by Sara Collins
She stopped, curved her hands around her waist, as if she were cold. My heart thumped against my ribs.
‘I have been sitting here for several minutes, pretending to write, wondering all this time –’
Oh! The wild shock when I pulled her to me, like that first time I tasted ice. The little bird bones in her shoulders and her neck. I remember how I dipped my head, how we kissed, how she reached up to cover my hands with hers, pulled her head back, laughing.
My head felt so hot and so light I had to press my hands to it. She came against me, solid and warm. I felt her sliding, and then she was on her knees. I felt my own hands in her hair, her hands closing around my waist, and there was a cold fire in every inch of my skin. My eyes flew open, but I saw nothing, only dark. I felt her still. Her fingers dug sharp into my hips and I felt her breath, and when she lifted her head and smiled up at me her lips were shining too.
‘Fran.’ She whispered it against my thigh. ‘Fran.’
When I raised my head, the mirror was before me and I saw myself in it, clutching her head to my waist. There we were. My face, the back of her head, her knees. The whole room hung askew; only the glass was centred.
I looked down. ‘I suppose I’m your secret now.’
She laughed and pulled me to her.
Later she went over to the door and put her ear against it. Then she fitted the key to the latch and I lit a candle and she took me by the hand and led me to the bed.
‘Will we do that again?’ I asked.
Her laugh tunnelled under my skin. ‘It is all I have wanted since the first day.’
‘On the steps?’
‘On your knees! In soap. Even then. I never saw anybody like you. When we first came here, there were these almond macarons my maman would buy, when we had money . . . She found a French baker, near Spitalfields. You remind me of those . . . you . . . your skin.’ She bent to nip at my ear. ‘I wanted to see you. You must have known, surely, when I came to the kitchen that night?’
Her words slowed my thoughts to molasses.
She smoothed a hand over my ribs. ‘Just think. You are scribing my confessions, and now my body comes also under your spell. You will know me, body and soul, n’est-ce pas? Though self-revelation is never pretty . . . Richelieu said all he needed was six lines in any honest man’s hand, and he could find something in them to hang him with . . .’
I felt the blood moving through me. I felt swollen with it. I looked at her. ‘I don’t believe there’s any such thing as an honest man.’
Life is a brief candle but love is a craving for time. Therefore, I was already cursed to want what I couldn’t have. What I wanted was to learn her inch by inch. To read her like a book that wouldn’t end. I lay beside her, watching the small waves of her breath against the sheet, lashes thick with sleep.
Just before she slept, she’d asked me to move my pallet to her room for good: ‘Many ladies do the same with their maids! Had this house been properly designed, there would already be a maid’s bedroom over there, where the dressing room is. You could bring your pallet here.’
I turned and turned, and my mind turned also. I lay awake until I heard the first stirrings of the house, the screeches of doors that needed oiling, and Benham’s bell from his library below us. He’d be wanting tea, and kippers and coddled eggs, Pru would be up to start the sweeping, Linux would be running her hand along the banisters, making sure Levenhall gleamed, as it always did. The world cannot be kept long at bay.
I had said yes. But had I been answering as lover or maid?
‘Where would I sleep?’ I’d asked.
Towards the end, Phibbah had slept nights with Miss-bella, at the foot of her bed. Oh, Phibbah. What would she say now? I could almost hear her, laughing.
You go on thinking this white woman for you. None of them can be for us. All ducks don’t dabble in the same hole.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘There is so much flesh on show in that painting that Mr Benham will not allow it in any other room of this house,’ she said.
We were lying across her bed, looking up at the woman in red. It was a painting by her mother, she’d said, and it had been done after they came to England, one of the two things Madame had brought with her when she married Benham, the other being the little egg chest that her father had brought from France, which she’d had carved with her once-upon-a-time initials – MD, for Marguerite Delacroix. The violin, like her father, was long gone.
‘The only thing I have left of Maman,’ she said, nodding towards the portrait. ‘Don’t you think she looks like a lewd saint?’
I cocked my head, to see her. I was thinking about that other portrait. The little black boy. Thinking how she’d fought to keep him on the walls, too, although she’d lost.
Later I answered a knock at the door to discover Linux on the threshold. She screwed her face, of course, at discovering me on the other side of it. But there was a needle of happiness in my chest, such a pain I thought it would kill me, my mind still aflame with what Madame and I had been doing, moments before. Linux could do me no harm. Nothing could. A brothy scent of onions and vinegar followed her in, and she looked around at the tea tray, at the papers scattered on the desk, Madame in her kimono, outstretched on the bed. She took a step forward, stopped. Blinked as if it was the sight of Madame herself that had stopped her. ‘Pardon me, Madame, you are . . . working?’ She clasped her hands together. ‘I’m sure you should be resting.’
‘Oh, Linux.’ She tilted her head. ‘First you want me up and about, then you want me resting. There is no pleasing you, is there?’
‘Did Frances sleep here? Pru says she never came up last night.’
‘Frances is to be my own abigail, now, Mrs Linux. And I will thank you to leave her alone.’
‘It’s irregular ‒’
She waved a hand. ‘Frances will sleep here from now on. It is decided. And do stop turning and turning like a lighthouse beacon! You are making me dizzy.’
