Read by Paul Clarke
It is not our custom to invite strangers here, you know. For obvious reasons. Except of course on our Treat Days. Every Leap Year our Keepers permit just one resident to invite a guest to join us. Given the general sense of irony in here, it’s always on Valentine’s Day. Read nothing into that. It is simply an institutional joke. We take it in turns. It staves off the loneliness and the despair that follows. Today the honour has fallen to me. You are my choice. My treat.
But why you? Well, I have read your column, of course.
I enjoy your hyperbole, your witty turns of phrase. And I do so enjoy your amoral stances on whatever little titbits you happen to pick up around town. A dying art these days, the art of the high society gossipmonger. ‘Aletheia’ – your pen-name amuses me. ‘The disclosure of truth’.
But my God, your work has turned stale recently, don’t you think? No, please don’t take offence. Merely listen. I am here to help you. I am offering you a gift. The gift of Material. Fresh material for your avid public. I will tell it. You will write it. Anonymise it, naturally. I should take great pleasure in reading it back to myself in the dark nights. I trust you to use what I have to tell you wisely. And then you will never contact me, never return here again. Do you understand?
Welcome to Dashwood Mansions. What an unconventional little coterie we are here. Hidden away in this draughty old pile. Hidden by design. Though in plain sight. Rumours of our existence abound, I daresay. Are we even here at all? But as you see, the apartments are real enough. As are their inhabitants. Quite real. I believe I am giving you what they call ‘a scoop’.
You seem underwhelmed. I admit it’s hardly an opulent building. Faded glamour, one might say. Again, much like the inhabitants. We fade. We decay. Yet we endure, despite all we have done.
We are here because we got caught. But being too important, too wealthy or well-born, we are subject to different penalties from the common criminals and the bourgeois offenders of bourgeois taste. They shut us away so that we may ponder our sins in peace and comfort. Not for our own benefit, of course. But for the Families. The Reputations. The Inheritances.
Allow me to introduce the household.
On the ground floor, the Money people. The frauds, the embezzlers, sellers of shares in the non-existent. Dealers in the unspeakable trades. Those who sold commissions, or dangerously adulterated goods; or sold their friends, sold out their country. I could never understand the appeal of all that. Much more trouble than it’s worth – and for what pleasure beyond simple avarice? Rapacious locusts.
Above them, in physical space only, the murderers. Poisoners, stranglers, butchers. The stupid ones who removed those who would be missed, and were too proud to enlist help, so did it themselves. The ones who disposed of the wrong people – their own. Or those with powerful friends. So many well-known names on the doors of those corridors. Each with their own bloody account book of usurping infant heirs; inconvenient by-blows; love rivals; business rivals; the parents who would not just do the decent thing and die when the gambling debts were being collected.
Fools, on the first floor. Impulsive fools, scheming fools. No psychotics, mind. There are other places for them to go. Here you will find only those in their right minds.
And at the very top, here in the attic, as far away from the streets as possible – the deviants. The pornographers and the pederasts. The rapists. The too-obvious incests. The unconscionable, irredeemable perverts who could not be induced to stop. None of our misdemeanours were kept behind closed doors – so now we must be. Scoundrels all.
You may note I have said nothing of the basement. There we have only one subterranean dweller. The Prince. (Yes, that one.) Or, to give him the well-earned moniker bestowed by the rotting courtesans of the continent – The Infector. Now quarantined. Sterilised. Not quite as dead as the newspapers would have you believe. He really did spoil rather a lot of parties. Ruined many a Grand Tour, and many a pretty face. We shall not refer to him again.
Where to begin…
Apartment 12, Lady Mary Addison. Canny girl. Made a fortune in husbands, but had a few too many. And then a great many too few for the authorities not to notice.
Ah, perhaps Apartment 32. Captain James Rasmussen. His particular peccadillo – twins. His own sisters, I ask you. Turns out twins ran in the family. And ran and ran ... Baroque for a man to be father to his own four nieces.
Apartment 40. The Honourable Henry Bellingham. Filled the back shelves of Holywell Street with his creative little photographs. A blessing of the modern world, the camera. Such treasures we may see through it. Such happy gentlemen. Animals too. All very pastoral.
There is a question in your eyes. Ask it. Ah. Yes. My offences? So-called. Domestic bliss was my offence. The realisation of private dreams in a little establishment of my own, tucked away from prying respectability. Where anything and everything a man – or woman – might desire was possible and permitted for a fair price.
My business was not in the ordinary way of things. It was specialist. What do people want most in this world but youth and beauty? And if they themselves are blessed with neither, there are places they can go to obtain them. Possess them, if only briefly. And while beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, youth is self-evident. It certainly was in my household.
A sneer of disgust? Yes. That is, I’m led to believe, the ‘normal’ response. But why disgust? I can think of many more disgusting things.
For one, the rank hypocrisy of the righteous who throw charity at the destitute but never trouble themselves to intervene in their circumstances. A penny here, a bowl of soup there, and back to the Sunday service to pray for their souls. Does it occur to the upright to provide real opportunity to those for whom they weep?
