He has lifted his hand to his head, and now puts back his hair from his brow; and his pallor, and the dark about his eye, seem suddenly to age him. His collar is soft, and creased from the grip of his neck-tie. His beard has a single strand of grey. His throat bulges queerly, as men’s throats do: as if inviting the blow that will crush it.
I say, ‘This is madness. I think you are mad—to come here, to confess yourself a villain, to suppose me willing to receive you.’
‘And yet you have received me. You receive me still. You have not called for your maid.’
‘You intrigue me. You have seen for yourself, the evenness of my days here.’
‘You seek a distraction from those? Why not give them up, for ever? So you shall—like that, in a moment! gone!—when you marry me.’
I shake my head. ‘I think you cannot be serious.’
‘I am, however.’
‘You know my age. You know my uncle would never permit you to take me.’
He shrugs, speaks lightly. ‘We shall resort, of course, to devious methods.’
‘You wish to make a villain of me, too?’
He nods. ‘I do. But then, I think you are half a villain already.—Don’t look like that. Don’t suppose I am joking. You don’t know all.’ He has grown serious. ‘I am offering you something very great and strange. Not the commonplace subjection of a wife to her husband—that servitude, to lawful ravishment and theft, that the world terms wedlock. I shan’t ask you for that, that is not what I mean. I am speaking, rather, of liberty. A liberty of a kind not often granted to the members of your sex.’
‘Yet to be achieved’—I almost laugh—‘by a marriage?’
‘To be achieved by a ceremony of marriage, performed under certain unusual conditions.’ Again he smooths his hair, and swallows; and I see at last that he is nervous—more nervous than I. He leans closer. He says, ‘I suppose you’re not squeamish, or soft about the heart, as another girl might be? I suppose your maid is really sleeping, and not listening at the door?’
I think of Agnes, of Agnes’s bruises; but say nothing, only watch him. He passes his hand across his mouth.
‘God help me, Miss Lilly, if I have misjudged you!’ he says. ‘Now, listen.’
This is his plan. He means to bring a girl to Briar, from London, and install her as my maid. He means to use her, then cheat her. He says he has a girl in mind, a girl of my years and colouring. A sort of thief—not overscrupulous, not too clever in her ways, he says; he thinks he will secure her with the promise of some slight share in the fortune—‘Say, two or three thousand. I don’t believe she’ll have the ambition to ask for more. Her set are a small set, as crooks go; though, like crooks everywhere, think themselves grander.’ He shrugs. The sum means nothing, after all: for he will agree to whatever she asks for; and she will not see a shilling of it. She will suppose me an innocent, and believe herself assisting in my seduction. She will persuade me, first, into marriage with him, then into a—he hesitates, before admitting the word—a madhouse. But, there she will take my place. She will protest—he hopes she will!—for the more she does, the more the madhouse keepers will read it as a form of lunacy; and so keep her the closer.
‘And with her, Miss Lilly,’ he says finally, ‘they keep close your name, your history as your mother’s daughter, your uncle’s niece—in short, all that marks you as yourself. Think of it! They will pluck from your shoulders the weight of your life, as a servant would lift free your cloak; and you shall make your naked, invisible way to any part of the world you choose—to any new life—and there re-clothe yourself to suit your fancy.’
This is the liberty—the rare and sinister liberty—he has come to Briar to offer. For payment he wants my trust, my promise, my future silence; and one half of my fortune.
When he has finished I sit not speaking, my face turned from his, for almost a minute. What I say at last is:
‘We should never achieve it.’
He answers at once: ‘I think we will.’
‘The girl would suspect us.’
‘She will be distracted by the plot into which I shall draw her. She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there. She will look at you, here, knowing nothing of your uncle—who wouldn’t, in her place, believe you innocent?’
‘And her people, the thieves: shan’t they look for her?’
‘They shall look—as a thousand thieves look every day for the friends who have cheated and robbed them; and, finding nothing, they’ll suppose her flown, and curse her for a while, and then forget her.’
‘Forget her? Are you sure? Has she no—no mother?’
