Fingersmith

  That made me thoughtful. For a minute, we sat and said nothing. And what I asked her next was something I had never asked before—something which, in all my years at Lant Street, amongst all those dodgers and thieves, I had never heard anyone ask, not ever. I said, in a whisper,

  ‘Do you think it hurts, Mrs Sucksby, when they drop you?’

  Her hand, that was smoothing my hair, grew still. Then it started up stroking, sure as before. She said,

  ‘I should say you don’t feel nothing but the rope about your neck. Rather ticklish, I should think it.’

  ‘Ticklish?’

  ‘Say then, pricklish.’

  Still her hand kept smoothing.

  ‘But when the drop is opened?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t you say you felt it then?’

  She shifted her leg. ‘Perhaps a twitch,’ she admitted, ‘when the drop is opened.’

  I thought of the men I had seen fall at Horsemonger Lane. They twitched, all right. They twitched and kicked about, like monkeys on sticks.

  ‘But it comes that quick at the last,’ she went on then, ‘that I rather think the quickness must take the pain clean out of it. And when it comes to dropping a lady—well, you know they place the knot in such a way, Sue, that the end comes all the quicker?’

  I looked up at her again. She had set her candle on the floor, and the light striking her face all from beneath, it made her cheeks seem swollen and her eyes seem old. I shivered, and she moved her hand to my shoulder and rubbed me, hard, through the velvet.

  Then she tilted her head. ‘There’s Mr Ibbs’s sister, quite bewildered again,’ she said, ‘and calling on her mother. She has been calling on her, poor soul, these fifteen years. I shouldn’t like to come to that, Sue. I should say that, of all the ways a body might go, the quick and the neat way might, after all, be best.’

  She said it; and then she winked.

  She said it, and seemed to mean it.

  I do sometimes wonder, however, whether she mightn’t only have said it to be kind.

  But I didn’t think that then. I only rose and kissed her, and made my hair neat where she had stroked it loose; and then came the thud of the kitchen door again, and this time heavier feet upon the stairs, and then Dainty’s voice.

  ‘Where are you, Sue? Ain’t you coming for a dance? Mr Ibbs has got his wind up, we’re having a right old laugh down here.’

  Her shout woke half the babies, and that half woke the other. But Mrs Sucksby said that she would see to them, and I went back down, and this time I did dance, with Gentleman as my partner. He held me in a waltz-step. He was drunk and held me tight. John danced again with Dainty, and we bumped about the kitchen for a half-an-hour—Gentleman all the time still calling, ‘Go it, Johnny!’ and ‘Come up, boy! Come up!’, and Mr Ibbs stopping once to rub a bit of butter on his lips, to keep the whistle sweet.

  Next day, at midday, was when I left them. I packed all my bits of stuff into the canvas-covered trunk and wore the plain brown dress and the cloak and, over my flat hair, a bonnet. I had learned as much as Gentleman could teach me after three days’ work. I knew my story and my new name—Susan Smith. There was only one more thing that needed to be done, and as I sat taking my last meal in that kitchen—which was bread and dried meat, the meat rather too dried, and clinging to my gums—Gentleman did it. He brought from his bag a piece of paper and a pen and some ink, and wrote me out a character.

  He wrote it off in a moment. Of course, he was used to faking papers. He held it up for the ink to dry, then read it out. It began:

  ‘To whom it might concern. Lady Alice Dunraven, of Whelk Street, Mayfair, recommends Miss Susan Smith’—and it went on like that, I forget the rest of it, but it sounded all right to me. He placed it flat again and signed it in a lady’s curling hand. Then he held it to Mrs Sucksby.

  ‘What do you think, Mrs S?’ he said, smiling. ‘Will that get Sue her situation? ’

  But Mrs Sucksby said she couldn’t hope to judge it.

  ‘You know best, dear boy,’ she said, looking away.

  Of course, if we ever took help at Lant Street, it wasn’t character we looked for so much as lack of it. There was a little dwarfish girl that used to come sometimes, to boil the babies’ napkins and to wash the floors; but she was a thief. We couldn’t have had honest girls come. They would have seen enough in three minutes of the business of the house to do for us all. We couldn’t have had that.

