She shook her head. She spoke quietly, too. ‘Not then,’ she said. ‘Not until Richard took me to London. Then she—’ She coloured, but lifted her head. ‘Then I was told.’
‘Not before?’ I said.
‘Not before.’
‘They tricked you, too, then.’
I should have been glad to think it, once. Now it was all of a piece with every bleak and terrible thing I had suffered and seen and learned, in the past nine months. For a minute, we said nothing. I let myself sink against the window and put my cheek against the glass. The glass was cold. The rain fell hard, still. It struck the gravel before the house and made it churn. The lawn seemed bruised. Through the bare wet branches of the tangled wood I could just make out the shape of yews, and the pointed roof of the little red chapel.
‘My mother is buried there,’ I said. ‘I used to look at her grave, thinking nothing. I thought my mother was a murderess.’
‘I thought my mother was mad,’ she said. ‘Instead—’
She could not say it. Neither could I. Not yet. But I turned to look at her again, and swallowed, and said,
‘You went to see her, at the gaol.’ I had remembered the matron’s words.
She nodded. ‘She spoke of you,’ she said.
‘Of me? What did she say?’
‘That she hoped you never knew. That she wished they might hang her, ten times over, before you should. That she and your mother had been wrong. That they meant to make you a commonplace girl. That that was like taking a jewel, and hiding it in dust. That dust falls away . . .’
I closed my eyes. When I looked again, she had at last come closer.
‘Sue,’ she said. ‘This house is yours.’
‘I don’t want it,’ I said.
‘The money is yours. Half of your mother’s money. All of it, if you wish. I have claimed none of it. You shall be rich.’
‘I don’t want to be rich. I never wanted to be rich. I only want—’
But I hesitated. My heart was too full. Her gaze was too close, too clear. I thought how I had seen her, last—not at the trial, but on the night that Gentleman died. Her eyes had glittered. They did not glitter now. Her hair had been curled. Now it was smooth, unpinned, she had put it back and tied it with a simple ribbon. Her hands did not tremble. They were bare, and marked, as I have said, with spots and smudges of ink. Her brow had ink upon it, too, from where she had pressed it. Her dress was dark, and long, yet fell not quite to the floor. It was silk, but fastened at the front. The highest hook was left undone. I saw the beating of her throat behind it. I looked away.
Then I looked back, into her eyes.
‘I only want you,’ I said.
The blood spread across her face. She unjoined her hands, took another step to me and almost, almost reached. But then she turned and lowered her gaze. She stood at the desk. She put her hand to the paper and pen.
‘You do not know me,’ she said, in a queer, flat voice. ‘You never did. There were things—’
She drew in her breath and would not go on. ‘What things?’ I said. She didn’t answer. I rose, and went closer to her. ‘What things?’
‘My uncle—’ she said, looking up fearfully. ‘My uncle’s books—You thought me good. Didn’t you? I was never that. I was—’ She seemed, for a moment, almost to struggle with herself. Then she moved again, went to the shelves behind the desk, and took up a book. She held it, tight to her breast; then turned and brought it to me. She opened it up in her hands. Her hands, I think, were shaking. ‘Here,’ she said, as she looked across the page. ‘Or, here.’ I saw her gaze settle. And then, in the same flat voice she had spoken in before, she began to read.
‘How delicious,’ she read, ‘was the glow upon her beauteous neck and bare ivory shoulders, as I forced her on her back on the couch. How luxuriously did her snowy hillocks rise against my bosom in wild confusion—’
‘What?’ I said.
She did not answer, did not look up; but turned that page and read from another.
‘I scarcely knew what I was about; everything now was in active exertion—tongues, lips, bellies, arms, thighs, legs, bottoms, every part in voluptuous motion.’
Now my own cheek coloured. ‘What?’ I said, in a whisper.
She turned more pages, read again.
