The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  ‘Apologies, Miss,’ mutters Clara, and hurries from the room.

  As soon as she’s gone, Sugar jumps out ofbed and gets dressed. The house, she hears now, is in a state of whispery, flustery commotion. Doors are opening and shutting, and, through the crack in her door, she can see lights grow brighter in sudden increments. Hurry, hurry: her hair is impossible, she ought to’ve had it cut weeks ago, but who’s to cut it? All trace of the original frizzed fringe is gone, and only the use of a dozen pins and a cluster of clasps keeps the mess under control. Where are her shoes? Why is her bodice so difficult to button up? Her chemise must be rucked underneath …

  ‘Darkroom!’ shouts William from somewhere below. ‘Are you deaf?’

  A female voice, unidentifiable and small, pleads that all the rooms are dark.

  ‘No! No!’ cries William, clearly in a state of great agitation. ‘The room that used to be …Ach, it was before your time!’ And his heavy tread thumps down the hallway.

  Sugar is presentable now, more or less, and rushes out onto the landing, candle in hand. Her first port of call is Sophie’s room, but when she ventures inside, she finds the child sleeping deeply, or at least affecting to.

  Only when Sugar is walking back along the landing does she notice how very peculiar and unusual it is, to see the door of Agnes’s bedroom ajar. She runs downstairs, following the noise of voices.

  ‘Oh, Mr Rackham, and on a night like this!’ cries Rose, the words reverberating queerly through the maze of passages leading to the rear of the house.

  The rendezvous-point is the kitchen, in whose mausoleum frigidity a glum, sleepy-headed company has gathered. By no means the entire household: Cook has been left to snore upstairs, and the newer, less trustworthy servants, curious though they naturally are about the commotion, have been told to settle back under the covers and mind their own affairs. But fully dressed and shivering down here are William, Letty, Rose and Clara. Oh yes, and there stands Janey in the doorway of the scullery, in tears, humiliated by her failure to produce Mrs Rackham from out of the ice-chest or the meat larder, despite Miss Tillotson’s angry expectation that she should.

  Letty hugs herself, her mulish teeth clenched to stop them chattering. The white bib of her uniform glistens with moisture: she’s braved the elements once already, to bang on the door of Shears’s little bungalow. But Shears is too drunk to be roused, and Cheesman has evidently been charmed by his ‘mother’ into staying the night, so once again William Rackham is the only male on hand to deal with the crisis.

  He greets Sugar’s arrival with an unwelcoming scowl; his face looks ghastly in the light reflected off the chopping-table and the stone floor, both of which still shimmer from the liberal sponging they were given only a few hours ago.

  ‘She’s out there, sir,’ pleads Rose, her voice shaking with the urgency of what she dare not say to her master: that he is wasting precious time — perhaps even condemning his wife to death — by failing to move the search out of doors.

  ‘What about the cellar?’ William demands. ‘Letty, you were in and out of there in a flash.’

  ‘It was empty, Mr Rackham,’ the girl insists, her indignant whine ringing in the copper pans hung around the walls.

  William runs his hands through his hair, and stares up at the windows, whose inky-black panes are spattered with sleet and garlanded with snow. This cannot be happening to him!

  ‘Rose, fetch the storm-lanterns,’ he croaks, after an excruciating silence. ‘We must search the grounds.’ His eyes grow suddenly bright, as if a flame has belatedly kindled behind them — or a fever. ‘Put warm coats on, all of you! And gloves!’

  A cursory inspection of the grounds confirms the worst: a trail of footsteps in the snow leading from the front door to the gate, and the gate swung wide open. The street-lamps of Chepstow Villas glow feeble in the drizzly gloom, each illuminating nothing more than a drab sphere of air suspended fifteen feet off the ground. The road is pitch black, with a hint, in the murk beyond, of unlit buildings and convoluted passageways. A woman in sombre clothing could quickly be lost in such a darkness.

