couldn’t take my eyes off the dog and the rats, sir. It was my first time.’
He sighed deeply, and looked out the window. Night was falling. Shopworkers were hurrying home. A lamplighter was doing what seemed like callisthenics, stretching his back and arms in preparation for the task ahead.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Clara. She surmised that Mr Heaton was too much of a gentleman to demand his ten shillings back, but thought it was just as well to show contrition, so that he might take pity on her.
‘What’s done is done,’ he said, in a tone of bitter melancholy. He seemed to be retreating into a world of his own, a place where he alone could go. Clara found this more discomfiting than if he had loudly chastised her in the street.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said again, peeking surreptitiously at whether he was softening towards her. He appeared not to have heard.
The cab joined the traffic bound for Westminster, rattled across the bridge, passed the houses of Parliament. The tall buildings blocked out the sun, bringing on the night all the quicker. Mr Heaton unfastened his overcoat, unbuttoned the coat he wore underneath, and pulled out a tobacco tin from an inside pocket. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it. Inhaling for what seemed like a very long time, he tilted his head back against the back wall of the cabin. It was then that Clara saw the deep scar on his neck, just under his beard-line, running almost from earlobe to earlobe. The scar was perfectly semicircular in shape, except for a hiccup caused by the Adam’s apple. It was punctuated all around by other scars: cross-shaped white dots where someone had crudely stitched the gaping flesh back together. The dots looked as if buttons had once been sewn there and fallen off unnoticed.
‘What happened to you, sir?’ Clara asked.
He exhaled smoke until it hung around his head like a fog. He stared up at the ceiling, blinking his gleaming, bloodshot eyes.
‘Happened?’ he murmured absently.
‘Someone hurt you, sir.’ She pointed at his neck, almost touching him. He smiled but didn’t respond.
‘Was it robbers, sir?’
Again he smiled. ‘You might say that.’ He took the deepest possible puff of his cigarette, making it glow fierce in the dimness of the cabin.
The hansom rattled on. Through the window on her side, Clara saw a landmark she recognised from that lost period of her life when she used to meet with another lady’s maid called Sinead at a tea-room near Charing Cross Station. She knew where she was now, more or less. It wouldn’t be very long before they were back in St Giles, so she started rehearsing what her parting words to Mr Heaton ought to be, whether she should affect a breezy tone or a solemn one; whether a third apology might melt him or whether she’d milked contrition for as much as it was worth; whether she ought to suggest that they attempt to do this again next month, despite her honest intention never to clap eyes on him again. Just when she was deep in thought, debating the wisdom of perhaps giving him some sort of kiss on the cheek the instant before sprinting to her freedom, he spoke again.
‘I was in the Battle of Peiwar Kotal.’
‘How terrible, sir. Was that in India?’
‘Afghanistan.’
Clara had never heard of the place. Admittedly her schooling had been scant and she’d entered into service almost immediately afterward, and her mistress, for all her wealth, knew nothing about anything. Clara strained to recall if Mr William Rackham, her mistress’s husband, had ever uttered any informative pronouncements about Afghanistan in her earshot. But thinking of the pompous windbag who’d dismissed her with a damning letter of reference – a letter of reference so poisonous that she’d spent more than three years trying to get decent employment with it, only to be driven to her current line of work – made her deaf, dumb and blind with anger.
‘I don’t know much about history, sir,’ she said.
He flicked his cigarette out of the window. ‘It was last year, actually.’ Turning his face close to hers, he examined her features as though evaluating, for the first time, her desirability as a woman. ‘You think I’m an old man, don’t you? I’m younger than you are, I’ll wager.’
‘I wouldn’t wager against you, sir.’
He broke off his gaze and slumped back in his seat. His melancholy pout and wispy beard struck her, all of a sudden, as boyish. He was fine-boned and slender, after all. Whatever he’d endured in battle had added ten, twenty, thirty years onto his age.
‘How did the war start, sir?’
He chuckled, an ugly sound. ‘The leader of the Afghans, Shere Ali, made friends with a Russian gentleman. Our government decided that this friendship was not in the interests of our empire. So several thousand men, including myself, marched from India to Afghanistan. When we reached the Peiwar Pass, we were met with an army of eighteen thousand Afghans.’
‘Oh, heavens, sir: what a terrible defeat you suffered.’
He laughed again. ‘Defeat? On the contrary: we won. That is, Her Majesty’s army won. I, personally, did not win. As you can see.’
Clara chewed her lower lip, feeling wretchedly out of her depth.
‘It’s awful, sir. We should all be thankful to you, sir, for the victory.’
He was rummaging in his clothing for the tobacco tin. ‘It’s a little too soon to celebrate, I’m afraid,’ he said, as he began to construct another cigarette. ‘The war goes on.’
‘Goes on, sir?’
‘I was wounded in a battle. The war goes on. Only a month ago, we lost hundreds of men in a disastrous defeat in Maiwand.’
Clara was silent. If there was a lesson to be learned from this fiasco, it was never to participate in conversations she could not hope to keep her place in. While Mr Heaton made short work of his cigarette, Clara simmered with frustration; she wished she could somehow make him understand that she had suffered, too. She wanted to tell him all about her unfair dismissal, and the many humiliations that had preceded it, and the insults she had endured after it, and, most of all, the indignities she had been forced to undergo at the hands of those swinish, repulsive creatures, the men who used whores. She held her tongue.
Familiar lights were glowing in the distance. Night had descended entirely, and the temperature in the cabin had become chilly. Clara became aware that her hands were still bare. She fetched her gloves out of the pocket of her dress, taking great care not to jingle the coins in there. But in attempting to put her right glove on, she discovered that the nail of her middle finger was impeding progress more than usual: it was jagged, shaped like the edge of a specialised cutting-tool. She must have gripped the rim of the rat pit harder than she remembered.
An unexpected voice – her own – piped up in the dark.
‘My nail is broken, sir. But it’s still quite long. And very sharp. Do you want to feel it, sir?’
She put her hand into the murky space between them and he took it. She dug her fingernail into his palm, to demonstrate its potentials.
‘Shall I, sir?’
He wrapped her finger in his hand, holding it gently.
‘It’s
