by Sara Collins
I smoothed my hands along the waistline of my new dress, a pink satin with black rosettes. It was the first thing I’d bought for myself. Sal wore her golden ear-bobs, shaped like conch shells, brown kid breeches and a crimson bandeau around her head. We stopped to buy chestnuts and, when we turned around, stepped right into a man waiting in line. Fat, a gut like the prow of a ship, a thin straggle of beard. ‘Savages,’ he muttered. ‘No room in this country for the likes of you.’
Sal stopped, elbows akimbo. ‘More than enough room. Maybe it’s you taking up too much.’
He spat. ‘Nothing but savages and whores.’
‘Says a man who only got him own well-larded palm to keep company with.’
By now she’d attracted a crowd, and was drawing laughter out of them, too, and that got him angry. Aflame, beetroot, he pushed his face towards hers. Beak to beak, like fighting cocks. ‘I don’t have to stand for this from some nigger,’ he said, ‘come here to eat the bread of idleness.’
‘Sal.’ I pulled at her. ‘Sorry,’ I said. Held my hands up. I could feel all eyes on us.
Around the corner, she turned on me. Our good mood vanished, like soap suds in a drying sun. ‘Why you say sorry to him?’
‘You always start trouble.’
‘Me? I was walking.’ She sucked her teeth. ‘And you? You always looking at clouds and tripping over you own damn feet. Just like a house-nigger.’
The words were like a slap. So much like something Phibbah might have said. ‘Sal –’ I said.
She spat. ‘You might be ’shamed of me. But that’s ’cause you got white hopes. I got Negro expectations.’ She turned on her heels. ‘And stop following me. I not you mother.’
Sal’s words smacked Phibbah’s voice right back into my head: What that gal say only vex you ’cause you know is true. You a house-nigger. You thought that made you better off, and now you not so sure. Tell the truth. All your palabber, only to still end up right here? Right where you already were. You get your precious freedom, and is it any better for you than being a slave? Her voice was lodged in my throat. Memories scraping at me.
I think that’s why I did what I did.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Sometime towards the end of my first week at the School-house, Mrs Slap had sent for me to meet her in the library. Yes, there was a library there, too. Full of books I’d never seen in any other. Boileau’s Histoire des Flagellants. A Treatise of the Use of Flogging. I found her writing up her ledgers. Any time I saw Mrs Slap she was holding the Bible or one of her ledgers. Ten thousand a year, in a good year, the other girls had told me.
She held up a finger for me to wait, and only when she was good and done did she set down her pen, give me a hard stare. Carrying on with her sums in her head, no doubt. Pounds of flesh, my weight in coins.
There was still that sour taste in my mouth, dregs of the drug and the vomit. I licked my lips, and said nothing.
‘Here’s the most important thing you need to know while you’re here. In this trade, and in this branch of the trade, there’s only one way for a girl to thrive. And that’s by learning to judge a man’s appetites. Now, some of it’s more than enough to turn your stomach, I grant you, but who are we to stop a man’s nastiness if it’s his own self he wants it done to? No. That’s not for you to judge. But! You give them just enough. Let them think they’re getting as much as they want. It’s up to you to see the line. Save them from their nastier appetites.’ She gave the quill feather a long stroke, same way you’d go about trying to raise a man’s flag. ‘However. It is for us to judge what is appetite and what is thirst. Appetite is what we cater to, here. Thirst? No. Thirst will make you claw out your own throat. Thirst will get my house shut down.’
I nodded, swaying, the shelves blurred. ‘Yes. I understand. His appetites are fair game, not his thirsts.’
‘His?’ She threw back her head and laughed. ‘His? But . . . I wasn’t talking about his thirst, girl. I was talking about yours.’
The coves went by first names only. Henry was one of my regulars. Drooping jowls and a mouth as small as a mustard seed. For all I knew, he could have been the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I did know what he liked. Being birched, whipped, flogged, stung with nettles, swaddled, holly-brushed. Kissing my feet while I lay back on the chaise; being taken over my knee for doing his sums incorrectly; being paraded downstairs in nothing but a corset and kid slippers. Sal said he surely had to be a lawyer or a priest.
