Fingersmith

  I say, ‘You’ve no right to hurt me! You’re nothing to me! I want my mothers, that love me!’

  ‘Here’s your mother,’ she says, plucking at the portrait at my throat. ‘That’s all the mother you’ll have here. Be grateful you have that, to know her face by. Now, stand and be steady. You must wear this, to give you the figure of a lady.’

  She has taken the stiff buff dress from me, and all the linen beneath. Now she laces me tight in a girlish corset that grips me harder than the gown. Over this she puts a nightdress. On to my hands she pulls a pair of white skin gloves, which she stitches at the wrists. Only my feet remain bare. I fall upon the sofa and kick them. She catches me up and shakes me, then holds me still.

  ‘See here,’ she says, her face crimson and white, her breath coming hard upon my cheek. ‘I had a little daughter once, that died. She had a fine black head of curling hair and a temper like a lamb’s. Why dark-haired, gentle-tempered children should be made to die, and peevish pale girls like you to thrive, I cannot say. Why your mother, with all her fortune, should have turned out trash and perished, while I must live to keep your fingers smooth and see you grow into a lady, is a puzzle. Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.’

  She catches me up and takes me to the dressing-room, makes me climb into the great, high, dusty bed, then lets down the curtains. There is a door beside the chimney-breast: she tells me it leads to another chamber, and a bad-tempered girl sleeps there. The girl will listen in the night, and if I am anything but still and good and quiet, she will hear; and her hand is very hard.

  ‘Say your prayers,’ she says, ‘and ask Our Father to forgive you.’

  Then she takes up the lamp and leaves, and I am plunged in an awful darkness.

  I think it a terrible thing to do to a child; I think it terrible, even now. I lie, in an agony of misery and fear, straining my ears against the silence—wide awake, sick, hungry, cold, alone, in a dark so deep the shifting black of my own eye-lids seems the brighter. My corset holds me like a fist. My knuckles, tugged into their stiff skin gloves, are starting out in bruises. Now and then the great clock shifts its gears, and chimes; and I draw what comfort I can from my idea that somewhere in the house walk lunatics, and with them watchful nurses. Then I begin to wonder over the habits of the place. Perhaps here they give their lunatics licence to wander; perhaps a madwoman will come to my room, mistaking it for another? Perhaps the wicked-tempered girl that sleeps next door is herself demented, and will come and throttle me with her hard hand! Indeed, no sooner has this idea risen in me, than I begin to hear the smothered sounds of movement, close by—unnaturally close, they seem to me to be: I imagine a thousand skulking figures with their faces at the curtain, a thousand searching hands. I begin to cry. The corset I wear makes the tears come strangely. I long to lie still, so the lurking women shall not guess that I am there; but the stiller I try to be, the more wretched I grow. Presently, a spider or a moth brushing my cheek, I imagine the throttling hand has come at last, and jerk in a convulsion and, I suppose, shriek.

  There comes the sound of an opening door, a light between the seams of the curtain. A face appears, close to my own—a kind face, not the face of a lunatic, but that of the girl who earlier brought my little tea of biscuits and sweet wine. She is dressed in her nightgown, and her hair is let down.

  ‘Now, then,’ she says softly. Her hand is not hard. She puts it to my head and strokes my face, and I grow calmer. My tears flow naturally. I say I have been afraid of lunatics, and she laughs.

  ‘There are no lunatics here,’ she says. ‘You are thinking of that other place. Now, aren’t you glad, to have left there?’ I shake my head. She says, ‘Well, it is only strange for you here. You will soon grow used to it.’

  She takes up her light. I see her do it, and begin at once again to cry.—‘Why, you shall be asleep in a moment!’ she says.

  I say I do not like the darkness. I say I am frightened to lie alone. She hesitates, thinking perhaps of Mrs Stiles. But I dare say my bed is softer than hers; and besides, it is winter, and fearfully cold. She says at last that she will lie with me until I sleep. She snuffs her candle, I smell the smoke upon the darkness.

  She tells me her name is Barbara. She lets me rest my head against her. She says, ‘Now, isn’t this nice as your old home? And shan’t you like it here?’

  I say I think I shall like it a little, if she will lie with me every night; and at that she laughs again, then settles herself more comfortably upon the feather mattress.

