The Journal of Dora Damage(45)
‘Where have you been?’
‘At the sluicery.’
‘I can see that. What have you had to drink?’
‘Why? You offering me some more?’
‘No, I am not. But go on, then, tell me what happened, but hush you now, before you wake the squire.’ I took the parcel from him and placed it on the table; it felt like more manuscripts.
‘He was chuffed to pieces, Mrs D, to pieces. You won’t believe what he gave me. This.’ He opened his fist to show a handful of silver and brown coins. ‘Nah, that’s not it. Well it is, or it was. It was a friggin’ coach-wheel, Mrs D!’
‘A crown? He gave you a crown?’
‘Aye he did, and I said to him, I said, am I to give this back to Mr Damage, and he says no, Jack, my boy, it’s for you. It’s your tip, young lad, he called me.’
It was as much as I could do to restrain myself from snatching them out of the sot’s hand; the injustice of it stung my cheeks. Here my child was starving while Jack went out drinking on my employer’s gratuities.
‘And this is for you, he said it was.’ He waved a brown envelope in my face. I grabbed it, and felt inside to find a sovereign. It was more than I had handed over to Skinner.
Jack whistled. ‘A thick ’un an’ all. Crikey. And go on, open the parcel, Mrs D, when you’ve stopped dribblin’ over the balsam.’
I prised open the seal, and found inside several thin manuscripts and a letter from Mr Diprose.
Dear Mrs Damage,
I enclose twelve books which I would not trouble you to persue at any length. Their literary merit is scant; they belong to that subset of facetiae known as galanterie, and they are nothing but the simplest examples of that genre. Despite their gaudiness, I ask you to dress them with understated elegance, as one would make a lady of an opera-dancer. On the back of each must be the crest of Les Sauvages Nobles; underneath, one each of the following noms de plume, in the order in which the manuscripts are stacked herewith:
– Nocturnus
– Labor Bene
– P.cinis It.
– Monachus
– Vesica Quartus
– Beneficium Flumen
– Praemium Vir
– Clementia
– R. Equitavit
– Osmundanus
– Clericus
– Scalp-domus
Yours most sincerely, &c
Charles Diprose
* * *
I chose to ignore Diprose’s suggestion that I should not read the books, for I felt it important to distil the essence of the book on to the binding. But he was correct about their merit: they were sentimental novelettes with little thought of style, characterisation and plot, and I only managed to wade my way through the first three of the twelve.
The first was rather fancy in its descriptions of marital passion, and the protagonists preferred to do the act en plein air, as Diprose no doubt would have said.
The second made me blush even more, for the activity, although occurring inside the house this time, was not inside the marriage, and described with a bit less restraint.
By the time I reached the third, I wished I had taken Diprose’s advice more seriously. I knew not how to clothe these naked bodies in the binding of a book.
Eventually I restored to the language of flowers. In the centre of each front cover, I wove a wreath of ivy leaves, as a symbol of wedded love and fidelity, and these poor souls needed all the help they could get. How appropriate, I thought at the time, that I lived in Ivy-street. And within each wreath of ivy, I placed a different bouquet of flowers according to the requirements of the story.
For the first, fern, for shelter from the elements.
For the second, marigold, for the health and vigour the protagonists clearly required.
For the third, euphorbia, to represent persistence, the key value praised therein.
And may the Lord bless my naïveté, for I made sure that the discerning booklover could delight himself with the discovery that, in each circlet of ivy leaves, every third leaf was in fact a heart.
Chapter Eight
When I was young and in my prime,
I’d done my work by dinner time;
But now I’m old and cannot trot
I’m obliged to work till eight o’clock.
'You are skimping on the household,’ Peter shouted at me from upstairs as yet another parcel arrived at the workshop.
This one seemed innocuous enough at first glance: an Apocrypha, a Litany, a Paradise Lost and a Regain’d, an Areopagitica; two reprints of Michael Drayton’s The Nymphidia and The Muses Elizium; M. Felix Lajard’s Cult, Symbols and Attributes of Venus, published in Paris in 1837 and in need of a re-bind, a minute-book for a Turkish Bath company; several collections of correspondence; two Visitors’ Books, four blank account ledgers; twelve black journals; and various short anthropological, medical and anatomical tracts. Most were to receive the coat-of-arms of Les Sauvages Nobles, especially the blank ones, which would display it on the front cover, not the rear.