Sugar’s forehead lands with a soft thud on the papers she has been toiling over. Half past midnight, Mrs Castaway’s. Musty quiet and the smell of embers and candle-fat. The cobwebby mass of her own hair threatens to stifle her as she comes back to life with a gasp.

Raising herself from her writing-desk, Sugar blinks, scarcely able to believe she could have fallen asleep when, only an instant before, she was so seriously pondering what word should come next. The page on which her face landed is smudged, still glistening; she stumbles over to the bed and examines her face in the mirror. The pale flesh of her forehead is branded with tiny, incomprehensible letters in purple ink.

‘Damn,’ she says.

A few minutes later she’s in bed, looking over what she has written. A new character has entered her story, and is suffering the same fate as all the others.

‘Please,’ he begged, tugging ineffectually at the silken bonds holding him fast to the bedposts. ‘Let me go! I am an important man!’ – and many more such pleas. I paid no heed to him, busying myself with my whet-stone and my dagger.

‘But tell me, exalted Sir,’ I said at last. ‘Where is it your pleasure to have the blade enter you?’

To this, the man gave no reply, but his face turned gastly grey.

‘The embarassment of choices has taken your tongue,’ I suggested. ‘But never fear: I shall explain them all to you, and their exquisite effects …’

Sugar frowns, wrinkling the blur of backwards text on her forehead. There’s something lacking here, she feels. But what? A long succession of other men, earlier on in her manuscript, have inspired her to flights of Gothic cruelty; dispatching them to their grisly fate has always been sheer pleasure. Tonight, with this latest victim, she can’t summon what’s needed – that vicious spark – to set her prose alight. Faced with the challenge of spilling his blood, she hears an alien voice of temptation inside her: Oh, for God’s sake, let the poor fool live.

You’re going soft, she chides herself. Come on, shove it in, deep into his throat, into his arse, into his guts, up to the hilt.

She yawns, stretches under the warm, clean covers. She has slept here alone for days now; it smells of no body but hers. As always, there are half a dozen clean sheets on the bed, interleaved with waxed canvas, so that each time a sheet is soiled she can whip it off, revealing a fresh layer of bedding. Before William Rackham came into her life, these layers were stripped off with monotonous regularity; now, they stay in place, all half-dozen of them, for days at a time. Christopher climbs the stairs every morning to collect soiled bedding, and finds nothing outside her door.

Luxury.

Sugar slides deeper under the covers, her manuscript weighing heavy on her breast. It’s a rag-bag of a thing, made up of many different sized papers, sandwiched in a stiff cardboard folder on which are inscribed many titles, all crossed out. Underneath this inky roll-call of erasures, one thing survives:

‘by “Sugar”.’

Her story chronicles the life of a young prostitute with waist-length red hair and hazel eyes, working in the same house as her own mother, a forbidding creature called Mrs Jettison. Allowing for a few flights of fancy – the murders, for instance – it’s the story of her own life – well, her early life in Church Lane, at least. It’s the story of a naked, weeping child rolled into a ball under a blood-stained blanket, cursing the universe. It’s a tale of embraces charged with hatred and kisses laced with disgust, of practised submission and the secret longing for vengeance. It’s an inventory of brutish men, a jostling queue of human refuse, filthy, gin-stinking, whisky-stinking, ale-stinking, scabrous, oily-nailed, slime-toothed, squint-eyed, senile, cadaverous, obese, stump-legged, hairy-arsed, monster-cocked – all waiting their turn to root out the last surviving morsel of innocence and devour it. Is there any good fortune in this story? None! Good fortune, of the William Rackham kind, would spoil everything. The heroine must see only poverty and degradation; she must never move from Church Lane to Silver Street, and no man must ever offer her anything she wants – most especially, rescue into an easier life. Otherwise this novel, conceived as a cry of unappeasable anger, risks becoming one of those ‘Reader, I married him’ romances she so detests.

No, one thing is certain: her story must not have a happy ending. Her heroine takes revenge on the men she hates; yet the world remains in the hands of men, and such revenge cannot be tolerated. Her story’s ending, therefore, is one of the few things Sugar has planned in advance, and it’s death for the heroine. She accepts it as inevitable, and trusts that her readers will too.

Her readers? Why, yes! She has every intention of submitting the manuscript for publication once it’s finished. But who on Earth would publish it, you may protest, and who would read it? Sugar doesn’t know, but she’s confident it has a fighting chance. Meritless pornography gets published, and so do respectable novels politely calling for social reform (why, only a couple of years ago, Wilkie Collins published a novel called The New Magdalen, a feeble, cringing affair in which a prostitute called Mercy Merrick hopes for redemption … A book to throw against the wall in anger, but its success proves that the public is ready to read about women who’ve seen more than one prick in their lives … ) Yes, there must be receptive minds out there in the world, hungry for the unprettified truth – especially in the more sophisticated and permissive future that’s just around the corner. Why, she may even be able to live by her writing: A couple of hundred faithful readers would be sufficient; she’s not coveting success on the scale of Rhoda Broughton’s.

She snorts, startled awake again. Her manuscript has slid off her breast, spilling pages onto the bed-clothes. Page one is uppermost.

All men are the same, it says. If there is one thing I have learned in my time on this Earth, it is this. All men are the same.

How can I assert this with such conviction? Surely I have not known all the men there are to know? On the contrary, dear reader, perhaps I have!

My name is Sugar …

Sugar sleeps.

* * *

Henry Rackham removes the wrapping-paper from the red hearts, dark livers and pale pink necks of chicken he has bought from the pet-meat man, and throws a few morsels to the kitchen floor. His cat pounces instantly, seizing the meat in her mouth, her sleek shoulders convulsed with the effort of swallowing. Once upon a time, Henry would murmur pleas of restraint, for fear she’d make herself sick; now he looks on, acquiescent in the ravenous face of Nature. He knows that in a few minutes, she’ll be lying in front of the fire, as serene and innocent as the moon. She will purr at his touch, licking his hand which, although he has washed it, still smells – to her – of his gift of bloody flesh.

