Philip Kerr - Dark Matter

“Why does that man cry out?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s just Monsieur Vogueavant,” said Deborah, trying to coax my cock to crow again. “Vogueavant’s French for ‘stroke.’”

“I had quite forgotten him,” I confessed.

“And he is beaten with a whip.”

“A whip? Good Lord, where is there pleasure in that?”

“Not so as you would notice. I’ve beaten him myself upon occasion. But I care not for it. It’s warm work. Warmer than this. For Monsieur Vogueavant has a tolerance of pain like no other man I have ever met. And one must lay on hard to please him. The English perversion, they calls it, but Monsieur Vogueavant learned his taste as a galley slave on a French ship. His back tells the story well enough, for I never saw the like.”

Once again I heard Mornay cry out in response to the sting of the whip.

“And the Major has himself beaten in order that he should recollect his experiences? How monstrous.”

“I believe that it is more confused than that. He himself told me that he is beaten so that he will never forget his hatred of the French, and of Roman Catholics in particular.”

I was properly confounded by this information, which at least served to take my mind off the insult I had privately done to Miss Barton, and would have said more about the disgusting things men will have done to them in pursuit of pleasure, yet I feared Deborah’s abusing me for a hypocrite and so I kept silent. Which was more than she did, for momentarily she was troubled with some wind in her cunny parts, and I was moved by her farts to take my leave of her bed.

I had just started to piss in her pot, which be another good precaution against the clap, when I heard Mornay’s door open, followed by the sound of his boots stamping downstairs; and I made haste to dress and go after him.

“Why do you rush so?” asked Miss Barton’s facsimile.

“Because he does not know that I am here. And I know not where he goes now.”

“Oh, I can tell you that,” said Deborah. “He goes over the water to the Dutchman’s house in Lambeth Marshes.”

“To do what, pray?”

“It ain’t to have his fortune told by gypsies. It’s a wicked place he goes. What a man with money cannot obtain there, let him not search for it anywhere else in this world of ours. He wanted to take me there once. Offered me a guinea to go with another woman, he said. Well, I don’t mind that so much. It’s safer than going with a man. Just licking another girl’s cunny and moaning a bit. But I’ve heard tales about that place. Called The Dutchman’s. Some of the poor molls who go to work there are never seen again.”

Having for a shilling obtained some directions to this house of evil repute, I went outside onto Fleet Street, took coach, and went down to White’s Stairs in Channel Row, where, hearing a wherryman shout “Southward, ho!” I joined a boat that was crossing the river.

The moon edged out from under a black flap of sky like a curling yellow fingernail. Halfway across the river a mist descended upon our boat that was like some floating pestilence. In the distance, the windows of the leaning houses on London Bridge were lit up like a necklace of yellow diamonds.

So far I was making a sorry job of plaguing my quarry; and I hardly knew how I was going to tell Miss Barton’s uncle where my pursuit of Major Mornay had taken me. Nor knew how I would present my expenses. Would any man wish his ward to associate with a fellow that had visited such places? Especially a man like Newton, who took a dim view of all licentious behaviour and was only concerned with higher things — a man for whom the body and its needs hardly seemed to matter except as the possible medium for some scientific experiment. Every time I looked Newton in the eye, I thought of him probing it with a bodkin. What did such a man know of human frailty?

Our boat rocked on, making, it seemed to me, very little progress across the grey water, and somewhere above our heads, a seagull hovered like some invisible screaming demon. Gradually, we neared the other side of the river where the mist lightened and the skull-shaped hulls of ships loomed across our boat. A dog barked in the distance as I stepped off the boat at the King’s Arms stairs, and then all was quiet.

Lambeth was a large unruly village on the Surrey bank of the Thames, with most of the buildings grouped around the palace and the Parish Church of St. Mary, and behind these, the black masts of ships. It was separated from Southwark, with its many small metalworking shops to the east, by the marshes where many crooked houses and lonely taverns were situated. As soon as I landed I drew my sword, for it was much darker on the south side of the River, with one or two ruffianly-looking men about. I walked east, along the Narrow Wall, as Deborah had directed, until I came to the sawmills, where I turned my footsteps south, across a stinking, muddy field, to a small row of houses. Here, next to the sign of the star, which is often said to indicate a place of lewd purpose, I found the house I was looking for. I peered in at a grimy-looking window, and seeing the orange tongue of a candle, I knocked.

The door was opened by a woman who looked comely enough, although she also seemed somewhat hard and yellowish in the face, and her eyelids almost motionless; and having saluted her and paid the ten shillings she asked, which was a large sum, I went inside. A sweet, heavy aroma filled air that was thick with pipe smoke.

The woman took my cloak, and as she hung it on a peg I recognised the Major’s hat and cloak. He was here after all. “So,” she said, in a whistling accent that made me think she must be Dutch. “Will you take a pipe first, or see the show?”

I have never much liked smoking, for it gives me the cough; and I replied that I would see the show. She seemed a little surprised at this, but led me through a tattered green curtain and down a flight of stairs to a low, mean room, surrounded with greasy-looking mirrors, that was stopped from any light save a few candles, where five dull-looking men sat in the shadows and, like a theatre audience, awaited some kind of performance. I knew not what this might be, and thought another posturer was probably expected. Of Major Mornay there was no sign, and I presumed he must have gone to smoke a pipe first. Meanwhile I made no attempt to conceal myself and took a most prominent seat so that Mornay, when eventually he came in, might easily see me.

My breath came uneasily to me down in that loathsome room, for the atmosphere was filled not just with smoke but also with foreboding, as if something dreadful was about to happen. And yet, curiously, I did almost feel at my ease.

After a good deal of waiting, two women brought a nun into the room and treated her most cruelly, spitting upon her and slapping her before eventually stripping her naked; whereupon they made her lie belly-down upon the bare floor without any garment. Her arms and legs were drawn with cords to a post in each corner of the room; and all the while the poor, dull-eyed nun bore her torments without protest, as if she cared little what happened to her. As I was myself. I know not if she was a real nun or no, except to say her hair was cut very short, which is, I believe, a sign of the nun’s renunciation of the world; but she was most comely, being no more than twenty years of age, and the sight of her naked body and privy parts stirred me much.

It was now that the Major came downstairs, and I remarked to myself how he seemed to be almost ill, or drunk; but despite my very obvious position, he sat down without even seeming to notice I was there.

After she was properly secured, one of the other men stood up from his chairs and started to whip her, all the time cursing her for a damned Roman Catholic whore, and other words most obscene, so that I began to apprehend some real danger to the girl’s life. And standing up myself, I remonstrated with these men most openly, calling them monsters to mete such treatment to a woman, and entreating them all to desist, although I looked only at the Major so that at last he recognised me, and with such anger in his yellow-looking eyes that it quite froze my blood. It may have been his eyes, but it was more likely the sound of a piece cocked and the chill of a pistol pressed against my cheek that was so disconcerting.