Capeworld Comics

The first few days were difficult, so difficult that Cora would not have been able to endure them if Esmee wasn’t by her side. But she was. She never left Cora. When Cora woke up in the little house Ernst, Morton, and Glass had purchased for her, Esmee greeted her with breakfast.

 

Cora never ate alone, but she was the only one that ate anything. Esmee wasn’t the kind of ghost that could consume food and water. She was weaker than Cora in that aspect, but far stronger than her in so many other aspects. When Cora followed the dictates of her object impression and walked through the winding corridors of Chopin Street, Esmee was with her. When she retired to her house and went to sleep, Esmee stayed awake as her ever-watchful guardian. Neither Cora nor Esmee needed sleep. They both could have stayed awake forever if they so wished. But sleep felt natural to Cora, and it helped her alleviate the great stress of those first few days, and so she regularly slept long, peaceful hours where she and the world dissolved together, leaving behind only a deep and abiding calm.

 

But in order for her to sleep, Esmee had to stay awake. Cora could not stand the thought of being asleep, alone, with the man watching her, though she knew her fear was irrational.

The Werewolf was always there, watching her from a distance like a wolf waiting for a sheep to wander close, but Esmee was always there too, and Cora could have endured the silent glares of a thousand Werewolves with her by her side. But the man was not as bad as the people.

 

The people gathered to watch her walk Chopin Street as if they came to watch a monkey pace around her cage at the zoo. The crowds were thick enough to be a wall of clothing stretching from one end of the street to the other. Cora had only ever seen so many people gathered together back during the Thames settlement. They muttered about a whore ghost, a wicked ghost, a ghost who entered into the sad quasi-existence of a manes because she foolishly wagered her safety against the kindness of her lowlife customers one too many times.

 

Cora couldn’t understand why they never spoke up. She could hear them perfectly. And it’s not like they cared whether or not she heard them, so why were they so quiet? Why did they only curse her when her back was turned to them?

“Look at how God has punished her.” they said to one another. “God has taken her skin and left her with air, for she dishonored her flesh.” Cora could take only a little comfort in the fact that most of their eyes were not on her, but on the man. The people truly acted like visitors to a zoo, and the man was the star lion of that zoo while she was a mere dirty monkey.

 

But after the first handful of days, things started to change.

 

People began to ignore the man. He didn’t talk. All he did was stare, and while his leering, shadowed face was bone-chilling, it lost its effect over time. A horror that could only be a horror grew boring over time until it ceased to be frightening. People began to talk to Cora, though what they said was brief and repetitive.

 

“You’re the ghost of Agnes Little?” they would ask, as if she could be anything else.

“Yes, I am.” she would reply. “But please call me Cora.”

 

“Oh. Very well. May God help you, Cora.”

 

That was the extent of her early interactions with the crowd, but Esmee reminded her that it was normal for people to be reticent around newly discovered ghosts. Ghosts, after all, came in many varieties. Some could kill with a touch. Some could kill without even that slight degree of contact. Cora had a lot of time on her hands now that she didn’t have to worry about feeding herself or keeping the lights on and so she spent that time improving her reading with the help of Esmee, who was very well-read for a woman, and she practiced her reading by catching up on issues of Illustrated Phantom Stories.

 

One story told how two extremely powerful ghosts, who called themselves Gog and Magog, established themselves as the rulers of the London ruins and all the ghosts that gathered there. When the ghosts started to follow surviving humans to Blackwall, Gog and Magog blamed the flight of their subjects on the steam beast companies that built Blackwall and retaliated by picking up stones and throwing them–all the way down the Thames to Blackwall. Their throws were the stuff of mythology. Each stone was the size of a house, each toss covered miles, and each impact left a crater and a demolished steam beast, never again to spit steam into the air and perform construction.

 

Gog and Magog were proof that one could never be too careful when it came to recently discovered ghosts. But eventually, the crowd figured out that they had nothing to fear from Cora. The only thing that made her stand out from the average ghost was that her bodily impression was relatively strong. She looked like a human, even up close, and could taste food and drink. Only on occasion did her ectoplasmic body flicker like a bolt of lightning and reveal that she was something not human. She was very approachable, for a ghost, and very soon people were asking her about her life.

