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Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them.
This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have
not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've
read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you,
welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The
truth is that you are an alien from another time and place
altogether.

When I first caught your eye and you decided to come with me, you
were probably thinking you would simply arrive and make yourself at
home. Now that you're actually here, the air is bitterly cold, and
you find yourself being led along in complete darkness, stumbling
on uneven ground, recognising nothing. Looking left and right,
blinking against an icy wind, you realise you have entered an
unknown street of unlit houses full of unknown people.

And yet you did not choose me blindly. Certain expectations were
aroused. Let's not be coy: you were hoping I would satisfy all the
desires you're too shy to name, or at least show you a good time.
Now you hesitate, still holding on to me, but tempted to let me go.
When you first picked me up, you didn't fully appreciate the size
of me, nor did you expect I would grip you so tightly, so fast.
Sleet stings your cheeks, sharp little spits of it so cold they
feel hot, like fiery cinders in the wind. Your ears begin to hurt.
But you've allowed yourself to be led astray, and it's too late to
turn back now.

It's an ashen hour of night, blackish-grey and almost readable like
undisturbed pages of burnt manuscript. You blunder forward into the
haze of your own spent breath, still following me. The cobblestones
beneath your feet are wet and mucky, the air is frigid and smells
of sour spirits and slowly dissolving dung. You hear muffled
drunken voices from somewhere nearby, but what little you can
understand doesn't sound like the carefully chosen opening speeches
of a grand romantic drama; instead, you find yourself hoping to God
that the voices come no closer.

The main characters in this story, with whom you want to become
intimate, are nowhere near here. They aren't expecting you; you
mean nothing to them. If you think they're going to get out of
their warm beds and travel miles to meet you, you are
mistaken.

You may wonder, then: why did I bring you here? Why this delay in
meeting the people you thought you were going to meet? The answer
is simple: their servants wouldn't have let you in the door.

What you lack is the right connections, and that is what I've
brought you here to make: connections. A person who is worth
nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and
that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you
can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.

That is why I've brought you here to Church Lane, St Giles: I've
found just the right person for you.

I must warn you, though, that I'm introducing you at the very
bottom: the lowest of the low. The opulence of Bedford Square and
the British Museum may be only a few hundred yards away, but New
Oxford Street runs between there and here like a river too wide to
swim, and you are on the wrong side. The Prince of Wales has never,
I assure you, shaken the hand of any of the residents of this
street, or even nodded in passing at anyone here, nor even, under
cover of night, sampled the prostitutes. For although Church Lane
has more whores living in it than almost any other street in
London, they are not of the calibre suitable for gentlemen. To
connoisseurs, a woman is more than a carcass after all, and you
can't expect them to forgive the fact that the beds here are dirty,
the décor is mean, the hearths are cold and there are no cabs
waiting outside.

In short, this is another world altogether, where prosperity is an
exotic dream as distant as the stars. Church Lane is the sort of
street where even the cats are thin and hollow-eyed for want of
meat, the sort of street where men who profess to be labourers
never seem to labour and so-called washer- women rarely wash.
Do-gooders can do no good here, and are sent on their way with
despair in their hearts and shit on their shoes. A model
lodging-house for the deserving poor, opened with great
philanthropic fanfare twenty years ago, has already fallen into the
hands of disreputables, and has aged terribly. The other, more
antiquated houses, despite being two or even three storeys high,
exude a subterranean atmosphere, as if they have been excavated
from a great pit, the decomposing archaeology of a lost
civilisation. Centuries-old buildings support themselves on
crutches of iron piping, their wounds and infirmities poulticed
with stucco, slung with clothes-lines, patched up with rotting
wood. The roofs are a crazy jumble, the upper windows cracked and
black as the brickwork, and the sky above seems more solid than
air, a vaulted ceiling like the glass roof of a factory or a
railway station: once upon a time bright and transparent, now
overcast with filth.

However, since you've arrived at ten to three in the middle of a
freezing November night, you're not inclined to admire the view.
Your immediate concern is how to get out of the cold and the dark,
so that you can become what you'd thought you could be just by
laying your hand on me: an insider.

