The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman

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Industrial Age Europe was a hothouse for disease -- cholera, bubonic plague, and typhoid epidemics were common and as deadly as war. In 1831, a particularly virulent outbreak of cholera decimated cities on the Continent and in the British Isles. Spread by the "traveling salesmen" of the great mercantile fleets, the disease took up residence in dank, miasmic neighborhoods and preyed upon the young, the old, and the very poor. In her Dickensian second novel, The Dress Lodger, Sheri Holman shows what happens when cholera invades the riverside city of Sunderland, England.

It is on Sunderland's mucky, airless streets that we meet the story's "dress lodger," a 16-year-old single mother named Gustine, whose baby has been born with a bizarre anatomical deformity. To keep the boy alive, Gustine works as a prostitute. After a full day's work at a potter's factory, Gustine dons an expensive blue gown loaned out by her sleazy, libertine landlord, Whilky Robinson. To ensure the dress's safety, Whilky also assigns a shadow to Gustine -- a deformed crone appropriately known as The Eye -- to watch Gustine's every move and goad her to keep looking for clients. The dress does attract upscale clients, but it hardly affords Gustine treatment befitting a lady. When Gustine's admirers realize that she is a whore, they roughly take her in squalid alleys, dimly lit parks, or in the upstairs room at an East End pub called The Labour in Vain.

There she meets Dr. Henry Chiver, a young, effete teacher of anatomy. Chiver came to Sunderland in 1830 fleeing disgrace and outrage in Edinburgh, where he was implicated in the procurement of bodies for medicine's higher purpose. In addition to his legitimate need for cadavers, there is a darker side to Chiver's lust for the dead. He is a collector of specimens, and his study is lined not by books but with jars containing organs and freaks of nature preserved in formaldehyde. When Gustine learns of Chiver's morbid hobby, she offers to troll the piers and alleyways of Sunderland for corpses. For this, she will of course pocket a shilling or two. Her real motive, however, is to ingratiate herself with a doctor who can prolong the life of her son.

When cholera begins to overwhelm the city, Henry's supply of bodies is interrupted by a grieving, suspicious populace that has begun to mistrust all men of medicine. As a result, he must resort to his old ways, robbing graves and the lodging houses of the recent dead. Such disappearances further raise the ire of the city's poor, who are convinced that the disease has been created by the government to weed them out of society. Henry and his Uncle Clanny, a much more principled doctor, are outraged at the ignorance of the city's poor, who cling to the poisoned vestments and remains of their loved ones and thereby spread the infection. A popular melodrama called "Cholera Morbus" further stokes the heat between the poor and the rich, the doctors and the patients, turning the quarantined city into a theater of superstition.

At the same time, Henry has become dangerously preoccupied with Gustine's son, an obsession that disturbs the fine balance he maintains between fetish and Hippocratic duty. Sensing Henry's tenuous grip on sanity, Gustine backs out of an arrangement to have her son live with him. But nothing will stop Henry -- not even cholera's blue stranglehold on Sunderland, or the ravages a mob inflicts upon his elegant townhouse. When she seems bereft of hope, Gustine makes amends and joins forces with a most unlikely partner. Together, they exact vengeance for what's been stolen from them, and from the city's poor.

The Dress Lodger is at once a wickedly funny and deeply philosophical novel. Take away its mesmerizing, fiendish tone, its formidable grasp on the physical and social realities of 1830s England, or its raucous cast of cameos -- sailors, constables, and theater players -- and you still would have a wonderful exploration of the way class wars invaded the literal body politic. In the same way that Gustine's body becomes a marketplace for sexual commerce, the poor in this story become lodgers, rather than owners, of their bodies. They are better employed when dead, doctors' actions tell them. While this reality becomes painfully clear in The Dress Lodger, Holman never forces it home. She's too busy churning out the fabulous plot twists and the gritty details that make her book as entertaining as it is important. Dickens would have been proud.

From the Publisher

In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a defiant, fifteen-teen-year old beauty in an elegant blue dress makes her way between shadow and lamp light. A potter's assistant by day and dress lodger by night, Gustine sells herself for necessity in a rented gown, scrimping to feed and protect her only love: her fragile baby boy. She holds a glimmer of hope after meeting Dr. Henry Chiver, a prisoner of his own dark past. But in a world where suspicion of medicine runs rampant like a fever, these two lost souls will become irrevocably linked, as each crosses lines between rich and destitute, decorum and abandon, damnation and salvation. By turns tender and horrifying, The Dress Lodger is a captivating historical thriller charged with a distinctly modern voice. . . .

