Fingersmith (7 page)

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 clumsy. 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.'

That made me thoughtful. For a minute, we sat and said nothing. And what I asked her next was something I had never asked before—something which, in all my years at Lant Street, amongst all those dodgers and thieves, I had never heard anyone ask, not ever. I said, in a whisper,

'Do you think it hurts, Mrs Sucksby, when they drop you?'

Her hand, that was smoothing my hair, grew still. Then it started up stroking, sure as before. She said,

'I should say you don't feel nothing but the rope about your neck. Rather ticklish, I should think it.'

'Ticklish?'

'Say then, pricklish.'

Still her hand kept smoothing.

'But when the drop is opened?' I said. 'Wouldn't you say you felt it then?'

She shifted her leg. 'Perhaps a twitch,' she admitted, 'when the drop is opened.'

I thought of the men I had seen fall at Horsemonger Lane. They twitched, all right. They twitched and kicked about, like monkeys on sticks.

'But it comes that quick at the last,' she went on then, 'that I rather think the quickness must take the pain clean out of it. And when it comes to dropping a lady—well, you know they place the knot in such a way, Sue, that the end comes all the quicker?'

I looked up at her again. She had set her candle on the floor, and the light striking her face all from beneath, it made her cheeks seem swollen and her eyes seem old. I shivered, and she moved her hand to my shoulder and rubbed me, hard, through the velvet.

Then she tilted her head. 'There's Mr Ibbs's sister, quite bewildered again,' she said, 'and calling on her mother. She has been calling on her, poor soul, these fifteen years. I shouldn't like to come to that, Sue. I should say that, of all the ways a body might go, the quick and the neat way might, after all, be best.'

She said it; and then she winked.

She said it, and seemed to mean it.

I do sometimes wonder, however, whether she mightn't only have said it to be kind.

But I didn't think that then. I only rose and kissed her, and made my hair neat where she had stroked it loose; and then came the thud of the kitchen door again, and this time heavier feet upon the stairs, and then Dainty's voice.

'Where are you, Sue? Ain't you coming for a dance? Mr Ibbs has got his wind up, we're having a right old laugh down here.'

Her shout woke half the babies, and that half woke the other. But Mrs Sucksby said that she would see to them, and I went back down, and this time I did dance, with Gentleman as my partner. He held me in a waltz-step. He was drunk and held me tight. John danced again with Dainty, and we bumped about the kitchen for a half-an-hour—Gentleman all the time still calling, 'Go it, Johnny!' and 'Come up, boy! Come up!', and Mr Ibbs stopping once to rub a bit of butter on his lips, to keep the whistle sweet.

Next day, at midday, was when I left them. I packed all my bits of stuff into the canvas-covered trunk and wore the plain brown dress and the cloak and, over my flat hair, a bonnet. I had learned as much as Gentleman could teach me after three days' work. I knew my story and my new name—Susan Smith. There was only one more thing that needed to be done, and as I sat taking my last meal in that kitchen—which was bread and dried meat, the meat rather too dried, and clinging to my gums—Gentleman did it. He brought from his bag a piece of paper and a pen and some ink, and wrote me out a character.

He wrote it off in a moment. Of course, he was used to faking papers. He held it up for the ink to dry, then read it out. It began:

'To
whom it might concern. Lady Alice Dunraven, of Whelk Street, Mayfair, recommends Miss Susan Smith'
—and it went on like that, I forget the rest of it, but it sounded all right to me. He placed it flat again and signed it in a lady's curling hand. Then he held it to Mrs Sucksby.

'What do you think, Mrs S?' he said, smiling. 'Will that get Sue her situation?'

But Mrs Sucksby said she couldn't hope to judge it.

'You know best, dear boy,' she said, looking away.

Of course, if we ever took help at Lant Street, it wasn't character we looked for so much as lack of it. There was a little dwarfish girl that used to come sometimes, to boil the babies' napkins and to wash the floors; but she was a thief. We couldn't have had honest girls come. They would have seen enough in three minutes of the business of the house to do for us all. We couldn't have had that.

So Mrs Sucksby waved the paper away, and Gentleman read it through a second time, then winked at me, then folded it and sealed it and put it in my trunk. I swallowed the last of my dried meat and bread, and fastened my cloak. There was only Mrs Sucksby to say good-bye to. John Vroom and Dainty never got up before one. Mr Ibbs was gone to crack
a
safe at Bow: he had kissed my cheek an hour before, and given me a shilling. I put my hat on. It was a dull brown thing, like my dress. Mrs Sucksby set it straight. Then she put her hands to my face and smiled.

'God bless you, Sue!' she said. 'You are making us rich!'

But then her smile grew awful. I had never been parted from her before, for more than a day. She turned away, to hide her falling tears.

'Take her quick,' she said to Gentleman. Take her quick, and don't let me see it!'

And so he put his arm about my shoulders and led me from the house. He found a boy to walk behind us, carrying my trunk. He meant to take me to a. cab-stand and drive me to the station at Paddington, and see me on my train.

The day was a miserable one. Even so, it was not so often I got to cross the water, and I said I should like to walk as far as Southwark Bridge, to look at the view. I had thought I should see all of London from there; but the fog grew thicker the further we went. At the bridge it seemed worst of all. You could see the black dome of St Paul's, the barges on the water; you could see all the dark things of the city, but not the fair—the fair were lost or made like shadows.

'Queer thing, to think of the river down there,' said Gentleman, peering over the edge. He leaned, and spat.

We had not bargained on the fog. It made the traffic slow to a crawl, and though we found a cab, after twenty minutes we paid the driver off and walked again. I had been meant to catch the one o'clock train; now, stepping fast across some great square, we heard that hour struck out, and then the quarter, and then the half—all maddeningly damp and half-hearted, they sounded, as if the clappers and the bells that rung them had been wound about with flannel.

'Had we not rather turn around,' I said, 'and try again tomorrow?'

But Gentleman said there would be a driver and a trap sent out to Marlow, to meet my train there; and I had better be late, he thought, than not arrive at all.

But after all, when we got to Paddington at last we found the trains all delayed and made slow, just like the traffic: we had to wait another hour then, until the guard should raise the signal that the Bristol train—which was to be my train as far as Maidenhead, where I must get off and join another—was ready to be boarded. We stood beneath the ticking clock, fidgeting and blow ing on our hands. They had lit the great lamps there, but the fog having come in and mixed with the steam, it drifted from arch to arch and made the light very poor. The walls were hung with black, from the death of Prince Albert; the crape had got streaked by birds. I thought it very gloomy, for so grand a place. And of course, there was a vast press of people beside us, all waiting and cursing, or jostling by, or letting their children and their dogs run into our legs.