Linux had come to a stop at the writing desk. Her hand crept towards the pile of pages. For a time, she said nothing, just went on stroking the wood. ‘Well. You must stir yourself, for the time being. You must stir yourself. Mr Benham expects you in the breakfast room.’
Madame sat up. ‘I had no intention of being expected.’
‘Nevertheless.’ Her smile darted out. ‘You are. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.’ Then she lowered her head, bent to touch a finger to the skirting board. ‘Dust. Pru must do better.’
She had to go down, of course. When Benham called, everyone in that house went running.
After they left, I went through to the dressing room, which was little more than a closet, with a copper tub in the middle, racks for gowns and hooks for towels. Silence stoppered my ears. I sat on the rim of the tub and dipped my hand into the water, cooled to a scum. That needs emptying, I thought, but then remembered Pru would see to it.
The sum of all my duties was to see to her.
Hours before, I’d poured water over her hair from the little china ewer she kept beside the tub, watched it make waves down her spine. Like all white women’s hair, hers obeyed the known laws of beauty and gravity. Water smoothed it into dark, slippery threads.
What does he want with her? The thought swelled thick in my throat.
I lifted the soap out of its china dish, stepped out of my own skirts. Welcomed the slap of water against my thighs. My shift lay slick and dark just as her hair had done, and I leaned forward, looked down the waking-up length of myself. And then ‒ I’ll confess it ‒ I brought the soap under my nose, between my legs, where it felt small and sharp as a fingernail.
I think that was when it came upon me. The madness that has lain upon me since. I lifted her towel from the floor, went back into her bedchamber, sat on her bed, and waited.
From the journals of George Benham
(Marked by George Benham as: NOT INTENDED FOR PUBLICATION)
Latest conversation wi
th Langton’s girl, recorded verbatim.
‘Tell me about Mrs Benham.’
‘Madame? What do you want to know about her? Sir.’
‘Stop playing coy, girl. How much does she take?’
‘The drug?’
‘The drug.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘More than usual?’
‘I don’t know what’s usual.’
‘Fifteen drops? Twenty? More than that?’
A laugh. ‘I don’t keep count.’
‘Not a laughing matter, girl. I want you to note how much she takes. She is delicate. You must have seen that for yourself. All I want is to know if she shows any signs of becoming unwell. Just tell me what she does, where she goes. I can be the judge of what it means.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
My pallet stayed in her room.
‘She wants you in there now?’ said Pru, watching from her bed as I lifted my dresses from the hook in the attic room. I left my blue serge, Candide still tucked in its hem, forgotten, with my grey rag. I took my time rolling my pallet. My nerves were tuning forks. I feared she’d see the change in me, seared across my face.
But she only smiled at me, shook her head. ‘It’s a bad idea,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘She’ll get bored. Never let your lady get bored. Courtesans always turf the fellows out afterwards, don’t they?’
Always a courtesan, never a bride, Frances.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘What would you know about being a courtesan?’ I asked.
She grinned. ‘Fair.’ She tilted her head. ‘But I know more than you about being a dressing maid. And, I’m telling you, for both, familiarity breeds boredom. And boredom breeds trouble.’
Pru had been skittish with me since the night in the attic. I fancied I saw pity, when she looked at me. We hadn’t spoken again about what I’d told her. Now I see what a friend she was. Steadfast. I should have said so then, but my head was turned, one foot already downstairs.
The next morning Charles brought up a package. Sweetmeats wrapped in parchment, trailing the label of one of those fancy Piccadilly emporiums, which Madame left in a china dish on her washstand. Gold rings, ear-bobs, pearls: she mixed the sweets with them as if they were the same. I went over and picked one out and held it to my nose. Marzipan. The same smell that glazed her breath.
‘He always plays husband after staying out all night,’ she said, from the bed. ‘The manners of a tomcat. Blow in at daybreak, snarl out complaints, eat, then sleep all morning.’
The gifts kept coming the whole time I stayed with her in that room: sweetmeats; nuts; jewelled pins; once, a kaleidoscope, the kind of gift you’d send a child. But the man himself never did. Which suited me, of course.
I crackled a sweet out of its wrapper. ‘Let him stay out all night.’
I asked her where he went. ‘I have never asked,’ she replied, ‘and he has never said.’
I remembered what she’d said to Linux, that night in the kitchen. How lonely she’d seemed. No doubt he keeps a mistress, I thought. There’d have been nothing odd in that: those ton marriages make a wife of one woman and a courtesan of the next. But I didn’t like to think about the times when she might be required to play wife to him, so I selected a little marzipan heart, just as if I was a lady in a shop, crossed the carpet to stand over her.
My hand skimming her thigh, lifting her gown. Her eyes flying open. A dart of shock. A smile. I snapped the heart between my teeth, and then put my tongue to hers. She pulled me to the bed. Came over me. A soft rain of hair falling against my face.
The other thing I didn’t like to think about. That now she was keeping a mistress of her own.