‘Quickly my daring hand seized her most secret treasure, regardless of her soft complaints, which my burning kisses reduced to mere murmurs, while my fingers penetrated into the covered way of love—’
She stopped. Her heart was beating harder, though she had kept her voice so flat. My own heart was also beating rather hard. I said—still not quite understanding:
‘Your uncle’s books?’
She nodded.
‘All, like this?’
She nodded again.
‘Every one of them, like this? Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
I took the book from her and looked at the print on the pages. It looked like any book would, to me. So I put it down, and went to the shelves and picked up another. That looked the same. Then I took up another; and that had pictures. You never saw any pictures like them. One was of two bare girls. I looked at Maud, and my heart seemed to shrink.
‘You knew it all,’ I said. That’s the first thing I thought. ‘You said that you knew nothing, when all the time—’
‘I did know nothing,’ she said.
‘You knew it all! You made me kiss you. You made me want to kiss you again! When all the time, you had been coming here and—’
My voice broke off. She watched my face. I thought of the times I had come to the library door, heard the smothered rising and falling of her voice. I thought of her reading to gentlemen—to Gentleman—while I sat, eating tarts and custards with Mrs Stiles and Mr Way. I put my hand to my heart. It had shrunk so small and tight, it hurt me.
‘Oh, Maud,’ I said. ‘If I had only known! To think, of you—’ I began to cry. ‘To think of your uncle—Oh!’ My hand flew to my mouth. ‘My uncle!’ That thought was queerer than anything. ‘Oh!’ I still held the book. Now I looked at it and let it drop as if it burned me. ‘Oh!’
It was all I could say. Maud stood very still, her hand upon the desk. I wiped my eyes. Then I looked again at the smears of ink on her fingers.
‘How can you bear it?’
She did not answer.
‘To think of him,’ I said, ‘that sod! Oh, stinking was too good for him!’ I wrung my hands. ‘And now, to look at you and see you here, still here, with his books about you—!’
I gazed across the shelves; and wanted to smash them. I went to her, and reached to draw her close. But she held me off. She moved her head, in a way that at any other time I should have called proud.
‘Don’t pity me,’ she said, ‘because of him. He’s dead. But I am still what he made me. I shall always be that. Half of the books are spoiled, or sold. But I am here. And look. You must know everything. Look how I get my living.’
She picked up a paper from the desk—the paper that I had seen her write on. The ink was still damp. ‘I asked a friend of my uncle’s, once,’ she said, ‘if I might write for him. He sent me to a home for distressed gentlewomen.’ She smiled, unhappily. ‘They say that ladies don’t write such things. But, I am not a lady . . .’
I looked at her, not understanding. I looked at the paper in her hand. Then my heart missed its beat.
‘You are writing books, like his!’ I said. She nodded, not speaking. Her face was grave. I don’t know how my face seemed. I think it was burning. ‘Books, like that!’ I said. ‘I can’t believe it. Of all the ways I thought I’d find you—And then, to find you here, all on your own in this great house—’
‘I am not alone,’ she said. ‘I have told you: I have William Inker and his wife to care for me.’
‘To find you here, all on your own, writing books like that—!’
Again, she looked almost proud. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she said.
I did no
t know. ‘It just don’t seem right,’ I said. ‘A girl, like you—’
‘Like me? There are no girls like me.’
I did not answer for a moment. I looked again at the paper in her hand. Then I said quietly,
‘Is there money in it?’
She blushed. ‘A little,’ she said. ‘Enough, if I write swiftly.’
‘And you—You like it?’
She blushed still harder. ‘I find I am good at it . . .’ She bit her lip. She was still watching my face. ‘Do you hate me for it?’ she said.
‘Hate you!’ I said. ‘When I have fifty proper reasons for hating you, already; and only—’
Only love you, I wanted to say. I didn’t say it, though. What can I tell you? If she could still be proud, then so, for now, could I . . . I didn’t need to say it, anyway: she could read the words in my face. Her colour changed, her gaze grew clearer. She put a hand across her eyes. Her fingers left more smudges of black there. I still couldn’t bear it. I quickly reached and stopped her wrist; then wet my thumb and began to rub at the flesh of her brow. I did it, thinking only of the ink, and her white skin; but she felt my hand and grew very still. My thumb moved slower. It moved to her cheek. Then I found I had cupped her face in my hand. She closed her eyes. Her cheek was smooth—not like a pearl, warmer than pearls. She turned her head and put her mouth against my palm. Her lips were soft. The smudge stayed black upon her brow; and after all, I thought, was only ink.
