But he had thought of that. He had thought of everything. He said he meant to pass me off as his old nurse’s sister’s child—a city girl come on hard times. He said he thought the lady would take me then, for his sake.
He said, ‘We’ll write you a character—sign it Lady Fanny of Bum Street, something like that—she won’t know any better. She never saw Society, doesn’t know London from Jerusalem. Who can she ask?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said again. ‘Suppose she don’t care for you, so much as you are hoping?’
He grew modest. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think I might be permitted by now, to know when a green girl likes me.’
‘Suppose,’ said Mrs Sucksby then, ‘she don’t like you quite enough? Suppose she turns out another Miss Bamber or Miss Finch?’
Miss Bamber and Miss Finch were two of the other heiresses he had almost netted. But he heard their names, and snorted. ‘She won’t,’ he said, ‘turn out like them, I know it. Those girls had fathers—ambitious fathers, with lawyers on every side. This girl’s uncle can see no further than the last page of his book. As to her not liking me enough—well, I can only say this: I think she will.’
‘Enough to do a flit, from her uncle’s house?’
‘It’s a grim house,’ he answered, ‘for a girl of her years.’
‘But it’s the years that will work against you,’ said Mr Ibbs. You picked up bits and pieces of Law, of course, in a line like his. ‘Till she is one-and-twenty, she shall need her uncle’s say. Take her as fast and as quiet as you like: he shall come and take her back again. You being her husband won’t count for buttons, then.’
‘But her being my wife, will.—If you understand me,’ said Gentleman slyly.
Dainty looked blank. John saw her face. ‘The jiggling,’ he said.
‘She shall be ruined,’ said Mrs Sucksby. ‘No other gent will want her, then.’
Dainty gaped more than ever.
‘Never mind it,’ said Mr Ibbs, lifting his hand. Then, to Gentleman: ‘It’s tricky. Uncommonly tricky.’
‘I don’t say it’s not. But we must take our chances. What have we to lose? If nothing else, it will be a holiday for Sue.’
John laughed. ‘A holiday,’ he said, ‘it will be. A fucking long one, if you get caught.’
I bit my lip. He was right. But it wasn’t so much the risk that troubled me. You cannot be a thief and always troubling over hazards, you should go mad. It was only that, I was not sure I wanted any kind of holiday. I was not sure I cared for it away from the Borough. I had once gone with Mrs Sucksby to visit her cousin in Bromley; I had come home with hives. I remembered the country as quiet and queer, and the people in it either simpletons or gipsies.
How would I like living with a simpleton girl? She would not be like Dainty, who was only slightly touched and only sometimes violent. She might be really mad. She might try and throttle me; and there would be no-one about, for miles and miles, to hear me calling. Gipsies would be no use, they were all for themselves. Everyone knows a gipsy would not cross the street to spit on you, if you were on fire.
I said, ‘This girl—what’s she like? You said she’s queer in her head.’
‘Not queer,’ said Gentleman. ‘Only what I should call fey. She’s an innocent, a natural. She has been kept from the world. She’s an orphan, like you are; but where you had Mrs Sucksby to sharpen you up, she had—no-one.’
Dainty looked at him then. Her mother had been a drunkard, and got drowned in the river. Her father had used to beat her. He beat her sister till she died. She said, in a whisper:
‘Ain’t it terribly wicked, Gentleman, what you mean to do?’
I don’t believe any of us had thought it, before that moment. Now Dainty said it, and I gazed about me, and nobody would catch my eye.
Then Gentleman laughed.
‘Wicked?’ he said. ‘Why, bless you, Dainty, of course it’s wicked! But it’s wicked to the tune of fifteen thousand pounds—and oh! but that’s a sweet tune, hum it how you will. Then again, do you suppose that when that money was first got, it was got honestly? Don’t think it! Money never is. It is got, by families like hers, from the backs of the poor—twenty backs broken for every shilling made. You have heard, have you, of Robin Hood?’
‘Have I!’ she said.
‘Well, Sue and I shall be like him: taking gold from the rich and passing it back to the people it was got from.’
John curled his lip. ‘You ponce,’ he said. ‘Robin Hood was a hero, a man of wax. Pass the money to the people? What people are yours! You want to rob a lady, go and rob your own mother.’