Apart from the pale gas-light of the street-lamps at the far
corners, you can't see any light in Church Lane, but that's because
your eyes are accustomed to stronger signs of human wakefulness
than the feeble glow of two candles behind a smutty windowpane. You
come from a world where darkness is swept aside at the snap of a
switch, but that is not the only balance of power that life allows.
Much shakier bargains are possible.

Come up with me to the room where that feeble light is shining. Let
me pull you in through the back door of this house, let me lead you
through a claustrophobic corridor that smells of slowly percolating
carpet and soiled linen. Let me rescue you from the cold. I know
the way.

Watch your step on these stairs; some of them are rotten. I know
which ones; trust me. You have come this far, why not go just a
little farther? Patience is a virtue, and will be amply
rewarded.

Of course - didn't I mention this? - I'm about to leave you. Yes,
sadly so. But I'll leave you in good hands, excellent hands. Here,
in this tiny upstairs room where the feeble light is shining, you
are about to make your first connection.

She's a sweet soul; you'll like her. And if you don't, it hardly
matters: as soon as she's set you on the right path, you can
abandon her without fuss. In the five years since she's been making
her own way in the world, she has never got within shouting
distance of the sorts of ladies and gentlemen among whom you'll be
moving later; she works, lives and will certainly die in Church
Lane, tethered securely to this rookery.

Like many common women, prostitutes especially, her name is
Caroline, and you find her squatting over a large ceramic bowl
filled with a tepid mixture of water, alum and sulphate of zinc.
Using a plunger improvised from a wooden spoon and old bandage, she
attempts to poison, suck out or otherwise destroy what was put
inside her only minutes before by a man you've just missed meeting.
As Caroline repeatedly saturates the plunger, the water becomes
dirtier - a sure sign, she believes, that the man's seed is
swirling around in it rather than in her.

Drying herself with the hem of her shift, she notes that her two
candles are dimming; one of them is already a guttering stub. Will
she light new ones?

Well, that depends on what time of night it is, and Caroline has no
clock. Few people in Church Lane do. Few know what year it is, or
even that eighteen and a half centuries are supposed to have passed
since a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away to the gallows for
disturbing the peace. This is a street where people go to sleep not
at a specific hour but when the gin takes effect, or when
exhaustion will permit no further violence. This is a street where
people wake when the opium in their babies' sugar-water ceases to
keep the little wretches under. This is a street where the weaker
souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake
listening to the rats. This is a street reached only faintly, too
faintly, by the bells of church and the trumpets of state.

Caroline's clock is the foul sky and its phosphorescent contents.
The words 'three a.m.' may be meaningless to her, but she
understands perfectly the moon's relationship with the houses
across the street. Standing at her window, she tries for a moment
to peer through the frozen grime on the panes, then twists the
latch and pushes the window open. A loud snapping noise makes her
fear momentarily that she may have broken the glass, but it's only
the ice breaking. Little shards of it patter onto the street
below.

The same wind that hardened the ice attacks Caroline's half-naked
body too, eager to turn the sheen of perspiration on her pimpled
breast into a sparkle of frost. She gathers the frayed collars of
her loose shift into her fist and holds them tight against her
throat, feeling one nipple harden against her forearm.

Outside it is almost completely dark, as the nearest street-lamp is
half a dozen houses away. The cobbled paving of Church Lane is no
longer white with snow, the sleet has left great gobs and trails of
slush, like monstrous spills of semen, glowing yellowish in the
gas-light. All else is black.

The outside world seems deserted to you, holding your breath as you
stand behind her. But Caroline knows there are probably other girls
like her awake, as well as various scavengers and sentinels and
thieves, and a nearby pharmacist staying open in case anyone wants
laudanum. There are still drunkards on the streets, dozed off in
mid-song or dying of the cold, and yes, it's even possible there's
still a lecherous man strolling around looking for a cheap
girl.

Caroline considers getting dressed, putting on her shawl and going
out to try her luck in the nearest streets. She's low on funds,
having slept most of the day away and then passed up a willing
prospect because she didn't like the look of him; he had a poxy air
about him, she thought. She regrets letting him go now. She ought
to have learned before today that it's no use waiting for the
perfect man to come along.

