The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  Benham raised his head. ‘I see you are indulging again, wife?’

  ‘I am bored again, husband,’ she replied, thudding down her glass. I pricked the needle in and out through the fabric, drew in a breath. When I looked up from my stitching I came face to face with the painted, dying horses, their eyes bone-white and wide, their chests heavy as anvils. I wanted to pull aside the drapes, to the Devil with the hot air. I wanted him to leave, so I could have her to myself once again.

  At last, she set aside the magazine. ‘Mr Benham,’ she said. ‘I have been thinking.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘What if we sponsored something like the Bordeaux prize? Invited papers on the debate motion? Have those read out?’ Her words crept up to him.

  He clanked down his fork. ‘Didn’t we just speak about this? My answer is no. Besides, the Bordeaux prize was a failure.’

  ‘I wish you would reconsider. There is still time for a change of heart.’ She’d become brave, I thought. This was not the same woman who’d eaten the egg in silence.

  ‘My heart is an ever-fixed mark. Have always said the institution can be reformed.’ He licked at a crumb pasted above his lip. ‘The trade is at an end, has been for decades. Since Frances was a babe.’ He sniggered at me. I kept my head down, pretended not to hear.

  ‘But the suffering of the thousands still enslaved is no less of an emergency than those who were transported in the ships.’

  ‘Careful, wife. You’ll make yourself sound like a Radical. Half the income that keeps your bottom cushioned on all that velvet comes from those same estates. Don’t forget that.’ He cocked a hand at his ear. ‘I don’t hear you volunteering to give it up.’ He leaned over, set down the plate, dipped a napkin in a glass of water and swiped at his forehead. ‘In any event, I am on the brink of sharing my opinions, which will put paid to that very suffering. Design a benevolent framework for the institution. When my essays are published, the vultures can pick them over. They can scoop out the contents of my skull then. Isn’t that what vultures do with skulls? Frances?’ He swivelled again in his chair. I hated the way he kept calling on me, the way he kept looking at me.

  When I think of her, it’s with the kind of love that makes murder seem a lie. But I could have killed him.

  I busied my hands on the hoop. Needles ticking. The drug made it as if my head was sleeping, even if the rest of me was not.

  Searing hot in the kitchen as always. Smells of roasting. A rabbit carcass twirling on the spit, grease burning black into the stove. I took myself a plate down from the dresser. China for me, no more tin. I looked around to make sure Linux was watching. Their heads flickered, like candles in a breeze. The room seemed to curl and uncurl before my eyes. I hardly went down there in those days, so busy was I with Madame. But that evening, she’d said she wanted only brandy and laudanum mixed in a tumbler, and for me to give her a few moments’ peace. A few moments’ peace.

  The kitchen had been the sum of all my choices.

  I felt that same itch of worry I’d felt earlier, in the parlour. Did she draw away? Did she no longer want me? That thought had struck such terror in me that my hand shook, and before I knew it I’d pricked my finger.

  Linux’s voice creaked like a stair. The supper had been laid out on the table. Pork, turnips, tumblers of ale. A Friday supper. She turned her granite eyes on me: ‘Those who know pride will surely also know the fall,’ she said.

  The Bible lay beside her place. I had no appetite for it. The reading made me think of Paradise, of Phibbah. How Miss-bella would sometimes mutter, ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.’

  When I’d asked Phibbah what it meant, she’d kissed her teeth. ‘Some would say it mean that just ’cause a woman have everything don’t mean she don’t know how it feel to lose.’

  The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.

  If that’s right, there’s nothing you can do but sit back and wait, see what you get, see what gets taken away. Thank the giving Lord, or curse the thieving one.

  She asked Mr Casterwick to carve, then started on her complaining. ‘On Monday, Charles, I was informed you were impertinent with clerks when sent to make the withdr‒’

  ‘Why do you do that?’ I interrupted, my own impatience boiling hot. Or was it the drug?

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Week after week you trot out Charles’s sins, or Pru’s, or mine. You seek only to humiliate.’

  A smile carved into her face. ‘Oh. I haven’t humiliated you, girl.’ She lifted the knife away from Mr Casterwick, and stabbed the joint. Meat juices ran pink into the wood. ‘Yet.’

