by Sarah Waters
I said she was right. I would give Millbank up. I said it, and wouldn’t catch her eye, I suppose she read it as shame, for she came to me again and put her hand upon my cheek. ‘It is only your own health,’ she said, ‘that I am thinking of.’
Her rings were cold upon my face. I remembered then how she had come when they had saved me from the morphia. She had come in her gown of black, and with all her hair unfastened. She had put her head upon my breast until my night-gown was wet with her tears.
Now she handed me paper and a pen, and stood at the foot of the bed and watched me write. I wrote:Selina Dawes
Selina Dawes
Selina Dawes
Selina Dawes
and, seeing the pen move across the page, she left me. Then I burned the paper in the grate.
Then I rang for Vigers and said there had been a mistake, she must clean my gown but return it to me, later, when my mother had gone out; and Mrs Prior need know nothing of it, nor Ellis.
Then I asked, Had she any letters that must be posted?—and, when she nodded and said she had one, I told her she might run with it now to the letter-box, and that, if anyone asked, she was to say it was for me. She kept her eyes well lowered as she made me her curtsey. That was yesterday. Later Mother came, and put her hand to my face again. This time, however, I pretended sleep, and didn’t look at her.
Now there is the sound of a carriage in the Walk. Mrs Wallace is coming, to take Mother to a concert. Mother will be here in a moment, I think, to give me my medicine before she leaves.
I have been to Millbank, and seen Selina; and now, everything is changed.
They were ready for me there, of course. I think the Porter was keeping watch for me, for he seemed knowing when I went to him; and when I reached the women’s gaol I found a matron waiting, and she took me at once to Miss Haxby’s room, and Mr Shillitoe was there, and Miss Ridley. It was like my first interview—that seems in a different life to me now, though it did not this afternoon. Even so, I felt the change between that time and this, for Miss Haxby didn’t smile at all, and even Mr Shillitoe looked grave.
He said he was very glad to see me there again. He had begun to fear, after his letter to me went unanswered, that the business upon the wards last week might have frightened me from them for ever. I said that I had only been a little unwell, and that the letter had been put aside by a careless servant. I saw Miss Haxby studying the shadows about my cheeks and eyes as I spoke—I think my eyes were dark, from that draught of laudanum. I think I should have been worse, however, without it, for I had not been out of my room, before to-day, for more than a week, and the medicine did lend me a kind of strength.
She said she hoped that I was quite recovered; then, that she was sorry not to have been able to talk to me, after the breaking-out. ‘There was no-one to tell us what happened, apart from poor Miss Brewer. Dawes, I’m afraid, has been very stubborn.’
I heard the scuff of Miss Ridley’s shoes, as she shifted to a more comfortable pose. Mr Shillitoe said nothing. I asked how long it was that they had kept Selina in the darks?—‘Three days,’ they told me. Which is as long as they are allowed to keep a woman there, ‘without a legal order’.
I said, ‘Three days seems very hard.’
For assaulting a matron? Miss Haxby did not think so. She said Miss Brewer was so badly hurt and shocked that she has gone from Millbank—gone from prison service altogether. Mr Shillitoe shook his head. ‘A very bad affair,’ he said.
I nodded, then asked, ‘And how is Dawes?’—‘She is quite,’ said Miss Haxby, ‘as wretched as she should be.’ They had her now picking coir on Mrs Pretty’s ward, she said; and all plans of sending her to Fulham were, of course, forgotten. Here she held my gaze. She said, ‘I imagine you, at least, will be glad of that.’
I had thought of this. I said, very steadily, that I was glad of it. For it was now more than ever that Dawes would need a friend, to counsel her. It was now, much more than before, that she would need a Visitor’s sympathies—
‘No,’ said Miss Haxby. ‘No, Miss Prior.’ How could I argue that, she asked, when it was my sympathies that had so worked on Dawes already, they had made her harm a matron and upset her cell? When it was my attentions to her that had led directly to this crisis? She said, ‘You call yourself her friend. Before your visits, she was the quietest prisoner in Millbank! What kind of friendship is it, that can provoke such passions in a girl like that?’