What is there to be learned from cats? thinks Henry. Perhaps that all creatures can be peaceable and kind – if they’re not hungry.

But how to explain the iniquity of those who have sufficient to eat? They hunger in a different way, perhaps. They are starving for grace, for respect, for the forgiveness of God. Feed them on that, and they will lie down with the Lamb.

Henry walks noiselessly in his thick knitted socks, into his sitting-room, and kneels at the hearth. Sure enough, no sooner has he stirred the fire than his cat comes to join him, purring and ready for sleep. Out of the blue he finds himself remembering, as he often does, his first meeting with Mrs Fox – or at least the first time he became aware of her. Inconceivable though it now seems that he could have failed to notice a woman of her beauty, she claims she was worshipping alongside him for weeks before the incident he so clearly recalls.

It was in 1872, in August of that year. She shone a bright fresh light into what had until then been the camera obscura of the North Kensington Prayer and Discussion Assembly. She was like the answer to his prayers, for he harboured in his heart the conviction that Christ never intended Christianity to be quite as Jesuitical as the N.K.P.D.A. would have it.

It was Trevor MacLeish who provoked her to make herself manifest on that day in August. A Bachelor of Science, and always abreast of the most recent developments in that sphere, he voiced his misgivings on the manner of receiving Holy Communion. ‘It has been conclusively proven,’ he said, ‘that disease may be communicated from person to person when utensils and especially when drinking vessels are shared.’ He argued for a new procedure of drinking Communion wine out of a number of individual cups, as many as there were Communicants. Someone asked if the wiping of a cup’s rim were not sufficient to remove the Bacteria, but MacLeish insisted that it was impervious to such measures.

In fact, MacLeish had brought to the Assembly a petition on this matter, addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury no less, and lacking only signatures. Henry was glum at the prospect of signing, believing the whole affair to be ridiculous, but fearing to say so, in case he were accused of Papist primitivism. Then up spoke a young lady, new to their midst, a Mrs Fox by name, saying,

‘Really, gentlemen, this is a quibble, refuted by the Bible.’

MacLeish’s countenance fell, but at Mrs Fox’s direction, Bibles were opened to Luke, Chapter 11, vv. 37–41, and she read the lines aloud without even being invited to do so, putting especial emphasis on the words: ‘Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.’

To see MacLeish folding his petition under the table, face red as a beetroot, was a pleasure; to be alerted to Mrs Fox’s existence, a delight. That a person of the fair sex, and one additionally hampered in her religious growth by her beauty, should be so well versed in the Bible, was almost a miracle. Henry yearned to hear her speak again. He loves to hear her still.

The next time William visits Sugar, he brings with him two publications, both promised when last they met.

‘Oh! You remembered!’ she cries, with a puppyish embrace. She’s dressed as if going out, in dark blue and black silk, not a hair out of place, not a crease out of line. Her soft sleeves whisper and rustle as she squeezes her arms around his waist, her hair is fragrant and slightly damp.

He notices, over her shoulder, that her bedroom is immaculately tidy: she always keeps it so for him. There are pale rectangles on the wallpaper, unstained by smoke, where those feeble pornographic prints used to hang, and although it’s months since they disappeared, their absence never fails to thrill him, for it was to please him that Sugar removed them. How did she put it? Ah yes: ‘This room is no one’s business now but yours and mine!’ A golden tongue she has, in more ways than one.

He seizes her by her bony shoulders and pushes her, affectionately, to arm’s-length. She grins at him, twice as beautiful as last time. Dozens of times he’s seen her, and each time it’s as if he’s seen her only dimly before, and this is the fully-lit reality! Her mouth is fuller, her nose is more perfect, her eyes are brighter, and her eyebrows have (how could he not have noticed this before?) bristles of dark purple within the auburn.

‘Yes, yes of course I remembered,’ he grins back. ‘My God, you are a lovely thing.’

She lowers her face, blushing. Yes, that’s a blush, he’ll swear – and no one can fake a blush! She’s genuinely flattered, he can tell!

‘Which first?’ he says, pulling both of the promised pamphlets into view.

‘Whichever you wish,’ she says, stepping back towards the bed.

He hands her his newly-cut copy of Mr Philip Bodley and Mr Edward Ashwell’s book, The Efficacy of Prayer. This little tome, he explains, has already caused a sensation, principally among the dozens of clergymen with whom Bodley, son of Bishop Bodley, conducted his ‘informal’ chats. Libel actions aplenty have been threatened but as the book discloses initials and localities only (Reverend H. of Stepney: ‘Why God should deem it so essential I suffer lumbago I cannot hope to understand’) they’re likely to come to nothing.

Perched on the edge of the mattress, Sugar leafs through the slim volume, quickly appraising its thrust. She knows men like Bodley and Ashwell. They talk loudly, are subject to fits of sniggering, and pretend they wish to deflower virgins when what they secretly desire is a milky cuddle from a fat matron.

(If, at a conservative estimate, 2,500,000 British infants per day pray for the health of their mamas and papas, can we conclude, from current mortality rates, that the Almighty’s juvenile applicants would be better advised to safeguard their parents by other means?)

Oh yes, she knows men like this all right. They’re always half-drunk, half-stiff, they beaver away endlessly, they can’t spend, they won’t leave. Must she praise their handiwork now? Sugar re-plays, in her uncanny memory, the way William has talked about these friends of his, these cronies from his fading youth. Can she take a risk?

She smiles. ‘How perfectly …’ (she consults his face, decides to gamble) ‘childish.’

For a moment William’s brow creases; he hovers on the brink of disapproval – maybe even anger. Then he permits himself to savour his own superiority to his friends, his annoyance with their immature shenanigans. The air between him and Sugar is suddenly sweet with lovers’ concord.

‘Yes,’ he says, almost in wonder. ‘Isn’t it?’

