Читать книгу The Way of All Flesh - Ambrose Parry - Страница 7

ONE

o decent story ought to begin with a dead prostitute, and for that, apologies, for it is not something upon which respectable persons would desire to dwell. However, it was the very assumption that the gentle folk of Edinburgh would shy from such a thing that set Will Raven upon his fateful path during the winter of 1847. Raven would not have wished anyone to consider the discovery of poor Evie Lawson as the beginning of his own story, but what truly motivated him was the determination that neither would it be the end of hers.

He found her four flights up on the Canongate, in a cold and crooked wee garret. The place was reeking of drink and sweat, barely tempered by a merciful note of something more perfumed: a womanly musk to be sure, if cheap and redolent only of a woman who sold herself. With these scents in his nostrils, if he closed his eyes he could imagine she was still there, about to haul herself down to the street for maybe the third or fourth time in as many hours. But his eyes were open, and he didn’t have to feel for the absence of a pulse to know otherwise.

Raven had seen enough death to understand that her passing from this life into the next had not been an easy one. The sheets on the bed were swirled up around her, testament to more writhing than she ever feigned in her counterfeit passion, and he feared it lasted longer than any of her customers ever did. Her body, far from lying in repose, was in a state of contortion, as though the pain that had carried her off was still with her and there had been no release in death. Her brows remained contracted, her lips drawn apart. There were collections of froth at the corners of her mouth.

Raven laid a hand on her arm and quickly withdrew it. The cold was a shock, though it shouldn’t have been. He was no stranger to handling a corpse, but seldom one whose touch he had known when warm. In this moment of contact, something ancient in him was moved by how she had gone from a person to a thing.

Many before him had seen her transformed in this room: from the sum of their desires to a wretched vessel for their unwanted seed, adored and then despised in the moment they spilled it.

Not him, though. Whenever they had lain together, the only transformation he contemplated was the desire to elevate her above this. He was not merely another customer. They were friends. Weren’t they? That was why she shared with him her hopes that she might find a position as a maid in a respectable house, and why he had promised to make enquiries on her behalf, once he began to move in the right circles.

That was why she came to him for help.

She wouldn’t tell him what the money was for, only that it was urgent. Raven guessed she owed somebody, but it was pointless trying to prevail upon her to reveal who. Evie was too practised a deceiver for that. She had seemed mightily relieved and tearfully grateful that he had got it, though. He didn’t tell her from where, concealing a concern that he might have put himself in hock to the self-same money-lender, effectively transferring Evie’s debt to him.

It was two guineas, as much as he might expect to live on for several weeks, and thus a sum he had no immediate means of paying back. He hadn’t cared, though. He wanted to help. Raven knew there were those who would scoff at the notion, but if Evie believed she could reinvent herself as a housemaid, then he had been prepared to believe it twice as hard on her behalf.

The money had not saved her, however, and now there would be no escape.

He looked around the room. The stumps of two candles were guttering in the necks of gin bottles, a third long ago melted down to nothing. In the tiny grate, the embers were barely glowing in a fire she would otherwise have sparingly replenished hours ago from the coals in a nearby scuttle. By the bed was a shallow basin of water, wet rags draped over its rim and a ewer alongside. It was what she used to clean herself afterwards. Close by it on the floor lay an upended gin bottle, a modest puddle testifying to there being little left inside when it tumbled.

There was no label on the bottle, its provenance unknown and therefore suspect. It would not be the first time some back-alley gut-rot distiller had inadvertently brewed up a lethal draught. Complicating this thesis was the sight of a bottle of brandy on the windowsill, still half full. It must have been a client who brought it.

Raven wondered if the same individual witnessed Evie’s throes and left it behind in his hurry to escape the aftermath. If so, why didn’t he call for help? Possibly because to some, being found with a sick hoor was no better than being found with a dead one, so why draw attention to yourself? That was Edinburgh for you: public decorum and private sin, city of a thousand secret selves.

Aye. Sometimes they didn’t even need to spill their seed for the vessel to be transformed.

He looked once more upon the glassy hollowness in her eyes, the contorted mask that was a mockery of her face. He had to swallow back the lump in his throat. Raven had first set eyes upon her four years ago when he was but a schoolboy, boarding at George Heriot’s. He recalled the whispers behind hands of the older boys who knew the truth of what they were looking at when they spied her walking along the Cowgate. They were full of that curious mix of lustful fascination and fearful scorn, wary of what their own instincts were making them feel. They wanted her as they hated her, even then. Nothing changed.

At that age, the future seemed unattainable even as he was hurtling towards it. To Raven, she appeared an emissary of a world he was not yet permitted to inhabit. For that reason, he regarded her as someone above him, even after he discovered that the future was unavoidably here, and learned how easily certain things were attainable.

She seemed so much older, so much more worldly, until he came to understand that she had seen only a small, grim part of the world, and far more of that than any woman should. Woman? Girl. He later learned that she was younger than him by almost a year. She must have been fourteen when he saw her on the Cowgate. How she had grown in his mind between that moment and the first time he had her: a promise of true womanhood and all he dreamed it had to offer.

Her world had been small and squalid. She deserved to see a wider one, a better one. That was why he gave her the money. Now it was gone and so was she, and Raven was none the wiser as to what his debt had paid for.

For a moment he felt as though tears were about to come, but a vigilant instinct cautioned him that he must get out of this place before he was seen.

He left the room on quiet feet, closing the door softly. He felt like a thief and a coward as he crept down the stairs, abandoning her to preserve his own reputation. From elsewhere in the close he could hear the sounds of copulation, the exaggerated cries of a young woman feigning her ecstasy to hasten the end.

Raven wondered who would find Evie now. Her landlady most likely: the redoubtably sleekit Effie Peake. Though she preferred to pretend ignorance when it suited her, she missed little that went on under her roof unless she had already succumbed to the gin for the night. Raven felt sure the hour was yet too early for that, hence the softness of his tread.

He left out the back way and through the middens, emerging from an alleyway onto the Canongate a good forty yards west of Evie’s close. Out here beneath the black sky, the air felt cold but far from fresh. The smells of ordure were inescapable around here, so many lives piled one upon the other in the foetid labyrinth that was the Old Town, like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel or Botticelli’s Map of Hell.

Raven knew he should repair to his cold and joyless wee room in Bakehouse Close for one last night. He had a whole new beginning ahead of him the next day, and he ought to rest himself ahead of it. But he also knew sleep was unlikely to come after what he had just witnessed. It was not a night for solitude, or for sobriety.

The only antidote to being confronted with death was the hearty embrace of life, even if that embrace was smelly, sweaty and rough.