She reached out to caress the bunch of Parma violets on her dressing-table with a smile that, for once, was not meant for Walser to see.
‘My Violetta on my knee, we explore together the adventures of A and B and C when comes a jangle on the bell and there in the shop is the strangest old lady that ever I saw, dressed up in the clothes of her youth, that is to say, some fifty years behind the times, a dress of black chiffon that looked like rags hung over such a mass of taffeta petticoats you couldn’t see at first how thin she was, that she was a lady all skin and bone. On her head she wore an old-fashioned poke bonnet of dull black satin with jet ornaments at either side and a black spotted veil hanging down in the front, so thick you could not see her face.
‘“Let me through into the back room, Winged Victory,” she said and she had a voice like the wind in telegraph wires.
‘Violetta burst out crying at the sight of my visitor and I hustled her off into the kitchen to get a treat of nuts and citron off Lizzie but I was a good deal discomposed by this apparition, too, and set her by the fire on the best chair – for you could tell she was a perfect gentlewoman – with stammerings and nervous fussings, quite unlike myself. She stretched her hand towards the flames; she had those great-auntish black lace mittens on, that go no further than the first joint of the fingers and thumbs, so all you could see of her hands was bone and nail.
‘“I reckon you’ve fallen on hard times since Nelson went,” she says.
‘“I won’t say things are rosy,” says I, although her very presence made me shudder and throughout our interview she never lifts her veil.
‘“Well, Fevvers,” she says, “I’ve a proposition for you.” And with that names me a figure that takes my breath away.
‘“And never any need to do the thing, oh, rest assured!” she tells me. “Not ’til you want to, that is.” So I realise she has heard all about me, how I was Ma Nelson’s flagship but always kept out of the battle, that Nelson never brought me to the block so I was known to all the netherside of London as the Virgin Whore.
‘“I want you for my museum of woman monsters,” she says. “Take your time about making up your mind.” Rising, she leaves her card on the mantelpiece and departs, and, looking after her out of the shop door, I see her little, old-fashioned carriage, all closed in, drawn by a little black pony and, on the box, a black man with this mournful peculiarity, he had been born without a mouth. Then the sour, brown fog rising from the river swallowed them up but I heard the hooves trotting towards Chelsea Bridge, although the wheels I could not hear since they were solid rubber.’
‘It was the famous Madame Schreck,’ said Lizzie tonelessly, as if the mention of the name were sufficient bad news in itself.
Famous, indeed; Walser knew of her already, vague rumours in men’s clubs, over brandy and cigars, the name never accompanied by guffaws, leers, nudges in the ribs, but by bare, hinted whispers of the profoundly strange, of curious revelations that greeted you behind Our Lady of Terror’s triple-locked doors, doors that opened reluctantly, with a great rattling of bolts and chains, and then swung to with a long groan as of despair.
‘Madame Schreck,’ wrote Walser. The story was about to take a grisly turn.
‘Oh, my poor girl!’ exclaimed Lizzie on a sigh. ‘If only . . . if only the baby had not taken a turn for the worse; oh, and if only Gianni’s cough had not turned septic, so he had to take to his bed; if only Isotta never took such a tumble down the stairs that the doctor swore she must spend the last three months of her time flat on her back on the kitchen sofa . . . Oh, Mr Walser, the dolorous litany of the misfortunes of the poor is a string of “if onlys”.’
‘Had not the doctor’s bills, that winter, swallowed up all our savings and as for the activities of the Special Branch –’
This time it was Lizzie who kicked furiously at Fevvers’ ankle and the girl never missed a beat of her narrative but went smoothly on a different tack.
‘And the little ones staring starvation in the face; oh! if our household had not been overwhelmed by an accumulation of those unpredictable catastrophes that precipitate poor folk such as we into the abyss of poverty through no fault of their own –’
‘“Don’t do it, Fevvers,” our Gianni begged her, but then he coughed up blood.’
‘So, rising early one morning, before the house was awake, when nobody could stop me, leaving Lizzie sleeping in our bed, I hastily packed a few things in a carpet bag, and not forgetting my pet talisman, Ma Nelson’s toy sword, to give me courage, I left a scribbled message on the kitchen table and trudged over Chelsea Bridge just as the moon was setting. It was bitter, bitter cold and even at Nelson’s funeral was my heart never so heavy. As I reached the last lamp-post on the bridge, out it blinked, and I lost sight of Battersea in the darkness before dawn.’
