The Journal of Dora Damage(159)

‘Only because you wish it to be so.’ I bit my lip. I had so many questions that needed answering, but where to start? ‘You asked Diprose to dispose of me, Sir Jocelyn,’ I said solemnly, as an opening.

‘Dora, I would have disposed of Charles first if I could have done. You saved me the trouble.’

‘Did you know the chloroform would kill him?’

‘He duped me into teaching him how to administer it correctly. He said he wanted to relieve his sister of her pains in childbirth. I did not know he was going to use it on you. He deserved it.’

‘I always knew you were dangerous.’

‘Come now, it was the safest option for us all. I know not of a single surgeon who has been prosecuted for death by chloroform. “Chloroform syncope” I wrote on his death certificate, which was true, was it not? Then I donated his body to medical science.’

‘Tell me, why did you want to dispose of him?’

‘I was tiring of him. Only he persisted in trying to impress me. The more vulnerable he felt his position in my favour, the more he overreached himself.’

‘You did not want that hideous binding?’

‘Come, come, Dora. Every medical library of note has an anatomy bound in the hide stripped from a dissected corpse. A well-bound whore gives me no thrills.’

‘I was repulsed by it. I wanted revenge.’

‘You wanted my guts for garters.’

I laughed, despite myself. ‘No. I wanted your scrotum for a nice, soft silky purse, to keep my pennies in.’

‘I will leave it to you in my will. No, Charles did not understand sentimentality when it came to choosing his victims,’ he said. ‘I could not finger your buttocks as I turned those pages. As exciting a prospect as it sounds, you are, nevertheless, preferable to me alive. And I never agreed to abusing my medical knowledge in order to threaten your daughter in such a way.’

‘I know you didn’t.’ I shifted myself closer to him, able to relax at last. Then I whispered, and he bowed his head towards mine to hear me better. ‘She would have you back, you know. Sylvia still loves you.’ My lips brushed his ears, and I felt him tense. ‘This – what you have revealed to me – wouldn’t matter now to her. She has left society behind her, and cares not for it any more.’

But Sir Jocelyn would have none of it. He sat up straight again, and fingered the curtains. ‘Your attempt is well meaning but futile, Dora,’ he said sadly.

‘Please, Sir Jocelyn. You have a son together.’

‘It is too preposterous even to consider.’

‘She loves you, Sir Jocelyn. Or does your hatred for yourself inure you to that?’ For is it not, I was realising, a futile endeavour to consider love without love itself? Love viewed from a place of hatred is a painful sight, and only serves to harden the heart against it further. Love seen from a place of hatred, I mused: at last, a fair definition of the literature he had been asking me to bind.

Sir Jocelyn interrupted my reveries. ‘There is nothing here for me any more. Did you not hear about the razzia? They seized and destroyed all my translations. I passed them through Holywell-street for one night only, and then they were gone. Even Pizzy is still in prison.’

‘Why haven’t you got him out?’

‘He was proving rather tedious too. You had shown us what a relief it was to put Diprose somewhere where even the Home Office could not reach him, and we wished the same for Bennett.’

‘And there was I thinking the British Empire stretched to most places.’

He laughed, and continued with his previous train of thought. ‘No, sex is too dangerous these days. My devotion shall be to anthropological studies. I am off to Africa in a month, and I intend never to return.’

‘You said that four years ago.’

But his silence spoke more than his words, and I knew that this would indeed be the last time I saw him. Why else would he be so candid with a secret he had kept for so long?

‘I am sorry about your tattoos,’ he said suddenly. ‘They were rather beautiful, though. The image of them is still firmly embedded in my mind’s eye.’

‘They’re not so bad now. Pansy learnt from a sailor, and has altered the insignia for me. It was not an image I wished to carry with me. She always was a fine needlesmith.’

‘You could always take your inspiration from Olive Oatman, or those sailors shipwrecked in the South Pacific, and claim you were abducted and forcibly tattooed by a savage tribe.’

‘Which wouldn’t be too far from the truth, Sir Jocelyn, if you think about it.’

‘I shall miss you, Dora Damage. You are the one I couldn’t have.’