The Fiend in Human Read online

  Another detriment to the taking of opium is the dreaming: hours spent in a damp bed with lunatics and vermin, or revisiting, in the most excruciating detail, events one should never have lived in the first place. Such memories occur as moving pictures, whose horror is not mitigated by the awareness that it is all but a dream.

  So vivid have these nocturnal horrors become that Whitty has seen fit to consult a medium over the possibility of possession, a hirsute Romani who counselled a programme of ‘luminary adjustment’. This he underwent for a fee, but to no avail.

  EVERY MAN HAS HIS FANCY

  RATTING SPORTS IN REALITY

  In front of his face is a placard containing a programme of the evening’s events. The sign, with which he is all too familiar, hangs above a bar made of mahogany. He turns to gaze upon the pit, a small horseshoe-shaped circus some six feet across, fitted with a high wooden rim to the height of a man’s elbow. This too he knows well. A series of gas lamps overhead render the white-painted arena stark and shadowless, the better to discern movements almost too quick for the human eye.

  The ratting parlour again. How he wishes he had never seen the place. He has sworn off ratting since – why then must he re-enact the whole catastrophe again and again? What has he failed to learn from the experience?

  Around the rim of the pit he discerns the heads and shoulders of several gentlemen – one in costermonger’s corduroy, one in a soldier’s uniform carelessly unbuttoned, another in coachman’s livery – each holding in the crook of his right arm a small terrier, squalling and barking and struggling to gain access to the lighted playing-area, while a rusty cage full of live rats is brought to the arena. The cage is opened and the rats are pulled out one at a time by their tails. This is done by the Captain, the owner of the establishment, who presides over the proceedings like a cleric.

  ‘Careful, Captain,’ sounds a voice above the din. ‘These ones are none the cleanest.’ By this it is meant that the creatures are not the favoured country rats, but city wharf rats of the kind that outnumber the population of London, swarming through the drains, tunnels and sewers beneath the city.

  ‘Sewer rats is notorious for giving dogs the canker,’ cautions the Captain to Whitty in a confidential voice. ‘Do you still wish to participate, Sir?’

  Why did you not heed the Captain’s warning? Why did you risk your animal and make such a wager into the bargain? Fool! You fool!

  While the rats are being counted out, those rodents which have already emerged from the cage frantically circumnavigate the arena, trying to hide in the gaps of the boards surrounding the pit, and scrambling up the sleeves of the Captain’s coat. ‘Get out, ye varmint,’ the Captain cries out, shaking them off.

  ‘Chuck him in, then.’

  Over goes Tiny – a terrier of mixed parentage, five pounds and a half in weight, whip-like in structure, scarred from head to toe, and in a perfect fit of excitement. Whitty’s prize, his fortune in the making, the dog upon whom he had invested far more than he owned – indeed, were this a legally sanctioned speculation, the wager alone would be more than enough to assure him a sojourn in debtors’ prison.

  Loose in the pit, Tiny becomes quiet and goes about his task in a businesslike manner, first rushing at the rats, then burying his nose in the mound of those who have fled until he brings one out in his mouth.

  Twenty rats with wetted necks lie bleeding on the floor and the white paint of the pit has become stained with blood. However, Tiny has a rat hanging from his nose, which, despite his tossing, still holds on with its teeth and claws. Let it be, Tiny, let it be! Enraged, Tiny dashes his tormentor up against the sides until finally he has shaken the rat loose. There is a patch of blood like a strawberry upon Tiny’s nose …

  Whitty awakens with a spasm of self-hatred, and it comes to his attention that he has been miserably bruised, cut and scratched – not in the nose, but in a more intimate region of the body.

  Is he about to follow Tiny, the victim of an infected nibble?

  What fiend within induced him to gamble so ruinously? Did he hope to remake himself? Was that it? To acquire a sudden fortune, redeem the family estate, extinguish the memory of his own disgrace and be welcomed back into the family bosom, to his father’s open arms, the Prodigal Son returned? Fool!

