Affinity (9 page)

Then I put my hand over the marks above her heart. I said ‘He had a name for you, what was it?’ She said it was Dolly. I said ‘Yes, now I see him, he is a gentle-looking boy & he is weeping. He is showing me his hand & your heart is in it, I can see Dolly written on it quite plain, but the letters are black as tar. He is kept in a very dark place by his yearning for you. He wishes to move on, but your heart is like a piece of lead holding him down.’ She said ‘What must I do, Miss Dawes, what must I do?’ I said ‘Well, you gave your heart to him, you shouldn’t weep now because he wants to keep it. But we must persuade him to let go. Until we can do that however, I think that every time your husband kisses you the spirit of this boy will come between your mouths. He will be trying to steal your kisses for himself.’ I said I will work to see if I can’t loosen his hold a little. She is to come back Weds. She said ‘What can I pay you for this?’ & I told her that if she cared to leave a coin she ought to leave it for Mr Vincy, since she was more properly his lady than mine. I said ‘In this sort of establishment, where there is more than one medium practising, we must you know be very honest.’

When she had gone however, Mr, Vincy came to the door & gave me the money she had left. He said ‘Well, Miss Dawes, you must have impressed her. Look what she has paid, a whole
shiner
.’ He put the money in my hand. It was very warm from his own hand, & as he gave it to me he laughed, saying it was a
hot one
. I said he ought not to give me the money, since Mrs Lewis had really been his. He said ‘But you, Miss Dawes, being up here all alone & having no-one, you make a man remember his gentlemanly responsibilities.’ He still held my hand, that had the coin in it. When I tried to take it from him he held it tighter, saying ‘Did she show you the marks?’ I said then that I thought I heard Mrs Vincy in the passage.

When he went I put the coin into my box, & the day passed very dull.

4 October 1872

To a house at Farringdon, for a lady Miss Wilson - brother to spirit ’58,
fell in a fit & choked
.
3/-

Here
, Mrs Partridge - 5 infants to spirit, namely Amy, Elsie, Patrick, John, James, none of which lived in this world longer than a day. This lady came wearing a black lace veil, which I made her put back. I said ‘I see your babies’ faces close to your throat. You are wearing their shining faces like a necklace, & don’t know it.’ The necklace had a space in it however, there was room on the thread for 2 more jewels. When I saw that, I dropped the veil about her again, saying ‘You must be very brave’ -

I grew sad, working with that lady. After her, I told them downstairs to say I was too tired for any more, & I have kept to my own room. It is 10 o’clock. Mrs Vincy has gone to bed. Mr Cutler, who has the room below this, is exercising with a weight, & Miss Sibree is singing. Mr Vincy came once, I heard his feet upon the landing & the sound of his breaths outside my door. He stood breathing there for 5 minutes. When I called ‘Mr Vincy, what do you want?’ he said that he had come to look at the carpet on the stairs, since he was afraid it was loose & might catch my toe & trip me. He said a landlord must do that sort of work, even at 10 o’clock at night.

When he went I put a stocking in my key-hole.

Then I sat & thought of Aunty, who tomorrow will be dead 4 months.

2 October 1874

We have had rain for three days—a cold, miserable rain, that turns the surface of the river rough and dark, like crocodile-skin, and makes the barges roll and bob so restlessly upon it, it tires me to watch them. I am sitting with a rug about me, and wear an old silk bonnet of Pa’s. From somewhere in the house comes Mother’s voice, raised, scolding Ellis—I should say Ellis has dropped a cup or spilled water. Now there is the banging of a door, and the whistles of the parrot.

The parrot is Priscilla’s, and was got for her by Mr Barclay. It sits in the drawing-room on a bamboo perch. Mr Barclay is training it to say Priscilla’s name; so far, however, it will only whistle.

