The Bastards' Paradise Page 7

  I close with the hope that Mrs. Wooster’s duties as Auxiliary president do not prove too taxing for her; and that Master Wooster continues well. Please thank him for the China lovebird pair—their song is very sweet, my Prudence is quite charmed by them.

  With great sincerity I remain,

  MRS. DECCA MATTISON

  “She met him at the Femmes et Bêtes,” says the duke’s second cousin, perched tipsy on the tufted seat of peach-colored velvet, nibbling on a square of cake soaked in Jamaica rum. “She says he was quite the brute himself, and the moment they left off waltzing, he—But oh, I mustn’t say it, it’s much too naughty!” as Roland Smalls leans forward to pat her freckled hand: “Certainly you must, dear. Confession is good for the soul,” ignoring his own square of cake for a glass of bitters; he likes bitters; those sugary desserts always upset his digestion. And tonight of all nights must be sweet…. Without checking his timepiece he can discern that it is half past seven, for what passes for an overture has already begun in the orchestra pit, the horns’ tootle and shiver of cymbals for this “Evening of Ind,” another excuse to send from the stage to the balcony loges an army of young ladies no better than they should be, to undulate in spangled scarves that, for a pittance, they will remove; at least at the “Romulus & Remus” affairs, one can also see handsome young men! And then on to supper and the foolish guessing-games, in this city the mania is for charades, itself a charade to cloak what they all have come for: femmes et bêtes, yes, and in the morning back to sacred motherhood and war heroes once again. And all in clouds of that cedars-of-Lebanon incense, the greenish fire in the onstage brazier to make it smoke—M. Marcus says it is powdered resin, that fire, M. Marcus says that more than one theatre has been burnt to the ground by such but What’s play without a spark of danger? with one of his careless little smiles; oh, those smiles. One could well write a poem to those smiles, their mingled promise and infinite indifference, that beautifully maddening trick of looking through the lashes —

  “—because if her husband were to learn of it! The last thing one wants is another suicide, I’m such a fright in funeral black.”

  “That simply can’t be so.”

  —as he looked when he was leaving the hotel, off on another of his private forays; poor old Portia was completely livid, though a jaunty-enough lickspittle at the boat races, telling lies to the iron-stayed hostess (who still can wear, or bear, those old-fashioned things?), lies housed in the neighborhood of truth: He’s a real artist, Mme Ezterhaus, he must go where his art insists. But you’ll be at Lucilla’s charades, tonight? Yes, and so will he.

  Portia now seems to be having an excellent time, moving through the loge’s maze of seats and tiny tables, ormolu vases of wilting lilies-of-the-valley, third-rate duchesses and lieutenants whose closest proximity to actual war seems limited to pictures in the newspapers: talking to this one and that one, sipping her watered wine—she is always careful with liquor, he has noticed; he wonders why—and concealing her impatience and terror that M. Marcus will not appear at all, again, will make of her a fool and worse; only the quiet, frantic shoe against carpet betrays her real feelings. If he himself were a less compassionate man he might laugh at such a display: she has a tiger by the tail, does Portia, and no matter how deft her pretense (and she pretends very well, she ought to have taken to the stage herself), still she can no more predict or control what M. Marcus will do than she could fly. He is not predictable. He is not controllable. He does what he pleases, and oh, what a pleasure it would be, to be able to please him oneself!

  “—by Crescent Bridge, you know, the hyssop parlor— ‘Holy water,’ have you heard of that?”

  “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “You must try it, it’s completely divine,” as the duke’s second cousin hiccups over her cake and the music swells to drown all conversation, Roland leaning forward in his seat to pretend great interest in the false maharanis below, drinking bitters with one hand while the other slips into his jacket pocket to pat the jeweler’s case discreet inside, the case itself so finely made it is half a work of art, as the gift it holds—a silver cigarette case that, when opened, reveals inside its lid a butterfly, wings accented with diamonds, rubies for the eyes—is simple but quite stunning. M. Marcus wears no real jewelry beyond that pirate’s pearl at his ear, and a rose-gold ring with a Greek god intaglio, somewhat too large for him; a gift, from someone who did not know him well? Yet still he wears it, so the giver must be dear…. Gifts seem to mean little to him, or at least Portia’s have done so, but her choices—those gaudy cigarette holders, cravats a Cheapside juggler might wear! Nothing at all like this tasteful and useful present, that every time it is opened will display the constant shine of that butterfly—