She arranges herself more comfortably, leaning one elbow on the mattress, allowing her hip to rise up through her trailing skirts.

‘Have they nothing better to do, do you think?’

‘No, nothing,’ he affirms. How odd that he never realised this before! His two oldest friends, and there’s a gulf between him and them – a gulf he could bridge only if he resumed being as idle as they, or if they found something purposeful to do. What an insight! And it comes out of the mouth of this entrancing young woman whom it has been his good fortune to win. Truly, these are strange and significant times in his personal history.

A little shyly, in exchange for the Bodley and Ashwell book she’s plainly losing patience with, he hands her the Winter 1874 catalogue of Rackham manufactures. (The Spring one isn’t ready.) Again Sugar surprises him, by looking him square in the eyes, and saying, ‘But tell me, William … how is business?’

No woman has ever asked him this question. It is a great deal more transgressive than talk of cocks and cunts.

‘Oh … splendid, splendid,’ he replies.

‘No, really,’ she says. ‘How is it? The competition must be frightful.’

He blinks, nonplussed; clears his throat. ‘Well, uh … Rackham’s is on the ascendant, I’d venture to say.’

‘And your rivals?’

‘Pears and Yardley are unassailable, Rimmel and Rowland are in good health. Nisbett had a bad Season last year, and may be in decline. Hinton is ailing, perhaps fatally …’

How queer this conversation is becoming! Is there no limit to what’s possible between him and Sugar? First literature, now this!

‘Good,’ she smirks. ‘Here’s to the decline of your rivals: may they expire one by one.’ And she opens the catalogue and begins browsing. William sits close beside her, one arm around her back, his knees pressing into the warmth of her skirts.

‘The end of Winter is always a good time for sales of soaps, bath oils and the like,’ he informs her, to fill the silence.

‘Oh?’ she says. ‘I suppose it’s because people aren’t so reluctant to wash.’

He chuckles. They’ve been together for fifteen minutes already, and are both still fully clothed, as proper a pair as any married couple.

‘Maybe so,’ he says. ‘Mainly it’s due to the London season. Ladies like to stock up early, so that when May comes and they have to brave the crowds, they’ve nothing left to buy but big things in showy parcels.’

Sugar reads on attentively. When Rackham strokes her cheek, she nudges her face against his hand affectionately and kisses his fingers, but her eyes don’t leave the pages of the catalogue. Even when William kneels at her feet and lifts her skirts, she reads on, shifting forward on the bed to allow him greater freedom, but otherwise pretending not to notice what’s happening to her. It is a game that Rackham finds arousing. Through the layers of soft fabric that shroud him in darkness, he hears, at once muffled and sharp, the sound of a page being turned; closer to his face, he smells the odour of female excitement.

When it’s over, and she’s belly-down on the bed, she is still reading. She reads aloud, reciting the entries, breathless from her exertions.

‘Rackham’s Lavender Milk. Rackham’s Lavender Puffs. Rackham’s Lavender Scented Moth Balls. Rackham’s Damask Rose Drops. Rackham’s Raven Oil …’ She squints at the fine print, rolling onto her side. ‘A high class and innocent Extract for giving instant and permanent Colour. Not a dye.’ She raises her eyebrows over the edge of the catalogue.

‘Of course it’s a dye,’ snorts William, at once embarrassed and slightly exhilarated by this frankness, this intimacy she’s drawing him into.

‘Rackham’s Snow Dust,’ Sugar continues. ‘Are malodorous feet your Achilles’ heel? Try Rackham’s Foot Balm. Not a soap. A Medicinal Preparation to Scientific Specifications. Rackham’s Aureoline. Produces the beautiful Golden Colour so much admired, ten shillings and sixpence, not a dye. Rackham’s Poudre Juvenile …’

William notes that her French accent is not at all bad: better than most. From the waist up, she’s as soignée as any lady he knows, reciting his company’s products like poetry; from the waist down …

‘Rackham’s Cough Remedy. Free of poisons of any kind. Rackham’s Bath Sweetener. One bottle lasts a year. Do your feet smell? To spare your blushes, use Rackham’s Sulphur Soap, does not contain lead, one shilling and sixpence …’

Suddenly he frets: is she mocking him? Her voice is a soft purr, without any audible trace of disrespect. Her legs are still open, displaying the white abundance of Rackham semen slowly leaking out. And yet …

‘Are you making fun of me?’ he asks.

She puts the catalogue down, leans over to stroke his head.

‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘All this is new to me. I want to learn.’

He sighs, flattered and shamed. ‘If you’re keen to fill gaps in your education, better you read Catullus than a Rackham catalogue.’

‘Oh, but you didn’t write this, did you, William?’ she says. ‘It was written in your father’s time, yes?’

‘By many hands, no doubt.’

‘None as elegant as yours, I’m sure.’ And she eyes him, a gentle challenge.

He reaches for his trousers. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘Oh, but I could help you. Make suggestions.’ She smiles lasciviously. ‘I’m awfully good at making suggestions.’ Fetching the catalogue up again, she lays her forefinger on one line of it. ‘Now, I happened to notice you flinching when I read the words “Do your feet smell?” A rather low phrase, I must agree.’

‘Ugh, yes,’ he groans, hearing the old man’s voice, picturing him writing those ugly words in that ridiculous green ink of his, tongue slightly protruding from his wrinkled mouth.

‘So let’s think of a phrase worthy of Rackham’s,’ says Sugar, tossing her skirts down to her ankles. ‘William Rackham’s, that is.’

Bemused, he opens his lips to protest. Swift as a bird, she swoops on him, laying one flaky finger on his mouth.

Shush, she mimes.

Miles away, the woman whom William vowed before God to love, honour and cherish is examining her face in a mirror. A tight, throbbing blemish has appeared on her forehead, just below the wispy golden hairline. Unthinkable, given how often and how carefully she sponges her face, but there it is.

