by Sara Collins
‘At least,’ Langton used to say, ‘I put my hands right down in that dirt beside a nigger. I walk through that same dirt barefoot beside him, too. Before I make him cut my cane.’
Who’s to say which of them was God, and which the Devil? Or whether they were both devils or both gods. They both owned slaves, and no man can be virtuous who does.
Whenever I write about Benham, I remember something you said about the arsenic, the receipt from Apothecary Jones that Jessop waved at the jurors, how you argued that it was like Cobbett’s red herring, drawn across the path to put the hounds off the scent. But the same could be said of Benham and Langton, too. They were savages, yet it’s my so-called savagery that’s being drawn across the path now, leading everyone away from theirs.
Benham’s eyes had become as raw-rimmed as my own before I left, as if he, too, had fallen under the spell of some drug. Keeping to those night-time hours of his. The truth is, there was less to George Benham than met the eye. Spying on her, asking me to spy too, when all along he was the one who needed watching. Yet nobody was watching him.
I took the newspapers every morning. And Langton wasn’t the only ghost to find his way to me by that route. One morning it was raining, so there was no chance of a walk. I took my bread up to my room, with a scoop of jam, and an apricot fancy for Sal. She brought her little mirror, and propped it on my mantel while she shaved her head. I watched her smooth soap across her scalp, crooning some tune under her breath. Then I looked down at the paper and the shock climbed up into my throat.
‘What happen?’ Sal said. ‘You see duppy?’
The nose was wrong. Too harsh, too narrow. She’d curled her hair into those fat swinging sausages they had all wanted that Season. ‘It’s her,’ I said. ‘Says here she was trying to swim in the fountain. At Almack’s. Do you know Almack’s? Finally gone and got herself banned.’
But already I was skimming the remaining lines, tripping over my breath. She’d had Laddie, then the drug, then me. What did she have now? The drug again, I thought. Only the drug. She’d sworn she had not been trying to swim, that the patronesses were simply looking for scandal, anything to give their tedious little Assemblies a thrill. I didn’t notice until I straightened that Sal had stilled, razor pinched between two fingers. ‘Fran. I done. You hear me? Done, done, done. I done talking about you white woman, and all them white people you left behind. You should be too.’ I watched her, and swung my jaw shut. ‘If you count losses all the time,’ she said, turning back to the mirror, ‘losses be all you have.’
What had I lost?
Two faces pressed together in the dark. Small embers of breath. The feeling that here was all my happiness at last.
Some things are always better done by someone else, like pulling teeth. I needed someone to thread twine between my heart and the door handle. Two mornings later, I shoved a fist under my pillow and crossed the hall. Sal was still in bed, smoking, a tray propped on her knees. Each morning she made Martha bring her whatever puddings and jellies had been left in the dessert bowls the night before, and a single cigar. She said she felt not an ounce of guilt about the sugar. ‘It surely better to eat than make.’
It was always warm in Sal’s room. Mrs Slap had put a marble surround in there at the fireplace, with laughing cherubs carved into it, and there was a rose-pink settee in one corner, beside Sal’s paddling bench. Even Sal looked softer in there, her face smudged with sleep. I handed her the clipping, folding the page away from me.
‘You kep’ this?’ Her mouth shrank like a thirsty flower. ‘You love to pull pain right off the goddamn shelf.’
‘Seems so.’
‘All right.’ She looked up at me. ‘What I suppose to do with it?’
‘Burn it.’
Five months. Through September, through the drying leaves, then the falling ones. I stayed to watch London moving towards dark winter again.
I’m close now to having to write about all those things I wish I could forget, yet I can only write about them, for there are some things I will never be able to say out loud. Now, I must come full circle. Departure to return. But what I haven’t told you yet is that Mr Benham sought to turn me out again, the very day he was killed. And that I argued with him, not just with her.
But, first, I must return.
One night, I found someone waiting in the Scarlet Room I’d never have expected. Not in a month of Sundays.
‘How’d you ‒’ I reached behind me for the knob. But then I tightened my shoulders. ‘Hello, Pru.’