Still, if she goes out again now, that would mean lighting another
two candles, her last. The harsh weather must be considered, too:
all that thrashing about in bed raises your temperature and then
you go out in the cold and lose it all; a medical student once told
her, as he was pulling on his trousers, that that was the way to
catch pneumonia. Caroline has a healthy respect for pneumonia,
although she confuses it with cholera and thinks gargling plenty of
gin and bromide would give her a good chance of survival.

Of Jack the Ripper she need have no fear; it's almost fourteen
years too early, and she'll have died from more or less natural
causes by the time he comes along. He won't bother with St Giles,
anyway. As I told you, I'm introducing you at the bottom.

A particularly nasty gust of wind makes Caroline shut the window,
sealing herself once more into the box-like room she neither owns
nor, properly speaking, rents. Not wanting to be a lazy slut, she
tries her best to imagine walking around out there with an
enigmatic look on her face; tries to conjure up a picture of an
eligible customer stepping out of the darkness to call her
beautiful. It doesn't seem likely.

Caroline rubs her face with handfuls of her hair, hair so thick and
dark that even the crudest men have been known to stroke it in
admiration. It has a silky texture, and is warm and pleasant
against her cheeks and eyelids. But when she takes her hands away
she finds that one of the candles has drowned in its puddle of fat,
while the other still struggles to keep its flaming head above it.
The day is over, she must admit, and the day's earnings are
in.

In the corner of the otherwise empty room sags the bed, a wrinkled
and half-unravelled thing like a bandaged limb that has been
unwisely used for a rough, dirty chore. The time has come, at last,
to use this bed for sleeping. Gingerly, Caroline inserts herself
between the sheets and blankets, taking care not to tear the slimy
undersheet with the heels of her boots. She'll take her boots off
later, when she's warmer and can face the thought of unhooking
those long rows of buttons.

The remaining candle-flame drowns before she has a chance to lean
over and blow it out, and Caroline rests her head back against a
pillow fragrant with alcohol and foreheads.

You can come out of hiding now. Make yourself comfortable, for the
room is utterly dark, and will remain that way until sunrise. You
could even risk, if you wish, lying down beside Caroline, because
once she's asleep she's dead to the world, and wouldn't notice you
- as long as you refrained from touching.

Yes, it's all right. She's sleeping now. Lift the blankets and ease
your body in. If you are a woman, it doesn't matter: women very
commonly sleep together in this day and age. If you are a man, it
matters even less: there have been hundreds here before you.

A while yet before dawn, with Caroline still sleeping beside you
and the room barely warmer than freezing outside the blankets, you
had better get out of bed.

It's not that I don't appreciate you have a long and demanding
journey ahead of you, but Caroline is about to be jolted violently
awake, and it's best you aren't lying right next to her at that
moment.

Take this opportunity to engrave this room on your memory: its
dismal size, its moisture-buckled wooden floor and candle-blackened
ceiling, its smell of wax and semen and old sweat. You will need to
fix it clearly in your mind, or you'll forget it once you've
graduated to other, better rooms which smell of pot-pourri, roast
lamb and cigar smoke; large, high-ceilinged rooms as ornate as the
patterns of their wallpaper. Listen to the faint, fidgety
scufflings behind the skirting-boards, the soft, half-amused
whimper of Caroline's dreams...

A monstrous shriek, of some huge thing of metal and wood coming to
grief against stone, rouses Caroline from her sleep. She leaps out
of bed in terror, throwing her sheets into the air like a flurry of
wings. The shrieking grinds on for several more seconds, then gives
way to the less fearsome din of a whinnying animal and human
curses.

Caroline is at her window now, like almost every other resident of
Church Lane. She's squinting into the gloom, excited and confused,
trying to find evidence of disaster. There's none at her own
doorstep, but farther along the street, almost at the lamp-lit
corner, lies the wreck of a hansom cab still shuddering and
splintering as the cabman cuts loose his terrified horse.

Her view hampered by dark and distance, Caroline would like to lean
further out of the window, but gusts of icy wind drive her back
into the room. She begins a fumbling search for her clothes, under
the scattered bed-sheets, under the bed; wherever the last customer
may have kicked them. (She really needs spectacles. She will never
own any. They turn up in street markets from time to time, and she
tries them on but, even allowing for the scratches, they're never
right for her eyes.)