USA Today - Ann Prichard

The Dress Lodger is potent historical fiction....a beautifully written tale about a host of hideous subjects. Plague, prostitution, squalid poverty, grave-robbing and madness drive the action in Sheri Holman's atmospheric and highly graphic third novel.

New York Times Book Review - Annette Kobak

In The Dress Lodger, Sheri Holman brings to new realms the ambition and gusto she exhibited so dazzlingly in her debut novel, A Stolen Tongue....If she flirts with melodrama, it is only in the way that Wuthering Heights does, or the novels of Dickens: that is, it is merely the exuberance of an outstandingly generous and fertile imagination. The Dress Lodger is an even better book than Holman's first, with prose that's more limber and vivid-and with, appropriately enough, more heart.

Providence Sunday Journal - Sam Cole

Here's a splendid novel to sink your teeth into-your heart and soul as well....The Dress Lodger borders on revelation in the guise of a Dickensian thriller.

Globe and Mail (Toronto) - Andrew Pyper

The Dress Lodger is Dickensian in a truer sense....In another 100 years, "Holmanian" may be a short form for tragic thriller, or some such unhelpful sub-category. But for the time being, we can simply appreciate this fine novelist's work on its own terms.

San Francisco Chronicle - Jason K. Friedman

Sheri Holman has given voice and heart to Gustine and her fellow wretched poor, making The Dress Lodger' not just a first-rate entertainment but a moving, enlightening one as well.

Washington Post Book World

The Dress Lodger is as unsettling as it is brilliant. Holman attempts Herculean feats of plot and character, and the resulting novel is seamlessly crafted and deserving of wide acclaim and readership.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Amy Waldman

An engrossing novel that's part medical thriller, part Greek tragedy and wholly rewarding.

Salon - Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Compulsively fascinating, the novel draws the reader through the alleys and quays of Sunderland with all the practiced charm of its title character.

Publishers Weekly

Scrawny and tough, only 15, Gustine is the heartrending protagonist of Holman's brilliantly stark portrayal of 19th-century urban life, class warfare, cruel medicine and encroaching pestilence in the English city of Sunderland. With remarkable breadth and depth, the narrative vividly portrays the human suffering spawned by the early Industrial Revolution. Inhabitants of city slums endure oozing sores, infections, lice--not to mention the devastating cholera morbus making its lethal way through Sunderland's population. Gustine works two jobs to support her beloved illegitimate infant, who was born with his heart outside his chest cavity. By day she's a potter's assistant, but to earn enough to live, by night she walks the streets wearing an expensive, elegant blue gown supplied by her pimp/landlord as a ploy to attract higher-class tricks. Pimp Whilky Robinson employs a deaf-mute, one-eyed old woman to follow Gustine constantly, to protect the dress, his treasured investment. Gustine hates the old woman, called "The Eye," but cannot shake this all-seeing symbol of mortality and fate ("Does not old age always dog youth? Does not monstrosity forever shadow beauty?"). Seeking medical help for her ailing child, Gustine strikes up an alliance with surgeon and anatomist Dr. Henry Chivers. The doctor needs corpses for dissection and since Gustine stumbles upon plenty of dead bodies in her night work, she becomes a resource for the ambitious, depraved doctor. The cholera epidemic, graphically and tirelessly described, entwines the lives of the doctor and Gustine, even as Dr. Chivers grows reckless in the resurrection business, eventually inviting violent retribution by impoverished citizens who discover their loved ones' pauper-graves exhumed. Holman (A Stolen Tongue) delivers a wealth of morbid, authentic detail, as well as an emotional pivot in her captivating Moll Flanders-like heroine. The major characters are buttressed by a vivacious cast of minors: Whilky's cowed daughter, Pink; a troupe of traveling thespians; pawnbrokers; rat catchers; and sailors. Holman's style is risky and direct, treating scenes of Gustine's quick, humiliating back-alley couplings as well as the doctor's hypocritical sleaze, with unflinching emotional precision. This dazzlingly researched epic is an uncommon read. Agent, Molly Friedrich. 40,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

An obtrusive, all-seeing narrator tells the story of a young prostitute and her alliance with an ambitious doctor in an old-fashioned, Victorian-style mystery. In the first two tapes, the listener is led in a seemingly random fashion around Sunderland, while the storyteller experiments with how to start the tale. Eventually, the plot thickens into a struggle for life in the midst of death, disease, and deprivation. Gustine, the Dress Lodger, moves between poverty in her own ragged clothing and prosperity when she dons the beautiful blue dress. She is a prisoner in both worlds, but her indomitable spirit will carry her out of both. The horror builds and comes to a satisfying d nouement. Nadia May as narrator effects a husky, raw, thick voice that seems part of the mud, the plague of frogs, and the cholera epidemic. Warm and sympathetic, cold and impartial, or frightened and gasping, May's voice reflects effectively the characters' prejudices, fears, and determination to survive. The 15-year-old Dress Lodger has a high, childlike voice, yet it holds an underlying tenacity. For most collections, but for a select group of listeners. Juleigh Muirhead Clark, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Lib., Colonial Williamsburg Fdn., VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Frank McCourt
Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

1. Why do you think the novel opens by following Fos? How do you feel when you encounter her again later in Whilky's house? What does the movement with, then away, and finally back to Fos accomplish?

