She dropped her hands to the bench and started fiddling with the tools, as if they might distract her.
‘Are these how you make the patterns?’ she said, sniffing loudly.
I nodded, vigilant and wary. She weighed one in her hand, and traced her fingertips over the brass acorn at the tip. Then she picked up a rose, then a teardrop, the one I used for angels’ wings. Finally, her hands moved over to a large, heavy tool.
‘I thought you’d returned the Society’s coat of arms.’
I waited for her to peruse it further, and when realisation set in, she cried, ‘Oh!’ then sighed heavily.
‘What do you know about that crest?’ I asked her.
In a whisper, she said, ‘Les Sauvages Nobles.’
‘Who are they, Sylvia?’ I enquired. The woman, might, at least, be of some use to me, no matter what she had done with my Din.
‘It’s a club. A private club. It started with the inner circle of the Scientific Society; now it includes some of their immediate, their most like-minded, colleagues. They meet for dinner every Monday evening, in chambers, or at St James’s, or at White’s, or sometimes at Berkeley-square.’
‘Lord Glidewell is one of them, isn’t he?’
‘Indeed. You know him? His family has several plantations in the West Indies, three stars to their name in the East India stockholders list, and a mansion in Hampshire.’
‘What do they discuss?’
‘Oh, this and that. Mostly tedium. The higher speciali-sations of their scientific and creative endeavours. Theories that may or may not gain acceptance in wider circles. I must confess that I was never entrusted with further confidences about their activities, but neither did I express an interest.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Well, they didn’t play parlour croquet, if that’s what you are asking,’ she snapped.
And I didn’t ask you to come to live with me, I was about to scream, you and your nigger child! But instead, I waited for her to continue.
‘I fear they found me somewhat disapproving,’ she said, more subdued now, ‘along with all the other wives. Why, even the poor servants disapprove of their Monday evenings. There has been many a valet working for Valentine – that is, Lord Glidewell – who has handed in his notice on Tuesday morning and left without reference by the afternoon. He can never keep them.’
‘What else do you know about them?’
‘My dear, very little. They mean next to nothing to me. You should hear the way they ridicule the Anti-Slavery lobby, indeed, the Anti-Anything lobby. I overheard them one evening, and my ears still burn at the memory. They were discussing the forthcoming marriage of Aubrey’s daughter, Herberta, to a Romanian prince, or a Bavarian count, I forget which, and they were debating amongst themselves about how far East was too far to accept in a son-in-law. Then they moved on to our more Western brethren, when I distinctly heard Jossie say, “My wife, lamentably, is a negrophile; give her a nigger over a Yankee any day,” to which Ruthven replied, “Rather an African Negro than an Irish Catholic.” And they laughed, Dora, all of them.’
I started to rub at the lamps again, with vigour, my cheeks burning.
‘Unfathomable, isn’t it?’ Sylvia said glumly, presuming to read my thoughts about her husband. Indeed it was, if I thought about it. Here was a man whose fascination with Africa and India was both personal and professional, whose scientific endeavours drove him to calibrate, study and truly endeavour to understand the African and other racial groups, and yet who read The Lustful Turk, took Turkish baths, and was more savage than noble in his racial and sexual attitudes. ‘But Jossie is by no means the worst of them,’ she continued. ‘The Noble Savages is, I have always felt, a club based on a shared understanding of – how best to put it? – cruelty. It is hard for me to say this, but I believe my husband and his contemporaries have a fundamentally evil streak that needs to be manifested in some way. I must confess to you, Dora, that I have over time grown to be grateful for his Monday nights of hellfire and savagery, for his vicious excesses, for he returns to me on Tuesday morning with a merriness and a levity that is sweeter than sugar.’
When I finally slept that night, the nightmares that visited me could have come straight out of the pages of the books I had bound. First, I was roaming along a row of female body parts suspended in spirits of wine in glass jars, trying to find my own heart. When I found it, I discovered a bite had been taken out of it, and next to it, on either side, were the two castrated organs of the Dey in The Lustful Turk. I seized my bitten heart, and ran with it along a corridor into a green room, where Lord Glidewell, clad only in tight black leather breeches, was standing on his desk, underneath a noose. Only it was not Lord Glidewell, but Sir Jocelyn. He asked me with great civility whether I would care to play his favourite game of cut-the-cord, and instructed me to put my heart into his mouth. I did as I was told, but with difficulty, for his mouth was small and my heart over-large, but the effect on limiting his breathing was excellent. Then he handed me a knife; I was to sever the rope just before the moment of ejaculation.