Wonder
Sarah
The performance was thus, because that is how the men required it: Sarah and Rose were in love. They met on a wrought-iron bench in the park, sitting at opposite ends, every inch of skin covered except their eyes, their skirts so voluminous they couldn’t help but touch. They each carried fans, which they used to hide their faces, to coyly glance at one another, and to cool themselves, for it was a hot day.
Or at least, the make-believe was that the day was hot, as later this would give them a reason to remove first one layer of clothing, and then another, and so on; but of course the day outside this room meant nothing, as in here it was perpetually an overheated summer night, the velvets always drawn over the windows, the grandfather clock thudding heavily the seconds, the fires always stoked high, the skin gleaming with sweat, dripping down between their legs so that when the men finally uncovered the hidden petals they could convince themselves that the wetness was their own doing.
Whores in love. A cliché, but what man on heat ever disliked a cliché? The schoolmistress with the whipping cane, the schoolgirl with the pleading eyes, the unfulfilled wife begging to be filled. The menu tended to be somewhat limited, even in this building of surprising bodies and their surprising capabilities.
Sarah adjusted her expression under her veil. The men watching knew that one of the women was one type of wonder, and the other another; but they did not know which was which. Soon enough, they would. Sarah resisted the urge to check she had not let one of the curly golden tendrils escape from her hat or veil or gloves. She wondered what Rose was sitting on, if anything.
Rose had a special skill, which was that she could hold any manner of things inside herself without it showing on the outside. Anything you would like to give to her, she would keep. The only house rules were that it should be nothing sharp or dirty, because they might make Rose unwell or damaged; and that it should be nothing living, because Rose thought it cruel.
Sarah’s skill could not rightly be called such. It was not something she had practised or learned; it was something she had been born with.
The first time they were alone together, bathing themselves in rosewater before the men arrived, Sarah had expressed admiration for Rose’s vagina and its capacities, but Rose had scoffed. Any woman could do it, she claimed. She merely had to want to. Most women had no idea of what they could hide inside themselves.
‘But you,’ said Rose wonderingly, ‘you are a wonder. A real freak.’
Rose knew that Sarah was not unique; she had seen both of Sarah’s sisters. She knew that Sarah was not the most beautiful of the sisters, nor the most thickly pelted. She was merely the middle one, caught between fierceness and loveliness. Yet the way that Rose had called her a wonder made her feel that, perhaps, she might really mean it. Sarah blinked hard, not sure if she was concealing an eye-roll or blinking back tears. How foolish to fall for the trickeries of a whore. As if every man who had ever been alone with Rose did not believe that he was special.
Sarah peeled off her glove, the reveal provoking a series of sounds from the room: a gasp, a chuckle, a groan. She kept her hand in a loose fist to hide the naked pink skin of her palms; it was one of the few truly bare parts of her, and she would keep it for later, for when it had disappeared inside Rose several times and gleamed pearlescent.
As Sarah slid her hand beneath Rose’s skirts, Rose splayed her fan as if to hide her maidenly blushes.
‘You’ll find something sweet when you taste me,’ breathed Rose into Sarah’s ear, and fluttered her fan dramatically to hide her wink. ‘I put it there for you, not for them.’
It was a tale of temptation and forbidden love, and both Sarah and Rose played it well. And every time they did, Sarah died a little more.
Hannah
Hannah was among the exhibits. The glass cases slept neatly under the arched windows, snug homes for a hundred thousand things in jars. Her little shoes went clack-click on the polished marble floors, and Hannah rejoiced that she had not had to polish those floors; she would not, in fact, polish a floor for the rest of her life; not now that she had been discovered, and proven to be valuable.
She leaned in close to read the labels on the nearest jars: ‘chick newly hatched, its abdomen opened’, ‘genital organ of a doe rabbit on heat’, ‘clitoris, human’. At the corner of each label was his looping signature: Dr Temple Eustace, Dr Temple Eustace, Dr Temple Eustace. Who knew the name of the doe rabbit or the chick newly hatched? The only name that mattered was the one on the label. She was sure that Dr Temple Eustace would have an adroit and intricate system for organising these specimens but had to confess that she could not understand it. Well, that made sense; he was a man of genius, and she was neither.
