Fingersmith (34 page)

But I could not want a lover, more than I want freedom.

I put his letter upon the fire, then draw up my reply:
Send her at once. I am sure I shall love her. She shall be the dearer to me for coming from London, where you are
!—we settled on the wording before he left.

That done, I need only wait, one day and then another. The day after that is the day she comes.

She is due at Marlow at three o'clock. I send William Inker for her, in good time. But though I sit and seem to feel her drawing close, the trap comes back without her: the trains are late, there are fogs. I pace, and cannot settle. At five o'clock I send William again—again he comes back. Then I must take supper with my uncle. While Charles pours out my wine I ask him, 'Any news yet, of Miss Smith?'—My uncle hearing me whisper, however, he sends Charles away.

'Do you prefer to talk with servants, Maud, than with me?' he says. He is peevish, since Richard left us.

He chooses a book of little punishments for me to read from, after the meal: the steady recitation of cruelty makes me calmer. But when I go up to my chill and silent rooms, I grow fretful again; and after Margaret has undressed me and put me into my bed, I rise, and walk—stand now at the fire, now at the door, now at the window, looking out for the light of the trap. Then I see it. It shows feebly in the fog—seems to glow, rather than to shine—and to flash, with the motion of the horse and the passage of the trap behind the trees, like a thing of warning. I watch it come, my hand at my heart. It draws close—slows, narrows, fades—I see beyond it, then, the horse, the cart, William, a vaguer figure. They drive to the rear of the house, and I run to Agnes's room—Susan's room, it will be now—and stand at the window there; and finally see her.

She is lifting her head, gazing up at the stables, the clock. William jumps from his seat and helps her to the ground. She holds a hood about her face. She is dressed darkly, and seems small.

But, she is real. The plot is real.—I feel the force of it all at once, and tremble.

It is too late to receive her, now. Instead I must wait further, while she is given a supper and brought to her room; and then I must lie, hearing her step and murmur, my eyes upon the door—an inch or two of desiccated wood!— that lies between her chamber and mine.

Once I rise and go stealthily to it, and put my ear to the panels; but hear nothing.

Next morning I have Margaret carefully dress me, and while she pulls at my laces I say, 'I believe Miss Smith has come. Did you see her, Margaret?'

'Yes, miss.'

'Do you think she will do?'

'Do, miss?'

'As girl to me.'

She tosses her head. 'Seemed rather low in her manners,' she says. 'Been half a dozen times to France and I don't know where, though. Made sure Mr Inker knew that.'

'Well, we must be kind to her. It will seem dull to her here, perhaps, after London.' She says nothing. 'Will you have Mrs Stiles bring her to me, so soon as she has taken her breakfast?'

I have lain all night, sometimes sleeping, sometimes waking, oppressed with the nearness and obscurity of her. I must see her now, before I go to my uncle, or I fear I will grow ill. At last, at half-past seven or so, I hear an unfamiliar tread in the passage that leads from the servants' staircase; and then Mrs Stiles's murmur: 'Here we are.' There comes a knock upon my door. How should I stand? I stand at the fire. Does my voice sound queer, when I call out? Does she mark it? Does she hold her breath? I know I hold mine; then I feel myself colour, and will the blood from my face. The door is opened. Mrs Stiles comes first and, after a moment's hesitation, she is before me: Susan—Susan Smith—Suky Tawdry—the gullible girl, who is to take my life from me and give me freedom.

Sharper than expectation, comes dismay. I have supposed she will resemble me, I have supposed she will be handsome: but she is a small, slight, spotted thing, with hair the colour of dust. Her chin comes almost to a point. Her eyes are brown, darker than mine. Her gaze is now too frank, now sly: she gives me a single, searching look that takes in my gown, my gloves, my slippers, the very clocks upon my stockings. Then she blinks—remembers her training, I suppose—makes a hasty curtsey. She is pleased with the curtsey, I can tell. She is pleased with me. She thinks me a fool. The idea upsets me, more than it should. I think, You
have come to Briar to ruin me
. I step to take her hand. Won't
you colour, or tremble, or hide your eyes
? But she returns my gaze and her fingers—which are bitten, about the nails—are cold and hard and perfectly steady in mine.

