The Journal of Dora Damage(137)

What next? Not the books. No sewing, still. So I tried the anagram of Diprose’s inscription. I scrutinised the grid of squares and spaces, then wrote out all the letters, first in alphabetical order, and then in random order.

a, a, a, b, c, c, d, e, f, h, i, i, i, m, n, o, o, p, r, r, r, s, u n, c, o, a, r, b, c, s, d, u, h, i, m, a, i, o, p, e, r, i, a, r, f

‘Birch’ and ‘houri’, I found straight away, as well as ‘farce’, ‘hide’, ‘chief’, ‘epic’ and ‘opium’, all of which seemed very appropriate, but I did not need any four-or five-letter words: the grid demanded a word of two letters, followed by one of six, one of eight, and finally one of seven.

Two-letter words were easy: ‘is’, ‘am’, ‘of’, ‘us’, ‘no’, ‘in’, ‘he’, ‘as’. I had thought that the tool I had used farthest to the left had been a ‘d’, but could not be sure. I had used no upper-case tools, so could not tell which letter had started the sentence that way.

Six-letter words were: ‘mirror’, ‘riches’, ‘porous’, ‘prince’, ‘honour’, ‘heroic’, ‘french’, ‘purism’, ‘parish’ and ‘humour’.

Seven-letter words were: ‘currish’, ‘ciphers’, ‘informs’ and ‘horrors’.

Eight-letter words were: ‘abidance’, ‘academic’, ‘conspire’ and ‘horrific’.

When I found ‘soir’ and ‘horreur’ I wondered if the inscription was in French; when I found ‘a priori’ and ‘primus’, I wondered if it could be in Latin.

In short, I was none the wiser. I started to doubt my memory. Had the space been here, and not there? Had I really used ‘a’ three times, or just twice? Surely I had used ‘e’ more than once?

I gave up.

I pulled out my account book, which seemed a more sensible distraction, and settled down to my accounts.

I knew we had made a substantial profit, but I had not appreciated that the total would near seventy pounds. It was enough for a guillotine, even. But I had better things to spend the money on; I would continue to oil and steel the old one. I set aside a portion to put into savings for Lucinda, extracted Din’s and Pansy’s wages, then I took out of it a month’s wages for Jack, and then I doubled it, and added another three pounds, and put it in an envelope to take to Lizzie.

Jack, dear Jack, Jack the Skull. I stared at the place where he used to stand behind the bench each day, and felt it tingle with love, real and pure and requited and unrequited, and lust, real and dirty, and I felt a flicker of understanding, that he was no different from me and Din, that we shared our own sense of joy and shame, bliss and guilt, and the feeling that we were different from the world out there, who would never love us the way we needed to be loved. And I thought of all the other men who traipsed through here with their higher and lower desires, their nobler and baser thoughts, and I wondered if we were all one and the same.





That evening, Sylvia sat at the newly positioned table writing a list, muttering to herself.

‘Valentine, first. Then I need to find Aubrey. Yes, Aubrey will know. And Theodore, of course, if he will speak to me. I could send a letter to Charles, but that may take a while. Dora, congratulate me on my plans. I will grill them all, and find all Jossie’s sins. There must be – must be – some mistress in Paris, some concubine in Africa. Where was he on his birthday last year? With some doxy in a bawdyhouse, no doubt.’

‘And you think they’ll tell you? The other Noble Savages?’

‘Of course they’ll tell me. They’ll tell me everything. They’ll tell me . . .’

‘What?’ I prompted.

‘What?’ she quizzed me vaguely.

‘The Savages. What will they tell you?’

‘What it is I need to know.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Dora! I can divorce him, if I can prove adultery in the first instance, together with bigamy, incest, or cruelty, or desertion, or rape, or sodomy. So, adultery first. Shouldn’t be hard. Incest is out, thank the Lord, and rape, and sodomy.’ I might have raised a querying eyebrow, but she did not see. ‘Bigamy is always a possibility, in those evil lands he frequents. And cruelty, hmmm.’

‘Desertion?’

‘Strictly speaking, I left him. But that’s a detail. We would still have to wait two years, though, until it counts as desertion.’

‘But Sylvia, what rights would these give you over your property?’

‘I will be able at least to inherit and bequeath; so whatever my father deigns to leave me would come to me. And anything I might earn in the future. Not that I’d actually consider working. So, cruelty. Oh curses! It doesn’t exactly look promising, does it?’