2. Describe the voice of the narrator in The Dress Lodger. How is the narrative voice different from that of most contemporary novels? Does the voice remind you of other books you may have read? Does the narrator play a role in the story? How do you, as a reader, react when the narrator addresses you directly?

3. How would you characterize Henry's feelings for Gustine? Is his behavior toward her reprehensible, or do the class-based restrictions imposed upon him thwart his good intentions? What are his intentions? Does he even know? Compare Henry's interactions with Gustine to his behavior with Audrey.

4. Compare the clearly articulated goals of the various characters: Gustine, the Eye, Pink, Henry, Audrey. What is each character striving for? What do you think about their goals? How do their efforts to do good and to be of use to others backfire, and are these characters responsible for their failure to realize their goals?

5. How would you characterize the relationship between Whilky and Gustine? Is she Whilky's slave or does she have other options? Is being a prostitute ever a moral issue for her, or even in the world of The Dress Lodger? Is Whilky evil for exploiting Gustine, or is he also a victim of the economic circumstances in Sunderland?

6. What do you think the social function might be of a play like Cholera Morbus, or Love and Fright? Why would people wish to see such a play? What did you think of the content of the play and of theaudience's reaction?

7. Discuss the gulf between rich and poor in this novel. What are some of the more significant flash points of this divide? What do you think of Whilky's suspicion of the government and of doctors, and the general belief among the poor that the cholera epidemic is some kind of conspiracy? Are the wealthier characters also victimized or in some way injured by this social chasm?

8. Is there a metaphorical significance to Gustine's baby's condition? What do you make of his namelessness and his disease (and Henry's particular interest in it)? Do you think Gustine is attached to her child in ways she would not be if the child had been born perfectly healthy?

9. What function does the Student of Life have in this novel? What does his presence tell the reader about narrative? Is his goal of writing a book "spanning the great gulf that yawns between rich and poor" laughable or laudable?

10. What is the connection between prostitution and anatomy? Is Holman drawing an analogy? Does labor, in the general sense, form the third point of a triangle in this novel? In what ways is The Dress Lodger concerned with the economic uses to which the body is put?

11. What function does the Labor in Vain serve in The Dress Lodger? How does this space in which characters of various social classes congregate, work within the fabric of the novel? How does the name of the public house relate to some of the events of the story? Do the people in this novel labor in vain, and if so, is the pointlessness of their labor inevitable?

12. Henry says that he has "been wed to the graveyard since I first laid eyes on Dr. Knox." Is Henry in some way addicted to dissection? Would such an addiction explain his dubious actions in Edinburgh?

Read an Excerpt

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

A GIRL AND HER SHADOW

The boys down on the Low Quay know a hundred ways to sell bad fish.

    They'll mingle four dead eels with every one alive knowing full well the average man can't tell which is which tangled inside a cloudy tub. They'll polish up a stinking mackerel with a bit of turpentine and buff it with their shirttails until it gleams. Beneath the wharves late in the day, you can catch them blowing air into the bellies of cod to make their underweight catch look fat and succulent. Poor hungry family, to puncture those flatulent fish and find them more air than meat. But a boy's got to make a living, and when he is forced to feel around in the mud at low tide, scrambling after sprats dropped overboard from a trawler, he may have to take a little advantage to earn his daily wage.

    You notice it most on Saturday nights when the markets are set up along Low Street. The orange sellers have secretly boiled their fruit to plump it up, though the practice causes it to turn black within a day; the cherry vendors have weighted their prepacked boxes with cabbage leaves to tip the scales. Not everyone is dishonest, but nearly every merchant prefers to sell his wares after dark when their imperfections are softened by candlelight and men's eyes are less discerning after a full day's work. Most workers are paid on Saturday night here in Sunderland, so they have money in their pockets for meat pies and jacket potatoes kept warm in barrel ovens; they buy two pennies' worth of greasy herring and a roll to go with it. The young sons of public houseowners crisscross the market delivering trays of ale to wives who've ordered it for their family dinners, and are stopped along the way by so many thirsty men, they have to run back for more. On Saturday night, when the streets are extravagant with stacked purple cabbages, ruby apples, bright green leeks fringing stalls iridescent with oyster shells, everyone feels rich. There will be meat on Sunday, and when a favorite customer comes to buy his chops the expansive butcher holds out a newly slaughtered pig's heart like a present.

