Fingersmith (35 page)

But I am alone and unvisited, now. And I shall have Richard there, Richard will guide and advise me. Richard means to take us a house, with rooms, with doors that will fasten—

'Are you cold, miss?' she says. Perhaps I have shivered. She rises, to fetch me a shawl. I watch her walk. Diagonally she goes, over the carpet—heedless of the design, the lines and diamonds and squares, beneath her feet.

I watch and watch her. I cannot look too long, too narrowly at her, in her easy doing of commonplace things. At seven o'clock she makes me ready for supper with my uncle. At ten she puts me into my bed. After that, she stands in her room and I hear her sighing, and I lift my head and see her stretch and droop. Her candle lights her, very plainly; though I lie hidden in the dark. Quietly she passes, back and forth across the doorway—now stooping to pick up a fallen lace; now taking up her cloak and brushing mud from its hem. She does not kneel and pray, as Agnes did. She sits on her bed, out of my sight, but lifts her feet: I see the toe of one shoe put to the heel of the other and work it down. Now she stands, to undo the buttons of her gown; now she lets it fall, steps awkwardly out of her skirt; unlaces her stays, rubs her waist, sighs again. Now she steps away. I lift my head, to follow. She comes back, in her nightgown—shivering. I shiver, in sympathy. She yawns. I also yawn. She stretches—enjoying the stretch—liking the approach of slumber! Now she moves off—puts out her light, climbs into her bed—grows warm I suppose, and sleeps…

She sleeps, in a sort of innocence. So did I, once. I wait a moment, then take out my mother's picture and hold it close to my mouth.

That's her
, I whisper.
That's her. She's your daughter now
!

How effortless it seems! But when I have locked my mother's face away I lie, uneasily. My uncle's clock shudders and strikes. Some animal shrieks, like a child, in the park. I close my eyes and think—what I have not thought so vividly of, in years—of the madhouse, my first home; of the wild-eyed women, the lunatics; and of the nurses. I remember all at once the nurses' rooms, the mattings of coir, a piece of text on the limewashed wall:
My meat is to do the will of
Him
that sent me
. I remember an attic stair, a walk upon the roof, the softness of lead beneath my fingernail, the frightful drop to the ground—

I must fall into sleep, thinking this. I must plunge to the deepest layers of the night. But then, I am woken—or, not quite woken, not quite drawn free from the tugging of the dark. For I open my eyes and am bewildered—perfectly bewildered—and filled with dread. I look at my form in the bed and it seems shifting and queer—now large, now small, now broken up with spaces; and I cannot say what age I am. I begin to shake. I call out. I call for Agnes. I have quite forgotten that she has gone. I have forgotten Richard Rivers, and all our plot. I call for Agnes, and it seems to me she comes; but she comes, to take away my lamp. I think she must do it to punish me. 'Don't take the light!' I say; but she takes it, she leaves me in the terrible darkness and I hear the sighing of doors, the passage of feet, beyond the curtain. It seems to me then that much time passes before the light comes back. But when Agnes lifts it and sees my face, she screams.

'Don't look at me!' I cry. And then: 'Don't leave me!' For I have a sense that, if she will only stay, some calamity, some dreadful thing—I do not know it, cannot name it—will be averted; and I—or she—will be saved. I hide my face against her and seize her hand. But her hand is pale where it used to be freckled. I gaze at her, and do not know her.

She says, in a voice that is strange to me: 'It's Sue, miss. Only Sue. You see me? You are dreaming.'

'Dreaming?'

She touches my cheek. She smooths my hair—not like Agnes, after all, but like— Like no-one. She says again, 'It's Sue. That Agnes had the scarlatina, and is gone back home. You must lie down now, or the cold will make you ill. You mustn't be ill.'

I swim in black confusion for another moment; then the dream slips from me all at once and I know her, and know myself—my past, my present, my ungaugeable future. She is a stranger to me, but part of it all.

'Don't leave me, Sue!' I say.

I feel her hesitate. When she draws away, I grip her tighter. But she moves only to climb across me, and she comes beneath the sheet and lies with her arm about me, her mouth against my hair.

She is cold, and makes me cold. I shiver, but soon lie still. There,' she says then. She murmurs it. I feel the movement of her breath and, deep in the bone of my cheek, the gentle rumble of her voice. 'There. Now you'll sleep— won't you? Good girl.'

