by Sara Collins
I crouched to set down the tray. He swivelled, spoke, voice cold as a blade. Carrying over some argument they’d been having. ‘I’m sure I told Linux it must go to storage,’ he said.
‘Yes. I asked Charles to put it back. Weeks ago. It is funny how seldom you visit most of the rooms in this house.’
‘The only household matter you’ve concerned yourself with for weeks. I ask myself why.’
‘And I ask myself why you want it removed.’
‘Because it’s the sort of thing no one should be decking their walls with any more.’
‘Or is it because you’ve given too much credit to nonsense gossip?’ She braced her arms beside her on the sofa. She hesitated, then said, ‘Let me see if I understand. The boy was here, but now his portrait must vanish so you can pretend he has. Is that it?’
The portrait. I turned to look at it. The boy. His black jaw a curve of sadness. Pru had told me she hadn’t been in service when the boy was there, seeing as she’d been only a child then herself. But she’d had some of the story from Mr Casterwick. He had been brought over by Benham from one of his Antigua estates when he and Madame were first married. From slave to servant, then, I thought. Just like me. He had been called Olaudah. Madame had bestowed upon him a pet name: Laddie. ‘The wee boys were so much more fashionable, once upon a time,’ Pru said. I asked her what had happened to him. ‘No one will say exactly. All I ever heard was that Mr Benham asked him to leave, and afterwards not a soul would even speak of him, save for Mr Casterwick. He says he used to bring the poor mite downstairs to warm himself through, after Madame had him out and about.’
Madame picked up one of the blue brocade sofa cushions, curled her arms around it. He laughed, like something hard tapping his teeth. ‘You’re far too spoiled, wife.’
She didn’t say anything to that. Twisted the cushion in her hands. Some strange look creaked onto her face. A sadness, to match the boy’s. He turned away, cracked his knuckles. Still laughing quietly to himself.
I slipped out, closed the door and went back downstairs.
Later that day, when I went to her room, she was tucked into one of the chairs, pages scattered on the floor and on her lap, and I saw that she was feeding them to the fire. Paper burning to black petals and then to ash. Her memoirs. I would soon learn that the work on them started and stopped, depending on her moods. She squinted into the grate after each page, cocking her head. Unblinking.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Oh. I know, I know. All that writing! Ashes to ashes . . .’ Her voice trailed, and she tipped forward with a slow effort. I thought with a stab of confusion she must be drunk. I remembered a conversation we’d had about her papa: ‘You can always tell, straight away, with drunks. It’s the smile. They have cruel smiles.’
She went on until her fingers grappled air, then stared at her empty lap.
I set down the tray. ‘Madame?’
When she looked up, she spied the lily I’d plucked out of the vase that stood in the front hall. ‘How lovely! I prescribe one such theft every morning. Though they are hot-housed in winter, you know. All the flowers are.’
It was false cheer, thick as a coating of tallow.
‘It seems everything is hot-housed here,’ I said.
She flicked her face towards me. ‘Oh, I have made you cross. I can see that. Destroying your lovely pages. But I read them over this morning and knew they must not be allowed to stand. Everything in the world is already more terrifying or beautiful than anything we can put into it. What is the use attempting to add to it?’
Everything in the room, including my time, including me, was hers to do with as she would. What I wanted wouldn’t matter. Never had. I swallowed, hoped my thoughts wouldn’t show on my face, made myself shrug. ‘They are your pages.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ She gave me a sharp look. ‘You needn’t feel you must tiptoe around me, Frances. We will be such great friends. I know it.’
‘Yes, Madame, thank you,’ I said, in a voice smooth as apples.
She pushed suddenly to her feet, went over to her cabinet, and when she straightened, she was holding a vial. Her laudanum, I realized. She’d been careful never to let me see her taking more than Dr Fawkes prescribed. But Dr Fawkes came as often as the tides. Every time, the dose crept like a vine up a wall. Eight grains. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. I was the one who went down to Apothecary Jones in Knightsbridge to fetch it. How well I came to know his dark little shop, crowded by bottles. Arsenic, prussic acid, laudanum.