She felt a chill on her fingers and realised she had reached out her hand and pressed it to the glass. Before her was ‘hand to mid-forearm, human, female’, the skin puffy and ivory, the arm looking for all the world as if it was resting beside her own in the audience at the theatre.
Some of the exhibits were taken from Egyptian mummies, which Dr Temple Eustace had himself rescued. He liked to describe it for Hannah: the shaft of white light piercing the desert darkness, the slither of ropes unravelling, brave men dropping down into the ancient underworld. All in the name of empire and the rescue of precious treasures. A tragedy that such stores of gold had been ignored for so long – and, to him, gold was not the shining metal (of which there was plenty in the tombs, which was fortunate as the expeditions were expensive), but instead the black gold of the mummies. It was a most precious of medicines, and Dr Temple Eustace was midway through various experiments to discover why. Others had tried since then to recreate the ancient methods, but none had succeeded in creating a specimen that lasted like the Egyptians. There was so much to learn from these exotic peoples and their curiously immaculate bodies. He described the mummies as a man might describe something holy; his eyes turned far away. She envied them then, those fusty sacks of bones and leather, that they could make the eyes of Dr Temple Eustace turn from this world and see another.
If Hannah was truthful, she failed to see their appeal. Even if she imagined herself dropping down into that ancient hole, gleaming golden in that shaft of foreign sun, sliding off a heavy stone lid and uncovering a body black, hard and shiny as obsidian – still she could not find excitement in it.
Mummies were simply everywhere ; people used them for firewood, swallowed small pills of them medicinally, crushed them up to make pigments. Dr Temple Eustace had told her that some artists stopped using ‘mummy brown’ pigment when they discovered how it was made. He harrumphed at that. Imagine, he said, not eating a sausage simply because you’ve heard of a pig. And imagine also that pig died millennia ago. Would not eating the pig save it somehow? And where was the concern for the old bones being flooded out of the graves in all Glasgow’s cemeteries? Were the bodies of their countrymen somehow less worthy than the ancient corpse of an embalmed foreigner? It was a waste to bury bodies in the first place; better, logically, to grind the bones for fertiliser and use the fat for tallow candles. A little distasteful to use local people, but there were plenty of bodies going to waste out in the colonies. Use what you have, says he. No point wasting a thing. He had personally preserved the brains of a skate, porpoise, lion’s cub, great horned owl, dugong and young mulatto.
He had no intention of wasting Hannah, she knew that. Every part of her was treasure to him. She was vital, and she was cherished.
She smiled, leaning in to read the text on a tiny label, ‘suckling gland of a monkey’, it looked like, but – she was brought up short as suddenly the light shifted and her own face was reflected back at her. She was in the case. Blonde-faced, fur-cheeked, bright green eyes gazing out from the thick golden down. She flinched back and cast her eyes down, then clacked her little shoes across the polished marble to find Dr Temple Eustace.
Julia
In the way of fairy tales, Julia was the youngest sister, and the most beautiful, and had the longest and most golden hair. Therefore it was a true shame, a tragedy even, that barely any of her hair remained. She stifled a sad sigh over it, lingering by the butterfly table, pretending to select something from the tasting platter, but really trying not to scratch. The hair was beginning to prickle on her cheeks. She had shaved it just this morning, but she was so healthful that it grew back at a ferocious pace. The pregnancy was not helping; her body, excited to grow these strange new parts, seemed to be growing every part of Julia faster too.
Julia was a wife now, and soon to be a mother, and like all respectable women she removed all her hair. For many years, growing up motherless, Julia thought that respectable women simply had no hair at all. It was only after she and her sisters began their business that she began to see other women intimately, and understood the natural state of the body. It was true that Julia and her sisters still had significantly more hair than the other women, but the difference was not quite so stark as she had believed.
