The Crimson Petal and the White (103 page)

‘I thought I’d return these,’ says Sugar, proffering the dirty dishes. ‘To save you the trouble.’

Rose looks flabbergasted, as if she’s just witnessed a flamboyant somersault by a stark naked acrobat who now stands waiting for applause.

‘Much obliged, Miss Sugar,’ she says, and swallows the half-chewed bread.

‘Please, call me Sugar,’ says Sugar, handing the plates over. ‘We’ve worked together on quite a few things by now, haven’t we, Rose?’ She considers reminding Rose specifically of Christmas, and the way they were both powdered up to the elbows in flour, but judges that this might appear a little fawning.

‘Yes, Miss Sugar.’

Harriet and Rose exchange nervous glances. The kitchenmaid doesn’t know whether to stand to attention with her hands folded across her apron, or continue moulding and pinioning the ox tongues, one of which has unrolled and threatens to stiffen in quite the wrong shape.

‘How hard you all work!’ remarks Sugar, determined to break the ice. ‘Wi— why, Mr Rackham can scarcely imagine, I’m sure, how constant your labours are.’

Rose watches with widening eyes while the governess limps all the way into the kitchen and lowers herself stiffly into a chair. Both Rose and Harriet are only too well aware that their labours have been far from ‘constant’ since the death of Mrs Rackham and the total cessation of dinner parties; indeed, unless the master marries again in the near future, he must soon come to the conclusion that he’s employing more servants than he needs.

‘We’ve no complaints, Miss Sugar.’

There is a pause. Sugar looks around the kitchen in the harsh mortuary light. Harriet has folded her hands, allowing the ox tongue to do what it will. Rose is folding her sleeves down to her wrists, her lips pursed in an apprehensive half-smile. Janey’s rump gyrates as she scrubs dishes, the haphazard pleats of her skirts swaying to and fro.

‘So,’ Sugar pipes up, as companionably as she can manage, ‘what are you all going to have for supper? And where’s Cook? And do you all eat here, at the table? I expect you get interrupted by bells at the worst possible moment.’

Rose’s eyes go in and out of focus as she swallows this indigestible quadruple spoonful of questions.

‘Cook’s gone upstairs, and … and we’ll have some jelly, Miss. And there’s roast beef left from yesterday, and … And would you like some plum cake, Miss Sugar?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Sugar. ‘If you can spare it.’

The plum cake is fetched, and the servants stand by and watch the governess eat. Janey, finished stowing the dishes in the racks, comes to the doorway to see what’s going on in the wider world.

‘Hello, Janey,’ says Sugar, in between bites of plum cake. ‘We haven’t seen each other since Christmas, have we? What a shame it is, don’t you think, the way one part of the household is hidden from the other?’

Janey blushes so red that her cheeks almost match the colour of her lobsterish hands and forearms. She half-curtsies, her eyes bulging, but utters not a sound. Having landed in mischief twice already for incidents involving members of the Rackham household with whom she oughtn’t to have had any intimacy – first Miss Sophie, on the day she got a bloody nose, and then poor mad Mrs Rackham, on the day she barged into the scullery offering to help – she’s determined to stay out of trouble this time.

‘Well,’ says Sugar brightly, when she’s consumed her last morsel of plum cake and the servants are still staring at her in mistrust and bafflement. ‘I suppose I must be going. Sophie’s bedtime shortly. Goodbye, Rose; goodbye, Harriet; goodbye, Janey.’

And she heaves herself to her feet, wishing that she could ascend through the air, painlessly and instantaneously, like a spirit whisked away from the scene of its own corporeal demise; or else that the kitchen’s stone floor could open up and swallow her down into merciful extinction.

On her return to her room, there’s a letter from William after all. If ‘letter’ is the right word for a note saying simply:

No further discussion.

Sugar crumples this note in her fist, and is again tempted to smash windows, scream her lungs raw, hammer on William’s door. But she knows this is not the way to change his mind. Instead, her hopes shift to Sophie. William has reckoned without his daughter. He has only the vaguest conception of the loyalty that’s developed between governess and child, and he’ll soon find out. Sophie will change his mind for him: men can never stand to be the cause of female weeping!

At bedtime, Sugar tucks Sophie in as usual, and smooths her fine golden hair evenly over the pillow until it radiates like a picture-book illustration of the sun.

‘Sophie?’ she says, her voice hoarse with hesitation.

