Fingersmith (72 page)

I never spoke to him again. He took a room for him and Dainty in another house, and kept out of my way. I saw him, only once; and that was in the court-room, at Mrs Sucksby's trial.

The trial came up very quick. I spent the nights before it at Lant Street, lying awake in my old bed; sometimes Dainty came back, to sleep beside me and keep me company. She was the only one, out of all my old pals, who would: for of course, everyone else supposed—from the story having been put about, before—that I was a cheat. It came out that I had taken that room, in the house across from Mr Ibbs's; and had lived there, in what seemed a sneaking sort of way, for almost a week. Why had I done that? Then someone said they saw me running, on the night of the murder, with a look of wildness in my eye. They talked about my mother, and the bad blood that flowed in me. They didn't say I was brave, now; they said I was bold. They said they wouldn't have been surprised if it was me that had put the knife in, after all; and Mrs Sucksby—who still loved me like a daughter, though I had turned out bad—who had stepped forward and taken the blame…

When I walked out in the Borough, people cursed me. Once, a girl threw a stone at me.

At any other time it would have broken my heart. Now, I did not care. I had only one thought, and that was to see Mrs Sucksby as often as I could. They had her in the Horsemonger Lane Gaol: I spent all my days there—sitting on the step outside the gate, when it was too early to be let in; talking with her keepers, or with the man who was to plead her case in court. Some pal of Mr Ibbs's had found him for us; he was said to have regularly saved the worst sort of villains from the rope. But he told me, honestly, that our case was a bad one. The most we can hope,' he said, 'is that the judge show mercy, for the sake of her age.'

More than once I said, 'Suppose it could be proved she never did it?'

He'd shake his head. 'Where is the evidence?' he'd say. 'Besides, she has admitted to it. Why should she do that?'

I did not know, and could not answer. He would leave me then, at the gate of the gaol—going quickly off, stepping into the street and calling out for a cab-man; and I'd watch him go with my hands at my head, for his shout, and the rattle of hooves and wheels, the movement of people, the very stones beneath my feet, would seem harsh to me. Everything seemed harsh, and loud, and harder and faster than it ought to have been, just then. Many times I would stop, and remember Gentleman, gripping the wound in his stomach, looking disbelievingly at our own disbelieving faces. 'How did this happen?' he had said. I wanted to say it, now, to everyone I saw:
How did this happen? How can this be? Why do you only stand and watch me
… ?

I would have written letters; if I had known how to write, and who to send them to. I would have gone to the house of the man who was to be judge; if I had known how to find it. But I did nothing like that. What little comfort I got, I got at Mrs Sucksby's side; and the gaol, though it was so grim—so dark, and bleak—at least was also quiet. I got to spend more time there than I ought to have, through the kindness of the keepers: I think they thought me younger and less of a sharper than I was. 'Here's your daughter,' they'd say, unlocking the gate to Mrs Sucksby's cell; and every time, she would quickly lift her head and study my face, or glance beyond my shoulder, with a troubled look—as if, I thought, not quite believing they had let me come again and meant to let me stay.

Then she'd blink, and try at a smile. 'Dear girl. Quite alone?'

'Quite alone,' I'd answer.

'That's good,' she'd say after a moment, taking my hand. 'Ain't it? Just you and me. That's good.'

She liked to sit with my hand in hers. She did not like to talk. When at first I'd weep, and curse, and beg her to take back her story, my words would so upset her I feared she'd grow ill.

'No more,' she'd say, very pale in the face and set about the mouth. 'I done it, that's all. I don't want to hear no more about it.'

So then I'd remember that dander of hers, and keep silent, and only smooth her fingers in mine. They seemed to grow thinner, every time I saw her. The keepers said she left her dinners quite untouched. The sight of the dwindling of those great hands upset me, more than I can say: it seemed to me that everything, that was so wrong, would be put right if only Mrs Sucksby's hands could be made to be handsome again. I had spent what money there was in the house at Lant Street, on finding a lawyer; but all that I could make now through borrowing or pawning I put on little dishes to try and tempt her—on shrimps, and saveloys, and suet-puddings. Once I took her a sugar mouse, thinking she might remember the time she had put me in her bed and told me about Nancy from
Oliver Twist
. I don't think she did, however; she only took it and set it distractedly aside, saying she would try it later, like she did with everything else. In the end her keepers told me to save my money. She had been passing the dishes to them.

