Fingersmith (61 page)

I went slowly towards her, and looked myself over, in horror.

I looked, as the lady had said, like a lunatic. My hair was still sewn to my head, but had grown or worked loose from its stitches, and stood out in tufts. My face was white but marked, here and there, with spots and scratches and fading bruises. My eyes were swollen—from want of sleep, I suppose—and red at the rims. My face was sharper than ever, my neck like a stick. The tartan gown hung on me like a laundry bag. From beneath its collar there showed the dirty white tips of the fingers of Maud's old glove, that I still wore next to my heart. You could just make out, on the kid-skin, the marks of my teeth.

I looked, for perhaps a minute. I looked, and thought of all the times that Mrs Sucksby had washed and combed and shined my hair, when I was a girl. I thought of her warming her bed before she put me in it, so I should not take chills. I thought of her putting aside, for me, the tenderest morsels of meat; and smoothing my teeth, when they cut; and passing her hands across my arms and legs, to be sure that they grew straight. I remembered how close and safe she had kept me, all the years of my life. I had gone to Briar, to make my fortune, so I might share it with her. Now my fortune was gone. Maud Lilly had stolen it and given me hers. She was supposed to be here. She had made me be her, while she was loose in the world, and every glass she gazed at—as say, in milliners' shops, while she was fitted with gowns; or in theatres; or in halls, as she went dancing—every glass showed her to be everything I was not—to be handsome, and cheerful, and proud, and free—

I might have raged. I think I began to. Then I saw the look in my eye, and my face frightened me. I stood, not knowing what I should do, until the nurse on duty woke up, and came and jabbed me.

'All right, Miss Vanity,' she said with a yawn. 'I dare say your heels are worth looking at, too. So let's see 'em.' She pushed me back into the middle of the turning line; and I bowed my head and walked, watching the hem of my skirt, my boots, the boots of the lady in front—anything, anything at all, to save me from lifting my gaze to the drawing-room window and seeing again the look in my own mad eye.

That, I suppose, was at the end of June. It might have been sooner, though. It was hard to know what dates were what. It was hard to tell so much as the day—you only knew another week had gone by when, instead of spending all morning on your bed, you were made to stand in the drawing-room and listen while Dr Christie read prayers; then you knew it was a Sunday. Perhaps I ought to have made a mark, like convicts do, for every Sunday that came round; but of course, for many weeks there seemed no point—each time one came I thought that, by the next, I should have got out. Then I began to grow muddled. It seemed to me that some weeks had two or three Sundays in them. Others seemed to have none. All we could tell for certain was, that spring had turned to summer: for the days grew long, the sun grew fiercer; and the house grew hot, like an oven.

I remember the heat, almost more than anything. It was enough to make you mad all by itself. The air in our rooms, for instance, became like soup. I think one or two ladies actually died, through breathing that air—though of course, being medical men, Dr Graves and Dr Christie were able to pass off their deaths as strokes. I heard the nurses say that. They grew bad-tempered as the days grew warm. They complained of headaches and sweats. They complained of their gowns. 'Why I stay here, looking after you, in wool,' they'd say, pulling us about, 'when I might be at Tunbridge Asylum, where the nurses all wear poplin—!'

But the fact of it was, as we all knew, no other madhouse would have had them; and they wouldn't have gone, anyway. They had it too easy. They talked all the time of how troublesome and sly their ladies were, and showed off bruises; but of course, the ladies were far too dazed and miserable to be sly, the trouble came all from the nurses when they fancied some sport. The rest of the time their job was the slightest one you can imagine, for they got us in bed at seven o'clock—gave us those draughts, to make us sleep—then they sat till midnight reading papers and books, making toast and cocoa, doing fancy-work, whistling, farting, standing at the door and calling down the hall to each other, even slipping in and out of each other's rooms when they were especially bored, leaving their ladies locked up and unguarded.

And in the mornings, when Dr Christie had made his round, they would take off their caps, unpin their hair, roll down their stockings and lift their skirts; and they gave us newspapers and made us stand beside them and fan their great white legs.

Nurse Bacon did, anyway. She complained of the heat more than anyone, because of the itch in her hands. She had Betty rubbing grease into her fingers ten times a day. Sometimes she would scream. And when the weather was at its warmest she put two china basins beside her bed and slept with her hands in water. That gave her dreams.