FOUR
‘You’ve filled up your notebook,’ observed Lizzie. Walser reversed it in order to give himself a fresh set of blank pages. He sharpened his pencil with the razor blade he always carried in an inner pocket for the purpose. He flexed his aching wrist. Lizzie, as if rewarding him for these activities, refilled his mug and Fevvers held out her mug for more tea, too. ‘Thirsty work, this autobiography,’ she said. Her exuberant hair was beginning to escape from Lizzie’s hairpins and frolic here and there along her bullish nape.
‘Mr Walser,’ she went on earnestly, spinning on her stool towards him. ‘You must understand this: Nelson’s Academy accommodated those who were perturbed in their bodies and wished to verify that, however equivocal, however much they cost, the pleasures of the flesh were, at bottom, splendid. But, as for Madame Schreck, she catered for those who were troubled in their . . . souls.’
Darkly she turned her attention for a moment to her treacly tea.
‘It was a gloomy pile in Kensington, in a square with a melancholy garden in the middle full of worn grass and leafless trees. The façade of her house was blackened by the London soot as if the very stucco were in mourning. A louring portico over the front door, sir, and all the inner shutters tightly barred. And the door knocker most ominously bandaged up in crepe.
‘That self-same fellow with no mouth, poor thing, opens the door to me after a good deal of unbolting from the inside, and bids me come in with eloquent gestures of his hands. I never saw eyes so full of sorrow as his were, sorrow of exile and of abandonment; his eyes said, clear as his lips could have, “Oh, girl! go home! save yourself while there is yet time!” even while he takes away my hat and shawl, but I am the same poor creature of necessity as he, and, as he must stay, then so needs I.
‘Early as it was in the morning for a house of pleasure – it was not yet seven – Madame Schreck, it seems, was wide awake but still in bed, taking her chocolate. She had me sit meself down and have a cup with her, which I did willingly enough, in spite of my trepidation, for that long walk had worn me out and I was starving hungry. The shutters were up, the blinds down, her heavy curtains drawn across and the only light in her bedroom a little nightlight or corpse light on the mantel so I was hard put to it to see what witches’ broth there is in my cup and she’s laid out in an old four-poster with the embroidered hangings pulled almost together so I can’t make out the face or shape of her, and all cold as hell.
‘“I’m glad to see you, Fevvers,” she says, and her voice was like wind in graveyards. “Toussaint will show you to your quarters, presently, and you can take a rest until dinner-time, after which we shall measure you for your costume.” From the way she said it, you’d think that costume was to be a winding sheet.
‘As my eyes grew used to the penumbra, I saw the only furniture in the room, besides her bed and my chair, was a safe the size of a wardrobe with the biggest brass combination lock on it that I ever did see, and a desk with a roll-top all locked up.
‘That was all she spoke to me. I made haste to finish my chocolate, I can tell you. Then the manservant, Toussaint, with the tenderest gesture, covers my eyes up with his hand, and, when he uncovers, M
adame Schreck is up and dressed and stood there before me in her black dress and a thick veil such as a Spanish widow wears that comes down to her knees, and her mittens on, all complete.
‘Now, Mr Walser, do not think I am a faint-hearted woman but although I knew very well it was all so much show, the black carriage, the mute, the prison chill, all the same she had some quality of the uncanny about her, over and above the illusion, so you did think that under those lugubrious garments of hers you might find nothing but some kind of wicked puppet that pulled its own strings.
‘“Be off with you!” she says. But I thought of my little nephews and nieces who, that very minute, would be plaguing Lizzie for a bite of breakfast when we’d shared the last crust in the house at last night’s supper, and I sang out: “How about a bit on account, Madame Schreck? Or else I fly straight up the chimney, you won’t see me again.” And I swept over to the fireplace, that ain’t never seen a burned stock in its life, shoved aside the firescreen, ready to make good my promise.
