Fingersmith

She pulled a face, let out her breath, and her eyes closed. I thought in horror, Two-and-twenty years!—and the thought must have shown on my face, for Miss Wilson said,

  ‘You must not think you shall stay so long as that. Mrs Price comes, every year; but her husband has her home again, when the worst of her spells are past. It was a husband, I think, who signed your order? It is my brother who keeps me here. But men want wives, when they may do without their sisters.’ Her hand rose. ‘I would speak plainer, if I could. My tongue—You understand.’

  ‘The man,’ I said, ‘that has put me here, is a dreadful villain; and only pretends to be my husband.’

  ‘That is hard for you,’ said Miss Wilson, shaking her head and sighing. ‘That is the worst of all.’

  I touched her arm. My heart, that had sunk, now rose like a float—so hard, it hurt me.

  ‘You believe it,’ I said. I looked at Nurse Bacon; but she had heard me and opened her eyes.

  ‘Don’t make anything of that,’ she said, in a comfortable voice. ‘Miss Wilson believes all sorts of nonsense. Only ask her, now, what creatures live in the moon.’

  ‘Curse you!’ said Miss Wilson. ‘I told you that as a confidence!—You may see, Mrs Rivers, how they work to diminish my standing.—Does my brother pay a guinea a week for you to abuse me? Thieves! Devils!’

  Nurse Bacon made a show of rising from her chair and making her hands into fists; and Miss Wilson grew quiet again. I said, after a moment,

  ‘You may think what you like about the moon, Miss Wilson. Why shouldn’t you? But when I tell you I have been put in here by swindlers and am perfectly right in my head, I say no more than the truth. Dr Christie shall find it out, in time.’

  ‘I hope he will,’ she answered. ‘I am sure he will. But you know, it is your husband who must sign you out.’

  I stared at her. Then I looked at Nurse Bacon. ‘Is that true?’ I asked. Nurse Bacon nodded. I began to weep again. ‘Then, God help me, I’m done for!’ I cried. ‘For that shyster never, never will!’

  Miss Wilson shook her head. ‘So hard! So hard! But perhaps he will visit, and take a change of heart? They must let us see our visitors, you know; that is the law.’

  I wiped my face. ‘He won’t come,’ I said. ‘He knows that, if he did, I would kill him!’

  She looked about her, in a sort of fear. ‘You must not say such things, in here. You must be good. Don’t you know, that they have ways of taking you, of binding you—That they have water—’

  ‘Water,’ murmured Mrs Price, in a shuddering way.

  ‘That’s enough!’ Nurse Bacon said. ‘And you, Miss Muffet’—she meant me—‘stop stirring up the ladies.’

  And again, she showed her fist.

  So then we all fell silent. Betty worked the grease in for another minute or two, then put the jar away and went back to her bed. Miss Wilson bent her head and her gaze grew dark. Mrs Price now and then let out a murmur or a moan from behind her veil of hair. From the room next door there came a burst of ragged shrieking. I thought of Mr Ibbs’s sister. I thought of all my home, and all the people in it. I began, again, to sweat. I felt suddenly I think as a fly must feel, when wrapped in the thread of a spider. I got to my feet and walked from one wall of the room to the other, and back.

  ‘If only there was a window!’ I said. ‘If only we might see out.’ And then: ‘If only I had never left the Borough!’

  ‘Will you sit down?’ said Nurse Bacon.

  Then she cursed. There had come a knocking at the door, and she must get up from her chair to answer it. It was another nurse, with a paper. I waited until their heads were close together, then stole back to Miss Wilson. Desperation was beginning to make me sly.

  ‘Listen to me,’ I said quietly. ‘I must get out of here, quick as I can. I have people in London, with money. I’ve a mother. You’ve been here so long, you must know of a way. What is it? I’ll pay you for it, I swear.’

  She looked at me, and then drew back. ‘I hope,’ she said, in an ordinary tone, ‘I hope you don’t suppose that I was the kind of girl brought up to speak in whispers?’

  Nurse Bacon looked round and stared.

  ‘You, Maud,’ she said. ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘Whispering,’ said Betty, in her gruff voice.

  ‘Whispering? I’ll whisper her, all right! Get back to your bed and leave Miss Wilson alone. Can’t I turn my back a minute without you start up trying to tamper with the ladies?’

