‘After the door clanged shut again, I’d go and turn the light on, throw a blanket over the Sleeping Beauty, lift the Wonder off the perch from which it was too high for her to jump, and Toussaint would bring us a hot pot of coffee with a bit of brandy in it, or tea with rum, for it was perishing down there. Oh, it was easy work, all right, especially for me and the Beauty. But what I never could get used to was the sight of their eyes, for there was no terror in the house our customers did not bring with them.
‘We were supposed to get a tenner a week each, basic, with bonuses per trick, those that turned ’em, but, out of that, she kept back a fiver each for our keep, which was scanty enough, boiled beef and carrots, spotted dog; and, as to the rest, which was riches beyond the dreams of most working girls, why, we never saw a penny of it. She “put it away for us in her safe”, ha! ha! What a joke. Those five sovereigns I got out of her the first day I arrived in the house was the only cash I got in my hand all the time I worked there.
‘For, the moment that her front door shut behind you, you were her prisoner; indeed, you were her slave.’
Lizzie, once again crouched at Fevvers’ feet, tugged the hem of the aerialiste’s dressing-gown.
‘Tell ’im about the Sleeping Beauty,’ she prompted.
‘Oh, what a tragic case, sir! She was a country curate’s daughter and bright and merry as a grig, until, one morning in her fourteenth year, the very day her menses started, she never wakened, not until noon; and the day after, not until teatime; and the day after that, her grieving parents watching and praying beside her bed, she opened her eyes at suppertime and said: “I think I could fancy a little bowl of bread and milk.”
‘So they propped her up on her pillows and fed her with a spoon and when she’d eaten it all up, she says: “I couldn’t keep my eyes open if I tried,” and falls back asleep. And so it went on. After a week of it, then a month of it, then a year of it, Madame Schreck, chancing to hear of this great marvel, came to her village and let on she was a philanthropic gentlewoman who would take care of the poor girl and let the best doctors visit her, and Beauty’s parents, getting on in years, could hardly believe their luck.
‘She was loaded on a stretcher into the guard’s van of the London train and so to Kensington, where her life went on as it had done before. She always woke at sunset, like night-scented stock; she ate, she filled a bedpan, and then she slept again. This difference, only: now, each night, at midnight, Toussaint gathered her dreaming body in his arms and took her to the crypt. She would have been about twenty-one when I first knew her, pretty as a picture, although a mite emaciated. Her female flow grew less and less the time she slept, until at last it scarcely stained the rag and then dried up altogether but her hair kept on growing, until it was as long as she was herself. Fanny it was who undertook the task of combing it and brushing it for old Four-Eyes was a tender woman with a loving heart. The Beauty’s fingernails and toenails kept on growing too, and it was the Wiltshire Wonder’s task to trim them, owing to the marvellous dexterity of her tiny fingers.
‘Because the Sleeping Beauty’s face had grown so thin, her eyes were especially prominent, and her closed eyelids were dark as the under-skins of mushrooms and must have grown very heavy during those long, slumbering years, for, every evening, when she opened her little windows at the approach of the dark, it cost her a greater, even greater effort, as if it took all the feeble strength that remained to her to open up shop.
‘And, every time, we who watched and waited with her supper were afraid that, this time, it might be the last time she would so valiantly strive to wake, that the vast, unknown ocean of sleep, on which she drifted like sea-wrack, had, that night, finally taken her so far from shore on its mysterious currents that she would not return. But, whilst I was at Madame Schreck’s, the Sleeping Beauty always did wake up long enough to take a little minced chicken or a spoonful of junket, and she would evacuate a small, semi-liquid motion into the bedpan Fanny held under her, and then, with a short sigh, she would sink down again under the soft weight of her dreams.
‘For do not think she was a dreamless sleeper. Under those soft, veined webs, her eyeballs moved continually this way and that, as if she were watching shapes of antic ballets playing themselves out upon the insides of her eyelids. And sometimes her toes and fingers would convulse and twitch, as a dog’s paws do when it dreams of rabbits. Or she might softly moan or cry out, and sometimes, very softly, laugh, which was most strange.
