Pleasures Of Men

by Kate Williams

Genres: Historical Fiction; Christian Suspense; Thrillers

Synopsis

Spitalfields, 1840. Catherine lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London's East End, with little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination. Then news reaches her of a disturbing murderer known as The Man of Crows. As Catherine hungrily devours the news, she finds she can channel the voices of the dead ... and comes to believe she will eventually channel The Man of Crows himself.
As the murders continue, Catherine gradually realises she is snared in a deadly trap, where nothing is as it first appears ... and behind the lies are secrets more deadly than anything her imagination can conjure.

Release date: August 7, 2012

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

London, July 1840

Night comes late to Spitalfields Market, across the dump at the back used by the traders for the detritus of old vegetables and splintered crates. The stallholders pack up their apples and cabbages, gather their pieces of meat, oysters, and bags of fish, the battered hardware and cheap clothes, down the last dregs of ale, then wrap their arms around each other for the short journey to the lights of Lely’s gin house on the corner. I stay behind, near the dump, see the mass glistening as maggots slither out of the soft flesh of the discarded beef.

The first scavengers are the younger men, dismissed soldiers hiking useless legs, crawling up the dump and delving in their hands. Then women, babies swaddled to their breasts, picking off the heads from trout and cockerels and pulling scraps of pork from the bones. Huddles of rheumy children come next, biting off carrot heads and around potato eyes, licking at the old boxes, rubbing their feet in the last juice of the meat. And when all the others have departed, the old woman comes, baring her rotted teeth at the pile, her lifeless bosoms like dirty moons, pulling herself around the sides of the stack, racking herself with laughter.

At first, when she screams, no one hears but me. Not the seamen outside the gin shop, talking about money and girls, or the women in darkened red dresses and thin shawls, waiting along street corners, or even the scavenging children, fighting over their spoils in the corner of the marketplace. She does not stop. The sound hurtles over the walls until they seem to echo to her cries, and so the children look up and the women hear, and the sailors put aside their bottles and soon real men come, significant, responsible men with dressed hair and long black cloaks, who never give those who work in the market or the scavengers a single thought. They look at the madwoman, rocking in the blood, and think that she is the one dying.

Then they see what lies behind her. A girl, her blue dress ragged ribbons around her legs. She has been stabbed twenty times, they guess, over and over until her skin lies like ruffled feathers over the darkening flesh. Her arms and legs have been bent back so she is all chest, and her pale hair has been plaited and thrust into her mouth. A blue ribbon and a feathered comb cling to the edges of her hair. Over what remains of her bosom, the killer has gouged a deep star. And then they peer further and see a one-pence coin, perched on the still warm core of her heart.

A bigail Greengrass shakes out her thick skirt as she leaves Davis’s Milliners. She beats at the wool, as if by doing so she can throw off the dirt and cruelties of her day. The door bangs behind her and she does not care. She hates Mrs. Davis and her simpering girls. She feels the wetness of the Cobblestones touch the soles of her boots as she sets off toward Long Acre. Four builders at the pie shop whistle at her, and she is not so tired that she cannot toss her head slightly and give a half smile at the swarthy one in the front. Then into Long Acre and the crowds of people milling home, and her day returns: the bottom of her spine is sharp with pain from bending, her left eye is twitching, and the skin smarts under her fingernail from when Mrs. Davis pushed the needle there, on purpose she is sure.

The old witch. For the last two weeks, Mrs. Davis has been making her sew in lining and mend holes, which means sitting at the back of the shop. Even though she was just as good at netting and embroidering as the others and ten times better than stuck-up Emily Warren, whom Mrs. Davis petted just because of her thick golden hair fit for pleasing the gentlemen and a face not so pretty that the peaches there would upset the ladies.