We are watched by Mrs Stiles. Her look says plainly: 'Here is the girl you sent for, to London. She is about good enough for you, I think.'

'You need not stay, Mrs Stiles,' I say. And then, as she turns to go: 'But you will have been kind to Miss Smith, I know.' I look again at Susan. 'You've heard, perhaps, that I am an orphan, Susan; like you. I came to Briar as a child—very young, and with no-one at all to care for me. I cannot tell you all the ways in which Mrs Stiles has made me know what a mother's love is, since that time…'

I say this, smiling. The tormenting of my uncle's housekeeper is too routine an occupation, however, to hold me. It is Susan I want; and when Mrs Stiles has twitched and coloured and left us, I draw her to me, to lead her to the fire. She walks. She sits. She is warm and quick. I touch her arm. It is as slender as Agnes's, but hard. I can smell beer upon her breath. She speaks. Her voice is not at all how I have dreamed it, but light and pert; though she tries to make it sweeter. She tells me of her journey, of the train from London—when she says the word,
London
, she seems conscious of the sound; I suppose she is not in the habit of naming it, of considering it a place of destination or desire. It is a wonder and a torment to me that a girl so slight, so trifling as she, should have lived her life in London, while mine has been all at Briar; but a consolation, also—for if she can thrive there, then might not I, with all my talents, thrive better?

So I tell myself, while describing her duties. Again I see her eye my gown and slippers and now, recognising the pity in her gaze as well as the scorn, I think I blush. I say, 'Your last mistress, of course, was quite a fine lady? She would laugh, I suppose, to look at me!'

My voice is not quite steady. But if there is a bitterness to my tone, she does not catch it. Instead, 'Oh, no, miss,' she says. 'She was far too kind a lady. And besides, she always said that grand clothes weren't worth buttons; but that it was the heart inside them that counts.'

She looks so taken with this—so
taken in
, by her own fiction—so innocent, not sly—I sit a moment and regard her in silence. Then I take her hand again. 'You are a good girl, Susan, I think,' I say. She smiles and looks modest. Her fingers move in mine.

'Lady Alice always said so, miss,' she says.

'Did she?'

'Yes, miss.'

Then she remembers something. She pulls from me, reaches into her Pocket, and brings out a letter. It is folded, sealed, directed in an affected feminine hand; and of course comes from Richard. I hesitate, then take it—rise and walk, unfold it, far from her gaze.

No
names
! it says;—
but I think you know me. Here is the
girl
who will make us rich
—
that fresh little fmgersmith, I've had cause in the past to employ her skills, and can commend her. She is watching as I write this, and oh! her
ignorance is
perfect. I imagine her now
, gating
at you. She is luckier than I, who must pass two filthy weeks before enjoying that pleasure
.—Bum this,
will you
?

I have thought myself as cool as he. I am not, I am not, I feel her watching—just as he describes!—and grow fearful. I stand with the letter in my hand, then am aware all at once that I have stood too long. If she should have seen—! I fold the paper, once, twice, thrice—finally it will not fold at all. I do not yet know that she cannot read or write so much as her own name; when I learn it I laugh, in an awful relief. But I don't quite believe her. 'Not read?' I say. 'Not a letter, not a word?'—and I hand her a book. She does not want to take it; and when she does, she opens its covers, turns a page, gazes hard at a piece of text—but all in a way that is wrong, indefinably anxious and wrong, and too subtle to counterfeit.—At last, she blushes.

Then I take the book back. 'I am sorry,' I say. But I am not sorry, I am only amazed. Not to read! It seems to me a kind of fabulous insufficiency—like the absence, in a martyr or a saint, of the capacity for pain.

The eight o'clock sounds, to call me to my uncle. At the door I pause. I must, after all, make some blushing reference to Richard; and I say what I ought and her look, as it should, becomes suddenly crafty and then grows clear. She tells me how kind he is. She says it—again—as if she believes it. Perhaps she does. Perhaps kindness is measured to a different standard, where she comes from. I feel the points and edges of the folded note he has sent by her hand, in the pocket of my skirt.