  Whitty curls into the foetal position and awaits the rebirth of hope, only to have his mind return to that dreadful scene …

  ‘Time!’ shouts the Captain. Tiny is snatched up, panting, neck stretched like a serpent, the remaining rats crawling about while the Captain endeavours to rinse the terrier’s mouth and nose with peppermint water, then catches Whitty with a baleful look: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here …

  The peppermint water did no good. Tiny came down with a fever which sent the most promising ratter in London to join the choir invisible and, along with it, Whitty’s foolish hopes.

  He reawakens with that bone-deep shudder which accompanies the passage to dreaming and back, like the skeleton attempting to shake free of the flesh and hop about the room.

  Again the pain in his groin. Dancing, they called it – a terrified man with a rat in the trousers, dancing in Ingester Square. He gingerly touches the lacerations, which burn beneath the covers. He can only pray that they heal, that Rodney was not of the sewer variety that did for Tiny …

  The ratters threatened much worse. The Captain’s claim, with accrued interest, has expanded to £400 – a staggering debt whose mounting increments place him in the position of a man trying to outrun a speeding train.

  The ratters once forced a defaulter’s hand into a cage of starved rats and held it there for half an hour.

  Whitty slides off the bed, shuffles to the wash-table and examines the face in the glass – stricken, not by alcohol and medicine, but by fear. He probes his skull with his fingers, noting a marked diminishment in the region of Hope.

  He pours cold water into the washbowl, splashes it upon his face, then uses the pitcher to prepare himself a morning healer of gin and water. As a further precaution he takes a measure of Acker’s Chlorodine.

  He returns to his bed and sits upon the edge, warming his feet upon the rug, awaiting relief. Glancing absently about the room, his eyes rest upon his coat, draped over the chair in front of the dressing-table with a bulge in the side-pocket. It reminds him of something …

  Bigney. Mr Bigney gave something to him: papers. In return for an obscene stipend.

  Whitty lights a cigar, rises to his feet and retrieves the package of clippings.

  Yet another deluded wager? More money down the cess-pit when he might have employed those funds to keep the ratters at bay? What can he have been thinking of?

  Calm. Remain calm. He opens the packet and examines its contents. The first clipping is not encouraging, given that its by-line happens to be the contemptible Fraser, whose turbid observations are the last place to which one might turn for illumination on a delicate morning.

  THE PUBLIC ORDEAL OF MRS COX

  by

  Alasdair Fraser

  Senior Correspondent

  Dodd’s

  Seldom in memory has your correspondent observed such an orectic conventicle as the mob which slavered outside the High Court of Judiciary this July 30 morning, snarling in vulgar whispers, cackling at anything that might pass for humour, pressing their filthy hands upon the heavy doors, vying for choice positions from which to view the coming spectacle, in which a rare specimen of female licentiousness endures the most solemn ordeal society has to offer since the regrettable abolition of heresy: to be on trial for the murder of her husband.

  Naturally, to the rabble (many of whom could do with a spell in the stocks themselves), the issue of justice being done or not done stood a distant second to the prospect of coarse titillation.

  At the stroke of eight o’clock precisely, as the oaken doors opened and a dense mass of humanity in its rudest form spilled inward, mutton-faced louts ruthlessly elbowed their way to the few available seats, with no
quarter given to the niceties of age, gender or physical limitation.

  With another two hours to wait, spectators availed themselves of breakfast – cheese, bread and meat pies consumed on soiled handkerchiefs as though at a picnic, while watching a parade of their betters enter the well of the court.

  Below, high Scottish clergymen took their places as well as the country’s finest journalists and illustrators, preparing their sketchbooks to render their now-famous profiles of the legal duellists on the case, as well as the fascinating form of Mrs Cox herself.

