Chapter 8 #2
It did not take a genius to realize that Saturday’s supper coincided with the full moon.
Caroline marked its progress through her window each morning, shining white in the opaque London air, swelling as predictably as a pregnant belly.
She thought often of the peeling letters on the boardinghouse’s front door, which declared The Whitechapel Full Moon Society, and developed theories for their meaning, trying them on like new hats, discarding them in frustration when they didn’t quite fit.
It was a secret society of pagans.
The thought occurred to her when she was sweeping the dining room floor, and she stood up straight, grinning with her own cleverness.
But as the day wore on, her theory sprouted leaks.
Mr. Bajwa was a practicing Sikh; her brief interactions with him painted the portrait of a man of extreme sincerity.
He bowed to the waist whenever they met, his ceremonial sword gleaming at his side, and Caroline often paused outside his door to listen as his voice walked the well-trodden words of his prayers.
Mr. Tythe, the naturalist, was godless—he kept a worn copy of On the Origin of Species on his bedside table like a Bible—but Senhor Perreira was a devout Catholic, and Mr. Toussaint wore a gold crucifix.
Caroline bit her lip in irritation and turned her mind back to her tasks.
It was a society of gamblers.
Caroline had found a bent betting card beneath Senhor Perreira’s bed, a stack of red-lettered envelopes on his desk.
They were the exact type of documents she had found stuffed into the drawers of her father’s secretary after he died, and the sight of them soured her stomach.
The loss of Audley House, of her dreamed future with Charlie, still stung, so the conclusion was leapt to with meager evidence.
Each night before supper, the wine merchant cajoled the other boarders into playing cards with him in the parlor.
Sometimes the games grew heated, with Senhor Perreira shouting in his native tongue and turning red as a beet.
But this was the shortest-lived of her theories.
The Portuguese had a gambling problem, but none of the other men seemed afflicted and exited the game easily with a laugh and a pat on the shoulder.
It was a society of homosexuals.
This was her most recent theory, and the most thrilling.
It had come to her like this: She was in Monsieur Rodart’s room, replacing his empty chamber pot, when his not-quite-closed desk drawer caught her eye.
Caroline had been self-conscious in her snooping.
She did not rifle through the guests’ belongings, did not open shut drawers or slide her hands into jacket pockets as she had done when her father was alive.
Not yet, not yet, she told her itching fingers.
You are still new here. Wait until they do not suspect you.
But she let her eyes rove the rooms unleashed.
She justified her nosiness in this way: The guests knew their beds would be made and their chamber pots emptied.
If they didn’t want her to see something, they would hide it.
So when she saw a metallic glimmer in the drawer of Monsieur Rodart’s bedside table, she stepped closer to get a better look.
The drawer was open only an inch. With a glance over her shoulder at the closed door, Caroline tugged the knob and slid it out far enough to see what it contained.
The object that had caught her eye was a slim gold cigarette lighter. Caroline had never seen the Frenchman smoke, nor smelled tobacco on his clothing. Carefully, she drew it out with two fingers. An inscription ran down one side:
Beloved A ~ You are the smoke to my fire. Yours, J.
This, she was certain, was something she should not have seen, though she did not know why.
As she placed the lighter back in the drawer, she caught a glimpse of what lay beneath it and stepped back, flushing.
It was a magazine, open to an illustration. Two well-muscled men with curving erections, one standing, one on all fours. Caroline shut the drawer and nearly ran from the room.
—
All afternoon, the illustration flashed across her mind.
She could not meet Monsieur Rodart’s eye as she served supper.
She had overhead him mention his children.
A wife in Brittany. Did he really go to the Merchant Navy offices, as he claimed?
Or did he go, instead, to some East End brothel and engage in the act she had just seen?
She took to avoiding the Frenchman, skirting his chair in the parlor, serving him at breakfast and supper with her eyes on her shoes. She did not trust herself to meet his gaze, as though he might read the discovery in her face.
Did the other guests at the Full Moon prefer the company of men?
Senhor Perreira stared openly at Mrs. Easton’s bosom when she bent to pour his wine. Mr. O’Riley, the American whom Caroline had never yet seen without his cowboy hat, spoke of women constantly. Birdies, he called them.
“I knew this little birdie once down in Laramie,” he’d begin, but then Mr. Toussaint or Monsieur Rodart would clear their throat and incline their head pointedly at Caroline, and Mr. O’Riley would change the subject to the weather.