Then we had to go down for breakfast, though neither of us could bear to face him. But he wanted them to be seen taking meals together, she said. And if she had to, so did I. He was already at the table, lining up the cutlery beside his plate, even though Casterwick would have had the inch-rule to them twice that morning. I stopped at the sideboard, slid an egg into a cup, for her, poured her chocolate. There was a hush when we took our seats, but some men see silence as a net, to toss their own words into. ‘Good to see that you’re fit again, Meg. A man expects a sighting of his wife from time to time.’
‘I am lucky you have such low expectations.’
He made a noise like a laugh. ‘All the better for you to meet them, then, my dear.’
She sent a smile across to me, as if to say, Patience. The quicker we endure this, the quicker we go upstairs.
I leaned back into the pinch of my dress, kept my gaze to the window. The weather had turned, and there was a smell of grass, and coming rain, the garden littered with curling blooms that frisked across it, like mice, when the wind lifted. Birds crying out.
I lifted my cup, marzipan sticking on my tongue. Even my coffee tasted like her.
I sent her a look. Just know I’ll come apart if we don’t go now.
I tried to watch her without looking as if I was watching, wondering what he’d do to us if he knew what we did upstairs. Mr Casterwick came in to bring the newspapers and lift away Benham’s plate, smeared with kipper bones as fine as hair. I scarcely knew where to put my eyes, so kept them on Casterwick, thinking idle thoughts. How his wages would’ve been paid for by cane and that was where mine would come from too, if I ever got any.
He was still watching her. Taking narrow little bites of her bread and butter.
‘Oh, for God’s sake. Eat!’
When she jerked up in surprise, the egg tumbled to the floor and cracked, yolk spreading, like a slow breath. Spoon tinkling porcelain. We all turned to stare down at it. He rocked forward in his chair.
She took a small sipping breath, and I saw Casterwick slip out, as quietly as he’d come in.
Benham heaved out of his chair and wavered there a moment, like a man consulting a map, speared the dribbling yolk with his spoon. She saw his hand lifting towards her and recoiled. ‘It has been on the floor.’ The spoon jumped in his hand.
I wanted to jump too. Leap at him, yell, ‘All this over an egg?’ But I held my tongue, though the words strained against it. I kept my eyes down, on the tiles, where yolk was drying, and screwed my thumbs into my palms. The thought came screaming. Don’t.
He lifted the spoon again, cleared his throat. ‘We can wait all morning, Meg. Choice is yours.’
At that, she leaned forward. After she’d taken one quick bite, then another, and another, he stepped back, shuddering his chair away from the table and the spoon onto it. I felt the wood shake. She drew in a breath, which shook too. He gave a little nod. ‘I suppose . . .’ he said, looking around him almost in confusion ‘. . . I suppose . . . it’s high time I got on with my day.’
She twisted her napkin up to her lips, coughed into it. Then it was me she was shrinking from, just as she’d shrunk from him. Because I’d been witness to the whole terrible scene.
‘Does he hurt you?’
The idea of her under his thumb sat in my stomach like soured milk. The thought of her eating that mangled egg. Of him pushing away from the table as if she was the one who disgusted him.
The rain had come. Branches close and dark and specked with drizzle. She slipped off her shoes, took her hair out of its coils, saying she’d have some brandy, and as I unlatched the cabinet the thoughts whispering at me sounded very like Phibbah: Drinking brandy for breakfast? And all that hair hanging loose, like her idle hands. But I tamped them back, like tobacco into a pipe. She picked up the hairbrush, beckoned me over to the bed.
‘You haven’t answered.’
A noise of frustration. She pressed the brush between her palms. ‘I am not sure how to answer you,’ she said. ‘He does not hurt me with his fists. He does not hurt me now.’
‘That could mean a hundred different things.’
‘It means he hurt me once upon a time . . .’
‘And?’
She dropped the brush on her lap.
‘Frannie. You have a choice. I will tell you. But telling you will hurt.’
She was steering me away, of course, and I was letting myself be steered, letting myself be pulled onto her lap while she whispered, ‘Will you let me brush your hair?’
My little smothered laugh swept away our conversation, like cobwebs. I touched the bristles, soft as her own hair. ‘That brush has met its match.’
Knowing a person’s story, and how they tell it, and where the lies are in it, is part of love. But I told myself there was no point knowing a thing you couldn’t change, though worry pinched at me all the same.
There was no use asking why she wouldn’t speak about it. I’d closed my own mind too, after all, to so many things. I gave myself over to her hands and the brush, letting my head go where she turned it, letting it tick from side to side. A tingle through my skull. I leaned into her, enjoying the tug-of-war between brush and scalp. I wanted to walk out of that house with her. If we were to leave, what could we take? The money was his. The dresses. The portmanteau. The drawers and all their contents. To all intents and purposes, so were we. The portrait and the egg-keeper were the only two things she owned.
She was in a writing mood afterwards. I remember this line: We go from birth to death. We go from love to marriage. Of each we may claim an equal understanding, which is to say none at all.
When Benham called me down to the library that afternoon, the piece of my mind I wanted to give him lay stuck in my throat. Hate can be as strong a draw as love, but it was love that drew me then, a strong rope pulling me back upstairs. I had to hold my own feet fast to the floor.
