Affinity (23 page)

The exclamation might have conjured her up. We heard footsteps in the corridor and raised our heads to see Mrs Jelf herself, making her patrol past Power’s gate. She saw our faces turned her way and slowed her step, and smiled.

Power grew pink. ‘You have caught me a-telling Miss Prior about your kindnesses, Mrs Jelf,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t mind it.’

At once, the matron’s smile grew stiff, and she put her hand to her breast and turned to look, a little nervously, along the corridor. I understood she was afraid Miss Ridley might be near, so I said nothing about the flannel and the extra meat, only nodded to Power, then gestured to the gate. Mrs Jelf unlocked it—still, however, she wouldn’t catch my eye, nor acknowledge the smile I turned on her. At last, to put her at her ease, I said I had not known that she had come so recently to Millbank. What was it that she worked at, I asked her, before the gaol?

She took a moment to secure the chain of keys upon her belt, and to brush a streak of lime-dust from her cuff. Then she made me a kind of curtsey. She had been in service, she said; but the lady she maided for having been sent abroad, she had not cared to find out a place with another.

We had begun to walk along the passage-way. I asked if her work suited her?—She said she would be sorry to leave Millbank, now. I said, ‘And you don’t find the duties rather hard? And the hours? And haven’t you a family? The hours must be very hard on
them
, I should have thought.’

She told me then that, of course, none of the wardresses there have husbands, but are all spinsters, or else widows like herself. ‘You must not be a matron,’ she said, ‘and also married. ’ She said that some matrons had children, who must be put to nurse with other mothers; but that she herself was childless. She kept her eyes lowered all this time. I said, Well, perhaps she was a better matron for it. She had a hundred women on her wards, all helpless as infants, all looking to her for care and guidance; and I thought she must be a kind mother to them all.

Now she did gaze at me, but with eyes made dark and mournful by the shadow of her bonnet. She said, ‘I hope I am, miss,’ and brushed again at the dust upon her sleeve. Her hands are large, like my own—the hands of a woman rendered lean and angular, through labour or through loss.

I didn’t like to question her further then, but went back to the women. I went to Mary Ann Cook, and to Agnes Nash, the coiner; and finally, as usual, to Selina.

I had crossed the mouth of her cell already, in order to move into the second passage; but I had kept back the visiting of her—just as I have kept back the writing of her, here—and when I passed her gate I turned my face to the wall and wouldn’t look at her. It was, I suppose, a kind of superstition. I remembered the visiting-room: now it was as if there was an hour-glass that would be turned upon
our
visit—I didn’t want a single grain to slither through the glass before the salt was properly set running. Even while I stood before her gate with Mrs Jelf, I would not gaze at her. Only when the matron had turned her key, then fussed another moment with her belt and chain, then fastened us into the cell and gone on her way, did I raise my eyes at last to hers. And when I did—well, then I found that after all there was scarcely a feature to her upon which my glances could settle and be quite calm. I saw, at the edges of her bonnet, her hair, which had once been handsome and now was blunt. I saw her throat, that had had velvet collars buckled to it; and her wrists, that had been fastened; and her little crooked mouth, that spoke in voices not her own. I saw all these things, all these tokens of her queer career, they seemed to hang about her poor pale flesh and blur it, they were like the signs of the stigmata on a saint. But she was not changed—it was I who was changed, by my new knowledge. It had worked upon me, secretly and subtly—as a drop of wine will work upon a cup of plain water, or as yeast will leaven simple dough.

It made a little
quickening
within me, as I stood gazing at her. I felt it—and with it came a prickle of fright. I put a hand to my heart, and turned away from her.

Then she spoke, and her voice—I was glad of it!—was quite familiar and quite ordinary. She said, ‘I thought you might not come. I saw you pass the cell and go to the next ward.’

I had moved to her table and touched the wool that lay upon it. I must visit other women, as well as her, I said. Then, because I felt her look away and seem to grow sad, I added, that I would always, if she wished it, come to her at the last.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Of course, she is like the other women, and would rather talk to me than be confined to silence. So when we spoke, it was of prison things. The damp weather has brought great black beetles into the cells—they call them ‘blackjacks’, she said she thinks they come there every year; and she showed me the smudges upon her limewashed wall where she had crushed a dozen of them with the heel of her boot. She said that some simple women are rumoured to catch the beetles and make pets of them. Others, she said, have been driven by hunger to eat them. She said she doesn’t know if that is true, but has heard the matrons say it . . .

