‘Dutch champagne!’ called out Ruby to a pageboy wearing leather blinkers. She turned to Cale. ‘It’s the best vintage in a hundred years.’
She gestured for him to choose one of the women in the room, trying to give Cale the impression she was at ease, but something terrified her about the white-faced boy and she hoped he would decide quickly. She was astonished at what he said next.
‘I want you.’
Ruby was in her early fifties and had retired from whoring more than twenty years before. During that time such requests had been made but delicately or firmly rejected as the case might be.
‘But these are some of the most beautiful women in the country.’
‘I’m not interested. Only in you.’
Ruby knew how to make the best of herself, it was true. She had considerable skill in paint – enough, not too much – and she could afford the best efforts of the dressmakers of the city. She had by no means let herself go but she loved her food and was pleasantly lazy. And the truth was that she had never been beautiful. She had made her way to the top of a craft that took a dreadful toll on most through her warmth and wit. Her neck was too long for most tastes, she had a small nose but of an unusual shape and lips so full they verged on the peculiar. ‘When I’m tired,’ she used to joke, ‘I look like a tortoise.’
But Cale thought she was gorgeous.
She was a woman of strong mind, and harsh if she needed to be, but what could she do? This white-faced boy could not be refused. Faced, then, with the inevitable, she put on the smile she had contrived over thirty years on her back to come easily and gestured him towards the door, watched by the open-mouthed and excited tarts.
‘Who on earth was that funny-looking kiddiewink?’ said the Puritan maiden who could now stop weeping.
‘You’re such a stupid slut!’ said the girl who’d now stopped tormenting her partner with the swan’s feather. ‘That was Thomas Cale.’
The Puritan’s eyes widened in delighted horror. ‘I hear he came back from the dead and keeps his soul trapped in a coal-scuttle.’
Ruby Eversoll might not have believed in revenants or imprisoned souls but she knew enough hard facts about Cale to be afraid. She had once been owned by Kitty the Hare and while she was delighted by the news of his death, and how long and horrible his dying, she was aware of what kind of creature you would have to be to be capable of murdering Kitty in his own home. The fact that he was just a sick-looking boy only made him more unsettling. As she unlocked the door to her apartment she realized she was trembling. Ruby Eversoll had not shaken with fear in a very long time.
Cale would have been astonished if he’d known what Ruby was feeling. If he was not, perhaps, as apprehensive as most boys of fifteen or sixteen would have been in the same circumstances, he was still nervous – slightly out of his depth, slightly ashamed at paying someone to have sex with him, but also agitated at the unfamiliar pleasures of a woman so very different from Arbell or Artemisia. At the thought of his late lover he felt a stab of something – something like loss, something like remorse. But that was all too confusing so he put it away and concentrated on the statuesque Ruby.
‘Shall I undress?’ asked Ruby.
‘Um … yes, please.’ It certainly didn’t sound very commanding but Ruby was too agitated to notice.
Ruby was a professional; Ruby knew her job. Very slowly she began to unclip the hooks and eyelets at the front of her dress from the top down. As she opened each of them Cale became transfixed by her breasts. Held in and forced upwards by the engineering talents of her dressmaker, with each unclasping the soft roundness, held up by the dress, seemed to swell as if they were desperate to be free at last. He did not notice he’d stopped breathing. She dropped the corset to the floor, undid her skirt and stepped out of it. Now all she wore was a white silk shift. Oddly, and to Ruby, incomprehensibly, she felt deeply awkward as she undid the ties down the front of the tissue-thin shift and then shrugged it to the floor and stepped away. Cale’s lungs, if not Cale himself, decided it was time to breathe – and it was the gasps from Cale that began to tell Ruby that perhaps she had misunderstood something.
Above the waist she was naked now. Even as a slim young woman she had been proud of her breasts. She was no longer slim, or anything like it, but whatever her pleasure in butter and eggs and wine had added, and it had added a great deal, her breasts had retained something of their youthful lift. They were, to put it simply, very large, the pink nipples enormous. Cale, used only to the sight of the lithe Arbell and the tiny Artemisia, for whom the word delicate was gross, stared as if he was seeing a naked woman for the first time again. How was it possible, he thought (though thought was nearly paralysed), for the same creature to be so different? He had not, of course, shared Vague Henri’s gawping epiphany while spying on the abundant Riba when she was bathing in the Scablands. Reaching to one side, Ruby undid the drawstrings at the side of her pale blue pantalettes and let them drop to the floor. It was as well that Cale had been undergoing a period of feeling stronger that week or else he might have dropped dead on the spot and the future of the world taken a very different turn.
There was an intense stillness in the room as Cale, utterly struck, looked at Ruby. Ruby began to feel her dread of the boy recede and the almost forgotten pleasure of intoxicating someone with the power of her body reassert itself. Slowly, enjoying each step more, she walked towards him and, holding out her arms, there was no other world, folded Cale into her body. That moment, the sense of being wrapped in a paradise you could smell and touch, would stay with him until the day he died, to be turned over in his mind whenever he was at his lowest point, a refuge against despair.
But now he was burning with greed. He dragged her onto the bed and began as if he wanted to eat her up. His mouth and hands were everywhere, fascinated by everything about her. Her belly was fat, nothing like the boy-flat tummies of Arbell and Artemisia. Ruby’s stomach was round and pillow-soft and shimmered when he touched it like one of the curds in the banquets of the Materazzi. She was all curves and folds and he touched her everywhere, his delight so great that she began to laugh. ‘Patience,’ she said, and got to her knees. He knelt behind her, lips devouring her neck and experienced, according to the Hunterians, one of the seven great pleasures the world has to offer – holding a pair of weighty breasts in the palms of both hands.
As if desperate to discover the other six, he pushed Ruby back onto the bed and began kissing her nipples with such unrestrained hunger that he went too far.
‘Ow!’ she squealed.
He sat up – shocked and alarmed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
The nip had been really painful but he was so remorseful and she so taken aback by the intensity of his desire for her that she could do nothing but reach for his cheek and smile.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, and fanned her face with her other hand. ‘Just slow down a little.’
‘Tell me what to do,’ he said sweetly. Now she felt how hysterical she’d been to project such dread around such engaging regret and such innocence.
‘Well, I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm but just try to draw the line at eating me up.’
In the hours that followed, Cale experienced another three of the remaining six great pleasures (about two of them it is, quite rightly, against the law of the land to be anything other than silent).