Delicately she selected a pearl-handled tasting pin and pricked it into the nearest morsel: a monarch butterfly, its wings an oily reflective blue. She let it sit in her mouth so that the wings could begin to dissolve on her tongue. She didn’t particularly enjoy the wings; they tasted dusty and gritty to her, but she was trying to appreciate them, since they were the most delicate and healthful choice for a woman. She smiled vaguely and let her eyes skim across the room, searching for Feodore. The women fluttering around with their delicate mouthfuls of butterfly, bellies padded round to mimic gravidity, their breasts pushed up, their bare heads gleaming soft in the candlelight. All their parts so round and so pale, like a cluster of pearls in silk. The men all in red, roaring at one another’s humour, gnawing on skewers of roasted penis, fists holding hearts still so raw they dripped blood down the wrists of their suits. Julia supposed that was why they were red; not to save the washerwomen’s work, but so that even if they hadn’t feasted yet, it would appear –
A deep, booming clang sounded from outside. No one paid it any mind, too used to its regularity, but Julia still found it a shock each time. Through the window she watched the looming white moon of the Queen’s face turn back and forth, back and forth, as she scanned the city. Her enormous tin arm lifted and banged her gong again on the bell of her skirts. Motherly, she watched over everyone, from the poet in his garret to the mouse in her gutter. Julia had spent most of her life behind curtains, so the enormous tin Queen was still a novelty to her.
Julia feared she would never feel used to the world that Feodore had brought her into. Its startling extravagance. The pomp, the peccadilloes, the panache, the pageantries. She did her best to fit in, but a part of her knew she never would. The same deep-down part of her, perhaps, that itched and pushed out her golden fur, that wanted to drop to all fours and bellow like a beast and push out her child right there beneath the chandelier. How Sarah would applaud her in her full animal glory. So natural. So true.
Julia wondered if Feodore had been to visit Sarah, or even Hannah. Did he still visit the old business? Did he miss Julia as she used to be; the version of her that no one else saw?
‘Should you die,’ Feodore had said to her the previous evening, as if it was a possibility that she would not, in fact, die, ‘I will never take another wife. I will only have mistresses for the rest of my life.’
How Julia’s heart leapt at this. No other woman could ever take her place in Feodore’s affections. A man can have a mistress and also visit a brothel and also be devoted to his wife. But his wife must have only one lover.
‘Mrs Fortune!’ called a high, fluttery voice. ‘Oh, dear Julia!’
She looked up to see Mrs Eustacia Honeybag and Mrs Hippolyta Fairweather approaching, twin pearls in their ballooning gowns, and she remade her face appropriately. The butterfly had dissolved to grit on her tongue, and she worked her throat painfully until it was gone.
Sarah
Sarah told herself that she was merely hiding behind the wall and watching through the peephole to check on Rose: to check that she was in no danger from her gentleman caller, and also that she was performing her duties to him. The sole reason that Sarah was not lighting a candle was so that the man did not see her. The sole reason she was staying silent was so that the man did not hear her. And the sole reason she was still there, still watching Rose through the peephole, even though the hour had almost fully passed, was that when Hannah was away, Sarah was in charge of the business, and had to keep control of the building and everyone in it.
‘How many more?’ the man said wonderingly, gazing into the folded pink petals of Rose.
‘As many as you wish,’ Rose replied airily, which truly was a feat of self-possession, as she was lying on her back with her legs spread wide and her skirts splayed in a bouquet around her.
The man pulled another shining coin from his pocket and pressed it to Rose’s labia. The petals parted obligingly, and the coin disappeared.
‘That’s twenty!’ cried the man.
He couldn’t see Rose’s face, but Sarah could, and so she was the only one who saw Rose’s look of exasperation and boredom.
‘As I said,’ she sighed, ‘as many as you wish.’
