Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

‘You the first visitor I had in t’ree months,’ she said, the whites of her eyes accentuated by the inky blackness of her skin.

Pyke knelt down and showed her the charcoal etching of Mary Edgar. Wincing, she sat up so that she could get a better look at it, and as she did so, she sniffed his skin. ‘You smell good, like soap.’

The room, on the other hand, reeked of human faeces and for a moment he wondered how and where she defecated.

‘Her name is Mary Edgar.’ He put the lantern down next to the drawing so she could see it properly.

‘So?’

‘I wondered if you might know her.’ As soon as it had left his mouth it struck Pyke as an absurd proposition, but he needed to find a way of getting her to talk.

She peered at the etching and laughed without warmth. ‘That why you come here? ’Cos I’m black and she’s mulatto so we must know each other?’

Pyke acknowledged the truth of her observation with a rueful smile. ‘I don’t know a thing about her apart from her name and that she recently arrived from Jamaica. I thought she might have fallen into the game.’

That drew a more serious nod. ‘So how did you find me?’

‘Craddock.’

Jane bit her lip, or what was left of it. ‘That bitch had me there to serve them Lascars and Africans but it was the whites who ask for me because I was cheap and they reckoned they could do what they liked with me.’

‘And as soon as you contracted syphilis she tossed you out.’ Pyke tried to keep any sympathy from his voice; he guessed it would only anger her.

‘She gave me a bottle of mercury, told me that would cover it.’ She touched her bald head self-consciously.

Pyke brought her attention back to the drawing. ‘Have you got any idea where I might start looking for her?’ He paused and then told her that Mary Edgar had been sharing a room at the Bluefield lodging house with a black man called Arthur Sobers.

Jane shook her head. ‘Why are you looking for her? What she done?’

Pyke shrugged. He didn’t want to tell her that Mary Edgar was dead. Nor, for obvious reasons, did he want to reveal that the woman’s eyes had been gouged out. But if the murder had a ritualistic element to it, as he now suspected, he wanted to find out as much as possible about such things.

‘Whether she black or white, it look like she got money. So why you looking for her in a black hole like Craddock’s?’ Jane snorted through her disintegrating nose. ‘And why you think she want to be friends with a nigger like me?’

He felt the anger of her stare. ‘To be honest, I hardly know a thing about the black community in the city.’

This much was true. Whereas forty or fifty years earlier, London had had a thriving black population, buoyed by emigres from the United States who’d fought on the side of the Crown during the revolutionary wars and former slaves who’d earned their freedom and decided to stay and work in the capital, the effects of grinding poverty and falling numbers of immigrants meant there were now probably just a few hundred — or maybe as many as a thousand — black men and women left in the city, in a population of more than a million. Pyke was used to seeing coloured faces around the docks but these men were often sailors and merchant seamen who would spend their shore leave in and around the Ratcliff Highway before leaving for the next port.

‘And you think I do?’ Jane looked at him. ‘I was born in Gravesend. I can point it out on a map if you don’t know where it is.’

‘If you were a black man or woman recently arrived in the city, where would you go to eat and drink?’

‘Anywhere I could afford that would take my money.’ She hesitated. ‘You seem to think there’s one place all black folk go to spend time with each other. That’s not how it is. The only thing black people got in common is being poor and getting exploited by white men like yourself.’

Pyke absorbed her insult. ‘But if I did want to speak to people who might have known Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers…’

She studied his face for a few moments, deciding whether she wanted to help or not. ‘There’s a beer shop at the bottom of Commercial Road, near the docks. Ask for Samuel.’

Pyke thanked her and stretched his legs, but when he reached down to gather up the drawing, she touched his hand. ‘You want to know something? That’s the first time I touched another human being in a month.’ She looked away suddenly, perhaps because she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes.

Pyke went to kiss her on the cheek but at the last moment she turned her head towards him and he had no choice but to embrace her mouth. Her lips were softer and saltier than he had imagined. Momentarily Pyke closed his eyes and put the smell of faeces out of his mind. When he pulled away, he expected that she might say something, but whatever had happened in that moment passed and she was staring up at the ceiling, as though nothing had happened.

‘I lie here trying to remember happier times but when I shut my eyes all I can see are the faces of the men who fucked me.’

Pyke left her without saying goodbye. He guessed that she would be dead before the end of the year.

William Maginn’s face glistened like a ham that been soaked in briny water and boiled vigorously until it had turned a burnished shade of pink. He was pontificating about the merits of Shakespeare’s tragedies while imbibing from a hip-flask. Around him, a coterie of admirers hung on his every word. At one time, he had been the most respected and feared journalist in the city, though this had been before he had burned his bridges at Fraser’s magazine and spent time in prison, like Pyke, for failing to pay his debts. Godfrey told Pyke all this while fretting nervously at the edges of the circle, trying to find a way of interrupting Maginn and maybe limiting his consumption of gin, at least until after the speeches.

Hatchard’s bookshop on Piccadilly was full and Pyke was momentarily surprised by the number of people Godfrey had persuaded to attend the event, until he remembered that the book they’d all come to toast had attracted more than its fair share of notoriety in the months following its publication. Figures as worthy as Dickens and Bulwer had described Godfrey’s book as a ‘brutally honest account of wrongdoing’. Godfrey had framed those reviews. But other critics had torn it to shreds. Thackeray, for example, had compared it unfavourably to the ‘already lamentable’ Eugene Aram and had lambasted it as a ‘foul, sordid piece of writing’ that should be ‘consigned to the nearest cesspool’ for fear that ‘it might irrevocably contaminate those whose misfortune it was to turn its pages’. Godfrey had framed that review as well, claiming that a book capable of provoking such hostility had to be doing something right. Pyke suspected that beneath his bluster, his uncle cared very deeply what a man like Thackeray thought and that the review had wounded him more than he cared to admit. It had been something of a surprise, then, when Maginn had written to Godfrey to offer a cautiously favourable verdict, because Maginn and Thackeray had once been good friends, and perhaps still were.

Pyke hadn’t read The True and Candid Confession of an ex-Bow Street Runner, nor did he have any desire to do so. He had talked at length with Godfrey, while his uncle scribbled notes, and he had been as truthful and as candid as he thought appropriate. But Pyke had known from the start that what appeared in print would bear only the slightest resemblance to his own experiences. Godfrey wasn’t interested in virtue and goodness; rather his writing and publishing reflected a preference for the tasteless, sordid, low and morally repugnant. Pyke knew there were things he had done in his past that fitted this description, and that his uncle would doubtless embellish such episodes into something even nastier, but he hadn’t robbed or killed to satisfy his own primal urges. He had done so only when absolutely compelled to and wherever possible he had tried to do what was right, even if this meant hurting other people in the process. But none of this would make it into his uncle’s book; instead it would be a fictional tale that wallowed in its own stench with the sole purpose, Pyke believed, of offending the refined sensibilities of a particular kind of educated reader.