Abigail walks past the blazing shops and sees nothing. The rounded glass bottles glowing blue, green, red in the window of the chemist’s she has regarded a thousand times before, likewise the toppling apples and pears on the stall next to the stationer’s. She ignores the newsboy selling the latest gossip about the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and the boot polisher, his nails blackened for life around the edges. Even the custard tarts trembling in the steamy window of the cake shop, dotted with raisins like stars around the sky, do not touch her eye. She sees only the inside of her mind and the cruelties of her day.

Her mind turns over the spite of Mrs. Davis as she walks up Kingsway and to High Holborn. The cuts in her heels catch slightly on her stockings, and she does not flinch, for she likes the feeling of rawness, the heat that comes before the fissures widen and grow painful. Abigail crosses the road toward St. Paul’s and then trots along London Wall. Gathering her heavy skirts out of a puddle, she turns onto Bishopsgate and then Shoreditch High Street, rehearsing to herself how Lily, the front shop girl, said that a customer had asked for her, Abigail, to do the work personally and Mrs. Davis had replied that the young lady in question was ill and offered Emily instead. She blows on her thin fingers. One day she shall have her own shop and Mrs. Davis and Emily will come begging for work, and she will offer them a little simple stitching to do at home. I cannot do more, she imagines herself saying. I have such good girls now. Her mind wanders to glassy windows full of hats and benches of neat workers bent sewing just for her. Abigail Greengrass. Milliner of Distinction.

She touches her hair and then the soft blue silk of the ribbon. The gentleman had come with a lady (some lady, Lily said) to pick out a hat, returned an hour later, and said that if the young lady with the hazel eyes might accept a ribbon from the shop—any type—he would be pleased to add the cost to his account. Mrs. Davis was out, so she came up. His eyebrows thinned at the end, and she imagined reaching up and touching the few stray hairs into place. Thanking him, she felt Lily’s nudge and wondered—was this the beginning of ruin? The gentleman would come back for her and start taking her to the theater, where she would wear big flowers on her hat and everybody would think her fallen. She chose the blue and waited. But he did not come, and even sent a servant to the shop to collect the hat. “Men are unaccountable,” said Lily, a word they both enjoyed. Still, months on, Abigail wonders. Well now, when he finally came for her, he would be too late, she would be the owner of her own shop, married perhaps. The young lady with the hazel eyes. And since yesterday, she had a better ornament, a feathered comb she’d found on the street near St. Magnus the Martyr Church.

She turns in to Boundary Street. As the gas lamps thin and the street darkens, she is not seeing, not thinking, caught in the trap of her mind.

A scuffle behind her. A footstep.

She looks ahead and the street is empty. Only the beginnings of the moon casting over the stones. The trail of pictures of Mrs. Davis and Emily Warren disappears, and she thinks only of where she is and the air around her.

The footstep comes once more, and then there is a breath. Walking forward, she tells herself that there is nothing. So many times she has thought a man was too near behind when he was simply close by for no reason. She hears a cough and a clack of fine-sounding heels, and her chest tightens. She moves more quickly. So does he.

God help me.

She will not turn. To do so would make him real, but if she walks and pretends she does not know he is there, he will melt away and she will be safe and she will never tell of this to anyone, never. Soon someone will appear, a man carrying his bundle at the end of the day, a ragged woman with two squalling children. She will go up to him or her, smile and stay beside them, and take the route home that stays in the light.

Abigail walks on. So does he.

Stay calm, she tells herself. Only a few streets to her lodgings. Not far. She has not spoken to God since she was a small girl and her mother was dying. Now she bargains. Let me return, and you can have anything. I will be in church every Sunday. I will make Joseph marry me. I will love Mrs. Davis and Emily Warren. Her mind tries to hold the image of a white-bearded man looming kindly in a yellowy tunic, just like the one her father wore for mending things around their rooms when she was a child.

She walks, faster now, hearing the man do the same.

Stop imagining things, she tells herself. He’s just trying to frighten you.

