by Sara Collins
The world slid away. The lid slammed shut, and almost took my fingers with it. Peck.
Not eggs. Letters. Letter after letter after letter.
Why did I reply ‘at last’? It seemed to me someone should take pity on you. Does that satisfy? The more interesting question is why you kept writing. LL
You are as persistent with this question as you were with your unanswered letters. I will be frank. Your first letter I took for a bored woman’s self-indulgence. I was not bored enough to answer it. Now I am. But you still haven’t answered my question. Why did you keep writing? I will venture a guess. You are lonely. LL
You say your husband is sympathetic. He is not the man you think, though he is the man I remember. Sympathy without action is nothing more than an idea. LL
You already know my story. When I arrived here as a boy, I thought it was a place as bright and shining as Heaven. I’d lived my first four years in a slave cabin with my mother until Mr George Benham, in his wisdom, decided I would serve, and plucked me right off his estate. I remember that my mother turned away from me, before I left. She refused to speak and, indeed, began to behave as if I simply did not exist. It made the parting easier on me, of course. Who can say what would have made it easier on her? I don’t remember much else. I’ve drawn a shade down over the rest of it. Five years, then he married you. I thought you were an angel. Everything you both surround yourselves with is so soft and luminous (even, if I may bring your husband into it again, your ideas). After I was sent down from Cambridge, I decided to take that name for myself. I became Olaudah Cambridge. For a time I was able to disappear. Some among your kind find it droll that I have named myself after that great university. Thumbing my nose at it. While I was there, I was introduced to some frilly baroness who asked me where I learned to speak English so well. I replied that even a parrot might be taught this uncomplicated language. It has served me well. I entertain myself by doing what you found me doing. Taking whites for sport. From the podium, and in the ring.
I won’t meet you simply because you command it, nor would you think much of me if I did. LL
From him to her. All of them.
Every mother hates her own babe. That’s what Phibbah used to say. The hate is a needful part of mothering, same as love. Always there comes that one moment. Early days, and they’re red, thunderous, ugly. Their feet kick, like dogs digging dirt. You’re awake knowing you need to be in the fields before the sun and you’re going to stay out there long after the sun too. It’s in that moment you wish it gone. Not a long wishing, just a blink. You feel it like your belly dropping out of you, all the way down to gully-bottom. And as soon as you do, the need boils up in you never to feel it again.
But it going come again. That blink. When it comes time to really let them go. That’s when it going come.
What can I say in my own defence? When I closed my eyes, I still saw the letters behind them. Folded small as daggers. They pierced holes in me, and let the intention pour right in. But I pressed myself against the window, flattening my skirts, my cheeks. Fighting it, I forced myself to stare down towards the pond, remembering how she would pluck at the grass whenever we sat there, and scrape through the dirt. Muck her nails. I curled my arms around my waist, holding myself back. A half-hour I stood there, perhaps longer. But she didn’t come back. A cloud swung over the sun and showed me my own face darkening the glass. I stepped away from it, turned towards her desk, pulled out a clean page. Lifted the pen.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The world had gone wrong. There were the letters, where eggshells should have been. Madame’s sins.
And me, committing them to paper.
Then the door creaked open. There was Linux. Smiling.
‘You never stay where you’re put, do you?’ she said. ‘Flitting from husband to wife like a bee to honeysuckle.’
‘What are you accusing me of now?’
‘Not accusation, girl. Facts. Strong enough to swing from.’
One arm peeled away from her chest. It had been so long since I had seen my blue serge that I’d been slow to recognize it. The dress I’d worn to London. The dress I’d left in the attic. Then we raced each other down the halls. It was a strange echo of my first night, the sconces empty, the walls bathed in sunshine. Light cutting into dark.
This time I knew the way as well as she.
She knocked the jamb, shivering the frame. Benham gave a bird-hop, raised his hands to palm his waistcoat, as if we’d caught him dipping them where they didn’t belong.
‘What in God’s name . . . ?’
