We laughed at that; and then, when I had walked about the room to grow used to the skirt (which was narrow), and to let Dainty see where the cut was too large and needed stitching, he had me stand and try a curtsey. This was harder than it sounds. Say what you like about the kind of life I was used to, it was a life without masters: I had never curtseyed before to anyone. Now Gentleman had me dipping up and down until I thought I should be sick. He said curtseying came as natural to ladies’ maids, as passing wind. He said if I would only get the trick, I should never forget it—and he was right about that, at least, for I can still dip a proper curtsey, even now.—Or could, if I cared to.
Well. When we had finished with the curtseys he had me learn my story. Then, to test me, he made me stand before him and repeat my part, like a girl saying a catechism.
‘Now then,’ he said. ‘What is your name?’
‘Ain’t it Susan?’ I said.
‘Ain’t it Susan, what?’
‘Ain’t it Susan Trinder?’
‘Ain’t it Susan, sir. You must remember, I shan’t be Gentleman to you at Briar. I shall be Mr Richard Rivers. You must call me sir; and you must call Mr Lilly sir; and the lady you must call miss or Miss Lilly or Miss Maud, as she directs you. And we shall all call you Susan.’ He frowned. ‘But, not Susan Trinder. That may lead them back to Lant Street if things go wrong. We must find you a better second name—’
‘Valentine,’ I said, straight off. What can I tell you? I was only seventeen. I had a weakness for hearts. Gentleman heard me, and curled his lip.
‘Perfect,’ he said; ‘—if we were about to put you on the stage.’
‘I know real girls named Valentine!’ I said.
‘That’s true,’ said Dainty. ‘Floy Valentine, and her two sisters. Lord, I hates those girls though. You don’t want to be named for them, Sue.’
I bit my finger. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Gentleman. ‘A fanciful name might ruin us. This is a life-and-death business. We need a name that will hide you, not bring you to everyone’s notice. We need a name’—he thought it over—‘an untraceable name, yet one we shall remember . . . Brown? To match your dress? Or—yes, why not? Let’s make it, Smith. Susan Smith.’ He smiled. ‘You are to be a sort of smith, after all. This sort, I mean.’
He let his hand drop, and turned it, and crooked his middle finger; and the sign, and the word he meant—fingersmith—being Borough code for thief, we laughed again.
At last he coughed, and wiped his eyes. ‘Dear me, what fun,’ he said. ‘Now, where had we got to? Ah, yes. Tell me again. What is your name?’
I said it, with the sir after.
‘Very good. And what is your home?’
‘My home is at London, sir,’ I said. ‘My mother being dead, I live with my old aunty; which is the lady what used to be your nurse when you was a boy, sir.’
He nodded. ‘Very good as to detail. Not so good, however, as to style. Come now: I know Mrs Sucksby raised you better than that. You’re not selling violets. Say it again.’
I pulled a face; but then said, more carefully,
‘The lady that used to be your nurse when you were a boy, sir.’
‘Better, better. And what was your situation, before this?’
‘With a kind lady, sir, in Mayfair; who, being lately married and about to go to India, will have a native girl to dress her, and so won’t need me.’
‘Dear me. You are to be pitied, Sue.’
‘I believe so, sir.’
‘And are you grateful to Miss Lilly, for having you at Briar?’
‘Oh, sir! Gratitude ain’t in it!’
‘Violets again!’ He waved his hand. ‘Never mind, that will do. But don’t hold my gaze so boldly, will you? Look, rather, at my shoe. That’s good. Now, tell me this. This is important. What are your duties while attending your new mistress?’
‘I must wake her in the mornings,’ I said, ‘and pour out her tea. I must wash her, and dress her, and brush her hair. I must keep her jewellery neat, and not steal it. I must walk with her when she has a fancy to walk, and sit when she fancies sitting. I must carry her fan for when she grows too hot, her wrap for when she feels nippy, her eau-de-Cologne for if she gets the head-ache, and her salts for when she comes over queer. I must be her chaperon for her drawing-lessons, and not see when she blushes.’
‘Splendid! And what is your character?’
‘Honest as the day.’
‘And what is your object, that no-one but we must know?’
‘That she will love you, and leave her uncle for your sake. That she will make your fortune; and that you, Mr Rivers, will make mine.’