By the time she's back at her window, rugged up and fully roused,
events have moved on remarkably quickly. A number of policemen are
loitering around the wreck with lanterns. A large sack or maybe a
human body is being bundled into a wagon. The cabbie is resisting
invitations to climb aboard, and instead circles his upended
vehicle, tugging at bits of it as if to test how much more it can
possibly fall apart. His horse, placid now, stands sniffing the
behinds of the two mares yoked to the police-wagon.

Within minutes, as the pale sun begins to rise over St Giles,
whatever can be done has been done. The living and the dead have
trundled away, leaving the wrecked cab in their wake. Splintered
wheel-spokes and window-frame glass shards hang still as
sculpture.

Peeping over Caroline's shoulder, you may think there's nothing
more to see, but she remains hypnotised, elbows on the window-sill,
shoulders still. She isn't looking at the wreck anymore; her
attention has shifted to the house-fronts across the street.

There are faces at all the windows there. The silent faces of
children, individually framed, or in small groups, like shop-soiled
sweetmeats in a closed-down emporium. They stare down at the wreck,
waiting. Then, all at once, as if by communal agreement on the
number of seconds that must pass after the cabman's disappearance
around the corner, the little white faces disappear.

At street level, a door swings open and two urchins run out, quick
as rats. One is dressed only in his father's boots, a pair of
ragged knickerbockers and a large shawl, the other runs barefoot,
in a night-shirt and overcoat. Their hands and feet are brown and
tough as dog's paws; their infant physiognomies ugly with
misuse.

What they're after is the cab's skin and bone, and they're not shy
in getting it: they attack the maimed vehicle with boyish
enthusiasm. Their small hands wrench spokes from the splintered
wheel and use them as chisels and jemmies. Metal edgings and ledges
snap loose and are wrenched off in turn; lamps and knobs are
beaten, tugged and twisted.

More children emerge from other filthy doorways, ready for their
share. Those with sleeves roll them up, those without fall to work
without delay. Despite their strong hands and wrinkled
beetle-brows, none of them is older than eight or nine, for
although every able-bodied inhabitant of Church Lane is wide awake
now, it's only these younger children who can be spared to strip
the cab. Everyone else is either drunk, or busy preparing for a
long day's work and the long walk to where it may be had.

Soon the cab is aswarm with Undeserving Poor, all labouring to
remove something of value. Practically everything is of value, the
cab being an object designed for a caste many grades above theirs.
Its body is made of such rare materials as iron, brass, good dry
wood, leather, glass, felt, wire and rope. Even the stuffing in the
seats can be sewn into a pillow much superior to a rolled-up potato
sack. Without speaking, and each according to what he has in the
way of tools and footwear, the children hammer and gouge, yank and
kick, as the sound echoes drily in the harsh air and the framework
of the hansom judders on the cobblestones.

They know their time is likely to be short, but it proves to be
even shorter than expected. Scarcely more than fifteen minutes
after the first urchins' assault on the wreck, a massive two-horse
brewer's dray turns the corner and rumbles up the lane. It carries
nothing except the cabman and three well-muscled companions.

Most of the children immediately run home with their splintery
armfuls; the most brazen persist for another couple of seconds,
until angry shouts of 'Clear off!' and 'Thief!' send them
scurrying. By the time the dray draws up to the wreck, Church Lane
is empty again, its house-fronts innocent and shadowy, its windows
full of faces.

The four men alight and walk slowly around the cab, clockwise and
counter-clockwise, flexing their massive hands, squaring their
meaty shoulders. Then, at the cabman's signal, they lay hands on
the four corners of the wreck and, with one groaning heave, load it
onto the dray. It settles more or less upright, two of its wheels
having been plundered.

No time is wasted scooping up the smaller fragments. The horse
snorts jets of steam as it's whipped into motion, and the three
helpers jump on, steadying themselves against the mangled cab. The
cabman pauses only to shake his fist at the scavengers behind the
windows and yell, 'This 'ere was my life!' and then he, too, is
carted away.

His melodramatic gesture impresses nobody. To the people of Church
Lane, he is a lucky man, a survivor who ought to be grateful. For,
as the dray rattles off, it exposes a pattern of dark blood nestled
between the cobbles, like a winding crimson weed.

From where you stand you can actually see the shiver of distaste
travelling down between Caroline's shoulder-blades: she's not brave
about blood, never has been. For a moment it seems likely she'll
turn away from the window, but then she shudders exaggeratedly, to
shake off the goose-flesh, and leans forward again.