On impulse, Agnes squeezes the pimple between her thumb and forefinger. Pain spreads across her brow like a flame, but the pimple stays intact, only angrier. She should have been patient, and applied some Rackham’s Blemish Balm. Now the thing is rooted fast.

In her hand-held mirror, she sees the fear in her eyes. She’s had this pimple before, in exactly the same place, and it has proved a harbinger of something much, much worse. But surely God will spare her, on the eve of the Season? She imagines she can feel her poor brain pulsing against the pink seashell of her inner ear.

Why, oh why, is her health so bad? She has harmed no one, done nothing. What is she doing in this frail and treacherous body? Once upon a time, when she wasn’t born yet, she must have had a choice between a number of different bodies in a number of different places, each destined to have its own retinue of friends, relations and enemies. Maybe this place, this body, caught her fancy for the silliest of reasons, and now here she is, stuck! Or maybe a mischievous imp distracted her when she was choosing … She imagines herself looking down, from Heaven, from the spirit world, at all the nice new bodies available, trying to decide whether Agnes Pigott might be an agreeable thing to be, while all around her other spirits jostled for their own return to human life. (Pray God Doctor Curlew never finds her hidden cache of books about Spiritualism and the Beyond. It’ll be the death of her if he does!)

Ah, but all this sophisticated thought is no help at all. She must make peace with her body, however bad a choice it may have been, for if she’s to manage the coming Season, she needs unhindered use of her body’s faculties.

So, bravely, Agnes carries on with her day, forcing herself to perform small tasks – combing her hair, buffing her nails, writing her diary – doing her best to ignore clumsy mishaps. Small scratches and chafes appear on her skin without warning; bruises spread over her like measles; the muscles in her neck, arms and back are stretched to snapping-point, and on her forehead the shiny blemish throbs and throbs.

Please, no, please, no, please, no, she recites constantly, as if from a rosary. I don’t want to bleed again.

To Agnes, bleeding from the belly is a terrifying and unnatural thing. No one has told her about menstruation; she has never heard the word nor seen it in print. Doctor Curlew, the only person who might have enlightened her, never has, because he assumes his patient can’t possibly have married, borne a child and lived to the age of twenty-three without becoming aware of certain basic facts. He assumes incorrectly.

But it’s not so very odd: when, at seventeen, Agnes married William, she’d only bled a few times, and ever since then she’s been ill. Everyone knows that ill people bleed: bleeding is the manifestation of serious illness. Her father (her real father, that is) bled on his deathbed, didn’t he, despite not being in any way injured, and she remembers also, as a small child, seeing a baa-lamb lying in a pool of blood, and her nurse telling her that the animal was ‘sickly’.

Well, now she, Agnes, is ‘sickly’. And, from time to time, she bleeds.

She hasn’t discerned any pattern. The affliction began when she was seventeen, was cured by prayer and fasting and, after her marriage, it stayed away for almost a year. Then it came at intervals of a month or two – or even three, if she starved herself. Always she hopes she’s seen the last of it, and now she prays she might be spared until August.

‘After the Season,’ she promises the demons who wish her ill. ‘After the Season, you can have me.’ But she feels her belly swelling already.

A few days later, with William away on business in Dundee (wherever on Earth that might be), Sugar decides to take a peep at his house. Why not? She’ll only sit idle in her little room at Mrs Castaway’s otherwise, her novel stalling upon the latest man, unable to decide on his fate.

Her collaboration with William on the wording of future Rackham catalogues proved very fruitful – for her as well as for him. In his enthusiasm to jot down her suggestions, he pulled an old envelope from his pocket that happened to have his address written on it. ‘How about … “Restore your hair to the luxuriance that is your birthright!”?’ she said, simultaneously committing the address to memory.

Now Sugar sits among old folk and respectable young women, riding the omnibus from the city to North Kensington, on a changeable Monday afternoon, on her way to find out where William Rackham, Esquire, lays his head at nights. She’s wearing her dowdiest dress – a loose-fitting woollen one in plain blue, so at odds with the latest fashions as to be pitiable on a woman under thirty. Indeed, Sugar has the impression she is pitied by one or two of the ladies, but at least no one suspects her of being a prostitute. That might have made things difficult, given that in the confines of the omnibus there’s no choice but to sit face-to-face with one’s fellow passengers.

‘High Street already,’ murmurs an old man to his wife very near Sugar. ‘We’ve made good time.’

Sugar looks past their wrinkled heads at the world outside. It’s sunny and green and spacious. The omnibus slows to a stop.

‘Chepstow Villas Cor-nerrr!’

Sugar alights right behind the elderly couple. They don’t hurry away from her, but accept her walking in their wake as if she’s respectable, just like them. Her disguise, evidently, is perfect.

‘Chilly, isn’t it?’ one old dear mutters to the other, while the sun beams down on Sugar’s perspiring back.

I am young, she thinks. It’s a different sun shining on me from the one that shines on them.

Sugar walks slowly, allowing the old folk to forge ahead. The ground beneath her feet is extraordinarily smooth, as near as cobble-stones can get to parquetry; she imagines an army of paviours patiently completing it like a jigsaw puzzle while the placid citizens look on. She walks on, sniffing the air and goggling at the handsome new houses, trying hard to absorb the Notting Hillness of Notting Hill, trying to imagine what the choice of such a place for a man’s home reveals about him. This, not the stench of the city, is the air my William breathes, she reminds herself.

What she knows about William Rackham so far would hardly fill a book. She knows his preferences in orifices (conventional, unless he’s in a bad mood) and how he feels about the size of his pego (it’s a respectable size, isn’t it, though some other men may be bigger?), and she’s inscribed on her memory all his opinions in literature, down to the last witticism at George Eliot’s expense. But William Rackham the family man and citizen? An elusive creature, not identifiable as the lover she embraces.