She leaned over and dropped the bundle onto his table.
‘A dress, Mrs Linux?’
‘Beg pardon, sir, it’s what’s inside.’
‘She means there’s a book sewn there, in the hem,’ I said. ‘One of your books. Which I took from your library. Candide.’
‘Stole.’ Linux tapped a fingernail on the serge. ‘Stole.’
Benham looked down at the dress, up at me.
I sucked in my cheeks. ‘I wanted something to read.’
‘It has turned out as I’ve been saying all along, sir,’ said Linux, her voice slipping with glee, ‘and I take no pleasure in that, for in keeping with her character the girl has proved herself a thief. Perhaps you will heed me now. There is a greater danger in keeping her, though I know you believe it is a mercy. But what is said about them, sir? The African is sly, and lascivious, and lazy. And she is all those things! And a danger to this house besides.’
Were things not so dire, I’d have laughed. She might have been reading out Langton’s own words that I had scribed myself.
‘Words,’ I said. ‘Paper and ink. Why should words be commodities? Didn’t you say something similar to me yourself? On my first day?’
Before he could answer, the scrape and rustle of skirts and boot-heels coming to a stop. I glanced up and saw Madame, looking at me strangely.
‘Oh, yes, Madame,’ said Linux. ‘This concerns you. Your abigail has been caught, I’m afraid. Caught, yes. Thieving.’
‘What?’
Benham gave out a laugh. ‘Well, now. That’s a strong way to put it, Mrs Linux. Let the girl consider this a warning.’ He turned to me. ‘Mrs Linux will deduct from your wages a sum which I will calculate and give her due notice of. If we’re lucky you’ll pay it off before we all cock up our toes.’ He puffed himself up. ‘Let that be a lesson to us all about the grace of forgiveness.’
Linux’s jaw swung open. Her cough stuck in her throat.
I knew why Benham wouldn’t turn me out. Nothing whatsoever to do with grace or forgiveness. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, which is where all his words came from. He wanted the truth about that infant. He wanted the truth about her, also. And I hadn’t yet given him either one.
But still I wondered. Could I leave? Take myself someplace else?
Become your own woman, she’d written. The thought struck me then that perhaps I could.
I turned. Could I ask her to come? It was the drug talking, of course. The courage of the mad. She had betrayed me, I had betrayed her. But what would the world be without her in it?
She stood trembling. All of her seemed made of glass, and I saw, for the first time, her expression ‒ not shock but rage. And it was then that I looked down at her hands. There was the note I’d written, and left upstairs. My heart stuck to my ribs.
‘You have been spying on me?’
The School-house
August 1825‒January 1826
Chapter Thirty-Three
Out! Out!
Her voice rang in my ears as the door closed behind me. I stood on the step with a hand clapped over my mouth. Then I made my feet move. Across the street, past the rows of houses, along the park gates, on towards Piccadilly. Hour after hour I wandered until, when I raised my head, I saw the river. Westminster Bridge. My footsteps sounded a drumbeat, and I bent my head against the cold thwack of rain. The gas-lamps spanned one end to the other, sitting on to
p of their little domes. There were only a few stars. I strained to see the tall masts, and listen for the river beneath the creaking ships and the dull, rattling hackneys, wandering like great chained beasts.
I stood, clutched my shawl. Now you can be your own woman, I told myself. It was cold comfort. I had seldom been outside without a destination of someone else’s choosing. I kept hearing her last words: ‘Get out. Get out.’
Two days, I stayed close to the river. By day, I watched the ships go in and out. When night snapped my heels, I huddled in quieter spots and fought sleep, back to the wall, head to my knees. I dreamed of shillings clinking in my fist, though a knife would have been more use. I tried an inn. No working girls, they said. No touting your wares here. I came back to the bridge and looked out across the oily water and the winking lamps. Without laudanum, my mind was awake, and raging. And remembering. Even my teeth hurt. By the second night, my hands shook like leaves. I folded in two, vomited. When I straightened, I lifted my skirts, trying to keep them up out of the filth. A voice came from behind me. ‘Looky! Black as the night, yet trying to keep yer skirts up out of it!’