‘And once, when Fanny and I were at backgammon one night when trade was slow, the Wonder, giving this dreamer a manicure, cries out of a sudden: “Oh, unendurable!”
‘For, beneath those lashes, oozed out a few fat tears.
‘“And I had thought,” the Wonder said, “she was beyond all pain.”
‘Though so diminutive in stature, the Wonder was as perfectly formed as any of those avatars of hers, such as Good Queen Bess’s pretty little confidante, Mrs Tomysen; or that Anne Gibson who married the little fellow who painted miniatures; or the beautiful Anastasia Borculaski, who was small enough to stand under her brother’s arm, and her brother was a small man, himself. Besides, the Wonder was a most accomplished dancer and could do high kicks that was just like opening up a pair of embroidery scissors.
‘So I says to her: “Wonder, why do you degrade yourself by working in this house, which is truly a house of shame, when you could earn a good living on the boards?” “Ah, Fevvers,” she replies, “I’d rather show myself to one man at a time than to an entire theatre-full of the horrid, nasty, hairy things, and, here, I’m well protected from the dark, foul throng of the world, in which I suffered so much. Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?
‘“Let me tell you that I was conceived in the following manner. My mother was a merry milkmaid who loved nothing better than a prank. There was, near our village, a hill, quite round, and, though overgrown with grass, it was well-nigh hollow, since it was burrowed through and through with tunnels like runs of generations of mice. Though I have heard it said this hill was no work of nature but a gigantic tomb, a place that those who lived in Wiltshire before us, before the Normans, before the Saxons, before even the Romans came, laid out their dead, the common people of the village called it the Fairy Mound and steered clear of it at nights for they believed it was, if not a place accursed, then certainly one in which we human beings might suffer curious fates and transformations.
‘“But my madcap mother, egged on by the squire’s son, who was a rogue, and bet her a silver sixpence she would not dare, once spent the whole of one midsummer’s night inside this earthen castle. She took with her a snack of bread and honey and a farthing dip and penetrated to the chamber at its heart, where there was a long stone, much like an altar, but more likely, in all probability, to have been the coffin of some long dead King of Wessex.
‘“On this tomb she sat to eat her supper and by and by the light went out, so she was in the dark. Just as she began to regret her foolhardiness, she heard the softest footfall. ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Why, Meg – who but the King of the Fairies?’ And this invisible stranger forthwith laid her down on the stone slab and pleasured her, or so she said, as mightily as any man before or since. ‘Indeed, I went to fairyland that night!’ she said: and the proof of it was, nine months later, I made my infinitesimal appearance in the world. She cradled me in half a walnut shell, covered me with a rose petal, packed my layette in a hazel nut and carried me off to London town where she exhibited herself for a shilling a time as ‘The Fairy’s Nursemaid’, while I clung to her bosom like a burr.
‘“But all she got she spent on drink and men because she was a flighty piece. When I got too big to be passed off as a suckling, I said: ‘Mother, this won’t do! We must think of our security and our old age!’ She laughed a good deal when she heard her daughter pipe up in that style for I was only seven years old and she herself not five-and-twenty and it was a black day for me when I took it into my head
to turn that giddy creature’s mind to the future because, at that, she sold me.
‘“For fifty golden guineas cash in hand my own mother sold me to a French pastrycook with corkscrew moustaches, who served me for a couple of seasons in a cake. Chef’s hat perched on his head at a rakish angle, he’d bear the silver salver out of the kitchen and set it down in front of the birthday boy, for the patisseur had this much sensibility, I was a treat for children only. The birthday child would blow out the candles and lift up the knife to cut its cake, but the pastrycook kept his own hand on the handle, to guide the blade in case it cut me by accident and blemished his property. Then up I’d pop through the hole, wearing a spangled dress, and dance round the table, distributing streamers, favours and bonbons.
