‘I was, I know it,’ I say.
‘You was told it, I expect.’
‘Every one of my uncle’s servants knows it!’
‘They was told it, too, perhaps. Does that make it true? Maybe. Maybe not.’
As she speaks, she moves from the wash-hand stand to the bed, and sits upon it, slowly and heavily. She looks at Richard. She puts her hand to her ear, and strokes the lobe. With a show of lightness she says, ‘Find your room all right, Gentleman?’—I have guessed at last that this is some name he goes by here, among the thieves. ‘Find your room all right?’ He nods. She gazes at me again. ‘We keeps that room,’ she goes on, in the same light, friendly, dangerous tone, ‘for Gentleman to kip in when he comes. A very high, out-of-the-way sort of room it is, I can tell you. Seen all manner of business up there; all sorts of tricks. People been known to come here, rather quiet’—she pretends surprise—‘why, just as you have come!—to spend a day, two days, two weeks, who knows how long? tucked away up there. Chaps, maybe, that the police would like a word with. Can’t be found—do you see?—when they come here. Chaps, girls, kids, ladies . . .’
After this last word she pauses. She pats the space at her side. ‘Won’t you sit, dear girl? Don’t care to? Hmm? Perhaps in a minute, then.’ The bed has a blanket upon it—a quilt of coloured squares, roughly knitted, and roughly sewn together. She begins to pluck at one of its seams, as if in distraction. ‘Now, what was I speaking of?’ she says, her eyes on mine.
‘Of ladies,’ says Richard.
She moves her hand, lifts her finger. ‘Of ladies,’ she says. ‘That’s right. Of course, there come so few true ladies, you find they rather sticks in the mind. I remember one, particular, that came—oh, how long ago? Sixteen years? Seventeen? Eighteen . . . ?’ She watches my face. ‘Seems a long time to you, sweetheart, I dare say. Seems a lifetime, don’t it? Only wait, dear girl, till you are my age. The years all run together, then. All run together, like so many tears . . .’ She gives a jerk of her head, draws in her breath in a backwards sigh, quick and rueful. She waits. But I have grown still, and cold, and cautious, and say nothing. So then she goes on.
‘Well, this particular lady,’ she says, ‘she wasn’t much older than you are now. But wasn’t she in a fix? She had got my name from a woman in the Borough, that did girls and their complaints. You know what I am saying, dear? Made girls be poorly, in the regular way, when their poorliness had stopped?’ She moves her hand, makes a face. ‘I never bothered with that. That was out of my line. My idea was, if it wasn’t going to kill you on its way out, then have it, and sell it; or what’s better, give it to me and let me sell it for you!—I mean, to people that want infants, for servants or apprentices, or for regular sons and daughters. Did you know, dear girl, that there were people in the world, like that?—and people like me, providing the infants? No?’ Again, I make no answer. Again she moves her hand. ‘Well, perhaps this lady I am speaking of now didn’t know it either, till she came to me. Poor thing. The Borough woman had tried to help her, but she was too far on, she had only got sick. “Where’s your husband?” I said, before I took her in. “Where’s your ma? Where’s all your people? Won’t follow you here, will they?” She said they wouldn’t. She had no husband—that was her trouble, of course. Her mother was dead. She had run away from a great, grand house, forty miles from London—up-river, she said . . .’ She nods, still keeping her eyes on mine. I have grown colder than ever. ‘Her father and her brother were looking for her, and seemed likely to just about kill her; but would never find their way to the Borough, she swore it. As for the gentleman that had started her troubles all off, by saying he loved her—well, he had a wife and a kiddie of his own, and had given her up as ruined, and washed his hands.—As gentlemen, of course, will do.
‘Which, in a line like mine, you say thank heavens for!’ She smiles, almost winks. ‘This lady had money. I took her, and put her upstairs. Perhaps I ought-n’t to have done it. Mr Ibbs did say I oughtn’t to. For I had five or six babies in the house already, and was worn out and fretful—more fretful, through having just borne a little infant of my own, that had died—’ Here her look changes, and she waves a hand before her eyes. ‘I won’t talk of that, however. I won’t talk of that.’
She swallows and looks about her for a moment, as if in search of the fallen threads of her story. Then she seems to find them. The confusion passes from her face, she catches my eye again, then gestures upwards. I glance, with her, at the ceiling. It is a dirty yellow, marked grey with the smoke of lamps.
