Fingersmith

  ‘Do you hear that?’ he said weakly.

  ‘Dear boy, I do,’ said Mrs Sucksby. She still knelt at his side.

  ‘What sound is it?’

  She put her red hands over his. ‘The sound of Fortune,’ she said.

  She looked at me, and then at Maud. ‘You might run.’

  I said nothing. Maud shook her head. ‘Not from this,’ she answered. ‘Not now.’

  ‘You know what follows?’

  She nodded. Mrs Sucksby glanced again at me, and then again at Maud, then closed her eyes. She sighed, as if weary.

  ‘To have lost you once, dear girl,’ she said. ‘And now, to lose you again—’

  ‘You shall not lose me!’ I cried; and her eyes flew open, and she held my gaze for a second, as if not understanding. Then she looked at John. He had tilted his head.

  ‘Here they come!’ he said.

  Mr Ibbs heard him, and ran; but he got no further than that dark little court at the back of the house before a policeman picked him up and brought him back again; and by then, two more policemen had made their way into the kitchen by the shop. They looked at Gentleman, and at the chamber-pot of blood, and—what we had not thought to look for or to hide—at the knife, which had got kicked into the shadows and had blood upon it; and they shook their heads.—As policemen tend to do when they see things like that, in the Borough.

  ‘This is nasty work, ain’t it?’ they said. ‘This is very bad. Let’s see how bad.’

  They took hold of Gentleman’s hair and drew back his head, and felt for the pulse at his neck; and then they said,

  ‘This is filthy murder. Now, who done it?’

  Maud moved, or took a step. But John moved quicker.

  ‘She done it,’ he said, without a hesitation. His cheek was darker than ever, where he had been struck before. He lifted his arm and pointed. ‘She done it. I saw her.’

  He pointed at Mrs Sucksby.

  I saw him, and heard him, but could not act. I only said, ‘What—?’ and Maud, I think, also cried out, ‘What—?’ or ‘Wait—!’

  But Mrs Sucksby rose from Gentleman’s side. Her taffeta dress was soaked in his blood, the brooch of diamonds at her bosom turned to a brooch of rubies. Her hands were crimson, from fingertip to wrist. She looked like the picture of a murderess from one of the penny papers.

  ‘I done it,’ she said. ‘Lord knows, I’m sorry for it now; but I done it. And these girls here are innocent girls, and know nothing at all about it; and have harmed no-one.’

  17.

  My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. Now those days all came to an end.

  The police took every one of us, save Dainty. They took us, and kept us in gaol while they tore up the Lant Street kitchen, looking for clues, for stashes of money and poke. They kept us in separate cells, and every day they came and asked the same set of questions.

  ‘What was the murdered man, to you?’

  I said he was a friend of Mrs Sucksby’s.

  ‘Been long, at Lant Street?’

  I said I was born there.

  ‘What did you see, on the night of the crime?’

  Here, however, I always stumbled. Sometimes it seemed to me that I had seen Maud take up the knife; sometimes I even seemed to remember seeing her use it. I know I saw her touch the table-top, I know I saw the glitter of the blade. I know she stepped away as Gentleman started to stagger. But Mrs Sucksby had been there too, she had moved as quick as anyone; and sometimes I thought it was her hand I remembered seeing dart and flash . . . At last I told the simple truth: that I did not know what I had seen. It didn’t matter, anyway. They had John Vroom’s word, and Mrs Sucksby’s own confession. They didn’t need me. On the fourth day after they took us, they let me go.

  The others they kept longer.

  Mr Ibbs was brought before the magistrate first. His trial lasted half-an-hour. He was done, after all, not on account of the poke left lying about the kitchen—he was too good at taking the seals and stampings off, for that—but for the sake of some of the notes in his cigarette box. They were marked ones. The police, it turned out, had been watching the business at Mr Ibbs’s shop, for more than a month; and in the end they had got Phil—who, you might remember, had sworn he’d never do another term in gaol, at any cost—to plant the marked notes on him. Mr Ibbs was found to have handled stolen goods: he was sent to Pentonville. Of course, he knew many of the men in there, and might be supposed to have had an easy time among them—except that, here was a funny thing: the fingersmiths and cracksmen who had been so grateful to get an extra shilling from him on the outside, now quite turned against him; and I think his time was very miserable. I went to visit him, a week after he went in. He saw me, and put his hands before his face, and was in general so changed and so brought down, and looked at me so queerly, I could not bear it. I didn’t go again.