When I kissed her, she shook. I remembered what it was, then, to make her shake by kissing her; and began to shake, too. I had been ill. I thought I might faint! We moved apart. She put her hand against her heart. She had still held the paper. Now it fluttered to the floor. I stooped and caught it up and smoothed the creases from it.
‘What does it say?’ I said, when I had.
She said, ‘It is filled with all the words for how I want you . . . Look.’
She took up the lamp. The room had got darker, the rain still beat against the glass. But she led me to the fire and made me sit, and sat beside me. Her silk skirts rose in a rush, then sank. She put the lamp upon the floor, spread the paper flat; and began to show me the words she had written, one by one.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Lennie Goodings, Julie Grau, Judith Murray, Markus Hoffmann, Bridget Ibbs, Caroline Halliday, Laura Gowing, Kate Taylor, Joanne Kalogeras, Judith Bennett, Cynthia Herrup, Hirāni Himona, and Veronica Rago.
Many books provided historical detail and inspiration. I’m particularly indebted to V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994) and Marcia Hamilcar’s Legally Dead: Experiences During Seven Weeks’ Detention in a Private Asylum (London, 1910).
The index upon which Christopher Lilly is at work is based on the three annotated bibliographies published by Henry Spencer Ashbee under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi: Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio-Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books (London, 1877); Centuria Librorum Absconditorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books (London, 1879); and Catena Librorum Tacendorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books (London, 1885). Mr Lilly’s statements on book-collecting echo those of Ashbee, but in all other respects he is entirely fictitious.
All of the texts cited by Maud are real. They include: The Festival of the Passions, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, The Curtain Drawn Up, The Bagnio Miscellany, The Birchen Bouquet, and The Lustful Turk. For publishing details of these see Ashbee, above.
About the Author
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She is the author of the novels Tipping the Velvet (a New York Times Notable Book) and Affinity, for which she won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a Ferro-Grumley Award, and an American Library Association Award. She lives in London.
Keep reading for a preview of
Sarah Waters’s new novel
THE PAYING GUESTS
Chapter One
The Barbers had said they would arrive by three. It was like waiting to begin a journey, Frances thought. She and her mother had spent the morning watching the clock, unable to relax. At half-past two she had gone wistfully over the rooms for what she’d supposed was the final time; after that there had been a nerving-up, giving way to a steady deflation, and now, at almost five, here she was again, listening to the echo of her own footsteps, feeling no sort of fondness for the sparsely furnished spaces, impatient simply for the couple to arrive, move in, get it over with.
She stood at a window in the largest of the rooms—the room which, until recently, had been her mother’s bedroom, but was now to be the Barbers’ sitting-room—and stared out at the street. The afternoon was bright but powdery. Flurries of wind sent up puffs of dust from the pavement and the road. The grand houses opposite had a Sunday blankness to them—but then, they had that every day of the week. Around the corner there was a large hotel, and motor-cars and taxi-cabs occasionally came this way to and from it; sometimes people strolled up here as if to take the air. But Champion Hill, on the whole, kept itself to itself. The gardens were large, the trees leafy. You would never know, she thought, that grubby Camberwell was just down there. You’d never guess that a mile or two further north lay London, life, glamour, all that.
The sound of a vehicle made her turn her head. A tradesman’s van was approaching the house. This couldn’t be them, could it? She’d expected a carrier’s cart, or even for the couple to arrive on foot—but, yes, the van was pulling up at the kerb, with a terrific creak of its brake, and now she could see the faces in its cabin, dipped and gazing up at hers: the driver’s and Mr Barber’s, with Mrs Barber’s in between. Feeling trapped and on display in the frame of the window, she lifted her hand, and smiled.