'He's too slippy!' she cried one night. And then, in a mumble: 'There, I've lost him…'

I also dreamed. I seemed to dream every time I closed my eyes. I dreamed, as you might suppose I would, of Lant Street, of the Borough, of home. I dreamed of Mr Ibbs and Mrs Sucksby.—Those were troubling dreams, however; often I woke weeping from dreams like that. Now and then I dreamed only of the madhouse: I would dream I had woken and had my day. Then I really would wake, and have the day still to do—and yet, the day was so like the day I had dreamed, I might as well have dreamed them both.—Those dreams bewildered me.

The worst dreams of all, however, were the dreams I began to have as the weeks slipped by and the nights grew hotter and I began to get more and more muddled in my mind. They were dreams of Briar, and of Maud.

For I never dreamed of her as I knew she really was—as a viper or a thief. I never dreamed of Gentleman. I only ever used to dream that we were back in her uncle's house, and I was her maid. I dreamed we walked to her mother's grave, or sat by the river. I dreamed I dressed her and brushed her hair. I dreamed—you can't be blamed, can you, for what you dream?—I dreamed I loved her. I knew I hated her. I knew I wanted to kill her. But sometimes I would wake, in the night, not knowing. I would open my eyes and look about me, and the room would be so warm everyone would have turned and fretted in their beds—I would see Betty's great bare leg, Nurse Bacon's sweating face, Miss Wilson's arm. Mrs Price put back her hair as she slept, rather in the way that Maud had used to do: I would gaze at her in my half-sleep and quite forget the weeks that had passed, since the end of April. I would forget the flight from Briar, forget the wedding in the black flint church, forget the days at Mrs Cream's, the drive to the madhouse, the awful trick; forget I meant to escape, and what I planned to do when I had done it. I would only think, in a kind of panic,
Where is she? Where is she
?—and then, with a rush of relief:
There she
is… I would close my eyes again and, in an instant, be not in my bed at all but in hers. The curtains would be let down, and she would be beside me. I would feel her breath. 'How close the night is, tonight!' she would say, in her soft voice; and then: 'I'm afraid! I'm afraid—!'

'Don't be frightened,' I would always answer. 'Oh, don't be frightened.'— And at that moment, the dream would slip from me and I would wake. I would wake in a kind of dread, to think that, like Nurse Bacon, I might have said the words aloud—or sighed, or quivered. And then I would lie and be filled with a terrible shame. For I hated her! I hated her!—and yet I knew that, every time, I secretly wished that the dream had gone on to its end.

I began to be afraid I would rise in my sleep. Say I tried to kiss Mrs Price, or Betty? But if I tried to stay awake, then I grew bewildered. I imagined fearful things. Those nights were queer nights. For though the heat made us all grow stupid, it also now and then sent ladies—even quiet, obedient ladies— into fits. You caught the commotion of it from your bed: the shrieking, the ringing of bells, the pounding of running feet. It broke into the hot and silent night, like a clap of thunder; and though you knew, each time, what it was, still the sounds came so strangely—and sometimes one lady would set off another; and then you would lie and wonder whether that mightn't set
off you
, and you would seem to feel the fit gathering inside you, you would start to sweat, perhaps to twitch—oh, those were dreadful nights! Betty might moan. Mrs Price would start to weep. Nurse Bacon would rise: 'Hush! Hush!' she'd say. She would open the door, lean out and listen. Then the shrieking would stop, the footsteps begin to fade. 'That's got her,' she'd say. 'Now, will they pad her, I wonder, or plunge her?'—and at that word,
plunge
, Betty would moan again, and Mrs Price and even old Miss Wilson wouid shudder and hide their heads. I didn't know why. The word was a peculiar one and no-one would explain it: I could only suppose it must involve being pumped, like a drain, with a black rubber sucker. That thought was so horrible that soon whenever Nurse Bacon said it I began to shudder, too.

'I don't know what you're quaking at,' she would say to all of us, nastily, as she went back to her bed. 'Wasn't one of you that went off, was it?'

