Fingersmith Read online

  ‘Wait up, sweetheart, we’ve half a mile yet!’ And then, to a man who had appeared with a lantern at the door of the house, he called: ‘Good night, Mr Mack. You may shut the gate behind us. Here is Miss Smith, look, safe at last.’

  The building I had thought was Briar was only the lodge! I stared, saying nothing, and we drove on past it, between two rows of bare dark trees, that curved as the road curved, then dipped into a kind of hollow, where the air—that had seemed to clear a little, on the open country lanes—grew thick again. So thick it grew, I felt it, damp, upon my face, upon my lashes and lips; and closed my eyes. Then the dampness passed away. I looked, and stared again. The road had risen, we had broken out from between the lines of trees into a gravel clearing, and here—rising vast and straight and stark out of the woolly fog, with all its windows black or shuttered, and its walls with a dead kind of ivy clinging to them, and a couple of its chimneys sending up threads of a feeble-looking grey smoke—here was Briar, Maud Lilly’s great house, that I must now call my home.

  We did not cross before the face of it, but kept well to the side, then took up a lane that swung round behind it, where there was a muddle of yards and out-houses and porches, and more dark walls and shuttered windows and the sound of barking dogs. High in one of the buildings was the round white face and great black hands of the clock I had heard striking across the fields. Beneath it, William Inker pulled the horse up, then helped me down. A door was opened in one of the walls and a woman stood gazing at us, her arms folded against the cold.

  ‘There’s Mrs Stiles, heard the trap come,’ said William. We crossed the yard to join her. Up above us, at a little window, I thought I saw a candle-flame shine, and flutter, and then go out.

  The door led to a passage, and this led to a great, bright kitchen, about five times the size of our kitchen at Lant Street, and with pots set in rows upon a whitewashed wall, and a few rabbits hanging on hooks from the beams of the ceiling. At a wide scrubbed table sat a boy, a woman and three or four girls—of course, they looked very hard at me. The girls studied my bonnet and the cut of my cloak. Their frocks and aprons being only servants’ wear, I didn’t trouble myself to study them.

  Mrs Stiles said, ‘Well, you’re about as late as you could be. Any longer and you should’ve had to stay at the village. We keep early hours here.’

  She was about fifty, with a white cap with frills and a way of not quite looking in your eye as she spoke to you. She carried keys about her, on a chain at her waist. Plain, old-fashioned keys, I could have copied any one of them.

  I made her half a curtsey. I did not say—which I might have—that she should be thankful I had not turned back at Paddington; that I wished I had turned back; and that for anyone to have had the time that I had had, in trying to get forty miles from London, perhaps went to prove that London wasn’t meant to be left—I did not say that. What I said was:

  ‘I’m sure, I’m very grateful that the trap was sent at all.’

  The girls at the table tittered to hear me speak. The woman who sat with them—the cook, it turned out—got up and set about making me a supper-tray. William Inker said,

  ‘Miss Smith’ve come from a pretty fine place in London, Mrs Stiles. And she’ve been several times in France.’

  ‘Has she,’ said Mrs Stiles.

  ‘Only one or two times,’ I said. Now everyone would suppose I had been boasting.

  ‘She said the chaps there are very short in the leg.’

  Mrs Stiles gave a nod. The girls at the table tittered again, and one of them whispered something that made the boy grow red. But then my tray was made, and Mrs Stiles said,

  ‘Margaret, you can carry this through to my pantry. Miss Smith, I suppose I should take you to where you might splash your hands and face.’

  I took this to mean that she would show me to the privy, and I said I wished she would. She gave me a candle and took me down another short passage, to another yard, that had an earth closet in it with paper on a spike.

  Then she took me to her own little room. It had a chimney-piece with white wax flowers on it, and a picture of a sailor in a frame, that I supposed was Master Stiles, gone off to Sea; and another picture, of an angel, done entirely in black hair, that I presumed was Mr Stiles, gone off to Glory. She sat and watched me take my supper. It was mutton, minced, and bread-and-butter; and you may imagine that, being so hungry as I was, I made very short work of it. As I ate, there came the slow chiming of the clock that I had heard before, sounding half-past nine. I said,

  ‘Does the clock chime all night?’