Many times she held my face in her hands. Many times she kissed me. Once or twice she gripped me hard, and seemed about to speak on some awful matter; but always, at the last, she would turn the matter aside and it would be lost. If there were things I might have asked her—if I was troubled by queer ideas, and doubts—I kept quiet as she did. That time was bad enough; why make it worse? We talked instead of me—of how I should do now and in the future.

'You'll keep up the old place, at Lant Street?' she''d say.

'Won't I!' I'd answer.

'You won't think of leaving?'

'Leaving? Why, I mean to keep it ready, against the day they let you out…'

I did not tell her how very changed the house was, now that she and Mr Ibbs, and Mr Ibbs's sister, had gone. I did not tell her that neighbours had left off calling; that a girl threw a stone at me; that people—strangers—would come and stand, for hours at a time, at the doors and windows, hoping for a glimpse of the place where Gentleman had died. I did not say how hard I had worked, with Dainty, to take the blood-stain from the floor; how we had washed and washed; how many buckets of water we had carried off, crimson; how at last we had had
to
give it up, because the constant scrubbing began to lift the surface of the boards and turn the pale wood underneath a horrible pink. I didn't tell her of all the places—the doors, the ceiling—and all the things—the pictures on the walls, the ornaments upon the mantel, the dinner-plates, the knives and forks—that we found marked with streaks and splashes of Gentleman's blood.

And I did not say how, as I swept and scrubbed the kitchen, I chanced on a thousand little reminders of my old life—dog-hairs, and chips of broken cups, bad farthings, playing cards, the cuts on the door-frame made by Mr Ibbs's knife to mark my height as I grew up; nor how I covered my face and wept, at every one.

At night, if I slept, I dreamed of murder. I dreamed I killed a man, and had to walk the streets of London with his body in a bag too small to hold it. I dreamed of Gentleman. I dreamed I met him among the graves at the little red chapel at Briar and he showed me the tomb of his mother. The tomb had a lock upon it, and I had a blank and file and must cut the key to fit; and every night I would set to work, knowing I must work quickly, quickly; and every time, just as the job was almost done, some queer disaster would happen—the key would shrink or grow too large, the file would soften in my fingers; there would be a cut—the final cut—I could not make, never make in time…

Too late
, Gentleman would say.

One time the voice was Maud's.

Too late.

I looked, but could not see her.

I had not seen her, since the night that Gentleman died. I didn't know where she was. I knew the police had kept her longer than they kept me—for she gave them her name, and it got into the newspapers; and, of course, Dr Christie saw it. I heard it, from the keepers at the gaol. It had all come out, how she was Gentleman's wife, and had supposedly been in a madhouse and had escaped; and how the police didn't know what to do with her—whether to let her go, or lock her up as a lunatic, or what. Dr Christie said only he could decide; so they called him in to examine her. I nearly had a fit when I heard that. I still couldn't go near bath-tubs. But what happened, was this: he took one look at her, was seen to stagger and grow white; then declared himself only overcome with emotion, to find her so perfectly cured. He said this showed how good his methods were. He had the papers give details of his house. He got lots of new lady patients out of it, I think, and quite made his fortune.

Maud herself was set at liberty, then; and after that, she seemed to vanish. I guessed she had gone back home to Briar. I know she never came to Lant Street. I supposed her too afraid!—for of course, I would have throttled her if she had.