The dray has gone, and here and there along the house-fronts doors
are swinging open and figures are emerging. This time it's not
children but adults - that is, those hardened souls who've passed
the age of ten. The ones who have a moment to spare - the
bill-poster, the scrubber, and the fellow who sells paper windmills
- dawdle to examine the blood-spill; the others hurry past,
wrapping shawls or scarves around their scrawny necks, swallowing
hard on the last crust of breakfast. For those who work in the
factories and slop-shops, lateness means instant dismissal, and for
those who seek a day's 'casual' labouring, there's nothing casual
about the prospect of fifty men getting turned away when the
fittest have been chosen.

Caroline shudders again, this time from the chill of a distant
memory. For she was one of these slaves herself once, hurrying into
the grey dawn every morning, weeping with exhaustion every night.
Even nowadays, every so often when she has drunk too much and
sleeps too deeply, a brute vestige of habit wakes her up in time to
go to the factory. Anxious, barely conscious, she'll shove her body
out of bed onto the bare floor just the way she used to. Not until
she has crawled to the chair where her cotton smock ought to be
hanging ready, and finds no smock there, does she remember who and
what she's become, and crawl back into her warm bed.

Today, however, the accident has shocked her so wide awake that
there's no point trying to get more sleep just yet. She can try
again in the afternoon - indeed, she'd better try again then, to
reduce the risk of falling asleep next to some snoring idiot
tonight. A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you
just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons.

Responsibilities, responsibilities. To get enough sleep, to
remember to comb her hair, to wash after every man: these are the
sorts of things she must make sure she doesn't neglect these days.
Compared to the burdens she once shared with her fellow factory
slaves, they aren't too bad. As for the work, well...it's not as
dirty as the factory, nor as dangerous, nor as dull. At the cost of
her immortal soul, she has earned the right to lie in on a weekday
morning and get up when she damn well chooses.

Caroline stands at the window, watching Nellie Griffiths and old
Mrs Mulvaney trot down the street on their way to the jam factory.
Poor ugly biddies: they spend their daylight hours drudging in the
scalding heat for next to nothing, then come home to drunken
husbands who knock them from one wall to the other. If this is what
it means to be 'upright', and Caroline is supposed to be
'fallen'...! What did God make cunts for, if not to save women from
donkey-work?

There is one small way, though, in which Caroline envies these
women, one modest pang of nostalgia. Both Nellie and Mrs Mulvaney
have children, and Caroline had a child once upon a time, and lost
it, and now she'll never have another. Nor was her child an
illegitimate wretch: it was born in loving wedlock, in a beautiful
little village in North Yorkshire, none of which things exists in
Caroline's world anymore. Maybe her blighted insides couldn't even
sprout another baby, and all that flushing with alum and sulphate
of zinc is as pointless as prayer.

Her child would have been eight years old now, had he lived - and
indeed he might have lived, had Caroline stayed in Grassington
Village. Instead, the newly widowed Caroline chose to take her son
to London, because there was no dignified work in the local town of
Skipton for a woman who'd not had much schooling, and she couldn't
stand living on the charity of her mother-in-law.

So, Caroline and her son boarded a train to a new life together,
and instead of going to Leeds or Manchester, which she had reason
to suspect were bad and dangerous places, she bought tickets to the
capital of the civilised world. Pinned inside her provincial little
bonnet was eight pounds, a very substantial sum of money, enough
for months of food and accommodation. The thought of it ought to
have comforted her, but instead she was plagued by headache all the
way into London, as if the massive weight of those bank-notes was
bearing down hard on her neck. She wished she could spend this
fortune right away, to be rid of the fear of losing it.

Within days of arriving in the metropolis she was offered help with
her dilemma. A famous dress-making firm was so impressed with her
manner that it commissioned her to make waistcoats and trousers in
her own home. The firm would provide her with all the necessary
materials, but required the sum of five pounds as a security. When
Caroline ventured the opinion that five pounds seemed a great deal
to ask, the man who was engaging her agreed, and assured her that
the sum was not of his choosing. No doubt the manager of the firm,
his own superior, had become disillusioned by the dishonest
behaviour of the folk he'd taken on in more lenient times: yards
and yards of the best quality cloth stolen, hawked in street
markets, only to end up in tatters on the bodies of street urchins.
A chastening picture for any businessman of a generous and trusting
nature, did not Caroline agree?