  So Mrs Sucksby waved the paper away, and Gentleman read it through a second time, then winked at me, then folded it and sealed it and put it in my trunk. I swallowed the last of my dried meat and bread, and fastened my cloak. There was only Mrs Sucksby to say good-bye to. John Vroom and Dainty never got up before one. Mr Ibbs was gone to crack a safe at Bow: he had kissed my cheek an hour before, and given me a shilling. I put my hat on. It was a dull brown thing, like my dress. Mrs Sucksby set it straight. Then she put her hands to my face and smiled.

  ‘God bless you, Sue!’ she said. ‘You are making us rich!’

  But then her smile grew awful. I had never been parted from her before, for more than a day. She turned away, to hide her falling tears.

  ‘Take her quick,’ she said to Gentleman. ‘Take her quick, and don’t let me see it!’

  And so he put his arm about my shoulders and led me from the house. He found a boy to walk behind us, carrying my trunk. He meant to take me to a cab-stand and drive me to the station at Paddington, and see me on my train.

  The day was a miserable one. Even so, it was not so often I got to cross the water, and I said I should like to walk as far as Southwark Bridge, to look at the view. I had thought I should see all of London from there; but the fog grew thicker the further we went. At the bridge it seemed worst of all. You could see the black dome of St Paul’s, the barges on the water; you could see all the dark things of the city, but not the fair—the fair were lost or made like shadows.

  ‘Queer thing, to think of the river down there,’ said Gentleman, peering over the edge. He leaned, and spat.

  We had not bargained on the fog. It made the traffic slow to a crawl, and though we found a cab, after twenty minutes we paid the driver off and walked again. I had been meant to catch the one o’clock train; now, stepping fast across some great square, we heard that hour struck out, and then the quarter, and then the half—all maddeningly damp and half-hearted, they sounded, as if the clappers and the bells that rung them had been wound about with flannel.

  ‘Had we not rather turn around,’ I said, ‘and try again tomorrow?’

  But Gentleman said there would be a driver and a trap sent out to Marlow, to meet my train there; and I had better be late, he thought, than not arrive at all.

  But after all, when we got to Paddington at last we found the trains all delayed and made slow, just like the traffic: we had to wait another hour then, until the guard should raise the signal that the Bristol train—which was to be my train as far as Maidenhead, where I must get off and join another—was ready to be boarded. We stood beneath the ticking clock, fidgeting and blowing on our hands. They had lit the great lamps there, but the fog having come in and mixed with the steam, it drifted from arch to arch and made the light very poor. The walls were hung with black, from the death of Prince Albert; the crape had got streaked by birds. I thought it very gloomy, for so grand a place. And of course, there was a vast press of people beside us, all waiting and cursing, or jostling by, or letting their children and their dogs run into our legs.

  ‘Fuck this,’ said Gentleman in a hard peevish voice, when the wheel of a bath-chair ran over his toe. He stooped to wipe the dust from his boot, then straightened and lit up a cigarette, then coughed. He had his collar turned high and wore a black slouch hat. His eyes were yellow at the whites, as if stained with flip. He did not, at that moment, look like a man a girl would go silly over.

  He coughed again. ‘Fuck this cheap tobacco, too,’ he said, pulling free a strand that had come loose on his tongue. Then he caught my eye and
his face changed. ‘Fuck this cheap life, in all its forms—eh, Suky? No more of that for you and me, soon.’

  I looked away from him, saying nothing. I had danced a fast waltz with him the night before; now, away from Lant Street and Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, amongst all the men and women that were gathered grumbling about us, he seemed just another stranger, and I was shy of him. I thought, You’re nothing to me. And again I almost said that we ought to turn round and go home; but I knew that if I did he would grow more peevish and show his temper; and so, I did not.