‘Not two at once,’ breathed the man. Sarah wondered if he was thinking of the size of his own erect member, and wondering if it had the length – not to mention the weight, girth and heft – of twenty coins. He reached to his pocket, pulled out two coins, and pressed them both to Rose’s rose, which swallowed them. He reached again to his pocket, not looking away from the floral vortex, as if mesmerised. His pocket provided no clink of metal.
‘That’s all I have,’ he said, his tone astonished and wheedling.
Rose closed her legs, smoothed down her skirts and stood. She stepped delicately across the room and opened the door. Sarah was sure that she could hear a soft and muffled clink as Rose walked. The man, still entranced, joined her in the doorway and accepted her kiss.
‘What a wonder you are,’ breathed Rose. ‘My favourite gentleman, and so generous. I do hope you will return soon.’
The man pressed his hands to his pocket. ‘My … my coins?’
‘They are inside me now,’ she said, ‘and therefore they are mine.’
The man sputtered. ‘But that was twenty-two shilling coins! Over two pounds! You’re not worth that.’
Rose spread her hands: alas, alas.
‘I could have paid a month’s coal bill for that! I could have bought a good Sunday suit!’
‘And yet you did not. Good day.’
The man hesitated, not wanting to leave – but what was he going to do? Summon a policeman to make a complaint, and consequently have to admit that he had visited the brothel of degenerates and freaks? Little would it matter, as most of the policemen were regular visitors too. The police chief was particularly fond of Eliza, the tattooed lady, who allowed him to prick her with inked needles if he could find a bare patch of skin. It was not the pricking he enjoyed so much as the search.
The man turned and stamped down the stairs. Sarah knew he would be back. A Sunday suit, no matter how good, was no equal to a half-hour of Rose’s cunt. The sisters, and Hannah in particular, had worked hard to make this so much more than a viewing gallery of freaks; such a thing could be experienced for a ha’penny, as Sarah well knew, having earned many a ha’penny thus. What the sisters provided was more of a specialist service; for epicureans, connoisseurs, men of unusual taste. This did not mean, however, that they necessarily wished to advertise their presence here.
Sarah stifled a sneeze; it was dusty behind the walls. She thought she’d timed the sneeze to the precise moment that Rose shut the door, but Rose paused, head cocked as if listening. Sarah held her breath. There should be no shame in her keeping an eye on proceedings; it was her place of business, after all. And yet she held her breath, not daring to blink.
Rose smiled and tossed back her hair, as if for an admiring audience. She hitched up her skirts and squatted over a china chamber pot, its inner bowl painted with delicate blooms. With a moan of ecstatic relief, she shat out the coins in a clattering, gleaming stream, so strong that it was a wonder that the china did not shatter, and after the initial deposit, she took a deep breath and released one final coin onto the pile with a delicate tink , and she let a few drops of golden piss bless the coins just because she could, and, watching from the dark, Sarah loved her, she loved her, she loved her.
Hannah
Dr Temple Eustace called for the housemaid to add more coal to the fire and waited for it to warm the room further before instructing Hannah to disrobe. All of this was done for the benefit of Hannah herself; she had not mentioned to Dr Temple Eustace that, due to her extra layer, she rarely ever felt cold, though she appreciated these ministrations as she felt it was important that he did not catch a chill.
Presently the room was warm, Hannah’s clothes were piled on a chair in the corner, Dr Temple Eustace had ready his notebooks, his magnifier, his torch, his specimen jar.
Hannah took her place on the podium, and Dr Temple Eustace approached, barely able to contain his excitement.
‘Such a specimen,’ he murmured to himself.
Hannah smiled and closed her eyes. She did not need to look; she preferred to see herself through his gaze. She had been on this podium before, though never in such a bare state as this; today was the first time she would reveal herself to him entirely. She tried not to hold her breath in anticipation of his assessment.
‘We begin,’ he intoned, ‘with the ankle, which is feminine and well turned. The foot is small and shapely, the toes straight and regular, without the knurled skin common in an ape …’
Hannah let her mind wander as he continued. Dr Temple Eustace suffered frequently from ailments, which he attributed to overwork, yet would not lessen his commitments. His work, Hannah knew, mattered . It would ensure his legacy and keep his name on the tongues of learned people for many generations. What did the feeble and temporary body matter when you could make a mark for eternity?