  ‘Is she in white, d’you know?’ asks William of Clara, when the company of searchers is ready to set off from the house. She regards him as if he’s an imbecile, as if he has just enquired which of Mrs Rackham’s ball gowns she has chosen to wear on this momentous occasion.

  ‘I mean, is she in her night-dress, God help her!’ he snaps.

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ Clara replies, scowling as she represses the desire to tell him that if Mrs Rackham has frozen to death, it probably happened while Clara was being forced to search for her in broom-cupboards and under the governess’s bed.

  Stiff-limbed in a bulky overcoat, William blunders forward in a haze of his own breath and, in his footsteps, two women follow. Since only three functioning storm-lanterns have been found, those three have been divided amongst William, Clara, and Rose. Letty and Janey are in such a state of agitation that they’re useless anyway, and had better go back to bed, while

  Miss Sugar oughtn’t to have troubled herself to get up in the first place.

  Sugar stands at the front door and watches them go. Even as they pass through the Rackham gate and strike off in different directions, a hansom cab rattles by, raising the possibility that, despite the extreme lateness of the hour, Agnes may have hailed one, and be miles away by now, lost in a vast and intricate city, stumbling through unknown streets of unlit houses full of unknown people. Drunken laughter issues from the cab as it rolls past, a reminder that death from exposure is only one of several dangers awaiting a defenceless female in the world at large.

  It occurs to Sugar, as she stands shivering on the porch, that the interior of the Rackham house is unguarded; assuming the other servants stay in bed as they’re told, there’s no one to observe her opening prohibited doors, no one to stop her poking about wherever she chooses. Loath to let such a golden opportunity go by, she pictures herself standing at William’s study-desk perusing some secret document or other. Yes; she should hurry upstairs and make this lantern-slide fantasy come true … But no; her will is lacking; she’s so weary of stealth; there is nothing more she wants to discover; she wishes only to be a member of the family, absolved of suspicion, cosily welcome, forever.

  Suddenly, quite out of the blue — well, out of the black — she’s assailed by the thought that Agnes is close by. The certainty of it infuses her brain like a religious belief, a Damascene conversion. What idiots William and the others are, following a will-o’-the-wisp of tracks made by carol singers too careless to shut the Rackham gate! Of course Agnes isn’t out there in the streets, she’s here, hiding near the house – very near!

  Sugar rushes indoors to fetch a lamp, and emerges a couple of minutes later with a rather flimsy, puny type, better suited for lighting a few yards of carpeted passage between one bedroom and the next. Gingerly she carries it out into the wind and the wet, holding her palm above the open bulb to shield the trembling flame. Sleet stings her cheeks, sharp little spits of it so cold they feel hot, like fiery cinders in the wind. She must surely be mad, yet she cannot turn back until she has found Agnes.

  Where to look first, in this deadly serious game of hide and seek? She tramps onto the carriage-way, her boots going krift, krift, krift in the gravelly snow. No, no, says a voice in her head, as she makes her way along the flank of the Rackham house, past the bay windows of the parlour and the dining-room – No, not here; you’re not even ‘warm’. Move farther away from the house: yes: farther into the dark. Warmer, yes, warmer!

  She ventures into unfamiliar parts of the Rackham grounds, beyond the vegetable glass-houses whose snow-covered carapaces gleam like marble sarcophagi in the dark. Every few steps, in her efforts to keep the lamp sheltered, she’s distracted from her footing and almost stumbles, here on a garden tool, there on a coal-sack, but she reaches the stables without having fallen.

  Very hot, the voice in her head commends her.

 
The coach-house doors are shut but not padlocked; so strong is the instinct that brought her here, that she presumes this fact before her eyes confirm it. She undoes the latch, tugs the doors open a crack and lifts her lamp into the aperture.

  ‘Agnes?’

  No answer, except the burning of intuition in her breast. She opens the coach-house doors a little wider, and slips inside. The Rackhams’ carriage stands immobile in the gloom, larger and taller than she remembered, oddly disquieting in its burnished, steel-studded bulk. A puddle of chains and leather straps drools from its prow.