 

It was difficult for her to share, at first, but only at first. She shared everything, about how her mother and her father made found the same mistake in each other, but her mother bore the brunt of the consequences, about how she grew up promising herself not to repeat her mother’s mistake only to be realize too late that she inherited her mother’s weakness for gentlemen promises, about how she was left a ruined woman with no education, no prospects, and no hope save begging or prostitution.

 

Either way, she would have to work the streets, but her experience taught her that the lust of men was more reliable than their kindness, so she chose prostitution.

 

She explained that she regretted the immorality of her decision, but that could not find fault in her logic.

 

Most of the people she shared with were sympathetic. Even those that saw prostitutes as the purest root of societal corruption felt that she had suffered greatly. But some of them did laugh when she bared her heart to them, just as she feared they would. Some of them turned up their nose at her and cooly, cruelly stated “Such are the wages of your sin. Did you complain about your money as well as your consequences?” These cruel individuals discouraged Cora and made her reconsider the manesologists’ plan–until she noticed that the man’s appearance was gradually changing.

 

The manesologists were right about her reputation. As she talked to more and more people, she transformed herself in their minds. She transformed from one of many victims of the Werewolf of Blackwall to Cora, a woman with a past, present, and, she hoped, a future.

 

And as her reputation grew, the man shrank. He was still a shrouded figure, his face masked in perpetual darkness, but he no longer loomed like he used to. Cora could look at him without having to look up at him.

 

As Cora sharpened her literacy under Esmee, she began to read publications with the aim of answering questions she always had about the government and their regulation of the brothel business. She always wondered why it was that policemen could stop a woman suspected of being a prostitute–which meant any woman, really, that did not have a man of known character to speak for her own character–and examine her for social diseases. Cora had long suspected that policemen made up the law to act out their fantasies of inserting objects into women without paying for it, but she learned that it was indeed the law.

 

Back in 1864, a year before the destruction of London, the military learned that nearly a quarter of their soldiers were afflicted with social diseases, and so parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Act to ensure, through gross violations of civil liberties, the health of the troops of the British Empire. Prostitutes would now be licensed. Their cleanliness would be ensured. They would be examined by policemen at-will and if found to have a social disease would be placed in a lock hospital until their health could be certified.

 

Unsurprisingly to those with a little sense, the Contagious Diseases Act had no effect on the prevalence of social diseases in the armed forces. Persecuting the supply did not limit the voracious demand.

 

“We commit our sins and we are punished for them. But why are we the only ones?” Cora asked the crowd during her walks through Chopin Street. “The law was passed because soldiers kept coming down with social diseases. But why are they not punished? Why are they not subjected to the same humiliating, degrading, examinations?”

 

Cora was amazed to find that many people didn’t know how abusive the Contagious Diseases Act was. She had always assumed that they knew, but just didn’t care, but she found that that was not the case at all. Even Dr. Glass, who she held to be the wisest person on Earth, was ignorant of the abuses. “I believed the law was for the benefit of the women and the betterment of public health,” he admitted. “I believed it was to get them off the street and into hospitals. I had no idea they were so brutalized.”

 

Cora found that the world was more ignorant but less malicious than she thought. The world was, on the whole, more innocent than she thought, and that lightened her heart.

Cora began to attract the attention of reformers, men and women who not only agreed with Cora that the Contagious Diseases Act needed to be repealed but believed that they could get it done through public discourse. Some of the so-called “reformers” were merely men and women that made a little song-and-dance about caring for fallen women just so they could feel good about themselves. They treated Cora as a prop, as something to shake hands with and then move on from, but others truly were reformers, others truly fought tooth and nail to make the world a better place. One reformer in particular became a close friend of Cora–Josephine Butler, a founder of the International Abolitionist Federation, a group dedicated to ending the state regulation of prostitution.

 

Josephine had accepted fallen women into her Oxford home. She had uncovered the horrible secrets of licensed, “legitimate” brothel owners, pimps, and policemen who profited on a system that coerced girls as young as 13 into sex work. In return for her investigative work, she had been threatened, assaulted, and chased through the streets. Pimps and brothel madams saw Josephine as their greatest enemy, for while their girls hated the Contagious Diseases Act, they loved it, as it gave them a certificate they could point to and say “Our girls are all clean.”

 

An angry pimp had even tossed a bucket of cow dung on her and threatened to burn her alive during one of her speeches. But nothing stopped her. She had the work of God to perform.