  I supposed she guessed I had been trying to escape. I went back to my bed. She stood at the door with the other nurse, and said something to her in a murmur. The other nurse wrinkled her nose. Then they looked me over in the same cool, nasty way that I had seen other nurses look at me, before.

  I was still too ignorant then, of course, to know what the nasty look meant. God help me, though!—for I was to find out, soon enough.

  15.

  Until then, however, I didn’t trouble myself to wonder; for I still supposed I should get out. Even when a week went by, and then another, I supposed it. I only understood at last that I must give up my idea that Dr Christie would be the man to release me—for if he believed that I was mad when I went in, then everything I said as time went on only seemed to serve to make him think me madder. Worse than that, he still held firm to his idea that I should be cured, and know myself again, if I might only be made to write.

  ‘You have been put too much to literary work,’ he said on one of his visits, ‘and that is the cause of your complaint. But sometimes we doctors must work by paradoxical methods. I mean to put you to literary work again, to restore you. Look here.’ He had brought me something, wrapped in paper. It was a slate and chalk. ‘You shall sit with this blank slate before you,’ he said, ‘and before this day is done, you shall have written me out—neatly, mind!—your name. Your true name, I mean. Tomorrow you shall write me the start of an account of your life; and you shall add to it, on each day that follows. You shall recover the use of your faculty of reason, as you recover your facility with the pen . . .’

  And so he made Nurse Bacon keep me sitting with the chalk in my hand, for hours at a stretch; and of course, I could write nothing, the chalk would crumble to a powder—or else, grow damp and slippery from the sweating of my palm. Then he’d come back and see the empty slate, and frown and shake his head. He might have Nurse Spiller with him. ‘Ain’t you wrote a word?’ she’d say. ‘And here’s the doctors spending all their time to make you well. Ungrateful, I call that.’

  When he’d gone, she’d shake me. And when I’d cry and swear, she’d shake me harder. She could shake you so, you thought your teeth were being rattled out of your head. She could shake you until you were sick.—‘Got the grips,’ she’d tell the other nurses then, with a wink; and the nurses would laugh. They hated the ladies. They hated me. They thought that when I spoke in the way that was natural to me, I did it to tease them. I know they put it out that I got special attentions from Dr Christie, through pretending to be low. That made the ladies hate me, too. Only mad Miss Wilson was now and then kind to me. Once she saw me weeping over my slate and, when Nurse Bacon’s back was turned, came over and wrote me out my name—Maud’s name, I mean. But, though she meant it well, I wished she hadn’t done it; for when Dr Christie came and saw it, he smiled and cried, ‘Well done, Mrs Rivers! Now we are half-way there!’ And when, next day, I again could make nothing but scribbles, of course he thought me shamming.

  ‘Keep her from her dinner, Nurse Bacon,’ he said sternly, ‘until she writes again.’

  So then, I wrote out: Susan, Susan—I wrote it, fifty times. Nurse Bacon hit me. Nurse Spiller hit me, too. Dr Christie shook his head. He said my case was worse than he had thought, and needed another method. He gave me drinks of creosote—had the nurses hold me, while he poured it into my mouth. He talked of bringing a leech-man in, to bleed my head. Then a new lady came to the house, who would speak nothing but a made-up language she said was the language of snakes; and after tha
t he passed all his time with her, pricking her with needles, bursting paper bags behind her ear, scalding her with boiling water—looking for ways to startle her into speaking English.

  I wished he would go on pricking and scalding her for ever. The creosote had almost choked me. I was frightened of leeches. And his leaving me alone, it seemed to me, would give me more time for sitting and planning my escape in. For I still thought of nothing but of that. It got to June. I had gone in there some time in May. But I still had spirit enough to learn the lie of the house, to study the windows and doors, looking out for weak ones; and every time Nurse Bacon took out her chain of keys, I watched, and saw which did what. I saw that, as far as the locks on the bedroom and passage doors went, one key worked them all. If I could slip that key from a nurse’s chain, I could make my escape, I was certain of it. But those chains were stout; and each nurse kept her keys very close; and Nurse Bacon—who was warned I might be crafty—kept hers closest of all. She gave them up only to Betty when she wanted something got out from her cupboard; and then she took them back at once, and dropped them into her pocket.

