She is warm and quick. I touch her arm. It is as slender as Agnes's, but hard. I can smell beer upon her breath. She speaks. Her voice is not at all how I have dreamed it, but light and pert; though she tries to make it sweeter. She tells me of her journey, of the train from London— when she says the word, London, she seems conscious of the sound; I suppose she is not in the habit of naming it, of considering it a place of destination or desire. It is a wonder and a torment to me that a girl so slight, so trifling as she, should have lived her life in London, while mine has been all at Briar; but a consolation, also— for if she can thrive there, then might not I, with all my talents, thrive better?
So I tell myself, while describing her duties. Again I see her eye my gown and slippers and now, recognising the pity in her gaze as well as the scorn, I think I blush.
I say, 'Your last mistress, of course, was quite a fine lady? She would laugh, I suppose, to look at me!'
My voice is not quite steady. But if there is a bitterness to my tone, she does not catch it. Instead, 'Oh, no, miss,' she says. 'She was far too kind a lady. And besides, she always said that grand clothes weren't worth buttons; but that it was the heart inside them that counts.'
She looks so taken with this— so taken in, by her own fiction— so innocent, not sly— I sit a moment and regard her in silence. Then I take her hand again. 'You are a good girl, Susan, I think,' I say. She smiles and looks modest. Her fingers move in mine.
'Lady Alice always said so, miss,' she says.
'Did she?'
'Yes, miss.'
Then she remembers something. She pulls from me, reaches into her pocket, and brings out a letter. It is folded, sealed, directed in an
affected feminine hand; and of course comes from Richard. I hesitate, then take it— rise and walk, unfold it, far from her gaze.
No names! it says;— but I think you know me. Here is the girl who will make us rich— that fresh little finger smith, I've had cause in the past to employ her skills, and can commend her. She is watching as I write this, and oh! her ignorance is perfect. I imagine her now, gazing at you. She is luckier than I, who must pass two filthy weeks before enjoying that pleasure.— Burn this, will you?
I have thought myself as cool as he. I am not, I am not, I feel her watching— -just as he describes!— and grow fearful. I stand with the letter in my hand, then am aware all at once that I have stood too long. If she should have seen— ! I fold the paper, once, twice, thrice— finally it will not fold at all. I do not yet know that she cannot read or write so much as her own name; when I learn it I laugh, in an awful relief. But I don't quite believe her. 'Not read?' I say. 'Not a letter, not a word?'— and I hand her a book.
She does not want to take it; and when she does, she opens its covers, turns a page, gazes hard at a piece of text— but all in a way that is wrong, indefinably anxious and wrong, and too subtle to counterfeit.— At last, she blushes.
Then I take the book back. 'I am sorry,' I say. But I am not sorry, I am only amazed.
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Not to read! It seems to me a kind of fabulous insufficiency— like the absence, in a martyr or a saint, of the capacity for pain.
The eight o'clock sounds, to call me to my uncle. At the door I pause. I must, after all, make some blushing reference to Richard; and I say what I ought and her look, as it should, becomes suddenly crafty and then grows clear. She tells me how kind he is.
She says it— again— as if she believes it. Perhaps she does. Perhaps kindness is measured to a different standard, where she comes from. I feel the points and edges of the folded note he has sent by her hand, in the pocket of my skirt.
What she does while alone in my chambers I cannot say, but I
imagine her fingering the silks of my gowns, trying out my boots, my gloves, my sashes. Does she take an eye-glass to my jewels? Perhaps she is planning already what she will do, when they are hers: this brooch she will keep, from this she will prise the stones to sell them, the ring of gold that was my father's she will pass to her young man . . .
'You are distracted, Maud,' my uncle says. 'Have you another occupation to which you would rather attend?'
'No, sir,' I say.
'Perhaps you begrudge me your little labour. Perhaps you wish that I had left you at the madhouse, all those years ago. Forgive me: I had supposed myself performing you some service, by taking you from there. But perhaps you would rather dwell among lunatics, than among books? Hmm?'
'No, Uncle.'
He pauses. I think he will return to his notes. But he goes on.
'It would be a simple matter enough, to summon Mrs Stiles and have her take you back. You are sure you don't desire me to do that?— send for William Inker and the dog-cart?' As he speaks, he leans to study me, his weak gaze fierce behind the spectacles that guard it. Then he pauses again, and almost smiles. 'What would they make of you upon the wards, I wonder,' he says, in a different voice, 'with all that you know now?'
He says it slowly, then mumbles the question over; as if it is a biscuit that has left crumbs beneath his tongue. I do not answer, but lower my gaze until he has worked his humour out. Presently he twists his neck and looks again at the pages upon his desk.
'So, so. The Whipping Milliners. Read me the second volume, with the punctuation all complete; and mark— the paging is irregular. I'll note the sequence here.'
It is from this that I am reading when she comes to take me back to my drawing- room.
She stands at the door, looking over the walls of books, the painted windows. She hovers at the pointing finger that my uncle keeps to mark the bounds of innocence at Briar, just as I once did; and— again, like me— in her innocence she does not see it, and tries to cross it. I must keep her from that, more even than my uncle must!— and while he jerks and screams I go softly to her, and touch her. She flinches at the feel of my fingers.
I say, 'Don't be frightened, Susan.' I show her the brass hand in the floor.
I have forgotten that, of course, she might look at anything there, anything at all, it 156
would be so much ink upon paper. Remembering, I am filled again with wonder— and then with a spiteful kind of envy. I have to draw back my hand from her arm, for fear I will pinch her.
I ask her, as we walk to my room, What does she think of my uncle?
She believes him composing a dictionary.
We sit at lunch. I have no appetite, and pass my plate to her. I lean back in my chair, and watch as she runs her thumb along the edge of china, admires the weave of the napkin she spreads on her knee. She might be an auctioneer, a house-agent: she holds each item of cutlery as if gauging the worth of the metal from which it is cast. She eats three eggs, spooning them quickly, neatly into her mouth— not shuddering at the yielding of the yolk, not thinking, as she swallows, of the closing of her own throat about the meat. She wipes her lips with her fingers, touches her tongue to some spot upon her knuckle; then swallows again.
You have come to Briar, I think, to swallow up me.
But of course, I want her to do it. I need her to do it. And already I seem to feel myself beginning to give up my life. I give it up easily, as burning wicks give up smoke, to tarnish the glass that guards them; as spiders spin threads of silver, to bind up quivering moths. I imagine it settling, tight, about her. She does not know it. She will not know it until, too late, she will look and see how it has clothed and changed her, made her like me. For now, she is only tired, restless, bored: I take her walking about the park, and she follows, leadenly; we sit and sew, and she yawns and rubs her eyes, gazing at nothing. She chews her fingernails— stops, when she sees me looking; then after a minute draws down a length of hair and bites the tip of that.
'You are thinking of London,' I say.