She tiptoed from her room. The house was quiet. Sir Joseph had roared off to his club in a storm of threats and imprecations, and Lady B. was confined with a headache. Fanny stole a look at Lady B.’s address book, wrapped herself up in a shawl and slipped out the front door.
♦ ♦ ♦
For a time, when he was eighteen or nineteen, Adonais Brooks had insisted that his friends call him Werther, so affected was he by Goethe’s portrayal of that sad and neurotic youth. During the ensuing years he had discovered Collins, Smart, Cowper and Gray. The Oriental Eclogues sat on his shelf beside Macpherson’s Ossian poems and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. He cultivated ballads and cultural primitivism, sported red trousers and black velvet jackets. At the bimonthly meetings of the West End Poetry Club, of which he was then secretary, he championed passion over precision, sensibility over wit. One evening, in the middle of “Demitasse and Spoon,” an elegant satire by Blythe Bender, he rose to his feet and shouted: “Enough of Pope, Addison and Steele! Enough of wit and urbanity and the heroic couplet! Where is life, where is blood, where is the grave?” A shocked silence fell over the hall — never before had a reading been interrupted, never before had there been such a breach of taste and decorum. He was shouted down by his fellow members, and later asked to resign from the club.
Now, at twenty-six, he wandered the dismal foggy streets with tears in his eyes, thrived on electrical storms and blasts of wind, dreamed of mountains, wounds, derring-do and sex — thrilling, voluptuous and morbid sex. Sex in churchyards and catafalques, sex in shackles, galleys, dungeons. He kept four servants and a carriage. He believed in witches and revenants, and lived in decadent splendor on Great George Street. There was still a lingering pain in his ribs — especially when he coughed or breathed too deeply — and the shattered bones of his right leg, though healed, hadn’t quite knit properly. He secretly thrilled at the loss of his ear.
When Fanny came to the door he was toiling away at his “Elegy on the Demise of Our Afric Explorers” (“O Ledyard, O Lucas, O Houghton and Park, / Must I count you among the dear departed, /And Timbuctoo still languishing in the dark?”). Bellows, his manservant, announced her in stentorian tones. “Fanny Brunch, Sir.”
He was stunned. How many times had he pictured her here? How many times, alone in his bedchamber, had he. . et cetera? He leaped to his feet, shaking like a wet spaniel, licked his palms and smoothed back his hair — and then she was there, standing before him like a vision in a dream. “Fanny!” he ejaculated, rushing forward to offer her a chair. But what was this? Tears on her cheeks?
“I’ve come, begging your pardon, Sir, to entreat a favor,” she began, her breast palpitating. He listened, sucking at the vision of her like a vampire: her ankles, hips, hair. The sound of her voice was an aphrodisiac, apples and oysters, a feather tickling at his crotch. He wanted to plunge at her, sink himself into her — but he listened, twitching, an uncomfortable projection straining against his trousers. When she was finished he took hold of her hand. “I’ll help you,” he said, his voice so strained it was almost a whistle. “God knows I’ll help you, do anything you ask, anything. . mortify my flesh, tear out my eyes, open a vein — do you want proof of it? Right now? I’ll do it, I will. Anything you ask.” Then he looked her in the eye, cold as a knife. “But you must understand. . there has to be a quid pro quo.”
“A what. Sir?”
“An exchange. A tit for tat.”
Fanny lowered her eyes. “I knows that. Sir — what else has a poor girl got to offer? But you don’t have to get vulgar about it.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The next morning Fanny visited Newgate. She held a scented handkerchief to her nose and followed the turnkey down the winding stairwell to the dungeon, her footsteps echoing like gunfire in a well. When the massive iron door swung back on its hinges, the stink nearly knocked her to her knees. Inside the atmosphere was rank and caliginous: fumes rose from puddles, groans sifted through the shadows. She started forward gingerly, her pupils widening in the gloom. Muck pulled at her shoes, twisted claws reached out for her, the reek of urine stung her eyes. “Hey Mistress big-arse, come sit on me face,” growled a voice. “Titties,” called another, “titties, titties, titties.” A stark animal terror came over her — a fear of being buried alive, mewed up in a wall, sucked down through the hole in the latrine, down, down to the slick and steaming intestines of the earth where demons picked the flesh from your bones and howling beasts snuffed up your soul and shat it out in hard black pellets. Fanny pulled back with a cry, but the turnkey took her by the elbow. “It’s all right. Mistress,” he said. “Don’t mind them. . look now, there’s yer friend up ahead.”
Ned was delirious, gibbering about fish heads and pots of gold, lying in his own waste, naked and shivering. An old man, the gums drawn back from his teeth, lay dead beside him. Fanny pressed a half crown into the turnkey’s hand and he unshackled Ned’s legs, wrapped him in a blanket and carried him from the room. Later, in a private cell, Fanny sponged her lover down with vinegar and made him a hot broth. She held the steaming cup to his lips and kissed him. He vomited. Looked into her eyes and didn’t seem to recognize her. By the time the surgeon arrived he was running sweat and beating his head against the wall. “What is it. Sir?” Fanny begged. “What’s wrong with him?” The surgeon was seventy or eighty years old, dressed in the tight trousers and periwig of a young rake. His nostrils flared as he opened a vein in the patient’s leg and drew blood until Ned lay still. “Gaol fever,” the surgeon said matter-of-factly. “He’ll either pull through it or he’ll die like a dog. Flip a coin if it’ll make you feel any better.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The following day Lady B. demanded an explanation of Fanny’s failure to answer the bell. Byron Bount stood on the carpet before her, heels locked, staring down at his feet. “Well, speak up Bount — is the girl still indisposed? Should I have the medico come round?” Bount answered, begging his ladyship’s pardon, that Fanny was not in the house. “Not in the — did you say not in the house?” That’s what he’d said. But where was she then? Bount cleared his throat. “It’s anybody’s guess. Ma’am.” Lady B.’s face hardened past simple petrification, through the igneous phase, the metamorphic and beyond.
The upshot of all this is that when Fanny returned from the prison that evening, her dress smudged and heart heavy, she found Byron Bount waiting for her on the front steps. Beside him lay two bundles of clothing and a crude oil portrait of Fanny’s mother. Bount folded his arms and looked down on her like a carrion bird.
Did she really have a choice?
“Great George Street,” she said to the cabbie.
♦ APOSTASY ♦
Alexander Anderson was at war with himself. His father had been pressuring him to have a talk with Ailie about her marital status, and he couldn’t decide which side he was on. “There’s nobody in the world closer to her than you are lad, not even her old Da’,” his father coaxed. “Talk some sense into her.” There had been no word of Mungo in nearly two years: the old man wanted her to marry Gleg.