  Mrs Stiles nodded. ‘All night, and all day, at the hour and the half. Mr Lilly likes his days run very regular. You’ll find that out.’

  ‘And Miss Lilly?’ I said, picking crumbs from the corner of my mouth. ‘What does she like?’

  She smoothed her apron. ‘Miss Maud likes what her uncle likes,’ she answered.

  Then she rearranged her lips. She said,

  ‘You’ll know, Miss Smith, that Miss Maud is quite a young girl, for all that she’s mistress of this great house. The servants don’t trouble her, for the servants answer to me. I should have said I had been a housekeeper long enough to know how to secure a maid for my own mistress—but there, even a housekeeper must do as she is bid, and Miss Maud’ve gone quite over my head in this matter. Quite over my head. I shouldn’t have thought that perfectly wise, in a girl of her years; but we shall see how it turns out.’

  I said, ‘I am sure whatever Miss Lilly does must turn out well.’

  She said, ‘I have a great staff of servants, to make sure that it does. This is a well-kept house, Miss Smith, and I hope you will take to it. I don’t know what you might be used to in your last place. I don’t know what might be considered a lady’s maid’s duties, in London. I have never been there’—she had never been to London!—‘so cannot say. But if you mind my other girls, then I am sure they will mind you. The men and the stable-boys, of course, I hope I shall never see you talking with more than you can help . . .’

  She went on like that for a quarter of an hour—all the time, as I have mentioned, never quite catching my eye. She told me where I might walk in the house, and where I must take my meals, and how much sugar I should be allowed for my own use, and how much beer, and when I could expect my underclothes laundered. The tea that was boiled in Miss Maud’s teapot, she said, it had been the habit of the last lady’s maid to pass on to the girls in the kitchen. Likewise the wax-ends from Miss Maud’s candle-sticks: they were to be given to Mr Way. And Mr Way would know how many wax-ends to expect, since it was him who doled out the candles. Corks went to Charles, the knife-boy. Bones and skins went to Cook.

  ‘The pieces of soap that Miss Maud leaves in her wash-stand, however,’ she said, ‘as being too dry to raise a lather from: those you may keep.’

  Well, that’s servants for you—always grubbing over their own little patch. As if I cared, about candle-ends and soap! If I had never quite felt it before, I knew then what it was, to be in expectations of three thousand pounds.

  Then she said that if I had finished my supper she would be pleased to show me to my room. But she would have to ask me to be very quiet as we went, for Mr Lilly liked a silent house and couldn’t bear upset, and Miss Maud had a set of nerves that were just like his, that wouldn’t allow of her being kept from her rest or made fretful.

  So she said; and then she took up her lamp, and I took up my candle, and she led me out into the passage and up a dark staircase. ‘This is the servants’ way,’ she said as we walked, ‘that you must always take, unless Miss Maud directs you otherwise.’

  Her voice and her tread grew softer the higher we went. At last, when we had climbed three pairs of stairs, she took me to a door, that she said in a whisper was the door to my room. Putting her finger before her lips, she slowly turned the handle.

  I had never had a room of my own before. I did not particularly want one, now. But, since I must have one, this one I suppo
sed would do. It was small and plain—would have looked better, perhaps, for a paper garland or two, or a few plaster dogs. But there was a looking-glass upon the mantel and, before the fire, a rug. Beside the bed—William Inker must have brought it up—was my canvas trunk.

  Near the head of the bed there was another door, shut quite tight and with no key in it. ‘Where does that lead?’ I asked Mrs Stiles, thinking it might lead to another passage or a closet.

  ‘That’s the door to Miss Maud’s room,’ she said.

  I said, ‘Miss Maud is through there, asleep in her bed?’

  Perhaps I said it rather loud; but Mrs Stiles gave a shudder, as if I might just have shrieked or sprung a rattle.