  I never saw her do it, without trembling in a hopeless rage. It seemed too hard that I—of all people in the world!—should be kept so low, so long, from everything that was mine, by a single key—a single, simple key! not even a fancy key, but a plain one, with four straight cuts upon it that, given the right kind of blank and file, I knew I should have been able, in half a moment, to fake up. I thought it, a hundred times a day. I thought it as I washed my face, and as I took my dinner. I thought it as I walked the little garden; as I sat in the drawing-room, hearing ladies mumble and weep; as I lay in my bed, with the nurse’s lamp blazing in my eyes. If thoughts were hammers or picks I should have been free, ten thousand times over. But my thoughts were more like poisons. I had so many, they made me sick.

  It was a dull sort of sickness, not like the sharp panic that had gripped me and made me sweat, in my first days there. It was a kind of creeping misery, that crept so slow, and was so much a part of the habits of the house—like the colour of the walls, the smell of the dinners, the sound of weeping and shrieks—I did not know it had gained upon me, until too late. I still said, to everyone who spoke to me, that I was quite in my right mind—that I was there, through a mistake—that I was not Maud Rivers, and must be let out at once. But I said it so often, the words grew soft—like coins losing their faces through being too much spent. One day at last, I walked with a lady in the garden and said it again; and the lady looked at me in pity.

  ‘I thought the same thing, once,’ she said kindly. ‘But you see, I’m afraid you must be mad, since you are here. There is something queer about us all. You need only look about you. You need only look at yourself.’

  She smiled—but, as before, she smiled in a kind of pity; then she walked on. I stopped, however. I had not thought, I could not say in how long, of how I must look, to others. Dr Christie kept no looking-glasses, for fear they should get smashed, and it seemed to me now that the last time I had gazed at my own face was at Mrs Cream’s—was it at Mrs Cream’s?—when Maud had made me put on her blue silk gown—was it blue? or had it been grey?—and held up the little mirror. I put my hands to my eyes. The gown was blue, I was certain of it. Why, I had been wearing it when they got me into the madhouse! They had taken it from me—and they had taken, too, Maud’s mother’s bag, and all the things that were in it—the brushes and combs, the linen, the red prunella slippers—I never saw those again. Instead—I looked down at myself, at the tartan dress and rubber boots. I had grown almost used to them. Now I saw them again for what they were; and wished I might see them better. The nurse who had been set to watch us was sitting with her eyes closed, dozing in the sun, but a little to the left of her was the window that looked into the drawing-room. It was dark, and showed the line of circling ladies, clear as a mirror. One of them had stopped, and had her hand at her face.—I blinked. She blinked. She was me.

  I went slowly towards her, and looked myself over, in horror.

  I looked, as the lady had said, like a lunatic. My hair was still sewn to my head, but had grown or worked loose from its stitches, and stood out in tufts. My face was white but marked, here and there, with spots and scratches and fading bruises. My eyes were swollen—from want of sleep, I suppose—and red at the rims. My face was sharper than ever, my neck like a stick. The tartan gown hung on me like a laundry bag. From beneath its collar there showed the dirty white tips of the fingers of Maud’s old glove, that I still wore next to my heart. You could just make out, on the kid-skin, the marks of my teeth.

  I looked, for perhaps a minute. I looked, and thought of all the times that Mrs Sucksby had washed and combed and shined my hair, when I was a girl. I thought of her warming her bed before she put me in it, so I should not take chills. I thought of her putting aside, for me, the tenderest morsels of meat; and smoothing my teeth, when they cut; and passing her hands across my arms and legs, to be sure that they grew straight. I remembered how close and safe she had kept me, all the years of my life. I had gone to Briar, to make my fortune, so I might share it with her. Now my fortune was gone. Maud Lilly had stolen it and given me hers. She was supposed to be here. She had made me be her, while she was loose in the world, and every glass she gazed at—as say, in milliners’ shops, while she was fitted with gowns; or in theatres; or in halls, as she went dancing—every glass showed her to be everything I was not—to be handsome, and cheerful, and proud, and free—

  I might have raged. I think I began to. Then I saw the look in my eye, and my face frightened me. I stood, not knowing what I should do, until the nurse on duty woke up, and came and jabbed me.

  ‘All right, Miss Vanity,’ she said with a yawn. ‘I dare say your heels are worth looking at, too. So let’s see ’em.’ She pushed me back into the middle of the turning line; and I bowed my head and walked, watching the hem of my skirt, my boots, the boots of the lady in front—anything, anything at all, to save me from lifting my gaze to the drawing-room window and seeing again the look in my own mad eye.