‘My mother?’ answered Gentleman, colouring up. ‘What’s my mother to do with anything? Hang my mother!’ Then he caught Mrs Sucksby’s eye, and turned to me. ‘Oh, Sue,’ he said. ‘I do beg your pardon.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. And I gazed at the table, and again everyone grew quiet. Perhaps they were all thinking, as they did on hanging days, ‘Ain’t she brave?’ I hoped they were. Then again, I hoped they weren’t: for, as I have said, I never was brave, but had got away with people supposing I was, for seventeen years. Now here was Gentleman, needing a bold girl and coming—forty miles, he had said, in all that cold and slippery weather—to me.
I raised my eyes to his.
‘Two thousand pounds, Sue,’ he said quietly.
‘That’ll shine very bright, all right,’ said Mr Ibbs.
‘And all them frocks and jewels!’ said Dainty. ‘Oh, Sue! Shouldn’t you look handsome, in them!’
‘You should look like a lady,’ said Mrs Sucksby; and I heard her, and caught her gaze, and knew she was looking at me—as she had, so many times before—and was seeing, behind my face, my mother’s. Your fortune’s still to be made.—I could almost hear her saying it. Your fortune’s still to be made; and ours, Sue, along with it . . .
And after all, she had been right. Here was my fortune, come from nowhere—come, at last. What could I say? I looked again at Gentleman. My heart beat hard, like hammers in my breast. I said:
‘All right. I’ll do it. But for three thousand pounds, not two. And if the lady don’t care for me and sends me home, I shall want a hundred anyway, for the trouble of trying.’
He hesitated, thinking it over. Of course, that was all a show. After a second he smiled, then he held his hand to me and I gave him mine. He pressed my fingers, and laughed.
John scowled. ‘I’ll give you ten to one she comes back crying in a week,’ he said.
‘I’ll come back dressed in a velvet gown,’ I answered. ‘With gloves up to here, and a hat with a veil on, and a bag full of silver coin. And you shall have to call me miss. Won’t he, Mrs Sucksby?’
He spat. ‘I’ll tear my own tongue out, before I do that!’
‘I’ll tear it out first!’ I said.
I sound like a child. I was a child! Perhaps Mrs Sucksby was thinking that, too. For she said nothing, only sat, still gazing at me, with her hand at her soft lip. She smiled; but her face seemed troubled. I could almost have said, she was afraid.
Perhaps she was.
Or perhaps I only think that now, when I know what dark and fearful things were to follow.
2.
The bookish old man, it turned out, was called Christopher Lilly. The niece’s name was Maud. They lived west of London, out Maidenhead-way, near a village named Marlow, and in a house they called Briar. Gentleman’s plan was to send me there alone, by train, in two days’ time. He himself, he said, must stay in London for another week at least, to do the old man’s business over the bindings of his books.
I didn’t care much for the detail of my travelling down there, and arriving at the house, all on my own. I had never been much further west before than the Cremorne Gardens, where I sometimes went with Mr Ibbs’s nephews, to watch the dancing on a Saturday night. I saw the French girl cross the river on a wire from there, and almost drop—that was something. They say she wore stockings; her legs looked bare enough t
o me, though. But I recall standing on Battersea Bridge as she walked her rope, and looking out, past Hammersmith, to all the countryside beyond it, that was just trees and hills and not a chimney or the spire of a church in sight—and oh! that was a very chilling thing to see. If you had said to me then, that I would one day leave the Borough, with all my pals in it, and Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, and go quite alone, to a maid’s place in a house the other side of those dark hills, I should have laughed in your face.
But Gentleman said I must go soon, in case the lady—Miss Lilly—should spoil our plot, by accidentally taking another girl to be her servant. The day after he came to Lant Street he sat and wrote her out a letter. He said he hoped she would pardon the liberty of his writing, but he had been on a visit to his old nurse—that had been like a mother to him, when he was a boy—and he had found her quite demented with grief, over the fate of her dead sister’s daughter. Of course, the dead sister’s daughter was meant to be me: the story was, that I had been maiding for a lady who was marrying and heading off for India, and had lost my place; that I was looking out for another mistress, but was meanwhile being tempted on every side to go to the bad; and that if only some soft-hearted lady would give me the chance of a situation far away from the evils of the city—and so on.
