Fingersmith

She laughed, a little nervously, all the time she worked.

  ‘Why, look here in the glass,’ she said at last. ‘We might be sisters!’

  She had tugged my old brown dress off me and put the queer orange one over my head, and she made me stand before the glass while she saw to the hooks. ‘Breathe in,’ she said. ‘Breathe harder! The gown grips tight, but will give you the figure of a lady.’

  Of course, her own waist was narrow, and she was taller by an inch. My hair was the darker. We did not look like sisters, we just both looked like frights. My dress showed all my ankle. If a boy from the Borough had seen me then, I should have fallen down and died.

  But there were no Borough boys to see me; and no Borough girls, either. And it was a very good velvet. I stood, plucking at the fringes on the skirt, while Maud ran to her jewel box for a brooch, that she fastened to my bosom, tilting her head to see how it looked. Then there came a knock on the parlour door.

  ‘There’s Margaret,’ she said, her face quite pink. She called, ‘Come here to the dressing-room, Margaret!’

  Margaret came and made a curtsey, looking straight at me. She said,

  ‘I have just come for your tray, mi—Oh! Miss Smith! Is it you, there? I should never have known you from the mistress, I’m sure!’

  She blushed, and Maud—who was standing in the shadow of the bed-curtain—looked girlish, putting her hand before her mouth. She shivered with laughter, and her dark eyes shone.

  ‘Suppose,’ she said, when Margaret had gone, ‘suppose Mr Rivers were to do what Margaret did, and mistake you for me? What would we do, then?’

  Again she laughed and shivered. I gazed at the glass, and smiled.

  For it was something, wasn’t it, to be taken for a lady?

  It’s what my mother would have wanted.

  And anyway, I was to get the pick of all her dresses and her jewels, in the end. I was only starting early. I kept the orange gown and, while she went to her uncle, sat turning the hem down and letting out the bodice. I wasn’t about to do myself an injury, for the sake of a sixteen-inch waist.

  ‘Now, do we look handsome?’ said Maud, when I fetched her back. She stood and looked me over, then brushed at her own skirts. ‘But here is dust,’ she cried, ‘from my uncle’s shelves! Oh! The books, the terrible books!’

  She was almost weeping, and wringing her hands.

  I took the dust away, and wished I could tell her she was fretting for nothing. She might be dressed in a sack. She might have a face like a coalheaver’s. So long as there was fifteen thousand in the bank marked Miss Maud Lilly, then Gentleman would want her.

  It was almost awful to see her, knowing what I knew, pretending I knew nothing; and with another kind of girl, it might have been comical. I would say, ‘Are you poorly, miss? Shall I fetch you something? Shall I bring you the little glass, to look at your face in?’—and she would answer, ‘Poorly? I am only rather cold, and walking to keep my blood warm.’ And, ‘A glass, Sue? Why should I need a glass?’

  ‘I thought you were looking at your own face, miss, more than was usual.’

  ‘My own face! And why should I be interested in doing that?’

  ‘I can’t say, miss, I’m sure.’

  I knew his train was due at Marlow at four o’clock, and that William Inker had been sent to meet it, as he had been sent for me. At three, Maud said she would sit at the window and work at her sewing there, where the light was good. Of course, it was nearly dark then; but I said nothing. There was a little padded seat beside the rattling panes and mouldy sand-bags, it was the coldest place in the room; but she kept there for an hour and a half, with a shawl about her, shivering, squinting at her stitches, and sneaking sly little glances at the road to the house.

  I thought, if that wasn’t love, then I was a Dutchman; and if it was love, then lovers were pigeons and geese, and I was glad I was not one of them.

  At last she put her fingers to her heart and gave a stifled sort of cry. She had seen the light coming, on William Inker’s trap. That made her get up and come away from the window, and stand at the fire and press her hands together. Then came the sound of the horse on the gravel. I said, ‘Will that be Mr Rivers, miss?’ and she answered, ‘Mr Rivers? Is the day so late as that? Well, I suppose it is. How pleased my uncle will be!’

  Her uncle saw him first. She said, ‘Perhaps he will send for me, to bid Mr Rivers welcome.—How does my skirt sit now? Had I not rather wear the grey?’