Caroline did agree, then; she was a respectable woman, her boy was
no urchin, and she considered herself a citizen of that same world
her employer was trying to keep safe. So, she handed him the five
pounds and began her career as a manufacturess of waistcoats and
trousers.

The work proved to be tolerably easy and (it seemed to her)
well-paid; in some weeks she earned six shillings or more, although
from this must be deducted the cost of cotton, coals for pressing,
and candles. She never skimped on candles, determined not to become
one of those half-blind seamstresses squinting over their work by a
window at dusk; she pitied the shirt-makers eulogised in 'The Song
of the Shirt' in the same way that a respectable shop-keeper might
pity a ragged costermonger. Though keenly aware of how much she'd
come down in the world, she was not dissatisfied: there was enough
to eat for her and her boy, their lodgings in Chitty Street were
clean and neat, and Caroline, being husbandless, was free to spend
her money wisely.

Then winter came and of course the child fell ill. Nursing him lost
Caroline valuable time, particularly in the daylight hours, and
when at last he rallied she had no choice but to engage his
help.

'You must be my big brave man,' she told him, her face burning, her
eyes averted towards the single candle lighting their shadowy
labours. No proposal she would ever make in later years could be
more shameful than this one.

And so mother and son became workmates. Propped up against
Caroline's legs, the child folded and pressed the garments she had
sewn. She tried to make a game of it, urging him to imagine a long
line of naked, shivering gentlemen waiting for their trousers. But
the work fell further and further behind and her drowsy boy fell
forwards more and more often, so that in order to prevent him
burning himself (or the material) with the pressing iron she had to
pin the back of his shirt to her dress.

This dismal partnership didn't last very long. With dozens of
waistcoats still waiting, the tugs at her skirts became so frequent
it was obvious the boy was more than merely tired: he was
dying.

And so Caroline went to retrieve her bond from her employer. She
came away with two pounds and three shillings and a sick, impotent
fury that lasted for a month.

The money lasted slightly longer than that and, with her child in
marginally better health due to medical attention, Caroline found
work in a sweater's den making hats, jamming squares of cloth onto
steaming iron heads. All day she was handing dark, shiny, scalding
hats farther along a line of women, as if passing on plates of food
in an absurdly steamy kitchen. Her child (forgive this
impersonality: Caroline never speaks his name anymore) spent his
days locked in their squalid new lodgings with his painted ball and
his Bristol toys, stewing in his sickliness and fatherless misery.
He was always fractious, whimpering over small things, as if daring
her to lose patience.

Then one night at the end of winter he began coughing and wheezing
like a demented terrier pup. It was a night very like the one we
are in now: bitter and mucky. Worried that no doctor would agree,
at such an hour and in such weather, to accompany her unpaid to
where she lived, Caroline conceived a plan. Oh, she'd heard of
doctors who were kind and devoted to their calling, and who would
march into the slums to combat their ancient foe Disease, but in
all her time in London Caroline had not met any such doctor, so she
thought she'd better try deception first. She dressed in her best
clothes (the bodice was made of felt stolen from the factory) and
dragged her boy out into the street with her.

The plan, such as it was, was to deceive the nearest physician into
believing she was new to London, and hadn't a family doctor yet,
and had been all evening at the theatre, and only realised her son
was ill when she returned and found the nurse frantic, and had
hailed a cab immediately, and was not the sort of person to discuss
money.

'Doctor won't send us away?' asked the child, scoring a bull's-eye,
as always, on her worst fear.

'Walk faster,' was all she could reply.

By the time they found a house with the oval lamp lit outside, the
boy was wheezing so hard that Caroline was half insane, her hands
trembling with the urge to rip his little throat open and give him
some air. Instead she rang the doctor's bell.

After a minute or two, a man came to the door in his night-gown,
looking not at all like any doctor Caroline had met before, nor
smelling like one.

'Sir,' she addressed him, doing her best to keep both the
desperation and the provincial burr out of her voice. 'My son needs
a doctor!'