    It is Saturday night; work is another two days away. Sunday, you may play cards or walk out on the town moor or, if you are feeling guilty about something, wash your face and go to church. Perhaps you'll just want to sleep, which is what happens most Sundays, when you take your tea on the stool by the fire and realize how good it feels just to sit and stare until your head drops down upon your chest and your cup slips from your fingers. But Saturday night you are alive and want some entertainment. Two new shows have come to town. One is about that disease everyone keeps talking about, the cholera morbus, but the second one sounds far more promising. The Spectacle Unique Les Chats Savants: Signior Capelli's celebrated menagery of Sagacious Cats, well known in the principal cities of Europe, Whose Docility and Intelligence Never Fail to Astonish. You could certainly stand to be delightfully astonished, since the astonishment you'll receive tomorrow when you learn half the plums you bought tonight are rotted through will be decidedly less pleasant. You push your way between the stalls along Low Street headed toward the theatre on Sans. On your right, the River Wear makes a snaking black ribbon between Sunderland proper and well-lit Monkwearmouth on the opposite shore. There are fewer ships on the river because of the Quarantine, you think, and it is killing everyone, from the keelmen who load Newcastle coal to the potteries that need imported Dorset clay. Your back room matchstick factory is safe, at least, no matter what happens. For twenty years you've painted phosphorus tips on little wooden splinters and you've never, for a day, done without supplies. The phosphorus is slowly rotting your jawbone and turning you into a freakish mess, you can't bear to look in the glass, but tonight, Saturday night, you want only to see some sagacious cats, and not think about how your hands and face glow in the dark.

    Outside the cheap theatre, where children and domestics get in half price—as if life weren't easy enough for them anyway—you come upon a stampede. Housemaids leap squealing into coachmen; little boys stomp, stomp, stomp like Indians in a rain dance. It's those damn frogs. They've come up from the riverbed, where they've been fucking and spawning, fucking and spawning all this wet, warm autumn until they've overflowed the steep banks and invaded the town. Merchants along Low Street have found moist green frogs suffocated in their flour, the pastor of Trinity Church found them floating in the Communion wine. Just last night, your landlord cursed the chorus of frogs yowling in his basement and sent down his ferret to rip through them. Now it seems the frogs are headed toward the nicer part of town. They are advancing on Bishopwearmouth, the third and by far the most affluent section of Sunderland, built on higher ground to the south. Good, you think. Let a little of the river bottom come up in the world. Let a lawyer or two lie awake and worry, like you have on too many nights, that the Lord has sent a modern plague of Egypt to destroy this town.

    How those dainty domestics and little children carry on, jabbing their umbrellas at flailing rubbery-legs, frightening the frogs far more than they themselves are frightened! You roll your eyes and dig into your pocket for the 5 d. they extort from you at the box office, reach across to hand the rouged ticket vendor your money—but if you please, wait just a moment....

    Before you duck inside, dear matchstick painter, and disappear from view for what will be at least two hours, we beg leave to ask what might at first seem a frivolous question, but which will eventually make sense: if you were to compose your own story—forgetting for a moment the small fact that you cannot exactly write—would you choose this Saturday night, outside of this cheap theatre, through this veil of frogs in which to introduce your heroine? If you might have at your command the entire globe, any moment of historic confluence, if you might in the writing of a humble book bring back to life a Queen of Sheba or an Empress Josephine, would you strew her path with frogs here in dirty Sunderland when you might pluck from your imagination green emeralds to scatter before her in Zanzibar? No, we thought not. You are a personage of refined taste. Left up to you, who is to say this book might not evolve into a tender tale of a matchstick painter whose matches so delight the King of Sicily that he dedicates his palace to her private use, festoons it with pearls and causes the British royal family to hold her quartz and lapis phosphorus pots? If the story were in your hands, we might expect no unpleasantness, no murder or blackest betrayal, for you are not of a punishing nature. And yet, dear matchstick painter, your growing suspicions are correct—this is not your story. This is ours, and you have been summoned, led through the marketplace, encouraged to see this entertainment over the tedious play on cholera morbus down the street for solely that purpose: to provide us with an introduction to our true heroine, who, if you'll turn around, is walking down Sans Street toward you, carefully picking her way across the unctuous carpet of frogs.

    Don't be upset, dear friend; we can't all of us be heroes. Though we met you first, we shouldn't feel compelled to follow your tiresome life. From the factory. Home. To the public house for a warm beer every third night—the whole process repeating itself ad nauseam. You have a purpose in the machinery of this book, and though it is not large, it is necessary. We have brought you here to describe her to us, we being too far away in time and space to form a clear impression. Please, dear friend, keep us in suspense no longer. Is she lovely? Plain? Young? Old? First impressions are difficult to shake, dear friend, so please, be precise.