We are a discontented house to-day. The rain has made the kitchen flood, and there are leaks in the attics; worst of all, our girl, Boyd, has given us her week’s warning, and Mother is raging at the prospect of having to engage another maid, so close to Prissy’s wedding-day. It is a curious thing. We all supposed Boyd content enough, she has been with us for three years; but yesterday she went to Mother and said she had found out another situation and would be leaving in a week. She wouldn’t look at Mother as she spoke—told her some story, though Mother saw through it—and when she was pressed, she broke out in a passion of weeping. She said then that the truth was, the house when she is alone in it has begun to frighten her. She said it has ‘turned peculiar’ since Pa died, and his empty study, that she must clean, gives her the horrors. She said she cannot sleep at night, for hearing creaks and other sounds she cannot account for—once, she said, she heard a whispering voice, saying her name! She says there have been many times when she has lain awake, frightened to death, too frightened even to creep from her own room to Ellis’s; and the result of it is, she is sorry to be leaving us but her nerves are shattered, she has found out a new place in a house at Maida Vale.

Mother said she never heard such nonsense in her life.

‘Ghosts!’ she said to us. ‘To think of ghosts, in this house! To think of your poor father’s memory being sullied, like that, by a creature like Boyd.’

Priscilla said she did think it rather queer that, if Pa’s ghost should walk anywhere, it should be in the tweeny’s attic. She said, ‘You sit very late, Margaret. Have you heard nothing?’

I said that I had heard Boyd snoring; and that where I had thought her only sleeping she might, after all, have been snoring in fear . . .

Mother said then, she was glad I found it comical. There was nothing comical about the task she had now, getting another girl and training her up!

Then she sent for Boyd again, to bully her a little more.

The rain having kept us all so close at home, the argument has dragged miserably on. This afternoon I could not bear it any longer and, despite the weather, I drove to Bloomsbury—I went to the reading-room at the British Museum. I called up Mayhew’s book on the prisons of London, and the writings on Newgate of Elizabeth Fry, and one or two volumes recommended to me by Mr Shillitoe. A man who stepped to help me carry them said, Why was it that the gentlest readers invariably ordered such brutes of books? He held the volumes up to read their spines, and smiled at them.

It made me ache a little with the loss of Pa, to be there. The reading-room is very unchanged. I saw readers I last saw two years ago, still clutching the same limp folio of papers, still squinting over the same dull books, still fighting the same small, bitter battles with the same disobliging staff. The gentleman who sucks his beard; the gentleman who chuckles; the lady copying Chinese characters, who scowls when her neighbours murmur . . . They were all there still, in their old places beneath the dome—like flies, I thought, in a paperweight of amber.

I wonder, did anyone remember me? Only one librarian gave any sign of it. ‘This is Mr George Prior’s daughter,’ he said to a younger attendant as I stood at his window. ‘Miss Prior and her father were readers here for several years—why, I seem to see the old gentleman now, asking after his books. Miss Prior was assistant to her father while he worked on his study of the Renaissance.’ The attendant said he had seen the work.

The others, who do not know me, call me ‘madam’ now, I noticed, instead of ‘miss’. I have turned, in two years, from a girl into a spinster.

There were many spinsters there to-day, I think—more, certainly, than I remember. Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.

I didn’t stay many hours there, but was restless—and, besides that, the rain made the light very poor. But I did not want to come home, to Mother and to Boyd. I took a cab to Garden Court, on the chance that the weather would have kept Helen there, alone. It had: she had had no visitors since yesterday, but was sitting making toast before the fire, feeding the crusts of it to Georgy. She said to him when I went in, ‘Here is your Aunt Margaret, look!’ and she held him to me, and he braced his legs against my stomach and kicked. I said, ‘Well, what great fat handsome ankles you have,’ and then, ‘What a great red crimson cheek.’ But Helen said his cheek was only crimson because of a new tooth, that hurt him. After a little time in my lap he began to cry, and then she passed him to his nurse, who took him away.

I told her about Boyd and the ghosts; and then we talked of Pris and Arthur. Did she know they mean to honeymoon in Italy?—I think she had known it for longer than I, but would not admit to it. She said only, that anyone might go to Italy if they liked. She said, ‘Would you have everyone stop at the Alps, because you were meant to go to Italy once, and were kept from it? Don’t make Priscilla miserable over this. Your father was her father too. Do you think it hasn’t been hard for her, to have to hold her wedding off?’

I said that I remembered how Priscilla had cried herself into a fit when Pa was first found to be ill—that was because she had had a dozen new gowns made, that must be all returned and sent back black. When I wept, I asked her, what did they do with me?