  Later, Pru brought two of Madame’s dresses upstairs from the scullery. I took them from her in the hall, the door shut tight behind me.

  ‘Fran. You’re altogether too bold.’

  ‘Why do we let her treat us that way?’

  She let her voice drop. ‘You’re a dog barking at the wrong bird. You’re only this bold because you think she’s your friend.’ She pointed her thumb at the door. ‘There never is such a thing as real friendship between the likes of them and the likes of us.’

  ‘I have to go back in, Pru,’ I said. I put my hand behind me on the latch. Already my mind was racing back to her, and how might I coax her to eat. The black night crouched, like a watchman, at the glass.

  From the journals of George Benham

  (Marked by George Benham as: NOT INTENDED FOR PUBLICATION)

  Came upon Marguerite in the parlour yesterday, over-bright as she always is after every bout, the way the grass sparkles brightest after rain. ‘Look who’s here,’ she said.

  Who should be on the settee, next to that Elliot woman, but the boy.

  ‘Laddie!’ she announced, gesturing towards him. Nervous. As she should have been. Did it in front of Hep Elliot so there’d be no scene. ‘Hep brought him. I had no idea!’

  I’m sure she didn’t.

  Lost and found. He didn’t seem at all discomfited on coming face to face with me, but then he’d had the advantage of knowing that he was under my roof. He gave me a half-hearted little bow, every desultory gesture towards me communicating – what? His ambivalence? His resentment? His revenge?

  Ignored him entirely so as not to give them the satisfaction of a public display.

  I sat for a while, then left. Elliot followed me into the hall, pronged her nose at me. She made some remark about jealousy being such a common emotion, for someone who believes himself such an uncommon man.

  Later, I made it clear to Meg that the boy is not welcome. No. Not a boy. He has become a man.

  I’ve decided to sponsor the debate, but under my sole name. What is the purpose of variety in the species of humankind? The motion was, after all, my own design.

  Concerning Meg, the girl still delivers only tidy lines, takes far greater care over her penmanship than imparting anything of any use. Laudanum in prescribed doses. Work on her flimsy memoirs. Outings to Gunter’s for pistachio ices, Hooke’s library (paragraphs and paragraphs about that) and to Richmond for turns about the park with that ape-leader, Elliot. Surely there is more to your days than that, I said. In response, she bit her lip. She thinks to rescue Meg, by feeding me these half-truths.

  Everyone wants to rescue Meg.

  Meanwhile, that very object of our mutual attention grows brighter and brighter now while the girl grows dull, though I suspect both moods have the same root: to wit, Mr Olaudah Cambridge. To test my suspicions, I asked the girl what she thought of him. She replied that she didn’t think much of Laddie Cambridge at all, but that in any event it is impossible to think more of him than he thinks of himself. I think she has an inkling she’s been thrown over for a new favourite. That’s Meg. A magpie’s zeal for collecting.

  Talk turned again to Paradise. I asked whether she knew Boyle believed the existence of albinos proved that Adam and Eve were white, and all the other races descended from them. She shied away at the mention of albinos, as she always does, the flush coming down
her face like a shade descending. Fascinating that she is pale enough to blush!

  Perhaps it was the boy turning up like a bad penny that agitated me. So, I pressed her. Cruel, yes, but I have very little patience left for her impenetrable silences, or her lies.

  ‘I’ve had a letter from your old mistress,’ I said. ‘From Mrs Langton.’ That sent her scuttling back into her shell, blinking out at me, watching me as one might watch a fire, looking but not seeing. The news had reached Jamaica that Langton’s mulatta has ended up under my roof. Mrs Langton advises me to rid myself of her if I know what’s good for my household, but at the same time suggests she knows the whole story about the albino infant.

  Let me explain.