  —as below, past the guarded doors of the Music Ministry that, legally, no longer exists, the music continues, the gasping horns and forced laughter of dancing girls in liquor-stained veils, most of whom had better ambitions than to flash their tits at men who write editorials decrying the depravity of the hyssop-sellers and the bounce houses and the dirty little taverns who still wedge open their doors, as they deny the existence of these parties they themselves attend whenever invited; but those dancing girls, like the watching men, need every day to eat.

  The city is home now to many such contradictions, like the mingling of the penitential incense of St. Mary of Dolors with the cigar smoke of the trysting clubs, the Babel, the Sheik’s Tent or Caesar’s Court, the same play of forgetfulness enacted night after night in this city growing darker by the day and more hysteric, fear’s cruelty that tramples headlong anything that strays into its path. There is fear everywhere, in the Cathedral as well as the clubs, the townhouses of the aristocracy themselves decimated by prudent flight; so many live entirely at their country homes now, or in another country altogether, seeking to create by their massed presence some private state immune to war. In those manor houses time is something to hold at bay—Use lamps, instead of electricity! Ignore that vulgar iron finger that Eiffel has erected, and the gawping crowds who saluted its birth!—as though that contest is possible, as if one might climb to the clock tower and wrestle the mechanical figures inside, stop them from moving the timepiece hands, that timepiece and those figures the unfortunately timed gift of some minor nobleman wishing to make his name in the city: the Festus Clock, called Faustus by some, with a small dark shudder each time the inexorable figures emerge: What time is the devil due, and what will he carry when he comes?

  The Church, as always, meets all fears with certainty, the iron certainty of absolute truth, any mercy of dissent disallowed. The constables keep fear at heel by punishing the Libbys and Sanitaries and anyone else who seems to require it, sparing only those with money enough to keep the truncheons stilled. The men at the Protectorate, who direct the constables, focus on identity, insisting that all exists exactly as it appears: a woman alone on the streets at night is a prostitute; a man with an empty bottle in hand a drunkard; a wandering child an orphan in need of workhouse protection, and if the parents who allowed such wandering wish to be reunited with that child, a hefty ransom will be required, and the family fortunate to escape further prosecution. Students, barristers, ’bus drivers, egg-sellers, all must submit to a moral examination, and carry at all times their citizens’ certificates; the former rooms of inquiry have become laboratories of justice, those halls of gray walls and locked doors now augmented by the dynamometer, and encaustic casts, and Bertillon’s anthropometrics, to discover who would do harm, and punish proactively; thus is science employed, to keep fear further at bay.

  And the men who direct the directors, men like Richter and Ezterhaus and Konstantin, men who report through channels to other men like Chamsaur and Mevsky and de Metz, have their own private collections of dreads, mainly one of another, and of the failure of war to achieve the most profitable future possible; and at the back of the minds of the most thoughtful, some greatest dread, some unacknowledged image of what that future migh
t hold for all of them, some figure as inexorable as the mechanicals on the clock tower, as empire develops finally into machine.

  Insofar as puppets can be considered machines, half-organic actors with the eternal glint of anarchy at their center, any such operator must walk a particularly narrow span, as Alban Cockrill, toiling over Gawdy and Mrs. Gawdy at his grubby worktable, one’s missing wig and the other’s rusting wires, would be the first to avow. The plays he still mounts seem silly even to him, bland funfair stories of Mrs. Gawdy’s lost soup pot or Gawdy’s failure to snatch a paper apple from a paper tree, but even those are performed in a shadow so deep he feels its chill every time he trundles his barrow to the Park; still, who would ever have guessed that his own Palace would outlast Fairgrieve and Shakespeare Cowtan both? It goes to show, the closer to the ground the less far to fall—though if the competition is unmissed, the comradeship is surely not. He used to stop from time to time at the Mercury, even though its master puppeteers had long gone—one feet-first, and what a shame that was!—but now that door is locked to him, the young Missis staring him down in the alley: Your jaw’s never shut, you’ll say what you see even if there’s nothing to see at all—no puppets here, no shows. Go away before I make you.

