Fingersmith (57 page)

That's what I thought, as I grew calmer. I thought I must only speak with the doctors and they would see their mistake and let me go; but that anyway, Mrs Sucksby would come, and I should get out like that.

And when I was free, I would go to wherever Maud Lilly was, and—wasn't I my mother's own daughter, after all?—I would kill her.

You can see what little idea I had of the awfulness of the fix I was really in.

Next morning, the woman who had thrown me about came back for me. She came, not with the two men, Mr Bates and Mr Hedges, but with another woman—
nurses
, they called them there; but they were no more nurses than I was, they only got that work through being stout and having great big hands like mangles. They came into the room and stood and looked me over. Nurse Spiller said,

'Here she is.'

The other, who was dark, said,

'Young, to be mad.'

'Listen here,' I said, very carefully. I had worked this out. I had heard them coming, and had got to my feet and put my petticoat straight, and tidied my hair. 'Listen here. You think I am mad. I am not. I am not the lady you and the doctors suppose me to be, at all. That lady, and her husband—Richard Rivers—are a pair of swindlers; and they have swindled you, and me, and just about everybody; and it is very important that the doctors know it, so I may be let out and those swindlers caught. I—'

'Right in the face,' said Nurse Spiller, speaking across my words. 'Right here, with her head.'

She put her hand to her cheek, close to her nose, where there was the smallest, faintest mark of crimson. My own face, of course, was swollen like a pudding; and I dare say my eye was almost black. But I said, still carefully,

'I am sorry I hurt your face. I was only so thrown, to be brought in here, as a lunatic; when all the time it was the other lady, Miss Lilly—Mrs Rivers— that was meant to come.'

Again they stood and looked me over.

'You must call us
nurse
when you speak to us,' the dark one said at last. 'But between you and me, dear, we would rather you didn't speak to us at all. We hear that much nonsense—well. Come along. You must be bathed, so that Doctor Christie may look at you. You must be put in a gown. Why, what a little girl! You must be no more than sixteen.'

She had come close, and made to catch at my arm. I drew away from her.

'Will you listen to me?' I said.

'Listen to you? La, if I listened to all the rubbish I heard in this house, I should go mad myself. Come on, now.'

Her voice, that had started off mild, grew sharper. She took hold of my arm. I flinched from the feel of her fingers. 'Watch her,' said Nurse Spiller, seeing me twitch.

I said, 'If you'll only not touch me, I'll go with you, wherever you want.'

'Ho!' said the dark nurse then. 'There's manners. Come with us, will you? Very grateful, I'm sure.'

She pulled me and, when I tugged against her grip, Nurse Spiller came to help her. They got their hands beneath my arms and more or less lifted me, more or less dragged me, out of the room. When I kicked and complained— which I did, from the shock of it—Nurse Spiller got those great hard fingers of hers into my arm-pit, and jabbed. You can't see bruises in an arm-pit. I think she knew it. 'She's off!' she said, when I cried out.

'That's my head ringing for the rest of the day,' said the other. And she gripped me tighter and shook me.

Then I grew quiet. I was afraid I should be punched again. But I was also looking hard at the way we were taking—at the windows and the doors. Some doors had locks. All the windows had bars on. They looked over a yard. This was the back part of the house—what should have been, in a house like Briar, the servants' part. Here it was given over to nurses. We met two or three of them as we walked. They wore aprons and caps, and carried baskets, or bottles, or sheets.

'Good morning,' they all sang out.

'Good morning,' my nurses answered.

'New 'un?' one asked at last, with a nod at me. 'Come up from the pads? Is she bad?'

'Cracked Nancy on the cheek.'

She whistled. They should bring 'em in bound. Young, though, ain't she?'

'Sixteen, if she's a day.'

'I'm seventeen,' I said.

The new nurse looked at me, in a considering sort of way.

'Sharp-faced,' she said, after a minute.

'Ain't she, though?'

'What's her trouble? Delusions?'

'And the rest,' said the dark nurse. She dropped her voice. 'She's the one—you know?'

The new nurse looked more interested. 'This one?' she said. 'Looks too slight for that.'

