The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  ‘The new lass looks like trouble too,’ Pru called out. ‘She stared all night. Gave me such a terrific fright.’

  I heard Charles laughing. ‘Could be she planned to sharpen her teeth on you.’

  ‘Oh, no! She’s all airs and graces. You should hear her speak! Can you credit it? A black! We got one who’s got a princess shoved up her pin-cushion.’

  The scrape of a chair sent me clambering to my feet and I threw myself back upstairs, heart clattering in my chest, feet landing hard as bullets.

  It so happened that I was to light fires in Benham’s library next. I tried to shake off the angry thoughts that wanted to crack me, like an egg, as well as my dread that I might soon encounter him. But the room was empty, and to find myself alone among books just then was a needful comfort. I stopped at the doorway. Cherry-dark wood from floor to ceiling, black-and-white tiles. On one wall, a pair of tall windows overlooked the street and on the opposite one the bookshelves were divided by marble columns, and a pair of naked statues with eyes like peeled oranges. I leaned over, read some of the names. Hazlitt. Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. Benezet. The Political History of the Devil.

  Candide. I set down my bucket, plucked it out. Its spine creaked like an old woman’s knees.

  I was on the porch again, swallowing pages. Imagine the situation of a Pope’s daughter, aged fifteen, who in three months had undergone poverty and slavery, had been raped nearly every day, had seen her mother cut into four pieces, had undergone hunger and war, and was now dying of the plague in Algiers.

  A laugh shook itself up out of me, thin as dust. Ha! Imagine. Then the tears did come, hot, ungovernable. I swiped at my eyes. I didn’t dare read further, shoved the book back onto the shelf. But in doing so I caught sight of my hands, bloated as pork. This was how it would be. Hands in lye, hands in vinegar, hands in soap. I leaned my weight against the bookcase. I’d be the darky maid, underfoot. Another nigger. I staggered blindly across the room. On his desk stood a glass paperweight in the shape of a triangle, and a china plate smeared with egg. Nothing else, save Paley’s Natural Theology, and his own Encyclopaedia of the Natural World. A document beside it, headed Notes for new edn. Behind it, an onyx globe tipped over on its stand. Curved gilt arms gripped it around the middle like calipers, and the ocean had been shrunk so small I could have lapped it up with my tongue, continents bright as smashed crockery. Some men want to shrink the world to fit themselves. I could see my new master was one of those.

  I lifted a red snuff box shaped like a cat, with jade-green jewels for eyes, set it down, and picked up each of the others in turn. Leather, ivory, bone, tortoiseshell. I ran my fingers over them. And over jars of snuff, all marked with names I’d never read before. I sounded them out. Macouba, Bolongaro, Masulipatam. I lifted one of the jars, opened it. A burst of tobacco and oranges and violets. The smell of men and bright fields and faraway lands. I spied a single sheet of paper, glanced at the door, picked it up.

  John,

  I know that you are an admirer of le sage Locke. Let me therefore use his words in the hope they may drill where others have been too blunt to reach: ‘Whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be forwardest to throw it into the fire.’

  Is that clear enough? I will take the girl, but nothing more. Nor will I correspond any further on these matters.

  G.

  I dropped the letter as if it had sprung teeth and bitten me. I almost cried out. I looked around me.

  How to explain what I did next? A blink of madness. I bent and snatched at my hem, picking at the seam until it loosened, reached once more for Candide, pulled at its threading with my thumbnail, and slipped page after page into the safe, dark tunnel of my hem. It would be nothing to Benham, I reasoned, one book out of multitudes, and all of them cleaner than fresh-baked bread.

  You mightn’t believe me when I tell you I soon forgot those pages were there, but that is just what happened. Nor was there malice in what I did, though there are so many now trying to find malice in everything I did. If it was a crime, then I am guilty of it, and I confess it here. But I just wanted to keep that book as close as I could get it to my skin. Not to remind myself happiness was still possible, but to remind myself that anger was.

  From the hallway, the tick of footsteps. I barely had time to scramble upright, swipe up my bucket and rag, and stumble over to the hearth.

  A man appeared. He drew back when he saw me. ‘Langton’s girl,’ he said.