Good girl
, she says. How long has it been since anyone at Briar believed me good? But she believes it. She must believe it, for the working of our plot. I must be good, and kind, and simple. Isn't gold said to be good? I am like gold to her, after all. She has come to ruin me; but, not yet. For now she must guard me, keep me sound and safe as a hoard of coins she means, at last, to squander—

I know it; but cannot feel it as I should. I sleep in her arms, dreamless and still, and wake to the warmth and closeness of her. She moves away as she feels me stir. She rubs her eye. Her hair is loose and touches my own. Her face, in sleep, has lost a little of its sharpness. Her brow is smooth, her lashes powdery, her gaze, when it meets mine, quite clear, untinged with mockery or malice… She smiles. She yawns. She rises. The blanket lifts and falls, and sour heat comes gusting. I lie and remember the night. Some feeling—shame, or panic—flutters about my heart. I put my hand to the place where she has lain, and feel it cool.

She is changed with me. She is surer, kinder. Margaret brings water, and she fills me a bowl. 'Ready, miss?' she says. 'Better use it quick.' She wets a cloth and wrings it and, when I stand and undress, passes it, unasked, across my face and beneath my arms. I have become a child to her. She makes me sit, so she may brush my hair. She tuts: 'What tangles! The trick with tangles is, to start at the bottom…'

Agnes had used to wash and dress me with quick and nervous fingers, wincing with every catching of the comb. One time I struck her with a slip-per—so hard, she bled. Now I sit for Susan—
Sue
, she called herself, in the night—now I sit patiently while Sue draws out the knots from my hair, my eyes upon my own face in the glass…

Good girl.

Then: 'Thank you, Sue,' I say.

I say it often, in the days and nights that follow. I never said it to Agnes. Thank you, Sue.' 'Yes, Sue,' when she bids me sit or stand, lift an arm or foot. 'No, Sue,' when she is afraid my gown must pinch me.

No, I am not cold.—But she likes to look me over as we walk, to be quite sure; will gather my cloak a little higher about my throat, to keep off draughts. No, my boots are not taking in the dew.—But she'll slide a finger between my stockinged ankle and the leather of my shoe, for certainty's sake. I must not catch cold, at any cost. I must not tire. 'Wouldn't you say you had walked enough, miss?' I mustn't grow ill. 'Here is all your breakfast, look, untouched. Won't you take a little more?' I mustn't grow thin. I am a goose that must be plump, to be worth its slaughter.

Of course, though she does not know it, it is she who must be plump—she who will learn, in time, to sleep, to wake, to dress, to walk, to a pattern, to signals and bells. She thinks she humours me. She thinks she pities me! She learns the ways of the house, not understanding that the habits and the fabrics that bind me will, soon, bind her. Bind her, like morocco or like calf… I have grown used to thinking of myself as a sort of book. Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with her unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh—'Ain't you pale!' she says—but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.

I oughtn't to do it. I cannot help it. I am too compelled by her idea—her idea of me as a simple girl, abused by circumstance, prone to nightmare. No nightmares come, while she sleeps at my side; and so, I find ways to bring her to my bed, a second night and a third.—At last she comes, routinely. I think her wary, at first; but it is only the canopy and drapes that trouble her: she stands each time with a lifted candle, peering into the folds of cloth. 'Don't you. think,' she says, 'of the moths and spiders that might be up there, miss, and waiting to drop?' She seizes a post, and shakes it; a single beetle falls, in a shower of dust.

Once grown used to that, however, she lies easily enough; and from the neat and comfortable way she holds her limbs, I think that she must be used to sleeping with someone; and wonder who.

'Do you have sisters, Sue?' I ask her once, perhaps a week after she has come. We are walking by the river.

'No, miss.'

'Brothers?'

'Not as I know of,' she says.

'And so you grew up—like me—quite alone?'

'Well, miss, not what you would call, alone… Say, with cousins all about.'

'Cousins. You mean, your aunt's children?'

'My aunt?' She looks blank.

'Your aunt, Mr Rivers's nurse.'

'Oh!' She blinks. 'Yes, miss. To be sure…'

She turns away, and her look grows vague. She is thinking of her home. I try to imagine it; and cannot. I try to imagine her cousins: rough boys and girls, sharp-faced like her, sharp-tongued, sharp-fingered— Her fingers are blunt, however; though her tongue—for sometimes, when putting the pins to my hair, or frowning over slithering laces, she shows it—her tongue has a point. I watch her sigh.

