Fingersmith (22 page)

Then the Briar bell struck. Half-past twelve—the chime came clear across the park, I suppose the bright air made it sharper. For a second, the echo of it hung about the ear; and then above it rose another, gentler sound—we heard it, and stepped apart—it was the careful creak of oars, the slither of water against wood. About the bend of the silvery river came the dark shape of a boat. I saw the oars dip and rise, and scatter coins of moonlight; then they were drawn high, and left a silence. The boat glided towards the rushes, then rocked and creaked again as Gentleman half-rose from his seat. He could not see us, where we waited in the shadow of the wall. He could not see us; but it was not me who stepped forward first, it was her. She went stiffly to the water's edge, then took the coil of rope he threw and braced herself against the tugging of the boat, until the boat was steady.

I don't remember if Gentleman spoke. I don't believe he looked at me, except, once he had helped Maud across the ancient landing-place, to give me his hand and guide me as he had guided her, over the rotten planks. I think we did it all in silence. I know the boat was narrow, and our skirts bulged as we sat—for, when Gentleman took up the oars to turn us, we rocked again, and I grew suddenly frightened of the boat capsizing, imagining the water filling all those folds and frills and sucking us under. But Maud sat steady. I saw Gentleman looking her over. Still no-one spoke, however. We had done it all in a moment, and the boat moved quick. The stream was with us. For a minute, the river followed the wall of the park; we passed the place where I had seen him kiss her hand; then the wall snaked off. There came a line of dark trees instead. Maud sat with her eyes on her lap, not looking.

We went very carefully. The night was so still. Gentleman kept the boat as close as he could to the shadows of the bank: only now and then, when the trees were thinner, did we move in moonlight. But there was no-one about, to watch us. Where there were houses built near to the river, they were shut up and dark. Once, when the river became broad, and there were islands, with barges moored at them, and grazing horses, he stopped the oars and let us glide in silence; but still no-one heard us pass or came to look. Then the river grew narrow again, and we moved on; and after that, there were no more houses and no more boats. There was only the darkness, the broken moonlight, the creaking of the sculls, the dipping and the rising of Gentleman's hands and the white of his cheek above his whisker.

We did not keep upon the river for long. At a spot upon the bank, two miles from Briar, he pulled up the boat and moored it. This was where he had started from. He had left a horse there, with a lady's saddle on it. He helped us from the water, sat Maud upon the horse's back, and strapped her bags beside her. He said,

'We must go another mile or so. Maud?' She did not answer. 'You must be brave. We are very close now.'

Then he looked at me and nodded. We started off—him leading the horse by the bridle, Maud hunched and stiff upon it, me walking behind. Still we met no-one. Again I looked at the stars. You never saw stars so bright at home, the sky was never so dark and so clear.

The horse was shoeless. Its hooves sounded dull on the dirt of the road.

We went rather slowly—for Maud's sake, I suppose, so she should not be shaken about and made sick. She looked sick, anyway; and when we came at last to the place he had found—it was two or three leaning cottages, and a great dark church—she looked sicker than ever. A dog came up and started barking. Gentleman kicked it and made it yelp. He led us to the cottage that was nearest the church, and the door was opened, a man came out, and then a woman, holding a lantern. They had been waiting. The woman was the one who had kept the rooms for us: she was yawning, but stretching her neck as she yawned, to get a good look at Maud. She made Gentleman a curtsey. The man was the parson, the vicar—whatever you call him. He made a bow. He wore a gown of dirty white, and wanted shaving. He said,

'Good-night to you. Good-night to you, miss. And what a fair night, for an escapade!'

Gentleman said only, 'Is everything made ready?' He put his arms up to Maud, to help her from the horse: she kept her hands upon the saddle, and slid down awkwardly, and stepped away from him. She did not come to me, but stood alone. The woman still studied her. She was studying her pale, set, handsome face, her look of sickness, and I knew she was thinking—as anyone would think, I suppose—that she was in the family way, and marrying out of fear. Perhaps Gentleman had even made her think it, when he spoke to her before. For it would be all to his advantage, if it came to a challenge by Mr Lilly, for it to seem that he had had Maud in her uncle's own house; and we could say the baby got miscarried, later.

