Mortal Love Read Free

poor. The yellow-green night haze bore the charnel stink of the great river, two miles southward. From Highbury Fields came the sound of the steam fair’s carousel and the cries of children. Swinburne walked and talked, arms swinging wildly, making queer pinwheeling pirouettes into the street at the approach of another pedestrian and giving a shrill paroquet squawk of dismay or amusement. Now and then he would produce a silver flask of brandy—a legacy of Burton’s—and open it to wave beneath his nostrils, as though it were a nosegay that might drive away the pervasive stink of frying fish. Then he would drink, and weave on through the shadows of the long winter dusk.
    He was a small man, his elfin face and ginger hair already graying from drink; so small that one might almost mistake him for a foot soldier in the legion of women—laundresses, prostitutes, children—who made a Sunday of Mondays, giving themselves over to such drunken excess that more than once he had to step over a figure sprawled insensible across the path, her face smeared with filth and her petticoats smelling of vomit and semen.
    â€œâ€˜â€¦nothing fair lies in the muck/That we won’t meet, then mount and fuck….’”
    He giggled, his laughter rising to a shriek as he saw ahead of him a signpost swinging in front of a corner gin mill. The carved plank showed the image of two hands, each holding a glass, and below them a font of white spume.
    THE EVERLASTING ARMS
    St. Drustan’s Well
    â€œSaints bugger me, bugger me,” Swinburne sang, then stopped.
    Beneath the sign stood a woman. She wore a heavy wool mantle over a stiff black silk dress, good fabric though frayed; a housekeeper’s garb. She had neither bonnet nor kerchief; her graying hair was tightly pulled back above a high smooth forehead. As Swinburne approached, she did not look away but lifted her head to meet his gaze.
    â€œMedusa!” shrieked Swinburne, and clapped his hands against his cheeks. “Swine swan! Such a thing, poor thing!”
    Her lower jaw was gone, eaten away so that a spur of soft-looking black bone remained, like a bit of charred wood. But her eyes were sly and mocking, a pellucid blue in the thin light cast by the window of the Everlasting Arms, and her voice was sweet and coaxing.
    â€œMy mistress said I should meet you here, sir.”
    â€œMistress! Monstrous!” Swinburne pulled his cloak tight, peering at her. “Phossy jaw? Poor Flossie.”
    His hand reached for a coin to give her—he was a kind man, especially in his cups—but the woman shook her head, sliding forward to grasp his wrist. The poet snatched away his hand. The woman laughed.
    â€œNo money, sir—just follow me—”
    Her hands slipped back beneath her cloak; he noted that she did not wear gloves, but not that her fingernails had the deep-blue glow of a lit gas mantle.
    â€œFollow you?” he asked.
    â€œYes.” She tilted her head so that he had a clear view of her ruined face. Swinburne swallowed, thinking of the pain she must endure, felt a flicker of desire, and without a word nodded. The woman stepped into the street. With a quick look over her shoulder, she fled down an alley, so narrow the protruding gables of the structures fronting it met and blotted out what remained of twilight.
    Swinburne followed, the sound of her feet echoing before him. The alley twisted and twisted; with each turn it grew narrower, darker. The cobblestones gave way to gravel, then packed earth, and finally a mire of mud and dead grass that stank of the boghouse. He was in a tunnel now, a channel through which the New River had once flowed in wooden pipes, supported by an aqueduct that had long since decayed to skeletal timbers and disintegrating mats of weeds. A few feet ahead of him, the woman halted.
    â€œI’ll tell her you’ve come,” she said, then turned and disappeared into a shadowy