Up the Goblin Market

Content notice: it's a bit sexy. (I hope.)

This didn’t feel like sleep.

But the space between getting here, and what came before - all darkness.

She remembered her desk, her monitor, the cursor blinking unhelpfully. Imagination and history were one big knot she couldn't unravel. By the monitor, the one in her memory, she saw berry tea steeped so long it was basically syrup. Nothing else.

What obsession had drawn her so far in she’d lost the way back?

She drew in breath and let it out slowly, holding herself still.

When she wrote, it sometimes happened that imagination swallowed her whole. Never before like this.

She pinched herself and it stung. Not a dream, then.

Nothing revealed itself at first. Then, as her pupils dilated, faint shapes suggested themselves, the way darkness becomes a place once you let it in.

She reached out, cautious, and her fingers met something soft - alive, feathery to her touch.

She yelped, jumped back.

A citrine spotlight snapped into life. Betty flinched: a figure stood before her. For a second she braced for its movement - then saw it was no person at all, but a tailor’s mannequin. It wore an amethyst-coloured tailcoat, as though made for a commander in an army of dandies. Glittering beaded scrollwork burst outwards from white frogging fastenings. Behind fringed shoulder pads, tracing the upper arms, purple ostrich feathers plumed with magnificence. It was these that had responded to Betty’s touch.

Her breath caught.

She could only stare at the tailcoat. A corona of illuminated dust swirled around its edges.

‘Lourdes…’ she said, the tangle beginning to unravel.

The light flickered; she looked up, the unfamiliar exhalation she could hear coming from a gas lamp.

She edged closer. This coat wasn’t designed to be still; every stitch buzzed with kinetic energy. She ran her fingers gently behind the lapel. Taffeta, but she knew that already. She could see every imperfection on the hand-sewn scrollwork. The ostrich feathers shivered in her tentative breath.

This must be the original. Lost to time, like its wearer.

It was the wearer and maker of this tailcoat right at the heart of the tangle.

Lourdes Larkspur. Born Laura Arkwright in Hoxton, North-East London, 1845. Music hall performer and diarist. Biddable? Never. Bookable? Sometimes. Bawdy? Always.

Betty looked around. Was this a museum? But there was no museum in the world which had any of Lourdes's belongings. There was nothing left of her, except the diaries left in Attie’s possession.

But this - she turned to the coat. She'd read about this. Her signature and prized possession - the garment which brought Lourdes Larkspur rollicking to life.

Betty circled the mannequin slowly. A faint cheer emerged from the darkness.

At the back - the ribbon threading through fastenings. Corseted with uncharacteristic patience, the whole thing had taken her months to create. It was a thing to be held by, to be known by, to be remembered by.

The sleeves are constructed, she'd written. Lawks, what a trial. Every time I think I reach a conclusion, another little detail reveals itself. This time, a frill on the ruff. When mother and father said I do the devil's work, I presume they surely meant embellishments for stagecraft.

Betty lifted the cuff, slipping her hand into the hollow where Lourdes's would have come out. She held it to the lamplight, and she noticed a smear of something white - make up? - which seemed fresh. She brought it to her nose. Violet water, exactly as Lourdes had recounted buying, and an unwashed smell which felt too intimate. She pulled away, and in doing so, noticed something off.

At the wrist there should have been a small spray of violets. For my dear Sappho at my right hand, and the ones who know, Lourdes had written.

It was missing. She turned the cuff over - nothing there either.

But even as she thought it, an invisible hand seemed to dart through the fabric, stitching the violets into the sleeve. One by one, they bloomed, and as they did, another light flared - a chandelier, spilling gold across the space.

She was on the edge of a stage.

She gasped. She knew it and did not know it at all. Wilton’s Music Hall - so close to Lourdes’s childhood streets, so often the theatre of her triumphs - cast into light before her.

Wilton's today knew Betty well. Soon-to-be Dr. Betty Trafford, she had spent hours in its cafe with research notes splayed, crafting, drafting, revising, her thesis: Bawd of it All: Wit, Subversion and Queer Identities in Female Performance in London Music Halls, 1865–1875.

This was not quite the Wilton’s she knew. Some things she recognised - the balcony encircling the room supported by barley-twist columns. The vaulted ceiling with its fretted ribs. The bare plaster on the walls. But in this hall, the seats were tighter. The lights hissed instead of buzzed. The wooden floor lay unevenly.

Though empty, Betty heard a muted clamour - yelling, jeering, cheering - rowdier than any respectful audience would dare today. She ushered the voices into this liminal space, straining to catch a single thread, the voice of a woman who sounded like the type to whip a drunken rabble into shape with the clearing of her throat, serve up irony sharper than an unripe plum, or make a double entendre out of a single measure of gin - anyone who might be her.

The chandelier had revealed a piano, and next to it a small drinks table, with a few sheets of well-worn paper on it.

‘Hello?’ she called, coming over to the table. There was no reply, save for the boisterous but faded crowd. She took a seat, picked up the sheets, and studied the staves they contained.

Oh my dear friend Laura,

How I do adore her,

I won't go to market,

So she calls me a bore, ah!

Betty's eyes took in the notes hungrily. She began to sight read, her fingers finding the keys with surprising ease. She recalled the words from Lourdes’s diary.

I read Goblin Market this afternoon and have exhausted myself with self love - if only I had my own Lizzie to my Laura, to save me from this longing!

A poem by Christina Rossetti, 1862. Two women. As close as two people get. Laura entranced by the fruit of the goblin men. Gorges until she wastes away with - well, something. Her friend, Lizzie, more prudent, self-disciplined, determined to save her friend. Endures the assault of the goblin men, offering herself to Laura to suck the juices from her body, until she is saved.