‘“Toussaint!” she says. “Get in a man to block up all the chimneys immediately!” But when I started to toss the fire-irons furiously this way and that way, she says reluctantly: “Oh, very well,” feels under her pillow for a key, takes good care to put herself fair and square between me and the safe so I can’t read the combination, and, in a trice, the door swings open. Aladdin’s cave, inside! the contents shone with their own light, pile upon pile of golden sovereigns, a queen’s ransom of diamond necklaces and pearls and rubies and emeralds piled hugger-mugger among bankers’ drafts, bills of exchange, foreclosed mortgages etc. etc. etc. With a display of the greatest reluctance, she selects five sovereigns, counts ’em out again and, with as much painful hesitation as if they were drops of her dear heart’s blood, she hands ’em over.
‘What a shock I got when I felt the rasp of her fingertips on my palm, for they were indeed hard, as if there were no flesh on ’em. Afterwards, when I was free again, Esmeralda’s old man, the Human Eel, told me how this Madame Schreck, as she called herself, had indeed started out in life as a Living Skeleton, touring the sideshows, and always was a bony woman.
‘As I goes out the bedroom, I glances over my shoulder, to see what the old hag’s up to, now, and, bugger me, if she hasn’t precipitated herself bodily into that safe, and is hugging the riches it contains to her skinny bosom with the most vehement display of passion, making faint, whinnying sounds the while.
‘I trust Toussaint, to whom I have taken an immediate liking, to get these sovereigns straight to Battersea, lay my head on my hard, flat pillow, and take immediate refuge in sleep, to wake hours later, as night approaches. It was the barest, plainest chamber you ever saw, with a little iron bedstead, a deal washstand and iron bars across the window from which I can see the barren trees in the deserted garden and a few lights in the houses over the square. To see those lights in happy homes brought the tears to my eyes, sir, for I am in a house that shows no lights, no lights.
‘Then it comes to me how I might never leave this place, now I have come here of my own free will; that I have voluntarily incarcerated myself among the damned, for the sake of money, even if from the best of motives; that my doom has come upon me.
‘At this apocalyptic moment, the door opens, I see a shadow behind a kerosene lamp, I start up from the bed, crying out – and the shadow speaks, in broad Yorkshire: “It’s nobbut old Fanny, luv, don’t be afeared!”
‘And I will find the companionship of the damned my only solace.
‘Who worked for Madame Schreck, sir? Why, prodigies of nature, such as I. Dear old Fanny Four-Eyes; and the Sleeping Beauty; and the Wiltshire Wonder, who was not three foot high; and Albert/Albertina, who was bipartite, that is to say, half and half and neither of either; and the girl we called Cobwebs. During the time I stayed at Madame Schreck’s, such was the full complement, and though she begged Toussaint to join in some of the tableaux vivants, he never would, being a man of great dignity. All he did was play the organ.
‘And there was a drunk cook in the basement, but we never saw much of her.’
‘This Toussaint,’ said Walser, tapping his pencil against his teeth. ‘How did he –’
‘Eat, sir? Through a tube up his nose, sir. Liquids only but sufficient to sustain life. I’m happy to say that, since I began to prosper on the halls and started to frequent the company of men of science, I was able to interest Sir S—. J—. in Toussaint’s case and he was successfully operated upon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital two years ago last February. And now Toussaint has a mouth as good as yours or mine! You’ll find a full account of the operation in The Lancet for June, 1898, sir.’
She gave him this scientific verification of Toussaint’s existence with a dazzling smile.
It was true that Fevvers had won the friendship of many men of science. Walser recalled how the young woman had entertained the curiosity of the entire Royal College of Surgeons for three hours without so much as unbuttoning her bodice for them, and discussed navigation in birds with a full meeting of the Royal Society with such infernal assurance and so great a wealth of scientific terminology that not one single professor had dared be rude enough to question her on the extent of her personal experience.