‘How are you, Frances?’ She cut her eyes around the room. Mantel to bath to bed, and back again. She clutched a reticule to her chest. She’d dressed like it was an afternoon off. A grey muslin with a yellow stripe. I get every afternoon off now, Pru.
‘Madame sent me.’
‘So I see.’ And it rattled me like a door on a latch. ‘You want to sit?’
‘Oh, no, I –’ She laughed, looked down at the bed, took a little step back. ‘I’d better not, hadn’t I?’
‘Suit yourself.’
She gave me a thin smile.
‘You must take me as you find me, Pru.’
‘I know.’ She drummed her fingers against the purse.
‘Well?’
‘Madame’s sick.’
‘She can cure herself by leaving that vial alone.’
‘You have turned stony. I thought you cared for her.’
‘And I thought there’s no such thing as friendship for the likes of us.’
‘Maybe.’ She frowned. ‘But there is such a thing as decency.’ She set a folded paper on the bed, turned to go. ‘She said to give you that.’
The seal. Her initials. MD. And the fleur-de-lis pressed into blood-red wax. A letter. From her: I am unwell. And I fear only you can make me better. And I am sorry. I was mad for you once and ever will be. Will you come back? Please come. Ritte
‘Will there be any answer?’
‘No, Pru. No answer.’
But after she left, my hand shook so I could barely hold the page.
And, oh, in spite of myself, I was glad.
Levenhall
January 1826
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I climbed the stairs, snicked the latch, opened the door. There, half shadowed, head tucked onto her hands, just as I had pictured her a thousand times, there she was. My thoughts made flesh.
I crept around the bed. She was asleep, so I gazed my fill. Paced footsteps into the carpet. Bed to mantel to bed. Nerves all pins and needles, and heart pacing in its own cage. Her face was pinched in sleep, fluttering the sheets with hot breath. Drapes closed thick at the windows. The red cabinets were unlatched. No sign of any amber bottles.
I needed to busy myself. I sorted her books into piles on the tea-table and the desk, matched a glove on the mantel to one below the bed. I emptied dead roses from the vase, swept blackening petals into my palm, folded her kimono. I couldn’t stop myself searching the writing desk. Nothing from him. There was a strange smell, blood-sweet, though I’d cleared out the roses. The air was stale, and heavy on my skin. All the while she drew hitching breaths and did not wake.
I circled the room and couldn’t find my bearings. I sat, stood, sat again, until finally I stood and just stared at the woman in red.
When I drew back the drapes, she finally came to. ‘Frances! You got my letter? Is it truly you?’
‘Are you ill?’
She hesitated. ‘Only tired.’
‘I came to see how you fare. If you’re well, I’ll leave.’
‘Are we not friends any more?’
‘You turned me out.’
‘Oh, I have wished for you to come back.’ She drew herself up against the headboard, rubbed at her mouth. Her hair was knotted like the veins on an old woman’s legs. I had to stop myself reaching for the brush. Perhaps the smell was coming from her. She looked fevered, unwashed. She drew the sheet to her chin. ‘You are so changed.’
I curled my hands. You are
not.
I emptied her pot into the night-soil bin, rinsed it outside. The kitchen was empty but there was a loaf set on the counter, warm as a new babe. I took down the breadknife and cut a slice, fetched some cheese from the cold larder, cut an apple in half. I found some cold tongue under a towel and I cut a slice of that as well, set it on a plate with the bread and cheese and some green olives.
Pru came in out of the scullery, carrying a clutch of Madame’s evening dresses, and took such a fright on seeing me that she dropped them. But her smile ran out quick as a flag up a pole. ‘Frances! You came. I knew you would.’
‘What’s all this?’ I pointed upstairs.
‘Told you. Another of her spells. This time, Mr Benham says she mustn’t be disturbed. Not even to clean.’
Benham had been the one to open the door, which had jangled me. I know things about you, I thought, on coming face to face with him again. I’d gone there armed with my new knowledge, ready to use it if I had to, force him to let me in, but when Linux came up, dusting her hands on her apron, he’d told her sternly that I was to be allowed to stay. Her face shuttered, and she scuttled back downstairs. He blinked at me.
