Fingersmith (2 page)

Mrs Sucksby might be there, feeding pap to a baby. The thief would see her and take off his hat.

'All right, Mrs Sucksby?'

'All right, my dear.'

'All right, Sue? Ain't you growed!'

I thought them better than magicians. For out from their coats and sleeves would come pocket-books, silk handkerchiefs and watches; or else jewellery, silver plate, brass candlesticks, petticoats—whole suits of clothes, sometimes. 'This is quality stuff, this is,' they would say, as they set it all out; and Mr Ibbs would rub his hands and look expectant. But then he would study their poke, and his face would fall. He was a very mild-looking man, very honest-seeming—very pale in the cheek, with neat lips and whiskers. His face would fall, it would just about break your heart.

'Rag,' he might say, shaking his head, fingering a piece of paper money. 'Very hard to push along.' Or, 'Candlesticks. I had a dozen top-quality candlesticks come just last week, from a crib at Whitehall. Couldn't do nothing with them. Couldn't give them away.'

He would stand, making a show of reckoning up a price, but looking like he hardly dare name it to the man for fear of insulting him. Then he'd make his offer, and the thief would look disgusted.

'Mr Ibbs,' he would say, 'that won't pay me for the trouble of walking from London Bridge. Be fair, now.'

But by then Mr Ibbs would have gone to his box and be counting out shillings on the table: one, two, three— He might pause, with the fourth in his hand. The thief would see the shine of the silver—Mr Ibbs always kept his coins rubbed very bright, for just that reason—and it was like hares to a greyhound.

'Couldn't you make it five, Mr Ibbs?'

Mr Ibbs would lift his honest face, and shrug.

'I should like to, my son. I should like nothing better. And if you was to bring me something out of the way, I would make my money answer. This, however'—with a wave of his hand above the pile of silks or notes or gleaming brass—'this is so much gingerbread. I should be robbing myself. I should be stealing the food from the mouths of Mrs Sucksby's babies.'

And he would hand the thief his shillings, and the thief would pocket them and button his jacket, and cough or wipe his nose.

And then Mr Ibbs would seem to have a change of heart. He would step to his box again and, 'You eaten anything this morning, my son?' he would say. The thief would always answer, 'Not a crust.' Then Mr Ibbs would give him sixpence, and tell him to be sure and spend it on a breakfast and not on a horse; and the thief would say something like,

'You're a jewel, Mr Ibbs, a regular jewel.'

Mr Ibbs might make ten or twelve shillings' profit with a man like that: all through seeming to be honest, and fair. For, of course, what he had said about the rag or the candlesticks would be so much puff: he knew brass from onions, all right. When the thief had gone, he'd catch my eye and wink. He'd rub his hands again and grow quite lively.

'Now, Sue,' he'd say, 'what would you say to taking a cloth to these, and bringing up the shine? And then you might—if you've a moment, dear, if Mrs Sucksby don't need you—you might have a little go at the fancy work upon these wipers. Only a very little, gentle sort of go, with your little scissors and perhaps a pin: for this is lawn—do you see, my dear?—and will tear, if you tug too hard…'

I believe I learned my alphabet, like that: not by putting letters down, but by taking them out. I know I learned the look of my own name, from handkerchiefs that came, marked
Susan
. As for regular reading, we never troubled with it. Mrs Sucksby could do it, if she had to; Mr Ibbs could read, and even write; but, for the rest of us, it was an idea—well, I should say, like speaking Hebrew or throwing somersaults: you could see the use of it, for Jews and tumblers; but while it was their lay, why make it yours?

So I thought then, anyway. I learned to cipher, though. I learned it, from handling coins. Good coins we kept, of course. Bad ones come up too bright, and must be slummed, with blacking and grease, before you pass them on. I learned that, too. Silks and linens there are ways of washing and pressing, to make them seem new. Gems I would shine, with ordinary vinegar. Silver plate we ate our suppers off—but only the once, because of the crests and stampings; and when we had finished, Mr Ibbs would take the cups and bowls and melt them into bars. He did the same with gold and pewter. He never took chances: that's what made him so good. Everything that came into our kitchen looking like one sort of thing, was made to leave it again looking quite another. And though it had come in the front way—the shop way, the Lant Street way—it left by another way, too. It left by the back. There was no street there. What there was, was a little covered passage and a small dark court. You might stand in that and think yourself baffled; there was a path, however, if you knew how to look. It took you to an alley, and that met a winding black lane, which ran to the arches of the railway line; and from one of those arches—I won't say quite which, though I could—led another, darker, lane that would take you, very quick and inconspicuous, to the river. We knew two or three men who kept boats there. All along that crooked way, indeed, lived pals of ours—Mr Ibbs's nephews, say, that I called cousins. We could send poke from our kitchen, through any of them, to all the parts of London. We could pass anything, anything at all, at speeds which would astonish you. We could pass ice, in August, before a quarter of the block should have had a chance to turn to water. We could pass sunshine in summer—Mr Ibbs would find a buyer for it.

