The Journal of Dora Damage(62)

‘Mama, I’m still hungry,’ she said once she had finished. She had taken to saying this, since starting the bromide.

I took Peter his porridge, tea and toast in bed, but he would not eat until he had had his first dose of Dr Chisholm’s laudanum. While he toyed with his food, I emptied the slops, cleaned the outdoor privy, and rinsed the chamber-pots with hot water and soda, before returning them to the bedrooms, when I collected Peter’s tray, and handed it over to Lucinda to finish. His appetite was decreasing as hers was growing, which at least balanced the household bills.

Throughout the morning I would go into the workshop to sew a few signatures, but run back at times to stir the copper, to check the row of bottles of Black Drop fermenting by the fire, and to turn and shake the mattresses. At eleven, Lucinda and I went to the market, but through the soupy yellow fog we could scarcely make out the market stalls, and we returned with only a basket of milk, eggs, bread, butter, ham, apples, and cheese, and our mood was as dark as the day itself.

As we walked slowly back up Ivy-street through the dingy mist, we could just make out the shape of the perambulating pot-man and his large wooden frames, pulled by a mule, by the workshop door. ‘D’ya want any, lady?’ he said to me as we approached.

‘Jack?’ I asked, who had joined us at the door. Peter had never allowed alcohol on the premises, nor drank it himself, being temperately inclined, but I couldn’t help but worry at all the water in his tissues. I knew it was a practice in most of the other binding workshops to wet their whistle daily. The men had to have some perks, I thought.

‘Up to you, Mrs D.’

‘What have you got?’ I asked, peering at the frames through the gloom.

‘English Burgundy, heavy brown, porter and stout.’

‘I think we’ll have a jug of the burgundy and one of porter, please.’

‘Regular, or just today?’

‘Make it regular. We could do with a bit of liquid to keep us going in the evenings.’

‘Right-ho, Mrs?’

‘Mrs Damage.’

‘Alrighty, Mrs Damage.’

A train rattled past us, and as the man started to fill the jugs he asked, ‘That the stiffs’ express?’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said, and could not help but laugh.

Truth be told, and I never would have said it to Peter, but I was all in favour of a spot of beer. The pump in Broad-street from which my mother contracted cholera also served Golden-square, Berwick-street and St Ann’s, which is why mother caught it from the water at the Ragged-school where she had started to teach, for in Carnaby-street we never would send to Broad-street for water. It impressed me that none of the seventy men working at the Broad-street brewery died; most of them confessed to never drinking water at all, only beer. And when one remembers that over six hundred died then, there’s a lot to be said for never drinking water again. They opened up the pump-well and found a cess pool was leaking into it. Since then, I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that water wasn’t good for one, but I could never say this to Peter.

Lucinda and I took our purchases inside. I put the apples in a bowl, and the eggs, cheese and ham on the marble slab, then poured the milk into a pan and left it to scald on the stove to keep it fresh. Once I heard the pot-man rattling his frames over the cobbles, I nipped back into the workshop to instruct Jack about the brown diamond shapes I wanted him to inlay into some black morocco.

And then it was that there was a knock at the door, and there, when I opened it, stood a small, nervous gentleman. The fog was so dense I could not see if there was a carriage behind him; but out of a darker-seeming patch of fog looming below the lintel, a tall shadow stepped forward, revealing itself to be another man. The man in front cleared his throat, but made no introduction of himself. Instead, he announced his companion, with a certain flourish and a swelling of pride.

‘I present to you,’ he said in a high voice, like the scratching of an insect’s wings, ‘Mister Ding.’ Mister Ding did not step forward, but waited as the smaller man continued. ‘Who is also, of course you need no prompting to remember, both a man and a brother to us all.’

‘Er. My name is Din. Din Nelson.’ His voice was deep and coarse; his accent cut through the fog like the tolling of an unfamiliar bell.

‘Ding,’ said the little man in front.

‘Din. As in noise. Din. With a “nuh”.’

‘Din-nuh.’

It was as if the fog around Mister Din cleared as the words passed over me, and my skin prickled with shock. It was not because I had forgotten all about his impending arrival – which I had, things being as busy as they were – but because I had not quite appreciated, strange though this must sound, that the ex-slave, to be stationed at Damage’s bindery by Lady Knightley’s Ladies’ Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery, would be black.