by Sara Collins
Chapter Fifty-Two
Even now memory sieves those hard stones of grief. But I must draw back the shade. Hold a mirror up to that night. Her truth now forces me to set mine down also, to face myself and what I’ve done. Forcing me to bleed, and bleed again. I feel sure I can come close to the truth of it, which is as certain as we can ever be about the truth.
A breath.
And here it is.
I couldn’t sit still, I went downstairs in search of her. Through cold rooms, through narrow passages, through the darkened hall. The windows shrouded in fog. I couldn’t hold onto anything, tried to grasp the table, but I stumbled. Fell. The grandfather clock shuddered. The hall was empty and dim, but there was light and life in the drawing room, and it drew me. The very same longing that had driven me to her rooms in the dead of night. Polished wood gleamed like eyes, the doors gaped. Dark shapes twisted against the walls: people circling, talking. Most of them turned and gawped at me. A crush of skirts and perfumes and hair. Violin music coming from somewhere far away. I stopped, stared.
Benham took a step, raised his hand. Stay back. I saw Hep Elliot. Laddie.
Her.
She was beside the long window, at the heart of a small crowd. Head tilted, glass raised. Laughing. When I saw that it split my heart like a cord of wood. She moved from one guest to another, then the next. When she saw me, she came to a stop. The room went still. Their murmurings fell upon me like rain. Meg’s strange, darky maid.
When I reached her, I lifted my chin, gathered my breath.
‘Sssh. Frances.’ Her nails pressed into my arm. ‘Sssh.’ I tried to shake her loose, but she wouldn’t let go.
This is death.
Linux shouldering through the crowd, Charles in tow. Forgetting her manners. Her wide jar of a mouth, her eyes sour as plums. But it was Madame who told me to leave. ‘Please. Do not make a fuss.’ Her eyes black. I saw fear in them, and the coil of some darker thing.
The room breathed again as I turned on my heel.
Charles took me to the attic. But I went back down, to her room, sat on the bed. I kicked my feet against it. Books slumped in piles, like dark stones in a well, and the walls pressed in. I felt the same sick clutch at my stomach that had taken hold of me when I saw her. I got up, lit a candle, remembered how they’d all been congratulating themselves. Congratulating him.
What a debate! What a speaker! What a man!
While I had been forsaken. I was being turned out again.
Earlier that day, I’d come up from the kitchen to find her in bed, drapes of blood on her legs, the gown bunched up around them. Not her own blood. The baby had finally let go, and she lay curled around it. A little beached thing on the sheet. A little mulatta. Like me. All babies are pale, did you know that? You can only tell how dark they’re going to be by the fingers and the toes. This one slipped into my palm; a little girl; a tiny blood-dark head; feet small as nails.
Her face crumpled when I shook her awake. ‘Let me sleep . . .’ Her eyes rolled, her breath too. But, at last, she let me take it. I worked on the living body first, then the dead one. This was work I knew. I kept my hands busy. Washed her, changed her gown. I felt the fire move out of the grate and into my bones. Watched the ash cool white. ‘I’ll have to get fresh sheets,’ I said. ‘And we’ll need to burn these.’ She didn’t even look up. I drew an almighty breath. ‘I’ll have to burn it, too.’
That roused her. She sat up, slid her hands across the bed. ‘No.’
The bottle was on the bedside table, and I could see the tooth-marks of the drug upon her. Only a dark swirl left, mere dregs. My hand quaked with wanting it myself. I’d have licked the rim.
‘How much did you take?’ I asked.
She frowned. ‘I have not slept since you were here.’
A tiny flame. She needs me. Still.
‘How much?’ I repeated.
‘I didn’t know what you would decide. And I have been all agony, waiting. I wanted ‒’ She gave a sharp cry. She wouldn’t look at me. ‘But when I saw it – And now. I –’ She broke off. ‘I only wanted –’
‘You wanted what you got,’ I interrupted. ‘You wanted it gone.’ It was cruel of me. All she’d done was make sure she wanted no more than she was allowed.