I said, ‘If she’ll believe bouncers like those, Gentleman, she must be even sillier than you first told us.’
But he answered, that there were about a hundred girls between the Strand and Piccadilly, who dined very handsomely off that story, five nights a week; and if the hard swells of London could be separated from their shillings by it, then how much kinder wasn’t Miss Maud Lilly likely to be, all alone and unknowing and sad as she was, and with no-one to tell her any better?
‘You’ll see,’ he said. And he sealed the letter and wrote the direction, and had one of our neighbours’ boys run with it to the post.
Then, so sure was he of the success of his plan, he said they must begin at once to teach me how a proper lady’s maid should be.
First, they washed my hair. I wore my hair then, like lots of the Borough girls wore theirs, divided in three, with a comb at the back and, at the sides, a few fat curls. If you turned the curls with a very hot iron, having first made the hair wet with sugar-and-water, you could make them hard as anything; they would last for a week like that, or longer. Gentleman, however, said he thought the style too fast for a country lady: he made me wash my hair till it was perfectly smooth, then had me divide it once—just the once—then pin it in a plain knot at the back of my head. He had Dainty wash her hair, too, and when I had combed and re-combed mine, and pinned and re-pinned it, until he was satisfied, he made me comb and pin hers in a matching style, as if hers was the lady’s, Miss Lilly’s. He fussed about us like a regular girl. When we had finished, Dainty and I looked that plain and bacon-faced, we might have been trying for places in a nunnery. John said if they would only put pictures of us in the dairies, it would be a new way of curdling milk.
When Dainty heard that she pulled the pins from her hair and threw them at the fire. Some had hair still clinging to them, and the flames set it hissing.
‘Can’t you do anything to that girl of yours,’ said Mr Ibbs to John, ‘but make her cry?’
John laughed. ‘I likes to see her cry,’ he said. ‘It makes her sweat the less.’
He was an evil boy, all right.
But he was quite caught up in Gentleman’s plot, despite himself. We all were. For the first time I ever knew, Mr Ibbs kept the blind pulled down on his shop door and let his brazier go cold. When people came knocking with keys to be cut, he sent them away. To the two or three thieves that brought poke, he shook his head.
‘Can’t do it, my son. Not to-day. Got a little something cooking.’
He only had Phil come, early in the morning. He sat him down and ran him through the points of a list that Gentleman had drawn up the night before; then Phil pulled his cap down over his eyes, and left. When he came back two hours later it was with a bag and a canvas-covered trunk, that he had got from a man he knew, who ran a crooked warehouse at the river.
The trunk was for me to take to the country. In the bag was a brown stuff dress, more or less my size; and a cloak, and shoes, and black silk stockings; and on top of it all, a heap of lady’s real white underthings.
Mr Ibbs only undid the string at the neck of the bag, peeped in, and saw the linen; then he went and sat at the far side of the kitchen, where he had a Bramah lock he liked sometimes to take apart, and powder, and put back together. He made John go with him and hold the screws. Gentleman, however, took out the lady’s items one by one, and placed them flat upon the table. Beside the table he set a kitchen chair.
‘Now, Sue,’ he said, ‘suppose this chair’s Miss Lilly. How shall you dress her? Let’s say you start with the stockings and drawers.’
‘The drawers?’ I said. ‘You don’t mean, she’s naked?’
Dainty put her hand to her mouth and tittered. She was sitting at Mrs Sucksby’s feet, having her hair re-curled.
‘Naked?’ said Gentleman. ‘Why, as a nail. What else? She must take off her clothes when they grow foul; she must take them off to bathe. It will be your job to receive them when she does. It will be your job to pass her her fresh ones.’
I had not thought of this. I wondered how it would be to have to stand and hand a pair of drawers to a strange bare girl. A strange bare girl had once run, shrieking, down Lant Street, with a policeman and a nurse behind her. Suppose Miss Lilly took fright like that, and I had to grab her? I blushed, and Gentleman saw. ‘Come now,’ he said, almost smiling. ‘Don’t say you’re squeamish?’