  ‘Miss Maud sleeps very poorly,’ she answered quietly. ‘If she wakes in the night, then she likes her girl to go to her. She won’t call out for you, since you are a stranger to her now: we will put Margaret in a chair outside her door, and Margaret shall take her her breakfast tomorrow, and dress her for the day. After that, you must be ready to be called in and examined.’

  She said she hoped Miss Maud would find me pleasing. I said I did, too.

  She left me, then. She went very softly, but at the door she paused, to put her hand to the keys at her chain. I saw her do it, and grew quite cold: for she looked all at once like nothing so much as the matron of a gaol. I said, before I could stop myself:

  ‘You’re not going to lock me in?’

  ‘Lock you in?’ she answered, with a frown. ‘Why should I do that?’

  I said I didn’t know. She looked me over, drew in her chin, then shut the door and left me.

  I held up my thumb. Kiss that! I thought.

  Then I sat upon the bed. It was hard. I wondered if the sheets and blankets had been changed since the last maid left with the scarlatina. It was too dark to see. Mrs Stiles had taken her lamp and I had set my candle down in a draught: the flame of it plunged about and made great black shadows. I unfastened my cloak, but kept it draped about my shoulders. I ached, from the cold and the travelling; and the mince I had eaten had come too late—it sat in my stomach and hurt. It was ten o’clock. We laughed at people who went to bed before midnight, at home.

  I might as well have been put in gaol, I thought. A gaol would have been livelier. Here, there was only an awful silence: you listened, and it troubled your ears. And when you got up and went to the window and looked outside, you nearly fainted to see how high you were, and how dark were the yard and the stables, how still and quiet the land beyond.

  I remembered the candle I had seen, fluttering at a window as I walked with William Inker. I wondered which room it was that that light had shone from.

  I opened my trunk, to look at all the things that I had brought with me from Lant Street—but then, none of them were really mine, they were only the petticoats and shimmies that Gentleman had made me take. I took off my dress, and for a second held it against my face. The dress was not mine, either; but I found the seams that Dainty had made, and smelled them. I thought that her needle had left the scent there, of John Vroom’s dog-skin coat.

  I thought of the soup that Mrs Sucksby would have made, from the bones of that pig’s head; and it was quite as strange as I knew it would be, to imagine them all sitting eating it, perhaps thinking of me, perhaps thinking of something else entirely.

  If I had been a crying sort of girl, I should certainly have cried then, imagining that.

  But I was never a girl for tears. I changed into my nightgown, put my cloak back on above it, and stood in my stockings and my unbuttoned shoes. I looked at the shut door at the head of the bed, and at the key-hole in it. I wondered if Maud kept a key on her side and had it turned. I wondered what I would see, if I went and bent and looked—and who can think a thing like that, and not go and do it? But when I did go, on tiptoe, and stoop to the lock, I saw a dim light, a shadow—nothing clearer than that, no sign of any kind of sleeping or wakeful or fretful girl, or anything.

  I wondered, though, if I might hear her breathing. I straightened up, and held my breath, and put my ear flat to the door. I heard my heart-beat, and the roaring of my blood. I heard a small, tight sound, that must have been the creeping of a worm or a beetle in the wood.

  Beyond that, there was nothing—though I listened for a minute, maybe two. Then I gave it up. I took off my shoes and my garters and got into bed: the sheets were cold and felt damp, like sheets of pastry. I put my cloak over the bed-clothes—for extra warmth; and also so that I might quickly seize it, if someone came at me in the night and I wanted to run. You never knew. The candle I left burning. If Mr Way was to complain that that was one stub less, too bad.

  Even a thief has her weak points. The shadows still danced about. The pastry sheets stayed cold. The great clock sounded half-past ten—eleven—half-past eleven—twelve. I lay and shivered, and longed with all my heart for Mrs Sucksby, Lant Street, home.

  3.