Now, she walks along his home street, determined to learn more. How quiet it is here! And how spacious! Moats of greenery everywhere, and trees! Pedestrians are few and far between; they have nothing to sell, they are pensive and unencumbered, they stroll. Carts roll into view very slowly, and take their own sweet time to amble away. There are no shrieks of laughter or distress, no vertiginous stacks of decaying housing, no din of industry or smell of faeces, only curtains in the windows and birds in the trees.

One large house, set well back from the street, is fenced all around in freshly painted cast-iron; as she walks past, Sugar runs her gloved hands along the knots and curls. It’s only after a minute that she realises the dominant motif in the iron design is the letter ‘R’, repeated hundreds and hundreds of times, hidden among the curlicues.

‘Eureka,’ she whispers.

Adjusting her bonnet, she peers through the eye of the largest ‘R’ she can find. Her lips part, her mouth dilates in awe as she takes stock of the house, its pillars and porticos, its carriage-way and gardens.

‘My God. You’ll keep me better than you do now, my dear Willy,’ she softly prophesies.

But then the Rackham house’s front door swings open, and Sugar instantly pulls her hands away from the gate and retreats. She hurries around the corner into a different crescent, looking neither right nor left, wishing herself invisible. It’s all she can do not to break into a run; her bustle bounces against her bottom as it is. A stiff wind springs up where there was no wind before (or was it at her back, gently pushing her on?), stinging her face, almost tearing her bonnet off, flapping the skirts of her dress. She shelters – hides – behind the first public monument she comes to: a marble column commemorating the fallen in the Crimean War.

She peeps from behind the plinth, her cheek brushing against the names of young men who are no longer alive, subtle absences in the smoothness of the marble. A woman is coming down Pembridge Crescent, a small blonde woman with a perfect figure and a chocolate-and-cream-coloured dress. She walks briskly, bobbing slightly as she advances. Her eyes are so big and blue that their beauty can be appreciated at twenty yards’ distance.

This, Sugar is certain, is the wife of William Rackham.

He’s alluded to her once or twice, by way of comparison, but stopped short of naming her, so Sugar has no name to put to this pretty young woman drawing near. ‘Always-Sick’, perhaps. Apart from her bosom, which is full, Mrs Rackham inhabits a body of remarkably infantile scale. Nor is her body the only childish thing about her: is she aware, Sugar wonders, that she’s biting her lower lip as she walks?

Just as Mrs Rackham reaches the monument, a peculiar thing happens: the whole of North Kensington undergoes a remarkable meteorological phenomenon – the sun is covered over by sheets of dark-grey cloud, but continues to shine with such brilliance that the clouds themselves assume an intense luminosity. Down below, the crescent and everything in it is coated with a spectral light that lends an unnatural definition to each and every cobble, leaf and lamp-post. Everything stands out sharply and nothing recedes, at once revealed and obscured in a glow as treacherous as polar twilight.

Mrs Rackham stops dead. She looks up into the heavens in naked terror. From her hiding-place behind the column, Sugar can see the convulsive swallow in her white throat, the sheen of dread in her eyes, the angry red pimple on her forehead.

‘Saints and angels preserve me!’ she cries, then spins on her axis and flees. Her tiny feet all-but-invisible beneath her frothing hems, she glides back down the road like a bead sliding along a string, her progress unnaturally straight, unnaturally rapid. Then the pretty chocolate-coloured bead that is Mrs Rackham veers, and disappears, as if following a twist in its string, through the Rackham gates.

Moments later, the sun is unveiled again, and the world loses its eerie clarity. Everything is back to normal; the Gods are appeased.

Sugar gets to her feet, pats the dust off her skirts with her palms. She moves sluggishly, as though roused from a deep sleep. All she can think is: Why has William never told me his wife has such a beautiful voice? To Sugar’s ear, Mrs Rackham, even in the grip of terror, sounds like a bird – a rare bird pursued for its song. What man, if he could hear that voice whenever he pleased, wouldn’t listen to it as often as possible? What ear could tire of it? It’s the voice she wishes she’d been born with: not hoarse and low like her own croak, but pure and high and musical.

Go home, you fool, she cautions herself, as the first few raindrops spatter against the plinth. All this clean air is going to your head.

A few days later still, Henry Rackham, desperate to confide, yet having not a single confidante in the world except Mrs Fox, to whom he can’t possibly confess this particular secret, calls upon his brother William.

Intimacy hasn’t always flowed smoothly, it must be said, between the Rackham brothers. Despite their blood ties, and despite Henry giving William the benefit of the doubt in many things, Henry can’t help noticing their differences. Devoutness, for example, has never been William’s strong point, although they do share – judging from past conversations – a passionate desire to improve the world, and reform English society.

From William’s point of view, his older brother is dismal company indeed. As he put it once to Bodley and Ashwell: Henry has that werewolf look of someone who ought to be ravaging virgins, then scourging his flesh in remorse while the townspeople surround the castle with flaming torches, baying for his blood – but alas, no such racy scenario ever accompanies his fraternal visits. Instead, Henry always bemoans, in vague, irritatingly opaque terms, his unworthiness for anything he aspires to. What a pitiful head of Rackham Perfumeries he would have made! Surrendering his claim to William may well have been the only clever thing the poor dullard ever did!

Still, William has lately resolved to be generous and hospitable to his brother, and forgive him his shortcomings. It’s all part and parcel of being the chief Rackham now: this receiving of visits from troubled family members, this imparting of advice.

On the rainy afternoon that Henry does finally cough up a secret, it’s cold enough indoors for both men to regret that Spring has already been put into effect in the Rackham house. Granted, the banishing of Winter furnishings is a social obligation that must be obeyed, but Agnes has obeyed it rather earlier than necessary, and now, on her instruction, the fireplace in the parlour has been rendered wholly useless. Force of habit makes the men sit near it still, even though it’s empty and brushed out, sporting a small philodendron where the flames ought to be, and lace curtains embroidered with crocuses, robins and other vernal symbols. Henry leans forwards, closer to his brother and the hearth, trying to warm himself on what’s not there.

