by Sara Collins
I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the bile rise, until Pru poked an elbow into me, sharp as a hook, and motioned for me to get on with it. I pushed down harder on my brush, water darkening the flags. My breath rasped like the bristles – in, out, in, out ‒ clawing at my chest until, after a time, my head hummed, empty and dark. Then the doors swung apart, pushing us backwards, and two women came out. One stout, dressed in a long pink gown that ended in a frill at her ankles. The other taller, slimmer, walking behind with her eyes cast downwards and a black book clutched to her chest. She was the kind of frog-belly pale that is coveted by Creoles of a certain class, that lamp-bright skin they all blister themselves with cashew oil to get, and her hair was scraped into a navy turban. A plume of feathers trailed against her cheek, dyed blue to match, and her walking gown was green, with an empire line. Her mouth wide and red like something in bloom, and neck-bones like the handles on a dresser. Pretty like the Devil. Anybody who pretty like the Devil bound to be just as sweet, Phibbah would have said.
I held my brush up, let the suds drip.
She stopped suddenly, on the bottom step, swung her eyes back to where we stood. Blue as those long-ago pails of indigo. Shocking, bright. Little puckers at the corners made her seem sad. ‘You are . . . ?’
‘She’s the new girl, Madame,’ Pru called out. ‘From the Indies.’
She squinted, little creases pulling like thread around her eyes.
‘I’m Frances,’ I said, trying to hold my hands over my skirts, where soap had scummed snail-tracks into the blue. The likes of her expect nothing but curtsies from the likes of me, I thought, so I lifted my chin, puffed the hair off my brow.
‘I see. Frances. How are you finding us?’
‘A shock.’
It sprang out, before I could think better of it. But she only laughed. Like coins jangling, copper chiming copper. ‘I suppose we are . . .’ she said ‘. . . or this place is.’ She motioned at the door behind me, where I imagined the lion knocker must still be making its awful grimace.
‘Meg!’ Pink-frock called out, from the pavement. ‘Will you come?’
She cocked her head and looked me up and down. Studied me the way the Surgeon used to study a body before cutting, a little stitch of worry between her brows. Suddenly she lifted her skirts and clicked her heels and nodded, the kind of bow a gentleman would make to a lady. How strange she is! I thought. Charles opened the carriage doors and helped them inside, leaving us to gape as it pulled away, all quiet again, except for the plink-plink-plink of water from our brushes. There being no help for it, I went back to my hands and knees, and Pru did the same, swiped at her forehead with the back of a wrist.
‘Madame must be feeling herself again,’ she said. Her voice had brightened ‒ the women had lit her up. ‘And didn’t she take a shine to you!’
I made no reply, rubbed my finger into a crack that was already damp with moss, for all the house was new. Green as a stale crust. She pursed her lips. ‘Friendliness makes the day go faster.’
She hadn’t sounded friendly in the kitchen, but I’d have to swallow my anger, I knew, just as I’d been doing all day. I squatted back on my heels. Thoughts of my new mistress had mercifully crowded Benham out of my head. She’d spoken to me as if we were being presented, one lady to another. I’d felt a tug. Quiet had slipped into me, like water into sand. Like those times when Phibbah pointed at a chicken hawk, or a pair of parrots, whatever she could find streaking across the sky, then dabbed whiskey on my cuts and bruises. Of all London’s surprises, I thought, she was the only pleasant one. I dropped my eyes, scraped my brush across the stone.
‘That was the mistress?’ I asked, though I knew full well.
‘Herself, yes. The one in green. With Lady Catherine, who’s married to the master’s brother.’
‘Are ladies so familiar with their servants, here?’
She snickered. ‘You want to know what Madame will do? Think of what’s expected, then imagine the opposite.’
‘She’s been unwell?’
Pru puffed her cheeks, poked at one with her tongue. ‘It’s one of those complaints that only ladies ever suffer from. Ones like her.’ She shrugged, sweeping her brush wide. I watched her hands move. Raw and chapped, shoulders broad as ships’ masts. I could hear her clogged breaths. ‘The poor are sad every day, and no one sends out to a doctor about it. She ‒ well, she’s lonely, if you ask me. That’s the trouble with ton marriages, though. Too much space. When you’ve got only the one room to share, you either kill each other or you make peace.’