    Begin with her face.

    It is thin, you say, but well formed? Has she not the snub nose and round cheeks of so many Sunderland girls whose raw ancestors tramped down from Scotland or washed ashore lo those many centuries ago from pork-fed Saxony? Oh, hers is a more Gaulish beauty—if you dare to use the term as a compliment barely fifteen years after Waterloo—with delicate arching brows, a reasonably straight nose, and large, dark, almost navy blue eyes. Her slightly sunken cheeks are drizzled with light freckles—hereditary, you would wager, for surely freckles coaxed out by a pleasant day at the shore would not sit so starkly against white skin. And she is very pale. Her face and exposed arms are the color of cooling milk, faintly blue in the bucket; they possess the sort of pallor that scatters light, the sort of luminescence that great ladies, it is rumored, take small tastes of arsenic to achieve. Hers is the skin of a girl who never sees the light of day.

    And her hair, what of her hair? Such skin must set off a deep brunette mane or a fiery halo of red. No, you say? She is blonde? With hair almost as pale as her skin, worn in a complicated style (known in fashionable circles as an "apollo"); her slightly greasy tresses braided and wrapped into a topknot at the crown, while little blonde ringlets are left to frizz at her temples. An ornament which if decorating the tresses of a lady would be a gilt arrow to honor the slayer of Python but on our heroine is a pigeon-feather-dyed red, bisects the knot and completes the apollo.

    But we are confused. Is our heroine not a lady? Are we to go through this novel in the company of some commonplace Sunderland slut—not invited to any fancy parties, fed on boiled potatoes and beer when we might, in some other novel, have prawns and champagne? You said she has the pallor of a lady, wears her hair after the fashion of the day. How is she dressed, pray tell? By her clothes, surely we will know her.

    Her dress is blue. How descriptive. But of what color blue?

    Yes, of course in better years we too attended spectacles where nymphs and water sprites yearned for mortal men, where mermaids brushed their hair and admired themselves in flashing mirrors. You would have us picture, then, the backdrop of that theatrical Sea: the billows of cyan silk, the azure pasteboard waves, the ultramarine netting, tangled with sea horses and starfishes, flung to represent an aquatic paradise. We will close our eyes and do as you command. Ah, how cool they look while we sweat in the theatre of a hot summer's night, spying on their underwater world with its hierarchy and despot king and chorus of rebellious daughters; a world so rich and foreign, yet so happily fraught with the politics of our own. Now, to that cool, blinding blue, we are to add the color of our play's artificial sky, appreciating the scene painter's ability to reach back into his childhood and extract the extinct shade of cerulean that floated over the River Wear before the factories were built. Yes, we are old enough to remember that color. We are old enough, certainly, to remember a good many other things besides.

    To the complex blue body of her dress, you would have us add wide-blown gigot sleeves swelling from bare shoulders and a matching belt cinched at her narrow waist, creating the inverted-triangle look so popular among fashionable women of today. Festoon the entirety with tulle and white bouffant in three puffy tiers from knee to ankle-length hem. Tie her up with a handful of bows down the bodice. She is a sumptuous, fantastical wedding cake. A walking confection. A tasty morsel. And yet, still you hesitate. Certainly no one other than the finest lady might afford such a singular dress. So what is wrong?

    She seems small.

    Is that all? Dainty is the fashion, my friend. Long gone is the tall, lithe, neo-Grecian look made popular by Boney and his Court in France. Give us the fantasy of the Romantics, frothy faux shepherdess frocks and Oriental accessories! We are a global power, and yet we are pastoral! We have fought in Egypt, we are marching across India; we have the technology to replicate the entire world in our clothing, and we yearn for a simpler time. Anyone would look small against such an empire. But stop, you say. If we are to tap you for a description of our heroine, we must trust your evaluation. Daintiness is bred and daintiness is manufactured. This girl—for surely she can be no more than sixteen—has had daintiness thrust upon her. She seems to you stunted and underdeveloped beneath that dress; her shoulders are painfully thin and her belt hangs loosely at the waist. Her shoes, the universal giveaway of poverty, peek out from under the skirt, revealing themselves as mud-spattered, worn-heeled work boots.

    Is it possible? Could we be mistaken in our choice of heroines? Perhaps we got the date wrong, or the address, or even the century. Is there no one behind her—one of her betters perhaps, coming to rescue our book from certain dullness? Look again, dear friend, leave the ticket booth and just peer around the corner to make sure we have not overlooked someone.

