Its full title, according to Diprose, was the Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded at the turn of the century by the Church of England (presumably embarrassed by having purchased one too many fake Bibles from house clearances). It supplied the Metropolitan Police with information regarding the sale, distribution or exhibition of obscenities – after which a search warrant could be issued, and obscenities seized and destroyed unless their innocence was proved in court – but I never imagined that I would become part of the chain of supply they sought to crush.
Three guineas a volume was the price at which the volumes on which I worked would sell, or so Diprose told me. Three guineas a volume. Or three pounds and three shillings. Or sixty-three shillings. Or 756 pence. These were not books for the common man. Lord Campbell’s Act was a ruling only for the rich; the lower classes, presumably, would not have known what to do with such literature, and if they had, the excitement in their loins would have driven them to storm London’s own Bastille, and a revolution was not what Lord Campbell or anyone else up there wanted.
No, these were rich men’s books that came into my house, and their owners certainly seemed to take great pains not to make me feel like a common woman. Not only did the next hansom to stop on our cobblestones bring several crates of books and manuscripts – which I had to store in the parlour for want of space in the workshop – but also a pale blue parasol trimmed with point-lace, a tortoiseshell hair comb edged with gold filigree, and a black-and-purple feather fan.
It was Jack who spoke sense to me. ‘What you gonna do with them? Strip ’em and use ’em to fancy up your bindings?’ And he was right. Whenever would I use these superfluities? ‘Be careful, Mrs D,’ he said. ‘Be careful of the roses. It’s always the nobs who cause the most trouble.’
And again, he was right. The roses were not just the ones who bought the books. They had lead roles in them, too. The men in these books were not street-sweepers or sewer-flushers, closer though they might be to bodily functions: they were kings, dukes, barons, and in the literature that had Knightley’s stamp on it, caliphs, emperors, maharajahs, and the Dey.
Ah, the Dey. The Lustful Turk, or Scenes in the Harem of an Eastern Potentate was the fine 1828 first edition promised to me by Sir Jocelyn, and it told me more than I ever needed to know about the dark Dey and the white women whose legs were at first forcibly, and at length willingly, opened to him. My mother, the governess, had taught me to keep mine closed all the while, and my husband had furthered that lesson. What had I been missing?
The answer to that was the most extraordinary feature of the Dey’s anatomy. It troubled me greatly that the poor women he seduced at first considered it an object of terror: it was, variously, ‘that terrible instrument, that fatal foe to virginity’, ‘the instrument of my martyrdom’, ‘my stiff virgin-stretcher’, ‘his dreadful engine’, ‘the terrible pillar with which he was preparing to skewer me’, and ‘the enormous machine buried within her’. But then it became, to those very same women, once they had succumbed to their apparently pleasurable fate, ‘the uncontrolled master key of my feelings’, ‘nature’s grand masterpiece’, even ‘that delightful instrument that attunes my heart to harmony’. Such a change of attitude to ‘this wonderful instrument of nature’ is simply, I learnt, the passing of time: it is the ‘terror of virgins, but delight of women’.
But this was not simply a story of passion awakened time and again: the Dey may indeed have converted many a terrified virgin into a hedonistic woman, but that was not to be the end of it. For what a reduction befell his mightiness at the end! After his attempt to deflower one of his new harem girls (not in the way that nature intended, but in the hellish, secondary, dark orifice), the girl took her rightful revenge by cutting off the organs most vital to the Dey’s manner of existence! I considered this a curious exaltation of those parts of his anatomy; I could not for one moment see the appeal to Sir Jocelyn in a story that left the central male character so emasculated. But, ah me, the Dey so loved his two English girls that he gave them his ‘lost members preserved in spirits of wine in glass vases’, and sent them back to England with them, where they bestowed them upon a girls’ boarding school, to be shown ‘as a reward for good behaviour to the little lady scholars’.
I was spoilt for imagery to put on the cover of this extraordinary volume, but did not know how bold I dared be for Sir Jocelyn. On finishing the book I could not shake the image of the parts in glass vases from my fevered brain, but, much as I relished the disarmament of that terrifying weapon, I felt Sir Jocelyn might have accused me of focusing on the wrong part of the story. Instead, I paid homage to his previous visitation to my humble workshop, and settled upon a central minaret shape surrounded by intricate geometric tile shapes, within which basked a beautiful woman, whose finely embroidered robe slipped fetchingly about her shoulders. And between two slender, white fingers, she held rather suggestively a solidly gold-tooled, diamond-shaped confection, which explained the enigmatic smile on her face.