I took hold of my skirts and showed him one of those smooth curtseys, my eyes all the time on the toe of his boot.
Dainty clapped me. Mrs Sucksby rubbed her hands together and said,
‘Three thousand pounds, Sue. Oh, my crikey! Dainty, pass me an infant, I want something to squeeze.’
Gentleman stepped aside and lit a cigarette. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Not bad, at all. A little fining down, I think, is all that’s needed now. We shall try again later.’
‘Later?’ I said. ‘Oh, Gentleman, ain’t you finished with me yet? If Miss Lilly will have me as her maid for the sake of pleasing you, why should she care how fined down I am?’
‘She may not mind,’ he answered. ‘I think we might put an apron on Charley Wag and send him, for all she will mind or wonder. But it is not only her that you will have to fool. There is the old man, her uncle; and besides him, all his staff.’
I said, ‘His staff?’ I had not thought of this.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Do you think a great house runs itself? First of all there’s the steward, Mr Way—’
‘Mr Way!’ said John with a snort. ‘Do they call him Milky?’
‘No,’ said Gentleman. He turned back to me. ‘Mr Way,’ he said again. ‘I should say he won’t trouble you much, though. But there is also Mrs Stiles, the housekeeper—she may study you a little harder, you must be careful with her. And then there is Mr Way’s boy Charles, and I suppose one or two girls, for the kitchen work; and one or two parlourmaids; and grooms and stable-boys and gardeners—but you shan’t see much of them, don’t think of them.’
I looked at him in horror. I said, ‘You never said about them before. Mrs Sucksby, did he say about them? Did he say, there will be about a hundred servants, that I shall have to play the maid for?’
Mrs Sucksby had a baby and was rolling it like dough. ‘Be fair now, Gentleman, ’ she said, not looking over. ‘You did keep very dark about the servants last night.’
He shrugged. ‘A detail,’ he said.
A detail? That was like him. Telling you half of a story and making out you had it all.
But it was too late now, for a change of heart. The next day Gentleman worked me hard again; and the day after that he got a letter, from Miss Lilly.
He got it at the post-office in the City. Our neighbours would have wondered what was up, if we’d had a letter come to the house. He got it, and brought it back, and opened it while we looked on; then we sat in silence, to hear it—Mr Ibbs only drumming his fingers a little on the table-top, by which I knew that he was nervous; and so grew more nervous myself.
The letter was a short one. Miss Lilly said, first, what a pleasure it was, to have received Mr Rivers’s note; and how thoughtful he was, and how kind to his old nurse. She was sure, she wished more gentlemen were as kind and as thoughtful as him!
Her uncle got on very badly, she said, now his assistant was gone. The house seemed very changed and quiet and dull; perhaps this was the weather, which seemed to have turned. As for her maid—Here Gentleman tilted the letter, the better to catch the light.—As for her maid, poor Agnes: she was pleased to be able to tell him that Agnes looked set not to die after all—
We heard that and drew in our breaths. Mrs Sucksby closed her eyes, and I saw Mr Ibbs give a glance at his cold brazier and reck
on up the business he had lost in the past two days. But then Gentleman smiled. The maid was not about to die; but her health was so ruined and her spirits so low, they were sending her back to Cork.
‘God bless the Irish!’ said Mr Ibbs, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his head.
Gentleman read on.
‘I shall be glad to see the girl you speak of,’ Miss Lilly wrote. ‘I should be glad if you would send her to me, at once. I am grateful to anyone for remembering me. I am not over-used to people thinking of my comforts. If she be only a good and willing girl, then I am sure I shall love her. And she will be the dearer to me, Mr Rivers, because she will have come to me from London, that has you in it.’
He smiled again, raised the letter to his mouth, and passed it back and forth across his lips. His snide ring glittered in the light of the lamps.
It had all turned out, of course, just as the clever devil had promised.
That night—that was to be my last night at Lant Street, and the first night of all the nights that were meant to lead to Gentleman’s securing of Miss Lilly’s fortune—that night Mr Ibbs sent out for a hot roast supper, and put irons to heat in the fire, for making flip, in celebration.
