Her voice has risen. Her cheek is flushed. A pulse beats, briefly—very fast—in the lid of her eye. She puts her hand to it, then drinks again, and again wipes her mouth.
‘That’s what she said,’ she says, more quietly. ‘That’s what she said. And as she says it, all the infants that are lying about the house seem to hear her, and all start up crying at once. They all sound the same, when you ain’t their mother. They all sounded the same to her, anyway. I had got her to the stairs, just outside that door’—she tilts her head, Richard shifts his pose and the door gives a creak—‘and now, she stops. She looks at me, and I see what she’s thinking, and my heart goes cold. “We can’t!” I say. “Why can’t we?” she answers. “You have said yourself, my daughter shall be brought up a lady. Why not let some other little motherless girl have that, in her place—poor thing, she shall have the grief of it, too! But I swear, I’ll settle a half my fortune on her; and Susan shall have the rest. She shall have it, if you’ll only take her for me now, and bring her up honest, and keep her from knowing about her inheritance till she has grown up poor and can feel the worth of it! Don’t you have,” she says, “some motherless baby we can give to my father in Susan’s place? Don’t you? Don’t you? For God’s sake, say you do! There’s fifty pounds in the pocket of my gown. You shall have it!—I shall send you more!—if you’ll only do this thing for me, and not tell a living soul you’ve done it.” ’
Perhaps there is movement in the room below, in the street—I do not know, I do not hear it if there is. I keep my gaze on Mrs Sucksby’s flushed face, on her eyes, her lips.—‘Now, here was a thing,’ she is saying, ‘to be asked to do. Wouldn’t you say, dear girl? Here was a thing, all right. I think I never thought harder or quicker before in all my life. And what I said at last was: “Keep your money. Keep your fifty pounds. I don’t want it. What I want, is this: Your pa is a gentleman, and gents are tricky. I’ll keep your baby, but I want for you to write me out a paper, saying all you mean to do, and signing it, and sealing it; and that makes it binding.” “I’ll do it!” she says, straight off. “I’ll do it!” And we come in here, and I fetch her a bit of paper and ink, and she sets it all down—just as I have told you, that Susan Lilly is her own child, though left with me, and that the fortunes are to be cut, and so on—and she folds it and seals it with the ring off her finger, and puts on the front that it ain’t to be opened till the day her daughter turns eighteen. Twenty-one, she wanted to make it: but my mind was running ahead, even as she was writing, and I said it must be eighteen—for we oughtn’t to risk the girls taking husbands, before they knew what was what.’ She smiles. ‘She liked that. She thanked me for it.
‘And then, no sooner had she sealed it than Mr Ibbs sends up a cry: there’s a coach, pulled up at his shop door, with two gents—an old one, and a younger—getting out, and with them, a bully with a club. Well! The lady runs shrieking to her room and I stand, tearing the hair out of my head. Then I go to the cribs, and I fetch up this one particular baby that is there—a girl, same size as the other, looks to turn out fair, like her—and I carry her upstairs. I said, “Here! Take her quick, and be kind to her! Her name’s Maud; and that’s a name for a lady after all. Remember your word.” “Remember yours!” the poor girl cries; and she kisses her own baby, and I take it, and bring it down and lay it in the empty cot . . .’
She shakes her head. ‘Such a trifling little thing it was to do!’ she says. ‘—And done in a minute. Done, while the gentlemen are still hammering at the door. “Where is she?” they’re crying. “We know you’ve got her!” No stopping them, then. Mr Ibbs lets them in, they fly through the house like furies—see me and knock me down, next thing I know, there’s the poor lady being dragged downstairs by her pa—her gown all flapping, her shoes undone, the mark of her brother’s stick on her face—and there’s you, dear girl—there’s you in her arms, and nobody thinking you was anyone’s but hers.—Why should they? Too late to change it, then. She gave me one quick look as her father took her down, and that was all; I fancy she watched me, though, from the window of the coach. But if she was ever sorry she done it, I can’t tell you. I dare say she thought often of Sue; but no more than—Well, no more than she ought.’
She blinks and turns her head. She has placed her glass of brandy upon the bed between us; the seams in the quilt keep it from spilling. Her hands she has clasped: she is stroking the knuckles of one with the blunt red thumb of the other. Her foot in its slipper goes tap upon the floor. She has not taken her eyes from my face, all the time she has spoken, until now.