  That, I suppose, was at the end of June. It might have been sooner, though. It was hard to know what dates were what. It was hard to tell so much as the day—you only knew another week had gone by when, instead of spending all morning on your bed, you were made to stand in the drawing-room and listen while Dr Christie read prayers; then you knew it was a Sunday. Perhaps I ought to have made a mark, like convicts do, for every Sunday that came round; but of course, for many weeks there seemed no point—each time one came I thought that, by the next, I should have got out. Then I began to grow muddled. It seemed to me that some weeks had two or three Sundays in them. Others seemed to have none. All we could tell for certain was, that spring had turned to summer: for the days grew long, the sun grew fiercer; and the house grew hot, like an oven.

  I remember the heat, almost more than anything. It was enough to make you mad all by itself. The air in our rooms, for instance, became like soup. I think one or two ladies actually died, through breathing that air—though of course, being medical men, Dr Graves and Dr Christie were able to pass off their deaths as strokes. I heard the nurses say that. They grew bad-tempered as the days grew warm. They complained of headaches and sweats. They complained of their gowns. ‘Why I stay here, looking after you, in wool,’ they’d say, pulling us about, ‘when I might be at Tunbridge Asylum, where the nurses all wear poplin—!’

  But the fact of it was, as we all knew, no other madhouse would have had them; and they wouldn’t have gone, anyway. They had it too easy. They talked all the time of how troublesome and sly their ladies were, and showed off bruises; but of course, the ladies were far too dazed and miserable to be sly, the trouble came all from the nurses when they fancied some sport. The rest of the time their job was the slightest one you can imagine, for they got us in bed at seven o’clock—gave us those draughts, to make us sleep—then they sat till midnight reading papers and books, making toast and cocoa, doing
fancy-work, whistling, farting, standing at the door and calling down the hall to each other, even slipping in and out of each other’s rooms when they were especially bored, leaving their ladies locked up and unguarded.

  And in the mornings, when Dr Christie had made his round, they would take off their caps, unpin their hair, roll down their stockings and lift their skirts; and they gave us newspapers and made us stand beside them and fan their great white legs.

  Nurse Bacon did, anyway. She complained of the heat more than anyone, because of the itch in her hands. She had Betty rubbing grease into her fingers ten times a day. Sometimes she would scream. And when the weather was at its warmest she put two china basins beside her bed and slept with her hands in water. That gave her dreams.

  ‘He’s too slippy!’ she cried one night. And then, in a mumble: ‘There, I’ve lost him . . .’

  I also dreamed. I seemed to dream every time I closed my eyes. I dreamed, as you might suppose I would, of Lant Street, of the Borough, of home. I dreamed of Mr Ibbs and Mrs Sucksby.—Those were troubling dreams, however; often I woke weeping from dreams like that. Now and then I dreamed only of the madhouse: I would dream I had woken and had my day. Then I really would wake, and have the day still to do—and yet, the day was so like the day I had dreamed, I might as well have dreamed them both.—Those dreams bewildered me.

  The worst dreams of all, however, were the dreams I began to have as the weeks slipped by and the nights grew hotter and I began to get more and more muddled in my mind. They were dreams of Briar, and of Maud.

  For I never dreamed of her as I knew she really was—as a viper or a thief. I never dreamed of Gentleman. I only ever used to dream that we were back in her uncle’s house, and I was her maid. I dreamed we walked to her mother’s grave, or sat by the river. I dreamed I dressed her and brushed her hair. I dreamed—you can’t be blamed, can you, for what you dream?—I dreamed I loved her. I knew I hated her. I knew I wanted to kill her. But sometimes I would wake, in the night, not knowing. I would open my eyes and look about me, and the room would be so warm everyone would have turned and fretted in their beds—I would see Betty’s great bare leg, Nurse Bacon’s sweating face, Miss Wilson’s arm. Mrs Price put back her hair as she slept, rather in the way that Maud had used to do: I would gaze at her in my half-sleep and quite forget the weeks that had passed, since the end of April. I would forget the flight from Briar, forget the wedding in the black flint church, forget the days at Mrs Cream’s, the drive to the madhouse, the awful trick; forget I meant to escape, and what I planned to do when I had done it. I would only think, in a kind of panic, Where is she? Where is she?—and then, with a rush of relief: There she is . . . I would close my eyes again and, in an instant, be not in my bed at all but in hers. The curtains would be let down, and she would be beside me. I would feel her breath. ‘How close the night is, tonight!’ she would say, in her soft voice; and then: ‘I’m afraid! I’m afraid—!’