THE RAPTURES AND ROSES OF VICE
Don't s'pose we done 'im in, does yer?' Nell asked, squatting on the bed, prodding the naked man with a long finger. He was face-down in a pillow, wrists and ankles loosely tied with scarves to brass bedposts. The nice white cotton sheets were spotted and stained.
Mary Jane was preoccupied with dressing. It was hard to set a bonnet without a mirror.
'Mary Jane?'
'Marie Jeanette,' she corrected, loving the sound like music. She had tried to be rid of her brogue, until she realised men found it pleasing. 'I've been tellin' you for close on a year. 'Tis Marie Jeanette. Marie Jeanette Kelly.'
'Yer Kelly don't go with yer "Marie Jeanette", Duchess.'
'Tish-tush. And pish-posh too.'
'That bloke what took yer to Paree didn't do the rest of us no favours.'
'Any favours.'
'Pardon me fer suckin', Duchess.'
'And don't you be talkin' unkindly of my "Uncle Henry". He was very distinguished. Probably still is very distinguished.'
'Unless 'e's a-rottin' from the pox yer give 'im,' Nell said, without real meanness.
'Be away with the cheek of you, now.'
Mary Jane was finally happy with her hat. She was careful about her appearance. She might have turned vampire and she might be a cocotte, but she wasn't going to let herself go and become a fox-face horror like Nell Coles.
The other woman sat on the bed, and felt around the poet's neck, still sticky with his own blood.
'We done 'im, Mary Jane. 'E's bleedin' dead, an' 'e'll turn for certain.'
'Marie Jeanette.'
'Yeah, an' I'm Contessa Eleanora Francesca Muckety-Muck. Come 'ave a butchers.'
Mary Jane looked Algernon up and down. There were tiny bites, old and new, all over his body. His back and bottom were striped with purple welts. He had provided his own rods and encouraged them to put their backs into the whipping.
'He's an old hand at this, Nell. It'd take more than a flogging and a few love-bites to finish off this old cocker.'
Nell dipped a finger into the blood pooling in the small of Algernon's back and touched her rough lips. She got hairier with every moonrise. She had to brush her cheeks and forehead now, sweeping her thick red hair back into a flaring mane. She stood out in a crowd, which had been good for business. Customers were peculiar. She wrinkled her wide nose as she tasted the blood. Nell was one of those who got 'feelings' with her food. Mary Jane was glad that didn't happen to her.
Nell made a face. 'That's bitter,' she said. 'Who is the cove, anyway?'
'His friend said he was a poet.'
A square-rigged gent had sought them out, and paid for a carriage from Whitechapel to Putney. The house was almost in the country. Mary Jane understood Algernon had been sick and was taking the air for his health.
'Got enough books, ain't 'e?'
Nell couldn't read or write, but Mary Jane had her letters. The small bedroom was lined with bookshelves.
'Did 'e write 'em all?'
Mary Jane took a beautifully bound book down from a shelf, and let it fall open.
'"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath,"' she read aloud. '"We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death."'
'Sounds lovely. Yer reckon it's about us?'
'Doubt it. I think 'tis about Our Lord Jesus.'
Nell made a face. She cringed if someone showed her a crucifix, and couldn't bear to hear the name of Christ. Mary Jane still went to church when she could. She had been told God was forgiving. After all, the Lord returned from the grave and encouraged folk to drink His blood. Just like Miss Lucy.
Mary Jane put the book back. Algernon started gulping and Mary Jane held his head up. There was something in his throat. She burped him like a baby and let his head drop. A reddish stain seeped into his pillow.
'Come down and relieve us from virtue, Our Lady of Pain,' he said, clearly. Then he slumped insensible again, and started snoring.
'Don't sound dead, does he?'
Nell laughed. 'Garn, yer Irish cow.'
'Silver and stake my heart will break, but names'll never hurt me.'
The other woman fastened her chemise over furry breasts.
'Doesn't all that hair tickle?'
'Never 'ad any complaints.'