My own eyes I close. My hands I place before them, and I gaze into the darkness that is made by my palms. There is a silence. It lengthens. Mrs Sucksby leans closer.
‘Dear girl,’ she murmurs. ‘Won’t you say a word to us?’ She touches my hair. Still I will not speak or move. Her hand falls. ‘I can see this news’ve dashed your spirits, rather,’ she says. Perhaps she gestures then to Richard, for he comes and squats before me.
‘You understand, Maud,’ he says, trying to see about my fingers, ‘what Mrs Sucksby has told you? One baby becomes another. Your mother was not your mother, your uncle not your uncle. Your life was not the life that you were meant to live, but Sue’s; and Sue lived yours . . .’
They say that dying men see, played before their eyes with impossible swiftness, the show of their lives. As Richard speaks, I see mine: the madhouse, my baton of wood, the gripping gowns of Briar, the string of beads, my uncle’s naked eyes, the books, the books . . . The show flickers and is gone, is lost and useless, like the gleam of a coin in murky water. I shudder, and Richard sighs. Mrs Sucksby shakes her head and tuts. But, when I show them my face they both start back. I am not weeping, as they suppose. I am laughing—I am gripped with a terrible laughter—and my look must be ghastly.
‘Oh, but this,’ I think I say, ‘is perfect! This is all I have longed for! Why do you stare? What are you gazing at? Do you suppose a girl is sitting here? That girl is lost! She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones, stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the words have peeled and drifted—’
I try to take a breath; and might as well have water in my mouth: I draw at the air, and it does not come. I gasp, and shake and gasp again. Richard stands and watches.
‘No madness, Maud,’ he says, with a look of distaste. ‘Remember. You have no excuse for it now.’
‘I have excuse,’ I say, ‘for anything! Anything!’
‘Dear girl—’ says Mrs Sucksby. She has caught up her tumbler of liquor and is waving it close to my face. ‘Dear girl—’ But I shudder with laughter still—a hideous laughter—and I jerk, as a fish might jerk on the end of a line. I hear Richard curse; then I see him go to my bag and grope inside it, bring out my bottle of medicine: he lets the liquid drop, three times, into the glass of brandy, then seizes my head and presses the glass to my lips. I taste it, then swallow and cough. I put my hands to my mouth. My mouth grows numb. I close my eyes again. I do not know how long I sit, but at length I feel the blanket that covers the bed come against my shoulder and cheek. I have sunk upon it. I lie—still twitching, from time to time, in what feels like laughter; and again Richard and Mrs Sucksby stand, in silence, and watch me.
Presently, however, they come a little nearer. ‘Now,’ says Mrs Sucksby softly, ‘are you better, darling?’ I do not answer. She looks at Richard. ‘Oughtn’t we to go, and let her sleep?’
‘Sleep be damned,’ he answers. ‘I still believe she thinks we have brought her here for her own convenience.’ He comes, and taps my face. ‘Open your eyes,’ he says.
I say, ‘I have no eyes. How could I? You have taken them from me.’
He catches hold of one of my lids and pinches it hard. ‘Open your damn eyes!’ he says. ‘That’s better. Now, there is a little more for you to know—just a little more, and th
en you may sleep. Listen to me. Listen! Don’t ask me, how you are meant to, I shall cut the fucking ears off the sides of your head if you do. Yes, I see you hear that. Do you feel this, also?’ He strikes me. ‘Very good.’
The blow is not so hard as it might have been: Mrs Sucksby has seen him lift his arm and tried to check it.
‘Gentleman!’ she says, her cheek growing dark. ‘No call for that. No call at all. Hold your temper, can’t you? I believe you’ve bruised her. Oh, dear girl.’
She reaches towards my face. Richard scowls. ‘She ought to be grateful,’ he says, straightening, putting back his hair, ‘that I have not done worse, any time in the past three months. She ought to know I will do it again, and count it nothing. Do you hear me, Maud? You have seen me at Briar, a sort of gentleman. I make a holiday from gallantry, however, when I come here. Understand? ’
I lie, nursing my cheek, my eyes on his, saying nothing. Mrs Sucksby wrings her hands. He takes the cigarette from behind his ear, puts it to his mouth, looks for a match.