She stood for some time staring at the cabinet door. Then she spoke: ‘Mr Benham has said I may not publish after all.’
‘Oh.’
‘Well. I have misunderstood him, it seems. I may write, but that is not the same as saying I may publish.’
She took another swallow, and crossed to the window, still holding her vial. ‘First, he tells me to take Laddie off the wall, and then this.’
She pinched his name out, as if it would sting to say it. I gave her a hard stare. ‘Who is Laddie?’
‘Someone who disappeared. That is what they do best here. Pretend not to see a thing, fermer les yeux and – voilà! – it is not there. The greatest trick in English sleeves. Making things disappear.’
She went back to the window. ‘He would only tolerate my little scribbles, anyway, if he could have some guarantee they would be inferior to his.’ She laughed. ‘I was tempted to promise that.’
She always spoke slowly. Because she was foreign, she said. Afraid of making a mistake. She tapped out words the way you tap a walking stick. Cautious. She stood and chewed at her nail. I could hear the small wet sounds of her breath, and moved to stand beside her, not knowing what else to do. This close, her beauty slipped, like a bad wig. Sharp bones, thin mouth. I pressed my hands into the sash.
‘What is the point of writing for oneself alone?’ she said. And then, ‘Perhaps clever men should be permitted to marry only women with empty heads.’
‘No man can be as clever as the world thinks he is,’ I said, and a laugh cracked out of her, took her by surprise.
She looked at me, her face pleated with a smile. ‘You are amusing,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I should write about my marriage. About him. Publish anonymously. That would serve him right.’
Fat drops of rain slapped the window. Outside, mist clung to hard earth. A cobweb of light hung over the pond, though it was murky and green and had a scum of leaves on it. I could see Pru, beating a rug out over the hawthorn, her shoes slipping in the dew. We stood in silence for a long time. The next thing she said made me whip my head around: ‘London is full of so many people, yet all of them so alone.’
The laudanum bottle rested in the crook of her arm, uncapped. The rotten-plum smell of it rose into the air. She took another swig. The closeness of the room, the weather, the quiet made me brave. ‘Why did you marry?’ I asked.
She laughed, sent her tongue out for stray drops. ‘It was easy as a wrong sum. I wanted his fortune. He wanted my looks.’
Weeks passed, then a month, taking us into April. Soon they all got used to the sight of me. Meg’s black. On her perch at the window bench. I gazed around that room so many times. Now that Benham had had his way, the paintings were all of battlefields: bayoneted horses with rolling eyes, soldiers dying in blood. I stared through the window at the pond, and the grass, which was bright again, and the birds, which had delighted her by coming back.
There were times I felt light as an empty sack blowing on a pavement.
The ladies spilled in and out like dropped grain, swarmed the table, fiddling counters, biting down on them as they puzzled over their endless games of whist. There was one, Hephzibah Elliot, I noticed most of all. She watched, too. She wore short-sleeved dresses, a veil pinned to her hat by a jet pin that gripped her skull like a tiny hand. I disliked her on sight. Her heavy brow, and her small eyes, and the way they followed Madame above her teacup. She had the shape of a hand-barrow and a voice to match. ‘Oh, Hep is
not at all handsome,’ Madame said once. ‘But she does have very handsome thoughts.’ I had to chew my lip so as not to laugh.
There was something alike about all those ladies. Silk dresses carved to neat little figures, voices fluttering like hand-cloths. Only Hep Elliot was different, in her shapeless gowns. As I watched them, down would come the feeling that I’d walked up to a window and was peering at them through glass. I knew I’d never belong. And then I saw all of it sharp as knives, and it hurt my eyes.
Every part of me ached with wanting things I could not have. I wanted the courage of the mad. To declare myself. To her. As if mine were the kind of suit that could ever be spoken out loud.
Sometimes I felt a pulse of anger too, I’ll confess it.
Relentless as a heart.
