The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  ‘No. When you come back down. You’re to go up, now. Madame wants you.’

  Her door was open. Books tumbled around the desk in a bramble of cloth and leather. There was a faint smell of fruit, heedless and ripe. A musk of leather and ink. Lilies in a vase on her mantelpiece.

  I saw her, crouched among the books. Cleared my throat.

  ‘Frances! Yes. Sit.’ She pointed to an armchair, one of a pair, yellow with a winding pattern of blue leaves, pulled close to the fireplace. ‘Just a moment, I am . . . looking for something.’

  I could map that room now, needing no compass. My fingers my only tools. Seven steps from the japanned bed to the writing desk, four steps from there to the red cabinet painted with storks. Between them, the portrait of the woman with dark hair and pale cheeks, raised onto her elbows, the field around her dotted yellow, her gown a freshly butchered red. The woman in red. On the mantel, Madame’s little wooden box, with her initials carved into it – MD – ringed by bluebells.

  A door slammed below and the noise rattled up through brick and plaster and glass. I felt light as ash spat out of a fire. I couldn’t think what I would do next, where I would go, if I was being turned out. I sat holding my sore wrist with my other hand, watching her. She nudged her books, gave them little smiles and pats. ‘Montaigne . . . Johnson . . . Wollstonecraft! Ah! But look at you . . .’ She lifted one, flicked it open: ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be, before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.’ She looked up. Her eyes glittered like pins scattered on a floor. Last night’s ice had melted and she had decided we’d be friends once more, it seemed, now that there was no one to bear witness to it. ‘La! Isn’t that just it? Have you read Keats?’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Pity.’ She came across and dropped it into my lap. ‘I think it is true that the best art is driven by fear. The artist swarming with ideas! Like ants, or termites, can you imagine? Eating away. What an image.’

  ‘Am I being turned out?’ I asked abruptly.

  She laughed. ‘What?’

  I drew myself up. ‘I am not sorry I said what I said.’

  ‘No! Nor should you be. Why, I quite felt like standing up and clapping, when you put that awful man in his place. He speaks as if our fate is shot like an arrow into foetal clay. Fixed. Unchangeable. But Locke said we must suppose the mind to be white paper. A tabula rasa. One could take any child and make of him a scholar or a thief.’ She put out a hand. ‘I heard what happened, of course. I am sorry about it. Are you quite all right?’ I held my hand away and would not let her look. ‘I will have a word with Mrs Linux. It will not happen again. She has God’s patience. All that smiting and punishing. But I inherited her with marriage, like the dowager’s pearls, which never warmed to me either, mind you. Mr Benham will not let me dismiss her. She dotes on him. When I first married, I said to myself, a woman with such an attachment to a man must be his mistress. Or his bastard. Though she is neither . . . Have I shocked you? I am too frank, I know. Full to the brim with bad habits.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

  ‘Mr Langton? Mr Benham saw to it. He was returned to his inn. The doctor was called.’

  If he died, I thought, I would have been the one to kill him. And that thought made me glad.

  She pulled back. ‘Ah! There.’ She’d spied a volume on the floor near the hearth. ‘This is what I was looking for.’ She picked it up, read aloud: ‘I have spent my life in idle longing, without saying a word, in the presence of those whom I loved most –’

  ‘Is that a novel?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Rousseau’s Confessions. His autobiography. A book he wrote about himself.’

  ‘I know what an autobiography is.’

  ‘Of course. Do you know, I still remember where I was the first time I read him. The friends who had taken us in after we first came here from Paris had a library. We spent many years with them. Oh, that was a part of London I could feel welcome in! Someone else’s sentences, twisting, turning, moving, as all things must, towards their own ends. Sometimes where they take you is right to your own bewildered heart. One afternoon it was Monsieur Rousseau’s voice I heard there . . . Well! I could go on and on about those things. I bore most people to tears. Yet . . . with all that talk of science, last night, I cannot think of anything worse than spending all that time and energy trying to understand the mechanics of life but not the beauty of it.’