And am I to be excoriated and outcast for simply bestowing gainful employment on the scum of the earth? For rendering the worthless economically viable? Is the workhouse so very different from the whorehouse?
Suffer to come unto me the little ones, saith the Lord. And so say I. They were not starved. Not oppressed by canting pastors and sour-faced spinsters in black bonnets. They were made special. Given a use, a meaning. They brought and received pleasure. They were clothed in the finest and fattened with sweetmeats. They slept on feather beds instead of louse-infested sacks. Materially, they became indistinguishable from the offspring of the comfortable classes. And better treated, from all I know of the world. Peek behind the doors of lawyers and insurance men and bank clerks, and you will find far more miserable brats than mine. My little kittens were warm and clean. And so very grateful.
Ah, but their souls! What of their souls? Well, what of yours? How many begging unfortunates do you pass by in a day? How many pennies are enough to assuage your conscience? Even that word ‘unfortunates’ – it is fatalistic. You have decided that by luck or by desert, the slums and the streets are the rightful place for so much inadequate humanity. I have never looked upon them as such. I have only ever seen potential.
My only error was in thinking it could last.
It is interesting how easy it is to destroy what has been so carefully built. Creation, progress, growth, are the work of years. Destruction, the work of moments. It only takes one little pebble dropped into a calm pool for the ripples to spread outwards and disturb the peace. One little intervention to wreak havoc and downfall.
I worked hard to vet our clients and our commodities. But one cannot plan for every eventuality, alas. ‘Investigative journalism’ they call it. You will know all about it, in your line of work. You know your business, as I knew mine. Gone are the days when the stories came to you. Now you go out and find them. Or create them. It is efficient, I give you that.
But I ask myself, how deranged must a ‘journalist’ be to buy up a pretty little flower of the street and send it to me to be bought all over again, purely for the purposes of a good story? How riddled by arrogance must he be to pay another man to pose as a genuine customer, merely to give himself something to write about? He didn’t have the courage to come himself to try our wares. No, not W. M. Stanhope, self-appointed protector of public decency, defender of ‘the exploited’. Perhaps he thought he’d be tempted after all. No. He paid for a little scenario, he wrote the exposé. ‘Babylon Revealed’; ‘Sodom and Gomorrah in Modern London’; ‘The Evils of the White Slave Trade’. The vocabulary is telling, don’t you think? Who we choose to care about and whom it offends.
Stanhope the harbinger of justice. Stanhope the redeemer. Lauded and promoted. Whereas I was dragged through the mud and hushed up, sent here to live out my days in deep contemplation of right and wrong. I am no further on in that respect.
Quite the Fleet Street hero he became. Or should I say – you? Aletheia. W. M. Stanhope, to give you your full byline. Yet even that is not your real name, is it? Happily, I am not quite so cut off from the world that I can’t find these things out. Little kittens still mew to me when I require them to.
Please do not trouble to deny it. You have many a professional pseudonym. I quite understand. So did I. Yet I see that you don’t recognise me at all. Why should you? I was simply a name on a front page, for a few days. Before the next big crusade began, and the next worst scandal, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. Where does it end, Aletheia? Can you sniff out every scandal in the world?
A man must make a living, I know. That’s all I was doing before your intercession. But while I was a whoremonger, you were simply a whore, if you but knew it. How you turned your pen in the direction of the money! One minute a guardian of morals, bellowing hellfire from the front pages, demanding the restoration of Christian values and virtues. Condemning the procurers, the beyond-the-pale corruptors. Condemning me! But when the popular taste cries out for enjoyable scandal, entertaining scandal, there you are to write that too. We smirk as one at the base foibles of the rich. “Mr X the latest co-respondent in the titillating case of Madame Y. Doctor A, lately seen visiting the bawdy houses of B___ Street, W1.”
There is no hypocrisy like press hypocrisy. Oh, how you care. Oh, how you profit.
The unpleasant truth, Mr Stanhope, is that I am not the “social evil”. You are. And so you must be put away, as we have been. My neighbours and I shall pay you out at last, on this, my Treat Day – when we are permitted one guest from the outside world, who will never be seen again.
No, no. Please don’t bother. It is pointless to attempt to escape. Our Keepers will not help you. They permit us our occasional pleasures, for the sake of our sanity and their ease. It’s astounding what one can turn a blind eye to where profit is concerned. And ethics must never get in the way of professional success.
Will there be some disappointed sweetheart, waiting hopelessly in a restaurant for you tonight? Some lovely, upright girl with a twee romantic card she will never give you? Ah, well. She will forget. Innocent people do, you know. They turn the pages of the newspapers so quickly.
I do wonder who they will pay to write about your disappearance.
And who, finally, shall pen the obituary?
(c) Katty Pearce, 2020
Katty Pearce is an art gallery curator with a background in English literature and 19th century cultural history, and a very uncool passion for vintage comedy. Enthusiast of all things macabre and farcical. Sometime amateur wrestler and walker of strange places in sturdy Doc Martens.
Paul Clarke trained at the Central School and always got cast as a baddie or a monster. Or, just to mix it up, a bad monster. Now a photographer and occasional performer, he finds the League's stories islands of relative sanity in his life.
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