‘Bless my dear wife. She still drinks tea unsweetened, despite loathing the drink so in its natural state. What about you, Mrs Damage?’ he asked, pouring the tea into a china cup. And then, as he tipped one, and then a second, spoonful of sugar into the cup, he asked me, ‘Sugar?’
‘Thank you,’ I said as I took the cup, and watched as he put a slice of lemon in the one he handed to Diprose, but did not have one himself. Instead, he lit a cigar, which was monogrammed with the letters ‘JRK’.
Diprose took his tea, and muttered something I didn’t understand, but I heard the word ‘kaffir’, which I had heard before around Lambeth market when there had been a fight. So he had found a foreign word to use after all. I think he was trying to be funny, but Sir Jocelyn didn’t laugh.
‘ “Kaffir”, Dipsy, comes from an Arab word, “kafir”, which means “infidel”. It may indeed sound like the Cauzuh word “kafula”, which means, “to spit upon”, but the word you are using is a continent away from those to whom you are referring. If you are to use a term of abuse to describe a man of colour, please choose a geographically correct one.’
He stretched out his legs to reveal silk stockings and a pair of monogrammed slippers. I could imagine those legs wading through crocodile-infested swamps and sticky jungles. I could see him clubbing a man-eating tiger to death while singing the baritone aria from Don Giovanni and ripping her apart with his bare hands in order to assuage a week-long hunger. I could picture his strong body laid low with dysentery and malaria at times, but not for long.
Suddenly he stood up. ‘Mrs Damage, you are perfect for our requirements.’ My cheeks reddened to match the rose-coloured bloom of the light on his desk. ‘I can tell by your pert little nose.’ No one had ever called it that before, only ‘snub’. ‘You have a nose for discretion, and an aptitude for business. And your delightful chin tells me you are quick to learn, and are creative and spontaneous, without abandoning caution. Your brow tells me you have a sense of fun, and are quite flirtatious. But interesting features are all very well, as far as they go. It is how one chooses to inhabit them, to manifest their qualities in life, that makes the difference.’ He picked up a black leather-bound file, pulled out from it some drawings, and handed them to me. They were sketches, made in charcoal, of all the bindings I had constructed for Diprose. ‘Are we correct in assuming you designed these yourself?’
I nodded, for my mouth was too dry to speak, despite the tea.
‘And executed them?’ It would have been impossible for me to lie, but I did not know then whether a lie would have saved me. I nodded again, and then managed the words, ‘Jack did the forwarding.’
‘Ah yes. Jack. We shall come to him. But you were the finisher?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Excellent news. I believe that problems often arise in book-bindings when there is a division of labour. It is as if intelligent thought is lost in the gap between designer and maker. Is it fair to say, Mrs Damage, that you give a plain binding the same attention to detail and commitment as a more elaborate one?’
‘Oh yes, sir. My prices vary only according to the size of the book and the amount of gold required.’
‘Indeed. And your father Mr Archibald Brice, late of Brice’s Bookbinders, Carnaby-street, died of pulmonary disease, 28 September 1854? And your mother Georgina, likewise, of the cholera, 14 September 1854? No surviving siblings? Your husband, Peter, was apprentice first in Hammersmith at the workshop of Falcon Riviere, and next at your father’s, after Riviere died a year into his indenture?’ I nodded. ‘You married in June 1854? Peter took over the binding business, and moved it to Lambeth in November 1854? He suffers from rheumatism? Now an invalid?’ I nodded again and again.
‘I presume he has been taking salicylate, and probably quinine too, and that neither have been efficacious? And various other splendid embrocations too, no doubt, all with trifling success? Any signs of gout? Sciatica? Pleurisy? Periosteal nodes?’ I had long since ceased nodding, for I simply did not know, and he waved his arm dismissively.
‘Let us get back to the point. Jack Tapster, apprenticed to you since December 1854, of Howley-place, Waterloo. Any trouble with him?’
I shook my head. He sat down at his desk and picked up, not a pen from the well, but a gold pencil with a large coloured jewel embedded in the end, and added something to the notes.
‘Thank you, Mrs Damage. You may go now. We shall contact you soon with regard to our full intentions for you. Good day.’