My head had emptied so I could barely move.
‘Quiet, aren’t you? Puss? No use fighting it, love. You’re as filthy as that muck and you know it.’ A cold hand curled around my elbow. I spun around with my hands up, but ribbons of sweat clogged my eyes.
Silence. My whole body clenched. Head down. Breathing. I could tell that time passed only by the clack of boots striking cobbles. I’d beaten him with my fists, but it was whatever he saw in my eyes that had beaten him off. Dog barks tore through the night. Finally, I thought. Finally. I’m being punished at last.
Next morning, I kept my eye on a row of houses, set back a few streets from my lair. People came and went. Messenger boys. Deliveries. Maids with packages. Ladies, waiting for their carriages. I went back to my alley, damped my fingers in a puddle, and tried to smooth down my hair. I fluffed my skirts around me, wiped my cheeks with the hem. Then I went back, started with the busiest door.
Most of them threatened to call the watch. The last one did.
A maid with no character, whether turned out or run off, is worse than one of the scraps of rubbish you see blowing along London’s streets.
I tried begging. I tried standing up to do it, at first, but soon learned it worked better the dirtier you looked, the lower you crouched, and the further out you stretched your hand. The coves weren’t giving, you see, they were buying. What they paid for was humiliation. Yours, as an indemnity against theirs. After an hour or so on my knees on the pavement outside a coffee-house, a man approached. He had a watch on a chain under his grey waistcoat, one eye a toad-goggle, the other half shut. ‘Money for nothing?’ he said. ‘Not very enterprising of you.’
He gave off a powerful smell of raw onions. Said he was writing a diary of the streets, and would put me in it. You and everyone else, I thought, but what I said was: ‘I’d much prefer the black drop, sir, if you have any.’
He scraped out a laugh.
‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘Aren’t writers more reliable for drugs than scribbles?’
He said how unexpected I was, like finding a guinea in mud, which he supposed he had, if one stopped to remember that the coins are themselves named after Guineamen. Then he laughed at his own wit, fumbling at his breeches, and said that, as my luck would have it, he had more than one thing that might tickle my fancy, back in his rooms.
I took my skinny earnings back to the coffee-house, tried to buy a drink. I was turned away. For being a woman, they said. But at a table in the corner, nose tucked into a newspaper and a cup, was a face I’d thought never to see again. Pomfrey. He saw me through the window, tapped the glass. When he came out, he remembered me straight away: ‘Langton’s girl! By the looks of it, that’s some tumble you’ve taken, since he left you.’ I said nothing. There was a long silence while he sized me up. But I was sizing him up, too. Wondering if I could bring myself to sink so low.
‘I think I have something useful for you,’ he said, at last. ‘Remember me mentioning the School-house? My contact there gives me a finder’s fee.’
I remembered something. If you’re sinking, and someone throws you a log, it can be a weight or a raft. But the quickest way to drown is fighting it.
I know what’s said about my time in that place, how it counts against me now, shows me as a savage character and unrepentant whore, as Jessop would have it. But the first thing to know about whoring is that it’s work. You do it same way you’d empty a chamber pot, head down, nose pinched. Many an English wife must get herself through the same activity in the same fashion.
‘Bright-eyed thing, aren’t you?’ Mrs Slap said. She squinted. ‘In the right light, you could play innocent.’
My stomach lurched. ‘But I’m not.’
She laughed. ‘All you need’s a white nightgown and a fresh razor. Though looking at you, you could just as easily go dark.’
‘Dark?’ I jerked my head up. She was giving me a choice. I didn’t yet know what.
She smiled. ‘You ever whipped anybody?’