She trembled, under the bedcovers, made me promise we’d bury it, and begged me never to breathe a word. A promise you already know I’ve been forced to break.
I nodded towards the basin. ‘Are you going to tell him?’
‘No.’
‘He’ll find out.’
‘He will. But not today.’ Her mouth flickered. ‘I swear I will wean myself.’
‘He will be glad of it.’
‘The loss? Or the weaning?’
‘Both.’
She needed it, then, she said. She had to look well, fool them. Fool him. Give him Marvellous Meg. What was needed was a resurrection. Laudanum, she said, was the only way she could survive the night. We’d have to smooth her skin with powders and her nerves with the syrup. She’d wear breeches, under her skirts, padded with towels. It would take a small miracle to get her downstairs, and get her sparkling. I lifted the second bottle from the cabinet. ‘Some brandy, too,’ she said, so I got that as well. She opened for it, the spoon tipping to her mouth.
I told her I’d bring fresh sheets. But, first, I brought the little creature up with me to the attic, wrapped in a bedsheet. I thought no one had seen me. I went out. Bought the jar, bought the arsenic.
A body can be embalmed in arsenic. Did you know that? Useful knowledge for your trade, no doubt. It was useful for the one I’d practised at Paradise. Most of my learning has been a burden, but that was one of the only fruitful things I learned: arsenic and water, four ounces to a gallon.
After I’d done it, I couldn’t stay in the little room. I covered it over with my pallet and went downstairs, onto the basement steps, tried gulping at fresh air to calm myself, to go back up and face her. I was still there with my head against the railings when Benham sent Charles to tell me he wanted to see me, in his library.
‘I’ve been upstairs,’ he said, ‘taking an opportunity to remind my wife of her obligations for this evening. Quite a voyage of discovery. Her bed looked like it had been the scene of some fresh carnage.’
The sheets. I had left the sheets. My stomach clutched.
‘Perfect timing, of course.’
The thought stretched, curled. Struck me still as a stopped clock. He was going to send me away again. Then he said it: ‘I have no further use for you.’
‘You needed me when you were trying to spoon what I knew out of me, and when you wanted me to take her child ‒’
‘What else could have been done with it?’ He snorted. ‘Only man in all of London she had to steer clear of had to be the one she fucked.’
I’d stayed quiet about what I knew. But now my anger rose to meet his. Like strangers being introduced. ‘You only know where I’ve been because they know you there. They know you bought girls. Fresh off the stage-coaches. Didn’t you wonder if I’d find out? You keep apartments in Marylebone, or Sir Percy does . . . You’re both members of that club. What do you call yourselves? The Devilish Gentlemen?’
He hissed, drew back as if I’d slapped him. But with anger, not surprise. As if he might have been expecting it. ‘Those girls were prostitutes, and sold themselves.’
‘What did they sell? Their bruises? Their split skin? You kept them months against their will. One of those Devilish Gentlemen crippled a girl. But I’m sure you know that. ’Cause the talk is that it was you who did it.’
His mouth twitched but every other part of him stayed still. ‘That girl has been looked after ‒’
‘Even now you try to excuse yourself.’ I closed my eyes, felt the pop of anger. Though I didn’t know it then, it was the only thing I had left. ‘The finest mind in England? But it’s not always the mind that makes the man, is it? In some parts, they know the man.’
Then his hands s
tarted flying, fast as cards out of a deck. He shouted. Called me a thief, a savage. Said this was blackmail, added to the tally of my other crimes. How could I think I had any power over him? But he was wavering. Unsure now where I could do the most damage with what I knew about him ‒ there, or on the streets. Which is why he said I was to stay until he’d decided what was to be done, already pulling his papers towards him. But the whole time he kept his eyes on me.
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘This time I’m staying to suit myself.’
The night stretched before me deep as a well. I was a stone he wanted to cast into it. I found her door locked. I roamed the halls, went outside, stood beneath black trees once more picked clean as bones. In the kitchen, wine-glasses had been laid out, and silver platters for canapés. Everyone else upstairs, cleaning. It smelt of salt and meat. I watched the clock. Paced and waited. I knocked into the table, and the glasses jumped.