Men like him were the ones who wanted scarring, always happier to let themselves loose under the whip hand of a black. That put the white girls’ noses out of joint. But we’d already been in the bondage business, no matter that it had been at the other end.
The School-house was brightest after dark. All the sconces lit, all the girls scraping themselves out of bed, or back in from wherever they’d been. The light scattered like water from a pail, shining the drapes, beeswax masking the smell of sweat. Henry was my visitor for the evening. I stripped his clothes, made him wear the frilled apron, stand at the grate where I could keep an eye on him. I made my voice harsh. ‘No costume tonight. You going take me as you find me.’
Henry wanted me to sound ‘African’. The more African, the better, he always said. I heard his breath catch. ‘What’re you going to do to me?’
I shrugged.
This is all the freedom there is, I thought. Take it where you find it, or you don’t get it at all.
The smell coming off him. Salt, sharp. There was a whine in his voice. ‘Miss Fran? What are you going to do to me?’
‘What?’ I wondered aloud.
I’d taken the birch out of the bucket where it had been soaking. There’d be a sting in it. I tapped it into my opposite palm.
Raised my hand.
And then the clock slid down into some deep hole. Black. Blank. Sticky as coal-tar.
I heard steps running upstairs, down the hall, outside my door. Boots. Keys.
One moment, I raised my hand and next moment Henry was being carted away by Mrs Slap, and there was that hot blister through me all over again. Like the drug.
Then it was me who had to wait. I crossed the red carpet. A churning in my stomach. Not so much that I had shocked myself. No. It was that I’d thought maybe it was coming back. The old violence. The blood on my hands. In my mind’s eye, I saw Paradise. I saw the coach-house.
I heard the door open, heard the creak of the bed, and looked behind me. Sal.
I pressed my brow to the glass. A carriage pulled up outside.
‘My head hurts,’ I said.
Sal gave out her coconut-husk laugh. ‘Not as much as his back.’
‘It’s like they expect us just to pass through like shadows,’ she said to me later. We were in her bed. She’d taken my head into her lap and was plaiting my hair into rows. ‘Just don’t make no fuss. Don’t let them know we here. Is them bring us here yet still they act like we just come to eat up them little white babies! That’s what the real trouble is, you know.’ She laughed. ‘White babies. No African better get in the milk, not even one drop. Maybe one day this whole place full of mongrels like you.’
Sal had said sorry for calling me a house-nigger, I’d said sorry for being one, made her laugh.
‘What do you think Mrs Slap will do?’
‘Some questions don’t have right answers. Just have to wait and see.’
‘Wait and see is the trouble,’ I replied. ‘We’re always waiting and seeing.’
She finished up the last row, palmed her hand down over my brow. My scalp tingled under her hand.
‘My old master brought me to England too, you know. I ever told you? Is like them trying them damnedest to make sure we all have the same story.’ Her face moved like water as she spoke. ‘We hardly even reach good when that old bastard cock up him toes. The landlady turn me out, though the rent was paid in advance.’
Before they came, the summer she turned sixteen, he had sold Sal’s children out from und
er her to pay off some card-game debt. Three of them, the smallest only ten months. She dreamed of killing him. She supposed they were his children too, though he never saw it that way. Then one day he came to her and said he needed to see a man about a dog, in England – something to do with his no-good grown children – and couldn’t do without her.
‘So. We come here. Apoplexy give me my free paper. And there I am. Right out on the streets. I ask myself, What now? And then I hear the answer, plain as day: Sally Beckwith, no more buckra massa going pull you out the cane-piece and fuck you for free and then make you take the shame of it and the blame of it.’