  He finished his smoke, then smoked another. He went off for a piddle, and I went off for a piddle of my own. I heard a whistle blown as I was tidying my skirts; and when I got back, I found the guard had sent out the word and half the crowd had started up and was making in a great sweating rush for the waiting train. We went with them, Gentleman leading me to a second-class coach, then handing up my trunk to the man who was fixing the bags and boxes on the roof. I took a place beside a white-faced woman with a baby on her arm; across from her were two stout farmer-types. I think she was glad to see me get on, for of course, me being dressed so neat and comely, she couldn’t tell—ha ha!—that I was a thieving Borough girl. Behind me came a boy and his old dad, with a canary in a cage. The boy sat beside the farmers. The old dad sat by me. The coach tilted and creaked, and we all put back our heads and stared at the bits of dust and varnish that tumbled from the ceiling where the luggage thumped and slithered about above.

  The door hung open another minute and then was closed. In all the fuss of getting aboard I had hardly looked at Gentleman. He had handed me on, then turned to talk with the guard. Now he came to the open window and said,

  ‘I’m afraid you may be very late, Sue. But I think the trap will wait for you at Marlow. I am sure it will wait. You must hope that it will.’

  I knew at once that it would not, and felt a rush of misery and fear. I said quickly,

  ‘Come with me, can’t you? And see me to the house?’

  But how could he do that? He shook his head and looked sorry. The two farmer-types, the woman, the boy and the old dad all watched us—wondering I suppose what house we meant, and what a man in a slouch hat, with a voice like that, was doing talking to a girl like me about it.

  Then the porter climbed down from the roof, there came another whistle, the train gave a horrible lurch and began to move off. Gentleman lifted up his hat and followed until the engine got up its speed; then he gave it up—I saw him turn, put his hat back on, twist up his collar. Then he was gone. The coach creaked harder and began to sway. The woman and the men put their hands to the leather straps; the boy put his face to the window. The canary put its beak to the bars of its cage. The baby began to cry. It cried for half an hour.

  ‘Ain’t you got any gin?’ I said to the woman at last.

  ‘Gin?’ she said—like I might have said, poison. Then she made a mouth, and showed me her shoulder—not so pleased to have me sitting by her, the uppity bitch, after all.

  What with her and the baby, and the fluttering bird; and the old dad—who fell asleep and snorted; and the boy—who made paper pellets; and the farmer-types—who smoked and grew bilious; and the fog—that made the train jerk and halt and arrive at Maidenhead two hours later than its time, so that I missed one Marlow train and must wait for the next one—what with all that, my journey was very wretched. I had not brought any food with me, for we had all supposed I should arrive at Briar in time to take a servant’s tea there. I had not had a morsel since that dinner of bread and dried meat, at noon: it had stuck to my gums then, but I should have called it wonderful at Maidenhead, seven hours later. The station there was not like Paddington, where there were coffee-stalls and milk-stalls and a pastry-cook’s shop. There was only one place for vittles, and that was shut up and closed. I sat on my trunk. My eyes stung, from the fog. When I blew my nose, I turned a handkerchief black. A man saw me do it. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I ain’t crying!’ I said.

  He winked, then asked me my name.

  It was one thing to flirt in town, however. But I wasn’t in town now. I wouldn’t answer. When the train came for Marlow I sat at the back of a coach, and he sat at the front, but with his face my way—he tried for an hour to catch my eye. I remembered Dainty saying that she had sat on a train once, with a gentleman near, and he had opened his trousers and showed her his cock, and asked her to hold it; and she had held it, and he had given her a pound. I wondered what I would do, if this man asked me to touch his cock—whether I would scream, or look the other way, or touch it, or what.

  But then, I hardly needed the pound, where I was headed!

  Anyway, money like that was hard to move on. Dainty had never been able to spend hers for fear her father should see it and know she’d been gay. She hid it behind a loose brick in the wall of the starch works, and put a special mark on the brick, that only she would know. She said she would tell it on her death-bed, and we could use the pound to bury her.

  Well, the man on my train watched me very hard, but if he had his trousers open I never saw; and at last he tilted his hat to me and got off. There were more stops after that, and at every one someone else got off, from further down along the train; and no-one got on. The stations grew smaller and darker, until finally there was nothing at them but a tree—there was nothing to see anywhere, but trees, and beyond them bushes, and beyond them fog—grey fog, not brown—with the black night sky above it. And when the trees and the bushes seemed just about at their thickest, and the sky was blacker than I should have thought a sky naturally could be, the train stopped a final time; and that was Marlow.