I said, ‘You mean to stop my visits to her.’
‘I mean to keep her calm, for her own sake. She will not be calm, with you about her.’
‘She will not be calm, without me!’
‘Then she will have to learn it.’
I said, ‘Miss Haxby’—but I stumbled over the words, for I had almost said Mother! I put a hand to my throat, and looked at Mr Shillitoe. He said, ‘The breaking-out was very serious. Suppose, Miss Prior, she should strike you next time?’
‘She won’t strike me!’ I said. I said, Couldn’t they see, how terrible her plight was, and how my visits eased it? They must only think of her: an intelligent girl, a gentle girl—the quietest girl, as Miss Haxby had said, in all of Millbank! They must think of what the prison had done to her—how it had made her, not sorry, not good, but only so miserable, so incapable of imagining the other world beyond her cell, that she had struck the matron who had come to tell her she must leave it! ‘Keep her silent, keep her unvisited,’ I said, ‘I think you will drive her mad—or else, you’ll kill her . . .’
I went on like this, and couldn’t have been more eloquent had I been arguing for my own life—I know now, it was my life I argued for; and I think the voice I spoke with came from another. I saw Mr Shillitoe grow thoughtful, as he had before. I am not sure what was said between us then. I only know he agreed, at last, that I might see her, and they would watch to see how well she did. ‘Her matron,’ he said, ‘Mrs Jelf, has also spoken in your behalf’—that seemed to influence him.
When I looked at Miss Haxby I found her gaze quite lowered; only after Mr Shillitoe had left us, and I rose to make my way to the wards, did she lift her eyes to me again. I was surprised, then, by her expression, for it was not angry so much as awkward, self-conscious. I thought, She has been shamed before me, and of course feels the sting of it. I said, ‘Let us not quarrel, Miss Haxby,’ and she answered at once that she had no wish to quarrel with me. But I had come into her gaol, knowing nothing about it—Here she hesitated, and glanced quickly at Miss Ridley. She said, ‘I must answer of course to Mr Shillitoe; yet, Mr Shillitoe cannot govern here, because this is a gaol for women. Mr Shillitoe doesn’t understand its tempers and its moods. I once joked with you that I had spent many terms in prison—so I have, Miss Prior, and I know all the twisting ways that prison habits can turn. I think that, like Mr Shillitoe, you do not know, you cannot guess, the nature of the—’ she seemed to grasp after a word, and then repeated, ‘of the temper—of the queerness of the temper—of a girl such as Dawes, when she is shut up—’
Still she seemed to grope for words: she might have been one of her own women, seeking a term out of the prison ordinary and being unable to find it. I knew, however, what she meant. But the temper she was talking of, it is gross, it is commonplace, it is what Jane Jarvis has, or Emma White—it is not Selina’s, it is not mine. I said, before she could speak again, that I would keep her cautions in mind. Then she studied me a little longer, then let Miss Ridley take me to the cells.
I felt the drug upon me, as we walked the white prison passages; I felt it more than ever when we reached the wards, for there were breezes there that made the gas-jets flicker, so that all the solid surfaces seemed to shift and bulge and shiver. I was struck, as always, by the grimness of the penal ward, its fetid air and silence; and when Mrs Pretty saw me come she gave a leer, and her face seemed wide and strange to me, as if reflected in a sheet of buckling metal. ‘Well, well, Miss Prior,’ she said—I am sure she said this. ‘And are you back again, to see yo
ur own wicked lamb?’ She took me to a door, then put her eye to its inspection slit, very slyly. Then she worked at the lock, and at the bolt of the gate behind it. ‘Go on, ma’am,’ she said at last. ‘She has been meek as anything since her spell in the darks.’