  But Mr Lilly did not send for her. We heard voices and closing doors in the rooms below, but it was another hour again before a parlourmaid came, to pass on the message that Mr Rivers was arrived.

  ‘And is Mr Rivers made comfortable, in his old room?’ said Maud.

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘And Mr Rivers will be rather tired, I suppose, after his journey?’

  Mr Rivers sent to say that he was tolerable tired, and looked forward to seeing Miss Lilly with her uncle, at supper. He would not think of disturbing Miss Lilly before then.

  ‘I see,’ she said when she heard that. Then she bit her lip. ‘Please to tell Mr Rivers that she would not think it any sort of disturbance, to be visited by him, in her parlour, before the supper-hour came . . .’

  She went on like this for a minute and a half, falling over her words, and blushing; and finally the parlourmaid got the message and went off. She was gone a quarter of an hour. When she came back, she had Gentleman with her.

  He stepped into the room, and did not look at me at first. His eyes were all for Maud. He said,

  ‘Miss Lilly, you are kind to receive me here, all travel-stained and tumbled as I am. That is like you!’

  His voice was gentle. As for the stains—well, there wasn’t a mark upon him, I guessed he had gone quickly to his room and changed his coat. His hair was sleek and his whiskers tidy; he wore one modest little ring on his smallest finger, but apart from that his hands were bare and very clean.

  He looked what he was meant to be—a handsome, nice-minded gentleman. When he turned to me at last, I found myself making him a curtsey and was almost shy.

  ‘And here is Susan Smith!’ he said, looking me over in my velvet, his lip twitching towards a smile. ‘But I should have supposed her a lady, I am sure!’ He stepped towards me and took my hand, and Maud also came to me. He said, ‘I hope you are liking your place at Briar, Sue. I hope you are proving a good girl for your new mistress.’

  I said, ‘I hope I am too, sir.’

  ‘She is a very good girl,’ said Maud. ‘She is a very good girl, indeed.’

  She said it in a nervous, grateful kind of way—like you would say it to a stranger, feeling pushed for conversation, about your dog.

  Gentleman pressed my hand once, then let it fall. He said, ‘Of course, she could not help but be good—I should say, no girl could help but be good, Miss Lilly—with you as her example.’

  Her colour had gone down. Now it rose again. ‘You are too kind,’ she said.

  He shook his head and bit at his lip. ‘No gentleman could but be,’ he murmured, ‘with you to be kind to.’

  Now his cheeks were pink as hers. I should say he must have had a way of holding his breath to make the blood come. He kept his eyes upon her, and at last she gazed at him and smiled; and then she laughed.

  And I thought then, for the first time, that he had been right. She was handsome, she was very fair and slight—I knew it, seeing her stand beside him with her eyes on his.

  Pigeons and geese. The great clock sounded, and they started and looked away. Gentleman said he had kept her too long. ‘I shall see you at supper, I hope, with your uncle?’

  ‘With my uncle, yes,’ she said quietly.

  He made her a bow, and went to the door; then, when he was almost out of it he seemed to remember me, and went through a kind of pantomime, of patting at his pockets, looking for coins. He came up with a shilling, and beckoned me close to take it.

  ‘Here you are, Sue,’ he said. He lifted my hand and p
ressed the shilling in it. It was a bad one. ‘All well?’ he added softly, so that Maud should not overhear.

  I said, ‘Oh, thank you, sir!’ And I made another curtsey, and winked.—Two curious things to do together, as it happened, and I would not recommend you try it: for I fear the wink unbalanced the curtsey; and I’m certain the curtsey threw off the wink.

  I don’t think Gentleman noticed, however. He only smiled in a satisfied way, bowed again, and left us. Maud looked once at me, then went silently to her own room and closed the door—I don’t know what she did in there. I sat until she called me, a half-hour later, to help her change into her gown for dinner.

  I sat and tossed the shilling. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘bad coins will gleam as well as good.’

  But I thought it in a discontented sort of way; and didn’t know why.