    Why do you draw back? What? What is it there in the shadows you see?

    Now you are rushing back to the theatre. Now you claim your duty is done? We have given you the opportunity to participate in our story, and you choose instead to hide yourself among the mass of anonymous theatregoers eating sandwiches from dirty handkerchiefs, pulling the corks from bottles of beer with their round yellow teeth. What is her name at least? Ask her name! But now the lights are come up, the first disoriented snow leopard bounds on stage decked in an alchemist's cape and black cone hat; and you, dear matchstick painter, for we can see you hesitating in the aisle, are wrestling with yourself. It is Saturday night. You only wanted to see some chats savants, you wanted nothing to do with this infernal business. But you knew her, didn't you? We could tell from your stricken face when you peered into the shadows, you recognized that girl. What is her name?

    A lioness teeters on her back paws wearing a mortarboard. A gray tabby, mangy and naked, runs figure eights through her unsteady legs, and the crowd roars.

    Gustine. Her name is Gustine.

    Thank you, kind matchstick painter. We have a certain sight, you know, but the fact is, we don't always trust it for details. It's a strange ability we have that allows us to see more clearly those who are closer to us, who perhaps are only a few weeks or a few months separated in time. Like for instance you. Or the turnip-fleshed woman who is trailing our heroine. The one you pulled back from in the dark. Her we see quite clearly, though perhaps she appeared to you as only a malevolent shadow along the ground.

    In front of us, Gustine and her shadow turn left onto High Street.

    A greasy drizzle has picked up, slicking cobblestones already slippery with fallen oak leaves. She heads away from the theatre toward dark linen and woolen shops, bakeries, booksellers and stationers shut up tight against the raw night. Hackney cabs clatter by, not pausing to see why a respectably dressed woman might be walking alone in a closed neighborhood without a cloak or umbrella at half past nine at night. A few merchants, reluctant to go home and face another night of boiled onions and Bible lessons, linger over their locks, peering into their dark windows as though sure of having forgotten something very important. They catch a glimpse of her, reflected by gaslight in their plate glass, and stay just a little longer, to watch and wish that one night, they might be coming out at exactly the moment she passes by, and might, by accident, brush against her tight hot snatch. Gustine lifts her skirt and shakes a frog loose from the hem.

    People are saying this explosion of river frogs is due to an atmospheric disturbance, the same that brought the lightning storms and unseasonably warm weather even through October. They say that cholera is certain to follow in its wake. Gustine looks up to where the atmosphere is supposed to be. She wonders if one night it will merely begin to rain cholera. She wonders if cholera could even make it through the heavy gray clouds on this moonless sky begot by Sunderland's hardworking chimneys.

    Behind Gustine her shadow pauses, and it too cocks an eye at the sky.

    "Damn it!" Gustine turns and yells at the creature behind her. "Will you please just sod off?"

    The girl gathers her dress and sprints away down High Street. She takes a right and then a left and then another right, trying her best to shake the old woman who follows her every night. The old bitch who dogs her every bloody step. Truly, business is bad enough with the Quarantine. The last thing she needs is that hag on her tail.

    The shadow does not run after her, for shadows need never run; they are, by their very nature, inseparably, inexorably pulled along in the wake of their objects. They do not think, they do not argue. They never worry they will be lost or shaken. A shadow cannot be paid off or given the slip like some commonplace retainer; it is with you from the hour of your birth to the day of your death and beyond, following you even where no one else will, into the wooden box as they hammer down the lid.

    Wet blue rat.

    The old woman walks with her head down as though scenting prey, and yet, she has almost no sense of smell, nor of taste, and she is so old she can barely hear. The rain has plastered her gray hair to her cheeks like whiskers, but she doesn't feel it. She walks with a bent head studying her own shoes, confident they will take her where she needs to go, and she walks quickly for a woman her age—which, depending on who you ask, is anywhere from sixty to eighty-three. She wears a loose-fitting brown wool dress with a dirty handkerchief tied over the bosom and her hair pulled back in that old-fashioned no-style style. Nothing about her, from her slightly hunched back to her hairy ape arms, would distinguish her from any other old woman in the East End—until you looked into her slack-skinned turnip-colored face. With a single glance you would realize what makes this abandoned shadow so assuredly calm and confident. What keeps Gustine afraid. What made poor matchstick painter pull back in horror outside the cheap theatre. You would see the shadow has an Eye.