  She sleeps at once, and heavily, as housemaids do. She smells of a violet face-cream. Her gown has ribbons upon it, at the breast, and I find them out with my gloved hands and hold them while I wait for sleep to come—as if I am tumbling into the perfect darkness and they are the ropes that will save me.

  I am telling you this so that you might appreciate the forces that work upon me, making me what I am.

  Next day, I am kept to my two bleak rooms and made to sew. I forget my terrors of the darkness of the night, then. My gloves make me clumsy, the needle pricks my fingers. ‘I shan’t do it!’ I cry, tearing the cloth. Then Mrs Stiles beats me. My gown and corset being so stiff, she hurts her palm in the striking of my back. I take what little consolation I might, from that.

  I am beaten often, I believe, in my first days there. How could it be otherwise? I have known lively habits, the clamour of the wards, the dotings of twenty women; now the hush and regularity of my uncle’s house drives me to fits and foaming tempers. I am an amiable child, I think, made wilful by restraint. I dash cups and saucers from the table to the floor. I lie and kick my legs until the boots fly from my heels. I scream until my throat bleeds. My passions are met with punishments, each fiercer than the last. I am bound about the wrists and mouth. I am shut into lonely rooms, or into cupboards. One time—having overturned a candle and let the flame lap at the fringes of a chair until they smoke—I am taken by Mr Way into the park and carried, along a lonely path, to the ice-house. I don’t remember, now, the chill of the place; I remember the blocks of grey ice—I should have supposed them clear, like crystal—that tick in the wintry silence, like so many clocks. They tick for three hours. When Mrs Stiles comes to release me I have made myself a kind of nest and cannot be uncurled, and am as weak as if they had drugged me.

  I think that frightens her. She carries me back quietly, by the servants’ stairs, and she and Barbara bathe me, then rub my arms with spirits.

  ‘If she loses the use of her hands, my God, he’ll have our characters for ever!’

  It is something, to see her made afraid. I complain of pains in my fingers, and weakness, for a day or two after that, and watch her flutter; then I forget myself, and pinch her—and by that, she knows my grip is a strong one, and soon punishes me again.

  This makes a period of, perhaps a month; though to my childish mind it seems longer. My uncle waits, all that time, as he might wait for the breaking of a horse. Now and then he has Mrs Stiles conduct me to his library, and questions her as to my progress.

  ‘How do we do, Mrs Stiles?’

  ‘Still badly, sir.’

  ‘Still fierce?’

  ‘Fierce, and snappish.’

  ‘You’ve tried your hand?’

  She nods. He sends us away. Then come more shows of temper, more rages and tears. At night, Barbara shakes her head.

  ‘What a dot of a girl, to be so naughty! Mrs Stiles says she never saw such a little Tartar as you. Why can’t you be good?’

  I was good, in my last home—and see how I was rewarded! Next morning I upturn my chamber-pot and tread the mess into the carpet. Mrs Stiles throws up her hands and screams; then strikes my face. Then, half-clad and dazed as I am, she drags me from my dressing-room to my uncle’s door.

  He flinches from the sight of us. ‘Good God, what is it?’

  ‘Oh, a frightful thing, sir!’

  ‘Not more of her violence? And do you bring her here, where
she might break out, among the books?’

  But he lets her speak, looking all the time at me. I stand very stiff, with a hand at my hot face, my pale hair loose about my shoulders.

  At length he takes off his spectacles and closes his eyes. His eyes appear naked to me, and very soft at the lids. He raises his thumb and smudged forefinger to the bridge of his nose, and pinches.

  ‘Well, Maud,’ he says as he does it, ‘this is sorry news. Here is Mrs Stiles, and here am I, and here are all my staff, all waiting on your good manners. I had hoped the nurses had raised you better than this. I had hoped to find you biddable.’ He comes towards me, blinking, and puts his hand upon my face. ‘Don’t shrink so, girl! I want only to examine your cheek. It is hot, I think. Well, Mrs Stiles’s hand is a large one.’ He looks about him. ‘Come, what have we that is cool, hmm?’

