Fingersmith (56 page)

'Oh!' she cried. Her grip grew slack. 'Oh! Oh!'

'She's becoming demented,' said Dr Christie. I thought he was talking about her. Then I saw he meant me. He took a whistle from his pocket and gave it a blow.

'For God's sake,' I cried, 'won't you hear me? They have tricked me, they have tricked me—!'

The woman grabbed me again—about the throat, this time; and as I turned in her arms she hit me hard, with the points of her fingers, in my stomach. I think she did it in such a way, the doctors did not see. I gave a jerk, and swallowed my breath. Then she did it again. 'Here's fits!' she said.

'Watch your hands!' called Dr Graves. 'She may snap.'

Meanwhile, they had got me into the hall of the house and the sound of the whistle had brought another two men. They were pulling on brown paper cuffs over their coat-sleeves. They did not look like doctors. They came and caught hold of my ankles.

'Keep her steady,' said Dr Graves. 'She's in a convulsion. She may put out her joints.'

I could not tell them that I was not in a fit, but only winded; that the woman had hurt me; that I was anyway not a lunatic, but sane as them. I could not say anything, for trying to find my breath. I could only croak. The men drew my legs straight, and my skirts rose to my knees. I began to be afraid of the skirts rising higher. That made me twist about, I suppose.

'Hold her tight,' said Dr Christie. He had brought out a thing like a great flat spoon, made of horn. He came to my side and held my head, and put the spoon to my mouth, between my teeth. It was smooth, but he pushed it hard and it hurt me. I thought I should be choked: I bit it, to keep it from going down my throat. It tasted bad. I still think of all the other people's mouths it must have gone in, before mine.

He saw my jaws close. 'Now she takes it!' he said. That's right. Hold her steady.' He looked at Dr Graves. To the soft room? I think so. Nurse Spiller?'

That was the woman that held me by the throat. I saw her nod to him, and then to the men in the cuffs, and they turned so that they might walk with me, further into the house. I felt them do it and began to struggle again. I was not thinking, now, of Gentleman and Maud. I was thinking of myself. I was growing horribly afraid. My stomach ached from the nurse's fingers. My mouth was cut by the spoon. I had an idea that, once they got me into a room, they would kill me.

'A thrasher, ain't she?' said one of the men, as he worked for a better grip on my ankle.

'A very bad case,' said Dr Christie. He looked into my face. 'The convulsion is passing, at least.' He raised his voice. 'Don't be afraid, Mrs Rivers! We know all about you. We are your friends. We have brought you here to make you well.'

I tried to speak. 'Help! Help!' I tried to say. But the spoon made me gobble like a bird. It also made me dribble; and a bit of dribble flew out of my mouth and struck Dr Christie's cheek. Perhaps he thought I had spat it. Anyway, he moved quickly back, and his face grew grim. He took out his handkerchief.

'Very good,' he said to the men and the nurse, as he wiped his cheek. 'That will do. Now you may take her.'

They carried me along a passage, through a set of doors and a room; then to a landing, another passage, another room—I tried to study the way, but they had me on my back: I could make out only so many drab-coloured ceilings and walls. After about a minute I knew they had got me deep into the house, and that I was lost. I could not cry out. The nurse kept her arm about my throat, and I still had the spoon of horn in my mouth. When we reached a staircase they took me down it, saying, 'To you, Mr Bates,' and, 'Watch this turn, it's a tight one!'—as if I might be, not a sack of feathers now, but a trunk or a piano. Not once did they look me in the face. Finally, one of the men began to whistle a tune, and to beat out the time of it, with his finger-ends, on my leg.

Then we reached another room, with a ceiling of a paler shade of drab; and here they stopped.

'Careful, now,' they said.

The men put down my legs. The woman took her arm from my neck and gave me a push. It was only a little push and yet, they had so pulled and shaken me about, I found I staggered and fell. I fell upon my hands. I opened my mouth and the spoon fell out. One of the men reached, quick, to take it. He shook the spit from it.

'Please,' I said.

'You may say please, now,' said the woman. Then she spoke to the men. 'Gave me a crack with her head, upon the steps. Look here. Am I bruised?'

'I believe you shall be.'

'Little devil!'

She put her foot to me. 'Now, does Dr Christie have you here to give us all bruises? Eh, my lady? Mrs What-is-your-name? Mrs Waters, or Rivers? Does he?'