She turns left and knows he will follow. The street is quiet. A few years back, the parish decided to knock down the homes and put up brand-new buildings, in which artists and the like could make paintings and furniture for rich folks. But the buildings were completed just as everything changed and all the money was lost and so they are empty, some already run over with rats. There is no other route she can take, save turning around. She passes the deserted blocks, their windows shining like eyes, hearing him behind her. Nothing will happen. You are a lucky person—remember that. You have always had fortune. She moves slightly to the side of the road, and hears him do the same. Happier thoughts, she tells herself. That day with Joseph by the Thames. The times her father swung her over his head when she was small.

But all she can think of is her lodgings. Her room, left in a tumble when she hurried out in the morning, bed still unmade, her chemise thrown across the floor. Mrs. Wornley hanging over the rails, her bangs catching her face, shouting, “Not another instant for the coal money, my girl, it had better be tonight or you’ll be in trouble.” She would do anything to be in her bed, trying to sleep while Nelly crashes around in the room above her, breathing in the stench of overcooked sprouts and suet, hearing Peter bump buckets of water up the stairs. How she had detested her tiny room, longed for something more spacious, in a better part of town. Now she wishes only to touch open the greasy door, pull off her boots, sit on the wobbly chair she found on a street near Holborn, and know she is safe. Then, she tells herself, you will laugh at how afraid you have been.

And you will never take the short route back again.

Only a few more yards. First left and second right. Then all she has to do is cut through the alleyway behind the pie shop and she will be there. She moves to the black mouth of the alley. Hesitates for a moment, breathes. She is warm now. She thinks of Mrs. Wornley, opening the door to her, peering as the yellow from the lamps floods out into the street. Home. She straightens, smiles to herself, and moves toward the light.



Two men in overcoats stand by our gate. My uncle would have me believe them working men, leaning and talking before going on. The dark one I have seen three times over the past week. He is so close that I can see the black flecks of hair at the edges of his beard, and I imagine reaching up and pulling at them, the rough brown skin resisting and releasing until there is nothing there but clean skin, like a child’s.

Even as late as last winter, I saw many people from my window. Couples walking arm in arm, maids carrying milk pails, laborers shouldering baskets of bricks, old women shuffling past. Now July steams our street and all I see are men. Men saunter past my home and stop by the gates. When I pass in my carriage along the street, they watch. They lean against doors, look at my dress, and brush my arm.

“Please try this afternoon, Catherine.” My uncle was pretending to adjust the Hogarth etching of Gin Lane on the wall so he did not have to look at me. “It would not inconvenience you so very much to smile.” He stepped back and over the African death statue from the eastern part of the country propped on the coal scuttle. “Mr. Janisser is a very wealthy man.”

My breath was rising. “So you have said.”

My uncle batted at his dusty sleeve, turning to swirl his eye at me. “Is that the prettiest gown you have?” I had grown so much over the past few months that even the pale yellow dress, bought not long after I arrived at Princes Street, was too short at the ankles. The green trimming touched the top of my boots.

“I shall sit. Buying dresses is difficult at present.”

He shrugged. “Life must continue, my dear. We cannot live prisoners of fear. No one is going to trouble you. Always are the poor the victims. Well, I shall ask Thomas to take you out in the coach next week to a dressmaker.”

When my uncle’s mind reflected back at me, I saw an old, unmarriageable woman, locked up in her small room, adorned in the faded dresses of her youth.

“I shall resolve to stop growing.”

“That would be wise.” The dark clock to his side struck, and the gold man on the top began his slow turn. “If you rose earlier, Jane would have time to help you arrange your coiffure.” His face was quite still in the hot air. “After our meal, I wish you to return to your room and have her tidy your hair. And find a more becoming gown.” He raised an eyebrow. “The pale lilac. Our visitors this afternoon are of consequence.”

He turned away, and my eyes caught the large brown spot that sat in his cheek, like a bite that would not heal. He always combed his black hair very carefully off his forehead, and he had no mustache or beard, so that his face, sun-scored with wrinkles, was bare to the world. I longed to be back in my room with Grace, her hands flickering at my hair as she imitated my uncle and made me laugh.