  That night she stayed an hour or two after supper, reading to her uncle and to Gentleman in the drawing-room. I had not seen the drawing-room then. I only knew what she did when I wasn’t with her, through Mr Way or Mrs Stiles happening to remark on it as we took our meals. I still passed my evenings in the kitchen and in Mrs Stiles’s pantry; and pretty dull evenings they generally were. This night, however, was different. I went down to find Margaret with two forks in a great piece of roasting ham, and Mrs Cakebread spooning honey on it. Honeyed ham, said Margaret, plumping up her lips, was Mr Rivers’s favourite dish. Mr Rivers, said Mrs Cakebread, was a pleasure to cook for.

  She had changed her old wool stockings for the black silk pair I had given her. The parlourmaids had changed their caps, for ones with extra ruffles. Charles, the knife-boy, had combed his hair flat, and made the parting straight as a blade: he sat whistling, on a stool beside the fire, rubbing polish into one of Gentleman’s boots.

  He was the same age as John Vroom; but was fair, where John was swarthy. He said, ‘What do you say to this, Mrs Stiles? Mr Rivers says that, in London, you may see elephants. He says they keep elephants in pens in the parks of London, as we keep sheep; and a boy can pay a man sixpence, and ride on an elephant’s back.’

  ‘Well, bless my soul!’ said Mrs Stiles.

  She had fastened a brooch at the neck of her gown. It was a mourning brooch, with more black hair in it.

  Elephants! I thought. I could see that Gentleman had come among them, like a cock into a coop of roosting hens, and set them all fluttering. They said he was handsome. They said he was better-bred than many dukes, and knew the proper treating of a servant. They said what a fine thing it was for Miss Maud that a clever young person like him should be about the house again. If I had stood up and told them the truth—that they were a bunch of flats; that Mr Rivers was a fiend in human form, who meant to marry Maud and steal her cash, then lock her up and more or less hope she died—if I had stood and told them that, they should never have believed it. They should have said that I was mad.

  They will always believe a gentleman, over someone like me.

  And of course, I wasn’t about to tell them any such thing. I kept my thoughts to myself; and later, over pudding in her pantry, Mrs Stiles sat, fingering her brooch, and was also rather quiet. Mr Way took his newspaper away to the privy. He had had to serve up two fine wines with Mr Lilly’s dinner; and was the only one, out of all of us, not glad that Gentleman had come.

  At least, I supposed I was glad. ‘You are,’ I told myself, ‘but just don’t know it. You’ll feel it, when you’ve seen him on his own.’—I thought we would find a way to meet, in a day or two. It was almost another two weeks, however, before we did. For of course, I had no reason for wandering, without Maud, into the grand parts of the house. I never saw the room he slept in, and he never came to mine. Besides, the days at Briar were run so very regular, it was quite like some great mechanical show, you could not change it. The house bell woke us up in the mornings, and after that we all went moving on our ways from room to room, on our set courses, until the bell rang us back into our beds at night. There might as well have been grooves laid for us in the floorboards; we might have glided on sticks. There might have been a great handle set into the side of the house, and a great hand winding it.—Sometimes, when the view beyond the windows was dark or grey with mist, I imagined that handle and thought that I could almost hear it turning. I grew afraid of what would happen if the turning was to stop.

  That’s what living in the country does to you.

  When Gentleman came, the show gave a kind of jog. There was a growling of the levers, people quivering for a second upon their sticks, the carving of one or two new grooves; and then it all went on, smooth as before, but with the scenes in a different order. Maud did not go to her uncle, now, to read to him while he took notes. She kept to her rooms. We sat and sewed, or played at cards, or went walking to the river or to the yew trees and the graves.

  As for Gentleman: he rose at seven, and took his breakfast in his bed. He was served by Charles. At eight o’clock he began his work on Mr Lilly’s pictures. Mr Lilly directed him. He was as mad over his pictures as he was over his books, and had fitted up a little room for Gentleman to work in, darker and closer even than his library. I suppose the pictures were old and pretty precious. I never saw them. Nobody did. Mr Lilly and Gentleman carried keys about with them, and they locked the door to that room whether they were out of it or in it.

  They worked until one o’clock, then took their lunch. Maud and I took ours alone. We ate in silence. She might not eat at all, but only sit waiting. Then, at a quarter to two, she would fetch out drawing-things—pencils and paints, papers and cards, a wooden triangle—and she would set them ready, very neatly, in an order that was always the same. She would not let me help. If a brush fell and I caught it, she would take everything up—papers, pencils, paints, triangle—and set it out all over again.

