My voice is not quite steady. But if there is a bitterness to my tone, she does not catch it. Instead, ‘Oh, no, miss,’ she says. ‘She was far too kind a lady. And besides, she always said that grand clothes weren’t worth buttons; but that it was the heart inside them that counts.’
She looks so taken with this—so taken in, by her own fiction—so innocent, not sly—I sit a moment and regard her in silence. Then I take her hand again. ‘You are a good girl, Susan, I think,’ I say. She smiles and looks modest. Her fingers move in mine.
‘Lady Alice always said so, miss,’ she says.
‘Did she?’
‘Yes, miss.’
Then she remembers something. She pulls from me, reaches into her pocket, and brings out a letter. It is folded, sealed, directed in an affected feminine hand; and of course comes from Richard. I hesitate, then take it—rise and walk, unfold it, far from her gaze.
No names! it says;—but I think you know me. Here is the girl who will make us rich—that fresh little fingersmith, I’ve had cause in the past to employ her skills, and can commend her. She is watching as I write this, and oh! her ignorance is perfect. I imagine her now, gazing at you. She is luckier than I, who must pass two filthy weeks before enjoying that pleasure.—Burn this, will you?
I have thought myself as cool as he. I am not, I am not, I feel her watching—just as he describes!—and grow fearful. I stand with the letter in my hand, then am aware all at once that I have stood too long. If she should have seen—! I fold the paper, once, twice, thrice—finally it will not fold at all. I do not yet know that she cannot read or write so much as her own name; when I learn it I laugh, in an awful relief. But I don’t quite believe her. ‘Not read?’ I say. ‘Not a letter, not a word?’—and I hand her a book. She does not want to take it; and when she does, she opens its covers, turns a page, gazes hard at a piece of text—but all in a way that is wrong, indefinably anxious and wrong, and too subtle to counterfeit.—At last, she blushes.
Then I take the book back. ‘I am sorry,’ I say. But I am not sorry, I am only amazed. Not to read! It seems to me a kind of fabulous insufficiency—like the absence, in a martyr or a saint, of the capacity for pain.
The eight o’clock sounds, to call me to my uncle. At the door I pause. I must, after all, make some blushing reference to Richard; and I say what I ought and her look, as it should, becomes suddenly crafty and then grows clear. She tells me how kind he is. She says it—again—as if she believes it. Perhaps she does. Perhaps kindness is measured to a different standard, where she comes from. I feel the points and edges of the folded note he has sent by her hand, in the pocket of my skirt.
What she does while alone in my chambers I cannot say, but I imagine her fingering the silks of my gowns, trying out my boots, my gloves, my sashes. Does she take an eye-glass to my jewels? Perhaps she is planning already what she will do, when they are hers: this brooch she will keep, from this she will prise the stones to sell them, the ring of gold that was my father’s she will pass to her young man . . .
‘You are distracted, Maud,’ my uncle says. ‘Have you another occupation to which you would rather attend?’
‘No, sir,’ I say.
‘Perhaps you begrudge me your little labour. Perhaps you wish that I had left you at the madhouse, all those years ago. Forgive me: I had supposed myself performing you some service, by taking you from there. But perhaps you would rather dwell among lunatics, than among books? Hmm?’
‘No, Uncle.’
He pauses. I think he will return to his notes. But he goes on.
‘It would be a simple matter enough, to summon Mrs Stiles and have her take you back. You are sure you don’t desire me to do that?—send for William Inker and the dog-cart?’ As he speaks, he leans to study me, his weak gaze fierce behind the spectacles that guard it. Then he pauses again, and almost smiles. ‘What would they make of you upon the wards, I wonder,’ he says, in a different voice, ‘with all that you know now?’
He says it slowly, then mumbles the question over; as if it is a biscuit that has left crumbs beneath his tongue. I do not answer, but lower my gaze until he has worked his humour out. Presently he twists his neck and looks again at the pages upon his desk.
‘So, so. The Whipping Milliners. Read me the second volume, with the punctuation all complete; and mark—the paging is irregular. I’ll note the sequence here.’