When, at last, she let me in, I had a question burning through me that I was afraid to ask. The truth is she frightened me. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want the answer. Same reason I’d turned my eyes away from the tiny swaddled bundle earlier in the day.
She wanted to wear her lavender silk, so I took it down. Did she shrink from me? Did she avoid my eyes? When I lifted the dress, she raised her arms. The shadow of the silk darkened across her neck like a blush. How delicate she was, and had always been. She had never had the courage this world requires. I told myself to speak.
‘He said I’m to leave. Do you agree with it?’
‘I do not.’
‘But you will do nothing about it?’
The white gleam of her in the glass. I wanted to walk out of there, then, and ask her to come. But what could I offer her? A bedroom in a bawdy-house, if I was lucky.
It would be death, for a woman like her.
Speak, Frances. Say it. Just say it.
But that was when she turned, twisting her hands. ‘Please stay upstairs tonight? It will cause too much trouble with him. And – I . . . cannot bear –’
‘Cannot bear?’
‘To be reminded.’
I told her she was a coward, then. I said other horrible things.
This time, as you know, I did not obey.
After Charles left me in the attic, I crept back down to her room. It gaped around me and I gaped back. It was so like a room in a novel, for hiding treasure, or lunatics. Yet it was the place where I’d had my own romance, my own measure of happiness, fleeting as it was. Inside as well as out, there was nothing but smothering black. I went to the cabinet, took out the bottle, touched my lip to the rim, and felt the drug, cold then warm. More. I sat. Waited. More. I knew she’d come. Arranged my hair and skirts as prettily as I could.
She pushed open the door. ‘No one knows I’m here. I must go back down soon.’ I sat up.
She went straight for the bottle and tipped it to her lips. The thought shuddered through me that it was the drug she’d come back for, not me. She held the bottle out. Her eyes shone like poisoned fruit. ‘Shush.’
‘Did you ever love me?’
‘I am all in agony, Frances,’ she said. ‘And you wonder about love.’ She touched cold fingers to my cheek. Her eyes looked flat, dead already. I thought of her small affections. How I’d sucked it all down like a child’s ration of sweets. How she’d sucked me down, too, as greedily as she drank her tinctures. She took a dose, gave me one too. And another and another. I try to think what it was I saw on her face. Pity? Fear? Now it was my hands plucking at the sheets as I sat and watched. She drained the glass and turned to leave. But she stopped at the door, her back quivering.
‘I think it ‒ it has broken me,’ she said. I didn’t need to ask what she meant. Then, ‘He can divorce me now,’ as if she had just thought of it, clutching her own sleeves.
‘Then come. Let him divorce you. Come.’
She shook her head. ‘I did not agree with him about you, Frances. I am sorry. But if it is the only way . . . Please. Go back upstairs. Go back.’
I called her name.
She spoke her wounding words, and left.
I took more laudanum, took the bottle upstairs with me. No chance of rest. I listened to the carriages, their guests departing, and tried to slow my breaths. A minute passed. An hour? Time wriggled away. I couldn’t measure it.
When I crept back down, she was in bed. Dark hair pooled to her waist. A single candle burning. It seemed that her eyes were fixed on the woman in red. For a strange moment, I thought each of them was about to speak. Then I saw she was asleep. I felt the heavy crawl of the drug. Slowing me down. I felt rooted. I tried to take a step. Her head felt hot.
Then I was in Benham’s library, swaying over the jamb. ‘I think we should call a doctor. She’s not well.’
He looked up, laughed. ‘I’m quite sure she isn’t well.’
‘Send for Fawkes, then. She might need help, for the bleeding.’
‘It’s the drug, as you well know,’ he said. ‘Her constant solace. Tomorrow she’ll be the same thorn in my side she always is.’
‘But it could ‒’
His laugh as bitter as the laudanum on my lip. ‘It’s nothing. And even if she is ill . . .’ His head wove. ‘I think it was de Sade who said he’d prefer a dead mistress to an unfaithful one. One could well ask how one prefers one’s wife.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘It was a party, girl. Everybody’s drunk.’