‘Go on, Mrs Sucksby,’ he says as he does it. ‘Tell the rest. As for you, Maud: listen hard, and know at last what your life was lived for.’
‘My life was not lived,’ I say in a whisper. ‘You have told me, it was a fiction.’
‘Well’—he finds a match, and strikes it—‘fictions must end. Hear now how yours is to.’
‘It has ended already,’ I answer. But his words have made me cautious. My head is thick with liquor, with medicine, with shock; but not so thick that I cannot, now, begin to be fearful of what they will tell me next, how they plan to keep me, what they mean to keep me for . . .
Mrs Sucksby sees me grow thoughtful, and nods. ‘Now you start to get it,’ she says. ‘You are starting to see. I got the lady’s baby and, what’s better, I got the lady’s word.—The word’s the thing, of course. The word’s the thing with the money in—ain’t it?’ She smiles, touches her nose. Then she leans a little closer. ‘Like to see it?’ she says, in a different sort of voice. ‘Like to see the lady’s word?’
She waits. I do not answer, but she smiles again, moves from me, glances at Richard, then turns her back to him and fumbles for a second with the buttons of her gown. The taffeta rustles. When the bodice is part-way open she reaches inside—reaches, it seems to me, into her very bosom, her very heart—and then draws out a folded paper. ‘Kept this close,’ she says, as she brings it to me, ‘all these years. Kept this closer than gold! Look, here.’
The paper is folded like a letter, and bears a tilting instruction: To Be Opened on the Eighteenth Birthday of My Daughter, Susan Lilly.—I see that name, and shudder, and reach, but she holds it jealously and, like my uncle—not my uncle, now!—with an antique book, won’t let me take it; she lets me touch it, however. The paper is warm, from the heat of her breast. The ink is brown, the folds furred and discoloured. The seal is quite unbroken. The stamp is my mother’s—Sue’s mother’s, I mean; not mine, not mine—
M.L.
‘You see it, dear girl?’ Mrs Sucksby says. The paper trembles. She draws it back to herself, with a miser’s gesture and look—lifts it to her face and puts her lips to it, then turns her back and restores it to its place inside her gown. As she buttons her dress, she glances again at Richard. He has been watching, closely, curiously; but says nothing.
I speak, instead. ‘She wrote it,’ I say. My voice is thick, I am giddy. ‘She wrote it. They took her. What then?’
Mrs Sucksby turns. Her gown is closed and perfectly smooth again, but she has her hand upon the bodice, as if nursing the words beneath. ‘The lady?’ she says, distractedly. ‘The lady died, dear girl.’ She sniffs, and her tone changes. ‘Bust me, however, if she didn’t linger on another month before she done it! Who would have thought? That month was against us. For now her pa and her brother, having got her home, made her change her will.—You can guess what to. No penny to go to the daughter—meaning you, dear girl, so far as they knew—till the daughter marries. There’s gentlemen for you—ain’t it? She sent me a note to tell me, by a nurse. They’d got her into the madhouse by then, and you alongside her—well, that soon finished her off. It was a puzzle to her, she said, how things might turn out now; but she took her consolation from the thought of my honesty. Poor girl!’ She seems almost sorry. ‘—That was her slip.’
Richard laughs. Mrs Sucksby smooths her mouth, and begins to look crafty. ‘As for me,’ she says, ‘—well, I had seen from the first that the only puzzle was, how to get the whole of the fortune when I was only due to have half. My comfort must be, that I had eighteen years for figuring it out in. I thought many times of you.’
I turn my face. ‘I never asked for your thoughts,’ I say. ‘I don’t want them now.’
‘Ungrateful, Maud!’ says Richard. ‘Here has Mrs Sucksby been, plotting so hard in your behalf, so long. Another girl—don’t girls seek only to be the heroines of romance?—another girl might fancy herself distinguished.’