I would say it, I thought, for five hundred more.

I thought that, even as I stood watching the woman looking at Maud and hating her for doing it; even as I hated myself, for thinking it. The parson came forward and made another bow.

'All's ready indeed, sir,' he said. 'There's only the little matter of— In light of the special circumstances—'

'Yes, yes,' said Gentleman. He took the parson aside and drew out his pocket-book. The horse tossed its head, but from one of the other cottages a boy had come over to lead it away. He also looked at Maud; but then he looked from her to me, and it was me he touched his cap to. Of course, he had not seen her in the saddle, and I was dressed in one of her old gowns and must have seemed quite a lady; and she stood in such a mean and shrinking kind of way, that she seemed the maid.

She did not see it. She had her eyes upon the ground. The parson put his money away in some close pocket under his robe, then he rubbed his hands together. 'Well and good,' he said. 'And should the lady like to change her costume? Should she like to visit her room? Or shall we do the joining at once?'

'We'll do it at once,' said Gentleman, before anyone else could answer. He took off his hat and smoothed his hair, fussing a little with the curls about his ears. Maud stood very stiff. I went to her, and put her hood up nicely, and settled the cloak in neater folds; and then I passed my hands across her hair and cheeks. She would not look at me. Her face was cold. The hem of her skirt was dark, as if dipped in a dye for mourning. Her cloak had mud on it. I said, 'Give me your mittens, miss.'—For I knew that, beneath them, she had her white kid gloves. I said, 'You had much better go to your wedding in white gloves, than buff mittens.'

She let me draw them from her, then she stood and crossed her hands. The woman said to me, 'No flower, for the lady?' I looked at Gentleman. He shrugged.

'Should you like a flower, Maud?' he said carelessly. She didn't answer. He said, 'Well, I think we shall not mind the absence of a flower. Now, sir, if you will—'

I said, 'You might at least get her a flower! Just one flower, for her to carry into church!'

I had not thought of it until the woman said it; but now—oh! the cruelty of taking her, without a bloom, to be his wife, seemed all at once a frightful thing, I could not bear it. My voice came out sounding almost wild, and Gentleman gazed at me and frowned, and the parson looked curious, the woman sorry; and then Maud turned her eyes to me and said slowly,

'I should like a flower, Richard. I should like a flower. And Sue must have a flower, too.'

With every saying of the one word,
flower
, it seemed to grow a little stranger. Gentleman let out his breath and began to look about him in a peevish sort of way. The parson also looked. It was half-past one or so, and very dark out of the moonlight. We stood in a muddy kind of green, with hedges of brambles. The hedges were black. If there were flowers in there, we should never have found them. I said to the woman,

'Haven't you nothing we might take? Haven't you a flower in a pot?' She thought a minute, then stepped nimbly back into her cottage; and what she came out with at last was, a sprig of dry leaves, round as shillings, white as paper, quivering on a few thin stalks that looked ready to snap.

It was honesty. We stood and gazed at it, and no-one would name it. Then Maud took the stalks and divided them up, giving some to me, but keeping the most for herself. In her hands the leaves quivered harder than ever. Gentleman lit up a cigarette and took two puffs of it, then threw it away. It stayed glowing in the darkness. He nodded to the parson, and the parson took up the lantern, and led us through the church gate and along a path between a line of tilting gravestones that the moon gave deep, sharp shadows. Maud walked with Gentleman, and he held her arm in his. I walked with the woman. We were to be witnesses. Her name was Mrs Cream.

'Come far?' she said.

I did not answer.

The church was of flint and, even with the moon on it, looked quite black. Inside it was whitewashed, but the white had turned to yellow. There were a few candles lit, about the altar and the pews, and a few moths about the candles, some dead in the wax. We did not try to sit, but went straight to the altar, and the parson stood before us with his Bible. He blinked at the page. He read, and muddled his words. Mrs Cream breathed hard, like a horse. I stood and held my poor, bent twig of honesty, and watched Maud standing at Gentleman's side, holding tight on to hers. I had kissed her. I had lain upon her. I had touched her with a sliding hand. I had called her a pearl. She had been kinder to me than anyone save Mrs Sucksby; and she had made me love her, when I meant only to ruin her.