I listened as she spoke, nodding and grimacing—I didn’t ask her, as I might have, how she had known about my locket. I didn’t tell her that I had gone to the offices at the Association of Spiritualists, and sat there two and half hours, talking of her and taking notes upon her. But still I could not look at her without remembering all I had read. I looked at her face, and thought of the portraits in the newspaper. I studied her hands and remembered the wax moulds on the shelves.

Then I knew I could not go from her and leave those things unmentioned. I said that I hoped she would tell me more about her old life. I said, ‘You spoke, last time, about how it was for you before you went to Sydenham. Will you tell me now, about what happened to you there?’

She frowned. She said, why did I want to know it?—I said I was curious. I said that I was curious about all the women’s stories, but that hers—‘Well, you know yourself, it is a little rarer than the others . . .’

It seemed rare to me, she said after a moment; but if I was a spiritualist—if I had moved all my life among spiritualist people, as she had—well, it wouldn’t seem so curious then. ‘You ought to buy a spiritualist newspaper and look at the notices in it—that will show you, how common I am! You would think, looking at those, that there were more spirit-mediums in this world than there are spirits, in the other.’

No, she said, she had never been
rare
, in the days with her aunt, and then at the spiritualist house at Holborn . . .

‘It was when I met Mrs Brink, and she took me to live with her:
that
was when I became rare, Aurora.’

Her voice had fallen, and I had leaned to catch it. Now, hearing her say that foolish name, I felt myself blush. I said, ‘What was it about Mrs Brink that changed you? What did she do?’

Mrs Brink had gone to her, she said, while she was still at Holborn. ‘She came to me, I thought she had come only as an ordinary sitter—but the fact is, she had been guided to me. She had come to me for a special purpose, that only I could answer.’

And the purpose was?

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again they seemed a little larger, and green as a cat’s. She spoke, and it was as if she spoke of something wonderful. ‘She required a spirit bringing to her,’ she said. ‘She required me to give up my own flesh, for the spirit-world to use it for itself.’

She held my gaze, and from the corner of my eye I saw a quick, dark movement upon the floor of her cell. I had a very vivid vision, then, of a hungry prisoner, prising the shell from the back of a beetle, sucking the meat from it and biting at the wriggling legs.

I shook my head. ‘She kept you there,’ I said, ‘this Mrs Brink. She had you there, performing spirit-tricks.’

‘She brought me to my fate,’ she answered—I remember her saying this, quite clearly. ‘She brought me to myself, that waited for me at her house. She brought me to where I could be found, by the spirits that searched for me. She brought me to—’

To
Peter Quick
!—I said the name for her, and she paused, then nodded. I thought of how the lawyers had spoken at her trial; I thought of all they had implied about her friendship with Mrs Brink. I said slowly, ‘She brought you to her, to where
he
might find you. She brought you there, so you might take him to her, quietly, at night . . .?’

But as I spoke, her look changed, and she seemed almost shocked. ‘I never took him to
her
,’ she said. ‘I never took Peter Quick to Mrs Brink. It wasn’t for
his
sake that she had me there.’

Not for his sake? Then, for whose sake was it?—She wouldn’t answer me at first, she only looked away, shaking her head. ‘Who was it you took to her,’ I said again, ‘if not Peter Quick? Who was it? Was it her husband? Her sister? Her child?’

She put her hand to her lips, then said quietly at last: ‘It was her mother, Aurora. Her mother, who had died while Mrs Brink was still a little girl. She had said she would not leave, that she would come back. But she had not; for Mrs Brink had not found any medium to bring her, not in twenty years of looking. Then she found me. She found me through a dream. There was a likeness between her mother and myself; there was a—a sympathy. Mrs Brink saw that, she took me to Sydenham, she let me have her mother’s things; then her mother would come to her through me, to visit her in her own room. She would come in the darkness, she would come and—comfort her.’