But then, one time, it was. We woke to the sound of choking and found sad Mrs Price on the floor beside her bed, biting her fingers so hard she was making them bleed. Nurse Bacon went for the bell, and the men and Dr Christie came running: they bound Mrs Price and carried her off downstairs, and when they brought her back, an hour later, her gown and her hair were streaming water and she looked half-drowned.—I learned then that being plunged meant being dropped in a bath. That gave me some comfort, at least; for it seemed to me that being bathed could not be nearly so bad as being suckered and pumped…

I still knew nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

Then something happened. There came a day—I think it was the hottest day of all that stifling summer—that turned out to be Nurse Bacon's birthday; and on the night of it, she had some other nurses come secretly to our room, to give them a party. They did this, sometimes, as I think I have said. They weren't allowed to, and their talking made it harder than ever for the rest of us to sleep; but we should never have dared tell a doctor—for then the nurses would have put it down to delusions and, after, hit us. They made us lie very still, while they sat about playing cards or dominoes, drinking lemonade and, sometimes, beer.

They had beer on this night, on account of it being Nurse Bacon's birthday night; and because it was hot they took too much of it and got drunk. I lay with the sheet across my face, but kept my eyes half open. I dared not try to sleep while they were there, in case I dreamed of Maud again; for it had got with me what you might call—or what Dr Christie, I suppose, might call—a morbid fear, of giving myself away. And then again, I thought I ought to keep awake, in case they drank so much they drank themselves into a stupor; for then I could rise and steal their keys…

They did not, however. Instead, they grew livelier and more noisy and red in the face, and the room grew hotter. I think that now and then I did fall into a doze: I began to hear their voices like the far-off, hollow voices you hear in dreams. Then, every so often one of them would give a shout, or snort with laughter; the others would shush her, then snort with laughter themselves that would bring me back to myself, with a horrible jolt. At last I looked at their fat red sweating faces and their great wet open mouths, and wished I had a gun and could shoot them. They sat boasting of which ladies they had recently hurt, and how they had done it. They fell to comparing grips. They put their hands to one another's, palm to palm, to see who had the biggest. Then one of them showed her arm.

'Let us see yours, Belinda,' another cried then. Belinda was Nurse Bacon. They all had dainty names like that. You could imagine their mothers looking at them when they were babies, thinking they would grow up ballerinas. 'Go on, let us see it.'

Nurse Bacon pretended to look modest; then she put back her cuff. Her arm was thick as a coal-whipper's, but white. When she bent it, it bulged. 'That's Irish muscle,' she said, 'come down on my grandmother's side.' The . other nurses felt it, and whistled. Then one of them said,

'I should say, with an arm like that, you're almost a match for Nurse Flew.'

Nurse Flew was a swivel-eyed woman with a room on the floor below. She was said to have once been a matron in a gaol. Now Nurse Bacon coloured up. 'A match?' she said. 'I should like to see her arm beside mine, that's all. Then we'd see whose was the greater. A match? I'll match her, all right!'

Her voice woke Betty and Mrs Price. She looked, and saw them stirring. 'Get back to sleep,' she said. She did not see me, watching her and wishing her dead through half-closed eyes. She showed her arm again, and again made the muscle bulge. 'A match, indeed,' she grumbled. She nodded to one of the nurses. 'You fetch Nurse Flew up here. Then we'll see. Margaretta, you get a string.'

The nurses rose, and swayed, and tittered, and then went off. The first came back after a minute with Nurse Flew, Nurse Spiller, and the dark-headed nurse that had helped to undress me on my first day. They had all been drinking together, downstairs. Nurse Spiller looked about her with her hands on her hips and said,

'Well, if Dr Christie could see you!' She belched. 'What's this about arms?'

She bared her own. Nurse Flew and the dark nurse bared theirs. The other nurse came back with a length of ribbon and a ruler, and they took it in turns to measure their muscles. I watched them do it, as a man in a darkened wood might, disbelieving his own eyes, watch goblins; for they stood in a ring and moved the lamp from arm to arm, and it threw strange lights and cast queer shadows; and the beer, and the heat, and the excitement of the measuring made them seem to lurch and hop.

'Fifteen!' they cried, their voices rising. Then: 'Sixteen!—Seventeen!— Eighteen-and-a-half!—Nineteen! Nurse Flew has it!'

They broke their circle then, and put down the light, and fell about quarrelling—not so much like goblins, suddenly, as like sailors. You half expected them to have tattoos. Nurse Bacon's face was darker than ever. She said sulkily,