She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And soon no-one would love her, ever again.

I saw Gentleman look at her. The parson coughed over his book. He had got to the part of the service that asked if anybody there knew any reason as to why the man and woman before him should not be married; and he looked up through his eyebrows, and for a second the church was still.

I held my breath, and said nothing.

So then he went on, looking at Maud and at Gentleman, asking the same thing of them, saying that, on the Day of judgement they should have to give up all the awful secrets of their hearts; and had much better give them up now, and be done with it.

Again there was a silence.

So then he turned to Gentleman. 'Will you,' he said, and all the rest of it—'Will you have her and honour her, for as long as you live?'

'I will,' said Gentleman.

The parson nodded. Then he faced Maud, and asked the same thing of her; and she hesitated, then spoke.

'I will,' she said.

Then Gentleman stood a little easier. The parson stretched his throat from his collar and scratched it.

'Who gives this woman to be married?' he said.

I kept quite still, till Gentleman turned to me; and then he gestured with his head, and I went and stood at Maud's side, and they showed me how I must take her hand and pass it to the parson, for him to put it into Gentleman's. I would rather Mrs Cream had done it, than almost anything. Her fingers, without her glove, were stiff and cold as fingers made of wax. Gentleman held them, and spoke the words the parson read to him; and then Maud took his hand, and said the same words over. Her voice was so thin, it seemed to rise like smoke into the darkness, and then to vanish.

Then Gentleman brought a ring out, and he took her hand again and put the ring over her finger, all the time repeating the parson's words, that he would worship her, and give her all his goods. The ring looked queer upon her. It seemed gold in the candle-light, but—I saw it later—it was bad.

It was all bad, and couldn't have been worse. The parson read another prayer, then raised his hands and closed his eyes.

'These two that God has joined together,' he said, 'let no man put in sunder.'

And that was it. They were married.

Gentleman kissed her and she stood and swayed, as if dazed. Mrs Cream said in a murmur,

'She don't know what've hit her, look at her. She'll know it later—plum feller like him. Heh heh.'

I did not turn to her. If I had, I should have punched her. The parson shut his Bible and led us from the altar to the room where they kept the register. Here Gentleman wrote his name and Maud—who was now to be Mrs Rivers—wrote hers; and Mrs Cream and I put ours beneath them. Gentleman had already shown me how to write Smith; but still, I wrote it clumsily and was ashamed.—Ashamed, of that! The room was dark and smelled of damp. In the beams, things fluttered—perhaps birds, perhaps bats. I saw Maud gazing at the shadows, as if afraid the things should swoop.

Gentleman took her arm and held it, and then he led her from the church. There had come clouds before the moon, and the night was darker. The parson shook hands with us, then made Maud a bow; then he went off. He went fast, and as he walked he took his robe off, and his clothes were black beneath it—he seemed to snuff himself out like a light. Mrs Cream took us to her cottage. She carried the lantern, and we walked behind her, stumbling on her path: her doorway was low, and knocked Gentleman's hat off. She took us up a set of tilting stairs too narrow for our skirts, and then to a landing, about as big as a cupboard, where we all jostled about for a moment and the cuff of Maud's cloak got laid upon the chimney of the lantern and was singed.

There were two shut doors there, leading to the two little bedrooms of the house. The first had a narrow straw mattress on a pallet on the floor, and was tor me. The second had a bigger bed, an arm-chair and a press, and was for Gentleman and Maud. She went into it, and stood with her eyes on the floor, looking at nothing. There was a single candle lit. Her bags lay beside the bed.

I went to them and took her things out, one by one, and put them in the press. Mrs Cream said, 'What handsome linen!'—She was watching from the door. Gentleman stood with her, looking strange. It was him that had taught me the handling of a petticoat but now, seeing me take out Maud's shimmies and stockings, he seemed almost afraid. He said,

'Well, I shall smoke a final cigarette downstairs. Sue, you'll make things comfortable up here?'

I did not answer. He and Mrs Cream went down, their boots sounding loud as thunder and the door and the boards and the crooked staircase trembling. I heard him outside then, striking a match.