  He has a slim brass knife, blunt-edged, for cutting pages. He stoops and puts the blade of it against my face. His manner is mild, and frightens me. His voice is soft as a girl’s. He says, ‘I am sorry to see you hurt, Maud. Indeed I am. Do you suppose I want you harmed? Why should I want that? It is you who must want it, since you provoke it so. I think you must like to be struck.—That is cooler, is it not?’ He has turned the blade. I shiver. My bare arms creep with cold. He moves his mouth. ‘All waiting,’ he repeats, ‘on your good manners. Well, we are good at that, at Briar. We can wait, and wait, and wait again. Mrs Stiles and my staff are paid to do it; I am a scholar, and inclined to it by nature. Look about you here, at my collection. Do you suppose this the work of an impatient man? My books come to me slowly, from obscure sources. I have contentedly passed many tedious weeks in expectation of poorer volumes than you!’ He laughs, a dry laugh that might once have been moist; moves the point of the knife to a spot beneath my chin; tilts up my face and looks it over. Then he lets the knife fall, and moves away. He tucks the wires of his spectacles behind his ears.

  ‘I advise you to whip her, Mrs Stiles,’ he says, ‘if she prove troublesome again.’

  Perhaps children are like horses after all, and may be broken. My uncle returns to his mess of papers, dismissing us; and I go docilely back to my sewing. It is not the prospect of a whipping that makes me meek. It is what I know of the cruelty of patience. There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged. I have seen lunatics labour at endless tasks—conveying sand from one leaking cup into another; counting the stitches in a fraying gown, or the motes in a sunbeam; filling invisible ledgers with the resulting sums. Had they been gentlemen, and rich—instead of women—then perhaps they would have passed as scholars and commanded staffs.—I cannot say. And of course, these are thoughts that come to me later, when I know the full measure of my uncle’s particular mania. That day, in my childish way, I glimpse only its surface. But I see that it is dark, and know that it is silent—indeed, its substance is the substance of the darkness and the silence which fills my uncle’s house like water or like wax.

  Should I struggle, it will draw me deep into itself, and I will drown.

  I do not wish, then, to do that.

  I cease struggling at all, and surrender myself to its viscid, circular currents.

  That is the first day, perhaps, of my education. But next day, at eight, begin my lessons proper. I never have a governess: my uncle tutors me himself, having Mr Way set a desk and a stool for me close to the pointing finger on his library floor. The stool is high: my legs swing from it and the weight of my shoes makes them tingle and finally grow numb. Should I fidget, however—should I cough, or sneeze—then my uncle will come and snap at my fingers with the rope of silk-covered beads. His patience has curious lapses, after all; and though he claims to be free of a desire to harm me, he harms me pretty often.

  Still, the library is kept warmer than my own room, to ward off mould from the books; and I find I prefer to write, than to sew. He gives me a pencil with a soft lead that moves silently upon paper, and a green-shaded reading-lamp, to save my eyes.

  The lamp smells, as it heats, of smouldering dust: a curious smell—I shall grow to hate it!—the smell of the parching of my own youth.

  My work itself is of the most tedious kind, and consists chiefly of copying pages of text, from antique volumes, into a leather-bound book. The book is a slim one, and when it is filled my job is to render it blank again with a piece of india-rubber. I remember this task, more than I remember the pieces of matter I am made to copy: for the pages, from endless friction, grow smudged and fragile and liable to tear; and the sight of a smudge on a leaf of text, or the sound of tearing paper, is more than my uncle, in his delicacy, can bear. They say children, as a rule, fear the ghosts of the dead; what I fear most as a child are the spectres of past lessons, imperfectly erased.

  I call them lessons; but I am not taught as other girls are. I learn to recite, softly and clearly; I am never taught to sing. I never learn the names of flowers and birds, but am schooled instead in the hides with which books are bound—as say, morocco, russia, calf, chagrin; and their papers—Dutch, China, motley, silk. I learn inks; the cutting of pens; the uses of pounce; the styles and sizes of founts: sans-serif, antique, Egyptian, pica, brevier, emerald, ruby, pearl . . . They are named for jewels. It is a cheat. For they are hard and dull as cinders in a grate.