‘“But sometimes the greediest ones burst into tears and said it was a mean trick, and cake was what they wanted, not a visit from the fairies.
‘“Possibly due to the circumstances of my conception, I had always suffered from claustrophobia. I found I could scarcely bear the close confinement of those hollowed cakes. I grew to dread the moment of my incarceration under the icing and I would beg and plead with my master to let me free but he would threaten me with the oven and say, if I did not do as he bid me, then, next time, he would not serve me in a cake but bake me in a vol-au-vent.
‘“Came the day at last my phobia got the better of me. I clambered in my coffin, suffered the lid to close on me, endured the jolting cab-ride to the customer’s address, was cursorily unloaded on to the salver in the kitchen and then came the trip to the table. Half-fainting, sweating, choking for lack of air in that round space no bigger than a hatbox, sickened by the stench of baked eggs and butter, sticky with sugar and raisins, I could tolerate no more. With the strength of the possessed, I thrust my bare shoulders up through the crust and so emerged before my time, crusted with frosting, blinking crumbs from my eyes. My eruption scattered candles and crystallised violets everywhere.
‘“The tablecloth caught fire and all the little dears screamed blue murder as I ran down the length of the table with my hair and tulle skirt all in flames, pursued by the furious pastrycook wielding his cake knife and vowing he’d make a bonne bouche of me.
‘“But one child kept her wits about her in this mêlée, sat gravely at the bottom of the table until I reached her plate, when she dropped her napkin over me and put out the flames. Then she picked me up and stowed me away in her pocket and said to the pastrycook: ‘Go away, you horrid man! How dare you torture a human creature so!’
“‘As it turned out, this little girl was the eldest daughter of the house. She carried me off to the nursery and her nanny put soothing ointment on my burns and dressed me up in a silk frock that the young lady’s own doll sacrificed for me, although I was perfectly able to dress myself. But I was to find that rich women as well as dolls cannot put on their own clothes unaided. Later that night, when dinner was over, I was introduced to Mama and Papa, as they sat over their coffee, of which they gave me some, since it was served in cups of a size that just suited me. Papa seemed to me a mountain whose summit was concealed by the smoke from his cigar; but what a good, kind mountain it was! And after I had told my story as best I could, the mountain puffed a purple cloud, smiled at Mama, and spoke. ‘Well, my little woman, it seems we have no course but to adopt you.’ And Mama said, ‘I am ashamed. I never thought that horrid trick with the cake might cause suffering to a living creature.’
‘“They did not treat me like a pet or a toy, either, but as truly one of their own. I soon formed a profound attachment to the girl who’d been my saviour, and she for me, so that we became inseparable and, when my legs could not keep up with hers, she would carry me in the crook of her arm. We called each other ‘sister’. She was just eight years old to my nine. My ship had come to rest in a happy harbour!
‘“Time passed. We girls began to dream of putting up our hair and letting down our skirts and all the delicious mysteries of growing up that lay ahead . . . although, as for me, I knew I’d never grow up in any worldly sense, which made me, sometimes, sad. One Christmas, came the question of the pantomime. Some sixth sense, perhaps, forewarned me that danger lay ahead. I told Mama that I’d put childish things away and preferred to stay at home that night, and read my book. But my sister was lagging a little behind me in the business of maturing, longed to see the bright lights and pretty tinsel and told me that if I was not one of the family party, then the treat would all be spoiled. I submitted to her tender bullying. As it turned out, the pantomime was Snow White.
‘“I turned, first fire, then ice, in our box as the scenes unfolded before me, for, dearly as I loved my family, there was always that unalterable difference between us. Not so much the clumsiness of their limbs, their lumpish movements, oppressed me; nor even the thunder of their voices, as never in all my life had I gone to bed without a headache. No. I had known all these things from birth and grown accustomed to the monstrous ugliness of mankind. Indeed, my life in that kind house could almost have made me forgive some, at least, of the beasts for their beastliness. But, when I watched my natural kin on that stage, even as they frisked and capered and put on the show of comic dwarves, I had a kind of vision of a world in miniature, a small, perfect, heavenly place such as you might see reflected in the eye of a wise bird. And it seemed to me that place was my home and these little men were its inhabitants, who would love me, not as a ‘little woman’ but as – a woman.
