Fingersmith (43 page)

And one other thing I put with them, that she does not know I keep: the silver thimble, from the sewing-box at Briar, with which she smoothed my pointed tooth.

The coach comes, sooner than I think it will. 'Thank God,' says Richard. He carries his hat. He is too tall for this low and tilting house: when we step outside, he stretches. I have kept to my room so long, however, the day feels vast to me. I walk with Sue's arm gripped in mine, and at the door of the coach, when I must give it up—give it up, for ever!—I think I hesitate.

'Now, now,' says Richard, taking my hand from her. 'No time for sentiment.'

Then we drive. I feel it, as more than a matter of galloping horses and turning wheels. It is like an undoing of my first journey, with Mrs Stiles, from the madhouse to Briar: I put my face to the window as the carriage slows, and almost expect to see the house and the mothers I was snatched from. I should remember them still, I know it. But, that house was large. This one is smaller, and lighter. It has rooms for female lunatics, only. That house was set in bare earth. This one has a bed of flowers beside its door—tall flowers, with tips like spikes.

I fall back in my seat. Richard catches my eye.

'Don't be afraid,' he says.

Then they take her. He helps her into their hands, and stands before me at the door, looking out.

'Wait,' I hear her say. 'What are you doing?' Then: 'Gentlemen! Gentlemen!'—an odd and formal phrase.

The doctors speak in soothing tones, until she begins to curse; then their voices grow hard. Richard draws back. The floor of the carriage tilts, the doorway rises, and I see her—the two men's hands upon her arms, a nurse gripping her waist. Her cloak is falling from her shoulders, her hat is tilted, her hair is tearing from its pins. Her face is red and white. Her look is wild, already.

Her eyes are fixed on mine. I sit like a stone, until Richard takes my arm and presses, hard, upon my wrist.

'Speak,' he whispers, 'damn you.' Then I sing out, clear, mechanically: 'Oh! My own poor mistress!' Her brown eyes—wide—with that darker fleck. Her tumbling hair. 'Oh! Oh! My heart is breaking!'

The cry seems to ring about the coach, even after Richard has swung closed the door and the driver whipped the horse into life and turned us. We do not speak. Beside Richard's head is a lozenge-shaped window of milky glass, and for a moment I see her again: still struggling, lifting her arm to point or reach— Then the road makes a dip. There come trees. I take off my wedding-ring and throw it to the floor. I find, in my bag, a pair of gloves, and draw them on. Richard watches my trembling hands.

'Well—' he says.

'Don't speak to me,' I say, almost spitting the words. 'If you speak to me, I shall kill you.'

He blinks, and attempts to smile. But his mouth moves strangely and his face, behind his beard, is perfectly white. He folds his arms. He sits, first one way and then another. He crosses and uncrosses his legs. At length he takes a cigarette from his pocket, and a match, and tries to draw down the carriage window. It will not come. His hands are damp, grow damper, and finally slide upon the glass. 'Damn this!' he cries then. He rises, staggers, beats upon the ceiling for the driver to stop the horse, then fumbles with the key. We have gone no more than a mile or two, but he jumps to the ground and paces, coughs. He puts his hand to the lock of springing hair at his brow, many times. I watch him.

'How like a villain,' I say, when he takes his seat again, 'you are now.'

'And how like a lady, you!' he answers, with a sneer.

Then he turns his face from me, rests his head against the jolting cushion; and pretends, with twitching eye-lids, to sleep.

My own eyes stay open. I gaze through the lozenge of glass at the road we have travelled—a winding red road, made cloudy by dust, like a thread of blood escaping from my heart.

We make part of our journey like this, but then must give up the asylum carriage and take a train. I have never ridden a train before. We wait at a country station. We wait at an inn, since Richard is still afraid that my uncle will have sent out men to watch for us. He has the landlord put us in a private room and bring me tea and bread-and-butter. I will not look at the tray. The tea grows brown and cool, the bread curls. He stands at the fire and rattles the coins in his pocket, then bursts out: 'God damn you, do you think I take food for you, for free?' He eats the bread-and-butter himself. 'I hope I see my money soon,' he says. 'God knows I need it, after three months with you and your uncle, doing what he calls a gentleman's labour, receiving wages that would barely keep a proper gentleman in cuffs. Where's that damn porter? How much do they mean to swindle me of for our tickets, I wonder?'