'Well, they come in all sizes…'

I didn't know what they meant. But being held up for strangers to study, and talk and smile over, made me ashamed, and I kept silent. The woman went off on her way and my two nurses gripped me tight again and took me, down another passage, to
a
little room. It might have once been a pantry it was very like Mrs Stiles's pantry, at Briar—for there were cupboards, with locks upon them, and an arm-chair and a sink. Nurse Spiller sat down in the chair, giving a great sigh as she did so. The other nurse put water in the sink. She showed me a slip of yellow soap and a dirty flannel.

'Here you are,' she said. And then, when I did nothing: 'Come on. You've hands, haven't you? Let's see you wash.'

The water was cold. I wet my face and arms, then made to wash my feet.

'That will do,' she said, when she saw me do that. 'Do you think Dr Christie cares how dusty your toes are? Here, now. Let's see your linen.' She caught hold of the hem of my shimmy, then turned her head to Nurse Spiller, who nodded. 'Good, ain't it? Too good for this house. That'll boil up to nothing, that will.' She gave it a tug. 'You take that off, dear. We shall keep it, quite safe, against the day you leave us.—What, are you shy?'

'Shy?' said Nurse Spiller, yawning. 'Don't waste our time. And you, a married lady.'

'I ain't married,' I said. 'And I'll thank you both to keep your hands off my linen. I want my own gown back, and my stockings and shoes. I need only speak with Dr Christie, and then you'll be sorry.'

They looked at me and laughed.

'Hoity-toity!' cried the dark nurse. She wiped her eyes. 'Dear me. Come, now. It's no use growing sulky. We must have your linen—it's nothing to me and Nurse Spiller, it's the rules of the house. Here's a new set, look, and a gown and—look here—slippers.'

She had gone to one of the cupboards and brought out a set of greyish un-derthings, and a wool gown, and boots. She came back to me, holding them, and Nurse Spiller joined her; and it was no good then how hard I argued and cursed, they got hold of me and stripped me bare. When they took off my petticoat, that glove of Maud's fell out. I had had it under the waistband. I bent and caught it up. 'What's that?' they said at once. Then they saw it was only a glove. They looked at the stitching inside the wrist.

'Here's your own name,
Maud
,' they said. 'That's pretty work, that is.'

'You shan't have it!' I cried, snatching it back. They had taken my clothes and my shoes; but I had walked and torn and bitten that glove all night, it was all I had to keep my nerve up. I had the idea that, if they were to take it, I should be like a Samson shorn.

Perhaps they noticed a look in my eye.

'One glove's no use, after all,' said the dark nurse to Nurse Spiller, quietly. 'And remember Miss Taylor, who had the buttons on a thread that she called her babies? Why, she'd take the hand off, that tried to get a hold of one of those!'

So they let me keep it; and then I stood limp and let them dress me, through fear they would change their minds. The clothes were all madhouse things. The corset had hooks instead of laces, and was too big for me.— 'Never mind,' they said, laughing. They had chests like boats. 'Plenty of room for growing in.' The gown was meant to be a tartan, but the colours had run. The stockings were short, like a boy's. The shoes were of india-rubber.

'Here you are, Cinderella,' said the dark nurse, putting them on me. And then, looking me over: 'Well! You shall bounce like a ball all right, in those!'

They laughed again then, for quite a minute. Then they did this. They sat me in the chair and combed my hair and made it into plaits; and they took out a needle and cotton, and sewed the plaits to my head.

'It's this, or cut it,' the dark nurse said when I struggled; 'and no skin off my nose either way.'

'Let me see to it,' said Nurse Spiller. She finished it off—two or three times, as if by accident, putting the point of the needle to my scalp. That is another place that don't show cuts and bruises.

And so, between the two of them they got me ready; and then they took me to the room that was to be mine.

'Mind, now, you remember your manners,' they said as we walked. 'Start going off your head again, we shall have you back in the pads, or plunge you.'

'This ain't fair!' I said. 'This ain't fair, at all!'