The poet had just wanted a whipping. When his back was bloody, he had let them bite him. It had been enough to finish him off. After that he had been as harmless as a baby.
Since she turned, Mary Jane had been opening her legs less. Some men wanted the old-fashioned mixed in, but a lot only liked to be bitten and bled. She remembered with a thrill of nasty pleasure what it had been like when Miss Lucy was at her throat, tiny teeth worrying at the wound. Then the taste of Lucy's blood, and the fire running through her, turning her.
'Ladies of Pain, are we?' Nell said, belting her dress around thick red flanks.
Mary Jane's warm life was hazy in her mind. She had been to Paris with Henry Wilcox; that she knew. But she remembered nothing of Ireland, of her brothers and sisters. She knew from what folk who knew her said that she had come to London from Wales, that she had buried a husband, that she had been kept in a house in the West End. Once in a while she would have a glimpse of memory, seeing a face she knew or coming across an old keepsake, but her old life was a chalk picture in the rain, running and blurring. She had been seeing clearly since her turning, as if a dirty window had been wiped clean. Occasionally, when she was full of someone else's ginny blood, her former self would flood back, and she'd find herself puking in a gutter.
Nell was bending over Algernon, mouth to a bite on his shoulder, sucking quietly. Mary Jane wondered if the poet's blood was richer than a normal man's. Perhaps Nell would start spouting verses and rhymes. That'd be something to hear.
'Leave him be now,' Mary Jane said. 'He's had his guinea's-worth.'
Nell straightened up, smiling. Her teeth were yellowing, and her gums were black. She'd have to go to Africa and live in the jungle soon.
'I can't believe 'e's payin' a guinea. There ain't that much tin in the world.'
'Not in our world, Nell. But he's bein' a gentleman.'
'I knows gentlemen, Mary Jane. They is, as a rule, cheap as week-old pigsblood. And tight as a rat's arse-hole.'
They left the room arm in arm and went downstairs. Theodore, Algernon's friend, was waiting. He must be a good friend, to bring Mary Jane and Nell all the way out to Putney and to stand by all this time. A lot of folk would be disgusted. Of course, Theodore was a new-born and must be broad in the mind.
'How is Swinburne?'
'He'll live,' she said. Most girls had a fierce sort of contempt for customers like Algernon. They liked to look at a perfectly dressed gent and think of him wriggling naked in pain, sneering at them for preferring a whipping to a good shag. Mary Jane felt different. Maybe her turn had changed the way she felt about what folk did with each other. Sometimes she dreamed of opening the throats of angels as they sang, then straddling them as they died.
'How he loves you women,' Theodore said. 'He talks about your "cold immortal hands". Strange.'
'He knows what he likes,' Mary Jane said. 'No shame in bein' partial to something out of the ordinary.'
'No,' Theodore agreed, unsure. 'No shame at all.'
They stood in the reception room. There were portraits of famous men on the walls and still more books. Mary Jane had a picture of the Champs-Elysees, cut out of an illustrated paper, pasted to the wall of her room in Miller's Court. She saved up for a frame once when she was warm, but Joe Barnett, her man at the time, found the pennies in a mug and drank them away. He'd blacked her eye for holding back on him. When she turned, she'd thrown Joe out, but not before she had repaid him with interest for the bruises.
Theodore gave them a guinea apiece and escorted them out to the carriage. Mary Jane tucked her guinea safe into her poke, but Nell had to hold her coin up to catch the moonlight.
Mary Jane remembered to bid Theodore a good night and to curtsey as Uncle Henry had taught her. Some gentlemen had inquisitive neighbours, and it was only polite to act like a proper lady caller. Theodore didn't notice and turned back into the house before she had straightened up.
'A guinea, blimey,' Nell exclaimed. 'I'd 'a bitten 'is balls fer a guinea.'
'Get in the coach with you, you embarrassin' tart,' Mary Jane said. 'I don't know of what you're thinkin'.'
'I do believe I will, Duchess,' she said, squeezing through the door, wiggling her rump from side to side.
