Things in Jars

by Jess Kidd

This is a practical woman, or at least a woman who finds it practical to be able to fit through doorways, climb stairs, and breathe.

London is like a difficult surgical patient; however cautious the incision, anything and everything is liable to burst out. Dig too deep and you’re bound to raise floods and bodies, to say nothing of deadly miasmas and eyeless rats with foot-long teeth.

It is early yet, and here are the ladies of the town about to turn in after a supper of new hot rolls straight from the bakers. They loll, hatless and bare armed, red lipped and rouged, in early-morning doorways. Smoking, laughing, calling, they smile at Bridie, some address her by name, the lone woman walking the waking city.

Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate facade the unlikely union of a warship and a wedding cake. A riot of musket loops, carved shells, liquorice-twist chimneys, mock battlements, a first-floor prow, and an exuberance of portholes. On the carved stone pediment above the wide front door Neptune cavorts with sea nymphs. The lower-floor windows are festooned with theatrical swags of stone starfish and scallop shells. For all this, the house looks unlived in.

Prudhoe also gives evidence at inquests, compiles broadsides, writes scathing letters to medical journals, and enjoys being written about scathingly in medical journals. He holds certain truths dear to his heart. Namely, that most members of the medical profession are inordinately stupid. Moreover, women should have the uncontested right to enter the medical profession, being, as a general rule, notably less stupid than men. Further, that a rural doctor will take, on average, three months to realize that his patient has been poisoned, while a town doctor is four times more likely to poison his own patient in the first place.

She had two speeds, depending on the time of day (and, it was reported, her consumption of laudanum): supine or stampeding.

Sumi

The metropolis isn’t sleeping, not really. For every Londoner in bed there are ten awake and up to no good—on the fly, on the loose, on the tiles!

The pigeons started it. Taking flight as one cooing cloud like the whole thing had long been arranged. The crows watched them leave and then followed, covering the sun with a sudden sweep of night. Then the ravens, the rooks, and the jackdaws went too (so that Prudhoe’s flock are the only blackbirds left in the whole of London, for they would never leave the chemist’s side). Then went the jenny wrens and starlings, sparrows and song thrushes, robins and tits. All gone—scrabbling up into the air, their eyes bright with panic. But the waterbirds remain: swans, ducks, herons and cranes, moorhens and cormorants and grebes. Only now they are joined by great marauding flocks of seagulls. And not just gulls, but also storm petrels, oystercatchers and frigate birds, crakes by the dozen, plovers and lapwings. Puffins perch on Nelson’s Column and guillemots prabble over the Houses of Parliament. Kittiwakes roost on rooftops and gannets descend on Covent Garden. Maybe the waterbirds bring with them wetland winds and marine breezes, for the haze begins to dissipate and the sun, very briefly, shines. And the air is lit up visible and is beautiful—soot glitter, smoke dew, and the delicate mist of unborn raindrops shine above every Londoner. Even the omnibus drivers rein in their horses and look up.

Which is just as well really. For under London, beneath pavement and cobble, garden and yard, the cesspits and the sewers are beginning to churn and boil. Culverts are inundated as water levels rise. Generations of subterranean toshers are swept away in an eyeblink, their lanterns put out, and their staffs torn from their hands. They turn and bob in the dark, their mouths and ears and eyes plugged with the unimaginable. The tributaries of London are waking! The Walbrook, the dour-hearted Tyburn, the Fleet, and the Effra—abused, re-routed, dammed and buried. Some no more than a silty dribble; some great, disease-spreading, far-roaming blackguards. All are beginning to swell and course. Outside every tenement the water butts resonate, in every puddle and pond, bucket and trough there is a quickening. Fill a teacup, watch it rock.

He identified King Henry VIII as the best possible exemplar of the qualities requisite for a man intent on making his way in the world. When Lufkin was younger he wore padding to achieve the right bulk in chest, biceps, and codpiece. Now, aside from the codpiece, Lufkin is no longer in need of padding. His portrayal of a monarch past his prime is unfeigned; unfettered indulgence has given Lufkin the wide-bellied, jaded-eyed sprawl of a true gourmand. Lufkin also has a historically accurate case of gout, a beard of improbable red, a steel-trap strategist’s mind and a tendency to cry over haughty women.

And all at once Bridie is filled with the hot rage that comes over any sane woman who rails against her market price, or the damnable fact that there is a market price in the first place.

THE PSYCHIC WAY BY MADAM VOLKOV A discourse on HAUNTINGS, Poltergeists, Spectres, Lost and Stubborn Entities Keep your home FREE from GHOSTS OR ENCOURAGE them into your home. Séances for EDIFICATION and PLEASURE

From a distance, the average-sighted could be forgiven for mistaking Mrs. Peach to be in the first flush of wide-eyed, pink-cheeked, white-toothed youth. Mrs. Peach is, in fact, somewhat beyond flowering age. Her freshness has been retained—the years rewound, even—by sheer artifice. Face creams, powders, and paints—all applied with an unstinting hand. This cosmetic artistry is supplemented with the pinning of wigs and postiches and the donning of false dental bridges. Close up the effect is disturbing; Bridie is disturbed.

“Extraordinary.” “But then Mr. Hoy and I realized: it’s a blue blood thing. Sir Edmund’s ancestors would have taken the heads of their foes on the battlefield and, really, what don’t nobs put in aspic?”

With the resurgence of London’s lost rivers and the biblical rainfall, forgotten nursery tales bubble up in many minds. The people start to remember the folk figures of old. Creatures that have long been asleep, in lakes and under bridges, in horse troughs and in ponds, awaken. They trickle and paddle, slip and sneak into London. It’s as if they’ve been summoned. Names from nursery nightmares are remembered and spoken again: Peg Powler, Jenny Greenteeth, Nelly Longarms. Creatures with wild waterweed hair and long sinewy arms; all the better for reaching out and dragging you into the depths. A rash of children, it is said, have been drowned in buckets. Several more have been pulled into wells. A gentleman daren’t walk alone by the Serpentine these days, else some wet-haired floundering beauty will do for him. Three little mud-larks, it is said, were found drowned beside the creek at Deptford, just down by the old ship-chandlery shop.

The nurse alone is a wardrobe of a woman.”