  His sister, poor thing, was found by the police in her bed at Lant Street, while they were going through the house. We had all forgotten her. She was put on the ward of a parish hospital. The move, however, was too great a shock for her; and she died.

  John Vroom could not be pinned to any crime, save—through his coat—to that old one of dog-stealing. He was let off with six nights in Tothill Fields, and a flogging. They say he was so disliked in his gaol, the keepers played cards for who should be the one to flog him; that they flung in one or two extras above his twelve, for fun; and that after, he cried like a baby. Dainty met him at the prison gate, and he punched her and blacked her eye. It was thanks to him, though, that she had got clean off from Lant Street.

  I never spoke to him again. He took a room for him and Dainty in another house, and kept out of my way. I saw him, only once; and that was in the court-room, at Mrs Sucksby’s trial.

  The trial came up very quick. I spent the nights before it at Lant Street, lying awake in my old bed; sometimes Dainty came back, to sleep beside me and keep me company. She was the only one, out of all my old pals, who would: for of course, everyone else supposed—from the story having been put about, before—that I was a cheat. It came out that I had taken that room, in the house across from Mr Ibbs’s; and had lived there, in what seemed a sneaking sort of way, for almost a week. Why had I done that? Then someone said they saw me running, on the night of the murder, with a look of wildness in my eye. They talked about my mother, and the bad blood that flowed in me. They didn’t say I was brave, now; they said I was bold. They said they wouldn’t have been surprised if it was me that had put the knife in, after all; and Mrs Sucksby—who still loved me like a daughter, though I had turned out bad—who had stepped forward and taken the blame . . .

  When I walked out in the Borough, people cursed me. Once, a girl threw a stone at me.

  At any other time it would have broken my heart. Now, I did not care. I had only one thought, and that was to see Mrs Sucksby as often as I could. They had her in the Horsemonger Lane Gaol: I spent all my days there—sitting on the step outside the gate, when it was too early to be let in; talking with her keepers, or with the man who was to plead her case in court. Some pal of Mr Ibbs’s had found him for us; he was said to have regularly saved the worst sort of villains from the rope. But he told me, honestly, that our case was a bad one. ‘The most we can hope,’ he said, ‘is that the judge show mercy, for the sake of her age.’

  More than once I said, ‘Suppose it could be proved she never did it?’

  He’d shake his head. ‘Where is the evidence?’ he’d say. ‘Besides, she has admitted to it. Why should she do that?’

  I did not know, and could not answer. He would leave me then, at the gate of the gaol—going quickly off, stepping into the street and calling out for a cab-man; and I’d watch him go with my hands at my head, for his shout, and the rattle of hooves and wheels, the movement of people, the very stones beneath my feet, would seem harsh to me. Everything seemed harsh, and loud, and harder and faster than it ought to have been, just then. Many times I would stop, and remember Gentleman, grip
ping the wound in his stomach, looking disbelievingly at our own disbelieving faces. ‘How did this happen?’ he had said. I wanted to say it, now, to everyone I saw: How did this happen? How can this be? Why do you only stand and watch me . . . ?

  I would have written letters; if I had known how to write, and who to send them to. I would have gone to the house of the man who was to be judge; if I had known how to find it. But I did nothing like that. What little comfort I got, I got at Mrs Sucksby’s side; and the gaol, though it was so grim—so dark, and bleak—at least was also quiet. I got to spend more time there than I ought to have, through the kindness of the keepers: I think they thought me younger and less of a sharper than I was. ‘Here’s your daughter,’ they’d say, unlocking the gate to Mrs Sucksby’s cell; and every time, she would quickly lift her head and study my face, or glance beyond my shoulder, with a troubled look—as if, I thought, not quite believing they had let me come again and meant to let me stay.

  Then she’d blink, and try at a smile. ‘Dear girl. Quite alone?’

  ‘Quite alone,’ I’d answer.