I did wonder if she might, however. I wondered it, every day. 'Perhaps today,' I would think each morning, 'will be the day she'll come.' And then, each night: 'Perhaps tomorrow…'

But, as I have said, she never did. What came instead, was the day of the trial. It came in the middle of August. The sun had kept on blazing all through that awful summer, and the court—being packed with watchers—was close: every hour a man was called to throw water on the floor to try and cool it. I sat with Dainty. I'd hoped I might sit in the box with Mrs Sucksby, and hold her hand; but the policemen laughed in my face when I asked it. They made her sit alone, and when they took her in and out of the room, they put cuffs on her. She wore a grey prison gown that made her face seem almost yellow, but her silver hair shone very bright against the dark wood walls of the court. She flinched when she first came up, and saw the crowd of strangers that had come to see her tried. Then she found out my face among them and grew, I thought, more easy. Her eye came back to mine, after that, as the day went on—though I saw her looking, too, about the court, as if in search of another. At the last, however, her gaze would always fall.

When she spoke, her voice was weak. She said she had stabbed Gentleman in a moment of anger, in a quarrel over money he owed for the renting of her room.

She earned her money from the letting of rooms? asked the prosecuting lawyer.

'Yes,' she said.

And not from the handling of stolen goods, or the unlicensed nursing— commonly known as farming—of orphaned infants?

'No.'

Then they brought in men to say they had seen her, at different times, with different bits of poke; and—what was worse—found women who swore they had given her babies that had very soon afterwards died…

Then John Vroom spoke. They had put him in a suit like a clerk's, and combed and shined his hair; he looked more like an infant than ever. He said he had seen everything that took place in the Lant Street kitchen, on the fatal night. He had seen Mrs Sucksby put in the knife. She had cried, 'You blackguard, take that!' And he had seen her with the knife in her hand, for at least a minute, before she did.

'At least a minute?' the lawyer said. 'You are quite sure? You know how long a minute is? Look at that clock, there. Watch the movement of the hand…'

We all watched it sweep. The court fell still, to do it. I never knew a minute so long. The lawyer looked back at John.

'As long as that?' he said.

John began to cry. 'Yes, sir,' he said, through his tears.

Then they brought the knife out, for him to say it was the one. The crowd broke out in murmurs when they saw it; and when John wiped his eyes and looked, and nodded, a lady swooned. The knife was shown to all the men of the jury then, one by one, and the lawyer said they must be sure to note how the blade was sharpened, more than it naturally would have been for a knife of that kind—that it was the sharpening of it that made Gentleman's wound so bad. He said that broke in pieces Mrs Sucksby's story about the quarrel, by showing evidence of forethought—

I nearly started out of my seat, when I heard that. Then I caught Mrs Sucksby's eye. She shook her head, and looked so pleadingly at me to be silent, I fell back; and it never came out that the knife was sharp not because she had sharpened it, but because I had. They never called me to the stand. Mrs Sucksby would not let them. They did call Charles; but he wept so hard, and shook so badly, the judge declared him unfit. He was sent back to his aunty's.

No-one was told about me, and Maud. No-one mentioned Briar or old Mr Lilly. No-one came forward to say that Gentleman was a villain—that he had tried to rob heiresses—that he had ruined people through the selling of counterfeit stock. They made out that he was a decent young man with a promising future; they said that Mrs Sucksby had robbed him of it through simple greed. They even found out his family, and brought his parents to the trial— and you'll never believe it, but it turned out that all his tales of being a gentleman's son were so much puff. His father and mother ran a small kind of draper's shop, in a street off the Holloway Road. His sister taught piano. His real name was not Richard Rivers or even Richard Wells; it was Frederick Bunt.

They drew his picture in the papers. Girls all over England were said to have cut it out and worn it next to their hearts.

But when I looked at that picture—and when I heard people talk of the awful murder of Mr Bunt, and of vices, and sordid trades—it seemed to me as though they must be talking of something else, something else entirely, not of Gentleman, being hurt, by mistake, in my own kitchen, with my own people all about. Even when the judge sent off the jury, and we waited, and watched the newspaper-men getting ready to run with the verdict as soon as it came; even when the jury, after an hour, returned, and one of them stood and gave back their answer in a single word; even when the judge covered up his horsehair wig with a cloth of black, and hoped that God would have mercy on Mrs Sucksby's soul—even then, I did not really feel it as you would suppose I might, did not believe, I think, that so many dark and sober gentlemen speaking so many grave and monotonous words could pinch out the spirit and the heat and the colour from the lives of people like me and Mrs Sucksby.