Chapter Thirty-Four
You can’t ever get clean enough in a bawdy-house. It’s even worse in prison, where the simple act of lying down covers you in the kind of muck you’d find under a cow’s straw. But at least at the School-house I had my own bathwater and my own tin tub. And my own Martha to thump upstairs, carrying bathwater to the Scarlet Room, which was mine also. Or, at least, the one I slept in. Though I could see Martha’s brown eye rolling at the keyhole while I washed.
Mornings found me stretched in my little tub. Arms and legs hooked over the sides, and the swill of water warm as blood. But my heart was always somewhere behind me. Was she in her own bath? Between her sheets? Was it Pru who brought her chocolate up? Did she still see him? In my mind’s ear, I still heard her, screeching: Get out! Get out.
Memory swamped me, and I slapped at the side of the tub to stop it. I sat up. From outside a shout wedged through the window. ‘For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?’
You could set your clock by those Bible verses. I hated them, but it was one of the things I’d learned to endure in my first two weeks there.
With the diarist I’d fallen into a hole. At the School-house I had to step down into it. That first morning a woman came out to fetch me, took me to an empty bedroom. ‘You’re to dry out in here,’ she said. ‘Then the old Slapper will want a word.’ That was the first time I blessed my eyes on Sal. A gleam of shaved head and a wink of gold ear-drops. Elbows jutting.
My own breath knifed me into the pillow, coughing.
By the time Sal came back, night had fallen. Nothing showed in the doorframe but the lights of her eyes, her cigar. Black skin through a scarf of smoke.
I’ve lost her. I turned over, tried to scrabble back into sleep.
‘Oh, no. Up you get.’
‘I can’t. I can’t . . .’
‘Girl.’ Her voice floating above me. ‘You thought it was a question?’ Even with my eyes closed I could feel her staring. ‘You going have to make yourself useful or make yourself scarce.’
But she let me stay put. Through the shakes, the terrible needles pricking my flesh. Laudanum can be pure bliss going in, yet it’s nothing but pain to rid yourself of it. I vomited, I sweated, I slept. Each time I woke I barely knew my own name. You wouldn’t wish it on a dog you were trying to kill. I heard Sal come and go, felt her hands. A week of that and you could say I was weaned, in the sense that the drug made me sick even to think of it. But I couldn’t cure myself of the longing to go back. Not even Sal could help with that. Memory was a hook, twisted in my gut.
Now I was well again, and working. Sal came into my room, as was her habit every morning. She perched on the tub, and lifted one of my feet into her hands. But she took one look at my face, clucked her tongue, and dropped it. ‘You still fretting about you white woman?’
S
he hated when I spoke of Madame, so I didn’t answer her, but rose instead, flooding the rug, pulled on my dressing-gown. From the window, I could see Mrs Slap. Bible in hand, black-bonneted, fat. Wide everywhere except her eyes, which she narrowed at me, then at the street. ‘Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,’ she called out, ‘of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed!’
To the neighbours, Mrs Slap was Mrs Austen, a widow from Cornwall. We were her darky maids, Sally and Frances. I still thought it a miracle that she’d said I could stay, which made Sal laugh. ‘Don’t mistake that for charity. You going earn her plenty. White coves go mad for nigger gals! Two things they can’t get enough of. Flogging. Them all raised up on it. They get the taste in school and then for ever after either got to be giving a whipping or getting one. And sugar. The browner the better. And you a mulatta to boot!’
After my bath, Sal and I went for a walk. Some days, all the beauty in London is right above your head. We walked from Cleveland Street to Oxford Street to New Bond Street. I made up stories out of the signboards for Sal’s amusement. Hemp bags plump with coins swung next to geese laying golden eggs. There were gilt-edged purses, pewter ships rocking on black oceans, clerks with backs curved like quills. Bare-chested mermaids. Greed and gold and lust. The smells of hot chestnuts and ginger and melting butter swelled around us. Sunlight scrubbed everything clean. Our own chatter blended with the jangle of the hawkers and pedestrians. Some heads turned, but we paid them no mind. The day was too beautiful.
