Mrs Stiles watches me do it, with a curious expression. I never lie quite still until Barbara comes.
Meanwhile my uncle observes my work and finds my letters, my hand, my voice, greatly improved. He is used occasionally to entertaining gentlemen at Briar: now he has me stand for them and read. I read from foreign texts, not understanding the matter I am made to recite; and the gentlemen—like Mrs Stiles—watch me strangely. I grow used to that. When I have finished, at my uncle’s instruction I curtsey. I curtsey well. The gentlemen clap, then come to shake or stroke my hand. They tell me, often, how rare I am. I believe myself a kind of prodigy, and pink under their gazes.
So white blooms blush, before they curl and tumble. One day I arrive at my uncle’s room to find my little desk removed, and a place made ready for me among his books. He sees my look, and beckons me to him.
‘Take off your gloves,’ he says. I do, and shudder to touch the surfaces of common things. It is a cold, still, sunless day. I have been at Briar, then, two years. My cheek is round as a child’s, and my voice is high. I have not yet begun to bleed as women do.
‘Well, Maud,’ says my uncle. ‘At last you cross the finger of brass, and come to my books. You are about to learn the proper quality of your vocation. Are you afraid?’
‘A little, sir.’
‘You do well to be. For here is fearful matter. You think me a scholar, hmm?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, I am more than that. I am a curator of poisons. These books—look, mark them! mark them well!—they are the poisons I mean. And this—’ Here he reverently puts his hand upon the great pile of ink-stained papers that litter his desk—‘this is their Index. This will guide others in their collection and proper study. There is no work on the subject so perfect as this will be, when it is complete. I have devoted many years to its construction and revision; and shall devote many more, as the work requires it. I have laboured so long among poisons I am immune to them, and my aim has been to make you immune, that you might assist me. My eyes—do you look at my eyes, Maud.’ He takes off his spectacles and brings his face to mine; and I flinch, as once before, from the sight of his soft and naked face—yet see now, too, what the coloured lenses hide: a certain film, or milkiness, upon the surface of his eye. ‘My eyes grow weak,’ he says, replacing his glasses. ‘Your sight shall save my own. Your hand shall be my hand. For you come here with naked fingers, while in the ordinary world—the commonplace world, outside this chamber—the men who handle vitriol and arsenic must do so with their flesh guarded. You are not like them. This is your proper sphere. I have made it so. I have fed you poison, by scruple and grain. Now comes the larger dose.’
He turns and takes a book from his shelves, then hands it to me, pressing my fingers hard about it.
‘Keep this from others. Remember the rareness of our work. It will seem queer, to the eyes and ears of the untutored. They will think you tainted, should you tell. You understand me? I have touched your lip with poison, Maud. Remember.’
The book is called The Curtain Drawn Up, or the Education of Laura. I sit alone, and turn the cover; and understand at last the matter I have read, that has provoked applause from gentlemen.
The world calls it pleasure. My uncle collects it—keeps it neat, keeps it ordered, on guarded shelves; but keeps it strangely—not for its own sake, no, never for that; rather, as it provides fuel for the satisfying of a curious lust.
I mean, the lust of the bookman.
‘See here, Maud,’ he will say to me softly, drawing back the glass doors of his presses, passing his fingers across the covers of the texts he has exposed. ‘Do you note the marbling upon these papers, the morocco of this spine, the gilt edge? Observe this tooling, look.’ He tilts the book to me but, jealously, will not let me take it. ‘Not yet, not yet! Ah, see this one, also. Black-letter; the titles, look, picked out in red. The capitals flowered, the margin as broad as the text. What extravagance! And this! Plain board; but see here, the frontispiece’—the picture is of a lady reclined on a couch, a gentleman beside her, his member bare and crimson at the tip—‘done after Borel, most rare. I had this as a young man from a stall at Liverpool, for a shilling. I should not part with it now, for fifty pounds.—Come, come!’ He has seen me blush. ‘No schoolgirl modesty here! Did I bring you to my house, and teach you the ways of my collection, to see you colour? Well, no more of that. Here is work, not leisure. You will soon forget the substance, in the scrutiny of the form.’