The cell that they have put her in is smaller than those on the ordinary wards, and the iron louvres at its little window, together with the mesh they put about the gas-jets, to keep the women from the flames, make it desperately gloomy. There was no table and no chair: I found her seated on the hardwood bed, hunched awkwardly over a tray of coir. She put this aside when they opened the door to me, and attempted to rise to her feet; then she swayed, and had to reach for the wall to steady herself. They have taken the star from her sleeve and given her a gown that seemed too large for her. Her cheeks were white, her temples and her lips shadowed with blue, and on her forehead there was a yellow bruise. Her fingernails are split down to the quick, from picking coir. Coir fibres dust her cap, her apron, her wrists, and all her bedding.
When Mrs Pretty had closed the door and locked it, I took a step towards her. We had said nothing yet, only gazed at one another in a kind of mutual fright; but now I think I whispered, ‘What have they done to you? What have they done?’—and at that her head gave a jerk, and she smiled and, as I watched, the smile sagged and dissolved, like a smile of wax, and she put a hand to her face and wept. I could do nothing then but go to her, and put my arm about her, and sit her back upon the bed and stroke her poor, bruised face till she was calm. She kept her head against the collar of my coat, and gripped me. When she spoke it was to say, in a whisper: ‘How weak you must think me.’
‘How weak, Selina?’
‘It is only that I have wished so much that you might come.’
She shuddered, but at last grew still. I took her hand, to exclaim over her broken fingernails, and she told me then that they must pick four pounds of coir each day, ‘or else Mrs Pretty brings us more the next day. The coir flies about—you feel you will choke with it.’ She said they have only water and dark bread to eat; and that when she is taken to chapel, she is taken in shackles.—I could not bear to hear it. But when I took her hand again, she stiffened, and drew her fingers away. ‘Mrs Pretty,’ she murmured. ‘Mrs Pretty comes and looks at us . . .’
I heard, then, a movement at the door, and after a moment I saw the inspection slit quiver, and it was slowly unclosed by blunt, white fingers. I called, ‘You need not watch us, Mrs Pretty!’ and the matron laughed, saying, that they must always watch, on that ward. But the flap did spring shut again; and I heard her move away, then call at the door of another cell.
We sat in silence. I looked at the bruise on Selina’s head—she said that she had stumbled, when they put her in the dark cell. She gave a shiver, remembering it. I said, ‘It was very terrible there’, and she nodded. She said, ‘You will know, how terrible it was’—and then: ‘I should not have been able to bear it, if you had not been there to take a little of the darkness to yourself.’
I stared at her. She went on, ‘Then I knew how good you were, to come to me, after all you had seen. The first hour they had me there, do you know what frightened me the most? Oh, it was a torment to me!—far worse than any punishment of theirs. It was the thought that you might stay from me; the thought that I might have driven you away, and with the very thing I meant to keep you near me!’
I knew it—but the knowledge had made me ill, I couldn’t bear to have her say it. I said, ‘You mustn’t, you mustn’t’—she answered, in a fierce kind of whisper, that she must! Oh, to think of that poor lady, Miss Brewer! She never meant her any harm. But to be moved—to be what they call free, to talk with other prisoners! ‘Why should I want to talk with convicts, when I couldn’t talk with you?’
Now I think I placed my hand upon her mouth. I said again, she must not say such things, she must not.—At last she pulled my fingers free and said, that it was to say such things that she had hurt Miss Brewer, that it was to say such things that she had suffered the jacket and the darks. Would I make her still be silent, after that?
Then I put my hands upon her arms and gripped her, and almost hissed. I said, And what had she gained by it? All she had done was, made them study us the closer! Didn’t she know that Miss Haxby wanted to keep me from her? That Miss Ridley would look, to see how long we were together? That Mrs Pretty would look?—that even Mr Shillitoe would look? ‘Do you know how careful we shall have to be now, how sly?’
I had drawn her to me, to say these things. Now I grew conscious of her eyes, her mouth, her breath that was warm and sour. I heard my voice, and what I had admitted.
I opened my hands, and turned from her. She said, ‘Aurora.’
I said at once, ‘Don’t say that.’
But she said it again. Aurora. Aurora.
‘You mustn’t say it.’
‘Why mustn’t I? I said it in the dark to you, and you were glad to hear it, and answered me! Why do you step from me now?’
I had risen from the bed. I said, ‘I must.’