  Finally at ten-twenty, the packed courtroom turned to sudden silence and rose to their feet upon the order of the clerk of the court – ‘Court!’ – followed by the stately, bewigged procession of the Right Honourable John Lord Hope, the Lord Justice-Clerk, together with his two fellow judges, Lords Handyside and Ivory. However, to the public gallery neither ancient ritual nor judicial eminence could distract spectation from the small, square patch of flooring directly in front of the prisoner’s dock.

  Slowly, like an eyelid opening after sleep, the patch of floor began to rise, revealing itself to be a trap-door, below which one could discern a flight of steps leading to the cells, located in the dank depths of the building. From this dismal interior there arose a sombre policeman, his face flushed by the effort as well as by the unaccustomed public attention. Then a few steps behind rose the central protagonist of the drama: Mrs Eliza Cox, the Accused – or, in the peculiar legal terminology of Scotland, ‘The Panel’.

  As it has been throughout the trial, the sensuous features by which her true character might be read and understood (at whatever cost to public decency) have been, no doubt on the advice of her counsel, concealed by a full widow’s veil. One hand, gloved, clasps a lace handkerchief perpetually to her throat – no doubt to divert attention from her famous bosom. Such features, had they been displayed in their full hedonism as living evidence of the obscene passion smouldering behind the dreadful crime of which she stands accused, might have produced a more decisive verdict than that which was about to transpire …

  Expelling a derisive snort, Whitty sets the piece aside in favour of a second clipping, a standard news item containing a brief explication for the British reader of the ‘Not Proven’ verdict peculiar to Scottish courts. Trust the Scots, thinks Whitty – savage brutes, yet able to equivocate like the Swiss!

  Not Proven: it is clear that, far from exonerating Mrs Cox, the woman stood effectively convicted of a foul, contemptible murder; all that separated her from the gallows was the inability of a male jury to envisage a wife capable of such an outrage – such a possibility had the potential to infect the peace of every home in the realm.

  Hence, the third clipping, in the form of a satirical poem such as is commonly written by advocates of one movement or another as a means of gaining promotion for their cause:

  Upon the Acquittal of Mrs Cox Lucy Aikin

  Once more England, lift thy drooping eye,

  The tilted scales of Justice to descry;

  As to the might of feminine deceit,

  Twelve good men fall humbled in defeat;

  And yet what different verdict might be given

  What tissue of deception might be riven,

  The reason of a female to address,

  The subtle forms of delicate distress;

  A calculated tear may bring to grief

  The commonplace of masculine belief;

  In examining a woman in the dock,

  Less credulous the chicken than the cock.

  Thus does the woman stand convicted even by those shrill harpies, the feminists – who would have women become club members, smoke cigars, bet on the horses, run for Parliament; for whose satisfaction the House of Lords would become the House of Ladies! So universal is the presumption of her guilt, even the hags of militant feminism find political capital in condemning one of their own sex!

  Our Mrs Cox would not inherit, nor could she return to her former life, nor to any life a woman might willingly choose for herself. Under the circumstances, her best option would have been to disappear, to merge with others of her kind, to swim together down the drain of social misery all the way to London.

  Hence, the third clipping, an advertisement from a gentlemen’s quarterly catering to Oxford men, commonly sold under the counter on Halliwell Street:

  THE GROVE OF THE EVANGELIST

  Discipline for Wayward Boys

  Manners and Horsemanship

  Mrs Eliza Marlowe, Governess

  Clearly Mr Bigney has assembled a narrative wherein Mrs Cox became Eliza Marlowe. Having experienced utter ruin, our temptress discarded her honour forever – though not with the emphasis with which she discarded Mr Cox:

  Corrupt and mean, a libertine,

  Ancient, bald and stout;

  A suitor from a class above –

  For him I was cast out;

  And in my wrath then from the path

  I stumbled and I fell,

  While in her pride, my would-be bride

  Did sell her soul as well.