So he says to me, many times. I do not believe him. I am thirteen. The books fill me, at first, with a kind of horror: for it seems a frightful thing, that children, in becoming women and men, should do as they describe—get lusts, grow secret limbs and cavities, be prone to fevers, to crises, seek nothing but the endless joining together of smarting flesh. I imagine my mouth, stopped up with kisses. I imagine the parting of my legs. I imagine myself fingered and pierced . . . I am thirteen, as I have said. The fear gives way to restlessness: I begin to lie each night at Barbara’s side, wakeful while she sleeps on; one time I put back the blanket to study the curve of her breast. Then I take to watching her as she bathes and dresses. Her legs—that I know from my uncle’s books should be smooth—are dark with hair; the place between them—which I know should be neat, and fair—darkest of all. That troubles me. Then at last, one day, she catches me gazing.
‘What are you looking at?’ she says.
‘Your cunt,’ I answer. ‘Why is it so black?’
She starts away from me as if in horror, lets her skirt fall, puts her hands before her breast. Her cheek flares crimson. ‘Oh!’ she cries. ‘I never did! Where did you learn such words?’
‘From my uncle,’ I say.
‘Oh, you liar! Your uncle’s a gentleman. I’ll tell Mrs Stiles!’
She does. I think Mrs Stiles will hit me; instead, like Barbara, she starts back. But then, she takes up a block of soap and, while Barbara holds me, she presses the soap into my mouth—presses it hard, then passes it back and forth across my lips and tongue.
‘Speak like a devil, will you?’ she says as she does it. ‘Like a slut and a filthy beast? Like your own trash mother? Will you? Will you?’
Then she lets me fall, and stands and wipes her hands convulsively upon her apron. She has Barbara keep to her own bed, from that night on; and she makes her keep the door between our rooms ajar, and put out a light.
‘Thank God she wears gloves, at least,’ I hear her say. ‘That may keep her from further mischief . . .’
I wash my mouth, until my tongue grows cracked, and bleeds; I weep and weep; but still taste lavender. I think my lip must have poison in it, after all.
But soon, I do not care. My cunt grows dark as Barbara’s, I understand my uncle’s books to be filled with falsehoods, and I despise myself for having supposed them truths. My hot cheek cools, my colour dies, the heat quite fades from my limbs. The restlessness turns all to scorn. I become what I was bred to be. I become a librarian.
‘The Lustful Turk,’ my uncle might say, looking up from his papers. ‘Where do we have it?’
‘We have it here, Uncle,’ I will answer.—For within a year I know the place of every book upon his shelves. I know the plan of his great index—his Universal Bibliography of Priapus and Venus. For to Priapus and Venus he has devoted me, as other girls are apprenticed to the needle or the loom.
I know his friends—those gentlemen who visit, and still hear me recite. I know them now for publishers, collectors, auctioneers—enthusiasts of his work. They send him books—more books each week—and letters:
‘ “Mr Lilly: on the Cleland. Grivet of Paris claims no knowledge of the lost, sodomitical matter. Shall I pursue?” ’
My uncle hears me read, his eyes creased hard behind their lenses.
‘What think you, Maud?’ he says. ‘—Well, never mind it now. We must leave the Cleland to languish, and hope for more in the spring. So, so. Let me see . . .’ He divides the slips of paper upon his de
sk. ‘Now, The Festival of the Passions. Have we still the second volume, on loan from Hawtrey? You must copy it, Maud . . .’
‘I will,’ I say.
You think me meek. How else should I answer? Once, early on, I forget myself, and yawn. My uncle studies me. He has taken his pen from his page, and slowly rolls its nib.
‘It appears you find your occupation dull,’ he says at last. ‘Perhaps you would like to return to your room.’ I say nothing. ‘Should you like it?’
‘Perhaps, sir,’ I say, after a moment.
‘Perhaps. Very good. Put back your book then, and go. But, Maud—’ This last, as I cross to the door. ‘Do you instruct Mrs Stiles to keep the fuel from your fire. You don’t suppose I shall pay, to keep you warm in idleness, hmm?’
I hesitate, then go. This is, again, in winter—it seems always winter there! I sit wrapped in my coat until made to dress for dinner. But at the table, when Mr Way brings the food to my plate, my uncle stops him. ‘No meat,’ he says, laying a napkin across his lap, ‘for idle girls. Not in this house.’