'Please,' I said again. 'I ain't Mrs Rivers.'

'She ain't Mrs Rivers? Hear that, Mr Bates? And I ain't Nurse Spiller, I dare say. And Mr Hedges ain't himself. Very likely.'

She came closer to me, and she picked me up about my waist; and she dropped me. You could not say she threw me, but she lifted me high and let me fall; and me being just then so dazed and so weak, I fell badly.

'That's for cracking my face,' she said. 'Be glad we ain't on stairs, or a roof. Crack me again—who knows?—we might be.' She pulled her canvas apron straight, and leaned and caught hold of my collar. 'Right, let's have this gown off. You may look like thunder, too. That's nothing to me. Why, what small little hooks! And my hand's hard, is it? Used to better, are you? I should say you are, from what I've heard.' She laughed. 'Well, we don't keep ladies' maids, here. We has Mr Hedges and Mr Bates.' They still stood, watching, at the door. 'Shall I call them over?'

I supposed she meant to strip me bare; which I would rather die first, than endure. I got on to my knees and twisted from her.

'You may call who you like, you great bitch,' I said, in a pant. 'You ain't having my dress.'

Her face grew dark. 'Bitch, am I?' she answered. 'Well!'

And she drew back her hand and curled her fingers into a fist, and she hit me.

I had grown up in the Borough, surrounded by every kind of desperate dodger and thief; but I had had Mrs Sucksby for a mother, and had never been hit. The blow knocked me almost out of my head. I put my hands to my face, and lay down in a crouch; but she got the gown off me anyway—I suppose she was used to getting gowns off lunatics, and had a trick for it; and next she got hold of my corset and took that. Then she took my garters, and then my shoes and stockings, and finally my hair-pins.

Then she stood, darker-faced than ever, and sweating.

'There!' she said, looking me over in my petticoat and shimmy. 'There's all your ribbons and laces gone. If you chokes yourself now, it'll be no business of ours. You hear me? Mrs Ain't-Mrs-Rivers? You sit in the pads for a night, and stew. See how you care for that. Convulsions? I think I know a temper from a fit. Kick all you like in here. Put out your joints, chew your tongue off. Keep you quiet. We prefers them quiet, makes our job nicer.'

She said all that, and she made a bundle of my clothes and swung them over her shoulder; and then she left me. The men went with her. They had seen her hit me, and done nothing. They had watched her take my stockings and stays. I heard them pull off their paper cuffs. One began to whistle again. Nurse Spiller closed the door and locked it, and the whistling grew very much fainter.

When it had grown so faint I could no longer hear it, I got to my feet. Then I fell down again. My legs had been pulled so hard they shook like things of rubber, and my head was ringing, from the punch. My hands were trembling. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, properly funked. I went, on my knees, to the door, to look at the key-hole. There was no handle. The door itself was covered in a dirty canvas, padded with straw; the walls were covered in padded canvas, too. The floor had oil-cloth on it. There was a single blanket, very much torn and stained. There was a little tin pot I was meant to piddle in. There was a window, high up, with bars on. Beyond the bars were curling leaves of ivy. The light came in green and dark, like the water in a pond.

I stood and looked at it all, in a sort of daze—hardly believing, I think, that those were my cold feet on the oil-cloth floor; that it was my sore face, my arms, that the green light struck. Then I turned back to the door and put my fingers to it—to the key-hole, to the canvas, to the edge, anywhere—to try and pull it. But it was tight as a clam—and, what was worse, as I stood Plucking at it I began to make out little dints and tears in the dirty canvas— little crescents, where the weave was worn—that I understood all at once must be the marks left by the finger-nails of all the other lunatics—all the real lunatics, I mean—who had been put in that room before me. The thought that I was standing, doing just what they had done, was horrible. I stepped away from the door, the daze slipped from me, and I grew wild with fright. I flung myself back, and began to beat at the padded canvas with my hands. Each blow made a cloud of dust.

'Help! Help!' I cried. My voice sounded strange. 'Oh, help! They have put me in here, thinking I'm mad! Call Richard Rivers!' I coughed. 'Help! Doctor! Help! Can you hear me?' I coughed again. 'Help! Can you hear me—?'

