Each time Verity teaches a man Braille, or when Constance sees the tension in a veteran’s face soften after she has has read Tennyson aloud, they return to Lawless House slightly less empty, the salve of being needed having been applied. Their work with blind servicemen continued throughout the war’s duration. Then Ireland’s fight for independence brought more casualties who were blinded by mustard gas.
One boisterous morning when the sisters are enjoying a pot of tea with the ex-servicemen, a new blind veteran enters the lounge from the terrace of the hostel, guided by a volunteer. The men rise from their chairs and follow a strip of drugget that crosses the room and leads directly to the French door that opens onto the terrace. The men overwhelm the soldier with welcome so that at first the sisters do not gain a full view. But when the veterans finally peel away from the young man, Verity takes such a resounding gasp, that the men are quite alarmed.
‘Please, what is it?’ they ask in unison.
‘It’s just that …’ Constance summons the words. ‘My sister and I …’
‘Sir.’ Verity sweeps over to the new veteran. ‘May I ask your name?’
‘Henry Mason, madam.’
‘Oh,’ she says, her voice thick and sore. ‘How do you do, Mr Mason.’
When he removes his service dress hat his auburn hair gives the sisters a start, but it is his dark glasses that spark a memory, a searing image of the boy playing with Verity’s spectacles, placing them on his face, running through the garden, peering through them in wonder at the way Verity views the outdoors.
‘We’re very sorry,’ Constance addresses the group. ‘We thought we recognized you, Mr Mason.’
Like one who has a terrible addiction to the drink, who after years of abstinence accidentally picks up the wrong glass, their longing is unearthed by a mistake, and the sisters must now have more. Disturbed, because they have so swiftly and unexpectedly lost their footing and know they cannot fight it, they prepare to set out once more in search of Rafe.
But first, another shock. It isn’t their neighbours, or their ever-changing housekeepers and gardeners, it is those who pass through their lives in other small ways who notice.
‘Good morning.’ The postwoman is surprised that one of the sisters answers the door.
‘Good morning.’ Constance reaches for the package.
‘Dear me. I grow fatter, slower and greyer each year.’ The post-woman’s lingering gaze detects no change at all in the woman, who politely smiles at her pointed remark.
Hired at the beginning of the Great War, the postwoman retains her position, and during eight years of service she has come to believe that there is something queer about the residents of Lawless House.
Similarly, the elderly newsagent on Park Street often hesitates with a quizzical rheumy eye on Verity before he relinquishes the paper.
‘After all this time, it is now, when Camden Town grows even more populated, that I feel we’re in danger of losing our anonymity,’ Verity says.
‘Perhaps it’s time to make more drastic efforts,’ Constance suggests.
They are not often caught in a nostalgic web, but today their thoughts loom on the Limehouse of their past, where late on sultry nights they dressed as men.
‘Will it be you? Or me?’ Verity asks.
Constance studies her sister’s face.
‘Try a pair of your dark glasses.’
Verity chooses silver frames with dark green lenses and curls the wire around her ears.
‘Definitely you,’ Constance says.
‘All right then, do it.’
Constance takes the scissors to her sister’s hair and shears it like a hedge. With a little Brilliantine it rivals any man’s cut in its accuracy. Verity steps into a pair of tweed trousers; the hairy wool grazes her naked skin. A man’s shirt and waistcoat help fill out the suit’s jacket. For an off the peg, it appears expertly tailored. The brogues are from Jermyn Street where a smirking snob of a man measured her feet. Admiring their sheen, she sits with her legs crossed, surpassing the garçonne, looking every bit the man.
‘And now the derby.’ Constance places the hat on her sister’s cropped head. ‘You will pass, but you must be confident. Practise your walk while I change.’
Constance stretches a wig over her pinned-up hair. The chestnut-brown bob takes ten years off her. A chemise-style dress with a dropped waist accentuates the angular lines of her body. A hat and gloves, a long lavender scarf that serves as a wrap, and ankle-strap, button shoes complete her ensemble. She looks unremarkable, and not herself.
On this Saturday they travel south on the electric railway, changing lines three times before they see the light of Wapping. The scent of the river encases them, reminding them that every structure, every path has tentacles that eventually reaches the Thames.
‘You can relax, Verity. We are of no interest to this community. Look how it still clings to its identity.’
‘It does, Constance. Men look happy to be out of uniform and back to work.’
‘Those who returned,’ Constance reminds her.
The docks have survived the horrors of the Zeppelins, but not without casualties. It is impossible to calculate how many young dock workers, sailors, merchants and wharfingers never returned to Sailortown. With their absence in mind, the sisters find the streets and dwellings teeming with people. Barefoot children spill out onto the pavement to collect manure and coal.
‘Mr Atlee’s in charge of Limehouse now. He has work to do here.’ Constance murmurs.
