Trick of the Light

Let us hope the South wins, and that we may all find peace.

Your husband,

Jonathen

9

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back:

Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind

For which thou whip’st her.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

King Lear

The chattering magpies of the Just Land had descended on Leith market like tidings of such birds.

In their gay bonnets, bright colours and fashionable outdoor coats, parasols twirling, daintily avoiding the muck below lest it cling to their shiny black halfway-laced boots, they moved from one glittering bauble to the next with little cries of joy and excitement, displaying such innocence that the onlooker would have been hard-pressed to guess their chosen profession.

Perhaps a boldness in the gaze, a candid assessment of the males before them, either passing respectable or the cocksure peddler at his stall, that weighed such men in the balance and found the exact avoirdupois and possible cost of their carnal inclinations. Perhaps that might have tipped the wink.

The peddlers looked them straight in the eye; the passing respectable if they had previous acquaintance and a wife to hand craved invisibility, as if they were on the other side of a thick veil.

Or if no previous acquaintance enjoined, they clenched buttocks in distaste as golden opinion does when confronted by noxious depravity.

It is difficult to walk in such a state and the motion often resembles a bad case of haemorrhoids; yet virtue surely thus contained must be its own reward.

A distance aside from the main party, Francine and the Countess’s Simone rattled away to each other in quick-fire French, much to the chagrin of Lily Baxter who was accustomed to being Francine’s light of love. Of course she could not give utterance to her annoyance, being a deaf mute, but her face, which was by nature sunny, was set in sulky lines. Beneath curly tousled hair, the childlike open countenance bore witness to the unhappy thoughts that ran in her mind.

Lily and Francine had been lovers and followed their craft for nigh on two years. They had stretched, scourged, thistled, and inflicted requisite degrees of pain upon the supplicatory clients of the Just Land, sending them home milked dry of deviation to their wives who would have, in the words of Hannah Semple, died wi’ their leg up, had they known of their husbands’ compulsive drive for subjugation. Francine’s speciality.

The Frenchwoman ran the show: severe, leather-clad in the manner of an Egyptian princess, her chalk-white beautiful face gazing with dispassion at the hopeful mounds of flesh spread-eagled below; like a cartographer plotting out proposed lines of mortification.

Lily darted here and there around the Berkley Horse, a piece of equipment that had set Jean Brash back a pretty penny but was worth its considerable weight in gold, giving access – fore, aft, over and under – to the quivering recipient.

At the altar of agony, in the cellar of the Just Land, Lily was the acolyte, bearing the instruments of salvation with an innocent fervour, only the occasional grin letting show the mischief in her mental process.

Now and again she popped her head up above the straps and buckles of the horse like a jockey who had just won the race. A wicked flash to her lover, then out of sight.

Two of a kind.

But that had all changed since the arrival of Simone.

Both women were from Paris, but while Francine was of an educated background, a sophisticate whose artistic bent for painting had been sidetracked into stripes of a different kind, the other was a guttersnipe whose assumed airs and graces fooled most, but not Francine who knew the real thing, or Lily who could smell the fake a mile away.

However it amused the Frenchwoman as she watched Simone change shape like a chameleon to attract and seduce.

Francine was attracted for certain but the other verb had yet to come into play.

Now that Francine spoke constantly in her native tongue her voice had dropped in tone, the French vowels and gutturals sliding into ancestral cadence, the language a warm, sensual flowing stream, no longer shot through with Anglo-Saxon ambiguity, and Lily, who could not hear all this in any case, was left out in the cold.

A touch on the elbow brought her round. It was the other girl from the Countess, Jessie Nairn. She was also from the streets – Paisley, the west of Scotland – and the harshness of her life showed in the eyes. Whatever good deeds done or witnessed were lost in the mists of time.

Jessie spoke slowly, forming the words with her lips; she had already learned how to communicate with Lily.

‘Have ye lost your big rub-a-dub then?’ she asked.

Lily’s eyes narrowed.

‘I’d help ye out,’ said Jessie. ‘But I like the hairy men. Bigger the better.’

She roared in most unladylike laughter while her eyes appraised Lily with cool calculation.

The mute turned her head away and looked over to where Francine was standing with Simone, the tall woman wearing a dark mannish jacket that accentuated the slim lines of her figure. She jutted out one hip and Simone laughed at some remark. Very Gallic. Very gamine. Very droll.

I hope she burns in hell, thought Lily, the jealousy rising in her throat as a fear of loss, a fear of the love that made her tremble in the moist night never being hers again, never filling her eyes with tears, never catching her breath away, never…

This time the touch on her elbow was more like a sharp punch.

‘Ye must be desperate, ‘Jessie asserted. ‘The woman’s nothing but skin and bones.’

The image of Francine as a skeleton in leather caught Lily’s fancy and her eyes lit up in sudden humour. She punched Jessie back in the muscle of the arm and stuck up her small fists in the parody of a prize-fighter.

‘C’mon,’ said the Paisley girl. ‘We’ll buy you a scarlet ribbon.’

The market was still crowded, though some of the barrows were being wheeled away. While Big Annie Drummond, who was supposed to be keeping an eye on the assorted magpies as senior heaviest member, was distracted by a cream cake stall and two of the barrows had crashed wheels with vituperative results, a small portly man stepped out from one of the crooked wynds that fed into the square.

Simone had found a pretty embroidered handkerchief and was holding it up to the light admiringly while Francine impaled the hawker with a glare as he tried to charge her an extortionate price for a miniature wooden figurine.

God knows how it had ended up in Leith but it was of African origin with a rounded belly and tapered breasts, the shape of which reminded her of Lily’s.

Her recollection jolted, Francine looked up to see her lover staring at her from across the square while Jessie rummaged amongst a tangle of cheap ribbon.

The Frenchwoman smiled but Lily’s face did not move a muscle and while all were thus engaged, Alfred Binnie, the portly man, uncorked a small phial of liquid and, as he passed behind Simone, poured it delicately high on her back.

For a moment it was as if time suspended, everyone frozen in the scene except Binnie who passed through