“I have met your friends before.”

“The occasion would not be the same without you, my dear.” He reached out, and the signet star ring glittered on his little finger.

I had to pour the tea for the South American mines man and his weasel face, but I didn’t wear my lilac gown for him.

“Mr. James Leith Janisser is the brother of our dear friend Mr. Belle-Smyth. He is not in the most splendid of health.”

I would not give my uncle the satisfaction of a reply. At the window, our neighbor Mr. Kent passed and waved, his child face shiny in the warm air. I looked back at my uncle, and a sly expression was illuminating his face. “I hear that the younger Mr. Janisser has a great facility for pleasing the ladies.” He patted his hand as if he was making a full stop.

Our house was three stories and over a hundred years old, in Princes Street, in the eastern part of London. Most of the other buildings were crammed with families, thirty, even forty bodies in one house, tailors, furniture makers, and weavers whose French I could not understand. They kept lit candles in their windows all night long. I grew up in Richmond and came to this area once before, but that visit was all pain in my head and the streets I could not remember. When I arrived in the coach to live with my uncle, not even a year ago, my mind had been turned blank by Lavenderfields, as if I had never seen the east of London in my life.

I could not credit the noise, in those first weeks. All day and night, the shouts of men, the cries of babies, howling dogs, and an endless clanging and crashing of wood and metal. The smell assaulted my nose, human sewage, rotting vegetables, dirty bodies and dogs, seeping into my chamber. I would turn the corner from the corridor into my bedroom and feel certain I could see the yellowish smog from outside drifting onto my counterpane. In Lavenderfields, the noise was made only by us inside. Outdoors was calm and quiet, and all you could smell was grass. Number 17 Princes Street was always invaded by the outside world. On those first nights I lay in bed certain that the grimy pigeons on the roof were about to come tumbling down the chimney and start flapping over my bed, the filth of the street falling after them.

Still, after a few months, I grew habited to Princes Street, forgetting until I saw our visitors, pale and surprised at the door, that we lived in an environ many in London would revile.

I climbed the stairs to my small room. I dreamt that Grace was already there, waiting, her pale hair like a candle in the gloom.

“You need a gown for this afternoon, I hear.” I turned, and she began to unbutton my dress. Her fingers were on my neck as she moved aside my hair. She smoothed the lilac over my shoulders, and I wanted then to lean against her. Reach for her with the hands that only a year ago had been tied with rope.

“Trying again with the suitors.” I sat on the chair at the table.

“You must marry sometime.”

“Never.” I want to stay with you. “I wish we could take a house together.”

“I would like that.” She moved her hand under my hair and began to brush it. I smiled as she did so. I leaned against the bosom of her dress, and my skin turned to fire.

But there was no one in the dark room but me, the masks my uncle found in Africa that stared out from the walls, and the two little dolls that looked like hunters. I took my tangled hair in my hand and brushed it, then called for Jane to form the style.

The visit was as I expected. Constantine Janisser, skinny, slack-jawed, stretched out his legs in front of him like two long drains. His mother admired and his father sat too close, extolling.

“Our son had great success at school.”

My uncle nodded. “Catherine received excellent reports from her governesses.”

Oh, all so polite! My uncle and Mr. Janisser began exchanging questions about business and family (two younger daughters finishing their education in Bath, and a niece living with them, eighteen and already affianced), and talked of the health of their relatives, the Belle-Smyths. Mrs. Janisser clutched for pleasant words about our ramshackle curiosity shop of a parlor. I poured tea, clumsily, and offered Mrs. Graves’s tea cakes and shortbread biscuits on our best flowered plates. I smiled. How I smiled.

I found myself desiring an aunt. A motherly female presence to flurry our visitors with chatter in a way I could not. I imagined her warming the room with her words, freeing us from the silences that hung over our heads like icicles. But then, my aunt Cross was not comforting or kind, and a wife of my uncle would have surely been the same.