In short, there was not much that was brought to our house that was not moved out of it again, rather sharpish. There was only one thing, in fact, that had come and got stuck—one thing that had somehow withstood the tremendous pull of that passage of poke—one thing that Mr Ibbs and Mrs Sucksby seemed never to think to put a price to.

I mean of course, Me.

I had my mother to thank for that. Her story was a tragic one. She had come to Lant Street on a certain night in 1844. She had come, 'very large, dear girl, with you,' Mrs Sucksby said—by which, until I learned better, I took her to mean that my mother had brought me, perhaps tucked in a pocket behind her skirt, or sewn into the lining of her coat. For I knew she was a thief.—'What a thief!' Mrs Sucksby would say. 'So bold! And handsome?'

'Was she, Mrs Sucksby? Was she fair?'

'Fairer than you; but sharp, like you, about the face; and thin as paper. We put her upstairs. No-one knew she was here, save me and Mr Ibbs—for she was wanted, she said, by the police of four divisions, and if they had got her, she'd swing. What was her lay? She said it was only prigging. I think it must have been worse. I know she was hard as a nut, for she had you and, I swear, she never murmured—never called out once. She only looked at you, and put . a kiss on your little head; then she gave me six pounds for the keeping of you—all of it in sovereigns, and all of 'em good. She said she had one last job to do, that would make her fortune. She meant to come back for you, when her way was clear…'

So Mrs Sucksby told it; and every time, though her voice would start off steady it would end up trembling, and her eyes would fill with tears. For she had waited for my mother, and my mother had not come. What came, instead, was awful news. The job that was meant to make her fortune, had gone badly. A man had been killed trying to save his plate. It was my mother's knife that killed him. Her own pal peached on her. The police caught up with her at last. She was a month in prison. Then they hanged her.

They hanged her, as they did murderesses then, on the roof of the Horse-monger Lane Gaol. Mrs Sucksby stood and watched the drop, from the window of the room that I was born in.

You got a marvellous view of it from there—the best view in South London, everybody said. People were prepared to pay very handsomely for a spot at that window, on hanging days. And though some girls shrieked when the trap went rattling down, I never did. I never once shuddered or winked.

'That's Susan Trinder,' someone might whisper then. 'Her mother was hanged as a murderess. Ain't she brave?'

I liked to hear them say it. Who wouldn't? But the fact is—and I don't care who knows it, now—the fact is, I was not brave at all. For to be brave about a thing like that, you must first be sorry. And how could I be sorry, for someone I never knew? I supposed it was a pity my mother had ended up hanged; but, since she
was
hanged, I was glad it was for something game, like murdering a miser over his plate, and not for something very wicked, like throttling a child. I supposed it was a pity she had made an orphan of me— but then, some girls I knew had mothers who were drunkards, or mothers who were mad: mothers they hated and could never rub along with. I should rather a dead mother, over one like that!

I should rather Mrs Sucksby. She was better by chalks. She had been paid to keep me a month; she kept me seventeen years. What's love, if that ain't?

She might have passed me on to the poorhouse. She might have left me crying in a draughty crib. Instead she prized me so, she would not let me on the prig for fear a policeman should have got me. She let me sleep beside her, in her own bed. She shined my hair with vinegar. You treat jewels like that.

And I was not a jewel; nor even a pearl. My hair, after all, turned out quite ordinary. My face was a commonplace face. I could pick a plain lock, I could cut a plain key; I could bounce a coin and say, from the ring, if the coin were good or bad.—But anyone can do those things, who is taught them. All about me other infants came, and stayed a little, then were claimed by their mothers, or found new mothers, or perished; and of course, no-one claimed me, I did not perish, instead I grew up, until at last I was old enough to go among the cradles with the bottle of gin and the silver spoon myself. Mr Ibbs I would seem sometimes to catch gazing at me with a certain light in his eye—as if, I thought, he was seeing me suddenly for the piece of poke I was, and wondering how I had come to stay so long, and who he could pass me on to. But when people talked—as they now and then did—about blood, and its being thicker than water, Mrs Sucksby looked dark.