Next morning, I couldn’t eat. My own nerves flavoured the bread sour, turned the coffee solid in my throat. The faces of the other girls danced around the table, wild-eyed. ‘You’ll be all right, Fran,’ they said. Their laughs still came easy. But the truth was, no one knew what would happen to me, and the only reason for them being awake so early was because they wanted to find out. I sat tall, drumming my fingers. Sooner or later everybody’s luck turns bad. Sal reached under the table, patted my knee. ‘You be all right,’ she mouthed.
Mrs Slap was in her library, having a smoke. She laughed, as soon as I went in, flicked a spear of ash into her tray. ‘I see you have gone dark,’ she said. ‘But we’ve had a request, not a complaint. Seems your thirsts quench his. Lucky for you. He wants more of the same, every Saturday, usual time. And try not to kill him.’
She waved a hand; smoke closed around her like fog.
So, far from being turned out, I became notorious. As Sal was fond of saying, I had to beat the customers away after that. (Ha!) Everybody wanted Ebony Fran. The African savage.
Her specialities were the ones who wanted scarring.
Chapter Thirty-Six
After a week or two, I was the only one who still fretted about those minutes, like something that had rolled under a bed. That time when my head had gone dark and filled with blood. What terrified me was that the world hadn’t so much fallen away as fallen into place. That I was the one submitting, even when it was I who wielded the whip. For all those weeks, I lived in terror of closing my eyes. Whenever I did, there was the coach-house, burning to the ground, and me standing inside it, my hands moving, but the rest of me stuck in mud. At Paradise, time began and ended with the scalpel in my hand. In between, it seeped black. And it had been the same blackness with Henry; that very blackness you say I must use now, as the cornerstone of my defence. Telling me to say it must have been the drug, since I couldn’t have been in my right mind, if I killed them as they say I did.
I don’t want to say it, because I am terrified it might be true. I know that memories hide sometimes for the simple reason that we could not bear their weight. That sometimes it’s mercy that unwinds the clock.
When night comes now, it’s black as a rotted tooth, and I dream her into it. I hear her voice: Death is the only thing that scares me now. I see Benham shouting, and hear myself shouting too. Though that part isn’t a dream, but shreds of memory, torn from a black cloth.
But, in time, thoughts of what I’d done to Henry faded. I settled to my work. Five months I stayed. I got used to being with the other girls when the house was empty, playing at Loo and cribbage in the corridors, leaning against the walls, or sitting on the velvet settees in the parlour before it filled, watching the fire. Small threads of happiness. Come morning that whole corridor was a dawn chorus. Girls calling down for their ewers of vinegar and their gin. Seven of them, all waiting for Martha. I had a sheaf of paper I’d bought myself at Wickstead’s, though all I did was stare at it, spent so long thinking what to write I never wrote anything. Eating breakfast with the others, from the same table where someone had been served up for the customers’ dinner the night before. It could feel almost like a little family, if you ignored the Berkley horse in the attic, the planks nailed together with leather straps, and the human skeleton in one of the kitchen cupboards that had been bought from resurrectionists.
But that happier part of me strayed back to knit itself to the broken part. Like a cracked but still-living bone. Madame was a door that wouldn’t stay closed; I thought of her so often that when one of the other girls said the name ‘Benham’ one morning, pointing at a newspaper cartoon, I thought for a moment it was I who’d said it, and slung my hand up to my mouth. But it turned out Benham had written a ‘biographical sketch of his friend, John Langton’, which made the pair of them sound as saintly as chicks just hatched. That made me laugh, and so did the word ‘friend’. Then I looked closer and saw the announcement. Langton was dead. The news scrubbed my mind clean, like windows flung wide to let in air. Everything went black. I had to steady myself against the table before I could read on. In spite of their public differences, the celebrated natural philosopher and diarist George Benham would deliver the eulogy. When I read that aloud, the girl laughed too. ‘Oh, I know him,’ she said.
‘Langton?’
‘No, the other one.’
Sometimes, she said, when you whip a cove, pain goes inside them, and hooks their secrets right out.