‘Oh, that Toussaint!’ said Lizzie. ‘How he can move a crowd! Such eloquence, the man has! Oh, if all those with such things to say had mouths! And yet it is the lot of those who toil and suffer to be dumb. But, consider the dialectic of it, sir,’ she continued with freshly crackling vigour, ‘how it was, as it were, the white hand of the oppressor who carved open the aperture of speech in the very throat you could say that it had, in the first place, rendered dumb, and –’
Fevvers shot Lizzie a look of such glazing fury that the witch hushed, suddenly as she’d started. Walser raised his mental eyebrows. More to the chaperone than met the eye! But Fevvers lassooed him with her narrative and dragged him along with her before he’d had a chance to ask Lizzie if –
‘Before he met up with Madame Schreck, sir, Toussaint used to work the shows at fairs, what they call on your side of the herring-pond the Ten-in-Ones, sir. So he was a connoisseur of degradation and always maintained it was those fine gentlemen who paid down their sovereigns to poke and pry at us who were the unnatural ones, not we. For what is “natural” and “unnatural”, sir? The mould in which the human form is cast is exceedingly fragile. Give it the slightest tap with your fingers and it breaks. And God alone knows why, Mr Walser, but the men who came to Madame Schreck’s were one and all quite remarkable for their ugliness; their faces suggested that he who cast the human form in the first place did not have his mind on the job.
‘Toussaint could hear us perfectly well, of course, and often jotted down encouraging words and sometimes little maxims on the pad he always carried with him and he was as great a comfort and an inspiration to us in our confinement as now he will be to a greater world.’
Lizzie nodded emphatically. Fevvers went smoothly forward.
‘Madame Schreck organised her museum, thus: downstairs, in what had used to be the wine cellar, she’d had a sort of vault or crypt constructed, with wormy beams overhead and nasty damp flagstones underfoot, and this place was known as “Down Below”, or else, “The Abyss”. The girls was all made to stand in stone niches cut out of the slimy walls, except for the Sleeping Beauty, who remained prone, since proneness was her speciality. And there were little curtains in front and, in front of the curtains, a little lamp burning. These were her “profane altars”, as she used to call them.
‘Some gent would knock at the front door, thumpetythump, a soft, deathly thunder due to that crepe muffler on the knocker. Toussaint would unbolt and let him in, relieve him of his topcoat and topper and put him in the little receiving-room, where the punter would rummage among the clobber in the big wardrobe and rig himself out in a cassock, or a ballet-dancer’s frock, or whatever he fancied. But the one I liked least was the executioner’s hood; there was a judge who come regular who always
fancied that. Yet all he ever wanted was a weeping girl to spit at him. And he’d pay a hundred guineas for the privilege! Except, on those days when he’d put on the black cap himself, then he’d take himself off upstairs, to what Madame Schreck called the “Black Theatre”, and there, Albert/Albertina put a noose around his neck and give it a bit of a pull but not enough to hurt, whereupon he’d ejaculate and give him/her a fiver tip, but La Schreck always took charge of that.
‘When the client had donned the garments of his choice, the lights dimmed. Toussaint would scurry down below and take his place at the harmonium, which was concealed behind a pierced Gothic fold-screen. He’d start pumping out some heartening tune such as a nice Kyrie from some requiem. That was our cue to off with the shawls and jackets we’d bundled ourselves in, to keep out the cold, and give over the games of bezique or backgammon with which we passed the time, climb up on our pedestals and pull the curtains shut. Then the old hag herself comes tottering down the cellar like Lady Macbeth, ushering the happy client. There’d be a lot of clanking of chains, there being several doors to open, and it was all dark but for her lantern, which was a penny candle in a skull.
‘So, we all stood to attention at our posts and the last door opens and in she comes like Virgil in Hell, with her little Dante trotting after, whickering to himself with deliciously scarified anticipation, and the candle-lantern throwing all manner of shadows on the sweating walls.
‘She’d stop at random in front of one niche or another and she’d say: “Shall I open the curtain? Who knows what spectacle of the freakish and unnatural lies behind it!” And they’d say, “yes”, or, “no”, depending on whether they’d been before, for if they’d been before, they’d got their fancies picked out. And if it was, “yes”, she’d pull back the curtain while Toussaint wheezed out a shocking discord on the old harmonium.
‘And there she’d be.
‘It cost another hundred guineas to have the Wiltshire Wonder suck you off and a cool two fifty to take Albert/Albertina upstairs because s/he was one of each and then as much again, while the tariff soared by leaps and bounds if you wanted anything out of the ordinary. But, as for me and the Sleeping Beauty, it was: “look, don’t touch”, since Madame Schreck chose to dispose of us in a series of tableaux.