  The Comte de Buffon is credited with the theory of inter-fertility, according to which if a pair produces a child who is itself capable of having children, then both members of that pair are human. In other words, if the child of a black mother and a white father can itself produce children, black and white are members of the same human stock. Otherwise mulattos would be barren as mules. Clearly the mulatto is demonstrably fertile – witness the terceroons and quadroons and octoroons sprouting like mushrooms throughout the new world – and so it is demonstrably false to assert that blacks are not human, and therefore a catastrophic waste of time. This posed a difficulty for Langton, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. I suppose he couldn’t turn a blind eye to it for long. Instead he proposed a series of ‘experimental matings’. I received this news on good authority, from several of the Fellows; thankfully, I could tell them by then that I had already written to him and cut the cord.

  A year later, I heard that he had sent Pomfrey on the hunt for a white Negro, an albino infant ‘less than four years of age’. I speculated as to what he could want with it. White Negroes are rarer than hen’s teeth. They won’t be found in the usual course of trade, not even on the blackest of black markets, not even by that black character, Pomfrey. There’d been a craze for albinos in the middle of the last century. A four-year-old white Negro had been exhibited in the Paris expositions in 1744, at the Académie Royale des Sciences. Maupertuis and Voltaire made such a meal of their own examinations on that occasion! (Voltaire’s own description, of an animal called a man because it had the gift of speech, memory, a little of what we call reason, and a sort of face ‒ deliciously ironic from the man who wrote Candide!) There have been albinos exhibited in this fair city as well, of course: for example, Amelia Newsham, the white Negress, at the Bartholomew Fair at the end of the last century.

  I admit to being torn. No naturalist would pass up a chance to examine such a rare creature. Langton might have seen it as his chance to prove that skin colour, and the other national characteristics, are innate rather than superficial. If the albino were like all other blacks, he would be black in the inner parts as well, in the bile and the blood, and would possess all the other Negro traits. I confess to a momentary excitement at the thought of what one could do with access to such a subject, but not even that would persuade me to join forces with Langton again. I knew he’d long been troubled by the argument that the little blafard exhibited in Paris was proof of a vestigial link between black and white, and even more by the assertion that humans were originally black (for blacks had bred whites but no whites had ever bred blacks). That would smash his polygenetic arguments that the races are in fact two entirely separate species.

  Perhaps Langton was simply curious; perhaps he merely wanted one of his own to keep, as Buffon had done with his Geneviève, his ‘high-breasted, sugar-breathed’ Geneviève. But I don’t believe it is possible to be too unfair when it comes to Langton’s motives.

  The infant is my best chance of killing all of my birds with a single shot, since I suspect it might be the worst example of Langton’s behaviour. I asked her: ‘About the baby?’

  She jumped, her eyes flew up to me.

  ADDENDUM

  Have been able to glean some additional facts from her. As with all good confessions, it started with one small, mitigating lie. She says it was nothing to do with her, but Langton did obtain an albino, from the Montpelier estate in Antigua. She does not know (said coyly) how this was possible, given abolition of the trade. The infant was already owned, and, she presumed, that was why he could be purchased. Nor did she know what their intentions were. (This last may indeed be true. I don’t think those two Bedlamites knew themselves.)

  What happened to it? She refused to say more.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  What did Shakespeare know? Love must alter, or it can’t survive.

  Her appetite had swelled during my early days with her. Walnuts that had to be cracked out of their shells, hard yellow cheeses, Linux’s roasted goose with potatoes roasted in fat, French madeleines. I’d taken my meals upstairs with her, on the pewter trays. But now it was back to broths and eggs, and hunger often forced me downstairs. One night, Linux had made a gooseberry tart and the pot of tea was steaming as usual on the table, with all of them sitting around it. She put the knife down and passed her hand over her mouth when she saw me.

  ‘Booted back down, then?’ she said.

  A knocking on the jamb. Madame. She’d just come in from some ball. I rose to my feet. Earlier, I’d helped her into her long gown, lined at the bosom with gauze thin as smoke. I will not need you there tonight, she’d said. I am sure you will be glad of the rest, no? Her long white gloves were still pulled up to her elbows.

  ‘Where is it?’ she demanded, looking straight at me. A tremble along her jaw.

  ‘Where is what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘I do not.’ My throat went tight, bridled with humiliation. With all the others watching. Pru’s eyes on me, her mouth twisting.

  ‘My tincture. It is not in the usual place.’