Verity’s confidence builds with each step on the cobbled streets. No one pays the slightest attention to the tall man with the dark glasses. Twenty minutes later they arrive at Three Colt Street. An artificial teeth-maker occupies the Fowler’s former house. Displayed on velvet cloth in the front window, pink-gummed models varying in size seem to laugh at them in an entirely sinister way. Knots twist in their stomachs. A memory of Rafe’s form standing in the first-floor window sears them.
‘Come, Verity. Don’t dwell here.’
They hurry past the artificial teeth, as if chased by their clomping bites, stopping a few feet down the street at a lively spit-and-sawdust pub. Seated at the Five Bells and Blade Bone they nurse their shandies with a ridiculous hope that someone will fling helpful gossip their way.
‘That’s my limit,’ Constance says. ‘I can’t drink any more.’ Her glass is still three quarters full.
Snatches of conversation hum in the background and then one voice hovers closer than the others.
‘I am arrested by your appearances.’
A trace of accent clings to her delivery. The slight trill to her ‘r’ makes the sisters bolt up in their seats.
‘Shhh. Do not say a word.’ Clovis, with her back to their table, speaks over her shoulder. ‘You place him in danger by coming east.’
Constance refuses to stay silent. ‘Is he well?’
A chair scrapes the floor. Clovis slides into the empty banquette at the sisters’ table. They are buttonholed by her muscular perfume and stupefied by this turn of events.
‘Did you not hear me?’
The sisters heed this new vision of Clovis Fowler. Her hair is either cut and dyed or she wears a wig of dark brown finger-waves under her cloche hat. A box-shaped knitted dress clings to her torso and flares out into a pleated skirt. Her legs make their shapely appearance into the world. There is a moment’s pause as the three women face up to their fresh transformations born in a new century.
‘I know the reason you keep him from us. I saw the evidence years ago.’ Suddenly clear-headed, Constance careers to the heart of their quest.
‘You know nothing.’
‘We have recently written again to Benedikt with our concerns.’ Verity says.
‘He has no power here.’
‘That isn’t true. More than once he has intervened …’
‘Yes.’ Clovis snaps. ‘Because you were careless. Twice they almost nabbed him.’
Verity feels as if she has been slapped. But Constance is livid. It looks as if she goes to pat Clovis’s hand, and instead she grabs her wrist, pulling her arm under the table, digging her nails into her wrist until she draws blood.
‘You will take us to him,’ Constance says.
‘I will not. The men from Copenhagen … if they see us together …’ She jerks her wrist from Constance’s grasp. ‘They haven’t yet discovered where we live. If you and your sister haunt my home like a couple of old ghouls, you’ll bring attention to us. If you really have his best interests at heart and not your own selfish wishes, then you will leave us alone.’
‘We would never put him in harm’s way.’
Clovis takes a handkerchief from her purse and dabs her wrist, then tosses the lace-trimmed linen on the table and stands.
‘None of this matters.’ Clovis looks down at them. ‘He thinks you’re both dead.’
‘He … he what?’ Verity stammers.
Clovis backs away from them expressionless, a witness to the effect of her blistering words.
The sisters long to lurch at her but they are thwarted by the lie, as if their limbs are screwed to their seats. Not until the door of the Five Bells and Blade Bone closes and the daylight disappears once again do they rouse, and then in a swift panic they bolt out after her.
Verity curses that she must wear her dark glasses and is no help to Constance who looks left and right until she catches sight of a swinging, pleated skirt. She spots Clovis turning onto the Commercial Road. Clovis moves like a dart to its target, and when she rounds the corner to Salmon Lane the sisters moan with what they face.
Saturday’s commerce spills out into the great market street of the district. Clovis easily disappears into the densely packed throng. Assaulted by the stink of naphtha, the sisters quickly lose the woman’s heady scent. They dodge the hanging, newly killed rabbits. Pushing past buyers and sellers they ask, ‘Beautiful lady, dark green dress?’ But an organ and coronet warm up to earn their Saturday shillings, drowning their enquiries. The sisters jostle past several fried-fish bars, forging on to the end of the market until they reek of frying oil.
‘We’ve lost her,’ Constance says.
They reach the bottom of Salmon Lane and stop to rest in front of the turtle warehouse. Its window boasts signage for ‘the Real Turtle Soup’ and inside, the calipash and calipee await transport to the city restaurants.
Verity uses her pocket handkerchief to remove a film of grime from her glasses.
‘She’s a liar. Even if she has told Rafe we are dead, he won’t believe her. I know he won’t,’ she says.
‘It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he’s somewhere in London. We should not have doubted. We will not give up this time, Verity.’
A sea turtle thumps its shell against the window. It claims its freedom from the boiling pot for a while longer.