‘Up there we put her,’ she says, ‘in Gentleman’s room. And all day long I would sit beside her and hold her hand, and every night I would hear her turning in her bed, and crying. Nearly broke your heart. She had no more harm in her than milk does. I supposed she might die. Mr Ibbs supposed it. I think even she supposed it, for she was meant to go another two months, and anyone could see that she wouldn’t have the strength to go half that time. But maybe the baby knew it, too—they do know, sometimes. For we only have her here a week, before her water busts and it starts coming. Takes a day and a night. Means to come, all right! Even so, it’s a shrimp of a thing, but the lady—being so poorly already—is quite made rags of. Then she hears her baby cry, and picks up her head from her pillow. “What’s that, Mrs Sucksby?” she says. “That’s your baby, my dear!” I tell her. “My baby?” says she. “Is my baby a boy, or a girl?” “It’s a girl,” I say. And when she hears that she cries out with all her lungs: “Then God help her! For the world is cruel to girls. I wish she had died, and me with her!” ’
She shakes her head, lifts her hands, lets them fall upon her knees. Richard leans against the door. The door has a hook, with a silk dressing-gown hanging from it: he has taken up the belt of the gown and is idly passing it across his mouth. His eyes are on mine, their lids a little lowered; his look is unreadable. From the kitchen below us there comes laughter and a ragged shrieking. The woman listens, gives another of those backwards, rueful sighs.
‘There’s Dainty, crying again . . .’ She rolls her eyes. ‘But how I have run on!—haven’t I, Miss Lilly? Not finding me tiresome, dear? Ain’t much to hold the interest, perhaps, in these old tales . . .’
‘Go on,’ I say. My mouth is dry, and sticks. ‘Go on, about the woman.’
‘The lady, what had the little girl? Such a slight little scrap of a girl, she was: fair haired, blue-eyed—well, they all come out blue, of course; and brown up, later . . .’
She looks, meaningfully, into my own brown eyes. I blink, and colour. But my voice I make flat. ‘Go on,’ I say again. ‘I know you mean to tell me. Tell me now. The woman wished her daughter dead. What then?’
‘Wished her dead?’ She moves her head. ‘So she said. So women do say, sometimes. And sometimes they mean it. Not her, though. That child was everything to her, and when I said she had much better give her up to me, than keep her, she grew quite wild. “What, you don’t mean to raise her yourself?” I said. “You, a lady, without a husband?” She said she would pass herself off as a widow—meant to go abroad, where no-one knew her, and make her living as a seamstress. “I’ll see my daughter married to a poor man before she knows my shame,” she said. “I’m through with the quality life.” That was her one thought, poor thing, that no amount of sensible talking from me could shake her of: that she would sooner see her girl live low but honest, than give her back to the world of money she come from. She meant to start for France so soon as her strength was all back—and I’ll tell you this now, I thought she was a fool; but I would have cut my own arm to help her, she was that simple and good.’
She sighs. ‘But it’s the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world—ain’t it, though! She kept very weak, and her baby hardly grew. Still she talked, all the time, of France, it was all she thought of; until one night, I was putting her into her bed when there comes a knocking on our kitchen door. It’s the woman, from the Borough, what first put her on to me: I see
her face, and know there’s trouble. There is. What do you think? The lady’s pa and brother have tracked her down after all. “They’re coming,” says the woman. “Lord help me, I never meant to tell them where you was; but the brother had a cane, and whipped me.” She shows me her back, and it’s black. “They’ve gone for a coach,” she says, “and a bully to help them. I should say you’ve an hour. Get your lady out now, if she means to go. Try to hide her and they’ll pull your house apart!”
‘Well! The poor lady had followed me down and heard it all, and started shrieking. “Oh, I’m done for!” she said. “Oh, if I might only have got to France!”—but the trip downstairs had half-killed her, she was so weak. “They’ll take my baby!” she said. “They’ll take her and make her theirs! They’ll put her in their great house, they might as well lock her into a tomb! They’ll take her, and turn her heart against me—oh! and I haven’t even named her! I haven’t even named her!” That’s all she would say. “I haven’t even named her!”—“Name her now, then!” I said, just to make her be quiet. “Name her quick, while you still got the chance.” “I will!” she said. “But, what name shall I give her?” “Well,” I said, “think on: she’s to be a lady after all, there’s no helping it now. Give her a name that’ll fit her. What’s your own name? Give her that.” Then she looked dark. She said, “My name’s a hateful one, I’d sooner curse her before I let anyone call her Marianne—” ’
She stops, seeing my face. It has jumped, or twisted—though I have known that the story must reach this point, and have stood, feeling my breath come shorter, my stomach grow sourer, as the tale proceeds. I draw in my breath. ‘It’s not true,’ I say. ‘My mother, coming here, without a husband? My mother was mad. My father was a soldier. I have his ring. Look here, look here!’