At last a boy appears to fetch us and take our bags. We stand on the station platform and study the rails. They shine, as if polished. In time they begin to purr, and then—unpleasantly, like nerves in failing teeth—to hum. The hum becomes a shriek. Then the train comes hurtling about the track, a plume of smoke at its head, its many doors unfolding. I keep my veil about my face. Richard hands a coin to the guard, saying easily: 'You'll see to it, perhaps, that my wife and I are kept quite private, till London?' The guard says he will; and when Richard comes and takes his place in the coach across from me he is more peevish than ever.

'That I must pay a man to think me lewd, so I may sit chastely, with my own little virgin of a wife! Let me tell you now, I am keeping a separate ac-count of the costs of this journey, to charge against your share.'

I say nothing. The train has shuddered, as if beaten with hammers, and now begins to roll upon its tracks. I feel the growing speed of it, and grip the hanging strap of leather until my hand cramps and blisters in its glove.

So the journey proceeds. It seems to me that we must cross vast distances of space.—For you will understand that my sense of distance and space is rather strange. We stop at a village of red-bricked houses, and then at another, very similar; and then at a third, rather larger. At every station there is what seems to me a press of people clamouring to board, the thud and shake of slamming doors. I am afraid the crowds will overburden the train—perhaps overturn it.

I think, I deserve to be crushed in the wreck of a train; and almost hope they do.

They do not. The engine speeds us onward, then slows, and again there are streets and the spires of churches—more streets and spires than I have yet seen; more houses, and between them a steady traffic of cattle and vehicles and people.
London
! I think, with a lurch of my heart. But Richard studies me as I gaze, and smiles unpleasantly. 'Your natural home,' he says. We stop at the station and I see the name of it: MAIDENHEAD.

Though we have come so swiftly we have travelled no more than twenty miles, and have another thirty to go. I sit, still gripping the strap, leaning close to the glass; but the station is filled with men and women—the women in groups, the men idly walking; and from them I shrink. Soon the train gives a hiss, and gathers its bulk, and shudders back into terrible life. We leave the streets of Maidenhead. We pass through trees. Beyond the trees there are open parklands, and houses—some as great as my uncle's, some greater. Here and there are cottages with pens of pigs, with gardens set with broken sticks for climbing beans, and hung with lines of laundry. Where the lines are full there is laundry hung from windows, from trees, on bushes, on chairs, between the shafts of broken carts—laundry everywhere, drooping and yellow.

I keep my pose and watch it all.
Look, Maud, I
think.
Here is your future. Here's all your liberty, unfolding like a bolt of cloth
…

I wonder if Sue is very much injured. I wonder what kind of place they have her in, now.

Richard tries to see beyond my veil. 'You're not weeping, are you?' he says. Come on, don't trouble over it still.'

I say, 'Don't look at me.'

'Should you rather be back at Briar, with the books? You know you should not. You know you have wanted this. You'll forget, soon, the manner in which you got it. Believe me, I know these things. You must only be patient. We must both be patient now. We have many weeks to pass together, before the fortune becomes ours. I am sorry I spoke harshly, before. Come, Maud.

We shall be at London, soon. Things will seem different to you there, I assure you…"

I do not answer. At last, with a curse, he gives it up. The day is darkening now—or rather, the sky is darkening, as we draw close to the city. There come streaks of soot upon the glass. The landscape is slowly growing meaner. The cottages have begun to be replaced by wooden dwellings, some with broken windows and boards. The gardens are giving way to patches of weed; soon the weed gives way to ditches, the ditches to dark canals, to dreary wastes of road, to mounds of stones or soil or ashes. Still,
Even ashes
, I think,
are a part of your freedom
—and I feel, despite myself, the kindling in me of a sort of excitement. But then, the excitement becomes unease. I have always supposed London a place, like a house in a park, with walls: I've imagined it rising, straight and clean and solid. I have not supposed it would sprawl so brokenly, through villages and suburbs. I've believed it complete: but now, as I watch, there come stretches of wet red land, and gaping trenches; now come half-built houses, and half-built churches, with glassless windows and slateless roofs and jutting spars of wood, naked as bones.