Anger was what took me to her door. Anger and want, equal as butter and sugar in a pound cake. I took the rushlight and slipped along the third-floor corridor, laid my ear against the wood. I fancied I heard whispering through it. I listened for the smallest creak to tell me where she was. Was that a footstep at her desk? Was that a cabinet door banging against the wall? Was she leaning on the window sill? Did she lie awake? As restless as me? I wanted to call out to her through the wood. I wanted to say something. I wanted to go through that door. Perhaps she was calling out to me! Perhaps that was the whisper I’d heard: Frannie! Frannie! But the thought of knocking, moreover of what she might say if I did, filled me with dread. Terror in my throat thick as meat.
I heard footsteps striking the marble downstairs, and Linux crying out below. I took a deep breath and fumbled my voice down over the railing, telling her I thought I’d heard a disturbance at Madame’s door. ‘At the door?’ she repeated, as if it were some African word. ‘The only disturbance up there is you.’
MISS HEPHZIBAH ELLIOT, sworn
Mr Jessop: Did you know the prisoner?
A. Not really. I usually saw her in company. Sometime in March last year, Meg began to bring her everywhere. She never said much. Her eyes never left her mistress. She watched her, always, wherever she was in any room.
Q. Would you say it was obsessive?
Mr Pettigrew: I object, My Lord.
Q. How would you characterize it, the way she watched her mistress?
A. Observant, I’d say. But then it must have been so new for her. I am trying to be fair.
Q. What of the speculation concerning a love affair between the prisoner and her mistress?
A. I have heard it. I wouldn’t want to comment. I believe love affairs are matters that can only be confirmed by the protagonists, though such vast quantities of ink are wasted over them.
Q. But do you believe that was what happened between them?
A. I wouldn’t know.
Q. Would it shock you, to hear such a thing said about Mrs Benham?
A. What difference would that make to whether it happened or not?
Q. You were at the soirée at Levenhall on 26 January?
A. I was.
Q. Did you observe the exchange between the prisoner and her mistress in the drawing room that evening?
A. I did.
Q. Tell these gentlemen what you saw.
A. The prisoner came into the drawing room, just after champagne had been passed. We were celebrating a successful lecture series, sponsored by the Society. The soirée was intended to be a commemoration of the last lecture. The prisoner entered the room. She was distressed. Well, she was shaking, she raised her fist. Who can say if it was anger or fear or sorrow? Those things so often look the same. She was shaking, at any rate. You wouldn’t have mistaken it for happiness.
Q. Did she say anything?
A. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, she did. She came very close to Meg, right up to her so Meg was forced to take a step back, and she shook her fist again, as I’ve said, and then she said, ‘This is death.’
Q. You’re sure that’s what you heard?
A. Quite sure. And at such a volume, too, you couldn’t help but hear it if you were anywhere in that room.
CROSS-EXAMINED BY MR PETTIGREW
Mr Pettigrew: ‘This is death.’ That’s what you heard?
A. Yes.
Q. You didn’t think that strange?
A. That the maid had descended the stair to threaten her mistress’s life? Strange, indeed. The evening could barely limp along after that.
Q. Not strange in that sense, Miss Elliot. Strange that the prisoner would make a threat in the present tense. Surely she’d say, ‘I will kill you,’ or something of that sort? The future tense?
A. I thought perhaps it was due to her poor command of the English language, Mr Pettigrew.
Q. Did she have a poor command of the language?
A. I hardly heard her put three words together before that night.
Q. Then how would you know what her relationship was to the English language?
[Admonition from the court to the gallery for laughing and disturbance.]