He shrugs. ‘A sort of mother. A guardian, an aunt. She loses children all the time. I don’t think she will trouble very hard over one child more. Especially if she supposes—as I mean that she will—that the child has turned out swindler. Do you see? Her own reputation will help to bury her. Crooked girls can’t expect to be cared for, like honest ones.’ He pauses. ‘They will watch her more closely, however, in the place we’ll put her.’
I gaze away from him. ‘A madhouse . . .’
‘I am sorry for that,’ he says quickly. ‘But your own reputation—your own mother’s reputation—will work for us there, just as our crooked girl’s will. You must see how it will. You have been held in thrall to it, all these years. Here is your chance to profit by it, once; then be free of it, for ever.’
I still look away. Again, I am afraid he will see how deeply his words have stirred me. I am almost afraid of how deeply they stir me, myself. I say, ‘You speak as though my freedom were something to you. It’s the money you care for.’
‘I’ve admitted as much, have I not? But then, your freedom and my money are the same. That will be your safeguard, your insurance, until our fortune is secure. You may trust yourself, till then, not to my honour—for I have none—but, say, to my cupidity; which is anyway a greater thing than honour, in the world outside these walls. You will find that out. I might teach you how to profit from it. We can take some house, in London, as man and wife.—Live separately, of course,’ he adds, with a smile, ‘when the door of the house is closed . . . Once our money is got, however, your future will be your own; you must only be silent, then, as to the manner in which you got it. You understand me? Being once committed to this thing, we must be true to each other, or founder. I don’t speak lightly. I don’t wish to mislead you as to the nature of the business I’m proposing. Perhaps your uncle’s care has kept you from a knowledge of the law . . .’
‘My uncle’s care,’ I say, ‘has made me ready to consider any strategy that will relieve me of the burden of it. But—’
He waits and, when I add nothing, says, ‘Well, I don’t expect to hear you give me your decision now. It’s my aim that your uncle will keep me here, to work on his pictures—I am to view them tomorrow. If he does not, then we shall anyway be obliged to reconsider. But there are ways about that, as about everything.’
He passes his hand again before his eyes, and again looks older. The clock has struck the twelve, the fire has died an hour before, and the room is terribly chill. I feel it, all at once. He sees me shiver. I think he reads it as fear, or doubt. He leans, and at last takes my hand in his. He says, ‘Miss Lilly, you say your freedom is nothing to me; but how could I see the life that is yours—how could any honest man see you kept down, made a slave to lewdness, leered at and insulted by fellows like Huss—and not wish to free you of it? Think of what I have proposed. Then think of your choices. You may wait for another suitor: shall you find one, among the gentlemen your uncle’s work brings here? And, if you do, shall he be as scrupulous as I, in the handling of your fortune? —of your person? Or, say you wait for your uncle to die, and find a liberty that way; meantime, his eyes have faded, his limbs have a tremor, he has worked you the harder as he has felt his powers fail. By then you are—what age? Say thirty-five, or forty. You have given your youth to the curating of books, o
f a kind that Hawtrey sells, for a shilling, to drapers’ boys and clerks. Your fortune sits untouched in the vault of a bank. Your consolation is to be mistress of Briar—where the clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.’
As he speaks, I look not at his face; but at my own foot in its slipper. I think again of the vision I have sometimes had—of myself, as a limb bound tight to a form it longs to outgrow. With the drops in me the vision is fiercer, I see the limb made crooked, the flesh sour and grow dense. I sit quite still, then raise my eyes to his. He is watching me, waiting to know if he has won me. He has. Not by what he has told me, about my future at Briar—for he has said nothing that I have not, long ago, already concluded for myself; but by the fact that he is here, telling it at all—that he has plotted, and travelled, forty miles—that he has stolen his way to the heart of the sleeping house, to my dark room, to me.
Of the girl in London—who, in less than a month, he will persuade to her doom by a similar method; and to whom, a little later, with tears on my cheek, I will repeat his own arguments—I think nothing, nothing at all.