  If ever there were good reason for an Inquiry into the State of Girls’ Fashionable Schools, here it is – especially when taking into account Sir Henry Stork’s admirable concern over the unfulfilled woman’s natural and well-documented tendency to duplicity and malice. Notwithstanding the corruption and meanness of the doomed Mr Cox, his widow has sold her soul for certain, and other accoutrements as well.

  Thus, Mr Owler’s Sorrowful Lamentation, however unwittingly, holds true, assembled as it was from inadvertent scraps and details, and with no context to guide it. Moreover, Mr Ryan, up to this point at least, has not been proved a liar – which of course does not mean that he is telling the truth, any more than it makes him innocent. The most duplicitous of men are forthright in all respects but one.

  What may or may not be true, however, occupies at this moment a distant second place to the prospect of having found a story that is worth at least £50 – which would permit him to put the ratting débâcle behind him for a time and to get on with life, such as it is.

  Whitty pours another gin and water, relights his cigar, and prepares to reread the material, raising a glass to the appalling, essential Mr Bigney.

  19

  The Grove of the Evangelist

  … to reanimate the torpid circulation of the capillary or cutaneous vessels, to increase muscular energy, and favour the necessary secretions of our nature. Flagellation draws the circulation from the centre of the system to the periphery …

  Having given his coat and hat to a footman, the patron, notwithstanding his patrician bearing and leonine head of silver hair, stands meekly in the centre of the reception room, awaiting permission to enter.

  As always, the door (insulated with velvet) opens and the maid appears, like a tiny severe gentleman, a parson in widow’s dress, with a luminously pale cast to a face which, though by no means young, displays the open indifference of an introverted child. Clearly this is a maid by choice, not necessity. As always he is alarmed by her silence, which is not simply a lack of sound but an aura she carries wherever she goes. As always, he is intrigued by the bright scar on her left cheek – the result of a burn, not an incision, to judge by its colour and thickness, almost like a brand.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Button. I am pleased to see you again.’

  Mrs Button nods briskly and steps aside so that he may enter.

  ‘Good evening, My Lord.’

  As the door shuts quietly behind him he stands in the room and waits to be noticed, like an obedient child, which pause affords him ample time to watch her every movement and to remind himself why he is here.

  As always he is startled and intimidated by her appearance, which is of a kind seldom seen these days, when any figure may be built of any fashionable dimension, being constructed of horsehair, whalebone and other materials, then crowned with false hair, such architecture of form and line to be accomplished by the milliners and dressmakers and hairdr
essers of Regent Street and Mayfair.

  Not so with Mrs Marlowe, formerly Mrs Cox, nee Eliza Hurtle, whose naturally severe beauty transcends all fashion – scorns it as the moon scorns gaslight. Her skin, that which she permits to be seen, appears as white and chilly as marble; as does her bosom, proudly outlined beneath a garment of black silk seemingly thrown on in haste. A cliché of course, the pubescent dream of an adolescent; precisely what the gentleman, standing in the doorway in his shirt-sleeves and awaiting instruction, has purchased in advance.

  ‘Well? Are you coming in or not? I grow tired of these absurd hesitations of yours.’

  Tentatively he steps onto the red Turkey carpet. The velvet door swishes shut behind him – Mrs Button has been standing behind him all the while. What was she looking at?

  He proceeds just far enough onto the Turkey carpet that he may see her more clearly, seated upright on the divan beneath a lamp, indifferently reading a book covered with black leather.

  Abruptly she glances up with those startling green eyes, then arches one dark eyebrow, then returns to her book.

  ‘There are a great many things left to correct in you. I can see that. We may require the nettles, for utrication.’

  Delicious. ‘Whatever you think best, Madam.’

  ‘I have been thinking about your case and have decided you require special attention. When I am ready. Wait there while I finish my page and we shall begin the lesson. Stand very still or, I warn you, I shall know how to be firm.’