Mary Jane followed and settled down.
'Oi you,' Nell shouted to the driver, ''ome, an' don't spare the 'orses.'
The carriage lurched into motion. Nell was still playing with her gold coin. She had tried to bite it. Now she was shining it against her shawl.
'I'll be off the streets fer a month,' she said, licking her fangs. 'I'll go up West an' find myself a guardsman with a knob like a firehose, an' suck the bastard dry.'
'But you'll be back in the alleys when the money's gone, on your back in the muck while some drunkard wobbles all over you.'
Nell shrugged. 'I 'ardly think I'll be marryin' royalty. Yer neither, Marie Jeanette de Kelly.'
'I'm not on the streets any more.'
'Just 'cos there's a roof over the bed yer shag in don't make it a church, girl.'
'No strangers, that's my rule now. Just familiar gentlemen.'
'Very familiar.'
'You should be listenin' to me, you know. It's not healthy on the streets these nights. Not with the Ripper.'
Nell was unimpressed. 'In Whitechapel, 'e'd 'ave to kill an 'ore a night til kingdom come til 'e got to me. There's thousands of us, an' there will be long after 'e's rottin' in Hell.'
'He's killin' them two at a time.'
'Garn!'
'You know 'tis true, Nell. 'Tis over a week since he did for Cathy Eddowes and the Stride woman. He'll be out and about again.'
'I'd like to see 'im try anythin' with me,' Nell said. She snarled, a mouthful of wolf-teeth glistening. 'I'd rip 'is 'eart out, an' eat the blighter.'
Mary Jane had to laugh. But she was being serious. 'The only safe thing is familiar gentlemen, Nell. Customers you know, and are sure of. The best thing would be to find a gentleman to keep you. Especially if he wants to keep you outside Whitechapel.'
'Only place that'd keep me is the zoo.'
Mary Jane had been kept once. In Paris, by Henry Wilcox. He was a banker, a colossus of finance. He had gone abroad without his wife, and Mary Jane had travelled with him. He told everyone she was his niece, but the French understood the arrangement all too well. When he travelled on to Switzerland, he left her behind with an old frog rakehell to whom she did not take. 'Uncle Henry', it turned out, had lost her on a hand of cards. Paris had been lovely but she still came back to London, where she knew what folk were saying and she was the only person gambling with her life.
It was almost dawn when they got to Whitechapel. She'd not known enough at first to stay out of the sun, and her skin had burned to painful crackling. She had ripped dogs open for their juice. It had taken her months to catch up with the other new-borns.
She gave directions to the warm driver, realising with a nice hot surge that the man was petrified of his vampire passengers. She rented a room just off Dorset Street, from McCarthy the chandler for four and six a week. Some of the guinea would have to pay the arrears and keep McCarthy off her back. But the rest would be for her. Perhaps she could find a picture-framer?
Once they were out of the coach, it trundled off quickly, leaving them on the pavement. Nell gestured after the departing driver and howled like a comical animal. She even had fur growing around her eyes and up behind her pointed ears.
'Marie Jeanette,' croaked a voice from the shadows. Someone was standing under the Miller's Court archway. A gentleman, by his clothes.
She smiled, recognising the voice. Dr Seward stepped out of the dark.
'I've been waiting most of the night for you,' he said. 'I'd like...'
'She knows what yer'd like,' Nell said, 'an' yer orter be shamed of yerself.'
'Shush, furface,' she said. 'That's no way to be talkin' to a gentleman.'
Nell stuck her snout in the air, rearranged her shawl, and trotted off, sniffing like a music hall queen. Mary Jane apologised for her.
'Do you want to come in, Dr Seward?' she asked. 'It's nearly sunup. I have to have my beauty sleep.'
'I'd like that very much,' he said. He was fidgeting with his neck. She had seen her customers do that before. Once bitten, they always came back for more.
'Well, follow me.'
She led him to her room and let him in. Early sun fell through the dusty window on to the unwrinkled bedspread. She drew the curtains against the light.