The supper was a pig’s head, stuffed at the ears—a favourite of mine, and got in my honour. Mr Ibbs took the carving-knife to the back-door step, put up his sleeves, and stooped to sharpen the blade. He leaned with his hand on the door-post, and I watched him do it with a queer sensation at the roots of my hair: for all up the post were cuts from where, each Christmas Day when I was a girl, he had laid the knife upon my head to see how high I’d grown. Now he drew the blade back and forth across the stone, until it sang; then he handed it to Mrs Sucksby and she dished out the meat. She always carved, in our house. An ear apiece, for Mr Ibbs and Gentleman; the snout for John and Dainty; and the cheeks, that were the tenderest parts, for herself and for me.
It was all got, as I’ve said, in my honour. But, I don’t know—perhaps it was seeing the marks on the door-post; perhaps it was thinking of the soup that Mrs Sucksby would make, when I wouldn’t be there to eat it, with the bones of the roast pig’s head; perhaps it was the head itself—which seemed to me to be grimacing, rather, the lashes of its eyes and the bristles of its snout gummed brown with treacly tears—but as we sat about the table, I grew sad. John and Dainty wolfed their dinner down, laughing and quarrelling, now and then firing up when Gentleman teased, and now and then sulking. Mr Ibbs went neatly to work on his plate, and Mrs Sucksby went neatly to work on hers; and I picked over my bit of pork and had no appetite.
I gave half to Dainty. She gave it to John. He snapped his jaws and howled, like a dog.
And then, when the plates were cleared away Mr Ibbs beat the eggs and the sugar and the rum, to make flip. He filled seven glasses, took the irons from the brazier, waved them for a second to take the sting of the heat off, then plunged them in. Heating the flip was like setting fire to the brandy on a plum pudding—everyone liked to see it done and hear the drinks go hiss. John said, ‘Can I do one, Mr Ibbs?’—his face red from the supper, and shiny like paint, like the face of a boy in a picture in a toy-shop window.
We sat, and everyone talked and laughed, saying what a fine thing it would be when Gentleman was made rich, and I came home with my cool three thousand; and still I kept rather quiet, and no-one seemed to notice. At last Mrs Sucksby patted her stomach and said,
‘Won’t you give us a tune, Mr Ibbs, to put the baby to bed by?’
Mr Ibbs could whistle like a kettle, for an hour at a go. He put his glass aside and wiped the flip from his moustache, and started up with ‘The Tarpaulin Jacket’. Mrs Sucksby hummed along until her eyes grew damp, and then the hum got broken. Her husband had been a sailor, and been lost at sea.—Lost to her, I mean. He lived in the Bermudas.
‘Handsome,’ she said, when the song was finished. ‘But let’s have a lively one next, for heaven’s sake!—else I shall be drove quite maudlin. Let’s see the youngsters have a bit of a dance.’
Mr Ibbs struck up with a quick tune then, and Mrs Sucksby clapped, and John and Dainty got up and pushed the chairs back. ‘Will you hold my earrings for me, Mrs Sucksby?’ said Dainty. They danced the polka until the china ornaments upon the mantelpiece jumped and the dust rose inches high about their thumping feet. Gentleman stood and leaned and watched them, smoking a cigarette, calling ‘Hup!’ and ‘Go it, Johnny!’, as he might call, laughing, to a terrier in a fight he had no bet on.
When they asked me to join them, I said I would not. The dust made me sneeze and, after all, the iron that had warmed my flip had been heated too hard, and the egg had curdled. Mrs Sucksby had put by a glass and a plate of morsels of meat for Mr Ibbs’s sister, and I said I would carry them up.—‘All right, dear girl,’ she said, still clapping out the beat. I took the plate and the glass and a candle, and slipped upstairs.
It was like stepping out of heaven, I always thought, to leave our kitchen on a winter’s night. Even so, when I had left the food beside Mr Ibbs’s sleeping sister and seen to one or two of the babies, that had woken with the sounds of the dancing below, I did not go back to join the others. I walked the little way along the landing, to the door of the room I shared with Mrs Sucksby; and then I went up the next pair of stairs, to the little attic I had been born in.