Charlie had been involved with Mary Jane. Engaged, if the words Caroline had overheard in the alley were true.
And there was Rab.
Caroline had felt men’s eyes on her before. There had been a young groom in the stables whom she’d caught staring at her like she was a pie cooling in a window. But Rab’s gaze was different. She wished to run from it and be consumed by it all at once.
The day of the full moon dawned gray and dull.
Mrs. Easton had grown more anxious as the week progressed, snapping at Rab when he stole a shortbread biscuit from the tray and muttering aloud to herself while she worked.
“Mr. Jacobs in 202, Mr. O’Riley in 102—heaven forbid they meet on the stairs, but there’s nothing I can do about that, and they’re grown men, for heaven’s sake…
There’s the creamed spinach for Mr. Bajwa, and I can’t forget to bake a potato for Mr. Tythe, plain without butter, he has no stomach for milk… ”
The high pitch of Mrs. Easton’s nerves finally infected Caroline. Each night, as the moon waxed bigger and brighter through her window, she slept more fitfully and awoke sticky with sweat, grasping at the tails of strange dreams.
Rab’s knock found her already up and dressed. She opened the door on his second rap.
“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. Then, in her normal tone: “Are you quite all right?”
For Rab’s eyes were hung with dark crescents, his face drawn with lack of sleep. He was once again in only his shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled above his elbows, his placket creased as though he had slept in it.
“Couldn’t sleep.” He looked at Caroline for a long moment, and she knew he saw what she had seen in the glass: her eyes overbright, her mouth pale and pinched.
She had begun taking just one of Dr. Hoffman’s pills every other day, and the effects were instantaneous: Her head felt like the hot, humming track after a train has passed.
“Me neither,” she admitted. “Mrs. Easton has me worried I’ll forget to put the leaves in the tea.”
Rab snorted. “It’s a supper like all the rest, just with a few more guests. This time tomorrow there will be nothing to worry about but putting the silver away. Our dear benefactress can make a mountain out of a molehill like no one else.”
They walked downstairs together.
Steam fogged the kitchen windows and dewed Caroline’s skin. Boiling pots covered the stove, the oven smoked, and Mrs. Easton, her apron already mussed with half a dozen colors, was arranging glazed currants atop an iced three-layer cake.
“Finally,” she said when Caroline entered. Rab was a step behind her, waving a hand through the air and coughing dramatically.
“It’s not yet six,” Caroline protested.
“Viv,” said Rab, in the tone one might use to speak to a madwoman, “is all this quite necessary? It’s just the same chaps as always—”
“If you aren’t going to help,” Mrs. Easton said, in a voice like a meat cleaver, “get out of my kitchen.”
Rab shot Caroline a helpless look from under his brows, slid a dinner roll into his pocket while the landlady’s back was turned, and left.
Caroline rolled her eyes at his retreating shoulders and shoved up her sleeves. “What needs to be done?”
She did not see the other guests come in, one by one, as the day dragged on.
Mrs. Easton went up and down the stairs each time the front door creaked open, doffing her stained apron and donning a rather frantic smile.
But Caroline heard their low, muffled voices, heard the weight of their bodies moving about the house overhead.
A dozen guests would sup at the Full Moon tonight. By tomorrow afternoon, Mrs. Easton assured her, the newcomers would all be gone, and just the eight regulars would remain. Then she and Caroline would begin the work of stripping the beds and washing sheets that had only been slept in once.
“You remember,” the landlady said in the midafternoon, in the same voice she employed to ask whether Caroline had brought the laundry in off the line, “the promise you made on your first night here?” Sweat pearled her forehead, but she did not look up from the cream she was whipping to accompany the cake.
“I do,” Caroline replied.
How could she forget? The stipulations of that agreement had chased one another through her head all morning. In the previous weeks they had seemed a bit silly, like an old crone’s warning in a fairy tale. But now the day was here, and the floorboards creaked with the footsteps of strangers.
“Repeat for me, please, the piece that pertains to tonight.”
Caroline raised her fingertips to her throat, to the bruises that had faded back into white skin.
“As soon as dessert is served, I will retire to my room. I will lock the door and not open it until after sunrise tomorrow.”
Mrs. Easton nodded once. “Stir the gravy. It’s about to burn.”