Affinity (22 page)

All the time she spoke, she made small gestures with her grubby white hands—showing me where Selina would have the ropes tightened and fixed, how she would sit, how Mrs Brink would rub her. In the end I had to turn in my chair and look away from her, her words and gestures made me queasy. I thought of my locket, and of Stephen and Mrs Wallace, and of how I had come across that reading-room—by chance, it
was
by chance, and yet it had so much of Selina in it . . . It didn’t seem comical to me now. It seemed only queer. I heard the woman stand and draw on her coat, and still I kept my eyes from her. But she stepped to replace her book upon the shelves, and that brought her closer to me; and then she gazed at the page before me and shook her head.

‘They mean it for Miss Dawes,’ she said, indicating the caricature of the sharp-faced medium, ‘but no-one could see her and draw her like that. Did you ever know her? She had the face of an angel.’ She bent, and turned the pages of the book until she found another picture—or, rather, two pictures, that had been published in the month before Selina’s arrest. ‘Look here,’ she said. Then she stood a moment and watched me gaze at them; and then she went.

The pictures were portraits, set side-by-side upon the page. The first was an engraving taken from a photograph, dated June 1872 and showing Selina herself, aged seventeen. It showed her rather plump, and with brows that are dark and shapely: she is clad in a high-necked gown, perhaps of taffeta, and there are jewelled pendants at her neck and her ears. Her hair is rather fussily dressed—a shop-girl’s Sunday
coiffure
, I thought it; but one can see, for all that, that it is thick and fair and very handsome. She looks not at all like the Crivelli
Veritas
. I should say that she was never stern, before they sent her to Millbank.

The other portrait might be comical, if it were not so queer. It is a pencil drawing by a spiritual artist, and shows a bust of Peter Quick as he appeared for the dark circles at Mrs Brink’s house. There is a cloth of white about his shoulders and a cap of white upon his head. His cheek seems pale, his whiskers full and very dark; dark, too, are his brows and lashes, and his eyes. He is set upon the paper in a three-quarter profile, facing the picture of Selina—and so appears to gaze at her, as if compelling her to turn her eyes to his.

So, anyway, it seemed to me this afternoon; for I sat and studied those portraits, after the lady had left, until the ink upon the page appeared to waver and the flesh upon the faces to give a twitch. And as I sat and stared, I remembered the cabinet, and the yellow wax mould of Peter Quick’s hand. I thought, ‘Suppose that is quivering, too?’ I imagined I might turn and see the hand jerk, might see it pressed to the glass of the cabinet with one gross finger crooked and
beckoning
to me!

I didn’t turn; but still I sat, a little longer. I sat, and looked at Peter Quick’s dark eyes. They seemed—how odd it sounds!—they seemed
familiar
to me, as if I might have gazed at them already—perhaps, in my dreams.

9 December 1872

Mrs Brink says I must never think of rising in the mornings before 10. She says we must do everything we can to preserve my powers & make them stronger. She has given her own maid Ruth entirely over to the care of me & has taken another girl, named Jenny, for herself. She says her own comforts mean nothing to her compared with mine. Now Ruth brings me my breakfast & handles my gowns, & if I let my napkin or my stocking or any slight thing fall she picks it up, & if I say ‘Thank you’ she smiles & says ‘I’m sure, miss, you don’t have to thank me.’ She is older than me. She says she came to the house when Mrs Brink’s husband died 6 years ago. I said to her this morning ‘I think Mrs Brink might have had many spirit-mediums come here, since then?’ & she answered ‘She has had just about a thousand, miss! All trying for the one poor spirit. They all proved crooks however. We soon saw through them. We saw all their tricks. You will understand, how a maid feels about her mistress. I would sooner break my heart 10 times, than have a hair upon my mistress’s head hurt once, by a person like that.’ She said this, fastening my gown about me, looking at me in the glass. All my new gowns close at the back, & need her hand to fasten them.