Then Mr Way takes the platter away. Charles, his boy, looks sorry. I should like to strike him. Instead I must sit, twisting my hands into the fabric of my skirt, biting down my rage as I once swallowed tears, hearing the sliding of the meat upon my uncle’s ink-stained tongue, until I am dismissed.
Next day at eight o’clock, I return to my work; and am careful never to yawn again.
I grow taller, in the months that follow. I become slender and more pale. I become handsome. I outgrow my skirts and gloves and slippers.—My uncle notes it, vaguely, and instructs Mrs Stiles to cut me new gowns to the pattern of the old. She does, and makes me sew them. I believe she must take a sort of malicious pleasure from the dressing of me to suit his fancy; then again, perhaps in her grief for her daughter she has forgotten that little girls are meant to turn out women. Anyway, I have been too long at Briar, and draw a comfort, now, from regularity. I have grown used to my gloves and my hard-boned gowns, and flinch at the first unloosening of the strings. Undressed, I seem to feel myself as naked and unsafe as one of my uncle’s lenseless eyes.
Asleep, I am sometimes oppressed by dreams. Once I fall into a fever, and a surgeon sees me. He is a friend of my uncle’s and has heard me read. He fingers the soft flesh beneath my jaw, puts his thumbs to my cheeks, draws down my eye-lids. ‘Are you troubled,’ he says, ‘with uncommon thoughts? Well, we must expect that. You are an uncommon girl.’ He strokes my hand and prescribes me a medicine—a single drop to be taken in a cup of water—‘for restlessness’. Barbara puts out the mixture, while Mrs Stiles looks on.
Then Barbara leaves me, to be married, and I am given another maid. Her name is Agnes. She is small, and slight as a bird—one of those little, little birds that men bring down with nets. She has red hair and white skin marked with freckles, like paper foxed with damp. She is fifteen, innocent as butter. She thinks my uncle kind. She thinks me kind, at first. She reminds me of myself, as I once was. She reminds me of myself as I once was and ought still to be, and will never be again. I hate her for it. When she is clumsy, when she is slow, I hit her. That makes her clumsier. Then I hit her again. That makes her weep. Her face, behind her tears, keeps still its look of mine. I beat her the harder, the more I fancy the resemblance.
So my life passes. You might suppose I would not know enough of ordinary things, to know it queer. But I read other books besides my uncle’s; and overhear the talk of servants, and catch their looks, and so, by that—by the curious and pitying glances of parlourmaids and grooms!—I see well enough the oddity I have become.
I am as worldly as the grossest rakes of fiction; but have never, since I first came to my uncle’s house, been further than the walls of its park. I know everything. I know nothing. You must remember this, in what follows. You must remember what I cannot do, what I have not seen. I cannot, for example, sit a horse, or dance. I have never held a coin in order to spend it. I have never seen a play, a railway, a mountain, or a sea.
I have never seen London; and yet, I think I know it, too. I know it, from my uncle’s books. I know it lies upon a river—which is the same river, grown very much broader, that runs beyond his park. I like to walk beside the water, thinking of this. There is an ancient, overturned punt there, half rotted away—the holes in its hull a perpetual mockery, it seems to me, of my confinement; but I like to sit upon it, gazing at the rushes at the water’s edge. I remember the Bible story, of the child that was placed in a basket and was found by the daughter of a king. I should like to find a child. I should like it, not to keep it!—but to take its place in the basket and leave it at Briar to grow up to be me. I think often of the life I would have, in London; and of who might claim me.
That is when I am still young, and given to fancies. When I am older I do not walk by the river so much as stand at the windows of the house and gaze at where I know the water flows. I stand at my own casement, for many hours at a time. And in the yellow paint that covers the glass of the windows of my uncle’s library I one day, with my finger-nail, make a small and perfect crescent, to which I afterwards occasionally lean and place my eye—like a curious wife at the keyhole of a cabinet of secrets.
But I am inside the cabinet, and long to get out . . .
I am seventeen when Richard Rivers comes to Briar with a plot and a promise and the story of a gullible girl who can be fooled into helping me do it.
8.
I have said it was my uncle’s custom, occasionally to invite interested gentlemen to the house, to take a supper with us and, later, hear me read. He does so now.