  The finest mind in all of England. But he was a man, not a mind. And a large one at that. Wearing a black, well-starched suit, white cravat, shoes polished to blinding. Long nose, sandy hair pulled smooth, tied with a black ribbon at the nape. He looked as old as Langton, but his eyes were bright, his hands steady. He had the gift of health.

  But then I disappointed myself. Because it was terror, not anger, that I felt. I drew back. ‘Mr Benham? I was . . . I was . . . lighting your fires. Sir.’

  He frowned at me, walked over to his desk. Blocked the globe, like a cloud over the sun. He leaned over and lifted his letter.

  I flapped my hands, sure that he’d seen me take those pages. ‘I’ll sew them back in, if I can, if you’ll ‒’

  ‘Sew what?’

  ‘What is it worth? A few pages out of Candide?’ I let my arms hang, a sick feeling in my stomach.

  ‘Candide?’ He glanced behind him. ‘Oh. Ha! Quite right, quite right. What’s any page worth? Of any book? Words as commodities.’ He tapped his forefinger to his lips. His hands were pale and girlish, like those of any man who works only in his head. ‘Langton said you had some wit.’

  In those days, I had a dog’s nose for praise, though what I was thinking was that Langton would never have said any such thing. ‘He did?’

  ‘He also said you were a machine and he could wind you up and make you move.’

  ‘That sounds more like him.’

  He laughed to himself. ‘Marguerite will find you droll.’

  I stepped back, still in the grip of my terror, but knowing I had to steady myself. The only thing a maid can do with a new master is to study him. ‘Sir.’

  Along the top of the bookcase, I could see a telescope with a gilt-edged eyepiece, a marble statuette of a horse bucking onto its hind legs, a rocking cow made of plain old wood. I couldn’t see what one thing had to do with the next or why they were hidden up there out of reach. They looked like toys he might have found it difficult to part with, as if he was ashamed for the world and his mother to know that the finest mind in England still hadn’t put away his childish things. He flipped the tail of his jacket, lowered himself into the chair. ‘Stay. I want a word with you.’

  ‘Sir,’ I blurted. ‘I was not expecting to be left here . . . not like this – that is, I have not been a maid, sir . . . for many years. I –’

  ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I know what you’ve been.’

  ‘What I’ve been?’ I wanted to flee, not stand there discussing things I’d crossed an ocean to leave behind. Oh, yes, you know, I thought. You’re responsible for it.

  But a maid waits to be dismissed; she doesn’t ask. Nor had I lit his fires yet.

  He made a long study of me before finally speaking again. ‘Have you heard of Francis Williams?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  He rustled some papers, glanced from them to the top of my head. Lifted his quill. ‘Take your hair down.’

  ‘What?’

  No. No, no, no. My head whipped up, and a memory whipped into it. There’d been a woman at Paradise, named Sukey, who’d lost her hands in the crusher. I’d seen her sometimes, squatting behind the cow-shed, a coin between her teeth. It was charity, Langton said, allowing her to stay on, share the old women’s cabin. ‘One grateful nigger pays a thousand dividends.’ Hitched breeches, a sly grin.

  There was only one kind of work Sukey could do, with no hands. When she saw me watching her, my face so sour, she hawked and spat, and the coin flew loose. ‘You wait. Massa soon show
you what all nigger women born for.’

  I answered Benham, spoke the word out loud. ‘No.’

  But just then a fist galloped across his door, and Linux pushed through it, carrying a tray. ‘Oh! Begging your pardon, sir. I didn’t know you weren’t alone.’

  ‘As you can see, I am not.’

  ‘No. No. Well –’ She stood for a minute, at a loss, darted her eyes at me. ‘I thought to clear your breakfast plates.’ She scooted forward, came up with the egg-streaked saucer in one hand, the tray in the other. ‘I’ve just admitted Lady Catherine downstairs, sir.’

  ‘Surely that’s for you to tell Meg.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ She looked from him to me, chest quivering.