I say, ‘Tomorrow, when you are shown my uncle’s pictures: praise the Romano, though the Caracci is more rare. Praise Morland over Rowlandson. He thinks Rowlandson a hack.’
That is all I say. It is enough, I suppose. He holds my gaze, nods, does not smile—I think he knows I should not like to see him smile, at such a moment. He looses his grip about my fingers and then he stands, straightening his coat. That breaks the spell of our conspiracy: now he is large, dark, out of place. I hope he will leave. Again I shiver and, seeing that, he says, ‘I’m afraid I’ve kept you very late. You must be cold, and tired.’
He watches. Perhaps he is gauging my strength and beginning to grow doubtful. I shiver harder. He says, ‘You won’t be troubled—too troubled—by all I’ve said?’
I shake my head. But I am afraid to rise from the sofa, in case I tremble upon my legs and seem to him weak. I say, ‘Will you go?’
‘You are sure?’
‘Quite sure. I shall do better if you leave me.’
‘Of course.’
He would like to say more. I turn my face and will not let him, and in time hear his careful tread upon the carpet, the gentle opening and closing of the door. I sit a moment, then lift my feet, tuck the skirts of my cloak about my legs, raise my hood, lie with my head upon the hard and dusty sofa cushion.
This is not my bed, and the hour for bed has sounded and passed, and there are none of the things—my mother’s portrait, my box, my maid—about me, that I like to have close while I lie sleeping. But tonight, all things are out of their order, all my patterns have been disturbed. My liberty beckons: gauge-less, fearful, inevitable as death.
I sleep, and dream I am moving, swiftly, in a high-prowed boat, upon a dark and silent water.
9.
I suppose that even then—or rather, especially then, when our compact is so new, so unproved, its threads still slender and weak—I suppose that even then I might draw back, unloose myself from the tugging of his ambition. I believe I wake thinking I will; for the room—the room in which, in whispers, at the hush of midnight, he took my hand, unfolded his dangerous plan, like a man putting back the rustling wrappers about a poison—the room reassembles itself in the chill half-hour of dawn into all its rigid familiar lines. I lie and watch it. I know every curve and angle. I know them, too well. I remember weeping, as a girl of eleven, at the strangeness of Briar—at the silence, the stillness, the turning passages and cluttered walls. I supposed then that those things would be strange to me for ever, I felt their strangeness make me strange—make me a thing of points and hooks, a burr, a splinter in the gullet of the house. But Briar crept on me. Briar absorbed me. Now I feel the simple weight of the woollen cloak with which I have covered myself and think, I shall never escape! I am not meant to escape! Briar will never let me!
But, I am wrong. Richard Rivers has come into Briar like a spore of yeast into dough, changing it utterly. When I go, at eight o’clock, to the library, I am sent away: he is there with my uncle, looking over the prints. They pass three hours together. And when, in the afternoon, I am summoned downstairs to make my farewells to the gentlemen, it is only Mr Hawtrey and Mr Huss that I must give my hand to. I find them in the hall, fastening their greatcoats, drawing on their gloves, while my uncle leans upon his cane and Richard stands, a little way off, his hands in his pockets, looking on. He sees me first. He meets my gaze, but makes no gesture. Then the others hear my step and lift their heads to watch me. Mr Hawtrey smiles.
‘Here comes fair Galatea,’ he says.
Mr Huss has put on his hat. Now he takes it off. ‘The nymph,’ he asks, his eyes on my face, ‘or the statue?’
‘Well, both,’ Mr Hawtrey says; ‘but I meant the statue. Miss Lilly shows as pale, don’t you think?’ He takes my hand. ‘How my daughters would envy you! They eat clay, you know, to whiten their complexions? Pure clay.’ He shakes his head. ‘I do think the fashion for pallor a most unhealthy one. As for you, Miss Lilly, I am struck again—as I always am, when I must leave you!—by the unfairness of your uncle keeping you here in such a miserable, mushroom-like way.’
‘I am quite used to it,’ I say quietly. ‘Besides, I think the gloom makes me show paler than I am. Does Mr Rivers not go with you?’