What she does while alone in my chambers I cannot say, but I imagine her fingering the silks of my gowns, trying out my boots, my gloves, my sashes. Does she take an eye-glass to my jewels? Perhaps she is planning already what she will do, when they are hers: this brooch she will keep, from this she will prise the stones to sell them, the ring of gold that was my father's she will pass to her young man…

'You are distracted, Maud,' my uncle says. 'Have you another occupation to which you would rather attend?'

'No, sir,' I say.

'Perhaps you begrudge me your little labour. Perhaps you wish that I had left you at the madhouse, all those years ago. Forgive me: I had supposed myself performing you some service, by taking you from there. But perhaps you would rather dwell among lunatics, than among books? Hmm?'

'No, Uncle.'

He pauses. I think he will return to his notes. But he goes on.

'It would be a simple matter enough, to summon Mrs Stiles and have her take you back. You are sure you don't desire me to do that?—send for William Inker and the dog-cart?' As he speaks, he leans to study me, his weak gaze fierce behind the spectacles that guard it. Then he pauses again, and almost smiles. 'What would they make of you upon the wards, I wonder,' he says, in a different voice, 'with all that you know now?'

He says it slowly, then mumbles the question over; as if it is a biscuit that has left crumbs beneath his tongue. I do not answer, but lower my gaze until he has worked his humour out. Presently he twists his neck and looks again at the pages upon his desk.

'So, so.
The Whipping Milliners
. Read me the second volume, with the punctuation all complete; and mark—the paging is irregular. I'll note the sequence here.'

It is from this that I am reading when she comes to take me back to my drawing-room. She stands at the door, looking over the walls of books, the painted windows. She hovers at the pointing finger that my uncle keeps to mark the bounds of innocence at Briar, just as I once did; and—again, like me—in her innocence she does not see it, and tries to cross it. I must keep her from that, more even than my uncle must!—and while he jerks and screams I go softly to her, and touch her. She flinches at the feel of my fingers.

I say, 'Don't be frightened, Susan.' I show her the brass hand in the floor.

I have forgotten that, of course, she might look at anything there, anything at all, it would be so much ink upon paper. Remembering, I am filled again with wonder—and then with a spiteful kind of envy. I have to draw back my hand from her arm, for fear I will pinch her.

I ask her, as we walk to my room, What does she think of my uncle?

She believes him composing a dictionary.

We sit at lunch. I have no appetite, and pass my plate to her. I lean back in my chair, and watch as she runs her thumb along the edge of china, admires the weave of the napkin she spreads on her knee. She might be an auctioneer, a house-agent: she holds each item of cutlery as if gauging the worth of the metal from which it is cast. She eats three eggs, spooning them quickly, neatly into her mouth—not shuddering at the yielding of the yolk, not thinking, as she swallows, of the closing of her own throat about the meat. She wipes her lips with her fingers, touches her tongue to some spot upon her knuckle; then swallows again.

You have come to Briar
, I think,
to swallow up me
.

But of course, I want her to do it. I need her to do it. And already I seem to feel myself beginning to give up my life. I give it up easily, as burning wicks give up smoke, to tarnish the glass that guards them; as spiders spin threads of silver, to bind up quivering moths. I imagine it settling, tight, about her. She does not know it. She will not know it until, too late, she will look and see how it has clothed and changed her, made her like me. For now, she is only tired, restless, bored: I take her walking about the park, and she follows, lead-enly; we sit and sew, and she yawns and rubs her eyes, gazing at nothing. She chews her fingernails—stops, when she sees me looking; then after a minute draws down a length of hair and bites the tip of that.

'You are thinking of London,' I say.

She lifts her head.'London, miss?'

I nod. 'What do ladies do there, at this hour in the day?'

'Ladies, miss?'

'Ladies, like me.'

She looks about her. Then, after a second: 'Make visits, miss?'

'Visits?'

'To other ladies?'

'Ah.'

She does not know. She is making it up. I am sure she is making it up! Even so, I think over her words and my heart beats suddenly hard.
Ladies
, I said,
like me
. There are no ladies like me, however; and for a second I have a clear and frightening picture of myself in London, alone, unvisited—