    Not eyes, mind you, but an Eye: a single gray carbuncle that has, over the years, siphoned from her other four senses every bit of potency, redirected the diffuse sensations of sound and touch and even smell straight forward into a single supreme ability; into an Eye so aware, so magnified it never tires, needs no sleep, misses nothing. No one may steal an apple but the Eye sees it. No one may pick his nose or slap his wife or feed his dog under the table, but that it is noted. How happy Jeremy Bentham would be to discover a living, breathing Panopticon moving through Sunderland's East End, kicking aside squabbling cats, splashing through black puddles of human waste and rotting food, its formidable sight turned upon a single prisoner only—that pretty young girl laced inside her bright blue dress.

    The Eye takes in the rain eddying between the uneven cobblestones of High Street, a lone green frog trapped on an island of brick, afraid to hop across the rushing gutter, and the slimy vegetable tops left over from the abandoned market closed two hours early because of the bad weather. She can detect the slightest disturbance in the puddles made by the mad splashing of Gustine's boots as she ran away.

    Fast rat. Blue rat.

    People have told a hundred different stories about how the shadow lost her other eye. Only the oldest in town ever remembered her having a matched gray set instead of that twisted flap of purple skin to the left side of her nose, and they are all dead now. Now people who weren't even born when she was grown imagine that her left eye was put out by a jealous boyfriend after he caught her looking at another man. Those less romantic say she caught an ember in the face during the New Theatre fire of 1781, but that it served her right for being there so late at night. People used to believe she sold her eye to the Devil for a bottle of gin, but now the dominant theory is that she had it gored out by a wild pig while making water on the town moor. No one knows for certain how she came to be the Eye, no one but herself, and she hasn't spoken in so long, most people suppose she doesn't know how.

    All that is known of this woman—called Eyeball or Evil Eye or Gray Sister by boys who have read their Homer, but mostly called just plain Eye—is that she still lives at 9 Mill Street as she has since before the building was erected, and as she probably will long after it collapses around her; that her landlord suffers her to stay so long as she follows his expensive dress, making sure the girl inside does not steal it or pawn it; and that the night has never fallen these past two years which has not found the pair together—girl and her shadow, the dress and the Eye—plying the streets of Sunderland. All the other rumours, such as her having sold the recipe for human meat pies to the body snatchers Burke and Hare, or her being responsible for the Methodist Meeting House Panic back in '75 when all those children were crushed ... well, that is nothing but idle gossip and everyone knows it.

    Up ahead, Gustine slows down when she reaches the intersection of High and Bridge Streets. Gaslights follow one another on evenly spaced blocks, the lanes widen into avenues the farther west she pushes. Since the building of the great Wearmouth Bridge thirty-five years ago, the geographic center of the city has pushed west to meet it; not long ago this was all pastureland—now, it is booming with shops under construction. Men walking over the bridge from Monkwearmouth, their faces hidden by umbrellas, measure her carefully. Is she what she seems or merely someone's reckless younger sister caught in the rain without carfare? A paunchy mustachioed man in a green plaid woolen suit slows down and catches her eye.

    "Are you lost?" he asks.

    "I wonder, sir," replies Gustine with an apologetic smile. "Can you tell me the way to Silver Street?"

    "Ach, you're far away from there," he says. "That's the other way, back in the East End."

    "Oh," says Gustine, looking distressed.

    "Are you certain of the address, miss?" The gentleman clears his throat, and finds his cheeks growing hot. "Tha's a rough part of town."

    "Is it?" asks Gustine, now mightily distressed.

    "Oh yes, miss."

    "My brother," she falters. "My brother's friends are having a birthday party for him there at ten o' clock. I told them I was usually in bed by ten o' clock; we have church tomorrow, you know. But they insisted I come."

    The man in green plaid peeks at his watch and glances up at the threatening sky. The rain is falling harder now and the pretty miss is without an umbrella. He should offer to walk her. Still, he too has somewhere to be. There's this new show in town featuring some awfully smart cats—he read about it in the newspaper—if he's not already too late.

    "I'm sorry for troubling you," Gustine says, sensing his confusion. "Thank you for your help."

    She turns right and begins walking down toward the dark riverbank.

    "Miss!" shouts Green-plaid. "You are going the wrong way!"

    She obviously does not hear him, for she appears to speed up. How can she not know she is about to walk straight down into the river? Green-plaid gives chase and catches up to her at the stone pilings, in the shadow of the great Wearmouth Bridge.

