Sundark: An Elle Black Penny Dread

Chapter One

On a humble street of Camden Town, amongst the tiny cottages of worker families and their green vegetable gardens, a small row of red-brick villas sat, facing one of the few paved streets. They were modest in size, only two stories, and edged with low iron fences protecting strips of trim flower bushes. Pensioners and lowly clerks might be found dwelling within. In the small walled gardens in back, herbs, fruit, and vegetables thrived from the recent spring rain, wet laundry swayed in the breeze, and on one plot a chicken coop stood, belonging to retired Royal Navy Lieutenant Elmer Montague.

 Next to Lt Montague’s home and in the middle of the row, a villa’s entryway could be distinguished from the rest by the presence of a marble sphinx, her hair in curls and a shawl sculpted over her shoulders and leonine back. She smiled with her great paws laid out before her and didn’t seem to mind that the top of her bosom peeked above her lace-trimmed bodice. Behind her, the red front door shone in the afternoon sunlight, and its polished black iron doorknocker gleamed.

 Mrs Haggins, an older woman with silvered hair, walked down the sidewalk and turned for the gate leading to the red door. She carried a basket filled with sundries: soap for the dishes and laundry, a bottle of aspirin, a tin of black pepper, a paper bag of peppermints, a ball of white string, a sponge, a box of matches, and a copy of the magazine An Englishwoman’s Friend. The date on the cover read: Monday, 15th March, year 1880. She opened the door and laid the magazine on the foyer’s console table. She removed her bonnet and shawl and passed the parlour entrance for the kitchen, where she retrieved an apron and disappeared within.

 The parlour was bright with sunlight that shone on the red throw rugs and stuffed chairs. A low fire in the fireplace crackled and warmed the room and several framed daguerreotypes and tintypes dotted the mantle. One tintype showed a man in a pith helmet, sitting astride a camel before an Egyptian pyramid. In the family portrait by the tintype, the same man stood with a woman, a dark-haired girl, and smaller blond boy.

 Next to the portrait was another of a proud, blond man. But farther behind it lay a silver-framed daguerreotype of a dark-haired gentleman with pencil moustache and heavy-lidded eyes. It stood behind a terracotta Egyptian sphinx and a sandstone statuette of Bastet. And lying between Bastet and a mantle clock covered in red velvet was a framed cabinet card. In the photograph, a beautiful, tall blonde woman in a light-coloured dress brightly smiled. Her breast was pinned with a cascade of flowers. She stood arm in arm with a smaller dark-haired woman in dour black whose eyes were darkened with kohl and who wore a similar corsage on her chest. Head slightly tilted, she gazed at the camera sceptically. The card’s bottom border bore, along with the photography studio’s name imprinted in gold, the inscribed words: MARRIED 22nd of June, 1878.

 As the mantle clock ticked, a paper rustled in the room. Mrs Elle Black, aged twenty-four, sat by the windows facing the street and read The Times.

 Clad in a grey-trimmed black housedress with three-quarter sleeves, white lace cuffs, a white bodice front, black buttons, and white cravat, she looked the picture of a proper middle-class English wife except for certain peculiarities. Her upswept hair, perhaps originally auburn, was dyed with henna to a shade of deep red and smelled of cloves, which she had added to the colouring to achieve the red’s darkness. Her hazel eyes were lined with kohl, and her lips had the light paint of rouge.

 Whenever deliverymen or postmen came to the house and caught sight of Mrs Black, they could not help but wonder what manner of man or men such an exotic kept company with. In conversation they found her pleasant, but eventually her black-rimmed gaze stared overly long as if she sought answers deep within their souls, and this prompt many to hastily take their leave and bid a good day.

 She had just finished bottling ginger beer she’d been brewing in the basement, dusting the shelves that displayed Faedra’s markswoman medals, her sterling silver tennis cup, her archery cup, the silver-framed photograph of the girls’ cricket team of Miss Head’s School (from which a younger Faedra, leaning on her bat, gave a brilliant smile), spot-cleaning the hallway carpeting, sweeping all the rooms, and running her mechanical carpet sweeper over the rest of the rugs.