They shook me, and did not answer. So then I fell silent and, again, tried hard to study the way they took me. I was also growing afraid. I had had an idea in my head—that I think I had got from a picture, or a play—of how a madhouse should be; and so far, this house was not like it. I thought, They have got me in the place where the doctors and nurses live. Now they'll take me to the mad bit.'—I think I supposed it would be something like a dungeon or a gaol. But we walked only down more drab-coloured corridors, past door after drab-coloured door, and I began to look about me and see little things— such as, the lamps being ordinary brass ones, but with strong wire guards about the flames; and the doors having fancy latches, but ugly locks; and the walls having, here and there, handles, that looked as though they might, if you turned them, ring bells. And finally it broke upon me that this was the madhouse after all; that it had once been an ordinary gentleman's house; that the walls had used to have pictures and looking-glasses on them, and the floors had used to have rugs; but that now, it had all been made over to madwomen—that it was, in its way, like a smart and handsome person gone mad itself.

And I can't say why, but somehow the idea was worse and put me in more of a creep than if the place had looked like a dungeon after all.

I shuddered and slowed my step, then almost stumbled. The india-rubber boots were hard to walk in.

'Come on,' said Nurse Spiller, giving me a prod.

'Which do we want?' asked the other nurse, looking at the doors.

'Fourteen. Here we are.'

All the doors had little plates screwed to them. We stopped at one of them, and Nurse Spiller gave a knock, then put a key to the lock and turned it. The key was a plain one, shined from use. She kept it on a chain inside her pocket.

The room she took us into was not a proper room, but had been made, by the building of a wooden wall, inside another.—For, as I said, that house had been all chopped up and made crazy. The wooden wall had glass at the top, that let in light from a window beyond it, but the room had no window of its own. The air was close. There were four beds in it, along with a cot where a nurse slept. Three of the beds had women beside them, getting dressed. One bed was bare.

'This is to be yours,' said Nurse Spiller, taking me to it. It was placed very near the nurse's cot. 'This is where we puts our questionable ladies. Try a queer trick here, Nurse Bacon shall know all about it. Shan't you, Nurse Bacon?'

This was the nurse of that room. 'Oh, yes,' she said. She nodded and rubbed her hands. She had some ailment that made her fingers very fat and pink, like sausages—an unlucky ailment, I suppose, for someone with a name like hers—and she liked to rub them often. She looked me over in the same cool way that all the other nurses had, and she said, as they had,

'Young, ain't you?'

'Sixteen,' said the dark nurse.

'Seventeen,' I said.

'Sixteen? We should call you the child of the house, if it weren't for Betty. Look here, Betty! Here's a fresh young lady, look, almost your age. I should say she can run very quick up and down a set of stairs. I should say she's got neat ways. Eh, Betty?'

She had called to a woman who stood at the bed across from mine, pulling a gown on over a great fat stomach. I thought her a girl at first; but when she turned and showed her face, I saw that she was quite grown-up, but a simpleton. She looked at me in a troubled sort of way, and the nurses laughed. I found out later that they used her more or less as they would a servant, and had her running every sort of chore; though she was—if you could believe it—the daughter of a very grand family.

She ducked her head while the nurses laughed, and cast a few sly looks at my feet—as if to see for herself how quick they might be, really. At last one of the other two women said quietly,

'Don't mind them, Betty. They seek only to provoke you.'

'Who spoke to you?' said Nurse Spiller at once.

The woman worked her lips. She was old, and slight, and very pale in the cheek. She caught my eye, then glanced away as if ashamed.

She seemed harmless enough; but I looked at her, and at Betty, and at the other woman there—a woman who stood, gazing at nothing, pulling her hair before her face—and I thought that, for all I knew, they might be so many maniacs; and here was I, being obliged to make a bed among them. I went to the nurses. I said,

'I won't stay here. You can't make me.'

'Can't we?' said Nurse Spiller. 'I think we know the law. Your order's been signed, ain't it?'

'But this is all a mistake!'

Nurse Bacon yawned and rolled her eyes. The dark nurse sighed. 'Come, Maud,' she said. 'That's enough.'

'My name ain't Maud,' I answered. 'How many times do I have to tell you? It ain't Maud Rivers!'

She caught Nurse Bacon's eye. 'Hear that? She will speak like that, by the hour.'

Nurse Bacon put her knuckles to her hips and rubbed them.

'Don't care to speak nicely?' she said. 'Ain't that a shame! Perhaps she'd like a situation as a nurse. See how she'd like that. Spoil her white little hands, though.'

Still rubbing her own hands against her skirt, she gazed at mine. I gazed with her. My fingers looked like Maud's. I put them behind my back. I said,