It is from this that I am reading when she comes to take me back to my drawing-room. She stands at the door, looking over the walls of books, the painted windows. She hovers at the pointing finger that my uncle keeps to mark the bounds of innocence at Briar, just as I once did; and—again, like me—in her innocence she does not see it, and tries to cross it. I must keep her from that, more even than my uncle must!—and while he jerks and screams I go softly to her, and touch her. She flinches at the feel of my fingers.
I say, ‘Don’t be frightened, Susan.’ I show her the brass hand in the floor.
I have forgotten that, of course, she might look at anything there, anything at all, it would be so much ink upon paper. Remembering, I am filled again with wonder—and then with a spiteful kind of envy. I have to draw back my hand from her arm, for fear I will pinch her.
I ask her, as we walk to my room, What does she think of my uncle?
She believes him composing a dictionary.
We sit at lunch. I have no appetite, and pass my plate to her. I lean back in my chair, and watch as she runs her thumb along the edge of china, admires the weave of the napkin she spreads on her knee. She might be an auctioneer, a house-agent: she holds each item of cutlery as if gauging the worth of the metal from which it is cast. She eats three eggs, spooning them quickly, neatly into her mouth—not shuddering at the yielding of the yolk, not thinking, as she swallows, of the closing of her own throat about the meat. She wipes her lips with her fingers, touches her tongue to some spot upon her knuckle; then swallows again.
You have come to Briar, I think, to swallow up me.
But of course, I want her to do it. I need her to do it. And already I seem to feel myself beginning to give up my life. I give it up easily, as burning wicks give up smoke, to tarnish the glass that guards them; as spiders spin threads of silver, to bind up quivering moths. I imagine it settling, tight, about her. She does not know it. She will not know it until, too late, she will look and see how it has clothed and changed her, made her like me. For now, she is only tired, restless, bored: I take her walking about the park, and she follows, leadenly; we sit and sew, and she yawns and rubs her eyes, gazing at nothing. She chews her fingernails—stops, when she sees me looking; then after a minute draws down a length of hair and bites the tip of that.
‘You are thinking of London,’ I say.
She lifts her head. ‘London, miss?’
I nod. ‘What do ladies do there, at this hour in the day?’
‘Ladies, miss?’
‘Ladies, like me.’
She looks about her. Then, after a second: ‘Make visits, miss?’
‘Visits?’
‘To other ladies?’
‘Ah.’
She does not know. She is making it up. I am sure she is making it up! Even so, I think over her words and my heart beats suddenly hard. Ladies, I said, like me. There are no ladies like me, however; and for a second I have a clear and frightening picture of myself in London, alone, unvisited—
But I am alone and unvisited, now. And I shall have Richard there, Richard will guide and advise me. Richard means to take us a house, with rooms, with doors that will fasten—
‘Are you cold, miss?’ she says. Perhaps I have shivered. She rises, to fetch me a shawl. I watch her walk. Diagonally she goes, over the carpet—heedless of the design, the lines and diamonds and squares, beneath her feet.
I watch and watch her. I cannot look too long, too narrowly at her, in her easy doing of commonplace things. At seven o’clock she makes me ready for supper with my uncle. At ten she puts me into my bed. Af
ter that, she stands in her room and I hear her sighing, and I lift my head and see her stretch and droop. Her candle lights her, very plainly; though I lie hidden in the dark. Quietly she passes, back and forth across the doorway—now stooping to pick up a fallen lace; now taking up her cloak and brushing mud from its hem. She does not kneel and pray, as Agnes did. She sits on her bed, out of my sight, but lifts her feet: I see the toe of one shoe put to the heel of the other and work it down. Now she stands, to undo the buttons of her gown; now she lets it fall, steps awkwardly out of her skirt; unlaces her stays, rubs her waist, sighs again. Now she steps away. I lift my head, to follow. She comes back, in her nightgown—shivering. I shiver, in sympathy. She yawns. I also yawn. She stretches—enjoying the stretch—liking the approach of slumber! Now she moves off—puts out her light, climbs into her bed—grows warm I suppose, and sleeps . . .
She sleeps, in a sort of innocence. So did I, once. I wait a moment, then take out my mother’s picture and hold it close to my mouth.
That’s her, I whisper. That’s her. She’s your daughter now!