‘I’m here to see Madame,’ I said, lifting my chin.
He shook his head. ‘You will find her changed.’
She vomited as soon as I unwrapped the food, though I couldn’t say I blamed her. I held the pot under her chin until she finished. She slumped her head over it, tapped her thumbs, made it ring like tin.
‘This is not the drug,’ she blurted, wiping at her lips. ‘I am weaning myself.’
‘Oh.’ I thought back to my nights on the streets, and with Sal. ‘You’ll need water.’
‘I’ll need brandy.’ She gave a weak laugh.
Her face went dark, and her eyes too, and she turned them to me. She let the sheet fall. ‘Oh, Frances, darling Frances,’ she whispered. ‘Something terrible.’
I turned away.
If she needs me, I cannot stay away. That’s what I’d told Sal, and she’d got up and walked out without another word, not even to say goodbye.
A sick feeling tickled at my stomach. ‘This is why you sent for me.’
‘I sent for you because you are dear to me, because –’ I went to the bedside table and swirled brandy into her glass, swallowed down that drink and poured another. She watched me. Set the basin aside and gripped her hands. ‘‒ because you are dear to me. I do not know what to say,’ she said.
‘You are not ill.’ All I could see was the swollen lip of belly under the nightdress.
‘Non.’ She twisted her lips.
Brandy burned the back of my throat. Then the thought struck me. My lips went cold. Of course. Whose it was. I turned. ‘Does Mr Benham know?’
I helped her into the bath. My nails scraped along her spine, thin as a string of pearls, her shoulder blades pressing the skin of her back. I was shocked at how she’d dwindled. Everywhere except her round belly, she was skin knocking against bone. Clear skin. The truth between two people is a slow poison, though I’d say that love is even worse. The truth dribbled out between us then.
It had been the drug, she said. After I’d left, she took more and more. As many as eighty, ninety, one hundred grains. It’s a wonder she hadn’t died. A pity, I thought. A blink of hate. It had taken only weeks for her to recognize herself as a true opium-eater. Even then, she couldn’t stop herself. She started to eat it raw, and it had made her fevered, and mad. As deranged as any Bedlamite. She remembered hardly any of it. Her memories of that time were all noise and light, shapes and shadows. Several times she’d thought she heard me calling her name, or answering when she cried out to me. Sometimes she’d thought she saw me at the writing desk.
She tried to turn around, look at me, but I pushed her back. I lifted the pitcher, poured water over the hard shell of her belly, over her pink nipples, over her skin in private floods.
‘It was only once. I went to see him, because I had no one else. And he was my friend, once.’ She went in the carriage, swore Charles to secrecy. She needed help . . . she thought . . . she thought . . . she didn’t think. ‘Everyone had accused us already . . .’
‘He didn’t notice?’
She looked to the door. ‘He only notices when my misbehaviour scales the walls and makes news that gets back to him. And you had left me . . .’
‘You turned me out.’
‘Turned you out?’ She twisted, still trying to catch my eye, and again I held her at bay, feeling once more all the wretched agony of that afternoon. ‘Non! You said you were leaving, Frances. Remember? You told Mr Benham. I was upset, because of what I found, but I would not have turned you out.’
I sat back on my haunches. My head spun. Remembering the bluster I’d felt, thinking I could just walk out and fend for myself. The echo of her shouts. ‘We remember it differently,’ I said.
She shook her own head, her back quivering under the washcloth. ‘All that time . . .’
‘I found your letters, you know. I found them that afternoon.’
‘Letters?’
‘From him.’ His name sticks in my throat. I can’t say it. ‘You kept them. In your egg-chest. It’s the only reason I wrote what I did for Mr Benham. I shouldn’t have. I should have torn it up. I would not have given it to him.’
She fell quiet, drew her knees close, and spoke her next words to the water. ‘Those were letters between friends. I admired him, yes. But as a friend. How can I explain it? He made something so extraordinary of himself ‒’
I snorted. ‘A man. I know, I know. He made a man of himself. Because he is a man. And free to make of himself whatever he wants.’
