The Journal of Dora Damage(48)

‘So you are my fine bindress!’ Her voice was quiet, but had a hard edge, as if used to speaking only sparkling wit and clever sarcasm. ‘Let me look at you. I can’t tell you what a stir it put us in when Charlie told us you were a woman. Tell me, Mrs Damage, you must be frightfully clever to carry it off. Is it dreadfully hard work?’

I cannot for the life of me remember how I replied. I believe I answered her with simplicity and timidity, and that she did not seem to notice or care. I do remember taking especial care with my pronunciation.

The conversation flowed reasonably well, coming as it did in the main from her. She spoke in short sentences, as if otherwise she would, rather bothersomely, run out of air. But she was not sparse in her compliments for my bindings and indeed revealed her veritable passion for the subject. She directed me here and there around the shelves of her room, asking me to take down this volume of poetry, that volume of diaries, and bring them to her. But her shelves were filled too tightly, so it was hard to ease the books out using the sides of the spine cover; many a headband had been viciously ripped in the pursuit of a book. I was also anxious that my hands would sully the bindings, and wondered if I should ask her for a cloth to protect them. I did not stop to notice the absurdity of the bookbinder who feared that her hands, which bound books daily, could not then hold a finished book for a few seconds.

She certainly did not have the same reservations, for she rubbed her hands over the leathers and silks in the same way that I would season the skin of a chicken before sending it to the bake-house, and she opened the books with such a vile crack she could have been instructing me on how to spatchcock the fowl. The number of spines she broke during my short visit to her that morning would have kept me in business for days, not to mention the headbands. I could solicit her for work, I thought, should the trade from Diprose ever dry up. Furthermore, although there were a handful of fine or rare bindings in her collection, I saw nothing to which I could not aspire; indeed, I noticed a few books that would never have been allowed to leave Damage’s in their state, and started to realise that already I could consider myself a reasonably competent binder, with capabilities beyond my own doubts.

‘Have you been to America?’ she asked suddenly. I told her that I had not. I tried to think of something appropriate to add, but felt that she would not wish to know that the only long-distance travelling my family had undertaken was when Peter’s great-uncle was transported to the colonies for political radicalism, and took his cousins with him. Peter, out of a sense of moral rectitude, had chosen not to share the details with me, and I in turn kept them from my patroness.

My silence was filled by her sigh, for something was clearly troubling her. She closed her eyes again, and asked me if I was familiar with the activities of the Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery. I had to disappoint her again.

She was, she explained, a founder member of the Society, which reported to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. She told me, with increasing rapidity and shortness of breath, of her initiation into the abolitionist movement as she entered womanhood, when she felt the burden of frivolous society being lifted from her slender shoulders and replaced by a meaningful crusade, which would weigh heavily but not crush her.

I finally accepted that I did not have to be poised with something interesting to say. As I listened I let my gaze roam around the room again, and this time I saw a framed handbill, depicting a figure not unlike the boy in the hall, only kneeling and chained. I could just make out the inscription, ‘Am I not a man and brother?’

‘I will tell you,’ she went on, ‘of the horrors our dusky brethren still have to suffer in America.’ And she did, and she was right in describing them as horrors. Yet I could not help thinking of our own workhouses, which sounded similar enough: wives taken from husbands, and children from mothers, and sickness and hunger and those girls whose bodies were found and everyone knew it was the master who had done it, but no one could say anything, because they were nothing more than his plaything, as they all were, even the little ones. So as she sounded forth about whips and bodies on trees, I couldn’t see much difference, although I am sure she could have found me one. I was relieved when she cut to the purpose of her summoning me to her, which I feared she had started to lose sight of, as I was unable to fathom it all this time. I was even starting to think that perhaps this was what ladies of her station did for pleasure: call for some hapless poor woman, and torment her with ghastly stories of what people of our colour did to people of other colours in far-off lands.