How effortless it seems! But when I have locked my mother’s face away I lie, uneasily. My uncle’s clock shudders and strikes. Some animal shrieks, like a child, in the park. I close my eyes and think—what I have not thought so vividly of, in years—of the madhouse, my first home; of the wild-eyed women, the lunatics; and of the nurses. I remember all at once the nurses’ rooms, the mattings of coir, a piece of text on the limewashed wall: My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me. I remember an attic stair, a walk upon the roof, the softness of lead beneath my fingernail, the frightful drop to the ground—
I must fall into sleep, thinking this. I must plunge to the deepest layers of the night. But then, I am woken—or, not quite woken, not quite drawn free from the tugging of the dark. For I open my eyes and am bewildered—perfectly bewildered—and filled with dread. I look at my form in the bed and it seems shifting and queer—now large, now small, now broken up with spaces; and I cannot say what age I am. I begin to shake. I call out. I call for Agnes. I have quite forgotten that she has gone. I have forgotten Richard Rivers, and all our plot. I call for Agnes, and it seems to me she comes; but she comes, to take away my lamp. I think she must do it to punish me. ‘Don’t take the light!’ I say; but she takes it, she leaves me in the terrible darkness and I hear the sighing of doors, the passage of feet, beyond the curtain. It seems to me then that much time passes before the light comes back. But when Agnes lifts it and sees my face, she screams.
‘Don’t look at me!’ I cry. And then: ‘Don’t leave me!’ For I have a sense that, if she will only stay, some calamity, some dreadful thing—I do not know it, cannot name it—will be averted; and I—or she—will be saved. I hide my face against her and seize her hand. But her hand is pale where it used to be freckled. I gaze at her, and do not know her.
She says, in a voice that is strange to me: ‘It’s Sue, miss. Only Sue. You see me? You are dreaming.’
‘Dreaming?’
She touches my cheek. She smooths my hair—not like Agnes, after all, but like—Like no-one. She says again, ‘It’s Sue. That Agnes had the scarlatina, and is gone back home. You must lie down now, or the cold will make you ill. You mustn’t be ill.’
I swim in black confusion for another moment; then the dream slips from me all at once and I know her, and know myself—my past, my present, my ungaugeable future. She is a stranger to me, but part of it all.
‘Don’t leave me, Sue!’ I say.
I feel her hesitate. When she draws away, I grip her tighter. But she moves only to climb across me, and she comes beneath the sheet and lies with her arm about me, her mouth against my hair.
She is cold, and makes me cold. I shiver, but soon lie still. ‘There,’ she says then. She murmurs it. I feel the movement of her breath and, deep in the bone of my cheek, the gentle rumble of her voice. ‘There. Now you’ll sleep—won’t you? Good girl.’
Good girl, she says. How long has it been since anyone at Briar believed me good? But she believes it. She must believe it, for the working of our plot. I must be good, and kind, and simple. Isn’t gold said to be good? I am like gold to her, after all. She has come to ruin me; but, not yet. For now she must guard me, keep me sound and safe as a hoard of coins she means, at last, to squander—
I know it; but cannot feel it as I should. I sleep in her arms, dreamless and still, and wake to the warmth and closeness of her. She moves away as she feels me stir. She rubs her eye. Her hair is loose and touches my own. Her face, in sleep, has lost a little of its sharpness. Her brow is smooth, her lashes powdery, her gaze, when it meets mine, quite clear, untinged with mockery or malice . . . She smiles. She yawns. She rises. The blanket lifts and falls, and sour heat comes gusting. I lie and remember the night. Some feeling—shame, or panic—flutters about my heart. I put my hand to the place where she has lain, and feel it cool.
She is changed with me. She is surer, kinder. Margaret brings water, and she fills me a bowl. ‘Ready, miss?’ she says. ‘Better use it quick.’ She wets a cloth and wrings it and, when I stand and undress, passes it, unasked, across my face and beneath my arms. I have become a child to her. She makes me sit, so she may brush my hair. She tuts: ‘What tangles! The trick with tangles is, to start at the bottom . . .’
Agnes had used to wash and dress me with quick and nervous fingers, wincing with every catching of the comb. One time I struck her with a slipper—so hard, she bled. Now I sit for Susan—Sue, she called herself, in the night—now I sit patiently while Sue draws out the knots from my hair, my eyes upon my own face in the glass . . .