‘But – Fran ‒ you know that is not quite true. He was only a child when Mr Benham brought him here. Then he was like a son to me. My greatest shame is not that I proved them right, but that I proved myself wrong. You will not forgive me. He will not forgive me either. When I went to see him, it was as if there was something in him that wanted to wound me . . .’
That was all she gave by way of explanation. It was not enough, but I can never hope for more. Loneliness drove her to him. Loneliness drove her always. She hadn’t known what to do. She’d called for me. Even in her sleep, she called for me. I was the only true friend she had. Finally, it had been Laddie himself who’d told her what he’d heard on the streets about Ebony Fran, and where to find me.
Sending for me was not friendship, I thought.
She said no more, only sat forward, her back curved as a blade. A blade that should have finished me there and then, had it been merciful.
Look at you, said my own voice, close at my ear. Look where you are. Back on your knees.
I pushed away, to my feet. Water splashing. I was picturing it. The rotted-fruit smell of Laddie’s rooms. The baby, curled in the dark like a wet fist. ‘First thing a baby do is wring you inside out,’ Phibbah used to say. ‘Then it spend the rest of its life wringing you outside in.’ I set down the cloth, left her to dry herself.
Looking at her put a sour taste in my mouth. When she stood at the mirror, one hand curved careless, nails ragged and torn, looking at herself and worrying, I turned away. It was she who told me to tell Linux that now I was there she was not to be disturbed. That I would tend her, bring up her trays. She wrung her hands and kept her eyes fixed on the door, as if she thought we were being watched. But Benham never showed his face, the rest of that afternoon. He stayed in his library. Deep in his work, Linux said. ‘He’s almost there. Pulling the real meat out of his raw material. And you choose this time to bring your disturbance to his door.’
If she was weaning herself, I saw no signs of it. It was her nerves, she said. Needing the steadying hand of the drug. I needed it too. Craved it. All that night opium fever moved through her and, at times, it clutched at my hand and said all manner of unspeakable things. I could come back with you, Frances, I could keep it ‒
I went cold. In my mind’s eye, I saw a little mulatta girl, dandled on my k
nee.
‘No.’ I made myself say it quickly, shook my head. Some things are not possible in this world. Some women are born knowing that, some have to learn. Oh, but I should have said yes. I know that now. Come, my love, come with me, come what may. Isn’t that how they’d have it in a novel or a romance?
Mr Casterwick came up to say Benham wanted her downstairs in the parlour. I followed her down, thinking I’d see about making her some tea. But I crept back, put my ear to the door. Snatches of talk. Loose threads. Why can I not do it in my own time? . . . Please, let me . . . do it on my own . . . You stifle me with ‒ And then, only mumbling.
In the kitchen, the heat was stifling. I sat at the table to wait for the kettle and felt it like wet muslin over my face. The room was empty. My head filled with thoughts of what he could want with her. I hadn’t been there longer than a few minutes when Linux came in, knocked her boots against the jamb, and unknotted the strings of her bonnet. I coughed to make sure she looked up and saw me. When she did, her scars flared red. ‘You.’ She glanced at the stove. ‘What’s the water for?’
‘Tea.’
‘For her?’
‘Who else?’
‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s been three weeks now since she left that room. If it’s as bad as all that, we must send for Dr Fawkes.’
‘She doesn’t want the doctor.’
‘Then why are her doors locked? It’s always when you’re in this house that it fills with secrets.’
Before I could answer, Mr Casterwick came to the door. ‘Mr Benham requests that you join them upstairs.’
She sat on the blue sofa with her hands crab-clawed in her lap. I tried to catch her eye, but she looked away. I couldn’t tell anything from the set of her mouth, but I could from the way she refused to look at me. ‘Come in,’ he said. His face was tight and he jerked his neck, so it clicked forward; the knob in his throat slid up and down. ‘Sit.’ I went to the window bench. My old seat. Outside, a liquid earth, wet and green. The light fading. He waited for Mr Casterwick to shut the door. ‘I’ve been speaking with my wife.’ Her hands twitched. Laudanum shakes.