Grace would tell me I looked well. But this man and his family would flee from me, and I hated that they could make the choice to do so. I had my mother’s small nose and the green eyes a friend of my father’s said reminded him of paintings in Rome. And even when I was chained to the wall with it cut short, someone would say, My but she has handsome hair. So dark! Surely some Indian blood? Now my hair was blacker than ever, and since I had come to live with my uncle, it had grown down to my back. My appearance was not the problem. It was my manner. Anyone could see that I did not fit in, and every part of me was out of place, in my body and in my soul.

I wanted to ask my uncle, “Why do you show me around as a potential wife?” A responsible father might inquire about my past.

I turned my head and saw the footman by the glossy Janisser carriage, upright, every sinew of his body tensed to show resentment at standing in Princes Street, where scrawny dogs scratched at the corners of houses and rainwater ran brown down the center. I looked past him at the small face etched on the front wall of the opposite house, eyes, mouth, nose, and allowed the features to throb behind my eyes. Since every street in the east was controlled by a gang, Princes Street was fortunate, said my uncle, to be under the rule of the Malays. The collector came to our door for money twice a month, and then we were protected.

Mrs. Janisser reached out her beeswax fingers for a biscuit and ventured a declaration that the walls must be very strong. My uncle looked up and, as if his voice had been stoppered in a jug and set free, began to talk.

“I bought this house twenty years ago,” he explained. “The value has much increased. But speculation was not my ambition. No. I was entranced by the history.” He held out his arms. “I walked in and could immediately sense the past. Do you not agree?” Mr. Janisser bit at his tea cake. My uncle turned to open the drawer behind him. “I dug these pieces of pot from the garden,” he said, holding them up to the light. “Surely from the medieval age, would you not say? The thirteenth century, I think. Consider that family, cooking over a small fire, in fear of invaders. Or the inhabitants of later years in a black and white house on this spot, hearing talk of Queen Bess entering London, then others seeing their possessions aflame in the Great Fire.” Mrs. Janisser was gazing at the African death masks on the wall behind my uncle’s head. “This house was built anew in 1720. I picture the master silk weaver stepping out of his brand-new door and taking a sedan chair to drink coffee in Covent Garden.”

I ran a finger over my teacup, wishing I could flick the china so hard that it would break. I thought the Janissers were probably tormented by the smell of incense. My uncle sent Jane for incense sticks from the sellers near the docks, in the hope that they would mask the damp. I was used to the smell, but I knew visitors were not. I hoped they were confused by it. I could not understand how a man as established as the elder Mr. Janisser could have struck up any acquaintance with my uncle. The Belle-Smyths too, whom he had recently begun to visit. I could not see what they would want with him, even if he were as rich as they believed.

“Sometimes,” my uncle was saying, “I feel I can hardly work, such is the weight of history here. I prefer to sit and absorb the intense mass of Time.” He sat back, quite satisfied. “Your dress is of fine quality, madam. Spitalfields silk?”

I knew we were ridiculous to them, two oddities adrift in their shadowy, paneled house in a part of London no one would wish to visit. They screwed up their eyes at the Hogarth prints filling the walls, the lopsided couch bought in a market, the death masks, and the table etched with astrological signs. They ornamented their white houses in St. James’s with choice pieces of Sèvres rather than lumps of Babylonian frieze, candleholders from India, Malian death dolls, and pots from old China. Their bodies were gowned in fashion, but my dress was puffed-out lilac and I had only an Egyptian necklace of green and blue beads that my uncle had allowed me to take from the pin on the wall. His black suit edged with velvet was not what a man would habitually wear, that I knew.

“Your collection must be a trouble to dust,” ventured Mrs. Janisser, eyes on the Damascene warrior by the fire.

“Ah, madam, but when one acquires items of beauty, one cannot consider the housework they may entail. Regard this coal holder from Siberia. Mahogany and tiger skin, very ornate. The shopkeeper offered me his child instead, but I insisted.”