Good girl.
Then: ‘Thank you, Sue,’ I say.
I say it often, in the days and nights that follow. I never said it to Agnes. ‘Thank you, Sue.’ ‘Yes, Sue,’ when she bids me sit or stand, lift an arm or foot. ‘No, Sue,’ when she is afraid my gown must pinch me.
No, I am not cold.—But she likes to look me over as we walk, to be quite sure; will gather my cloak a little higher about my throat, to keep off draughts. No, my boots are not taking in the dew.—But she’ll slide a finger between my stockinged ankle and the leather of my shoe, for certainty’s sake. I must not catch cold, at any cost. I must not tire. ‘Wouldn’t you say you had walked enough, miss?’ I mustn’t grow ill. ‘Here is all your breakfast, look, untouched. Won’t you take a little more?’ I mustn’t grow thin. I am a goose that must be plump, to be worth its slaughter.
Of course, though she does not know it, it is she who must be plump—she who will learn, in time, to sleep, to wake, to dress, to walk, to a pattern, to signals and bells. She thinks she humours me. She thinks she pities me! She learns the ways of the house, not understanding that the habits and the fabrics that bind me will, soon, bind her. Bind her, like morocco or like calf . . . I have grown used to thinking of myself as a sort of book. Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with her unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh—‘Ain’t you pale!’ she says—but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.
I oughtn’t to do it. I cannot help it. I am too compelled by her idea—her idea of me as a simple girl, abused by circumstance, prone to nightmare. No night-mares come, while she sleeps at my side; and so, I find ways to bring her to my bed, a second night and a third.—At last she comes, routinely. I think her wary, at first; but it is only the canopy and drapes that trouble her: she stands each time with a lifted candle, peering into the folds of cloth. ‘Don’t you think,’ she says, ‘of the moths and spiders that might be up there, miss, and waiting to drop?’ She seizes a post, and shakes it; a single beetle falls, in a shower of dust.
Once grown used to that, however, she lies easily enough; and from the neat and comfortable way she holds her limbs, I think that she must be used to sleeping with someone; and wonder who.
‘Do you have sisters, Sue?’ I ask her once, perhaps a week after she has come. We are walking
by the river.
‘No, miss.’
‘Brothers?’
‘Not as I know of,’ she says.
‘And so you grew up—like me—quite alone?’
‘Well, miss, not what you would call, alone . . . Say, with cousins all about.’
‘Cousins. You mean, your aunt’s children?’
‘My aunt?’ She looks blank.
‘Your aunt, Mr Rivers’s nurse.’
‘Oh!’ She blinks. ‘Yes, miss. To be sure . . .’
She turns away, and her look grows vague. She is thinking of her home. I try to imagine it; and cannot. I try to imagine her cousins: rough boys and girls, sharp-faced like her, sharp-tongued, sharp-fingered—Her fingers are blunt, however; though her tongue—for sometimes, when putting the pins to my hair, or frowning over slithering laces, she shows it—her tongue has a point. I watch her sigh.
‘Never mind,’ I say—like any kindly mistress with an unhappy maid. ‘Look, here is a barge. You may send your wishes with it. We shall both send wishes, to London.’ To London, I think again, more darkly. Richard is there. I will be there, a month from now. I say, ‘The Thames will take them, even if the boat does not.’
She looks, however, not at the barge, but at me.
‘The Thames?’ she says.
‘The river,’ I answer. ‘This river, here.’
‘This trifling bit of water, the Thames? Oh, no, miss.’ She laughs, uncertainly. ‘How can that be? The Thames is very wide’—she holds her hands far apart—‘and this is narrow. Do you see?’
I say, after a moment, that I have always supposed that rivers grow wider as they flow. She shakes her head.
‘This trifling bit of water?’ she says again. ‘Why, the water we have from our taps, at home, has more life to it than this.—There, miss! Look, there.’ The barge has passed us. Its stern is marked in six-inch letters, ROTHER-HITHE; but she is pointing, not to them, but to the wake of grease spreading out from the spluttering engine. ‘See that?’ she says excitedly. ‘That’s how the Thames looks. That’s how the Thames looks, every day of the year. Look at all those colours. A thousand colours . . .’