The room was shrinking like wet cotton.
‘All those nasty little gossips . . . right . . . about that nigger cuckolding me.’
Oh, but so did I. My throat felt gritted. The blood rose in me, like flame through a wick. Rage welling hot. ‘You pretend you’re without sin. Sit here casting stones at the rest of us. You pretend your hands are clean. But all of it is your doing. Crania. Langton. Me. You brought Laddie here. How is that any better than what Langton did to me? And her. Forcing her into your small spaces . . .’ I brushed my face with my hands. ‘What if the world knew what kind of man you really are?’
I saw it. I saw it. He was even more afraid of the truth than I was.
I took a step back. The drug skimmed everything soft, made my pulse beat like wings. ‘Maybe I should put all that education you force-fed me to some good use,’ I said. ‘That would be quite an exposé.’
The old darkness was slipping into my head. His heels clicked through it. He raised his hand and slapped me. The room sagged, tore. I gripped him, but he slapped me again. The tails of his black jacket scuttled around us, and the drug made a strange, slow dance of it, thickened the air, prickled sour under my arms. I twisted my fingers at his cravat. He raised his hands. Scraped at my throat.
Find your backbone, Frannie.
I shook him off, reached down to my skirts.
It was quick. It’s a wonder they didn’t hear it downstairs.
That afternoon in the garden, the summer before. In Madame’s room, while she’d slept, I’d cut a hole in my pallet. Because Linux accused me of stealing them: that was why I’d done it. And they had stayed there all that time.
But now I had them in my hand.
I clasped them high above us. It felt like flying. The room torn open to the black underneath.
I was defending myself. That is what I choose to write here. If I was still the prisoner in court, some silver-tongued Jessop would ask why I had those scissors with me, when I went down to the library.
Did you bring the scissors downstairs?
Wasn’t your pallet upstairs?
You armed yourself, didn’t you, before coming down?
But I don’t have to answer any further questions.
Afterwards, I went upstairs. What choice did I have? I should have run, of course, taken myself back into the streets. But I went upstairs to lie down next to her. The sight of her dragged my heart, like an anchor on rocks. How would I explain myself to her? To anyone? I passed my hands over the books on the table, the mantel, tr
ying not to look at her. Blood had trailed along behind me, so I wetted a towel and wiped the carpet. I took the brush and pan up from the hearth, swept at the cold ashes there, kindled up a fire, then stood back to watch the flames coming. There was some of the drug left in the bottle I’d brought with me. I drained it. I wanted my mind blank. Tabula rasa. Inside all soft and black like soil. The only sound was the crackle of the fire. More laudanum. More and more until the bottle was drained. I felt my hands go cold, let the bottle drop. Let the towel fall into the fire. All my own blood left me, then. I heard her voice. I swear it. I am sure of it. ‘Sleep, dear Frannie. Sleep.’
Then, just as I told you, I slept.
They woke me, in her bed. They told me she was dead. It must have been his blood, around us in the bed, and on her, carried there on my own hands. There are things that cannot be written down. A terrible privacy. Like death, like love. Those things I felt then. I felt a pulling, a tearing, felt my heart dangling like a severed and torn and muddied root.
Before I went down to ask Benham to fetch the doctor, I’d thought she was sick, sleeping. Now I see that she must have been dying, even then.
I’m coming to the end. As I write, all I see is her. Opening the cabinet, laying her book inside, taking out one of the amber bottles. All that care she took. Lined up like instruments, isn’t that what Linux said? Like laying out the dead. The last time she ever opened that cabinet. The last time she ever took out the bottle. The last time she crossed her room, towards the portrait, her letter in her hand . . . Was she as terrified as I am now? The dose is the poison. Oh, and she was the poisoner herself.
I have wondered about the knife. The one Constable Meek said he took from her cabinet. Why was it there? When she went to the kitchen that night ‒ or at some other time, even earlier than that ‒ could she have brought it up without them seeing? It pains me to think of it. But Pears swears she didn’t use it, that it was laudanum she chose, in the end.