  Here no-one got off save me. I was the last passenger of all. The guard called the stop, and came to lift down my trunk. He said,

  ‘You’ll want that carrying. Is there no-one come to meet you?’

  I told him there was supposed to be a man with a trap, to take me up to Briar. He said, Did I mean the trap that came to fetch the post? That would have been and gone, three hours before. He looked me over.

  ‘Come down from London, have you?’ he said. Then he called to the driver, who was looking from his cab. ‘She’ve come down from London, meant for Briar. I told her, the Briar trap will have come and gone.’

  ‘That’ll have come and gone, that will,’ called the driver. ‘That’ll have come and gone, I should say three hours back.’

  I stood and shivered. It was colder here than at home. It was colder and darker and the air smelt queer, and the people—didn’t I say it?—the people were howling simpletons.

  I said, ‘Ain’t there a cab-man could take me?’

  ‘A cab-man?’ said the guard. He shouted it to the driver. ‘Wants a cab-man!’

  ‘A cab-man!’

  They laughed until they coughed. The guard took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth, saying, ‘Dearie me, oh! dearie, dearie me. A cab-man, at Marlow!’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ I said. ‘Fuck off, the pair of you.’

  And I caught up my trunk and walked with it to where I could see one or two lights shining, that I thought must be the houses of the village. The guard said, ‘Why, you hussy—! I shall let Mr Way know about you. See what he thinks—you bringing your London tongue down here—!’

  I can’t say what I meant to do next. I did not know how far it was to Briar. I did not even know which road I ought to take. London was forty miles away, and I was afraid of cows and bulls.

  But after all, country roads aren’t like city ones. There are only about four of them, and they all go to the same place in the end. I started to walk, and had walked a minute when there came, behind me, the sound of hooves and creaking wheels. And then a cart drew alongside me, and the driver pulled up and lifted up a lantern, to look at my face.

  ‘You’ll be Susan Smith,’ he said, ‘come down from London. Miss Maud’ve been fretting after you all day.’

  He was an oldish man and his name was William Inker. He was Mr Lilly’s groom. H
e took my trunk and helped me into the seat beside his own, and geed up the horse; and when—being struck by the breeze as we drove—he felt me shiver, he reached for a tartan blanket for me to put about my legs.

  It was six or seven miles to Briar, and he took it at an easy sort of trot, smoking a pipe. I told him about the fog—there was still something of a mist, even now, even there—and the slow trains.

  He said, ‘That’s London. Known for its fogs, ain’t it? Been much down to the country before?’

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  ‘Been maiding in the city, have you? Good place, your last one?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ I said.

  ‘Rum way of speaking you’ve got, for a lady’s maid,’ he said then. ‘Been to France ever?’

  I took a second, smoothing the blanket out over my lap.

  ‘Once or twice,’ I said.

  ‘Short kind of chaps, the French chaps, I expect? In the leg, I mean.’

  Now, I only knew one Frenchman—a housebreaker, they called him Jack the German, I don’t know why. He was tall enough; but I said, to please William Inker,

  ‘Shortish, I suppose.’

  ‘I expect so,’ he said.

  The road was perfectly quiet and perfectly dark, and I imagined the sound of the horse, and the wheels, and our voices, carrying far across the fields. Then I heard, from rather near, the slow tolling of a bell—a very mournful sound, it seemed to me at that moment, not like the cheerful bells of London. It tolled nine times.

  ‘That’s the Briar bell, sounding the hour,’ said William Inker.

  We sat in silence after that, and in a little time we reached a high stone wall and took a road that ran beside it. Soon the wall became a great arch, and then I saw behind it the roof and the pointed windows of a greyish house, half-covered with ivy. I thought it a grand enough crib, but not so grand nor so grim perhaps as Gentleman had painted it. But when William Inker slowed the horse and I put the blanket from me and reached for my trunk, he said,