  I learned not to touch. Only to watch. And then we would both listen, as the clock struck two. And at a minute after that there would come Gentleman, to teach her her day’s lesson.

  At first, they kept to the parlour. He put an apple, a pear and a water-jug upon a table, and stood and nodded while she tried to paint them on a card. She was about as handy with a paint-brush as she would have been with a spade; but Gentleman would hold up the messes she made and tilt his head or screw up his eye and say,

  ‘I declare, Miss Lilly, you are acquiring quite a method.’ Or,

  ‘What an improvement, on your sketches from last month!’

  ‘Do you think so, Mr Rivers?’ she would answer, all in a blush. ‘Is not the pear a little lean? Had I not ought to practise my perspective?’

  ‘The perspective is, perhaps, a little at fault,’ he’d say. ‘But you have a gift, Miss Lilly, which surpasses mere technique. You have an eye for an essence. I am almost afraid to stand before you! I am afraid of what might be uncovered, were you to turn that eye upon me.’

  He would say something like that, in a voice that would start off strong and then grow sweet, and breathless, and hesitating; and she would look as though she were a girl of wax and had moved too near to a fire. She would try the fruit again. This time the pear would come out like a banana. Then Gentleman would say that the light was poor, or the brush a bad one.

  ‘If I might only take you to London, Miss Lilly, to my own studio there!’

  That was the life he had faked up for himself—an artist’s life, in a house at Chelsea. He said he had many fascinating artist friends. Maud said, ‘Lady artist friends, too?’

  ‘Of course,’ he answered then. ‘For I think that’—then he shook his head—‘well, my opinions are irregular, and not to everyone’s taste. See here, try this line a little firmer.’

  He went to her, and put his hand upon hers. She turned her face to his and said,

  ‘Won’t you tell me what it is you think? You might speak plainly. I am not a child, Mr Rivers!’

  ‘You are not,’ he said softly, gazing into her eyes. Then he gave a start. ‘After all,’ he went on, ‘my opinion is mild enough. It concerns your—your
sex, and matters of creation. There is something, Miss Lilly, I think your sex must have.’

  She swallowed. ‘What is that, Mr Rivers?’

  ‘Why, the liberty,’ he answered gently, ‘of mine.’

  She sat still, then gave a wriggle. Her chair creaked, the sound seemed to startle her, and she drew her hand away. She looked up, to the glass, and found my eyes on her, and blushed; then Gentleman looked up too, and watched her—that made her colour still harder and lower her gaze. He looked from her to me, then back to her again. He lifted his hands to his whiskers and gave them a stroke.

  Then she put her brush to the picture of the fruit, and—‘Oh!’ she cried. The paint ran like a tear-drop. Gentleman said she must not mind it, that he had worked her quite enough. He went to the table, took up the pear and rubbed the bloom from it. Maud kept a little pen-knife with her brushes and leads, and he got this out and cut the pear into three wet slices. He gave one to her, kept one for himself, and the last he shook free of its juice and brought to me.

  ‘Almost ripe, I think,’ he said, with a wink.

  He put his slice of pear to his mouth and ate it in two sharp bites. It left beads of cloudy juice on his beard. He licked his fingers, thoughtfully; and I licked mine; and Maud, for once, let her gloves grow stained, and sat with the fruit against her lip and nibbled at it, her look a dark one.

  We were thinking of secrets. Real secrets, and snide. Too many to count. When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give it up, it makes my head spin.

  At last he said she might try painting from nature. I guessed at once what that meant. It meant that he could take her wandering about the park, into all the shady, lonely places, and call it instruction. I think she guessed it, too. ‘Will it rain today, do you think?’ she asked in a worried sort of way, her face at the window, her eyes on the clouds. This was the end of February, and still cold as anything; but just as everyone in that house perked up a bit to see Mr Rivers come back to it again, so now even the weather seemed to lift and grow sweet. The wind fell off, and the windows stopped rattling. The sky turned pearly instead of grey. The lawns grew green as billiard tables.