‘William,’ he is saying, the furrow in his brow identical to the one he already had as a boy of seven, ‘Do you think it’s wise for you to have so much to do with Bodley and Ashwell? They’ve published that book you know – The Efficacy of Prayer – Have you seen it?’

‘They’ve given me a copy,’ admits William. ‘Boys will be boys, yes?’

‘Boys, yes …’ sighs Henry, ‘but with the capacity of men to do harm.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says William, folding his arms against the chill and glancing at the clock. ‘They’re surely preaching to the … ah … converted is the wrong word here, isn’t it? … to the deconverted, shall we say. How many people d’you really think are going to regard prayer any differently as a result of this book?’

‘Every soul is precious,’ fumes Henry.

‘Ach, it’ll all blow over,’ counsels the younger brother. ‘Ashwell’s last book, The Modern Dunciad, was a scandal for two months, and then … ?’ William flings a handful of fingers wide, to mime a puff of smoke.

‘Yes, but they’re taking this book all around England on a sort of … grand tour, showing it off at working men’s clubs and so on, as if it were a two-headed giraffe. They read it aloud, taking parts, mimicking the voices of feeble old clerics and angry widows, and then they solicit questions from the audience …’

‘How do you know all this?’ asks William, for it’s news to him.

‘I’m forever running into them!’ cries Henry, as though lamenting his own clumsiness. ‘I’m convinced they follow me – it can’t be mere chance. But you, William, you must be careful – no, don’t smile – William, they’re becoming notorious, and if you’re seen to be thick with them, you may become notorious as well.’

William shrugs, unconcerned. He’s too wealthy now to fear the gossip of the righteous, and in any case, he’s noticed a tendency lately amongst the Best People to seek out the notorious, to add a bit of spice to parties.

‘They are my friends, Henry,’ he chides gently, ‘from so long ago … the best part of twenty years.’

‘Yes, yes, they were once my friends too,’ groans the older Rackham. ‘But I can’t be loyal to them as you are, I can’t! They cause me nothing but embarrassment.’ Henry’s large hands, one on each of his knees, are white-knuckled. ‘There are times – I hardly dare confess it – there are times when I wish I could simply be rid of them and all their memories of the man I used to be; when I wish I could wake one day to a world of perfect strangers who knew me only as … as …’

‘A man of the cloth?’ prompts William, staring in pity at those hands of Henry’s, clutching at his ungainly knees as if at the rim of a pulpit.

‘Yes,’ confesses Henry, and (oh, for Heaven’s sake!) hangs his head.

‘You haven’t … taken Orders, have you?’ enquires William, wondering if this is the oh-so-coy secret Henry has been struggling to divulge.

‘No, no.’ Henry fidgets irritably. ‘I know I’m not ready for that yet. My soul is far from … ah … any sort of purity.’

‘But isn’t the idea of it – forgive me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here – Isn’t the idea of it that you … ah … become pure while you’re taking the Orders? I mean, that the process itself effects a sort of transformation?’

‘That isn’t the idea at all!’ protests Henry.

But, inwardly, he fears that it is. The real truth of his reluctance to take the first steps towards becoming a clergyman, at least since he’s known Mrs Fox, is that he’s terrified his examiners will peer into his soul and tell him he is unfit not only for the collar and the pulpit, but for any sort of Christian life.

As a layman, he’s spared that awful judgement, for although he’s his own harshest critic, there’s one respect in which he’s lenient on himself: he doesn’t believe his sins disqualify him from striving to be a decent person. As long as he remains a layman, he can be impure in thought and word, or even in deed, and afterwards he can repent and resolve to do better in future, disappointing no one but himself and God. No one else is dragged down by his sins; he is the captain of his soul, and if he steers it into dark waters, no innocent person risks shipwreck along with him. But if he aspires to leadership of others, he cannot afford to be such a poor captain; he’ll have to be a stronger and better man than he is now. Sterner judges even than himself will have the right – nay, the obligation – to condemn him. And surely his depravity is written all over his face? Surely anyone can guess that his soul is rotten with carnal desires?

Perhaps it’s this belief that his secret must already be suspected by everyone except Mrs Fox, and all the more so by his brother, a man of the world, that finally makes it possible for Henry to confess, on this rainy afternoon in front of the frilly hearth.

‘William, I … I spoke to a prostitute last week,’ he says.

‘Really?’ says William, roused from near-somnolence by this promising titbit. ‘Did Mrs Fox bring her along to a meeting?’

‘No, no,’ grimaces Henry. ‘I spoke to her in the street. In fact, I … I have been speaking to prostitutes in the street for some time now.’

There is a pause while the brothers gaze first at each other, then at their shoes.

‘Speaking only?’

‘Of course, speaking only.’ If Henry notices his brother’s shoulders slump slightly in disappointment, he’s not put off by it. ‘I’ve fallen into the habit of walking in a wretched part of London – High Street – no, not the High Street here, the one in St Giles – and conversing with whoever addresses me.’

‘Which, I take it, is mainly prostitutes.’

‘Yes.’

William scratches the back of his head in bemusement. He wishes there were a fire he could stir with the poker, rather than this ridiculous philodendron.

‘This is … a rehearsal, perhaps, for your future career? You have your eye on St Giles as your parish?’

Henry laughs mirthlessly. ‘I am a mad fool, playing with fire,’ he says, enunciating the words with bitter emphasis, ‘and if I don’t come to my senses, I’ll be consumed.’ His fists are clenched, and his eyes shine angrily – almost as if it’s William, not his own desires, threatening his safety. ‘Well … urm …’ frowns William, crossing and uncrossing his legs. ‘I’ve always known you to be a sensible chap. I’m sure you don’t lack … resolve. And anyway, you’ll find that infatuations tend to run their course. What enthrals us today may have no hold on us tomorrow. Urm … These prostitutes, now. What are they to you?’

But Henry is staring sightlessly ahead of him, haunted.