‘The figure overall is exceedingly good and graceful, with no unpleasantness, and the bosom, hips and waist of a normal woman. Here there is no hint of the baboon, the bear, or the monkey. The face requires elucidation. The nostrils are larger than normal and are distinctly ape-like, as are the lips, which are so large as to appear deformed …’
There was a Lord Eustace in the high medieval period, many generations before Dr Temple Eustace, who was a great landowner; these lands were taken from him when he would not swear fealty to the new king, and after his death his remains were brought to the great hall to stand trial. After he was found guilty, even his bones were burned. Such is the power and pressure of the Eustace name. It was a wonder that Dr Temple Eustace did not crack under the weight of it. Fortunately he was a man of true strength; a man, despite his various inheritances and trusts, who could claim to be truly self-made. Some day he would put his name to the Eustacian Museum of Anatomy. Although the body did not matter, Hannah did wish he would instruct his landlady not to make up his bed while the linen was still damp or to serve him ill-cooked and slovenly suppers; it was havoc on his lungs and stomach.
‘The arms are well rounded and pleasantly plump. The palms of the hands are soft and pale, and the thumbs bend normally. At first glance, the pelt of yellow hair on the backs of the hands would suggest a simian ancestry; however, the fingernails are not thickened or blackened, and appear a shell-like pink, of a mostly human appearance …’
There was something, Hannah privately thought, inexplicably spongy about the body of Dr Temple Eustace. He was a flabby, incurvated person, somehow both rotund and flaccid. His eyes were damp, his nose constantly ran, and his lips were several shades too pale. Her sister Sarah referred to him as a ‘dollop of slop’, but that showed Sarah’s lack of refinement. Her other sister Julia, who had married up and now moved in the most elite society, refrained from comment entirely, which Hannah took to mean that Dr Temple Eustace was too sublime to be summed up by mere words.
‘The labia majora are of regular size, the left slightly larger than the right, and evenly covered in curly hair of a dark golden hue. The hair here appears normal for a woman. The labia minora fit inside the labia majora, and are pink and hairless. The insertion of a pencil into the vaginal cavity elicits a slight tremor, but nothing further. The smell and discharge, so far as I can ascertain, are normal. The uterus, felt through the rectum, seems normal, though undersized. Some medical men have claimed that hirsuteness is linked to hypersexuality and bestial desires, but I can see no sign of such depravities …’
Perhaps it was a little cold in the room now; the fire had damped down, and Dr Temple Eustace had not noticed, so mesmerised was he by his work. Hannah felt her bosom tingle, her nipples harden. Dr Temple Eustace brought his magnifier closer, gently lifting a golden spiral of hair to peer at the curve of her breast.
‘This will surely,’ he exclaimed, ‘be the highlight of the monthly meeting of the Society for Mental Improvement, Rational Advancement and Intellectual Refinement!’ His voice dropped, his notebook forgotten. He was so close to Hannah that she could smell him: hair oil, tobacco, burnt wood. She felt a soft pluck, low in her belly. ‘A true medical mystery,’ he murmured. ‘A wonder.’
Hannah opened her eyes. The examination was over, and it was time for her to dress. But for ten long, slow breaths, she stood motionless on the podium as Dr Temple Eustace simply looked at her, and there it was: his eyes, turned far away, gazing as he might upon something holy.
Julia
Since becoming Mrs Feodore Fortune and retiring from her sisters’ business, Julia had lived in well-appointed ease at 4 Lochleven Gardens. The family also had a country house, which Julia, if she was honest, found a little stuffy and overfull, out at Rothesay, on the island of Bute. All the chairs were horsehair, and frightfully itchy, and all the windows had draughts. Thankfully they had not had to visit that spring; Feodore’s middle brother, Montague, had recently left home in disgrace, in a great deal of debt which he could not and would not pay, and was suffering an alarming fall down the social scale, living very noisily and gaudily in a less-than-reputable part of town, leaving Pater Fortune beset by anxiety and reluctant to show face outside of his city town house.