  If Cockrill knew that M. Hilaire had returned to town, bearing with him a brand-new puppet, he might have tried to defy that edict, but—rubbing a thumbful of grease onto the recalcitrant wire, raising Gawdy’s cockeyed gaze to meet his own—he does not know, does not see both Istvan and Haden passing his own establishment on their return from Haden’s errand: an ascent to the roof of a councilman’s house, the smaller of two mansard peaks, Haden crouched to deploy the eggbeater drill while Istvan stood lookout in the avenue below, whistling a Te Deum to indicate that all was well; then repairing together down the avenue, past the Park and its motionless panorama, Istvan nodding that way —

  “That’s what it means to stay put, yeah? —same streets, same sights. However do you manage?”

  “I traveled some as a lad. I never liked it.”

  —as they stop at last at a nameless café, four booths behind close-drawn drapes, wooden bowls of walnuts and lukewarm vin ordinaire, Haden with an eyebrow cocked to ask “So will you say why you’ve come, ever? Or just keep on whistling?”

  “Why, I came to see you, kit,” that teasing smile to mask a certain truth in what he says, a smile that Haden cannot help but return, a look not often seen on his face these days: it makes him younger, gives him back his feral buccaneer cheer to say “May be I’ll take you on as a helper, then, you did all right today. Though I an’t do the business I used to—”

  “Volume, you mean? Or profession?”

  “Both,” deftly smashing a walnut into meat and scatters. “The Protectorate does its own spying now—though not Eig; recall Eig? He wouldn’t soil his gentleman’s gloves, old Costello’s on the street selling pen wipers—but I make a little here and there to keep us eating. That councilman’s got meetings that he means to keep secret, even though,” with a professional’s contempt, “they’re nothing much, smuggling in treadle wheels like they were bally gold! But I convinced him it would be good to keep a second eye on things, just in case.”

  “Hired to mend the wall you tumbled?”

  “Something like.”

  “Because there’s not enough work on the boards?” tipping his flask to their cups beside the other wary drinkers reading contraband newspapers, scandal sheets like the Brawl and the Echo, political screeds like the Stentor, those drinkers eyeing with a certain sideways trepidation that damp sling on the floor, the puppet inside like a little murder victim, the draped shape of an arm clear to see; and Haden’s own shrug a quick sharp jerk as if worked too hard by clumsy strings: “You heard him—the mayor and chicken bones and what-all, putting the lads where they oughtn’t be—it’s ‘vocation,’ it’s all over the head of an alley cat like me. He used to be happy, now he’s not. Fini.” He lifts his cup to drink to the dregs, plainly unwilling to say more. “What’s Herr Bok doing, while you’re out paying calls?”

  “Blistering with boredom, mainly, it makes him—unwieldy. Though when we were about on the roads,” whistling softly as if to himself the chorus of “Thumb-Your-Nose,” “we had a bit of fun. Even more than a bit…. But I can’t take him with me to charades, now, can I,” telling that chapter of the day’s tale, Portia del Azore and Roland Smalls, the hotel and the fountain boat races, asking while he answers as Haden listens, then slowly shakes his head: “I’ve never been, those parties an’t for the likes of us in the gully, and there’s no real coin to be made there unless you’re casting for big fish. Do you hazard, still?” with a teasing grin of his own, doused at once in surprise at Istvan’s bitter little twist of the lips: “I once thought to make my way as a broadsman—may be I should have. But times have changed. No more Heads or Tails, is there nowhere a man can dice in this fucking nunnery! Charades!”

  They sit in silence, Istvan’s silence that lengthens; outside a ’bus passes, then running feet, a constable shouting “Over here! Over here, you!” as the drinkers sit up straighter, one or two look ready to bolt and “You’ll need papers,” says Haden. “I can get them for you, both, if you’ll tell me what name to put on his.”

