is evidently not meant to be worn in the rain. Her camisole stinks, her pantalettes have the snot of male ecstasy all over them. She tosses everything into a pile, and steps naked into the tub.

First her long legs, then her bruised buttocks, then finally that bosom whose immaturity those drooling swine who compile muck-rags like More Sprees in London never fail to remark upon-all sink beneath the bubbles.

Guffaws, chatter and the clanking din of goods deliveries grow louder outside her window; sleeping may prove difficult, though she'll probably drop off during the lull that always comes between the shops preparing themselves and the customers arriving. Her consciousness is already dissolving at the edges; she must take care not to fall asleep where she sits. She's so tired now that she can't even remember whether she has performed her prophylactic ritual or not.

Heavy locks of hair disentwine from her loosening chignon, unravelling onto her wet back, dropping hairpins into the water, as she turns to look for evidence of remembering or forgetting. The tureen of contraceptive is where she left it, and yes, she remembers now, she has used it. Thank God for that. Not that she can actually recall inserting the plunger, but there it lies (tipped not with cloth, like Caroline's, but with a real sea sponge), sopping wet beside the tureen.

How many hundred times has she performed this ceremony? How many sponges and swabs has she worn away? How many times has she prepared this witches' brew, measuring the ingredients with mindless precision? Granted, in her Church Lane days the recipe was slightly different; nowadays, as well as the alum and the sulphate of zinc, she adds a dash of sal eratus, or bicarbonate of soda. But in essence it's the same potion she's squatted over almost nightly since she began to bleed at sixteen.

A crucial hairpin gives way; the remainder of her waist-length hair threatens to unfurl into the tepid water. Shivering, she rises, standing above the froth, hands on her thighs.

And, at long last, she is able to release the residue of urine, trifling but painful, that wouldn't come out earlier, before her bath. The yellow droplets patter down on the suds, writing dark nonsense into the white of the soap-scum. Is it only piddle draining out of her now? Could there really be anything else left in there? Sometimes she has walked along the street, a full half-hour after a wash, and suddenly felt a gush of semen soiling her underclothes. What could God, or the Force of Nature, or whatever is supposed to be holding the Universe together, possibly have in mind, by making it so difficult to be clean inside? What, in the grand scheme of things, is so uniquely precious about piss, shit or the makings of another pompous little man, that it should be permitted to cling to her innards so tenaciously?

"God damn God," she whispers, tensing and untensing her pelvic muscles, "and all His horrible filthy creation."

As if in response to the trickle into her bathwater, there is a pattering against the frosty window, and then the gentle rush of rain, drowning out the noise of humans and horses. Sugar steps out of the tub, drying herself with a fresh white towel while, on the window, the frost crackles, turns milky and washes off, revealing rooftops silhouetted against a brightening sky. The fire in her hearth has gone out and she's shivering with cold as she pulls her night-gown over her head, half dead with exhaustion. But her patience with what's-his-name-with Do-Call-Me-William-has been plentifully rewarded: as much money as she would have had from three individual men. Mind you, she isn't greedy: she'd happily have done without getting fucked in the end.

Then she shuffles-yes, yes, yes-to her bed.

Grunting, she slaps aside the sagging drapes. Her reflection shows an angry young woman ready to murder anyone or anything that stands in her way. With a grunt of determination she seizes hold of the soiled sheets and tries to drag them off the mattress, but all strength is gone. So, slumping in defeat, she extinguishes the lights, crawls up to a dry corner of the bed right near the mirror, pulls a blanket over her body, and utters a cry of relief.

For a few seconds more she lies awake, listening to the downpour. Then she shuts her eyes and, as usual, her spirit flies out of her body, into the dark unknown, unaware that this time she is flying in a different direction. Down on earth, her dirty tub and her wet bed remain, shut inside a decaying building among other decaying buildings in this vast and intricate city; in the morning, it will all be waiting to swallow her back inside. But there is a greater reality: the reality of dreams. And, in those dreams of flying, Sugar's old life has already ended, like a chapter in a book.