I let out a laugh, surprising myself, but she fell quiet again, as if reminding herself that she shouldn’t speak so freely.
I stared over my shoulder at the dark cobbles and the tall houses. ‘True,’ I said, turning the brush over, poking a finger between the damp bristles. ‘But we are, each of us, sad in our own peculiar ways.’
‘Don’t you sound like one of them!’ She sank into a fit of giggles. ‘Airs and graces don’t carry buckets, you know.’
‘Suits me,’ I said, ‘since I don’t want to be carrying buckets.’
More of Langton’s long-ago words came back to me: The Negro is happy to serve. Born for it. They’ve never produced a genius, and to expect genius from them would only cause distress. They’re as different from us as dogs from cows. Let the Negro therefore do what he is happy doing, for freeing him would do nothing but put the Devil in his head.
But Pru was poking me, good-naturedly this time. ‘No buckets in Jamaica, then?’
I laughed, and she laughed too. ‘I’ve been in service since I was twelve,’ she said. ‘I swear I see buckets in my sleep. And I’m nothing but thankful for it. I was a skelf of a girl. Didn’t have the pair of arms on me that I have now. We went so hungry some nights I’d have eaten my elbow. Ma despaired of me ever getting a place. Mrs Linux said she’d take me on precisely because she knew no one else would, which is how I know she’s got a soft side, though she does keep it well hid.’ She looked at me. ‘But a good servant must know her place, to be content in it.’
That’s always been my trouble. Never knowing my place or being content in it.
She turned back to the scrubbing. But my mind swung like wind, so many new things rattled through it. London’s sour, clotted streets. Levenhall’s narrow hallways, its smells of wool and cold hearths. My new master, tossing questions, eyes big and black as ackee seeds. My new mistress ‒ who had bowed to me! Strange woman. A queer feeling came over me, like a hand tightening around my chest, tiny hammers knocking at my breastbone. It felt like fright. A new mistress is a thing to be afraid of, if you’re a maid and have any wits. But now I know how small the space can be, between being afraid of a thing and wanting it.
MORNING POST, 21 MARCH 1827
Madame Marguerite Benham, as she was widely known – no doubt as a nod to her French racine – was notorious as much for her eccentric behaviour as for her ravishing good looks. Indeed, she was once heard to declare that life without adventure was death, and no London season was ever in full swing until Mischief Meg had stormed the gates of Almack’s wearing her own buff breeches, and a man’s jacket with gold buttons topped by her crowning glory, a swan-feathered turban rumoured to have come all the way from a modiste in Istanbul. Not only pretty but interesting! And that in an age when so many women seem capable of being only one or the other.
No wonder a frenzy attended her wherever she went; no wonder so many described her as beyond compare. The latter a sentiment which, some say, was shared by none other than the Negro boxer known as Laddie Lightning, or Olaudah Cambridge, the African genius, if you prefer his nom-de-plume.
Though we give no credence in this newspaper to vexatious rumour, might it not be said that the ravishing Mrs Benham was prone to adventure as some people are prone to accidents?
Chapter Twelve
There’d been a moment down at the West India Docks, after I’d just stepped off the ship, when I stood stock-still and looked around me
. Another stroke of good fortune, I thought. Another I didn’t deserve. The tall-masted ships and barrel-hulled barges. The tablecloth of fog laid over everything. In the drowned light, the dark shapes of porters dashed between the warehouses, crooked under weighty puncheons of sugar and rum, their shouts knocking against the glass. It had been so different that, for the span of one moment, I’d thought I could be different too.
But now Levenhall’s four walls were all my world, and it felt small again, narrow as the inside of a stocking.
That’s what I was thinking, next morning, as I watched Pru slide a bowl of broth onto a pewter tray, a cup and saucer beside it, pour in chocolate. She fetched the kettle to water it down. Linux looked up from where she was refilling the coal boxes for the charcoal irons.
‘Again?’ she said.
‘Did you not hear her bell, ma’am?’