'Come here, dear girl,' she'd say. 'Let me look at you.' And she'd put her hands upon my head and stroke my cheeks with her thumbs, brooding over my face. 'I see her in you,' she'd say. 'She is looking at me, as she looked at me that night. She is thinking that she'll come back and make your fortune. How could she know? Poor girl, she'll never come back! Your fortune's still to be made. Your fortune, Sue, and ours along with it…'

So she said, many times. Whenever she grumbled or sighed—whenever she rose from a cradle, rubbing her sore back—her eyes would find me out, and her look would clear, she'd grow contented.

But
here is Sue
, she might as well have said. Things is hard
for us, now. But here is Sue. She'll fix. 'em
…

I let her think it; but thought I knew better. I'd heard once that she'd had a child of her own, many years before, that had been born dead. I thought it was
her
face she supposed she saw, when she gazed so hard at mine. The idea made me shiver, rather; for it was queer to think of being loved, not just for my own sake, but for someone's I never knew…

I thought I knew all about love, in those days. I thought I knew all about everything. If you had asked me how I supposed I should go on, I dare say I would have said that I should like to farm infants. I might like to be married, to a thief or a fencing-man. There was a boy, when I was fifteen, that stole a clasp for me, and said he should like to kiss me. There was another a little later, who used to stand at our back door and whistle 'The Locksmith's Daughter', expressly to see me blush. Mrs Sucksby chased them both away. She was as careful of me in that department, as in all others.

'Who's she keeping you for, then?' the boys would say. 'Prince Eddie?' I think the people who came to Lant Street thought me slow.—Slow I mean, as opposed to fast. Perhaps I was, by Borough standards. But it seemed to me that I was sharp enough. You could not have grown up in such a house, that had such businesses in it, without having a pretty good idea of what was what—of what could go into what; and what could come out.

Do you follow?

You are waiting for me to start my story. Perhaps I was waiting, then. But my story had already started—I was only like you, and didn't know it.

This is when I thought it really began.

A night in winter, a few weeks after the Christmas that marked my seventeenth birthday. A dark night—a hard night, full of a fog that was more or less a rain, and a rain that was more or less snow. Dark nights are good to thieves and fencing-men; dark nights in winter are the best nights of all, for then regular people keep close to their homes, and the swells all keep to the country, and the grand houses of London are shut up and empty and pleading to be cracked. We got lots of stuff on nights like those, and Mr Ibbs's profits were higher than ever. The cold makes thieves come to a bargain very quick.

We did not feel the cold too much at Lant Street, for besides our ordinary kitchen fire there was Mr Ibbs's locksmith's brazier: he always kept a flame beneath the coals of it, you could never say what might not turn up that would need making up or melting down. On this night there were three or four boys at it, sweating the gold off sovereigns. Besides them was Mrs Sucksby in her great chair, a couple of babies in a cradle at her side; and a boy and a girl who were rooming with us then—John Vroom, and Dainty Warren.

John was a thin, dark, knifish boy of about fourteen. He was always eating. I believe he had the worm. This night he was cracking peanuts, and throwing their shells on the floor.

Mrs Sucksby saw him do it. 'Will you watch your manners?' she said. 'You make a mess, and Sue shall have to tidy it.'

John said, 'Poor Sue, ain't my heart bleeding.'

He never cared for me. I think he was jealous. He had come to our house as a baby, like me; and like mine, his mother had died and made an orphan of him. But he was such a queer-looking child, no-one would take him off Mrs Sucksby's hands. She had kept him till he was four or five, then put him on the parish—even then, however, he was a devil to get rid of, always running back from the workhouse: we were forever opening the shop-door and finding him sleeping on the step. She had got the master of a ship to take him at last, and he sailed as far as China; when he came back to the Borough after that, he did it with money, to brag. The money had lasted a month. Now he kept handy at Lant Street by doing jobs for Mr Ibbs; and besides them, ran mean little dodges of his own, with Dainty to help him.