Read Online The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page A

voice – a feeble, wheezy bleat, making a sound that could be wordless nonsense, could be ‘Money’, could be ‘Mama’. She turns, and finds the child alive and awake, gesturing from its swaddle of dirty wool. The grim façade of the chapel, new red brick with no windows down below, and spy-holes in dark locked door, flaunts its imperviousness to anti-Catholic rioters and children seeking charity.
    Sugar hesitates, rocking on the balls of her feet, feeling the sweat inside her boots prickle and simmer between her toes. She cannot bear going backwards when she’s made up her mind to go forwards; she’s crossed this street now, and there’s no crossing back. Besides, it’s hopeless; she could fuck a hundred men a day and give all the proceeds to destitute children, and still make no lasting difference.
    Finally, when her heart begins to labour in her breast, she fetches a coin from her reticule and throws it across the street. Her aim is true, and the shilling lands on the pale-yellow blanket. She turns away again, still unsure of the child’s sex; it doesn’t matter; in a day or a week or a month from now, the child will be dragged down into oblivion, like a lump of refuse flushed into London’s sewers. God damn God and all His horrible filthy creation.
    Sugar walks on, her eyes fixed on the grand thoroughfare of Regent Street shimmering through her stinging eyes. She needs sleep. And, yes, if truth be told, if you really must know, she is suffering, suffering so much that she’d be relieved to die, or else kill. Either would do. As long as a decisive blow is struck for disengagement.
    It’s not Caroline’s company that’s brought this on. Caroline, as you already know, is inconsequential; she asks nothing.
    No, what has tested Sugar so unbearably is this: having to be patient and kind all yesterday and last night, sitting up with a dying friend called Elizabeth in a fetid slum in Seven Dials. How long Elizabeth took to die, clutching Sugar’s hand all the while! Such a clammy, cool, claw-like hand it was too, for all those hours! At the thought of it, Sugar’s own hands sweat even more inside her gloves, itching and stinging against the powdered lining.
    But being a fallen woman has its small advantages, and she claims one of them now. The rules governing outdoor dress are clear, for those who can understand them: men may wear gloves or not wear gloves, as they please; poor shabby women must not wear them (the thought alone is ridiculous!) or the police are likely to demand where they got them; respectable women of the lower orders, especially those with babes in arms, can be forgiven for not wearing them; but ladies must wear them at all times, until safely indoors. Sugar is dressed like a lady, therefore she must on no account bare her extremities in public.
    Nevertheless, glove-tip by glove-tip, finger by finger, Sugar strips, even as she walks, the soft green leather off her hands. Unsheathed, her sweating white skin glistens in the sunshine. With a deep sigh of relief, indistinguishable from the one she uses when a man has done to her all he can do, she flexes in the cool air her intricately cracked and flaking fingers.
    Follow Sugar now into the great open space, the grandiose vacancy of Regent Street – admire those towering honeycombs of palatial buildings stretching into the fog of architectural infinity, those thousands of identically shaped windows tier upon tier; the glassy expanse of roadway swept clear of snow; all of it is a statement of intent: a declaration that in the bright future to come, places like St Giles and Soho, with their narrow labyrinths and tilting hovels and clammy, crumbling nooks infested with human flotsam, will be swept away, to be replaced by a new London that’s entirely like Regent Street, airy, regular and clean.
    The Stretch at this hour of morning is already alive with activity – not the insane profusion it will bear in the summer Season, but enough to impress