I looked at Mrs. Janisser. If I married her son, I would wear those same high-necked gowns, fuss about parlor fittings. I would spend the morning perusing tradesmen’s catalogs and the afternoon suffering a mild headache on the couch, until the time came for an overcooked dinner in a room hot with light. With child by Constantine, discussing choices for table for hours on end, no interest in what was important or beautiful in life. I would not bear it. I refused to. That would not happen to me.

“The fireplace induces my particular pride,” my uncle was saying. “It was part of the original house and works splendidly. New is not always superior.”

My uncle could not tell them, of course, that our roof leaked, servants had to be paid large sums to stay, and our neighbors were not respectable. The richer silk weavers had moved away to set up in the country, and so the houses were cheap, and Mr. Horace next door lived here because he could not find another rental after debtors’ prison. The Kents, mother and son, came here from Chatham, so that the son could study art, they said, but Jane told me she had heard the elder brother was hanged. Uncle did not care, such was his love for History.

“I could not live without shelves,” Mrs. Janisser said (we could not attach them to the paneling). “And do you not find the interior dark?” At first our visitors were interested, and then, after half an hour or so, the condescension bubbled up like water in a well after the leaves have been cleared. The Janissers were like the others. They, not we, were the explorers; they returned home confirmed in the happiness of the choices they had made.

She would not be discouraged. “No air!” I could hear her think: a young girl shut up in this dim house, surrounded by old things. Not normal. “Do you enjoy the fresh air, Miss Sorgeiul?” I gazed back at her in the expensive pink dress with blue lacing she hoped would make her look like a drawing in a magazine. I willed her to know that I was a long piece of silver and her thoughts would slide off me, unable to find a place to grip. I cannot bear the rooms either! I wanted to cry. I sat in the house and felt the history seeping over me, trying to get under my clothes, thick and hot as burning sugar. I sensed the people who had lived in the rooms pressing on me through the darkness and knew they wanted to take my thoughts for their own. I looked at Mrs. Janisser, her husband, and Constantine, unextraordinary but so clearly from the land of the living, where lives were sunny, yellow, rose, or blue like imported flowers, and there were always choices.

My uncle lied! It was not the charm of the lives that attracted him but the heavy weight of death. There was so much death in the house: the masks, the skulls in the cupboard, the swords that had cut off heads in India, and all the possessions of people long in their graves. He was the king of the realm, the ruler who remained. I could not escape, so I had to make the masks into a consolation. They encouraged you to think that life was, if not painless, quick, when the truth was that the days stretched out forever and all you had were endless hours to wait.

But I could not say such things. Mr. Janisser’s gleam would slide and his wife would cough and the son might even laugh. And paying a social call to friends, to a high, white room where delicate teacups clink, they might declare, Well, we visited Mr. Crenaban and Miss Sorgeiul, and, why, she is strange. And someone, one day, might think of my name and a tale she’d once heard, and soon my story would be known to all, and I would be lost.

So I simpered at her. “My uncle allows me to drive out whenever I wish. May I offer you more tea, madam?”

Mr. Janisser fingered his tea cake and shot his wife a quick glare. Within a minute, he had returned to describing the excellence of his son. Constantine Janisser was, we learned, possessed of a rapierlike intelligence, honed at Westminster and Magdalen, and now fully displayed in his daily work at Janisser & Smyth, Investors. Within a few weeks of arriving, he had discovered a host of accounts left to rot, contacted the clients, and renovated every account, and one owner had since brought two hundred pounds to the business.

“Well,” I managed. “Truly an achievement.”

“Yes, indeed.” He could not stop talking, he leapt in and off he went, veering through his firstborn’s virtues like a young deer hurtling past a river. I let the magnificence of Constantine’s eye for detail pass over my head. Ever since their arrival, I had been fighting the desire to look back into my dream from the previous . . .