And so on. I stood and called, and coughed, and beat upon the door— only stopping, now and then, to put my ear to it, to try to tell if there might be anyone near—for I can't say how long; and no-one came. I think the padding was too thick; or else, the people that heard me were used to lunatics calling, and had learned not to mind. So then I tried the walls. They were also thick. And when I had given up banging and shouting, I put the blanket and the little tin pot together in a heap beneath the window, and climbed on them, trying to reach the glass; but the tin pot buckled, and the blanket slithered and I fell.

At last I sat on the oil-cloth floor and cried. I cried, and my own tears stung me. I put my finger-tips to my cheek and felt about my swelling face. I felt my hair. The woman had pulled it to take the pins out, and it lay all about my shoulders; and when I took up a length of it, meaning to comb it, some of it came away in my hands. That made me cry worse than ever. I don't say I was much of a beauty; but I thought of a girl I knew, who had lost her hair to a wheel in a workshop—that hair had never grown back. Suppose I should be bald? I went over my head, taking out the hair that was loose, wondering if* ought to keep it, perhaps for making a wig with later; but there was not much of it, after all. In the end I rolled it up and put it in a corner.

And as I did that, I saw something, pale upon the floor. It looked like a crumpled white hand, and it gave me a start, at first; then I saw what it was. It had fallen out of my bosom when the nurse had got the gown off me, and been kicked out of sight. There was the mark of a shoe upon it, and one of its buttons was crushed.

It was that glove of Maud's, that I had taken that morning from her things and meant to hold on to, as a keepsake of her.

I picked it up and turned it over and over in my hands. If I had thought myself funked, a minute before—well, that funking was nothing to what I felt now, looking at that glove, thinking of Maud, and of the awful trick that she and Gentleman had played me. I hid my face in my arms, for very shame. I walked, from one wall to another, and from that to another: if I once tried to be still, it was as if I was resting on needles and pins—I started up, crying out and sweating. I thought of all my time at Briar, when I had supposed myself such a sharper, and been such a simpleton. I thought of the days I had spent, with those two villains—the looks the one must have given the other, the smiles.
Leave her alone, why don't you
? I had said to him, feeling sorry for her. And then, to her:
Don't mind him, miss. He loves you, miss. Marry him. He loves you
.

He will do it like this…

Oh! Oh! I feel the sting of it, even now. Then, I might really have been demented. I walked, and my bare feet went slap, slap, slap on the oil-cloth; and I put the glove to my mouth and I bit it.
Him
I suppose I expected no better of. It was
her
I thought of most—that bitch, that snake, that— Oh! To think I had ever looked at her and taken her for a flat. To think I had laughed at her. To think I had loved her! To think I had thought she loved me! To think I had kissed her, in Gentleman's name. To think I had touched her! To think, to think—!

To think I lay on the night of her wedding with a pillow over my head, so I should not hear the sound of her tears. To think that, if I had listened, I might have heard—might I? might I?—the sound of her sighs.

I could not bear it. I forgot, for the moment, the little detail of how, in swindling me, she had only turned my own trick back on myself. I walked, and moaned, and swore, and cursed her; I gripped and bit and twisted that glove, until the light beyond the window faded, and the room grew dark. No one came to look at me. No-one brought me food, or a gown, or stockings. And though I was warm at first, from all the walking, when at last I grew so tired I found I must lie upon the blanket or drop, I became cold; and then I could not get warm again.

I did not sleep. From the rest of the house there came, every so often, queer noises—shouts, and running feet and, once, the blowing of the doctor's whistle. At some hour of the night it began to rain, and the water went drip against the window. In the garden, a dog barked: I heard that and began to think, not of Maud, but of Charley Wag, of Mr Ibbs and Mrs Sucksby—of Mrs Sucksby in her bed, the empty place beside her, waiting for me. How long would she wait?

How soon would Gentleman go to her? What would he say? He might say I was dead. But then, if he said that, she would ask for my body, to bury.—I thought of my funeral, and who would cry most. He might say I was drowned or lost in marshes. She would ask for the papers to prove it. Could those papers be faked? He might say I had taken my share of the money, and cut.

He would say that, I knew it. But Mrs Sucksby wouldn't believe him. She would see through him like he was glass. She would hunt me out. She had not kept me seventeen years to lose me now, like this! She would look in every house in England, until she found me!