I have gone to my bag, and I stoop to it, and pull at the torn leather and find the little square of linen that holds my jewels. There is the ring that they gave me in the madhouse: I hold it up. My hand is shaking. Mrs Sucksby studies it and shrugs.
‘Rings may be got,’ she says, ‘from just about anywhere.’
‘From him,’ I say.
‘From anywhere. I could get you ten like that, have them stamped V.R.—Would that make them the Queen’s?’
I cannot answer. For what do I know about where rings come from and how they may be stamped? I say again, more weakly, ‘My mother coming here, without a husband. Ill, and coming here. My father—My uncle—’ I look up. ‘My uncle. Why should my uncle lie?’
‘Why should he tell the truth?’ says Richard, coming forward, speaking at last. ‘I dare swear his sister was honest enough, before her ruin, and only unlucky; but that’s the sort of unluckiness—well, that a man doesn’t care to talk about too freely . . .’
I gaze again at the ring. There is a cut upon it I liked, as a girl, to suppose made by a bayonet. Now the gold feels light, as if pierced and made hollow.
‘My mother,’ I say, doggedly, ‘was mad. She bore me, strapped to a table.—No.’ I put my hands to my eyes. ‘That part, perhaps, was my own fancy. But not the rest. My mother was mad—was kept in the cell of a madhouse; and I was made to be mindful of her example, lest I should follow it.’
‘She was certainly, once they had got her, put in a cell,’ says Richard; ‘as we know girls are, from time to time, for the satisfaction of gentlemen.—Well, no more of that, just yet.’ He has caught Mrs Sucksby’s eye. ‘And you were certainly kept in fear of following her, Maud. And what did that do to you?—save make you anxious, obedient, careless of your own comforts—in other words, exactly fit you to your uncle’s fancy? Didn’t I tell you once, what a scoundrel he was?’
‘You are wrong,’ I say. ‘You are wrong, or mistaken.’
‘No mistake,’ answers Mrs Sucksby.
‘You may be lying, even now. Both of you!’
‘We may be.’ She taps her mouth. ‘But you see, dear girl, we ain’t.’
‘My uncle,’ I say again. ‘My uncle’s servants. Mr Way, Mrs Stiles . . .’
But I say it, and I feel—the ghost of a pressure—Mr Way’s shoulder against my ribs, his finger in the crook of my knee: Fancy yourself a lady, do you?—And then, and then, Mrs Stiles’s hard hands on my pimpling arms and her breath against my cheek:
Why your mother, with all her fortune, should have turned out trash—!
I know it, I know it. I still hold the ring. Now, with a cry, I throw it to the floor—as I once, as a furious child, threw cups and saucers.
‘Damn him!’ I say. I think of myself at the foot of my uncle’s bed, the razor in my hand, his unguarded eye. Confidence Abused. ‘Damn him!’ Richard nods. I turn upon him, then. ‘And damn you, with him! You knew this, all along? Why not tell me, at Briar? Don’t you think it would have made me the likelier to go with you? Why wait, and bring me here—to this foul place!—to trick and surprise me?’
‘Surprise you?’ he says, with a curious laugh. ‘Oh, Maud, sweet Maud, we haven’t begun to do that.’
I don’t understand him. I hardly try to. I am thinking still of my uncle, my mother—my mother, ill, ruined, coming here . . . Richard puts his hand to his chin, works his lips. ‘Mrs Sucksby,’ he says, ‘do you keep any drink up here? I find myself rather dry about the mouth. It’s the anticipation, I think, of sensation. I am the same at the casino, at the spinning of the wheel; and at the pantomime, when they’re about to let fly the fairies.’
Mrs Sucksby hesitates, then goes to a shelf, opens a box, lifts out a bottle. She produces three short tumblers with gold about the rim. She wipes them, on a fold of her skirt.