She did not, I know, admit to any of this in court; and it cost her some sort of effort to admit it now, to me. She seemed reluctant to speak further—and yet I think there was more, and she half-wished that I might guess it. I could not. I could not think what there might be. It seems only a curious and not quite pleasant thing, that the lady I have imagined Mrs Brink to be should ever have looked at Selina Dawes, at seventeen, and seen the shadow of her own dead mother in her, and persuaded her to visit her at night, to make that shadow grow thick.

But we did not talk of it. I only asked her more about Peter Quick. I said,
He
, then, had come only for her?—Only for her, she said. And why had he come?—Why? He was her guardian, her familiar-spirit. He was her
control
. ‘He came for me,’ she said simply, ‘and—what could I do then? I was his.’

Now her face had grown pale, with spots of colour at the cheeks. Now I began to feel an excitement in her, I felt it rising in her, it was like a quality upon the sour air of the cell.—I almost envied it. I said quietly, ‘What was it like, when he came to you?’ and she shook her head—Oh! How could she say? It was like losing her self, like having her own self pulled from her, as if a self could be a gown, or gloves, or stockings . . .

I said, ‘It sounds terrible!’—‘It was terrible!’ she said. ‘But it was also marvellous. It was everything to me, it was my life changed. I might have moved, then, like a spirit, from one dull sphere into a higher, better one.’

I frowned, not understanding. She said, how could she explain it to me? Oh, she could not find the words . . . She began to look about her, for a way to show me; and at last she gazed at something that lay upon her shelf, and she smiled. ‘You spoke to me of spirit-tricks,’ she said. ‘Well . . .’

She came close to me, and held her arm to me as if she wanted me to take her hand. I flinched, thinking of my locket, her message in my book. But she only smiled, still, and then said softly: ‘Put back my sleeve.’

I could not guess what she was about to do. I looked once into her face, then, cautiously, pushed at her sleeve until her arm was bare to the elbow. She turned it, and showed me the inner flesh of it—it was white, and very smooth, and warm from her gown. ‘Now,’ she said as I gazed at it, ‘you must close your eyes.’

I hesitated a moment, then did as she asked; and then I took a breath, to nerve myself for whatever queer thing she might do next. But all she did was reach beyond me, and seem to take up something from the pile of wool upon the table; and after that I heard her step to her shelf and take something from there. Then there was a silence. I kept my eyes tight shut, but felt the lids upon them quiver, then begin to jerk. The longer the silence lasted, the more uncertain I grew. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, seeing me twitch—and then, after another second: ‘Now you may look.’

I unclosed my eyes, but warily. I could only imagine that she had taken her blunt-edged knife to her arm and made it bleed. But the arm seemed smooth, still, and unhurt. She held it close to me—though not as close as she had before; and she kept the shadow of her gown upon it, where before she had turned it to the light. I think that, if I had looked hard at it, I might have seen a little roughness or redness there. But she would not let me look harder. While I still blinked and stared, she raised her other arm and passed her hand, very firmly, over the flesh that she had bared. She did this once, then twice, and then a third time and a fourth and, with the movement of the fingers I saw, upon that flesh, a
word
emerge, marked there in crimson—marked roughly, and rather faintly, but perfectly legibly.

The word was: TRUTH.

When it was fully-formed she took her hand away, and watched me, saying, Did I think that clever? I could not answer. She brought the arm closer and said I must touch it—and then, when I had done that, that I must put my fingers to my mouth, and taste them.

Hesitantly, I raised my hand and gazed at my finger ends. There seemed a whitish substance upon them—I thought of ether, spirit-stuff. I couldn’t bear to put it to my tongue, but felt almost queasy. She saw that, and laughed. Then she showed me what she had taken up, while I sat with my eyes closed.

It was a wooden knitting needle, and her box of dinner-salt. She had used the needle to mark the word out; and the working of the salt into the letters had turned them crimson.

I took hold of her arm again. Already the marks upon it were growing less livid. I thought of what I had read, in the spiritualist newspapers. They had announced this trick there as a proof of her powers, and people had believed it—Mr Hither had believed it—I think that I had believed it. I said to her now, ‘Did you do this, to the poor, sad people who came to you for help?’