  Sugar walks up to the cabin window and lifts her lamp to the dark glass. Something pale stirs within.

  ‘Agnes?’

  ‘My … Holy Sister …’

  Sugar opens the door, and finds Agnes huddled on the floor of the cabin, her knees drawn up against her chin. That chin is speckled with vomit, and Agnes’s eyes are heavy-lidded, blinking too feebly to expose more than a slit of milky white. In her frigid lethargy, she’s passed beyond shivering, but at least she’s not deathly blue: her lips, smeared with lubricant, are still rosebud-pink. Thank God she’s wearing more than just her night-dress — not enough to keep her warm, but enough to discourage the cold from piercing her heart. A magenta dressing-gown, of thick silk in an oriental style, partly covers the white cotton night-dress, though the front has been buttoned clumsily, with most of the buttons in the wrong holes. Agnes’s feet are bandaged up to the ankles, and additionally shod in loose knitted slippers, the wool sodden with melted snow and prickly with fragments of leaf and twig.

  ‘Please,’ says Agnes, barely able to lift her head off her knees. ‘Tell me it’s my time.’ ‘Your time?’

  ‘To go …to the Convent with you.’ And she licks at her lips, trying ineffectually to dislodge, with her listless tongue, a small glob of vomit stuck in the mouth-salve.

  ‘N-not yet,’ says Sugar, doing her best, in spite of her revulsion, to speak with the authority of an angel.

  ‘They’re poisoning me,’ whimpers Agnes. Her face nods down again, and damp strands of fine blonde hair slither off her shoulders, one by one. ‘Clara’s in league with them. She gives me bread and milk … soaked in poison.’

  ‘Come out of here, Agnes,’ says Sugar, reaching into the cabin to stroke Agnes’s arm, as ifshe were a wounded pet. ‘Can you walk?’

  But Agnes appears not to have heard. ‘They’re fattening me up for sacrifice,’ she continues, in an anxious, high-pitched whisper. ‘A slow sacrifice … to last a lifetime. Each day, a different demon will come to eat my flesh.’

  ‘Nonsense, Agnes,’ says Sugar. ‘You’ll get well.’

  Agnes swivels her head towards the light. Through a veil of hair, one eye blinks wide, bloodshot-blue.

  ‘You’ve seen my feet?’ she says, with sudden, angry clarity. ‘Bruised fruit. And bruised fruit doesn’t get well again.’

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Agnes,’ says Sugar, though in truth she is very afraid herself, that the glare of Agnes’s eye and the sharpness of Agnes’s torment will cause her own nerve to crack. She takes a deep breath, as discreetly as an angel might, and declares, in a seductive voice she hopes is serenely trustworthy, ‘All will be well, I promise. Everything will turn out for the best.’

  But the assurance fails to impress Agnes, despite its fairytale flavour; it only reminds her of more nastiness.

  ‘Worms have eaten my diaries,’ she moans. ‘My precious memories of Mama and Papa …’

  ‘Worms haven’t eaten your diaries, Agnes. They’re safe with me.’ Sugar leans into the cabin to stroke Agnes’s arm again. ‘Even the Abbots Langley ones,’ she soothes, ‘with all their French dictation and Callisthenics. All safe.’

  Agnes raises her head high, and utters a cry of relief. Her pale throat trembles with the breath of that cry, and her hair slithers back over her shoulders, revealing tears on her cheeks.

  ‘Take me,’ she begs. ‘Please take me, before they do.’

  ‘Not yet, Agnes. The time isn’t yet.’ Sugar has set the lamp on the ground, and is hoisting herself gently and slowly into the cabin. ‘Soon I’ll help you get away from here. Soon, I promise. But first you must get warm, in your nice soft bed, and rest.’

  She lays an arm around Agnes’s back, then smoothly slides her fingers into Agnes’s armpits, which are hot and damp with fever.