  But I learn quickly. The season turns. I am made small rewards: new gloves, soft-soled slippers, a gown—stiff as the first, but of velvet. I am allowed to take my supper in the dining-room, at one end of a great oak table, set with silver. My uncle sits at the other end. He keeps a reading-easel beside his place, and speaks very seldom; but if I should be so unlucky as to let fall a fork, or to jar my knife against my plate, then he will raise his face and fix me with a damp and terrible eye. ‘Have you some weakness about the hands, Maud, that obliges you to grind your silver in that way?’

  ‘The knife is too large and too heavy, Uncle,’ I answer him fretfully once.

  Then he has my knife taken away, and I must eat with my fingers. The dishes he prefers being all bloody meats, and hearts, and calves’ feet, my kid-skin gloves grow crimson—as if reverting to the substance they were made from. My appetite leaves me. I care most for the wine. I am served it in a crystal glass engraved with an M. The ring of silver that holds my napkin is marked a tarnished black with the same initial. They are to keep me mindful, not of my name, but of that of my mother; which was Marianne.

  She is buried in the loneliest spot of all that lonely park—hers a solitary grey stone among so many white. I am taken to see it, and made to keep the tomb neat.

  ‘Be grateful that you may,’ says Mrs Stiles, watching me trim the springing cemetery grass, her arms folded across her bosom. ‘Who shall tend my grave? I shall be all but forgotten.’

  Her husband is dead. Her son is a sailor. She has taken all her little daughter’s curling black hair to make ornaments with. She brushes my own hair as if the locks are thorns and might cut her; I wish they were. I think she is sorry not to whip me. She still bruises my arms with pinches. My obedience enrages her more than ever my passions did; and seeing that, I grow meeker, with a hard, artful meekness that, receiving the edge of her sorrow, keeps it sharp. That provokes her to the pinches—they are profitless enough—and to scolds, which pay more, as being revealing of her griefs. I take her often to the graves, and make certain to sigh, to the full strength of my lungs, over my mother’s stone. In time—so cunning am I!—I find out the name of her dead daughter; then, the kitchen cat giving birth to a litter of kittens, I take one for a pet, and name it for her. I make sure to call it loudest when Mrs Stiles is near: ‘Come, Polly! Oh, Polly! What a pretty child you are! How fine your black fur is! Come, kiss your mama.’

  Do you see, what circumstances make of me?

  Mrs Stiles trembles and winks at the words.

  ‘Take the filthy creature and have Mr Inker drown it!’ she says to Barbara, when she can bear it no more.

  I run and hide my face. I think of my lost home, and the nurses that love
d me, and the thought brings the hot tears coolly to my eyes.

  ‘Oh, Barbara!’ I cry. ‘Say you shan’t! Say you wouldn’t!’

  Barbara says she never could. Mrs Stiles sends her away.

  ‘You’re a sly, hateful child,’ she says. ‘Don’t think Barbara don’t know it. Don’t think she can’t see through you and your designing ways.’

  But it is she who cries then, in great hard sobs; and my own eyes soon dry in the studying of hers. For what is she, to me? What is anyone now? I had thought my mothers, the nurses, might send to save me; six months go by—another six, another—and they send nothing. I am assured they have forgotten me. ‘Think of you?’ says Mrs Stiles, with a laugh. ‘Why, I dare say your place at the madhouse has been filled by a new little girl with a happier temper. I am sure, they were glad to be rid of you.’ In time, I believe her. I begin to forget. My old life grows shadowy in proportion to the new—or, sometimes emerges to darken or trouble it, in dreams and half-memories, just as those smudged strokes of forgotten lessons now and then start out upon the pages of my copy-book.

  My proper mother I hate. Didn’t she forsake me, before anyone? I keep her portrait in a little wooden box beside my bed; but her sweet white face has nothing of me in it, and I grow to loathe it. ‘Let me kiss mama good-night,’ I say one time, unlocking my box. But I do it only to torment Mrs Stiles. I raise the picture to my lips and, while she looks on, thinking me sorry—‘I hate you,’ I whisper, my breath tarnishing the gold. I do it that night, and the night which follows, and the night which follows that; at last, as a clock must tick to a regular beat, I find I must do it or lie fretful in my bed. And then, the portrait must be set down gently, with its ribbon quite uncreased. If the frame strikes the velvet lining of the wooden box too hard, I will take it out and set it down carefully again.