I look from him back to Mrs Sucksby, saying nothing. She nods. ‘I thought often of you,’ she says again, ‘and wondered how you got on. I supposed you handsome. Dear girl, you are!’ She swallows. ‘I had two fears, only. The first was, that you might die. The second was, that your grand-dad and uncle should take you away from England and have you married before the lady’s secret come out. Then I read in a paper that your grand-dad died. Then I heard how your uncle lived quietly, in the country; and had you with him, and kept you in a quiet way, too. There’s my two fears both gone!’ She smiles. ‘Meanwhile, ’ she says—and now her eye-lids flutter—‘Meanwhile, here’s Sue. You have seen, dear girl, how close and quiet I have kept the lady’s word.’ She pats her gown. ‘Well, what was the word to me, without Sue to pin it to? Think how close and quiet I have kept her. Think how safe. Think how sharp such a girl might have grown, in a house like this one, in a street like ours; then think how hard Mr Ibbs and me have worked to keep her blunt. Think how deep I puzzled it over—knowing I must use her at the last, but never quite knowing how. Think how it begins to come clear, when I meets Gentleman—think how quick my fear that you might be secretly married, turns into my knowing that he is the chap that must secretly marry you . . . It’s the work of another minute, then, to look at Sue and know what ought to be done with her.’ She shrugs. ‘Well, and now we’ve done it. Sue’s you, dear girl. And what we brought you here for is—’
‘Listen, Maud!’ says Richard. I have closed my eyes and turned my head. Mrs Sucksby comes to me, lifts her hand, begins to stroke my hair.
‘What we brought you here for,’ she goes on, more gently, ‘is for you to start being Sue. Only that, dear girl! Only that.’
I open my eyes, and suppose look stupid.
‘Do you see?’ says Richard. ‘We keep Sue as my wife in the madhouse, and with the opening of her mother’s statement, her share of the fortune—Maud’s share, I mean—comes to me. I should like to say I will keep every cent of it; but the scheme was Mrs Sucksby’s after all, and half goes to her.’ He makes a bow.
‘That’s fair, ain’t it?’ says Mrs Sucksby, still stroking my hair.
‘But the other share,’ Richard goes on, ‘—which is to say, Sue’s real share—Mrs Sucksby stands also to get. The statement names her Sue’s guardian; and guardians, I am afraid, are often less than scrupulous in the handling of their wards’ fortunes . . . That all means nothing, of course, if Sue herself has vanished. But then, it’s Maud Lilly—the true Maud Lilly’—he blinks—‘by which I mean of course, the false Maud Lilly—who has vanished. Isn’t that what you wanted? To vanish? You said, a minute ago, that you have excuse for anything now. What will it hurt you, then, to be passed off as Sue, and so make Mrs Sucksby rich?’
‘Make us both rich, darling,’ Mrs Sucksby says quickly. ‘I ain’t so heartless, dear, as to rob you quite of everything! You’re a lady, ain’t you, and handsome? Why, I shall need a handsome lady, to show me what’s what when I comes into my fortune. I got plans for us both,
sweetheart, that grand!’—She taps her nose.
I push myself up, away from her; but am too giddy, still, to stand. ‘You are mad,’ I say to them both. ‘You are mad! I—Pass me off as Sue?’
‘Why not?’ says Richard. ‘We need only convince a lawyer. I think we shall.’
‘Convince him, how?’
‘How? Why, here are Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs—that have been like parents to you, and so might be supposed, I think, to know you, if anyone might. And here are John and Dainty, too—they’ll swear to any kind of mischief with money in, you may be sure. And here am I—that met you at Briar, when you were maid to Miss Maud Lilly, later my wife. You’ve seen, haven’t you, what gentlemen’s words are worth?’ He pretends to be struck with the thought. ‘But of course you have! For in a madhouse in the country are a pair of doctors—they’ll remember you, I think. For didn’t you, only yesterday, give them your hand and make them a curtsey, and stand in a good light before them, for quite twenty minutes, answering questions to the name of Susan?’
He lets me consider that. Then he says, ‘All we ask is that, when the moment arrives, you give the performance over again, before a lawyer. What have you to lose? Dear Maud, you have nothing: no friends in London, no money to your name—why, not so much as a name!’
I have put my fingers to my mouth. ‘Suppose,’ I say, ‘I won’t do it? Suppose, when your lawyer comes, I tell him—’
‘Tell him what? Tell him how you plotted to swindle an innocent girl?—looked on, while the doctors dosed her and carried her off? Hmm? What do you think he will make of that?’