'Never mind,' I say—like any kindly mistress with an unhappy maid. 'Look, here is a barge. You may send your wishes with it. We shall both send wishes, to London.' To
London
, I think again, more darkly. Richard is there. I will be there, a month from now. I say, 'The Thames will take them, even if the boat does not.'

She looks, however, not at the barge, but at me.

'The Thames?'she says.

'The river,'I answer.'This river, here.'

This trifling bit of water, the Thames? Oh, no, miss.' She laughs, uncertainly. 'How can that be? The Thames is very wide'—she holds her hands far apart—'and this is narrow. Do you see?'

I say, after a moment, that I have always supposed that rivers grow wider as they flow. She shakes her head.

'This trifling bit of water?' she says again. 'Why, the water we have from our taps, at home, has more life to it than this.—There, miss! Look, there.' The barge has passed us. Its stern is marked in six-inch letters, ROTHER-HITHE; but she is pointing, not to them, but to the wake of grease spreading out from the spluttering engine. 'See that?' she says excitedly. 'That's how the Thames looks. That's how the Thames looks, every day of the year. Look at all those colours. A thousand colours…'

She smiles. Smiling, she is almost handsome. Then the wake of grease grows thin, the water browns, her smile quite falls; and she looks like a thief again.

You must understand, I have determined to despise her. For how, otherwise, will I be able to do what I must do?—how else deceive and harm her? It is only that we are put so long together, in such seclusion. We are obliged to be intimate. And her notion of intimacy is not like Agnes's—not like Barbara's— not like any lady's maid's. She is too frank, too loose, too free. She yawns, she leans. She rubs at spots and grazes. She will sit picking over some old dry cut upon her knuckle, while I sew. Then, 'Got a pin, miss?' she will ask me; and when I give her a needle from my case she will spend ten minutes probing the skin of her hand with that. Then she will give the needle back to me.

But she will give it, taking care to keep the point from my soft fingers. 'Don't hurt yourself,' she will say—so simply, so kindly, I quite forget that she is only keeping me safe for Richard's sake. I think that she forgets it, too.

One day she takes my arm as we are walking. It is nothing to her; but I feel the shock of it, like a slap. Another time, after sitting, I complain that my feet are chilled: she kneels before me, unlaces my slippers, takes my feet in her hands and hold and chafes them—finally dips her head and carelessly breathes upon my toes. She begins to dress me as she pleases; makes little changes to my gowns, my hair, my rooms. She brings flowers: throws away the vases of curling leaves that have always stood on my drawing-room tables, and finds primroses in the hedges of my uncle's park to put in their place. 'Of course, you don't get the flowers that you get in London, in the country,' she says, as she sets them in the glass; 'but these are pretty enough, ain't they?'

She has Margaret bring extra coals for my fires, from Mr Way. Such a sim-ple thing to do!—and yet no-one has thought to do it before, for my sake; even I have not thought to do it; and so I have gone cold, through seven winters. The heat makes the windows cloud. She likes to stand, then, and draw loops and hearts and spirals upon the glass.

One time she brings me back from my uncle's room and I find the luncheon-table spread with playing-cards. My mother's cards, I suppose; for these are my mother's rooms, and filled with her things; and yet for a second it quite disconcerts me, to imagine my mother here—actually here—walking
here
, sitting
here
, setting out the coloured cards upon the cloth. My mother, unmarried, still sane—perhaps, idly leaning her cheek upon her knuckles—perhaps, sighing— and waiting, waiting…

I take up a card. It slides against my glove. But in Sue's hands, the deck is changed: she gathers and sorts it, shuffles and deals it, neatly and nimbly; and the golds and reds are vivid between her fingers, like so many jewels. She is astonished, of course, to learn I cannot play; and at once makes me sit, so she may teach me. The games are things of chance and simple speculation, but she plays earnestly, almost greedily—tilting her head, narrowing her eye as she surveys her fan of cards. When I grow tired, she plays alone—or else, will stand the cards upon their ends and tilt their tips together, and from doing this many times will build a rising structure, a kind of pyramid of cards— always keeping back, for the top-most point, a king and a queen.