  ‘Or the ugliness.’

  ‘Precisely!’ She turned suddenly, crossed to the dressing-table, slippers leaving soft prints in the carpet, like tooth-marks in bread. Set the book down and picked up a hairbrush. ‘He’s a man of words, my husband, but he prefers to chase them. Like some men chase butterflies. And he also pins them under glass.’ She turned the brush over and over in her hands, and spoke into the looking-glass. ‘We understand each other, I believe.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  She laughed. ‘You and me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is it strange of me to say so?’

  A heartbeat, a breath.

  ‘Are you good with a needle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘You are not turning me out?’

  ‘Oh! I haven’t said it plain, have I? I want you for my abigail. A secretary, I suppose. I do want to write, you see. I have decided to, and Mr Benham says I may, and that I might have you to help me.’

  ‘Me?’ I rose to my feet. It came to me that I should not feel pleased. It would only be swapping one kind of maiding for another. An iron cage for a gilded one. But I did. Oh, I did. ‘Mrs Linux won’t like it.’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘She won’t.’

  Downstairs, Linux was making hot-water crusts. She smothered kettle screams with a clean towel, wrapped the handle, poured water into a copper pot.

  ‘I’m to take up some chocolate,’ I said from the door.

  She didn’t look up, but measured out two scoops of fat, lifted her wooden spoon, beat at the dough. ‘For Madame,’ I said.

  I walked over to the table where the coins had been set.

  She stilled. ‘You’re to take those only if you’re leaving.’

  ‘I’m staying.’

  Her eyes flitted over to me, boiling black. ‘I see. Well, take the chocolate, then. Is anyone stopping you?’ She unhooked the keys, threw one at me. ‘Isn’t she just the sort who’d lap up a darky maid like a cat at a plate of cream?’

  I jangled the key in my hand. ‘She wants cake rusks as well.’

  ‘Take it. Take it. By all means. And will that be all, Madam Blacky-boots?’

  Chapter Eighteen

  And what do two women do in a room of their own? Isn’t this the question that troubles my accusers most? Such an easy thing to hide in plain sight – a lady and her abigail ‒ all eyes looking the wrong way. There’s a turnkey at Newgate who likes to imply it. ‘They say the two of you was a nasty pair of flats, under cover of being mistress and dresser.’ He’s the one who took my letter from me, in the reception, when I first came, not the one who reads the broadsheets out loud. The only letter I ever had from her, now it’s gone. They took it to punish me. It makes them want to punish a woman even more, of course, if she stirs up any kind of lewdness in them.

  I suppose I must tell you about the first day. I’d never been a lady’s maid. She said she’d never bothered with one before. Perhaps nothing we did was as it was normally done. All I can tell you is how it was. Early morning, the watchman still calling out the hour, and the sky hung at the window black as ash. I climbed the stairs carrying her ewer of hot water between two hands. Found her already up and waiting. She was sitting up in bed, legs crossed in front of her, picking at slivers of pineapple Pru had brought up in a little silver bowl. A dress was laid out already, beside her on the bed, a white day dress, with a stiff neck-gauze.

  ‘Oh, Frances!’ she said, and went to stand before the mirror, stared at me in the glass. I fancied I saw a slow grin, a flash
of red lip, white teeth. Then she cocked her head at herself and let her kimono slip down her shoulders, which took me by surprise, let me tell you. She was nothing like Miss-bella, the only other white body I’d seen. Madame’s was naked as a savage, daring me to touch it. Her dark hair swelling full as skirts, her belly, creased like an eyelid. Her small breasts. I swallowed, took a cold, plummeting breath and set the ewer down. She lifted one arm overhead, sniffed. ‘A bath this morning, do you think?’ I realized she meant for me to smell it, too, and shook off memories of Phibbah and Miss-bella, the tin bath, Miss-bella’s high, whining complaints. I thought, How true it is that ugly people have hope while pretty people have expectation. I’d never seen the use of beauty myself. Nothing but a lucky arrangement of meat and bone. Never dug any holes, or baked any bread. She kept her arm above her head, and I crossed over to her, thinking how each step dragged me backwards, how I didn’t dare touch her, because I wanted nothing more, but had to touch her, if I wanted to stay. Touching her was my work, now. My jaw clenched. I leaned forward, fanned by her breaths, and she by mine. Tickling hairs under her arms waved, like babies’ legs. I pressed my nose to her. Roses, lemon water, sweat.

