Just licking another girl’s cunny and moaning a bit. But I’ve heard tales about that place. Called The Dutchman’s. Some of the poor molls who go to work there are never seen again.”
Having for a shilling obtained some directions to this house of evil repute, I went outside onto Fleet Street, took coach, and went down to White’s Stairs in Channel Row, where, hearing a wherryman shout “Southward, ho!,” I joined a boat that was crossing the river.
The moon edged out from under a black flap of sky like a curling yellow fingernail. Halfway across the river a mist descended upon our boat that was like some floating pestilence. In the distance, the windows of the leaning houses on London Bridge were lit up like a necklace of yellow diamonds.
So far I was making a sorry job of plaguing my quarry; and I hardly knew how I was going to tell Miss Barton’s uncle where my pursuit of Major Mornay had taken me. Nor knew how I would present my expenses. Would any man wish his ward to associate with a fellow that had visited such places? Especially a man like Newton, who took a dim view of all licentious behaviour and was only concerned with higher things—a man for whom the body and its needs hardly seemed to matter except as the possible medium for some scientific experiment. Every time I looked Newton in the eye, I thought of him probing it with a bodkin. What did such a man know of human frailty?
Our boat rocked on, making, it seemed to me, very little progress across the grey water, and somewhere above our heads, a seagull hovered like some invisible screaming demon. Gradually, we neared the other side of the river where the mist lightened and the skull-shaped hulls of ships loomed across our boat. A dog barked in the distance as I stepped off the boat at the King’s Arms stairs, and then all was quiet.
Lambeth was a large unruly village on the Surrey bank of the Thames, with most of the buildings grouped around the palace and the Parish Church of St. Mary, and behind these, the black masts of ships. It was separated from Southwark, with its many small metalworking shops to the east, by the marshes where many crooked houses and lonely taverns were situated. As soon as I landed I drew my sword, for it was much darker on the south side of the River, with one or two ruffianly-looking men about. I walked east, along the Narrow Wall, as Deborah had directed, until I came to the sawmills, where I turned my footsteps south, across a stinking, muddy field, to a small row of houses. Here, next to the sign of the star, which is often said to indicate a place of lewd purpose, I found the house I was looking for. I peered in at a grimy-looking window, and seeing the orange tongue of a candle, I knocked.
The door was opened by a woman who looked comely enough, although she also seemed somewhat hard and yellowish in the face, and her eyelids almost motionless; and having saluted her and paid the ten shillings she asked, which was a large sum, I went inside. A sweet, heavy aroma filled air that was thick with pipe smoke.
The woman took my cloak, and as she hung it on a peg I recognised the Major’s hat and cloak. He was here after all. “So,” she said, in a whistling accent that made me think she must be Dutch. “Will you take a pipe first, or see the show?”
I have never much liked smoking, for it gives me the cough; and I replied that I would see the show. She seemed a little surprised at this, but led me through a tattered green curtain and down a flight of stairs to a low, mean room, surrounded with greasy-looking mirrors, that was stopped from any light save a few candles, where five dull-looking men sat in the shadows and, like a theatre audience, awaited some kind of performance. I knew not what this might be, and thought another posturer was probably expected. Of Major Mornay there was no sign, and I presumed he must have gone to smoke a pipe first. Meanwhile I made no attempt to conceal myself and took a most prominent seat so that Mornay, when eventually he came in, might easily see me.
My breath came uneasily to me down in that loathsome room, for the atmosphere was filled not just with smoke but also with foreboding, as if something dreadful was about to happen. And yet, curiously, I did almost feel at my ease.
After a good deal of waiting, two women brought a nun into the room and treated her most cruelly, spitting upon her and slapping her before eventually stripping her naked; whereupon they made her lie belly-down upon the bare floor without any garment. Her arms and legs were drawn with cords to a post in each corner of the room; and all the while the poor, dull-eyed nun bore her torments without protest, as if she cared little what happened to her. As I was myself. I know not if she was a real nun or no, except to say her hair was cut very short, which is, I believe, a sign of the nun’s renunciation of the world; but she was most comely, being no more than twenty years of age, and the sight of her naked body and privy parts stirred me much.
It was now that the Major came downstairs, and I remarked to myself how he seemed to be almost ill, or drunk; but despite my very obvious position, he sat down without even seeming to notice I was there.
After she was properly secured, one of the other men stood up from his chairs and started to whip her, all the time cursing her for a damned Roman Catholic whore, and other words most obscene, so that I began to apprehend some real danger to the girl’s life. And standing up myself, I remonstrated with these men most openly, calling them monsters to mete such treatment to a woman, and entreating them all to desist, although I looked only at the Major so that at last he recognised me, and with such anger in his yellow-looking eyes that it quite froze my blood. It may have been his eyes, but it was more likely the sound of a piece cocked and the chill of a pistol pressed against my cheek that was so disconcerting.
“What’s this girl to you, then?” asked a man behind me, whose voice persuaded me that he also must be Dutch.
“Nothing,” I replied. “I care not for Galloping nuns, Quests, or Beguines, but she is human and, being so young, seems hardly to deserve such abuse.”
“Abuse you call it,” laughed the man. “Why, we ain’t hardly started yet.”
At this point the Major ran quickly out of that terrible room and up the stairs. Meanwhile the naked girl on the floor looked up at me with a most peculiar indifference, as if she cared very little for my intervention, so that I wondered if she did not mind her pain, or even enjoyed her flogging, like the Major.
“Surely she doesn’t deserve such cruelty?”
“Doesn’t deserve it?” said the voice. “What has that got to do with anything?” The voice behind me was silent for a moment. “What are you doing here?” it said at last.
I pointed upstairs. “I came with him. Major Mornay. He brought me. Only I came with little understanding of what I was to see, for he did not warn me of anything.”
“It’s true,” said the Dutch woman who had admitted me. “He did arrive not long after the Major.”
The man holding the pistol stepped in front of me so that I could see him. A most ignoble ruffian he was, with a forehead villainous low, and boils like barnacles; his red eyes were fierce, and yet his hand trembled upon the pistol which now he waved up the stairs.
“Your friend has left,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you had better leave as well.”
I moved toward the stair, glancing back all the time at the girl on the floor, whose back and bottom were already striped like a maypole.
“She cares not what happens to her,” laughed the man. “It’s the price she pays to satisfy her cravings. I wouldn’t worry about her if I were you.”
And still the girl said nothing; and endured her whipping, which commenced as soon as I had mounted the stairs, without so much as a murmur.
I hardly knew whether to believe him or not, but leave I did, although I was part minded to mount the stairs and return with my pistol in my hand to see that nothing more happened to the girl. I might have shot the one with the boils, but the other men were armed as well, and I do not doubt that they would have killed me. And for a while I was haunted by the possibility that the girl was a real
Much relieved to be out of that evil house, and somewhat light-headed, too, for the cloying smoke had been as thick as the river fog, I took a deep breath of cold air, and thinking Major Mornay to be long gone, I started back the way I had come, toward the wall and the river. I had not gone ten paces when he stepped out from the door of a vile-looking tavern and, trembling with anger, confronted me.
“Why are you following me, Mister Ellis?” he asked and, drawing his sword, advanced upon me with such obvious intent that no other course lay before me but to draw myself and prepare to answer his attack. True, I had promised Newton not to fight, but I could hardly see how I was now to avoid it. I snatched off my hat for ease of movement and vision, although I would have parried his first thrust easily enough had I been wearing St. Edward’s