This room was always cold. Tonight there was a breeze up, the window was loose, and it was colder than ever. The floor was plain boards, with strips of drugget on it. The walls were bare, but for a bit of blue oil-cloth that had been tacked to catch the splashes from a wash-stand. The stand, at the moment, was draped with a waistcoat and a shirt, of Gentleman’s, and one or two collars. He always slept here, when he came to visit; though he might have made a bed with Mr Ibbs, down in the kitchen. I know which place I would have chosen. On the floor sagged his high leather boots, that he had scraped the mud from and shined. Beside them was his bag, with more white linen spilling from it. On the seat of a chair were some coins from his pocket, a packet of cigarettes, and sealing-wax. The coins were light. The wax was brittle, like toffee.
The bed was roughly made. There was a red velvet curtain upon it, with the rings taken off, for a counterpane: it had been got from a burning house, and still smelt of cinders. I took it up and put it about my shoulders, like a cloak. Then I pinched out the flame of my candle and stood at the window, shivering, looking out at the roofs and chimneys, and at the Horsemonger Lane Gaol where my mother was hanged.
The glass of the window had the first few blooms of a new frost upon it, and I held my finger to it, to make the ice turn to dirty water. I could still catch Mr Ibbs’s whistle and the bounce of Dainty’s feet, but before me the streets of the Borough were dark. There was only here and there a feeble light at a window like mine, and then the lantern of a coach, throwing shadows; and then a person, running hard against the cold, quick and dark as the shadows, and as quickly come and gone. I thought of all the thieves that must be there, and all the thieves’ children; and then of all the regular men and women who lived their lives—their strange and ordinary lives—in other houses, other streets, in the brighter parts of London. I thought of Maud Lilly, in her great house. She did not know my name—I had not known hers, three days before. She did not know that I was standing, plotting her ruin, while Dainty Warren and John Vroom danced a polka in my kitchen.
What was she like? I knew a girl named Maud once, she had half a lip. She used to like to make out that the other half had been lost in a fight; I knew for a fact, however, she had been born like that, she couldn’t fight putty. She died in the end—not from fighting, but through eating bad meat. Just one bit of bad meat killed her, just like that.
But, she was very dark. Gentleman had said that the other Maud, his Maud, was fair and rather handsome. But when I thought of her, I could picture her only as thin and brown and straight, like the kitchen chair that I had tied the corset to.
I tried another curtsey. The velvet curtain made me cl
umsy. I tried again. I began to sweat, in sudden fear.
Then there came the opening of the kitchen door and the sound of footsteps on the stair, and then Mrs Sucksby’s voice, calling for me. I didn’t answer. I heard her walk to the bedrooms below, and look for me there; then there was a silence, then her feet again, upon the attic stairs, and then came the light of her candle. The climb made her sigh a little—only a little, for she was very nimble, for all that she was rather stout.
‘Are you here then, Sue?’ she said quietly. ‘And all on your own, in the dark?’
She looked about her, at all that I had looked at—at the coins and the sealing-wax, and Gentleman’s boots and leather bag. Then she came to me, and put her warm, dry hand to my cheek, and I said—just as if she had tickled or pinched me, and the words were a chuckle or a cry I could not stop—I said:
‘What if I ain’t up to it, Mrs Sucksby? What if I can’t do it? Suppose I lose my nerve and let you down? Hadn’t we ought to send Dainty, after all?’
She shook her head and smiled. ‘Now, then,’ she said. She led me to the bed, and we sat and she drew down my head until it rested in her lap, and she put back the curtain from my cheek and stroked my hair. ‘Now, then.’
‘Ain’t it a long way to go?’ I said, looking up at her face.
‘Not so far,’ she answered.
‘Shall you think of me, while I am there?’
She drew free a strand of hair that was caught about my ear.
‘Every minute,’ she said, quietly. ‘Ain’t you my own girl? And won’t I worry? But you shall have Gentleman by you. I should never have let you go, for any ordinary villain.’
That was true, at least. But still my heart beat fast. I thought again of Maud Lilly, sitting sighing in her room, waiting for me to come and unlace her stays and hold her nightgown before the fire. Poor lady, Dainty had said.
I chewed at the inside of my lip. Then: ‘Ought I to do it, though, Mrs Sucksby?’ I said. ‘Ain’t it a very mean trick, and shabby?’
She held my gaze, then raised her eyes and nodded to the view beyond the window. She said, ‘I know she would have done it, and not given it a thought. And I know what she would feel in her heart—what dread, but also what pride, and the pride part winning—to see you doing it now.’