  “Use Lazarus,” with a flicker of better cheer, nodding to one of the discarded broadsheets: SPIRIT PARTY ENDS IN GRIEF AND MADNESS! “WE SAW OUR DEAR MOTHER’S GHOST!” “Papers, yes, I suppose we do. Though that sort of thing used to be Mouse’s province, that is, Rupert’s, to arrange—you’d not believe it, what a broody hen I’m turning out to be.”

  “I don’t much like it either,” crushing another walnut with somewhat excessive force, “but it’s either me or that harebrained bitch, she’d rule us all with her cards if I’d let her. It’s why I put a hand in with Ru,” pulling from his coat a little sheaf of pretty drawings, fairy stories, Happy Poems for Virtuous Children stolen from a street stall; Ru likes those sorts of things, will sit in a corner for hours puzzling them out. “The little jack’s got no proper father, does he.”

  “Can that matter so much? He has kin,” drinking off the last of his own cup, some subtle grief like a shadow’s shadow in his shrug, some shade, though Haden cannot know it, of the boy born on St. John’s Eve, a bastard wandering in the rain, singing and jigging and bare as a sardine in the squats and back rooms for the men in shiny vests and dangling watch chains, who do as they wish with a jigging little boy, then send him back to the streets with a handful of pennies and a laugh, that boy whom some good angel or sympathizing god steered at last toward the dripping viaduct, the dark beloved, the stick of wood carved into weapon and endless friend; yes, it is all a near thing, and every step is hazard and play as “Kin and home,” Haden’s own shrug of agreement. “And anytime you mean to, you can come home, too,” with a northward nod to indicate the nameless Mercury, to call from Istvan a gaze so warm—“You’d take me underneath your roof?”—that Haden feels that heat rise, a blush to his cheeks as Istvan leans to place his hand, still gloved in faulty silver, atop Haden’s for a moment, a charged moment as their gazes meet and hold: mìse-en-abîme, mirror to the very heart of mirror, a rich and singular alchemy neither will ever feel for any other, of greed and lust and deep affection, comradeship, above all gamesmanship and “We’d have to play it prettily,” Istvan’s murmur, “for the mecs must play. And Mouse forgets he’s deceased, it could be disruptive—”

  “All’s already disrupted. And it would make her less a trial. Missus Landlady! Why’d he do so anyway?”

  “A man’s got a soft spot for his daughter,” as they rise together, Istvan resuming the sling and cape while those around them turn their gazes away, down to the scuffed floor, up to the draped windows, noticeable the lack of notice and “Before your party,” Haden’s conspirator’s wink, “why not a hand or two of faro? There’s a place around the way that’s sometimes open, from the outside it’s an ironwork shop,” as they exit the dim café for the darkened streets, two
men amongst many, the unescorted females having disappeared with sundown to their homes or other places of presumed safety, even the prowling youths pairing off into twos and threes—

  —though around another corner, in another and still bleaker neighborhood, furious and disappointed trudges solo Tilde: head ducked beneath her boy’s cap, a scanty costume mustache stuck on with spirit gum, the poke bag across her shoulder packed with cocoa, a precious nib of clean butter, and the brown bottle of serum of elm. For hours she has walked, from one end of the city nearly to the other, asking and asking from stable to stable, but found nearby no “Augean” hostel or hotel or lodging, was the name somehow misremembered? She cannot keep on, must turn back now for home, though may be past this one last bend in the canal—

  —as a clammy hand clamps unseen onto her shoulder, a man’s hand in the smell of cheapest lager and “Here,” hauling her into a muddy nook between buildings, “give it here, sonny,” Tilde kicking like fury backward at his shins, but his boots are thick clodhoppers, his grip tighter still as he discards the useless poke bag to dig inside her coat, a rapid rummage for wallet or valuables until “Ah!” as his hand finds something surprising, a young woman’s soft breasts beneath a boy’s stiff shirt. The man makes a sound like laughter as he swivels her, pins her one-handed to the bricks—“Won’t take a minute, jenny, just you hold still”—as with the other he pulls at his trousers—