  ‘No.’

  I turned, brought myself face to face with the dress.

  ‘I am so glad you’re here, Frances,’ I heard her say behind me.

  It was like having a wooden marionette, I told myself, slipping its limp little arms through the sleeves, fastening its buttons. White women all the same as babies, I heard Phibbah say. They just want feeding, dressing, fussing. Then stay out the way o’ their shit. After that, I busied my hands and eyes with the dress, wondering out loud whether I should pass the charcoal iron over it, whether she wanted me to sprinkle it with rosewater, and kept up those gallivantings until the very last hook was fastened in place.

  She’d already given me three of her cast-off frocks, which I’d hung on the nail above my pallet. The one I wore that morning was a pink-and-white-striped morning dress with a bow at the collar, gripping at the shoulders and waist and just touching my ankles. I’d put my hair up also, using some pins she gave me, so it crested over my forehead, and I fancied it made me look both serious and sad. When she was dressed, she went over and sat cross-legged on her bed, twisting her fingers into the coverlet and saying we’d make a start on the writing. From the desk rose the smell of orange oil and beeswax. I pictured Pru leaning over it, her polishing cloth swiping at the wood, and pressed my finger to it, leaving a smear like a breath on cold glass.

  The snug room, the warm fire, the woman with pale hands and blue eyes. It was so close to my vision that day I arrived in this city that I dared to believe I’d had a stroke of good fortune once more.

  EXAMINATION OF EUSTACIA LINUX BY MR JESSOP, continued

  A. Some weeks after she first arrived, I noticed that the prisoner had fallen into the habit of going to the mistress’s bedchamber late at night. It was just after she started as her abigail; I observed it myself, several times, starting with that very first night. She was crossing the landing which led away from the mistress’s bedchamber, the very same place I saw her the night of the murders.

  Mr Jessop: What time was this?

  A. Just gone midnight.

  Q. Where were you when you observed her?

  A. Downstairs, in the front hall. From there I could see clearly up to the landing on the third floor. I called out.

  Q. Did she show any signs of distress?

  A. No.

  Q. Did she seem startled?

  A. No.

  Q. Did she appear to be asleep?

  A. No. In fact, she leaned over the balcony, and spoke with me.

  Q. What did she say?

  A. She’d heard a noise from the mistress’s rooms and gone to check, but finding her door locked was going upstairs again. I warned her that she should be in bed and I’d better not find her out of bed again at night. Nevertheless, a few weeks later, the same thing happened again.

  Q. And she gave you the same excuse?

  Mr Pettigrew: My Lord –

  Court: Yes, yes. Mr Jessop, need I remind you to refrain from leading the witness?

  Mr Jessop: How did she respond, Mrs Linux, on that occasion?

  A. Same as before, sir. Said she’d heard a noise, only that time she said it was a scream. I remember that because it gave me a chill down my spine.

  Chapter Nineteen

  You want a confession. Or an explanation. Give me something I can save your neck with. Well. I am guilty of this. I was a woman who loved a woman, chief among the womanly sins, like barrenness and thinking. After that, my thoughts were all of her, and coarse and lewd, disturbing as dog-barks. Oh, the shock of it. The wrongness. The dark, surprising glee.

  That was the beginning of all my misery and all my joy. So close to what I wanted, yet just as far away. She was writing her own confessions after the manner of Mr Rousseau, who said he wrote his as a portrait. Mr Rousseau also wrote that man was born free but is everywhere in chains. I didn’t know what chains he could have been speaking of. Page-gazers like him feel the weight of chains in a feather. When I told her that, she laughed: ‘Indeed. Let one of them try being born a woman.’