  He waited for the door to close behind her. ‘I didn’t mean it like that, girl, I meant only to make a . . . study of your hair. But . . . no matter . . . There is a time to every purpose under the Heaven . . . Where was I? Oh, yes, Williams. Williams! Williams was a Jamaican black, like you.’ He dipped into the cat’s head for a pinch of snuff. ‘It’s an interesting tale, you know. The Duke of Montagu wagered that Williams could swallow down an education as well as your average Englishman. Found a tutor to stuff him to the gills with the whole lot ‒ Latin, Greek, multiplication, philosophy. No doubt the flogging and the fagging too. And young Williams proved himself a marvel, by some accounts. Genius where you’d least expect it, like getting oranges from Richmond . . . And ‒’ He flinched the powder up his nose. Snuff drifted onto the table. ‘‒ and, after all that, he couldn’t do anything with himself, though not for want of trying. Ended up going back to Jamaica, I believe, running some little school there, for piccaninnies. Wrote a few awful poems. Truly terrible. Let me see . . . I think I remember one . . .’ He leaned his head back.

  I hesitated. ‘A gentleman’s education can’t magic up a gentleman’s life. No more than a poet’s education can magic up a poet’s talent.’

  He jerked his head down again. ‘Indeed! Indeed, Frances.’ He nodded, patted himself on the chest. Some men, if you say something clever to them, always believe it is their own trick. He turned to his paper, lifted his quill again. Behind him, books hunkered shoulder to shoulder, like cannons. ‘He went out for the Royal Society, you know – young Williams – and they knocked him back because of his race. You do know what the Society is?’

  ‘The scientists. Nullius in verba. Take nobody’s word.’

  Another trick, the Latin. He gobbled it up. ‘Bravo! Bravo! Nullius in verba.’

  ‘You and Langton corresponded,’ I blurted. ‘About Crania ‒’

  ‘Ah. Yes. I gather you’re the one who wrote me back. It was my idea for you to be educated, you know. A sort of wager.’

  ‘A wager?’ The word shattered in my head like glass.

  ‘So you could say you’ve come full circle, haven’t you, Langton leaving you with me?’ A dry laugh. ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways.’ He turned to write something else down. ‘What do you make of young Williams’s tale?’

  I quailed, thinking of Paradise. The coach-house. The things that had been done there. I had been a machine. Their machine. An automaton. Wind them up and make them move. Because I’d been up on my high horse, and had a bit of learning. Because Langton permitted me the books. Because of a scheme they’d cooked up between them. Was that any better than whoring myself for coins or scraps of bread?

  I made my next words slow. Made sure nothing showed in my face. ‘What I think, sir, is that Mr Williams learned that the price of an education is different depending on who you are.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, yes. And you’ve been a veritable English schoolboy yourself –’

  ‘I have, and I have not.’

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I learned whatever would be useful to Langton, sir, whereas I’m sure the object of educating a schoolboy is to teach him something that would be useful to him.’

  ‘You were an apprentice. Of sorts.’

  ‘More of a scribe.’

  ‘Caliban to his Prospero!’ He needled his eyes through me. ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out? But you and I know a thing or two about man’s imperfections, don’t we, gel? Man’s nastiest sins? We know a thing or two about atonement as well.’

  With only myself for company in this cell, I’m driven always to think about what they say I’ve done. To wonder whether that strange encounter with Benham might have been the start of it, a straight path from there to that awful night. For this is where my anger started. Learning that the pair of them had toyed with me, like small boys pulling the wings off moths. Wondering if Benham was the same as Langton. Wondering what he might want from me. For so many years I had told myself that if my path ever crossed his I’d make sure he felt it. And then my courage had failed me when I’d had my chance.

  That anger would have been reason enough to kill him, I can’t deny it. Tear off his wings. Even now, thinking about it, there’s that hot quiver of rage again, the same quiver that was there that morning, after Linux woke me up. My head charred and black.

  There’s no shortage of people who believe I was savage enough to have done it. But some people look at a black and see only a savage, the same way some people will look at arsenic and see only poison. That’s how they see me here, too. They even take their time about permitting me to empty my bucket, and some days I’m so lonely I even miss watching the old birds in the communal cell. Maud, holding her hand over the mark where her husband branded her with a poker, or Miss Priss, the wards-woman who used to be a procuress but who makes a better racket in here than she ever did outside, and Margaret and Jane Whimple, sisters, and therefore always at each other’s throats.