    Every town in England is famous for something, whether it is a cathedral or a ghost or a blackberry jam recipe, and in 1796, a good twenty years before Gustine was born and thirty-five years before Sunderland became more famous as the first town in Britain stricken with cholera, we were drunk with love for our new cast-iron extension bridge, the longest and without a doubt the highest of its kind you'll find in all of England. Our town had been getting by since the days of the Venerable Bede, who swore his vows at Saint Peter's over in Monkwearmouth, but not until Napoleon reared his head had we come into our own. Suddenly all of England was on alert; ships were needed for the navy and men were needed to build them. In a matter of years Sunderland became the undisputed Queen of Shipyards—the river was clogged with every kind of ship, from worthy vessels to shoddily slapped together carracks destined to go down for insurance money. Our Sunderland keelmen shoveled coal from Newcastle and Durham onto barges that would circulate it among the machines of the new Industrial Age. Hammers bounced off pliant timber; drying hemp, festooned on the wooden skirders of Rope Walk, perfumed the still wealthy East End of town. The town sprang up on both sides of the Wear: in Sunderland proper, bounded by rich Bishopwearmouth, and in Monkwearmouth, on the other side where the natural docks cut in at Potato Garth. Surely, a bridge was needed—a spectacular modern bridge, for a booming, prosperous town. It took an Act of Parliament and a highly clever engineer to erect the 240-foot-long, 80-foot-high cast-iron voussoir bridge, but now every child in Sunderland, including Gustine, can recite the famous pledge buried inside the foundation stone: "At that time when the mad fury of the French citizens, dictating acts of extreme depravity, disturbed the peace of Europe with an iron war; we the people of Sunderland, aiming at worthier purposes, hath resolved to join the steep and craggy shores of the River Wear, with an iron bridge."

    Beneath the great Wearmouth Bridge, the man in the green plaid suit is pushing Gustine's pretty blue dress up around her neck and fumbling with his trousers.

    "Don't tell anyone about this," he is saying. "It won't take a minute."

    "Please don't," Gustine whispers, halfheartedly pushing him away. "I never have."

    "You're a flighty little thing. It's bound to happen sooner or later." He pulls back the skin of his prick and jabs about her thighs. Behind him, the bottle-work furnaces fire; along the bank, the black, dead-fish sewer stink rises on the fog. He finds his mark and Gustine turns her head to watch the river lazily carry downstream a bloated sheep, the poor thing bobbing like someone's comfortable, upended ottoman, dead of the scrapie.

    When he's done, he shakes his cock and wipes it on his linen handkerchief.

    "C'mon," he says, "I'll walk you to Silver Street."

    "I don't need to go to Silver Street," she says.

    "Aw, come on now," he whines. "Don't be like that."

    "I just need you to pay me so I can be on my way."

    "I knew it!" Green-plaid spits and kicks the ground. "You haven't gone an' given me a disease, have you?"

    "Pay up," she says, holding out her hand. "I'm not a charity."

    "All dressed up like a lady," the man snaps, and feels in his trousers for his purse. "A person can't even tell who's who anymore."

    Observe, friends, how a man of honor conducts his business transactions. If Gustine had came into his accounting office, say, and asked for an advance of an equally small sum as she now demands, Green-plaid with great gallantry would have counted it out, dropped each shiny penny into her palm, and sent her off with a pleasant little wink. He loves helping out pretty women, and if the door is shut and she doesn't mind a quick feel-up, well, he loves that, too, and has been known on occasion to count out an extra penny from his private pocketbook. But when a woman demands honest remuneration for an honest job performed, how does he then behave? Observe: he extends two dull coins churlishly, makes Gustine reach for them, and when she is off-balance, gives her a furious push that sends her reeling down the riverbank.

    "I'll not be taken advantage of, you little slut!" he yells, scampering up the hill, soiling his green plaid knees each time he slips on the muddy slope. Damn these whores. All dressed and perfumed. How is a man supposed to know? He has almost made it to the road when a heavy shadow falls across his neck and stops him cold.

    Sad, stupid rat to think he could escape the Eye. She saw plaid rat sink his teeth into blue rat's neck, mount her, and tear at her fur while he furiously humped himself dry. Now he scurries away, back to his hole. Bad rat, thinks Eye. To run away.

    The red flames of the furnaces hellishly light her face. Know, rat, she is warden and guard. She watches the dress. She watches herself grab you around the throat and shake you until you surrender your rat-skin purse. From it she takes four shillings, the dress's fee, no more, no less, and tosses the rest back to you. She watches you scamper up the hill, choking and coughing, humiliated, crying for the constable, for any bloody cop, goddammit, and she sees, just as surely, there is not one to hear you for miles.

    Eye walks heavily down the bank. She spies a puddle of blue under the bridge, half in the water, half in the black mud. The dress is dirty. Their landlord won't like that. When she gets a little closer, she sees the blue rat is not hurt. She is staring intently at something laid out beside her.

    A dead rat, about six feet tall, wearing a wool cap, brown trousers, and a mud-stained white shirt. His wide sightless eyes are turned upstream, watching for ships trapped on the far side of Quarantine.

    "Look what I found!" Gustine leaps up, clapping her hands. "Let's go tell Henry!"