  ‘That’s good,’ she’d say after a moment, taking my hand. ‘Ain’t it? Just you and me. That’s good.’

  She liked to sit with my hand in hers. She did not like to talk. When at first I’d weep, and curse, and beg her to take back her story, my words would so upset her I feared she’d grow ill.

  ‘No more,’ she’d say, very pale in the face and set about the mouth. ‘I done it, that’s all. I don’t want to hear no more about it.’

  So then I’d remember that dander of hers, and keep silent, and only smooth her fingers in mine. They seemed to grow thinner, every time I saw her. The keepers said she left her dinners quite untouched. The sight of the dwindling of those great hands upset me, more than I can say: it seemed to me that everything, that was so wrong, would be put right if only Mrs Sucksby’s hands could be made to be handsome again. I had spent what money there was in the house at Lant Street, on finding a lawyer; but all that I could make now through borrowing or pawning I put on little dishes to try and tempt her—on shrimps, and saveloys, and suet-puddings. Once I took her a sugar mouse, thinking she might remember the time she had put me in her bed and told me about Nancy from Oliver Twist. I don’t think she did, however; she only took it and set it distractedly aside, saying she would try it later, like she did with everything else. In the end her keepers told me to save my money. She had been passing the dishes to them.

  Many times she held my face in her hands. Many times she kissed me. Once or twice she gripped me hard, and seemed about to speak on some awful matter; but always, at the last, she would turn the matter aside and it would be lost. If there were things I might have asked her—if I was troubled by queer ideas, and doubts—I kept quiet as she did. That time was bad enough; why make it worse? We talked instead of me—of how I should do now and in the future.

  ‘You’ll keep up the old place, at Lant Street?’ she’d say.

  ‘Won’t I!’ I’d answer.

  ‘You won’t think of leaving?’

  ‘Leaving? Why, I mean to keep it ready, against the day they let you out . . .’

  I did not tell her how very changed the house was, now that she and Mr Ibbs, and Mr Ibbs’s sister, had gone. I did not tell her that neighbours had left off calling; that a girl threw a stone at me; that people—strangers—would come and stand, for hours at a time, at the doors and windows, hoping for a glimpse of the place where Gentleman had died. I did not say how hard I had worked, with Dainty, to take the blood-stain from the floor; how we had washed and washed; how many buckets of water we had carried off, crimson; how at last we had had to give it up, because the constant scrubbing began to lift the surface of the boards and turn the pale wood underneath a horrible pink. I didn’t tell her of all the places—the doors, the ceiling—and all the things—the pictures on the walls, the ornaments upon the mantel, the dinner-plates, the knives and forks—that we found marked with streaks and splashes of Gentleman’s blood.

  And I did not say how, as I swept and scrubbed the kitchen, I chanced on a thousand little reminders of my old life—dog-hairs, and chips of broken cups, bad farthings, playing cards, the cuts on the door-frame made by Mr Ibbs’s knife to mark my height as I grew up; nor how I covered my face and wept, at every one.

  At night, if I slept, I dreamed of murder. I dreamed I killed a man, and had to walk the streets of London with his body in a bag too small to hold it. I dreamed of Gentleman. I dreamed I met him among the graves at the little red chapel at Briar and he showed me the tomb of his mother. The tomb had a lock upon it, and I had a blank and file and must cut the key to fit; and every night I would set to work, knowing I must work quickly, quickly; and every time, just as the job was almost done, some queer disaster would happen—the key would shrink or grow too large, the file would soften in my fingers; there would be a cut—the final cut—I could not make, never make in time . . .

  Too late, Gentleman would say.

  One time the voice was Maud’s.

  Too late.

  I looked, but could not see her.

  I had not seen her, since the night that Gentleman died. I didn’t know where she was. I knew the police had kept her longer than they kept me—for she gave them her name, and it got into the newspapers; and, of course, Dr Christie saw it. I heard it, from the keepers at the gaol. It had all come out, how she was Gentleman’s wife, and had supposedly been in a madhouse and had escaped; and how the police didn’t know what to do with her—whether to let her go, or lock her up as a lunatic, or what. Dr Christie said only he could decide; so they called him in to examine her. I nearly had a fit when I heard that. I still couldn’t go near bath-tubs. But what happened, was this: he took one look at her, was seen to stagger and grow white; then declared himself only overcome with emotion, to find her so perfectly cured. He said this showed how good his methods were. He had the papers give details of his house. He got lots of new lady patients out of it, I think, and quite made his fortune.