  She dictated, and I wrote. Her family had fled to England from France when she was a small girl, and soon discovered you can’t eat noble titles, though you can suck on bedsheets. Many French starved, she said. Her father had brought his violin and a little chest, in which he kept his eggs. He couldn’t bear to be parted from them. Mistle thrushes and wagtails and eagles all came with them, wrapped in cotton in his little box, yet he hadn’t thought to bring something his wife and daughter could actually eat. The violin proved useful, however. After a while, he found work tutoring the children of one of the landed families in Wiltshire. It was there that George Benham had found her.

  Most afternoons, she wanted to sit in the parlour and read.

  ‘Oh, but of course you must come down with me, Frances!’ she said. She sat on the blue damask sofa, me at the window. She wanted me to read Mathilda, so I would know what she was talking about when I scribed her essay. I read it and didn’t like it, and didn’t know what I could say to her about it. In the end, I said only that, having had no father or mother, I was nobody’s daughter. When I told her I’d never read Frankenstein, she said she’d read it to me. We passed three afternoons on that adventure, my heart thudding as I listened with my head resting on the glass behind me. By the time she read, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer be felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct,’ I burned myself, with the urge to weep. I felt tears creeping behind my eyes and had to turn my face away from her.

  She thought it was important for women not just to live in the world, but to think about it. ‘Thinking is so much better than living,’ she said. ‘Montaigne said all the wisdom in the world teaches us not to be afraid of dying.’

  Sometimes Benham came in there, too, and they spoke in whispers or not at all. Sometimes her friends came, ladies whose skirts made noises like doves on a branch. But most often, it was just the pair of us. She read to me The Castle of Otranto and Vathek during the weeks that followed, but neither affected me as Frankenstein had.

  A month passed. February to March. She said she wanted to open Levenhall before the end of the Season. Soon every day seemed to start with a salon, and end with a soirée, the lower rooms lit bright as stars. I usually took down a book with me, or a bit of sewing, so I could keep my head down and my fingers working, pulling stitches, or following the lines. Perhaps it will impress you that Mr Zachary Macaulay himself called often. Always following behind a group of milk-faced women with tight hair, like a rooster with his hens. He was tall and thin, very pink in the cheeks, white hair waving like rat’s whiskers. The first time, he pressed my hands in his. What a grip he had, for someone who looked so weak.

  ‘What a pleasure to have you in England, girl.’

  I didn’t much like his palabber, or his airs of hawkish chari
ty. But I felt the same about all of them. Why is it that every white you’ll ever meet either wants to tame you or rescue you? What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they’ve all got a slaver’s appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it. And, for all their talk of men as brothers, most of them stared at me as if I had two heads.

  ‘She’s quite the reader, isn’t she, Meg? All those novels?’

  Benham had asked the day before whether I’d try my hand at a poem or two, no doubt wondering might he have his own Phillis Wheatley. I suspect she led a very sad life, if it was the kind that impressed them. Doing all those parlour tricks. And what they never tell you about her is that she didn’t die a poet, she died a maid.

  I could never trust someone who’d rather read a slave history than a novel, which was what many of them confessed: ‘Surely novels are a mere frippery, Frances, when you think of the weight of suffering in the world. They make such a great fuss out of nothing.’

  ‘Why not?’ I answered. ‘In the end, life makes nothing out of such a fuss.’

  Oh, they all hollered at that. I was as amusing to them as a dog walking on its hind legs.

  But misery is certain as a wound clock. There’s no need to go chasing after it.

  It’s hard to tell a remembered story in a straight line.

  It pops into my head that I should tell you about the first time Benham came to the parlour. It was the end of my first week with her. She’d gone down there for the afternoon. I came up from the kitchen with her wine and apple on a tray. When I went in, Benham was there, leaning on the mantel, where he fiddled with a glass of something. Madame was on the blue sofa. I stood rooted, not knowing whether to go forward or back. Neither of them looked up, nor said a word. They were frozen. I wondered what could have been happening that needed to be snuffed out as soon as someone else came in.