‘The gloom is the culprit. Really, Mr Lilly, I can barely make out the buttons on my coat. Do you mean never to join civilised society, and bring gas to Briar?’
‘Not while I keep books,’ says my uncle.
‘Say never, then. Rivers, gas poisons books. Did you know?’
‘I did not,’ says Richard. Then he turns to me, and adds, in a lower voice: ‘No, Miss Lilly, I am not to go up to London just yet. Your uncle has been kind enough to offer me a little work among his prints. We share a passion, it seems, for Morland.’
His eye is dark—if a blue eye can be dark. Mr Hawtrey says, ‘Now Mr Lilly, how’s this for an idea: What say, while the mounting of the prints is in progress, you let your niece make a visit to Holywell Street? Shouldn’t you like a holiday, Miss Lilly, in London? There, I see by your look that you should.’
‘She should not,’ says my uncle.
Mr Huss draws close. His coat is thick and he is sweating. He takes the tips of my fingers. ‘Miss Lilly,’ he says. ‘If I might ever—’
‘Come come,’ says my uncle. ‘Now you grow tedious. Here’s my coachman, look. Maud, do you step back from the door . . .’
‘Fools,’ he says, when the gentlemen have gone. ‘Eh, Rivers? But come, I’m impatient to begin. You have your tools?’
‘I can fetch them, sir, in a moment.’
He bows, and goes. My uncle makes to follow. Then he turns, to look at me. He looks, in a considering sort of way, then beckons me closer. ‘Give me your hand, Maud,’ he says. I think he means to have me support him on the stairs. But when I offer him my arm he takes it, holds it, raises my wrist to his face, draws back the sleeve and squints at the strip of skin exposed. He peers at my cheek. ‘Pale, do they say? Pale as mushroom? Hmm?’ He works his mouth. ‘You know what kind of matter mushrooms spring from?—Ho!’ He laughs. ‘Not pale, now!’
I have coloured and drawn away. Still laughing, he lets fall my hand, turns from me, begins to mount the stairs alone. He wears a pair of soft list slippers, that show his stockinged heels; and I watch him climb, imagining my spite a whip, a stick, with which I could lash at his feet and make him stumble.
I am standing, thinking this, hearing his step fade, when Richard returns to the gallery from the floors above. He does not look for me, does not know that I am there, still there, in the shadow of the fastened front door. He only walks; but he walks briskly, his fingers drumming the gallery rail. I think perhaps he even whistles, or hums. We are not used to such sounds at Briar, and with my passion raised and set smarting by my uncle’s words they strike me now as thrilling, perilous, like a shifting of
timbers and beams. I think the dust must be rising in a cloud from the antique carpets beneath his shoes; and when I raise my eyes to follow his tread I am sure I can see fine crumbs of paint flake and tumble from the ceiling. The sight makes me giddy. I imagine the house walls cracking—gaping—collapsing in the concussion of his presence. I am only afraid they will do so before I have had my chance to escape.
But I am afraid, too, of escaping. I think he knows it. He cannot speak privately with me, once Mr Huss and Mr Hawtrey have gone; and he does not dare to steal his way, a second time, to my own rooms. But he knows he must secure me to his plan. He waits, and watches. He takes his supper with us, still; but sits at my uncle’s side, not mine. One night, however, he breaks their conversation to say this:
‘It troubles me, Miss Lilly, to think of how bored you must be, now I have come and taken your uncle’s attention from his Index. I imagine you are longing to return to your work among the books.’
‘The books?’ I say. Then, letting my gaze fall to my plate of broken meat: ‘Very much, of course.’
‘Then I wish I might do something, to make the burden of your days a little lighter. Have you no work—no painting or sketching, material of that sort—that I might mount for you, in my own time? I think you must. For I see you have many handsome prospects, from the windows of the house.’
He raises a brow, as a conductor of music might raise a baton. Of course, I am nothing if not obedient. I say, ‘I cannot paint, or draw. I have never been taught it.’