‘They’re only children, some of them: children!’

‘Well, yes … It’s a disgrace, as I’ve often said …’

‘And they stare at me as if I were to blame for their misery.’

‘Well, yes, they’re very good at that …’

‘I try to convince myself that it’s pity that moves me, that I wish only to help them, as Mrs … as others help them. That I wish only to let them know I don’t despise them, that I believe they are God’s creatures just as I am. But, when I return home, and I lie in my bed, ready for sleep, it’s not any vision of aiding these wretched women that fills my mind. It’s a vision of an embrace.’

‘An embrace?’ Lord, here it is at last: the meat of the matter!

‘I see myself embracing them … all of them at once; they are all embodied in one faceless woman. I shouldn’t call her faceless, for she has a face, but it’s … many women’s faces at once. Can you understand that? She is their …’ (a comparison with the Trinity occurs to him, but he bites his tongue on the brink of blasphemy) ‘… their common body.’

William rubs his eyes irritably. He’s tired; he slept badly in the guest house in Dundee, and slept badly on the train, and he’s been working late hours since his return.

‘So …’ he rejoins, determined now, if it kills him, to get his brother to the point. ‘What exactly do you picture yourself doing to this … common body?’

Henry raises his face, suffused with an alarming glow of inspiration (or is it merely the sun beaming through the window at last?).

‘The embrace is all!’ he declares. ‘I feel I could hold this woman for a lifetime – pressed close to me – quite still, and doing nothing else but holding, and reassuring her that everything will be all right from now on. I swear it’s not Lust!’ He laughs incredulously. ‘I know what Lust feels like, and this is different …’ He looks across at William, loses courage as a result. ‘Or perhaps that’s what I delude myself to believe.’

William offers a smile which he hopes may pass for sympathy. This must be what it’s like, he thinks, for Catholic priests when they have to endure the confessions of the very young. Reams of lurid wrapping-paper to be removed from a giant parcel of guilt, only to reveal a tiny trifle inside.

‘So …’ he sighs. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, brother?’

Henry leans back in his chair, apparently exhausted. ‘You have done it already, William, merely by listening to my ravings. I know I am a fool and a hypocrite, trying to dress my sins up as virtue. You see, I was on my way to St Giles today – instead, I stopped here.’

William grunts, nonplussed. All things considered, he would rather Henry had pursued his original inclination, and left his overburdened brother in peace. This visit has swallowed up valuable time. The freshly signed contract with those damned Jewish jute merchants, which seemed such a good idea up in Dundee, is looking less advantageous the more he thinks about it, and he needs every spare minute to reconsider it before those damned crates of sacking start arriving on the damned wharf.

‘Well, I’m glad to have been of some use to you, Henry,’ he mutters. Then his glance falls on Henry’s bulbous Gladstone bag, which has been sitting at his brother’s side, stuffed to bursting like a burglar’s swag. ‘But what, if you don’t mind me asking, is all this?’

For one last time before he leaves, Henry blushes. Wordlessly, he unfastens the bag and allows its jumble of contents to protrude into the light. A Dutch cheese, some apples and carrots, a loaf of bread, a fat cylinder of smoked sausage, tins of cocoa and biscuits.

William stares into his brother’s face, utterly baffled.

‘They always say they’re hungry,’ Henry explains.

Later, much later, when brother Henry has gone home and the sun has long since set and the first draft of an important letter has been written, William lays his cheek on a warm pillow – a pillow with just the right amount of firmness, just the right amount of yield. Sleep follows inevitably.

A gentle, feminine hand strokes his cheek as he nuzzles deeper into the cotton-covered mound of duck feathers. Even in sleep, he knows it’s not his mother. His mother has gone away. ‘She’s turned into a bad woman,’ Father says, and so she’s gone, gone to live with other bad people, and William and Henry must be brave boys. So who is this female stroking him? It must be his nurse.

He burrows deeper into slumber, his head penetrating the shell of dreams. Instantly the room where he lies sleeping expands to a vast size, encompassing the whole universe, or at least all the known world. Ships sail into the docks, groaning with jute bags he doesn’t want: that’s bad, and the gloomy sky overhead reflects this. But, elsewhere, the sun is shining on his lavender fields, which this year are bound to surrender a juicier crop than they ever did in his father’s time. All over England, in shops and homes alike, the unmistakable ‘R’ insignia is on prominent display. Aristocratic ladies, all of whom bear a remarkable resemblance to Lady Bridgelow, are perusing Rackham’s Spring catalogue, uttering discreet sounds of approval over each item.

A loud snort – his own snore – half-rouses him. His prick is stiff, lolling aimlessly under the blankets, lost. He turns, huddles against the long hot body of the female, fitting himself against her back, comforting himself against her buttocks. With one arm, he hugs her close to him, breathes the perfume from her hair, sleeps on and on.

In the morning, William Rackham realises that this is the first time in six years he has slept all night with a woman at his side. So many women he’s fucked, and so many nights he’s slept, and yet so rarely the twain have met!

‘Do you know,’ he muses to Sugar, before he’s even fully awake, ‘this is the first time in six years I’ve slept all night with a woman at my side.’

Sugar kisses his shoulder. Almost says, ‘You poor thing,’ but thinks better of it.

‘Well, was it worth the wait?’ she murmurs.

He returns the kiss, ruffles her red mane. Through the fog of his contentment, the cares of his diurnal existence struggle to surface. Dundee. Dundee. A wrinkle dawns on his brow as he recalls the freshly penned letter he brought to show Sugar last night.

‘I should get up,’ he says, raising himself onto his elbows.

‘It’s an hour at least before the post gets collected,’ remarks Sugar calmly, as if, for her, reading his thoughts is the most natural thing in the world. ‘I have stamps and envelopes here. Rest your head a little longer.’