But it wasn’t Benham I was concerned with then. The awful clock of Langton’s heart had stopped. He’d outlived his doctor and, now, a twin misfortune: he’d been survived by his own ambitions. Crania was to be published after all, in the light of the interest stirred up by the author’s death. But I took some small pleasure in knowing he hadn’t lived to see it. Later that morning, Sal propped herself on my pillows to listen to the details about the funeral. Miss-bella had been still in Jamaica and unable to attend. It had been a sudden death; the body had tripped a chambermaid bringing fresh sheets. Apoplexy. ‘Your old bastard get the same damn death as mine!’ Sal cried.
She knew better than to ask me how I felt about any of it. And I knew better than to tell her.
Even now, writing of it, I’m afflicted with some queer feeling that goes right through my spine. I fear to write about it. You will judge me for it. How could you not? The news cast me down, same way thinking about it casts me down now. One part of what I was feeling was regret.
He should have died before now, I thought, and I should have been the one to kill him.
The next day, work done for the night, Sal and I went down to Hyde Park Corner, to one of the kitchen stalls. We bought saveloys, and ham sliced right off the pig, took our food to eat in the park. My satin skirts trailed behind us, and so did Sal’s laugh, a scurry of fresh mint from the single leaf she chewed after smoking. If Sal had known what I was thinking, she’d have boxed my ears. Because I was wondering if she was there. Would I see her? Would I turn a corner on one of the paths, and find her there? It was the thing I wanted most, yet feared even more.
I leaned over for a bite of ham, which was hot and salty and coated my fingers with grease. ‘Sal. Do you know anything about George Benham?’
‘George Benham.’ She swung her head towards me. ‘Why you ask?’
‘I worked for him. That’s where I came from.’
‘That’s who your old bastard gave you away to?’
‘Do you know him?’
She sucked on her cigar. ‘And that’s who you white woman is.’
Something was hovering on her lips, and I had to wait for it. Her smoke stung my eyes and I fiddled with a button on my boot. ‘Don’t know much about George Benham,’ she said at last, ‘except to know if that’s where you was, you better off here.’
She ground her cigar out under her heel. ‘Saw her. Once.’
‘What? Where?’
She laughed. ‘Settle yourself! Not yesterday. I went to the fisticuffs. It was just before you came. Laddie Lightning was fixing to break his knuckles on one a their champs. Name slips me. Some big, lardy fellow. Drew all the niggers like flies, a course.’
‘I must have been under a bridge at the time,’ I said, trying to raise a laugh, drown out his name.
‘Oho. You missed something. He jumped them ropes afterwards, words flying, spit flying. Blood just lashi
ng off him. But then him just stop – braps ‒ and bow, like so. Like him lifting a hat . . . but him never have no hat. Him staring at somebody. Everybody turn see who. Was like him put footlights on her. She the only white woman up front. Wearing some head-wrap, like she fooling a soul. She shook her head at him, then she left. But she was all the talk afterwards.’ She gave me a look. ‘That’s how I knew who she was.’
I twisted my hands into the grass. ‘Well. What were they saying?’
A pause. ‘Nothing kind.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Who? Lightning?’
‘Yes. To her.’
She looked up at the sky, dark as her cigar ash, stars simmering through the trees. Then she brushed down her skirts, sucked her teeth. ‘I never hear any of it.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Though it was Madame I craved news of, I learned more about Benham at the School-house than in all the time I lived under his nose. If I think about him now, I think about all those words he wrote, scrubbing his own history sure as Pru scrubbed his floors. And that eulogy, saying that though he might have differed with his great friend on the answer to the slavery question, they were united in seeing it as the cement of England’s fortunes. They agreed that the Negro had a natural place, they simply disagreed about how to treat him while he was in it. Benham himself would be quickest to tell you he campaigned for improvements, let me sit at his own table, cut the cord with Langton, who was despicable in truth (though he let him sit at his table too). But there’s a split in the minds of men like him, because it’s also true that he once told me he might not want to abuse his Negroes, but neither did he want to marry them, and that this world was built on slavery, from pyramids to plantations, that we’re all members of the same human species; nevertheless there is a hierarchy of men.