This is it, then, she said to herself, with the smile still in place.
It wasn’t like beginning a journey, after all; it was like ending one and not wanting to get out of the train. She pushed away from the window and went downstairs, calling as brightly as she could from the hall into the drawing-room, ‘They’ve arrived, Mother!’
By the time she had opened the front door and stepped into the porch the Barbers had left the van and were already at the back of it, already unloading their things. The driver was helping them, a young man dressed almost identically to Mr Barber in a blazer and a striped neck-tie, and with a similarly narrow face and ungreased, week-endy hair, so that for a moment Frances was uncertain which of the two was Mr Barber. She had met the couple only once, nearly a fortnight ago. It had been a wet April evening and the husband had come straight from his office, in a mackintosh and bowler hat.
But now she recalled his gingery moustache, the reddish gold of his hair. The other man was fairer. The wife, whose outfit before had been sober and rather anonymous, was wearing a skirt with a fringe to it and a crimson jersey. The skirt ended a good six inches above her ankles. The jersey was long and not at all clinging, yet somehow revealed the curves of her figure. Like the men, she was hatless. Her dark hair was short, curling forward over her cheeks but shingled at the nape of her neck, like a clever black cap.
How young they looked! The men seemed no more than boys, though Frances had guessed, on his other visit, that Mr Barber must be twenty-six or -seven, about the same age as herself. Mrs Barber she’d put at twenty-three. Now she wasn’t so sure. Crossing the flagged front garden she heard their excited, unguarded voices. They had drawn a trunk from the van and set it unsteadily down; Mr Barber had apparently caught his fingers underneath it. ‘Don’t laugh!’ she heard him cry to his wife, in mock-complaint. She remembered, then, their ‘refined’ elocution-class accents.
Mrs Barber was reaching for his hand. ‘Let me see. Oh, there’s nothing.’
He snatched the hand back. ‘There’s nothing now. You just wait a bit. Christ, that hurts!’
The oth
er man rubbed his nose. ‘Look out.’ He had seen Frances at the garden gate. The Barbers turned, and greeted her through the tail of their laughter—so that the laughter, not very comfortably, somehow attached itself to her.
‘Here you are, then,’ she said, joining the three of them on the pavement.
Mr Barber, still almost laughing, said, ‘Yes, here we are! Bringing down the character of the street already, you see.’
‘Oh, my mother and I do that.’
Mrs Barber spoke more sincerely. ‘We’re sorry we’re late, Miss Wray. The time just flew! You haven’t been waiting? You’d think we’d come from John o’ Groats or somewhere, wouldn’t you?’
They had come from Peckham Rye, about two miles away. Frances said, ‘Sometimes the shortest journeys take longest, don’t they?’
‘They do,’ said Mr Barber, ‘if Lilian’s involved in them. Mr Wismuth and I were ready at one.—This is my friend Charles Wismuth, who’s kindly lent us the use of his father’s van for the day.’
‘You weren’t ready at all!’ cried Mrs Barber, as a grinning Mr Wismuth moved forward to shake Frances’s hand. ‘Miss Wray, they weren’t, honestly!’
‘We were ready and waiting, while you were still sorting through your hats!’
‘At any rate,’ said Frances, ‘you are here now.’
Perhaps her tone was rather a cool one. The three young people looked faintly chastened, and with a glance at his injured knuckles Mr Barber returned to the back of the van. Over his shoulder Frances caught a glimpse of what was inside it: a mess of bursting suitcases, a tangle of chair and table legs, bundle after bundle of bedding and rugs, a portable gramophone, a wicker birdcage, a bronze-effect ashtray on a marbled stand . . . The thought that all these items were about to be brought into her home—and that this couple, who were not quite the couple she remembered, who were younger, and brasher, were going to bring them, and set them out, and make their own home, brashly, among them—the thought brought on a flutter of panic. What on earth had she done? She felt as though she was opening up the house to thieves and invaders.