The child looks up, aware at once that a matter more momentous than the sewing of dolls’ clothes is being raised.

‘Yes, Miss?’

‘Sophie, your father … Your father is likely to have some news for you. Quite soon, I think.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ says Sophie, blinking hard to keep sleep from claiming her before Miss Sugar arrives at the point.

Sugar licks her lips, which are as dry and rough-textured as sackcloth. She’s loath to repeat William’s ultimatum aloud, for fear that this will give it an indelible reality, like writing in ink over pencil.

‘Most probably,’ she flounders, ‘he will have you brought to see him … And then he will tell you something.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ says Sophie, puzzled.

‘Well …’ Sugar presses on, summoning courage by taking hold of Sophie’s hands. ‘Well, when he does, I … I want you to tell him something, in return.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ promises Sophie.

‘I want you to tell him …’ wheezes Sugar, blinking against tears. ‘I want you to tell him … how you feel about me!’

For answer, Sophie reaches up and embraces her just as she did yesterday, except that this time, to Sugar’s astonishment, she strokes and pats her governess’s hair in an infantile approximation of a mother’s tenderness.

‘Good night, Miss,’ she says sleepily. ‘And tomorrow: America.’

There being nothing more she can do but wait, Sugar waits. William has retreated from a firm resolution before – many times. He has threatened to tell Swan & Edgar to go hang; he has threatened to travel to the East India docks and grab a certain merchant by the collar and shake him till he gibbers; he has threatened to tell Grover Pankey to use better elephants for his pots. All bluster. If she leaves him alone, his tumescent resolve will wilt and shrivel to nothing. All it requires from her is … superhuman forbearance.

The morning of the next day passes without incident. Everything is exactly as normal. The Pilgrims have landed on American soil, and made peace with the savages. Homesteads are being built from felled trees. The luncheon, when served, is less bland than yesterday’s: smoked haddock kedgeree, and more of the plum cake.

On Sugar’s return to her room at midday, she finds a parcel waiting for her: a long, thin parcel, wrapped in brown paper and string. A conciliatory gift from William? No. A small
carte-de-visite
is attached to the end with string; she fetches it close to her eyes and reads what it has to say.

Dear Miss Sugar,

I heard about your misfortune from my father. Please accept this token of my
good wishes. It needn’t be returned; I find I have no use for it anymore, and I hope
that you will very soon be in the same position.

Yours truly,

Emmeline Fox

Sugar unwraps the parcel, and brings to light a polished, sturdy walking stick.

On her return to the school-room, keen to show Sophie her new tool, which allows her to walk with a much more dignified gait than the crutch, Sugar finds the child huddled over her writing-desk, sobbing and weeping uncontrollably.

‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ she demands, her stick thumping against the floorboards as she limps across the room.

‘You’re going to be suh-suh-sent
away
,’ wails Sophie, almost accusingly.

‘Was William – your father … here just now?’ Sugar can’t help asking the question, even though she smells his hair-oil in the air.

Sophie nods, bright tears jumping off her glistening chin.

‘I
told
him, Miss,’ she pleads shrilly. ‘I
told
him I luh-luh-love you.’

‘Yes? Yes?’ prompts Sugar, stroking her palms ineffectually over Sophie’s cheeks until the salty wetness stings the cracks in her flesh. ‘What did he say?’

‘H-he di’nt suh-suh-say
anything
,’ sobs the child, her shoulders convulsing. ‘But he luh-luh-looked very angry with muh-muh-me.’

With a cry of rage, Sugar pulls Sophie to her breast and kisses her over and over, murmuring inarticulate reassurances.

How dare he do this
, she thinks,
to
my
child.

The full story, when Sophie has been sufficiently calmed to tell it, is this: Miss Sugar is a very good governess, but there are a great many things that a lady needs to know that Miss Sugar doesn’t know, like Dancing, Playing the Piano, German, Watercolours, and other accomplishments whose names Sophie can’t recall. If Sophie is to be a proper lady, she’ll need a different governess, and quite soon. Lady Bridgelow, a lady who knows all about these things, has confirmed that this is necessary.

For the rest of the afternoon, Sugar and Sophie labour under a suffocating cloud of grief. They carry on with the lessons – arithmetic, the Pilgrim Fathers, the properties of gold – with a sorrowful awareness that none of these subjects is quite what’s required of a young lady in the making. And at bedtime, neither of them can look the other in the eye.