He falls back on his pillow, befuddled. Can it really be as early as that? Silver Street is so noisy, with carts and dogs and chattering pedestrians, it feels like mid-morning. And what sort of creature is he in bed with, who can hold in her head the fine print of his contract with a firm of jute merchants, while stretching her naked body like a cat?

‘The tone of my letter …’ he frets. ‘Are you sure it’s not too fawning? They’ll understand my meaning, won’t they?’

‘It’s clear as crystal,’ she says, sitting up to comb her hair.

‘But not too clear? They can make trouble for me, these fellows, if I get on the wrong side of them.’

‘It’s exactly right,’ she assures him, dragging the metal teeth in slow rhythm through her tangled orange halo. ‘All it needed was a softer word here and there.’ (She’s referring to the changes he made, on her advice, before they went to bed.)

He turns on his side, watches her as she combs. With every flex of her muscles, the tiger-stripe patterns of her peculiar skin condition move ever-so-slightly – on her hips, on her thighs, on her back. With every sweep of her comb, a luxuriant mass of hair falls against her pale flesh, only to be swept up again a moment later. He clears his throat to tell her how … how very fond he is growing of her.

Then he notices the smell.

‘Paghh …’ he grimaces, sitting bolt upright. ‘Is there a chamber-pot under the bed?’

Without hesitation, Sugar stops combing, bends over the edge of the mattress, and fetches out the ceramic tureen.

‘Of course,’ she says, tipping it sideways for his inspection. ‘But it’s empty.’

He grunts, impressed by her masculine continence, never guessing that she slipped away from his side during the night, performed a number of watery procedures, and disposed of the results. Instead, preoccupied with the task at hand – at nostril – William continues his search for the true source of the stench. He stumbles barefoot out of the bed, following his sensitive nose from one end of Sugar’s bedroom to the other. He’s embarrassed to find that the stink emanates from the soles of his own shoes, lying where he kicked them off the night before.

‘I must have stepped in dog’s mess on the way here,’ he frowns, disproportionately shamed by the stiff sludge he can neither clean nor endure. ‘There aren’t enough lamps out there, damn it.’ He’s pulling on his socks now, looking for his trousers, preparing to take his disgraced shoes away with him, away from Sugar’s immaculate boudoir.

‘The city is a filthy place,’ Sugar affirms, unobtrusively wrapping her body in a milk-white dressing-gown. ‘There’s muck on the ground, muck in the water, muck in the air. I find, even on the short walk between here and The Fireside – used to find, I should say, shouldn’t I? – a layer of black grime settles on one’s skin.’

William, buttoning himself into his shirt, appraises her fresh face, her bright eyes – the white gown.

‘Well, you look very clean to me, I must say.’

‘I do my best,’ she smiles, folding the creamy sleeves across her breast. ‘Though a little of your Rackham’s Bath Sweetener wouldn’t go amiss, I suppose. And do you have anything to purify drinking water? You don’t want to see me carried off by cholera!’

Bull’s-eye, she thinks, as a shudder passes through him.

‘I wonder, though,’ she goes on, in a dreamy, musing tone. ‘Don’t you ever get fed up, William, with living in the city? Don’t you ever wish you lived somewhere pleasanter and cleaner?’ She pauses, ready to feed him specifics (‘like Notting Hill, perhaps, or Bayswater …’) but biting her tongue on the words in case he should come out with them first.

‘Well, actually, I live in Notting Hill,’ he confesses.

Sugar allows her face to light up with the merest fraction of the joy she feels at this triumph in winning his confidence.

‘Oh, how agreeable!’ she cries. ‘It’s the ideal place, don’t you think? Close to the heart of things, but so much more civilised.’

‘It’s all right, I suppose …’ he says, fastening his collars. ‘Some might call it unfashionable.’

‘I don’t think it’s unfashionable at all! There are some grand parts to Notting Hill; everybody knows that. The streets between Westbourne Grove and Pembridge Square, for example, have a reputation for being awfully desirable.’

‘But that’s precisely where I live!’

At this, she throws her head back and chuckles, a rough low sound from her long white throat. In all things (says that chuckle) William Rackham can be depended upon to choose the best. ‘I ought to have guessed,’ she says.

‘You guess damn near everything else,’ he retorts ruefully.

She examines his eyes, weighs his tone, confirms he isn’t angry with her, merely impressed. ‘Feminine intuition,’ she winks. ‘I feel it, somehow.’ (Her hands caress her bosom, stray down to her abdomen.) ‘Deep inside me.’

Then, judging she must let him go, she swings off the bed and walks over to the escritoire, from which all her own papers have been removed, leaving nothing but William’s letter to the jute merchants. ‘Now, we had better get this ready for the post.’

Fully dressed but for the shoes, William joins her at the writing-desk. Sugar stands demurely at his shoulder and watches as he re-reads the letter, watches as he judges it satisfactory, watches as he folds it into the envelope she hands him, watches as he addresses it and, without attempting to obscure her view, writes his home address on the reverse. Only then does she close her eyes in satisfaction. What so recently were the fruits of stealth have now been given to her freely. Nothing now remains for her to do but sink her teeth in.

‘Mercy,’ he pleaded once more.

William is gone, and Sugar sits at her desk, finishing the troublesome chapter at last.

I gripped the hilt of the dagger, but found I lacked the strength (the strength of will, perhaps, but also the strength of sinew, for slaughtering a man is no easy labour) to plunge the knife into this fellow’s flesh and do my worst. I had performed the act so many times before; but that night, it was beyond me.

And yet, the man must die: he could not be released now that I had entrapped him! What, dear Reader, was I to do?

I put away my knife, and instead fetched up a soft cotton cloth. My helpless paramour ceased his struggle against his bonds, an expression of relief manifesting on his face. Even when I up-ended the flask of foul-smelling liquid into the cloth, he did not lose hope, imagining perhaps that I was about to swab his fevered brow.

Holding my own breath as if in sympathy, I pressed the poison rag to his mouth and nose, wholly sealing those orifices.

‘Sweet dreams, my friend.’