She answered, not looking at me, that when I had wept it had been different. She said, ‘Priscilla was nineteen, and very ordinary. She has had two hard years. We should be glad that Mr Barclay has been so patient.’

I said, rather sourly, that she and Stephen had been luckier; and she answered levelly: ‘We were, Margaret—because we were able to marry and have your father see it. Priscilla won’t have that, but her wedding will be finer without your poor pa’s illness to rush the planning of it. Let her enjoy it, won’t you?’

I stood, and went to the fireplace and put my hands before the flames. I said at last, that she was stern to-day; that it was dandling her baby and being a mother that did that to her. ‘Indeed,
Mrs Prior
, you sound like my own mother. Or would do, if you were not so sensible . . .’

When she heard me say that she coloured and said I must hush. But she also laughed and put her hand across her mouth, I saw her in the glass above the mantel. I said then, that I had not seen her blush so since she was plain Miss Gibson. Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? ‘Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card—mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that?’

She smiled, but had tilted her head. ‘There is Georgy,’ she said.—I had not heard him. ‘How his poor tooth makes him cry!’ And she rang for Burns, her maid, and had the baby brought again; and I did not stay long with her, after that.

6 October 1874

I feel not at all like writing to-night. I have come up, pleading a head-ache, and soon I suppose Mother will follow, to bring my medicine. I have had a dreary day, at Millbank Prison.

They know me there now, and are jolly with me at the gate. ‘What, back again Miss Prior?’ said the Porter when he saw me come. ‘I should’ve said you might have had enough of us by now—but there, it is remarkable how fascinating the penitentiary is, to those that do not have to work here.’

He likes to call the prison by that older name, I notice; and he sometimes calls the warders
turnkeys
, the matrons
taskmistresses
, on the same principle. He told me once that he has been porter at Millbank for thirty-five years, and so has seen many thousand convicts pass through his gate and knows all the most desperate and terrible histories of the place. Today being another very wet day, I found him standing at the gate-house window, cursing the rain that made a slurry of the Millbank earth. He said the soil holds the water and makes the men’s work in the grounds very miserable. ‘This is an evil soil, Miss Prior,’ he said. He made me stand with him at the glass, and he showed me where there had once, in the first days of the penitentiary, been a dry trench, that must be crossed like the moat of a castle, with a drawbridge. ‘But,’ he said, ‘the soil would not have it. As fast as they set convicts to drain it, so the Thames could seep; and they would find it, every morning, full of black water. At last they had to earth it in.’

I stayed a little while with him, warming myself before his fire; and when I went in to the women’s gaol I was passed on, as usual, to Miss Ridley, that she might take me round some of its sites. To-day she showed me the infirmary.

Like the kitchen, this is situated away from the body of the women’s building, in the prison’s central hexagon. It is a bitter-smelling room, but warm and large, and it might be pleasant, for it is the only chamber in which the women associate for purposes other than labour or prayer. Even here, however, they must be silent. There is a matron whose role it is to stand and watch them as they lie, and keep them from talking; and there are separate cells, and beds with straps, for the sick when they grow troublesome. On the wall there is a picture of Christ bearing a broken fetter, and a single line of text:
Thy love constraineth us
.

They have beds, I think, for fifty women. We found perhaps twelve or thirteen there, most of whom seemed very ill—too ill to raise their heads to us, they only slept, or shuddered, or turned their faces into their grey pillows as we passed by. Miss Ridley gazed hard at them; and at the bed of one, she stopped. ‘Look here,’ she said to me, gesturing to a woman who was laid out with her leg exposed, her ankle livid and wrapped with a bandage, and so swollen it was as thick, almost, as the thigh above it. ‘Now, this is the kind of patient I have no time for. You tell Miss Prior, Wheeler, how your leg came to be so hurt.’

The woman ducked her head. ‘If you please, miss,’ she said to me, ‘it got cut with a dinner-knife.’ I remembered those blunt knives, and how the women had had to saw away at their bits of mutton, and looked at Miss Ridley. ‘Tell Miss Prior,’ she said, ‘how your blood came to be so poisoned.’