‘High time she brought herself downstairs.’ Linux sprinkled the tablecloth, passed the iron down the length of it, made it hiss. There was a smothering heat. The smells of salt, lime, coal-ash.
Pru shrugged. ‘She is down. Said she’d have breakfast in the parlour, since the master’s out. And she was down yesterday. She went out with Lady Catherine.’
Be that as it may, Linux said, she’d have to speak to the master about stopping the trays. Madame shouldn’t be encouraged to eat wherever and whenever the mood took her. Let things become regular, for a change, and see how long it took her, then, to consult Linux about the many matters that were going stale, to take an interest in her own household, for once.
It sounded very like a plan to starve her out.
Linux said I was to black the grates that morning, before lighting any fires. I was to spend more hours than I’d care to write about at Levenhall making sheets white, and grates black. Those are the two marks of a well-tended English house. And that was my so-called freedom.
There’d been little to no need for inside fires in Montego Bay, so I was going through in my head how Pru had told me to tackle the grates, carrying my cloth, and a tarry paste of lead-black and water, when I stepped into the parlour, and saw that Madame was already in it. Curled small, folded into an armchair before the hearth, holding the same black book she’d had the day before. An apple lay beside her on the chair, and wine glinted from a glass set on a table beside her elbow. She must have finished her chocolate, I thought. A lit candle stood beside the glass in a silver holder, and more of them along the mantel, for they always wanted extra light in those lower rooms, even at the height of morning. I saw I’d have to pass right by her to reach the hearth. My feet hooked on the jamb. She seemed nothing like the woman from yesterday. Quiet, stiff. Wet ribbons of hair hung over her shoulders, leaking dark circles onto her dress. The room was so yellow it could have been planted in good soil, bouquets of lavender and myrtle studded in vases on the mantel and the sill and all the tables. It had the feeling of sunshine trapped in it. Some men are rich enough to make their own weather, I thought.
A gold-framed mirror hung on one wall, a portrait on the one opposite. I jumped when I saw what it was. Madame glistened from the canvas, throat long and white as church columns, one small hand resting on the head of a black boy kneeling at her feet. He was holding up a wooden bowl scattered with corals and petals and shells, his face in shadow. I wondered if this was the blacky servant Pru had mentioned, who’d caused the ‘bother’. I looked from her to the painting, back again. The light fell across a dark bruise on her cheek. She reached for her glass, took a sip. Picked up the apple, bit into it.
‘Are you just going to stand there?’ she said, without looking up.
I flinched, coughed out apologies. ‘Beg pardon, ma’am.’ When I set down the bucket, tin clanged against the hearth-stones, making me jump and jerking her head up, insect-quick, down again just as fast. I folded over my cloth, knelt to wipe loose dust and ash from the grate, as Pru had instructed, before dipping up the blacking. I saw that she was thin as rope, beneath her bunched grey sleeves. Nothing but silk and bone. I moved my cloth down to the tiles, rubbed one, then the next. My heart picked up a beat as I came closer.
‘Oh!’ I cried out.
She looked up.
‘It’s just – I’ve read that.’ I pointed at the book.
‘Milton?’
‘Yes. Ma’am.’
‘Madame. Ma’am is so English.’
I swallowed, lifted my cloth, took some of the paste onto it. She lowered the book, and I could see then that it was ink on her cheek, not a bruise. Thick as shadow. Black blooms dotted also across her skirt. I felt myself wishing I could unpick that word ‒ ma’am ‒ the way Phibbah would unpick a bad seam. Her eyes flicked to my brow and her mouth twisted. Was she laughing at me? Gawping at my hair? I felt it slipping out of the plait I’d tried to make that morning, growing like a sponge in water.
She smiled. ‘English maids are not so well-read.’
‘I . . .’
‘Something new ‒ at last. Nothing is ever new in this old bone-yard.’ She sloped her head in my direction. Along the margin of the page, a scrawl of words had been pressed in, nicked like a badly shaved neck: Non. NON. NON!
‘You are writing your own notes in it?’
She followed my gaze. ‘Well, if you choose to make one thing happen in a book, a thousand other things do not. When I read, it’s those thousand other things that I wonder about.’
‘You’re a writer?’