  ‘Your medicine, Madame?’ said Linux, her own lips smoothed into a smile. ‘I could come up if you like? Help you look?’

  ‘No, Mrs Linux. I would not like. Because Frances knows where it is.’ She tilted her chin, tapping a hand against her skirts. I was in those days always at the mercy of her mood.

  ‘But I don’t,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen it.’

  Linux’s face pulled like a lace through a boot. ‘What if I sent you up some nice chamomile, Madame? Would you like that? Or you could sit down here awhile? There’s a lovely tart.’

  The next day was hot but with a bluster to it. The park was quiet. We walked in silence, passed not another soul. The trees and flowers and the lake wove in and out of my eyes. The leaves were like little green planks floating on an ocean. There’d been no opium for me that day, and pain roared through my head. I felt cornered by the pair of them. And nothing could stop the fear that crawled up my throat. Never let your lady get bored. I stopped on the path. Black birds looped high and sometimes circled low to fill my ears with song or to perch on branches and stare.

  ‘I would move up into one of those elms . . .’ she said, her head turned to the sky. We were friends again. ‘Or I would make myself a little bed close to the Serpentine, sleep under a blue-black sky, make love to stars. La! What would they say about eccentric Meg Benham then?’ She turned towards me; her eyes glittered. ‘I am sorry I accused you . . . last night . . .’

  I was too tired to answer her.

  I could pull you behind one of those very elms, I thought, hook my thumbs beneath your bodice . . . Oh. Inside, I could do what I wanted. Bend her over her writing desk and kiss her breasts to my heart’s ease. But outside I was no one, nothing but a maid.

  I pictured myself looping a hurting fistful of hair around my hand. She took a step back.

  Now I begin to worry that it was me she feared after all.

  Later that afternoon, not knowing what else to do, I went into the garden in search of roses. The scissors were still nowhere to be found. I twisted with my fingers at the few blooms left on the bush. Petals fell away from me, like ash. I was bringing in those broken stems when Linux came behind me. As always, her mood was
sewn into her lips. ‘It’s you I’m looking for,’ she said. ‘I’ve come from speaking with the mistress. She’s asked for Pru to take up her tray.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Do you truly believe you’re owed any explanations, girl? Occupy yourself downstairs for a change.’ She smirked, her smile slipping and clawing. I turned away from her, one foot already on the stair, but she reached out and held fast, her fingers tight around my wrist.

  ‘Down,’ she said.

  My mind scrambled and scrambled and scrambled, but got nowhere.

  She set me to work scrubbing pots with sand. A pile of them slumped in the basin, coated with grease. Soap spat up onto my sleeves when I plunged my hands in. It felt like a fall from grace. Pru came down, saying she was no longer needed upstairs, as Madame had decided to go out. Again? My heart pumped. I stilled my hands above the basin. Fingers withered and dripping, like leaves. I hated the way my own mood teetered, trying to keep pace with hers. I hurried to finish the pots, thinking only about how to get back upstairs. When Linux had left, I slipped away, to the staircase, the hallway, her room. This time, no one stopped me.

  She was gone.

  My hands fled away from me of their own accord. Mantel, bedcovers. The dying roses. Her drawers. Her cabinet. The kindness of laudanum. Though it did nothing to stem the awful sour terror rising through me, like a flood. I drank more and more. Then, for the first time since Benham had asked it of me, I became a spy.

  They were in her egg-keeper. Of course. I felt a low scrabble of panic in my gut the moment I decided to open it. I put out my hands to grip the lid, tried to steady myself. My hands. How I’d hated all my life to watch them going about their work. I didn’t know how long before she’d be coming back. The woman in red watched from the wall, her eyes wide, in warning or in judgement. I opened the box. Lifted out her black brooch. Beside it lay a gold ring, what they called a signet. A man’s ring. Then a lock of grey hair tied in a black ribbon; a letter – to Papa – from Marguerite Delacroix, aged 7; a single white pearl, lost as a tooth. I lifted them all out. Even the simplest thing was all confusion in those days, my mind and my hands gone slow, my own face a puzzle in the glass. Therefore, when I first saw the scraps of white, I thought, Here are her father’s eggshells. Smashed. Peck-peck-peck.