Q. She could have been timid? Shy?
A. It’s possible. Though she had a forward look about her.
Q. I see. But you would expect a mere dressing maid to be quiet in the company of ladies such as yourselves.
A. I suppose.
Q. Now. Let’s come on to Mr Olaudah Cambridge, Miss Elliot. Also known as Laddie Lightning. What did you know of him?
Chapter Twenty
It grows so hot in my cell that the air is thick and damp, and always there is the rattle of bolts, the hammering of boots in the passages, the shrieking from the other cells, worse in the moment just after it stops because then it keeps ringing in my head. When I’m not writing, my head’s as empty as any gaol-bird’s. The slightest sound rolls around and around in it, and that’s when thoughts of her spill in, and cause me at times to doubt my own account. Not just of the murder, but of the love. It’s nonsense to say it didn’t happen. That it was all in my head. They say so only for Benham’s protection. But a dead man’s reputation means nothing to a dead man. They took my letter away from me when they first brought me here so that I cannot prove it. And though I have no care about proving it to them, some days I have a powerful need to prove it to myself.
How I wish I still had that folded scrap. Creases oily as fish skin, her handwriting sprawled across the page, the single line that she had copied out herself:
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.
They say it didn’t happen only because they can’t believe it could. A woman like her loving a woman like me.
It was all in your head, Frannie Langton.
No. It was there on paper too. Black marks. Necromancing marks, with all the power to bring her from the dead. It was the only letter I ever got from anybody.
It was all in your head, they say. But where else is love if not in your head? And, as Sal used to say, why is it that fucking is always our story, and love is always theirs?
It started when she said I should sleep in her room one night, so as not to wake up Pru when we got back.
We’d been to Almack’s. She wore her men’s costume. Breeches and a cambric shirt. Told me to wear one of the dresses she’d given me, a striped velvet, though I don’t know why, for I sat in the maids’ room all night.
Maids’ room was what they called it, but it was in truth the withdrawing room, where the ladies came to relieve themselves, attended by their own maid. I sat near one of the little screens beside a potted plant. Hands folded in my lap. The ladies had been coming and going, and now it was quiet. Some of the other maids gave tight smiles, nodded hello. But none approached me. I overheard some of them talking and, having nothing better to do, I strained my ears to listen.
‘My own mistress says there was talk the poor mite would have been left worrying Meg didn’t love him after all, the way he was turned out ‒ bags into the street, and his own arse behind them. The real problem might have been that Mr Benham suspected she loved him too much. That last Season he lived with them, they took up fencing, the
two of them together ‒ alone! He hung off her carriage at every party, too, like some shameless baboon. Too big to fit inside by then! She must have known it wouldn’t be possible to carry on like that after the boy had grown.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Maybe five years?’
‘He’s boxing now, I hear,’ said another. ‘Goes by Laddie Lightning.’
I jerked my head up. They were talking about Madame. The boy in the portrait. I strained to hear more but by then they had moved away.
All afternoon I’d been dreading the moment when I’d have to bed down in her room. Dressing her in the mornings was still terrible, but habit had taught me endurance. I knew undressing her would be even worse.
She sat on her bed. I bent to unlace her boots, thudding each one to the carpet. She snapped the buttons on her fall-fronts herself, shrugged off her shirt, and unhooked her bindings. I reached out, carefully, to take the clothes from her, bring her gown. And it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, though my head felt like an empty room, from trying not to look. Not to think. Only a glimpse of dimpled thigh, curve of bone at the hip, the scuttle of dark hair when she shook out the coiled plaits. Then I had this one cold, clear thought. Clear like writing. This kind of wanting is nothing but begging.
I rolled out my pallet in front of the fire, thinking I’d never sleep. But I must have, for I dreamed that I woke to find the Surgeon slouched in one of the armchairs, working his knife across the strop. And one! And-two-and! One-and-two-and –
He could tell I was awake. I’d gone still as a grass snake. ‘Found you,’ he said, pausing the blade. He snicked his thumb along it, lifted it to lick off a bead of blood. ‘This thing’s never sharp enough now, gel. You were the one with the knack for it.’ His voice went through me like a bell-strike. Clang. I scrabbled to my feet, but he laid a finger on his lips. ‘Hush. She’s sleeping’. Only then did I look over at Madame. The top of her skull doffed like a boy’s cap, the dusty flower of brain deep in the bowl. ‘So little eggs-han-gwination when they’ve been dead a long time,’ he said.