  Maud herself was set at liberty, then; and after that, she seemed to vanish. I guessed she had gone back home to Briar. I know she never came to Lant Street. I supposed her too afraid!—for of course, I would have throttled her if she had.

  I did wonder if she might, however. I wondered it, every day. ‘Perhaps today, ’ I would think each morning, ‘will be the day she’ll come.’ And then, each night: ‘Perhaps tomorrow . . .’

  But, as I have said, she never did. What came instead, was the day of the trial. It came in the middle of August. The sun had kept on blazing all through that awful summer, and the court—being packed with watchers—was close: every hour a man was called to throw water on the floor to try and cool it. I sat with Dainty. I’d hoped I might sit in the box with Mrs Sucksby, and hold her hand; but the policemen laughed in my face when I asked it. They made her sit alone, and when they took her in and out of the room, they put cuffs on her. She wore a grey prison gown that made her face seem almost yellow, but her silver hair shone very bright against the dark wood walls of the court. She flinched when she first came up, and saw the crowd of strangers that had come to see her tried. Then she found out my face among them and grew, I thought, more easy. Her eye came back to mine, after that, as the day went on—though I saw her looking, too, about the court, as if in search of another. At the last, however, her gaze would always fall.

  When she spoke, her voice was weak. She said she had stabbed Gentleman in a moment of anger, in a quarrel over money he owed for the renting of her room.

  She earned her money from the letting of rooms? asked the prosecuting lawyer.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  And not from the handling of stolen goods, or the unlicensed nursing—commonly known as farming—of orphaned infants?

  ‘No.’

  Then they brought in men to say they had seen her, at different times, with different bits of poke; and—what was worse—found women who swore they had given her babies that had very s
oon afterwards died . . .

  Then John Vroom spoke. They had put him in a suit like a clerk’s, and combed and shined his hair; he looked more like an infant than ever. He said he had seen everything that took place in the Lant Street kitchen, on the fatal night. He had seen Mrs Sucksby put in the knife. She had cried, ‘You blackguard, take that!’ And he had seen her with the knife in her hand, for at least a minute, before she did.

  ‘At least a minute?’ the lawyer said. ‘You are quite sure? You know how long a minute is? Look at that clock, there. Watch the movement of the hand . . .’

  We all watched it sweep. The court fell still, to do it. I never knew a minute so long. The lawyer looked back at John.

  ‘As long as that?’ he said.

  John began to cry. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, through his tears.

  Then they brought the knife out, for him to say it was the one. The crowd broke out in murmurs when they saw it; and when John wiped his eyes and looked, and nodded, a lady swooned. The knife was shown to all the men of the jury then, one by one, and the lawyer said they must be sure to note how the blade was sharpened, more than it naturally would have been for a knife of that kind—that it was the sharpening of it that made Gentleman’s wound so bad. He said that broke in pieces Mrs Sucksby’s story about the quarrel, by showing evidence of forethought—

  I nearly started out of my seat, when I heard that. Then I caught Mrs Sucksby’s eye. She shook her head, and looked so pleadingly at me to be silent, I fell back; and it never came out that the knife was sharp not because she had sharpened it, but because I had. They never called me to the stand. Mrs Sucksby would not let them. They did call Charles; but he wept so hard, and shook so badly, the judge declared him unfit. He was sent back to his aunty’s.

  No-one was told about me, and Maud. No-one mentioned Briar or old Mr Lilly. No-one came forward to say that Gentleman was a villain—that he had tried to rob heiresses—that he had ruined people through the selling of counterfeit stock. They made out that he was a decent young man with a promising future; they said that Mrs Sucksby had robbed him of it through simple greed. They even found out his family, and brought his parents to the trial—and you’ll never believe it, but it turned out that all his tales of being a gentleman’s son were so much puff. His father and mother ran a small kind of draper’s shop, in a street off the Holloway Road. His sister taught piano. His real name was not Richard Rivers or even Richard Wells; it was Frederick Bunt.