 

At first, Cora felt very uncomfortable in Josephine’s presence, for Josephine was a pious woman, the wife of an Anglican divine and schoolmaster named George. She was a wife, and a mother, and by all measures she was a successful woman, and in comparison Cora was nothing more than trash. But Josephine reassured her that God hated the sin, not the sinner, and though Cora was responsible for the direction her life took, there were elements of the world that were unduly cruel to her, elements that could be changed so that the world would be kinder to later generations of women,

 

Cora thought Josephine was a very remarkable woman, easily as remarkable as the manesologists. She was a prolific writer, Cora wasn’t even aware that there were any women writers, and she was interested in recording Cora’s experience as a fallen woman in a booklet.

 

Cora told her everything she could, and in exchange Josephine told Cora about herself. Josephine understood misery. At the age of 17, she found a suicide hanging from a tree while riding. This challenged her faith, but her faith emerged from the challenge galvanized and strengthened. As a young mother, her youngest child, little Evangeline, fell off a bannister and died. Again, her faith was challenged, but again, it emerged ever stronger.

Cora believed that she herself knew the extent of the world’s cruelty. But she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose a child, couldn’t imagine what she would have done in Josephine’s place.

 

Josephine’s faith had given her a resilience that Cora saw as nearly superhuman, yet the most remarkable thing about it was that Josephine claimed this resilience was available to everyone–even Cora herself. Josephine was fond of saying that God and one woman made a majority. Cora loved that saying.

 

Josephine had many ideas for improving the world, ideas that Cora believed were wonderful, though strange. Josephine and her International Abolitionist Federation believed, like many did, that marriage was the best thing for a woman or man, but they also saw that marriage was not an equal option for men and women. An unmarried man could still earn a living, but an unmarried woman either had to marry–a difficult feat if a man had ruined her–beg, or go into prostitution. To reduce the tempting incentives of prostitution, they proposed the education of women, particularly the learning of a trade. Cora wouldn’t have believed anyone would have cared for an educated woman, but Josephine was proof that someone clearly did. Josephine was one of the most educated people Cora knew. She particularly had an interest in Italian culture and spoke the language fluently.

 

Josephine and the International Abolitionist Federation also believed in female suffrage, which Cora thought was a joke the first time she heard it. When, in the history of the world, did women vote on anything? At least with the concept of an educated woman, Josephine could produce herself as evidence, but if history had gone this long without women voting in elections, Cora believed that the idea was far-fetched.

 

Less far-fetched to Cora, however, was their belief that they could put an end to licensed prostitution and the physical examinations it allowed, examinations Josephine called “steel rape.’ which Cora knew from bitter experience to be an accurate term. Cora knew that prostitution wasn’t always regulated. It only began in 1864. Cora could see no reason why the world couldn’t return to 1863.

 

As Cora spent her days with Josephine, the man grew even smaller and paler. He was short for a man, but now he was the size of a child. His obscured stare no longer held the strength it once had. Now it seemed almost comical, as if he were an obstinate little boy glaring at his mother. Esmee no longer had to watch Cora sleep, which freed her up to return to her work at Ernst, Morton, and Glass. There were other ghosts that needed Esmee’s help, and Cora was glad that Esmee could go to them now that she didn’t have to worry about her.

 

One day, Josephine presented Cora with a copy of a booklet recording everything Cora had told her with Josephine’s comments. It was the most flattering gift Cora had ever received. Josephine assured her that the booklet had been warmly received by an interested multitude. Even as they spoke, it was being printed and presented around the English speaking world and would soon be translated in several different languages. There was a copy in the office library of Ernst, Morton, and Glass and all three manesologists plus Esmee owned a copy.

 

Josephine had titled the booklet The Morning Cometh. When Cora asked her why she gave it that title, she answered that it was in reference to the great victory she had won over the little goblin that squatted in her shadow. He had clung to her like a long and awful night. He had reduced her to a corpse, then to a running victim for several years. But nights could not last forever, and when the morning came, Cora proved to be the radiant dawn, and she reduced the dark shadow down to next-to-nothing.

 

Josephine went further in her praise of Cora. She had a way with words and when she got going, she was able to put a great deal of emotion behind them. Josephine said it was the Italian in her. She actually likened Cora’s story to the resurrection of Christ, and if Cora had the blood to blush with, she would have.

 

Hearing Josephine explain the title caused Cora to remember something Dr. Martin Glass told her many, many nights ago when she had just learned the truth about herself and was frightened.

 

“You have had an awful night, but now comes the morning.”