For a moment he stared her up and down, noting her outmoded
monochrome dress, the frost on her cheeks, the mud on her boots.
Then he motioned her to come in, smiling and laying his broad hand
on her boy's shivering shoulder as he said:

'Well now, this is a happy coincidence. I need a woman.'

Five years later, moving sleepily through her bedroom, Caroline
stubs her toes on the ceramic basin and is provoked to clean up her
bedroom. She transfers the stagnant contraceptive bouillon
carefully into the chamber pot, watching, as she pours, the germs
of another man's offspring combine with piss. She heaves the full
pot onto her window-sill, and pushes the window open. There's no
crack of ice this time, and the air is still. She'd like to toss
the liquid into the air, but the Sanitary Inspector has been
sniffing around lately, reminding everyone that this is the
nineteenth century, not the eighteenth. Threats of eviction have
been made. Church Lane is infested with Irish Catholics, spiteful
gossips the lot of them, and Caroline doesn't want them accusing
her of soliciting cholera on top of everything else.

So, she tips the chamber-pot slowly forwards and lets the mixture
trickle discreetly down the brickwork. For a while the building
will look as though God relieved Himself against it, but then the
problem will get solved one way or another, before the neighbours
wake up - either the sun will dry it or fresh snow will rinse
it.

Caroline is hungry now, a sharp belly-hunger, despite the fact that
she doesn't normally wake until much, much later. She's noticed
that before: if you wake up too early, you're famished, but if you
wake later, you're all right again, and then later still you're
famished again. Needs and desires must rise and fall during sleep,
clamouring for satisfaction at the door of consciousness, then
slinking away for a while. A deep thinker, that's what her husband
used to call her. Too much education might have done her more harm
than good.

Caroline's guts make a noise like a piglet. She laughs, and decides
to give Eppie a surprise by paying an early-morning visit to The
Mother's Finest. Put a smile on his ugly face and a pie in her
belly.

In the cold light of day, the clothes she hastily threw on in order
to see the wrecked cab don't pass muster. Rough hands have wrinkled
the fabric, dirty shoes have stepped on the hems, there are even
speckles of blood from the scabby shins of old Leo the dyer.
Caroline strips off and starts afresh with a voluminous blue and
grey striped dress and tight black bodice straight out of her
wardrobe.

Getting dressed is much easier for Caroline than it is for most of
the women you will meet later in this story. She has made small,
cunning alterations to all her clothing. Fastenings have been
shifted, in defiance of fashion, to where her hands can reach them,
and each layer hides short-cuts in the layer beneath. (See? - her
seamstressing skills did come in useful in the end!)

To her face and hair Caroline affords a little more attention,
scrutinising the particulars in a small hand-mirror tacked
upside-down to the wall. She's in fair repair for twenty-nine. A
few pale scars on her forehead and chin. One black tooth that
doesn't hurt a bit and is best left alone. Eyes a little bloodshot,
but big and sympathetic, like those of a dog that's had a good
master. Decent lips. Eyebrows as good as anyone's. And, of course,
her splendid nest of hair. With a wire brush she untangles the
fringe and fluffs it out over her forehead, squaring it just above
the eyes with the back of her hand. Too impatient and hungry to
comb the rest, she winds it up into a pile on top of her head and
pins it fast, then covers it up with an indigo hat. Her face she
powders and pinks, not to conceal that she's old, ugly or corrupt
in flesh, for she isn't any of these yet, but rather to brighten
the pallor of her sunless existence - this for her own sake rather
than for her customers.

Arranging her shawl now, smoothing down the front of her dress, she
resembles a respectably well-to-do woman in a way she never could
have managed when she slaved in the steam of the hat factory,
suffering for her virtue. Not that an authentic lady could so much
as fasten a garter in less than five minutes, let alone dress
completely without a maid's assistance. Caroline knows very well
she's a cheap imitation, but fancies herself a cheekily good one,
especially considering how little effort she puts into it.

She slips out of her room, like a pretty moth emerging from a husk
of dried slime. Follow discreetly after her. But you are not going
anywhere very exciting yet: be patient a while longer.