‘I hope, Miss Lilly, you won’t suppose this sherry,’ she says, as she pours. The scent of the liquid comes sharp and sickly upon the close air of the room. ‘Sherry in a lady’s chamber I could never agree to; but a bit of honest brandy, meant for use now and then as a bracer—well, you tell me, where’s the harm in that?’
‘No harm at all,’ says Richard. He holds a glass to me and, so confused am I—so dazed and enraged—I take it at once, and sip it as if it were wine. Mrs Sucksby watches me swallow.
‘Got a good mouth for spirits,’ she says approvingly.
‘Got a mouth for them,’ says Richard, ‘when they’re marked up, Medicine. Hey, Maud?’
I will not answer. The brandy is hot. I sit, at last, upon the edge of the bed and unfasten the cord of my cloak. The room is darker than before: the day is turning into night. The horse-hair screen looms black, and casts shadows. The walls—that are papered here in a pattern of flowers, there in muddy diamonds—are gloomy and close. The scarf stands out against the window: a fly is caught behind it, and buzzes in hopeless fury against the glass.
I sit with my head in my hands. My brain, like the room, seems hedged about with darkness; my thoughts run, but run uselessly. I do not ask—as I would, I think, if this were some other girl’s story and I was only reading it or hearing it told—I do not ask why they have got me here; what they mean to do with me now; how they plan to profit from the cheating and stunning of me. I only rage, still, against my uncle. I only think, over and over: My mother, ruined, shamed, coming here, lying bleeding in a house of thieves. Not mad, not mad . . .
I suppose my expression is a strange one. Richard says, ‘Maud, look at me. Don’t think, now, of your uncle and your uncle’s house. Don’t think of that woman, Marianne.’
‘I shall think of her,’ I answer, ‘I shall think of her as I always have: as a fool! But, my father—You said, a gentleman? They have made me out an orphan, all these years. Does my father still live? Did he never—?’
‘Maud, Maud,’ he says, sighing, moving back to his place at the door. ‘Look about you. Think how you came here. Do you suppose I snatched you from Briar, did the deed I did this morning—ran the risks I have run—so that you might learn family secrets, no more than that?’
‘I don’t know!’ I say. ‘What do I know, now? If you will only give me a little time, to think in. If you will only tell me—?
??
But Mrs Sucksby has come to me, and lightly touches my arm.
‘Wait up, dear girl,’ she says, very gently. She puts a finger to her lip, half closes one eye. ‘Wait up, and listen. You ain’t heard all my story. The better part’s to come. For there’s the lady, you remember, that’s been made rags of. There’s the father and the brother and the bully, due in one hour’s time. There’s the baby, and me saying, “What’ll we name her? What about your own name, Marianne?”, and the lady saying as how she’d sooner curse her, than call her that. You remember, my dear? “As for being the daughter of a lady,” says the poor girl next, “you tell me this: what does being a lady do for you, except let you be ruined? I want her named plain,” she says, “like a girl of the people. I want her named plain.” “You name her plain, then,” I say—still meaning, as it were, to humour her. “I will,” she says. “I will. There was a servant that was kind to me once—kinder than ever my father or my brother was. I want her named for her. I shall call her for her. I shall call her—” ’
‘Maud,’ I say, wretchedly. I have lowered my face again. But when Mrs Sucksby is silent, I lift it. Her look is strange. Her silence is strange. She slowly shakes her head. She draws in her breath—hesitates, for another second—and then says:
‘Susan.’
Richard watches, his hand before his mouth. The room, the house, is still. My thoughts, that have seemed to turn like grinding wheels, now seem to stop. Susan. Susan. I will not let them see how the word confounds me. Susan. I will not speak. I will not move, for fear I should stumble or shake. I only keep my eyes upon Mrs Sucksby’s face. She takes another, longer sip from her glass of brandy, then wipes her mouth. She comes and sits again, beside me, upon the bed.
‘Susan,’ she says again. ‘That’s what the lady named her. Seems a shame to have named that baby for a servant, don’t it? So I thought, anyway. But what could I say? Poor girl, she was quite off her head—still crying, still shrieking, still saying as how her father would come, would take the child, would make her hate her own mother’s name. “Oh, how can I save her?” she said. “I would rather anyone got her, than him and my brother! Oh, what can I do? How can I save her? Oh, Mrs Sucksby, I swear to you now, I would rather they took any other poor woman’s baby, than mine!” ’