Today is a blur, yesterday is lost in fog and the day before that gone completely.
The calendar on the wall tells me it is October, 1980, and the nurses have drawn a red circle on the 13th, which is my birthday. I was born in the year of our Lord, 1880, so this year I will turn one hundred. It is an incomprehensible age. When I am asked to what I attribute my good health, I have no real answer. I ate all the wrong foods: white bread and sugar, red meat and little fruit. However, in my favor, I rarely drank and never touched opium, hashish nor laudanum, because I never wanted to lose control. I have seen, too often, what happened to women who lost control. I never smoked cigarettes, but not for health reasons; when I was growing up, a lady never smoked.
Though my recent past is gone and faded, the further back I go, the clearer the images and memories become. When I scroll back through the years, the fog of memory clears and I remember who I was, and what I was.
Today, the nurses call me Miss Lundy and the young doctors rather familiarly call me Katherine. They ask about the past, and if I remember the Wars—First and Second—or rationing, and they wonder if I was in Dublin for the Easter Rising? And I do, I remember it all and yes I was in the city for that terrible week in 1916.
But I prefer to remember the city before the Irish revolutionaries and the British army fought in the streets and changed it forever. I lived there during its heyday, when it was beautiful, elegant, and cultured, the second capital of the Empire . . . though, like most cities, there was another side to it: diseased and pox-ridden, with one of the highest child mortality rates in Europe, home to the first venereal diseases hospital in the world.
Society knew me as Katherine Lundy, a widow—though, in truth, I had never married. By day, I was a society hostess, elegant, refined, and reserved, but like the city, I too had a dark side. When night fell, I became Madam Kitten, sometimes called The Whoremistress—though never to my face. I ran one of the most exclusive brothels in the city and my tentacles ran deep into Dublin’s underworld.
What a time that was!
I may not be able to remember yesterday, but I do remember the woman I was half a century and more ago, the life I lived and the man I loved. He was a policeman and it was a crime which brought us together. He believed I had stolen the Irish Crown Jewels.
Katherine Lundy woke at five minutes before noon. Even if she had only been to bed with the dawn, she would open her eyes just before the city trembled with the sound of the noon-day bells. In a city divided by religion, the bells simply marked midday for the Protestant and Church of Ireland Dubliners, but for the majority Catholic faithful, they were a call to prayer.
Absently counting down the peals, Katherine sat up in bed and settled back on the pillows. On cue, as the last of the chimes faded, there was a discreet tap on the bedroom door. Katherine started to smile as Tilly Cusack appeared, carrying a tray with tea, toast, and the morning papers.
“Why do I employ maids, when you insist on bringing me tea every morning . . .” Katherine began and then stopped. The flame-haired, red-cheeked woman was followed by a large shaven-headed man whose thick ears and twisted nose suggested a former career as a boxer. Katherine’s smile faded: she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Mickey Woods had stood in her private chambers. “Good morning, Mickey.”
“Good morning, ma’am, though technically,” he added, “it’s more of an afternoon.” The huge man stood at the foot of the bed and twirled a grease-shined bowler hat in his hands as Tilly poured tea from a solid silver service into almost transparent china.
“I take it we have a problem,” Katherine said finally.
“A situation,” Mickey said in a whisper. In his youth, a jezail bullet had damaged his larynx during the Battle of Maiwand, rendering him incapable of raising his voice.
Tilly perched on the end of the bed. On other mornings, she would quickly run through the events of the previous night in the score of houses owned and controlled by Madam Kitten: the number of guests, the amount of food, drink, laudanum, and opium consumed, the most popular girls and boys—and, the all-important profit at the end of the night. Tilly would also report if the services of Mickey, or one of the twenty men under his command, had been called upon.
“Well, it cannot be too bad,” Katherine said, “at least you’ve not killed someone tonight.”
“Not tonight,” he rasped. “How did you know?”
“You’re still wearing your work clothes and boots. And there’s no blood on them. You’ve not washed your hands, and your knuckles are not bruised.”
The big man looked down at his hands and grinned. “Could have used a shillelagh,” he suggested. He carried a short length of iron-hard blackthorn tucked into his belt.