‘Mr Rackham asked me to tell you, Miss,’ says Rose, standing in the door of Sugar’s bedroom at supper-time, ‘that you needn’t get up tomorrow morning.’

Sugar grips her cup of cocoa tight to keep it from spilling.

‘Needn’t get up?’ she echoes stupidly.

‘You needn’t come out until the afternoon, he says. Miss Sophie is not to have any lessons in the morning.’

‘No lessons?’ echoes Sugar again. ‘Did he say why not?’

‘Yes, Miss,’ says Rose, fidgeting to be released. ‘Miss Sophie is going to have a visitor, in the school-room; I don’t know who, or when exactly, Miss.’

‘I see. Thank you, Rose.’ And Sugar lets the servant go.

Minutes later, she’s standing outside William’s study door, breathing hard in the unlit stillness of the landing. A glimmer of light is visible through the key-hole; a rustle of activity (or does she imagine this?) is audible through the thick wood, when she presses her ear against it.

She knocks.

‘Who is it?’ His voice.

‘Sugar,’ she says, trying to suffuse that one word with all the affection, all the familiarity, all the companionship, all the promises of erotic fulfilment, that a single whispered sound can possibly embody: a thousand and one nights of carnal bliss that will see him through until he’s an old, old man.

There is no reply. Silence. She stands shivering, urging herself to knock again, to appeal to him more persuasively, more cleverly, more insistently. If she yells, he’ll be forced to open up to her, to keep the servants from gossiping. She opens her mouth, and her tongue squirms like that of a dumb half-wit selling broken china in the street. Then she walks barefoot back to her bedroom, teeth chattering, choked.

In her sleep, four hours later, she’s back in Mrs Castaway’s house, aged fifteen but with a book’s worth of carnal knowledge already written into her. In the midnight hush after the last man has stumbled homewards, Mrs Castaway sits perusing her latest consignment of religious pamphlets all the way from Providence, Rhode Island. Before her mother can become too engrossed in her snipping, Sugar summons the pluck to ask a question.

‘Mother … ? Are we
very
poor now?’

‘Oh no,’ Mrs Castaway smirks. ‘We are
quite
comfortable now.’

‘We aren’t about to be thrown into the street, or anything like that?’

‘No, no, no.’

‘Then why must I … Why must I …’ Sugar is unable to finish the question. In the dream no less than in life, her courage falters in the face of Mrs Castaway’s arch sarcasm.

‘Really now, child: I couldn’t permit you to grow up
idle
, could I? That would leave you open to the temptation of Vice.’

‘Mother,
please
: I–I’m in earnest! If we aren’t in desperate straits, then why … ?’

Mrs Castaway looks up from her pamphlets, and fixes Sugar with a look of pure malevolence; her eyeballs seem to be effervescing with spite.

‘Child: be reasonable,’ she smiles. ‘Why should
my
downfall be
your
rise? Why should I burn in Hell while
you
flap around in Heaven? In short, why should the world be a better place for
you
than it has been for
me
?’ And, with a flourish, she dips her glue-brush into the pot, twirls it around, and deposits a translucent pearl of slime on a page already crowded with magdalens.

Next morning, Sugar tries the handle of a door she’s never touched before, and, thank God, it opens. She slips inside.

It’s the room Sophie once referred to as ‘the room that hasn’t got anyone living in it, Miss, only things.’ A storage-room, in other words, immediately adjacent to the school-room, and crowded with dusty objects.

Agnes’s sewing-machine is here, its brassy lustre dulled with the subtle powder of neglect. Behind that, there are strange apparatuses that Sugar recognises, after some study, to be photographic in nature. Boxes of chemicals, too; further evidence of William’s former passion for the art. An easel leans against the far wall. William’s, or Agnes’s? Sugar isn’t sure. An archery bow hangs by its string from one of the easel’s wing-nuts: a folly of Agnes’s that she found herself too weak to pursue. A rowing oar inscribed
Downing
Boat Club
1864 has toppled to the carpet. Stacked on the floor, in front of book-cases that are too full for any more, are books: books about photography, books about art, books about philosophy. Religion, too: many about religion. Surprised by this, Sugar picks one off the stack – “
Winter afore
Harvest”, or the Soul’s Growth in Grace
, by J. C. Philpot – and reads its flyleaf.