#do you want the nice snuff-addicted young girl to accompany you?

[nellygwyn]

It is half past noon, or it appeared to be so when the chairman let you alight at Covent Garden Piazza and gestured vaguely at the church clock, and you, a stranger to this time and place, walking briskly, nervously and with no apparent direction or purpose observe suddenly that you have come to a junction. It is unlike any other you have yet seen. Seven roads are converging, and crowning them all in the centre is a tall, Doric pillar, supported on a plinth and stretching up and up. It is the only thing that appears to be escaping to the sky and to the light: every other building in your immediate sight appears to be obscuring its neighbour, leaning into it, and vice versa. What is this pillar for? Something sits atop of it but you cannot see it, lest the afternoon mid-summer glare of the sun blind you. 

‘La Pyramide.’ 

Frenchified tones, coming from a finely dressed middle aged man, with a meticulously powdered bag-wig who loiters near the plinth and twists paper around the stem of a clay-pipe.

‘Teez La Pyramide’ he says again. 

‘But what is it?’ you ask, for this is certainly no pyramid, no matter what the gentleman says. 

‘Teez a sundial. The sundial of Seven Dials’ 

Seven Dials. You know it. You were here before. Or rather, you have been here after, in the future. However such a thing works. It lies, or at least WILL lie, near Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus.  

‘Where are you going? Are you lost, mademoiselle?’ he continues.

‘I don’t know. No. Or...yes. Where should I go from here? I need a room at an inn.’ 

‘Teez no fit place for a lady, teez no fit place for a stranger’

‘Even so...’

And he points you in the direction of an inn he knows and trusts, up through Mercer Street onto Monmouth Street, and near enough to the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. But he urges caution.

‘Teez the rookery of St. Giles that way, comprende? Nothing but cutpurses and whores.’

 Rookery. What does he mean? Is that not a nest for birds? 

‘Teez a slum. Teez London’s shame. They call it New Rome, its depravity stretches like empire’

He is right about the slum part and how it stretches like an empire, never-ending. As you move up Monmouth Street and into what the ragged stone street marking calls ‘Lyons Court,’ it is the rancid smell that hits you first and then the never-ending dilapidation. The cobbles are drenched in piss and shit, and perhaps, if you stood to make closer inspection, vomit and the leftovers of disembowelment. Houses fall into each other, seemingly suspended by nothing, but somehow standing anyway. And everything looks the same, street upon street, alley upon alley. The rooftops lean in so the sunlight, which seemed so pleasant, so bright before, does not and cannot reach you. In a word, it is dingy, it seems that it is where ‘dinginess’ came from. There are windows, glass hatches, everywhere, as if...as if every room of every house is occupied to bursting, as if every inch is taken up by someone who clamours for the window’s passage to putrid air. 

And it is eerily quiet. You slow your pace out of fear, curiosity and vague confusion, but you merely observe a few shabby dressed tenants moving between their dwellings, the public house and back again. You wonder if it is the sort of place that comes alive at night, when its imperfections are blurred and its hackles are up. But then again, if one wanted to commit a crime here, who could stop it? Who would see? 

As if on cue, you feel a tugging at your elbow. You turn like a flash, expecting to see the glint of a knife. Are you being robbed? Are you being hurt? 

But it is only a young woman, only mildly pretty and dressed shabby but done up to the nines with stark white paint and red rouge and blush, who, now she has your attention, holds her palm outstretched. Every exposed piece of skin is made up in this painted way, and covered in tiny black patches, many shaped like stars, though she has a moon near the left corner of her mouth and two dainty hearts resting symmetrically on each ample breast. If you look close enough, you can see where she has forgotten to conceal her many hairpieces. 

‘Not to bother ya, miss, but I needs a nip of gin. Steady my nerves, as it goes. Spare us some bobstick, will’ee?’

You don’t know what bobstick is but you assume she’s after money. You reach for the pocket attached inside your skirts and fish her some change you got from the chair journey. You pray its enough for the drink. 

‘Tis right proper nice of thee, that. My thanks. I’d earn it meself but it ain’t half dead today. Not a pintle in sight.’ 

It appears to be alright. She slides it into her own pocket. You watch her.

‘Steady your nerves for what?’ you ask, rather suddenly and surprising even yourself. As if it’s any of your business. But she shares cheerfully.

‘Well, ‘tis nearly an hour till the hanging cart comes this way, for Tyburn. I’ve a dear friend on it, do’ee see? She’ll get her St. Giles Bowl. I’d wager at the Cock and Pye. And then off to the hangman.’

She does not look sad, only mildly troubled, as if her dear friend is merely off on a long holiday, and not about to drop into oblivion. This throws you.

'Hangman?' you splutter out. It is all you can manage.

The woman.....no, the girl raises an eyebrow, her powder wrinkling. But she does not change tack.

'Indeed. Thievery from a cull.'

She slides an enamelled tin through the slit in her skirts, opens it, pinches her fingertips inside it and inhales a substance. She takes your look of bewilderment for one of expectation and offers you her 'jaded snuff.' One proper whiff of it and you realise it’s somehow more insufferable than the constant sweet & putrid tang of animal shit in the air. And now, your head's all askance, so you politely decline.

'Just as well' she says, 'Don't want to end up nuzzled in the stuff like Snuffy Queen Charlotte.'

'What did she steal? Your friend, I mean' you continue.

'A pair of shoe-buckles. Or so he says, though I never took her for a handsy one. And why covet a gent's buckles?'

Horror. 

'But that's nothing!' 

'Believe me, you'll swing for a lot less than that here.'

Even amongst the degradation up until this point, there was an air of mystery, of excitement, of a secret waiting to be unspooled, of newfangled pleasures and the thrill of the unseen. It's why you came here in the first place. But now, inch by inch, the mask of glamour slips and you realise now that it is, and perhaps always was, only bedazzled with paste jewels.