The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(10)
Slightly ashamed at his lack of endurance, he finished emptying himself in quiet contemplation, still pressed against her, until he felt her stir impatiently. He stepped back, embarrassed. Oblivious to his unease, the whore straightened her skirts and thrust out a hand to be paid. Trying to regain his composure, Andrew hurriedly gave her the agreed sum. He had enough money left in his pockets to buy her for the whole night, but he preferred to savor what he had just experienced in the privacy of his own bed, and to get her to meet him the next night.
“My name’s Andrew,” he introduced himself, his voice high-pitched from emotion. She raised an eyebrow, amused. “And I’d like to see you again tomorrow.” “Certainly, mister. You know where to find me,” the whore said, leading him back along the gloomy passageway she had brought him down.
As they made their way back towards the main streets, Andrew was wondering whether ejaculating between her thighs entitled him to put his arm around her shoulder. He had decided it did, and was about to do precisely that when they ran into another couple walking almost blindly the other way down the dim alleyway. Andrew mumbled an apology to the fellow he had bumped into, who, although scarcely more than a shadow in the darkness, seemed to him quite a burly sort. He was clinging onto a whore, whom Marie Kelly greeted with a smile.
“It’s all yours, Annie,” she said, referring to the backyard they had just left.
The woman called Annie thanked her with a raucous laugh and tugged her companion towards the passageway. Andrew watched them stagger into the pitch-blackness. “Would that burly fellow be satisfied with having his member trapped between her thighs?” he wondered, as he noticed how avidly the man clutched the whore to him.
“Didn’t I tell you it was a quiet spot,” Marie Kelly remarked matter-of-factly as they came out into Hanbury Street.
They said a laconic good-bye in front of the Britannia. Rather disheartened by the coldness she had shown after the act, Andrew tried to find his way back through the gloomy streets to his carriage. It was a good half hour before he found it. He avoided Harold’s eyes as he climbed back into the coach.
“Home, sir?” Harold enquired sardonically.
The following night he arrived at the Britannia determined to behave like a self-assured man instead of the fumbling, timid dandy of their previous encounter. He had to overcome his nerves and prove he could adapt to his surroundings if he was to display his true charms to the girl, that repertoire of smiles and flattery with which he habitually captivated the ladies of his own class.
He found Marie Kelly sitting at a corner table brooding over a pint of beer. Her demeanor unnerved him, but knowing he was not the sort to think up a new strategy as he went along, he decided to stick with his original plan. He ordered a beer at the bar, sat down at the girl’s table as naturally as he could, and told her he knew of a guaranteed way to wipe the worried expression from her face. Marie Kelly shot him a black look, confirming what he feared: his remark had been a tactless blunder. Following this reaction, Andrew thought she was going to tell him to clear off without even wasting her breath, with a simple wave of her hand, like someone shooing away an irritating fly. But in the end, she restrained herself and gazed at him quizzically for a few seconds until she must have decided he was as good a person as any to unburden herself to. She took a swig from her tankard, as if to clear her throat, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and told him that her friend Anne, the woman they had bumped into in Hanbury Street the night before, had been found that morning, murdered, in the same yard they had been in. The poor woman had been partially decapitated, sliced open, her intestines pulled out, and her womb removed. Andrew stammered that he was sorry, as shocked at the killer’s attention to detail as at having collided with him moments before the crime. Evidently that particular client had not been satisfied with the usual service. But Marie Kelly had other worries. According to her, Anne was the third prostitute to be murdered in Whitechapel in less than a month. Polly Nichols had been found dead with her throat slit in Bucks Road, opposite Essex pier, on August 31. And on the seventh of that same month, Martha Tabram had been found brutally stabbed to death with a penknife on the stairs of a rooming house. Marie Kelly laid the blame on the gang from Old Nichol Street, blackmailers who demanded a share of the whores” earnings.
“Those bastards will stop at nothing to get us working for them,” she said between gritted teeth.
This state of affairs disturbed Andrew, but it should have come as no surprise: after all, they were in Whitechapel—that putrid dung heap London had turned its back on, home to more than a thousand prostitutes living alongside German, Jewish, and French immigrants. Stabbings were a daily occurrence. Wiping away the tears that had finally flowed from her eyes, Marie Kelly sat head bowed in silence for a few moments as though in prayer, until, to Andrew’s surprise, she suddenly roused herself from her stupor, grasped his hand, and smiled lustfully at him.
Life went on. Whatever else happened, life went on. Was that what she had meant by her gesture? After all, she, Marie Kelly, had not been murdered. She had to go on living, dragging her skirts through those foul-smelling streets in search of money to pay for a bed. Andrew gazed with pity at her hand lying in his, her dirty nails poking through her frayed mitten. He too felt the need to concentrate for a moment in order to change masks, like an actor who needs some time in his dressing room to concentrate in order to become a different character when he goes back on stage. After all, life went on for him, too. Time did not stop just because a whore had been murdered. And so he stroked her hand tenderly, ready to resume his plan. As though wiping condensation from a windowpane, he freed his young lover’s smile from its veil of sadness and, looking her in the eye for the first time, he said: “I have enough money to buy you for the whole night, but I don’t want any fakery in a cold backyard.” This startled Marie Kelly, and she tensed in her seat, but Andrew’s smile soon put her at ease.