When I am dressed I generally go down to Mrs Brink & we sit for an hour, or she will take me to a shop or to the gardens at the Crystal Palace. Sometimes her friends will come, to make dark circles with us. They see me & say ‘O, but you are quite a young girl! You are younger even than my own daughter.’ But after we have sat they take my hand & shake their heads. Mrs Brink has told everyone she knows that she has me with her, & that I am something out of the way special - I think however, that there must be many media she has said that about. They say ‘Will you see if there is any spirit near me now, Miss Dawes? Will you ask it, has it any little message for me?’ I have been doing those things for 5 years, I could do them on my head. But they see me doing them in my nice dress, in Mrs Brink’s fine parlour, & are astonished. I hear them saying quietly to Mrs Brink ‘O, Margery, what a talent she has! Will you bring her to my house? Will you let her lead a circle, at a party of mine?’

But Mrs Brink says she would not dream of letting me water my gifts by attending gatherings like that. I have said she must let me use my powers to help other people as well as her, since that is what I was given powers for, & she always answers ‘Of course, I know that. I will do that, in time. It is only that, now I have you, I want to keep you to myself. Will you think me so very selfish if I do that, just a little while longer?’ And so her friends come in the afternoon, but never at night. The nights she keeps for us to sit in. She only has Ruth come sometimes, bringing wine & biscuits if I grow faint.

28 October 1874

To Millbank. It is only a week since my last visit, but the mood of the prison has shifted, as if with the season, and it is a darker and more bitter place now, than ever. The towers seemed to have grown higher and broader, and the windows to have shrunk; the very scents of the place seemed to have changed, since I last went there—the grounds smelling of fog and of chimney smoke as well as of sedge, and the wards reeking of nuisance-buckets still, of cramped and unwashed hair and flesh and mouths, but also of gas, and rust, and sickness. There are great black, blistering radiators at the angle of the passages, and these make the corridors very airless and close. The cells, however, remain so chill that the walls are wet with condensation, the lime upon them turned to a kind of bubbling curd, that marks the women’s skirts with streaks of white. There is, in consequence, much coughing on the wards, and many pinched and sorrowful faces and trembling limbs.

There is a darkness to the building, too, that I am not used to. They are lighting lamps there now at four o’clock, and with their high, narrow windows black against the sky, their sanded flags lit by pools of flaring gas-light, their cells dim, the women in them hunched, like goblins, over their sewing or their coir, the wards seem more terrible and more antique. Even the matrons seem touched by the new darkness. They move about the passage-ways with softer treads, their hands and faces yellow in the gas-light, their mantles black against their gowns like cloaks of shadow.

They took me, to-day, to the prisoners’ visiting-room, the place in which the women receive their friends and husbands and children—I think it is the dreariest place that I have seen there. They call it a room, but it is hardly that; it more closely resembles some sort of shed, for cattle, for it is made up of a series of narrow stalls or niches, which are arranged in a row, on either side of one long passage. When a prisoner receives a visitor at Millbank, her matron escorts her to one of these stalls and places her in it; above her head is fixed an hour-glass, and the salt in this is now set running. Before the prisoner’s face is an aperture, with bars upon it. Exactly opposite to her, on the other side of the passage-way, is another aperture—this one with mesh across it only, rather than bars. This is where the prisoner’s visitor is permitted to stand. There is another little hour-glass fixed here, which is turned to keep time with the first.

The passage-way between the stalls is, perhaps, seven feet wide, and a watchful matron continually patrols it, to ensure that nothing is passed across the space. The prisoner and visitor are obliged to raise their voices a little, in order to be heard—the din, therefore, is sometimes fierce. At other times a woman must call to her friends, and have her business overheard by all about her. The salt in the hour-glasses runs for fifteen minutes, and when it has done so the visitor must leave, the woman return to her cell.

A prisoner at Millbank may receive her friends and family, in this manner,
four times a year
.

‘And they may come no nearer to one another than this?’ I asked the matron who had escorted me, as I walked with her along the corridor in which the prisoners’ stalls are set. ‘May a woman not even embrace her husband—not even touch her own child?’

The matron—not Miss Ridley, to-day, but a fair-haired, younger woman named Miss Godfrey—shook her head. ‘Those are the rules,’ she said. How many times have I heard that phrase, there? ‘
Those are the rules.
They seem harsh to you, Miss Prior, I know. But once we let prisoner and visitor together, there come all manner of things into the gaol. Keys, tobacco . . . Infants may be taught to pass on blades, in their very kisses.’

