AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He smiled at her very slightly, an acknowledgment.
She sniffed and stood up, turning her back to him. Without explaining, she filled the kettle and put it on the hob, then fetched a china teapot and two mugs.
“I’ll tell yer wot I know,” she remarked while she waited for the water to boil. “Wot in’t much. She used ter do quite well sometimes, and bad others. If she were in an ’ard patch she’d come ’ere an’ I’d find ’er a bed for a spell. She’d always turn ’er ’and ter cookin’ an’ cleanin’ as return. Din’t expec’ summink fer nuffink. Honest, she were, in ’er own fashion. An’ generous.” She kept her back to him as the steam started to whistle in the spout.
He did not press her in what way; he understood it from her turned back. She was not willing to put words to it.
“Anyone in particular?” he asked, quite casually.
“Arthur Cutter,” she said, bringing the teapot over to the table and putting it down. “ ’E’s a right waster, but ’e wouldn’t ’ave ’urt ’er. It would ’a bin some o’ them daft artist people. I always told ’er they was no good.” She sniffed again and reached for a piece of cloth in her apron pocket. She blew her nose savagely and then poured the tea for both of them, not bothering to ask if he wanted milk or sugar, but assuming both. Monk disliked sugar intensely, but he made no comment, simply thanking her.
“How did she get in with the artists?” he asked.
Now she seemed willing to talk. She rambled on, telling and retelling, but a vivid picture of Sarah Mackeson emerged from a mixture of memory, opinion and anger. Fourteen years ago, aged eighteen, she had arrived in Risinghill Street without a penny but willing to work. Within weeks her handsome figure and truly beautiful hair and eyes had attracted attention, some of it welcome, much of it beyond her skill to deal with.
Mrs. Clark had taken her in and taught her a good deal about caring for herself and learning to play one admirer off against another in order to survive. Within a few months she had found a protector prepared to take her as his mistress and give her a very pleasant standard of living.
It lasted four years, until he grew bored and found another eighteen-year-old and began again. Sarah had come back to Risinghill Street, wiser and a good deal more careful. She found work in a public house, the Hare and Billet, about half a mile away, and it was there that a young artist had seen her and hired her to sit for him.
Over a space of a couple of years she had improved her skill as a model, and finally Argo Allardyce had persuaded her to leave Risinghill Street and go to Acton Street to be at his disposal any time he should wish. She kept a room nearby, when she could afford it, but more often than not she had to let it go.
“Was she in love with Allardyce?” Monk asked.
Mrs. Clark poured more tea. “ ’Course she was, poor creature,” she said tartly. “Wot do you think? Told ’er she were beautiful, an’ ’e meant it. So she was, too. But she were no lady, an’ she never imagined she were. Knew ’er limits. That were part of ’er trouble. Never thought she were more’n pretty. Never thought no one’d care for ’er once ’er skin and ’er figure went.”
In spite of himself, Monk was struck with a stab of sorrow for a woman who thought her on
ly worth was her beauty. Had she really no sense of her value for her laughter or her courage, her ideas, just her gift to love? Was that what life had taught her? That no man could simply like her, rather than want to look at her, touch her, use her?
A vision of fear opened up in front of him. He saw her constant anxiety each time she looked in the mirror, saw a line or a blemish on her skin, an extra pound or two on the rich lines of her body, a slackness real or imagined, that signaled the decline at the end of which lay hunger, loneliness and eventually despair.
Mrs. Clark went on talking, describing a life in which beauty was caught on canvas and made immortal for the pleasure of artists and viewers, yet was strangely disconnected from the woman, as if her face, her hair, her body, were not really her. She could walk away unnoticed, leaving the image of herself, the part they valued, still in their possession.
The loneliness of it appalled him. He pressed her for more stories, more details, names, places, times.
He felt subdued and deeply thoughtful when he arrived to meet Runcorn nearly an hour late. Runcorn was sitting in the corner of a tavern nursing a mug of ale and getting steadily angrier as the minutes passed.
“Mislaid your watch, have you?” he said from between his clenched teeth.
Monk sat down. He had drunk so much tea he had no desire for ale or cider, and the good-natured babble of the crowd around him made it impossible to speak quietly. “Do you want to know about her or not?” he replied, ignoring the remark. He refused to explain himself. He already knew Runcorn’s views on the virtues of women, which consisted mostly of being hardworking, obedient and chaste, the last being the necessity which framed all else. He had been too long away from the streets and the reality of most women’s lives, perhaps too afraid of his own frailties to look at other people’s.
Runcorn glared at him. “So what did you find, then?” he demanded.
Monk relayed the facts of Sarah’s parentage and career up to the point of Allardyce’s seeing her and then shortly afterwards employing her exclusively. He also gave him the name of her onetime lover, Arthur Cutter.
Runcorn listened in silence, his face heavy with conflicting emotions. “Better see him, I suppose,” he said at the end. “Could be him, if he thought she’d betrayed him somehow, but doesn’t seem likely. Women like that move from one man to another and nobody cares all that much. No doubt he expected it, and has had half a dozen different women since then.”
“Somebody cared enough to kill her,” Monk responded angrily. What Runcorn had said was probably true; it was not the fact that cut Monk raw, it was the contempt with which Runcorn said it, or perhaps even the fact that he said it at all. There were some truths that compassion covered over, like hiding the faces of the dead, a small decency when nothing greater was possible. He looked at Runcorn with intense dislike, and all his old memories returned with their ugliness, the narrowness of mind, the judgment, the willingness to hurt. “She’s just as dead as Elissa Beck,” he added.
Runcorn stood up. “Go and see Bella Holden,” he ordered. “You’ll probably find her at her lodgings, 23 Pentonville Road. She’s another artists’ model, and I daresay it’s a bawdy house. Unless you want to give up? But looks like you’re as keen to find out who killed Sarah Mackeson as you are about Beck’s wife.” He walked between the other drinkers without looking back or bothering to tell Monk where to meet him again. Monk watched Runcorn’s high, tight shoulders as he pushed his way out and lost sight of him just before the door.
The house at 23 Pentonville Road was indeed a brothel of sorts, and he found Bella Holden only after considerable argument and the payment of two shillings and sixpence, which he could ill afford. Callandra would willingly have replaced it, but both pride and the awareness of her vulnerability would prevent him from asking. This was friendship, not business.
Bella Holden was handsome, with a cloud of dark hair and remarkable pale blue eyes. She must have been a little over thirty, and he could see underneath the loose nightgown she wore that her body was losing its firmness and the shape an artist would admire. She was too lush, too overtly womanly. It would not be long before this house, and its like, were her main support, unless she learned a trade. No domestic employer would have her, even if she were capable of the tasks required. Without a character, a reference from a former employer, she would not be allowed over the step, let alone into the household.
Looking at her now as she stared back at him, holding the money in her hand, he saw anger and the need to please struggling against each other in her face, and a certain heaviness about her eyelids, a lethargy as if he had woken her from a dream far more pleasant than any reality. It was three o’clock. He might be her first customer. The indifference in her face was a lifetime’s tragedy.
He thought of Hester, and of how she would loathe having a stranger’s hand on her clothes, let alone on her naked skin. This woman had to endure intimacy from whoever chose to walk through the door with two shillings and sixpence to spend. Where did the ignorance and the desperation come from that she would not prefer to work, even in a sweatshop, rather than this?