Now there are so many smuts upon the glass they show like faults in the fabric of my veil. The train begins to rise. I don't like the sensation. We begin to cross streets—grey streets, black streets—so many monotonous streets, I think I shall never be able to tell them apart! Such a chaos of doors and windows, of roofs and chimneys, of horses and coaches and men and women! Such a muddle of hoardings and garish signs: S
PANISH
B
LINDS
.—L
EAD
C
OFFINS
.—O
IL
T
ALLOW
& C
OTTON
W
ASTE
. Words, everywhere. Words, six-feet high. Words, shrieking and bellowing: L
EATHER
A
ND
G
RINDERY
.—S
HOP
T
O
L
ET
.—B
ROUGHAMS
& N
EAT
C
ARRIAGES
.—P
APER-STAINERS
.—S
UPPORTED
E
NTIRELY
.—T
O
L
ET
!—T
O
L
ET
!—B
Y
V
OLUNTARY
S
UBSCRIPTION
.—

There are words, all over the face of London. I see them, and cover my eyes. When I look again we have sunk: brick walls, thick with soot, have risen about the train and cast the coach in gloom. Then comes
a
great, vast, vault' ing roof of tarnished glass, hung about with threads of smoke and steam and fluttering birds. We shudder to a frightful halt. There is the shrieking of other engines, a thudding of doors, the pressing passage—it seems to me—of a thousand, thousand people.

'Paddington terminus,' says Richard. 'Come on.'

He moves and speaks more quickly here. He is changed. He does not look at me—I wish he would, now. He finds a man to take our bags. We stand in a line of people—a
queue
, I know the word—and wait for a carriage—a
hackney
, I know that word also, from my uncle's books. One may kiss in a hackney; one may take any kind of liberty with one's lover; one tells one's driver to go about the Regent's Park. I know London. London is a city of opportunities fulfilled. This place, of jostling and clamour, I do not know. It is thick with purposes I do not understand. It is marked with words, but I cannot read it. The regularity, the numberless repetition, of brick, of house, of street, of person— of dress, and feature, and expression—stuns and exhausts me. I stand at Richard's side and keep my arm in his. If he should leave me—! A whistle is blown and men, in dark suits—ordinary men, gentlemen—pass by us,
running
.

We take our place in the hackney at last, and are jerked out of the terminus into choked and filthy roads. Richard feels me tense. 'Are you startled, by the streets?' he says. 'We must pass through worse, I'm afraid. What did you expect? This is the city, where respectable men live side by side with squalor. Don't mind it. Don't mind it at all. We are going to your new home.'

'To our house,' I say. I think: There, with the doors and windows shut, I will grow calm. I will bathe, I will rest, I will sleep.

'To our house,' he answers. And he studies me a moment longer, then reaches across me. 'Here, if the sight troubles you—' He pulls down the blind.

And so once again we sit, and sway to the motion of a coach, in a kind of twilight; but we are pressed about, this time, by all the roar of London. I do not see it when we go about the park. I do not see what route the driver takes, at all: perhaps I should not know it, if I did, though I have studied maps of the city, and know the placing of the Thames. I cannot say, when we stop, how long we have driven for—so preoccupied am I with the desperate stir of my senses and heart.
Be bold
, I am thinking. God
damn you, Maud! You have longed for this. You have given up Sue, you have given up everything, for this. Be bold
!

Richard pays the man, then returns for our bags. 'From here we must walk,' he says. I climb out, unassisted, and blink at the light—though the light here is dim enough: we have lost the sun, and the sky is anyway thick with cloud—brown cloud, like the dirty fleece of a sheep. I have expected to find myself at the door to his house, but there are no houses here: we have entered streets that appear to me unspeakably shabby and mean—are hedged on one side by a great, dead wall, on the other by the lime-stained arches of a bridge. Richard moves off. I catch at his arm.

'Is this right?' I say.

'Quite right,' he answers. 'Come, don't be alarmed. We cannot live grandly, yet. And we must make our entrance the quiet way, that's all.'