I studied the prisoners she led me by, gazing at their friends across the passage, across the patrolling matron’s shadow. They didn’t look as if they longed to be embraced only to have a knife or a key smuggled to them. They looked more wretched than I had seen any of the women look before. One, a woman with a scar upon her cheek straight as a razor’s cut, put her head to the bars, the better to hear her calling husband; and when he asked her was she well? she answered, ‘As well, John, as they will let me be—which is to say, not much . . .’ Another—it was Laura Sykes from Mrs Jelf’s ward, the woman who presses the matrons to petition for her with Miss Haxby—was visited by her mother, a shabby-looking lady who could do nothing but flinch from the iron mesh before her face and weep. Sykes said, ‘Come now, Ma, this won’t do. Will you tell me what you know? Have you spoke yet, with Mr Cross?’ But when the mother heard her daughter’s voice, saw the passing matron, she only shuddered the more. And at that Sykes gave a cry—Oh! There were half her minutes gone, her mother had wept them clean away! ‘You must send Patrick next time. Why isn’t Patrick here? I won’t have you come, only to weep at me . . .’

Miss Godfrey saw me looking, and nodded. ‘It
is
hard on the women,’ she conceded. ‘Some, indeed, cannot bear it at all. They sit waiting for their friends to come, marking off the days and fretting; but we bring them here and, after all, the upset proves too much for them. They tell their friends not to come at all, then.’

We began the walk back to the wards. I asked her, were there any women who received no visits, from anyone?—and she nodded: ‘Some. They have no friends or family, I suppose. They come in here and seem to be forgotten. I cannot say what they must do when they are sent out. Collins is like that, and Barnes, and Jennings. And—’ she struggled to twist a key inside an awkward lock ‘—and Dawes, I believe, on E ward.’

I think I had known she was about to say the name, before she said it.

I asked her no more questions then, and she took me up to Mrs Jelf. I made my way, as usual, from one woman to another—I did it in a flinching sort of way at first, for it seemed terrible, after what I had just seen, that I, who am nothing to them, should be able to call on them just as I please, and they must speak with me. And yet of course, they must speak with me or stay silent, I couldn’t forget that; and I saw at last that they were grateful to see me at their gates, and glad to come and tell me how they did. Many, as I have said, did badly. Perhaps because of this—and perhaps because, even through the thickness of the prison walls and windows, they have sensed the subtle shifting of the season and the year—there was much talk of ‘times’ and when they were due, such as: ‘It is seventeen months to-day, mum, to my time!’ And: ‘A year and a week, Miss Prior, off my time!’ And: ‘Three months, miss, to my time. What do you think of that?’

This last was Ellen Power, imprisoned—as she says—for letting boys and girls kiss in her parlour. I have thought much of her since the weather turned colder. I found her looking frail and slightly trembling, but not as ill as I had feared. I had Mrs Jelf shut me in with her and we talked together for half an hour; and when I took her hand at last I said that I was pleased to feel her grip so strong, and to see her so healthy.

I said it, and she grew crafty. She answered, ‘Well, you are not to say a word, miss, to Miss Haxby or Miss Ridley—indeed, you must pardon me for asking, for I know you would not. But the truth is, it is all thanks to my matron, Mrs Jelf. She brings me meat from her own plate, and she has given me a length of red flannel to wear about my throat at night. And when the air is extra chill, she has a bit of rubbing stuff she puts upon me here’—she touched her chest and shoulders—‘with her own hand; and that makes all the difference. She is as good to me as my own girl—in truth, she calls me “Mother”. “We must have you quite ready, Mother,” she says, “for your ticket-of-leave” . . .’

Her eyes gleamed as she spoke the words, and then she took her coarse blue kerchief and pressed it for a moment to her face. I said that I was glad that Mrs Jelf, at least, was kind to her.

‘She is kind to us all,’ she said. ‘She is the kindest matron in the gaol.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor lady! She ain’t been here long enough to learn proper Millbank ways.’

I was surprised at that: for Mrs Jelf is so grey and careworn, I should never have guessed her to have had a life, so recently, beyond the prison walls. But Power nodded. Yes, Mrs Jelf had been there—well, not quite a year, she thought. She did not know why a lady like Mrs Jelf should ever have come to Millbank, at all. She never saw a matron suited less to Millbank duties, than her!