‘Make yourself neat tonight, Maud,’ he says to me, as I stand in his library buttoning up my gloves. ‘We shall have guests. Hawtrey, Huss, and another fellow, a stranger. I hope to employ him with the mounting of our pictures.’
Our pictures. There are cabinets, in a separate study, filled with drawers of lewd engravings, that my uncle has collected in a desultory sort of manner, along with his books. He has often spoken of taking on some man to trim and mount them, but has never found a man to match the task. One needs a quite particular character, for work of that sort.
He catches my eye, thrusts out his lips. ‘Hawtrey claims to have a gift for us, besides. An edition of a text we have not catalogued.’
‘That is great news, sir.’
Perhaps I speak drily; but my uncle, though a dry man himself, does not mark it. He only puts his hand to the slips of paper before him and divides the heap into two uneven piles. ‘So, so. Let me see . . .’
‘May I leave you, Uncle?’
He looks up. ‘Has the hour struck?’
‘It has, I believe.’
He draws out from his pocket his chiming watch and holds it to his ear. The key to his library door—sewn about, at the stem, with faded velvet—swings noiselessly beside it. He says, ‘Go on then, go on. Leave an old man to his books. Go and play, but—gently, Maud.’
‘Yes, Uncle.’
Now and then I wonder how he supposes I spend my hours, when not engaged by him. I think he is too used to the particular world of his books, where time passes strangely, or not at all, and imagines me an ageless child. Sometimes that is how I imagine myself—as if my short, tight gowns and velvet sashes keep me bound, like a Chinese slipper, to a form I should otherwise outleap. My uncle himself—who is at this time, I suppose, not quite above fifty—I have always considered to have been perfectly and permanently aged; as flies remain aged, yet fixed and unchanging, in cloudy chips of amber.
I leave him squinting at a page of text. I walk very quietly, in soft-soled shoes. I go to my rooms, where Agnes is.
I find her at work at a piece of sewing. She sees me come, and flinches. Do you know how provoking such a flinch will seem, to a temperament like mine? I stand and watch her sew. She feels my gaze, and begins to shake. Her stitches grow long and crooked. At last I take the needle from her hand and gently put the point of it against her flesh; then draw it off; the
n put it back; then do this, six or seven times more, until her knuckles are marked between the freckles with a rash of needle-pricks.
‘There are to be gentlemen here tonight,’ I say, as I do it. ‘One a stranger. Do you suppose he will be young, and handsome?’
I say it—idly enough—as a way of teasing. It is nothing to me. But she hears me, and colours.
‘I can’t say, miss,’ she answers, blinking and turning her head; not drawing her hand away, however. ‘Perhaps.’
‘You think so?’
‘Who knows? He might be.’
I study her harder, struck with a new idea.
‘Should you like it if he was?’
‘Like it, miss?’
‘Like it, Agnes. It seems to me now, that you would. Shall I tell him the way to your room? I shan’t listen at the door. I shall turn the key, you will be quite private.’
‘Oh miss, what nonsense!’
‘Is it? Here, turn your hand.’ She does, and I jab the needle harder. ‘Now, say you don’t like it, having a prick upon your palm!’
She takes her hand away and sucks it, and begins to cry. The sight of her tears—and of her mouth, working on the bit of tender flesh that I have stabbed—first stirs, then troubles me; then makes me weary. I leave her weeping, and stand at my rattling window, my eyes upon the lawn that dips to the wall, the rushes, the Thames.
‘Will you be quiet?’ I say, when her breath still catches. ‘Look at you! Tears, for a gentleman! Don’t you know that he won’t be handsome, or even young? Don’t you know, they never are?’
But of course, he is both.
‘Mr Richard Rivers,’ my uncle says. The name seems auspicious to me. Later I will discover it to be false—as false as his rings, his smile, his manner; but now, as I stand in the drawing-room and he rises to make me his bow, why should I think to doubt him? He has fine features, even teeth, and is taller than my uncle by almost a foot. His hair is brushed and has oil upon it, but is long: a curl springs from its place and tumbles across his brow. He puts a hand to it, repeatedly. His hands are slender, smooth and—but for a single finger, stained yellow by smoke—quite white.