I tossed my head, to show I wasn’t. He nodded, then took up a pair of the stockings, and then a pair of drawers. He placed them, dangling, over the seat of the kitchen chair.
‘What next?’ he asked me.
I shrugged. ‘Her shimmy, I suppose.’
‘Her chemise, you must call it,’ he said. ‘And you must make sure to warm it, before she puts it on.’
He took the shimmy up and held it close to the kitchen fire. Then he put it carefully above the drawers, over the back of the chair, as if the chair was wearing it.
‘Now, her corset,’ he said next. ‘She will want you to tie this for her, tight as you like. Come on, let’s see you do it.’
He put the corset about the shimmy, with the laces at the back; and while he leaned upon the chair to hold it fast, he made me pull the laces and knot them in a bow. They left lines of red and white upon my palms, as if I had been whipped.
‘Why don’t she wear the kind of stays that fasten at the front, like a regular girl?’ said Dainty, watching.
‘Because then,’ said Gentleman, ‘she shouldn’t need a maid. And if she didn’t need a maid, she shouldn’t know she was a lady. Hey?’ He winked.
After the corset came a camisole, and after that a dicky; then came a nine-hoop crinoline, and then more petticoats, this time of silk. Then Gentleman had Dainty run upstairs for a bottle of Mrs Sucksby’s scent, and he had me spray it where the splintered wood of the chair-back showed between the ribbons of the shimmy, that he said would be Miss Lilly’s throat.
And all the time I must say:
‘Will you raise your arms, miss, for me to straighten this frill?’ and,
‘Do you care for it, miss, with a ruffle or a flounce?’ and,
‘Are you ready for it now, miss?’
‘Do you like it drawn tight?’
‘Should you like it to be tighter?’
‘Oh! Forgive me if I pinch.’
At last, with all the bending and the fussing, I grew hot as a pig. Miss Lilly sat before us with her corset tied hard, her petticoats spread out about the floor, smelling fresh as a rose; but rather wanting, of course, about the shoulders and the neck.
John said, ‘Don’t say much, do she?’ He had been sneaking glances at us all this time, while Mr Ibbs put the powder to his Bramah.
‘She’s
a lady,’ said Gentleman, stroking his beard, ‘and naturally shy. But she’ll pick up like anything, with Sue and me to teach her. Won’t you, darling?’
He squatted at the side of the chair and smoothed his fingers over the bulging skirts; then he dipped his hand beneath them, reaching high into the layers of silk. He did it so neatly, it looked to me as if he knew his way, all right; and as he reached higher his cheek grew pink, the silk gave a rustle, the crinoline bucked, the chair quivered hard upon the kitchen floor, the joints of its legs faintly shrieking. Then it was still.
‘There, you sweet little bitch,’ he said softly. He drew out his hand and held up a stocking. He passed it to me, and yawned. ‘Now, let’s say it’s bed-time.’
John still watched us, saying nothing, only blinking and jiggling his leg. Dainty rubbed her eye, her hair half curled, smelling powerfully of toffee.
I began at the ribbons at the waist of the dickies, then let loose the laces of the corset and eased it free.
‘Will you just lift your foot, miss, for me to take this from you?’
‘Will you breathe a little softer, miss? and then it will come.’
He kept me working like that for an hour or more. Then he warmed up a flat-iron.
‘Spit on this, will you, Dainty?’ he said, holding it to her. She did; and when the spit gave a sizzle he took out a cigarette, and lit it on the iron’s hot base. Then, while he stood by and smoked, Mrs Sucksby—who had once, long ago, in the days before she ever thought of farming infants, been a mangling-woman in a laundry—showed me how a lady’s linen should be pressed and folded; and that, I should say, took about another hour.
Then Gentleman sent me upstairs, to put on the dress that Phil had got for me. It was a plain brown dress, more or less the colour of my hair; and the walls of our kitchen being also brown, when I came downstairs again I could hardly be seen. I should have rathered a blue gown, or a violet one; but Gentleman said it was the perfect dress for a sneak or for a servant—and so all the more perfect for me, who was going to Briar to be both.