‘Why must you?’
I said it wasn’t right that we should be so near. That it was against the rules, it was forbidden by the rules of Millbank. But now she stood and, the cell being so close, there was nowhere I could step that she could not reach me. My skirts caught her tray of coir and set the dust of it swirling, but she only stepped through it, and came close, and put her hand upon my arm. She said: ‘You want me near.’ And when I answered at once that No, I did not—‘Yes, you want me,’ she said. ‘Or—why do you have my name, upon the pages of your journal? Why do you have my flowers? Why, Aurora, do you have my hair?’
‘You sent me those things!’ I said. ‘I never asked for them!’
‘I could not have sent them,’ she answered simply, ‘if you had not longed for them to come.’
Then I could say nothing; and when she saw my face she stepped away from me and her expression changed. She said I must stand carefully, and be calm, for Mrs Pretty might look. She said I must stand, and listen to what she had to tell me. For she had been in darkness, and knew everything. And now I must know it . . .
She bowed her head a little but kept her eyes upon me, and they seemed larger than ever and dark as a magician’s. She said, Hadn’t she told me once, that there was a purpose to her time there? Hadn’t she said, that the spirits would come and reveal it to her? ‘They came, Aurora, as I lay in that cell. They came and they told me. Can’t you guess it? I think I guessed it. It was that that made me frightened.’
She passed her tongue across her lips, and swallowed. I watched her, not moving. I said, What? What was it? Why did they have her there?
She said: ‘For you. So that we might meet and, meeting, know—and knowing, join . . .’
She might have put a knife to me and twisted it: I felt my heart beat hard and, behind the beat, caught another, sharper movement—that quickening, grown fiercer than ever. I felt it, and felt an answering twisting in her . . .
It was a kind of agony.
For what she had said seemed only terrible to me. ‘You mustn’t talk like this,’ I said. ‘Why are you saying such things? What use is it, what the spirits have told you? All their wild words—we mustn’t be wild now, we must be calm, we must be sober. If I am still to come to you, until you are released—’
‘Four years,’ she said. Did I think they would go on letting me come there, for all that time? Did I think Miss Haxby would let me? Would my own mother let me? And if they did, if I could come, once every week, once every month, for half an hour a time—well, did I think that I could bear it?
I said, that I had borne it until now. I said we might appeal, against her sentence. I said, If we might only take a little care—
‘Could you bear it,’ she said flatly, ‘after to-day? Could you go on being only careful, only cool? No—’ for I had made to step towards her. ‘No, don’t move! Be steady, keep from me. Mrs Pretty might see . . .’
I put my ha
nds together, and twisted them until the gloves made my flesh burn. What choice did we have? I cried. She was tormenting me! To say that we must join—that we must join, there, at Millbank! I said again, Why had the spirits said such things to her? Why was she saying them now, to me?
‘I am saying them,’ she answered, in a whisper so thin I had to lean into the twisting dust to catch it, ‘because there is a choice, and you must make it. I can escape.’
I believe I laughed. I think I placed my hand across my mouth, and laughed. She watched, and waited. Her face was grave—I thought then, for the first time, that perhaps her days in the dark cell had clouded her reason. I looked at her dead-white cheek, her brow with the bruise upon it, and I grew sober. I said, very quietly: ‘You have said too much.’
‘I can do it,’ she answered levelly.
No, I said. It would be terribly wrong.
‘It would be wrong, by their laws only.’
No. Besides, how could she do such a thing, from Millbank?—where there were gates with locks at every passage, and matrons, and warders . . . I gazed about me, at the wooden door, the iron louvres on the windows. ‘You would need keys,’ I said. ‘You would need—unimaginable things. And what would you do, even if you could escape? Where would you go?’
Still she watched me. Still her eyes seemed very dark. Then, ‘I would need no key,’ she said, ‘while I had spirit-help. And I would come to you, Aurora. And we would go away, together.’
Just like that, she said it. Just like that. Now I did not laugh. I said, Did she think that I would go with her?
She said she thought that I would have to.
Did she think that I would leave—
