Sometimes I was repelled, sometimes charmed, but always arrested, never bored. How strange the models looked, all tangled limbs, enlarged appendages and gaping orifices! Not one single image was anything like any amorous picture I had hitherto imagined; they were love unromanticised, but for that reason, possibly more authentic. One particular plate was entitled ‘cunnylyngus’: in it a man was behaving to a woman as a dog to a bitch, sniffing her crotch, and licking her with his tongue. My sentient mind screamed, Iniquity, diabolism, bestiality! until it heard a quieter, but similarly reasonable, voice in my head argue that it had never seen an animal behave in this way, licking another with such concern for the pleasure of the other. Something in me responded to this sense of transcendence, that in these pages there were higher, and not lower, energies at work. Even the most unwholesome of them, which inverted the tenderest act between a man and a woman into a display of violence and viciousness, held up to me what I had often felt underpinned my whole existence as a woman, but for which I had previously no visual representation in this world of convention and delicacy. I had not known that men could feel this way about women, but now that I saw it, dare I write that I felt gratitude to the images I was seeing for helping me make sense of foundlings and baby-farms and fallen women?
But as I was never intended to be their audience, what mattered my response? I thought of the artist, cross-hatching away at his shady visions, and the models performing for his art. Were these personal masterpieces for him, and the height of his aspirations? Or was he a hack-worker, scratching a meagre income from other people’s lusts? Did he see the luminous beauty, the curious honesty, in these human forms, or were they as vile to him as the daylight world said they were? Possibly he was just like me, in it for the money, and doing what he was told.
There was no place for shock, I learnt, if I was to get on with the work. The easiest were the tawdry novelettes and galanteries, which soon left me untouched, but eventually even the more vulgar literature ceased to raise a flush in my face: I started to find the endless litany of bodily parts rather tedious. The day soon came when I no longer had to wonder about euphemisms such as ‘visits to the dumpling shop’ and ‘sewing the parsley-bed’. I learnt entire new languages: I accepted words such as gamahuching, firkytoodling, bagpiping, lallygagging, or minetting as if they were my mother tongue. My world became tinged with unreality; such literature placated with its tone, written with such levity, good humour, civility and incoherence. It came to be endearing, childish, and meaningless. In fact, I came to realise, it was rather like the whimsical poems filled with nonce words that I read to Lucinda at night, only a bit wetter.
But my amusement was my protection, for in truth I was deeply discomfited by some of what I was confronting. To justify my role as Mistress Bindress in the obscene underworld of the book trade, I had to convince myself I was fashioning, as it were, the pearl around the grit in the oyster; I was making something beautiful out of something ugly. And at times, what was so ugly did not embarrass me, or shame me, but sometimes gently, sometimes forcibly, led me to my own ugliness, my own grit inside my hard white exterior, to which I had little desire to go. They were places for which my upbringing and society had not prepared me, and I was angry both at my ignorance and at this rapid acquisition of knowledge that was both against my will and counter to my expectations. The books told me of strange spices and savoury fruits I yet knew not of; I read words of love uttered by fortunate tongues that had tasted its bittersweet juices, and they led me into the dark caves of sin, and left me there in torment and confusion.
Over the following weeks, we bound scores of books with the insignia of Les Sauvages Nobles, plus one or other of the inscriptions. I started to notice a pattern emerging: twelve English names cropped up amongst the letters, the treatises and the accounts more often than others, and I could soon connect them to their particular Latinate expressions. They were names that I had seen in the pages of newspapers or heard talk of in the streets: names of noblemen. It did not take a genius to work out the correlation.
The first time I tried to go up to Peter to talk to him about them, I found him rocking in his chair, his pink legs trouserless, flesh quivering in fear.
‘Leave me, leave me,’ he was moaning. ‘Go away, you vile woman! Get off me!’
‘Me, Peter? I’m not on you, love.’
He had to swallow the spittle in his mouth before he could say anything more intelligible. ‘Dora! Get her off me, Dora! Get her away!’
‘No one’s there, Peter. Tell me what you see. Who is it?’