‘“And then, perhaps it was . . . perhaps the blood of my mother did flow in these scaled-down veins! Perhaps . . . I could not be content with mere contentment! Perhaps I always was a wicked girl and now my wickedness at last manifested itself in action.
‘“It was easy for me to give my family the slip in the crush at the end of the show; easy to find the stage door and trot past its guardian as he took in a bouquet for Snow White. I soon found the door on which some cruel-comic hand had pasted seven tiny stars. I knocked. Inside, there sat the handsomest young man, on a safe just the right size for both of us, and he was busy mending a tiny pair of trousers with what, to your eyes, Fevvers, would have seemed an invisible needle and a length of invisible thread.
‘“‘What pint-sized planet did you spring from?’ he cried out when he saw me.
‘Then the Wonder covered her face with her hands and wept bitterly.
‘“I shall spare you the sorry details of my fall, Fevvers,” she said when she recovered herself. “Suffice to say I travelled with them seven long months, passed from one to another, for they were brothers and believed in share and share alike. I fear they did not treat me kindly, for, although they were little, they were men. How they abandoned me, penniless, in Berlin and how I came under the terrible protection of Madame Schreck are circumstances I relate to myself each night when I close my eyes. Over and over, I rehearse an eternity of fearful memories until the time comes to get up again and see for myself how those who come to slake their fantastic lust upon my small person are more degraded yet than I could ever be.”’
Fevvers sighed.
‘So you see how this lovely creature truly believed herself to have tumbled so far from grace that she could never climb out of the Abyss, and she regarded her pretty, spotless self with the utmost detestation. Nothing I could say would make her feel she was worth more than a farthing in the world’s exchange. She would say: “How I envy that poor being – ” pointing to the Sleeping Beauty “ – except for one thing: she dreams.”
‘But Fanny was another kettle of fish, a big, raw-boned, plain-spoken hearty lass from Yorkshire whom you would have passed in the street without a second look but for the good cheer of roses in her cheeks and the spring of health in her step. When Madame Schreck pulled back the curtain on Fanny, there she’d stand, a bonny lump of a girl with nowt on but a shift, and a blindfold.
‘And Schreck would say: “Look at him, Fanny.” So Fanny would take off her blindfold and give him a beaming smile.
‘Then Madame Schreck wou
ld say: “I said, look at him, Fanny.” At which she’d pull up her shift.
‘For, where she should have had nipples, she had eyes.
‘Then Madame Schreck would say: “Look at him properly, Fanny.” Then those two other eyes of hers would open.
‘They were a shepherd’s blue, same as the eyes in her head; not big, but very bright.
‘I asked her once, what did she see with those mamillary eyes, and she says: “Why, same as with the top ones but lower down.” Yet I do think, for all her free, open disposition, she saw too much of the world altogether and that is why she’d come to rest with all us other dispossessed creatures, for whom there was no earthly use, in this lumber room of femininity, this rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
‘Seeing Fanny holding the Sleeping Beauty’s head against her bosom to spoon coddled egg between those helpless lips, I said: “Why don’t you marry, Fanny. For any man would be glad to have you, once he’d got over the shock. And bring into the world those children of your own you long for and deserve?” Placid as you please, she says: “How can you nourish a babby on salt tears?” Yet she was always cheerful, always a smile and a joke, but, as for Cobwebs, she never said much, she was a melancholy creature and sat by herself a good deal, playing patience. That was her life, she said. Patience.’
‘Why did you call her Cobwebs?’ asked Walser, out of his revulsion, out of his enchantment.
‘Her face was covered with them, sir, from the eyebrows to the cheekbones. The things that Albert/Albertina would do to get to make her laugh! S/he was a droll one and always full of fun. But, no; Cobwebs would never so much as smile.