On the landing and the stairs, all of last night's candles have
burnt out. No new ones will be lit until the girls start bringing
the men home in the afternoon, so there's not much light to see
Caroline downstairs. The landing receives a lick of sunshine from
her room, which she's left open to distribute the smell more evenly
around the house, but the stairs, corkscrewed as they are inside a
windowless stairwell, are suffocatingly gloomy. Caroline has often
thought that this claustrophobic spiral is really no different from
a chimney. Maybe one day the bottom-most steps will catch fire
while she's on her way down and the stairwell will suck up the
flames just like a chimney, the rest of the house remaining
undisturbed while she and the spiral of dark stairs shoot out of
the roof in a gush of smoke and cinders! Good riddance, some might
say.

The first thing Caroline sees when she emerges into the light of
the entrance hall is Colonel Leek seated in his wheelchair. Though
he is berthed very near the foot of the stairs, he faces the front
door, his back to Caroline, and she hopes that this morning he
might, for once, be asleep.

'Think I'm asleep, don't you girlie?' he promptly sneers.

'No, never,' she laughs, though it's far too early in the day for
her to be a convincing liar. She squeezes past the Colonel and lets
him examine her for a moment, so as not to be rude, for he never
forgets an insult.

Colonel Leek is the landlady's uncle, a pot-bellied stove of a man,
keeping the warmth in with overcoats, scarves and blankets, stoking
up on gossip, and puffing out smoke through a stunted pipe.
Concealed under all the layers, Colonel Leek still wears his
military uniform complete with medals, though these have a
handkerchief sewn over them to prevent them catching. In the last
war he went to, the Colonel accepted a bullet in the spine in
exchange for a chance to take pot-shots at mutineering Indians, and
his niece has cared for him ever since, installing him as her
'toll-collector' when she opened the empty rooms of her house to
prostitutes.

Colonel Leek performs his job with grim efficiency, but his true
passion remains war and other outbursts of violence and disaster.
When he reads his daily newspaper, happy events and proud
achievements fail to capture his interest, but as soon as he comes
across a calamity he cannot contain himself. It often happens that
Caroline, hard at work in her room, must suddenly croon more loudly
in a customer's ear to cover the noise of a hoarsely shouted
recitation from downstairs, such as:

'Six thousand Tartars have invaded the Amoor Province, wrested
fifteen years ago from China!'

Now the Colonel fixes his bloodshot eyes on Caroline, and whispers
meaningfully: 'Some of us don't sleep through disaster. Some of us
knows what goes on.'

'You mean that cab this mornin'?' guesses Caroline, well accustomed
to his turn of mind.

'I saw,' the Colonel leers, trying to raise himself up off his
perennially festering rear. 'Death and damage.' He falls back on
the cushions. 'But that was only the beginning. A small part of
what's afoot. The local manifestation. But everywhere! everywhere!
Disaster!'

'Do let us go, Colonel. I'll drop if I don't 'ave a bite to
eat.'

The old man looks down at his blanketed lap as if it were a
newspaper and, raising his forefinger periscopically,
recites:

'Disastrous overturn of train at Bishop's Itchington. Gunpowder
explosion on the Regent's Canal. Steamer gone down off the Bay of
Biscay. Destruction by fire of the Cospatrick, half-way to New
Zealand, four hundred and sixty lost, mere days ago. Think of it!
These are signs. The whirlpool of disaster. And at the centre of it
- what there, eh? What there?'

Caroline gives it a couple of seconds' thought, but she has no idea
what there. Alone of the three women who use Mrs Leek's house as
their lay and lodgings, she's oddly fond of the old man, but not
enough to prefer his demented prophesies to a hearty
breakfast.

'Goodbye, Colonel,' she calls as she swings open the door and
sweeps out into the street, closing him in behind her.

Now prepare yourself. You have not much longer with Caroline before
she introduces you to a person with slightly better prospects.
Watch her bodice swell as she inhales deeply the air of a new day.
Wait for her to plot her safe passage through Church Lane, as she
notes where the dung is most densely congregated. Then watch your
step as you follow her towards Arthur Street, walking briskly along
the line of litter left in the wake of the cab: first the blood,
then a trail of seat-stuffing and wood-splinters. Perhaps they'll
lead all the way to The Mother's Finest tavern, where hot pies are
served from dawn and no one is going to ask you if you knew the
woman who died.

Excerpted from THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE © Copyright
2002 by Michel Faber. Reprinted with permission by Harvest Books.
All rights reserved.

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