  Now I sit on my own, and the turnkeys try to make an animal of me. Though not even an animal can tolerate keeping company with its own pot. It’s them who are animals: ‘We could help you plead your belly, you know, even a filthy murderess like yourself.’ But they’re afraid, for all their talk. I see it in their eyes, and the way they give me a wide berth. I know what they’re thinking. Who else would have murdered the master of Levenhall, but the black he harboured under his roof?

  They might see me as the savage, but didn’t Benham and Langton pull me into their own dark corners? Wasn’t it them who tried to make an animal of me first?

  EUSTACIA LINUX, sworn.

  Mr Jessop: Mrs Linux, you were the housekeeper at Levenhall?

  A. Yes, for seven years. Before that for Sir Percy. And under-maid for Sir William, the father, before that. I don’t know what’s to become of all of us now, though a good servant won’t want for offers. The Lord provides. Some of the staff are kept on for the time being, to pack up the house, until Sir Percy, the master’s brother, gives us word. I am here to tell you that Levenhall suffers now, and so do those of us left within it. There was a newspaperman in the hedge last week, they’re as bad as vultures. We had to run him off. Thank God Mr Benham isn’t here to see this.

  Q. You were housekeeper to Mr Benham, when the prisoner joined his household?

  A. I was not happy about it. He didn’t even tell me why it was being done. Only I gathered it might have something to do with his own work, given that he was revising his Encyclopaedia, but I never enquired too much into that as he preferred to be left alone with it. What we needed was a footman, but we got her instead. I asked him would he really have us break bread with her? All we knew about her was that she came from that barbarous place. Savagery is a cruel nursemaid, I said to him, and cruel nursemaids rear cruel infants.

  Q. How many others were there in the house?

  A. Three servants, in addition to the prisoner. Mr Casterwick, the butler-valet; Prudence Rattray, the under-maid; Charles Pruitt, the manservant. Together with the master and mistress, that made seven of us.

  Q. How were relations between you?

  A. We got along as necessary for getting on with the work. Se
rvants shouldn’t be too familiar. Neither among themselves nor with their masters. There was no trouble at all before the prisoner arrived.

  Q. And what about the master and mistress? How did they get along?

  A. Theirs was a happy marriage. It’s disgraceful that anyone would now imply otherwise.

  Q. Forgive me, Mrs Linux, but I must speak plain: what about the suggestion of a love affair between the prisoner and her mistress?

  A. I hope you don’t expect me to dignify that with an answer, sir. All I’ll say is that she’s the only one who claims it, which tells you everything. Nothing but the lunatic invention of a lunatic mind.

  Chapter Eleven

  Montfort Street ran cobbled and straight. Like a spine. Houses huddled on either side of it, neat behind their little gold knockers. Linux sent me outside with Pru to wash the steps, and Pru went ahead, clumsy with the bucket, glancing back now and again as if to make sure I wasn’t going to stop, or cry out, like the night before. I kicked my heels out against my hems, and then, there being no other choice, I went to my knees and dipped my brush. For a time, there was only the scratching of brushes against stone, like mice in a cupboard. Sweat crawled at the backs of my knees and between my shoulder blades. Beside me, Pru’s arms moved steady as oars. Soot peeled away in waves under her brush, leaving the stones pale as sand, and I tried to copy her.

  My hair broke out of its plait and swung in brown clouds across my face. It was the kind of work that leaves too much room for thought. My meeting with Benham that morning swilled around my head, like linens in a copper. And there was anger, too. The first cold spurt had come from thinking he wanted the same work out of me as Langton had. Then it had come from thinking he wanted what they all want, first my hair down, then my dress. But he’d wanted worse. ‘You’re going to tell me what happened there. Every last thing. Exactly what Langton did.’

  No. My head swelled full of that single word. No.

  I could hear our brushes loud on the steps. All else was black. Only a sliver of memory. The silk-cotton tree. The warm, squirming bundle, the milky smell. No! I thought. Never.