Clovis turns off Salmon Lane into Copenhagen Place. Wondering if it is somehow possible to crush the Fitzgeralds, to silence them forever, she takes a dusty path that leads to the back of a timber-framed building. The door opens before she knocks.
‘I saw you through the window’ Mockett says.
He bolts the door as she sweeps in.
‘Your palace of science is a wreck,’ Clovis says.
Mockett ignores her comment. His workspace is normally immaculate when he isn’t creating a new product. She knows this.
She dips a finger into a concoction seeping through layers of muslin and sniffs.
‘Mint and lavender?’
Mockett nods.
He deals the legal drug: cosmetics. It is almost robbery. Face creams keep him and the Fowlers comfortable.
‘The mint is too strong.’
He nods again. She’s probably right, she has a good nose.
Mockett’s empire burgeons with a chain of chemist shops, but like the others, he cannot be acclaimed for his work. From his cavernous warehouse he doggedly protects his identity. There is no shortage of people with whom to do business; no one cares who he is as long as he produces and the profits soar. His medical, pharmaceutical, and science degrees, printed with pseudonyms, lie concealed in his desk drawer.
‘I thought we were meeting at the Five Bells,’ Rafe says to Clovis. ‘We’ve just begun.’
‘It’s no longer safe to be seen there. The publican is suspicious.’
‘Perhaps it’s time to make yourself scarce in Limehouse.’ Mockett suggests.
‘What about you? You still live here.’
‘I visit Wapping and Poplar. I never go to the Five Bells.’
Rafe sits in a dark corner, the laboratory section of Mockett’s workspace. Mockett taps Rafe’s vein. Another puncture, more blood. Tendrils of hair, nail-clippings, urine, a scraping of cuticles, and, did he remember to bring his semen, Mockett asks quietly. Clovis fastens her attention to the answer.
Rafe reaches into his trouser pocket. He’s past humiliation, but not anger. His tutor teaches him to paint with fingers tipped with fire. Your power as an artist is in your anger, he said. Rafe will be sad to leave him, as he must when his tutor’s sharp old eyes begin to notice.
‘Spit please, Rafe.’ Mockett holds a specimen jar to his lips.
Initially excited and challenged by Clovis’s wild quest to replicate Rafe’s fever sweat, row upon row of Rafe’s samples are a grim reminder of Mockett’s own arrogance. And now as he looks at the young man baring his arm, Mockett is awash with guilt for continuing useless experiments.
Rafe made his peace with Mockett one night when they were drunk as anything, both sick from a spit of ale. It was the night Mockett told Rafe what year he had stopped ageing. Painstaking record-keeping and monitoring of Rafe’s secretions, skin and blood, did actually account for something and revealed that Rafe’s body had not aged since 1867. They had guessed as much, but as science advances, it speaks clearer.
‘I’m thirty-five?’ Rafe had asked. ‘Why thirty-five?’
‘I have no fucking idea. It seems entirely random. Let’s get drunk.’
On these occasions when Clovis is present, Rafe closes his eyes. She tries to impress upon him the importance of what they do here, but he ignores her. Clovis and Mockett turn their discussion to cosmetic ventures.
The needle pricks again. Rafe recalls when once she had the audacity to mention love. The word was unnatural when she voiced it.
‘One day you will fall in love,’ she had said. ‘You should have the option. You’ll need a replica to keep her alive, if, as you claim, you have no more fevers.’
‘That’s rich,’ he’d replied. ‘You pretend to do this for me? If you really want to do something for me, you will give us what belongs to each of us. Give us back our phials.’
‘I can’t. It is for your safety, for everyone’s safety, that I keep them.’
While Mockett gently clips his nails, Rafe thinks of the men from Copenhagen who search for him. Why him? he’d asked when he was young and still growing, still ageing. The fever, he was told, he is a carrier, the only carrier. And on that sobering day when he discovered a partial truth about himself, he decided to hide his fevers from Clovis. How many he had secretly suffered in his room in that first house in Bermondsey, he could not count. Now, when it arrives with its blistering heat, he retreats to his studio, locks the doors, and sweats it out alone.
From the moment she first appeared, tainting the doorway of Lawless House, he couldn’t bear to be near Clovis Fowler. Those first years, she did not often touch him, but sometimes she placed her hand on his shoulder, or held him down until he understood what was required of him – the needles, and the lancet, and the scissors – and then he almost fainted from nausea. Her touch was worse than any bloodletting.
She often asks if he ever suffers from the fever to which he always replies that he does not, so convincingly that she only nods and then reminds him to let her know if that should change. He would never tell her the truth, because darkness rises in everything she does.
‘Rafe. It’s time to go. And we need to hurry, I think my long sleep is coming.’
Mockett and Rafe both supress the urge to acknowledge her remark. They have waited months for her next sleep to arrive. They have all waited.