Feodore and Julia had their own town house, which Feodore had specifically bought because it was bigger than his father’s. Again, if Julia was honest – which, of course, she rarely was – she did not find the house entirely satisfactory. She understood Feodore’s desire for grandeur, but the two of them did rather rattle around the place, and the housemaids, cook and butler barely counted. Still, soon the baby would arrive, in methods that Julia was not entirely sure about, as while running the business with her sisters she had seen many things go into a woman, but not many coming out. She doubted she had the capacious powers of Rose and did not see how the baby would comfortably exit. If she had not eaten quite so many items from the butterfly platter, might the baby have grown a little less, and so have an easier exit?
Supper was a neat platter of shiny blue beetles, with a small glass of pigblood – not the most ladylike, Julia knew, but Feodore said it was important for the baby, should it turn out to be a boy. She felt fortunate that a tiny glass was all he had prescribed for her; while out walking earlier, she had observed a newly set-up Iron Repository, where a well-dressed man, comfortably seated, drank at the wrist of a young donor. It benefited both to transfer the young blood to the old, as the younger man’s blood, Feodore assured her, was ‘excellent, but perhaps excessive’, but Julia still did not wish to try it. Feodore, being the best of men, had not even suggested it. How it was to be the happy wife of the fondest and most devoted of husbands.
He would be by soon on his nightly visit, but first she had to ready herself. She sharpened her pearl-handled straight razor on its leather strop, which was not necessary as she had done so this morning, but the sound of it pleased her. She called for a basin of hot water and a fresh cake of lavender soap. When it had arrived, she latched the door. She undressed and lathered up the entire front of her body: from the nape of her neck, over the top of her head, down to her face, her throat, her breasts, the stretching globe of her belly; her mons, her thighs, all the way down to her feet. If left wild, the smooth plain of her skin would soon be a curling golden meadow.
As she bent to begin, she caught the scent from between her legs. It seemed to change with each month of the pregnancy. It was good to have a way to mark time with her body, now that her bleeding had stopped. She knew that Feodore missed her menses; every month of their early marriage, she’d expected him to be disappointed when she bled again, as it meant no child was coming; but instead he revelled in the iron-smelling gush of it, enjoying the sight of his member emerging after the marital act, smeared red.
‘Blood without pain,’ he would murmur to himself as he washed himself off with a damp rag. ‘A woman is a wonder indeed.’
She was sure she had mentioned to him that the blood did indeed come with pain: a ratcheting and thudding in her low belly, like an enormous tightening vice. But like all men, Feodore tended to reshape the world, and everyone in it, to suit his vision. She rinsed the razor and patted her skin dry.
Julia was, per Feodore’s wishes, a woman of two sides. Now it was time to tend her favourite. From the fireplace she lit all the candles in the room, then positioned them around her largest mirror. She smiled at her bare reflection – then she turned.
The back of her body, from the nape of her neck, down her back and all the way to her heels, was deeply pelted with a spill of golden curls. How they spiralled and tumbled, how they gleamed and winked in the light; the negligent abundance, the impudence, the unreality. With a comb in each hand, Julia groomed herself like the most pampered of house cats. Slowly she slid the comb from the nape of her neck all the way down to the backs of her heels.
She shivered.
She swayed.
She shimmered.
She revelled in the lavish bloom of herself. What a shame that the rest of the world could not see this beauty; could not appreciate the natural and true wonder that was Julia – and Hannah, and Sarah, but Julia most of all, being the youngest and most golden.
Would she go now and wait for Feodore? No, she would not. She would stay here and bask in herself a little longer. It was true that a husband may have many lovers, and a wife may have only one. Only one lover for a woman, she thought, running the comb again from her nape down, down, down to her heels; but perhaps, she thought, perhaps that lover could be herself.