Betty had read the poem as a teenager, Lourdes’ diary not long after. At thirteen, she drew berries, pomegranates, wandering vines on her hi-tops. At eighteen, she had them tattooed on her inner thigh. Some readings of this poem, it seemed, had not changed in a century and a half.

The marital bliss of the final stanza? Well that was of no matter. It seemed as though Lourdes concurred.

Attie came by my lodgings this evening. She says the crowds were wild for her Female Hercules conquering the three-headed Cerberus, hoisting a trio of men clear above her head. Her troupe have a run at Wilton's so I have the rare pleasure of her company in our customary rooftop spot, her threatening she’ll fell my roof with her formidable Highland calves.

We sat together in London’s night air. I read her the poem while we drank sloe gin. Then we ran riot rewriting our own version. I already hear the chords dancing in my mind.

Lourdes had burned bright, but brief, it seemed. Born, a diary kept, a name inked on the 1871 census, and then … nothing. The notes of Up the Goblin Market had vanished into the wind, leaving only the echo of her audacity.

What became of Lourdes Larkspur?

History’s artefacts gave Betty nothing.

Her research had never promised revelations of this sort, yet the question wound itself through every conversation, every carefully catalogued note.

Did she die, brilliant but unappreciated? Or was she taken in some secret, dark way? Did she renounce Lourdes and Laura and become known by another name, another form? Did she live as a man? Did she leave London, try out her luck in the clubs of New York, or Berlin, or Paris?

Yet against all odds, somehow, Betty now held Up the Goblin Market at her fingertips, bringing to life the composition of Lourdes and her good friend - when in town - the strongest of women, Atlassie.

‘My intrepid Laura,

Pleader and implorer,

The people in the town,

Will say she’s a -’

(beat)

‘- deplorable…’

Lourdes’s lyrics were curved and definite, and ‘deplorable’ was dotted with a wicked grinning imp.

As Betty played and sang, more lights flickered into life. The audience’s clamour grew sharper, a swell of shouts and cheers, until a single heckler pierced through: ‘Mind your tongue, missus!’

‘Just like Lizzie!’ came the instantaneous reply - but not from Betty.

She stopped. That voice. Was that - Lourdes? She looked from wall to wall but it seemed to spring from nowhere - commanding and playful, sonorous yet easy.

‘My delightful Laura,’

Lourdes sang.

‘Syrupy explorer,

Without my sweet juices,

What do you live for-ah?’

One is supposed to have some sensible academic distance from the subject of study when completing a doctorate. Betty had worked hard to maintain academic seriousness with her supervisor. But to admit the truth at the heart of it, and say she went into her field thanks to a juvenile fantasy? Well, they weren’t about to put it on the prospectus.

Betty was not dispassionate about her subject - and passion can still be a dirty word.

‘My beloved Laura,

Writhing on the floor-ah,

Why do you get all the fun?

Laura, give me more-ah.’

Betty went to turn the page when she noticed that, on the table beside her, a few small bottles and a glass had appeared, glinting in the lamplight. She leaned over. Absinthe, sloe gin, wine.

Her lip curled.

‘Too easy,’ she said, pouring the gin, thinking of the memories Lourdes had recorded in her ornamental hand: she and Atlassie on the rooftop, the night pressed close around them, singing through smoke and into time.

A vast backdrop unfurled at the back of the stage. More sheet music, this time going from floor to ceiling. Betty hummed the melody: these words she did not recognise. It was slower than Goblin Market. The melody lilted, as though reaching for something. Her fingers found the notes and she sang:

‘She looks at the buildings in old London town,

She looks at the stars in the sky,

The lights blink at her and she blinks back,

But her gaze always passes me by, me by,

Her gaze always passes me by.

‘I know her from coins in the wishing well,

I know her from whispers and dreams,

I think that I’m out there caught in her mind’s eye,

Won’t she ever look back here at me.’

‘At me,’ sang a voice from the front row.

Betty turned sharply. The sound of the crowd fell away.

‘Won’t she ever look back here at me.’

There, in the very centre of the front row, sat a woman with her arms folded, head tilted. She’d never described herself in her diary. But there she was. Dark ringlets were piled high, framing a heart-shaped face. Her eyes, wider set than convention thought beautiful, were a piercing, icy blue, that startled Betty. She pouted: her chin pointed to a heart-shaped face. Atlassie called her a sprite, and Betty could see why.

There she was - not killed, not reinvented, not disappeared. Alive, and here, and very, very human.

At last Betty spoke.

‘What happened to you?’

It was all she could think to ask.

‘This,’ said Lourdes. ‘This is happening to me.’

‘I mean - in your life.’

Lourdes laughed. ‘This is my life,’ she said.

‘But where do you go?’ asked Betty.

Lourdes shrugged. ‘Wherever you take me, I suppose.’ She held her arms open. ‘You understand what’s happening here, don’t you?’

‘But -’ frowned Betty. ‘You only just met me.’

‘I hardly think so,’ she said, getting up from her seat. ‘I have always had one eye on the future.’

She began a slow approach toward the stage, her steps deliberate, each pause an invitation, her glance returning again and again to Betty, who got up from the piano.

‘The future …’ said Betty. ‘It would have been kinder to Laura and Lizzie.’

‘No goblins?’

‘Some goblins. But less domesticity,’ she said. ‘Unless that’s your thing.’

Lourdes tilted her head.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘That's a different flavour.’

As she ascended the stage she lifted the coat from its mannequin and slipped it on. She wore it so well. From a pocket she drew out a handful of raspberries, crushed them in her palm until the juice dripped darkly between her fingers. She offered her hand to Betty.

‘Eat me,’ she murmured. ‘Drink me. Make much of me.’

‘And then -’ Betty whispered, taking her hand and closing the space between them until they touched. ‘Come with me.’