‘La! A writer!’ She shook her head. ‘Non. Not a writer. I am a wife. And my own husband would say that is occupation enough for any wife of his. Mr Benham is a friend to bluestockings, but he prefers them in the wild rather than domesticated . . . When Wollstonecraft said that a woman will be crucified for aiming at respect instead of love, she must have meant at the hands of the very man who is supposed to love her . . .’ She laughed, and I heard bitter notes in it. Then she picked up the book again. ‘Well. Did you like it?’
‘You must like it, to scribble so much in it.’
‘On the contrary, I think I dislike it intensely. But I have just read Mathilda ‒ do you know it?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I thought to write some notes on its themes, purely for my own entertainment, on the topic of the relationship between father and daughter – there is that kind of love between them, you see, in Mathilda, that makes for controversy. Then this sprang to mind and I thought I would reread it –’
‘The mind is its own place . . . ?’
‘Indeed! You have read it!’
I had. Hidden behind the grill, stomach flipping with each page. I looked away, towards the cold grate. She sat forward. From the glint in her eye I could see that I’d amused her. ‘You are very well-spoken, for a ‒’
‘Black?’
‘A maid!’ She smiled. ‘For a maid.’
‘Oh.’ My face flamed. There I was. Kneeling like prayer or begging. Stone poking my shins. I tried to get up. ‘Well, I –’
Linux’s voice snapped behind me, like a lead pencil. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I jumped, turned around. ‘Didn’t I instruct you yesterday?’
‘Instruct me?’
‘Not to address the master or mistress unless they address you first.’
‘La! Mrs Linux.’ Madame cut her off, rose to her feet, shaking out her skirts. ‘Frances has been answering my questions. Is there really any need to stand on such ceremony?’
‘I see.’ Her face hardened. She looked from her to me, wavered a moment, like someone who’d lost her way. Then she stepped between us, her skirts spreading across my face, like potted beef on bread. ‘Since you’ve decided to come downstairs this morning, Madame, may I take this opportunity to speak to you about the menu for next week’s dinner with Sir Percy?’
I felt erased, blotted. My face flared hot. I bent my head to the task that was supposed to have brought me there, rubbed and rubbed with the cloth, watched black creeping into the cracks in my nails, staining my fingertips, crawling across the grate an
d making it clean.
‘Oh, Mrs Linux cannot forgive Madame for being French,’ Pru mumbled later, as she bedded herself down, punching her pillow. She snorted. ‘That’s part of it, anyway. And no house can serve two mistresses. They are always at odds.’
The window-glass hung above the bed, silvered, flat as a mirror, reflecting the bright moon. You had to be this high up to see it at all, I thought. I pressed my back against the hard floor, remembering how I’d gone over to the chair after Madame had followed Linux out of the parlour, how I’d stood staring at her book, then lifted it and smelt it, and how, holding it thus, I’d thought that, no matter the gully between us, here was one thing that had been laid across it, like the first flagstone set into a floor. All while we’d been speaking, it had felt as if she’d forgotten who she was, and who I was and, for that span of time, I’d felt like a dog fresh off its leash, sniffing earth. Perhaps that had been freedom, or some measure of it, though it had only been in my head.
I’d noticed a cloying smell, like apples simmering on a stovetop. When I looked down, I saw that it was coming from the apple core, which had fallen to the carpet and lay damp with juice and spit. Already as sweet as any rotting thing. For a long moment, I stood and stared at it, the weight of the book like a brick in my palm.
I fell asleep wishing Madame could see me as I’d been. Not the maid, not the house-girl, but Frannie the scribe. White cambric sleeves rolled up and marked with my own ink-stains, crow-feather pens, trimmed the way I liked them. Feet planted under a table, scribbling until my wrists cried out all their aches and pains. The Frannie who read Milton and Mr Defoe. Reading, thinking, writing.
Oh! But I had nothing to mourn, and certainly no business mourning whatever it was I thought I’d had. I squeezed my eyes shut, made my thoughts go black, waiting for sleep.
If she had seen those things, I told myself, she’d have seen my terrible shame, for they went hand in hand. She’d have borne witness to the very things I wanted to hide.