  They woke me at six in the morning. It seemed still the middle of the night to me, for my candle of course had burned to nothing, and the window-curtains were heavy and kept the thin light out. When the maid, Margaret, came knocking at my door, I thought I was in my old room at Lant Street. I was sure she was a thief, broke out from gaol and needing her fetters filed free by Mr Ibbs. That happened, sometimes; and sometimes the thieves were kind men, who knew us, and sometimes they were desperate villains. Once a man put a knife to Mr Ibbs’s throat, because he said the file went too slow. So, hearing Margaret’s knock now, I started from the bed, crying out, ‘Oh! Hold!’—though what I meant to be held, and who ought to have done it, I could not tell you; and neither, I suppose, could Margaret. She put her face about the door, whispering, ‘Did you call, miss?’ She had a jug of warm water for me, and she came and set my fire; then she reached beneath the bed and took the chamber-pot, and emptied it into her bucket of slops, and wiped it clean with a damp cloth that hung against her apron.

  I had used to wash the chamber-pots, at home. Now, seeing Margaret tip my piddle into her bucket, I was not sure I liked it. But I said, ‘Thank you, Margaret’—then wished I hadn’t; for she heard it and tossed her head, as if to say, Who did I think I was, thanking her?

  Servants. She said I should take my breakfast in Mrs Stiles’s pantry. Then she turned and left me—getting a quick look, I thought, at my frock and my shoes and my open trunk, on the way.

  I waited for the fire to take, then rose and dressed. It was too cold to wash. My gown felt clammy. When I drew the window-curtain back and let the daylight in, I saw—what I had not been able to see the night before, by the candle—that the ceiling was streaked brown with damp, and the wood at the walls stained white.

  From the next-door room there came the murmur of voices. I heard Margaret saying, ‘Yes, miss.’ Then there was the shutting of a door.

  Then there was silence. I went down to my breakfast—first losing my way among the dark passages at the bottom of the servants’ stairs, and finding myself in the yard with the privy in it. The privy, I saw now, was surrounded by nettles, and the bricks in the yard broken up with weeds. The walls of the house had ivy on them, and some of the windows wanted panes. Gentleman was right, after all, about the place being hardly worth cracking. He was right, too, about the servants. When I found Mrs Stiles’s pantry at last there was a man there, dressed in breeches and silk stockings, and with a wig on his head with powder on it. That was Mr Way. He had been steward to Mr Lilly for forty-five years, he said; and he looked it. When a girl brought the breakfasts, he was served first. We had gammon and an egg, and a cup of beer. They had beer with all their meals there, there was a whole room where it was brewed. And they say Londoners can lush!

  Mr Way said hardly a word to me, but spoke to Mrs Stiles about the running of the house. He asked only after the family I was supposed to have just left; and when I told him, the Dunravens, of Whelk Street, Mayfair, he nodded and looked clever, saying he thought he knew their man. Which goes to show you what a humbug he was.
br />   He went off at seven. Mrs Stiles would not leave the table before he got up. When she did she said,

  ‘You will be glad to hear, Miss Smith, that Miss Maud slept well.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. She went on, anyway:

  ‘Miss Maud rises early. She has asked that you be sent to her. Should you like to wash your hands before you go up? Miss Maud is like her uncle, and particular.’

  My hands seemed clean enough to me; but I washed them anyway, in a little stone sink she had there in the corner of her pantry.

  I felt the beer I had drunk, and wished I had not drunk it. I wished I had used the privy when I came across it in the yard. I was certain I should never find my way to it again.

  I was nervous.

  She took me up. We went, as before, by the servant’s stairs, but then struck out into a handsomer passage, that led to one or two doors. At one of these she knocked. I didn’t catch the answer that came, but suppose she heard it. She straightened her back and turned the iron handle, and led me in.

  The room was a dark one, like all the rooms there. Its walls were panelled all over in an old black wood, and its floor—which was bare, but for a couple of trifling Turkey carpets, that were here and there worn to the weave—was also black. There were some great heavy tables about, and one or two hard sofas. There was a painting of a brown hill, and a vase full of dried leaves, and a dead snake in a glass case with a white egg in its mouth. The windows showed the grey sky and bare wet branches. The window-panes were small, and leaded, and rattled in their frames.

  There was a little spluttering fire in a vast old grate, and before this—standing gazing into the weak flames and the smoke, but turning as she heard my step, and starting, and blinking—there was Miss Maud Lilly, the mistress of the house, that all our plot was built on.