  ‘Come,’ she says, and raises Mrs Rackham up off the floor.

  The walk back to the house is not quite the nightmare Sugar feared. True, they must make their way across the grounds without any light, because she can’t support Agnes and carry a lantern at the same time. But the sleet and wind have eased off, leaving the air quiet and apprehensive under gravid snow-clouds. Also, Agnes is no dead weight: she has rallied somewhat, and limps and lurches alongside Sugar without complaint — like a drunken strumpet. And, now that the objective is the single monumental structure of the house, whose downstairs windows helpfully glow with lamp-light, the going is easier than when Sugar was groping into the inky unknown.

  ‘William will be angry with me,’ Agnes frets, as they walk along the carriage-way, their four feet going krift, krift, krift and fro, fro, fro. ‘He isn’t here,’ says Sugar. ‘Nor is Clara.’

  Agnes looks at her rescuer in wonder, imagining William and Clara being rolled aside like the two halves of the Red Sea, their startled limbs waving impotently as the irresistible force of magic pushes them out of the picture. Then she stops in her tracks, and casts a critical glance over the house across whose threshold her guardian angel is about to lead her.

  ‘You know, I’ve never liked this place,’ she remarks, in a distant, reflective tone, as snow-flakes begin once more to flutter down from above, twinkling on her head and shoulders. ‘It smells …It smells of people trying terribly hard to be happy, without the slightest success.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  But now, my dear Children — for that is how I think of you, blessed readers of my Book throughout the world — I have taught you all the Lessons I know. And yet I hear your voices, from as far away as Africa and America, and as far removed as the Centuries to come, clammering Tell Us, Tell Us, Tell Us Your Story!

  Oh, Ye of little understanding! Have I not told you that the details of my own case are of no consequence? Have I not told you that this Book is no Diary? And still you hanker to know about me!

  Very well, then. I will tell you a story. I suppose, if you have read all my Lessons and pondered them, you have earned that much. And perhaps a book looks better if it is not quite so thin — though I believe there is more substance in this little volume of mine than in the thickest tomes written by unenlighted souls. But let that pass. I will tell you the story of when I witnessed a thing that none of us is permitted to see until the Resurrection — but I saw it, because I was naughty!

  It happened on one of the occasions I was transported to the Convent of Health for healing. I had arrived in a dreadful state, but after an hour or two of my Holy Sister’s sweet attentions, I was much improved, and madly curious to explore the other cells of the Convent, which I was forbidden to do. But I felt so well I was bored. Curiosity, which is the desparaging name that men give to womens’ thirst for Knowledge, has always been my greatest flaw, I admit. And so, dear readers, I left the confine of my cell.

  I moved stealthily, as Wrongdoers do, and looked into the key-hole of the next chamber. What a surprise! I had always presumed that only our sex could be offered Sanctuary at the Convent of Health, but there was Henry, my brother in law! (I didnt mind in the least, for Henry was the decentest man in the world!) But I swear that I should never have looked through the key-hole if I had known he wouldnt be wearing any

  clothes! However — in a glimpse I had seen him. One of the blessed Sisters was at his side, tending to his burns. I looked away at once.

  In the hallway behind me I suddenly heard footsteps, but, rather than run back into my own cell, I took fright and hastened on ahead. I ran directly to the Most Forbidden Room
, the one with a golden A fixed upon it, and passed inside!

  How can I pretend to be contrite for my sin of disobedience? I could say a thousand Hail Marys, and still smile in bliss at the memory. There I stood, dazzled with wonder at the Apparition in the middle of the room. A giant column of flame, for which I could detect no source: it seemed to issue from empty air a little distance off the floor, and taper to nothingness far above. I estimate — though I was never much good at calculations — that it was fully twenty feet high, and four feet wide. The flame was bright orange, gave off no heat and no smoke. At its heart, suspended inside it like a bird floating on the wind, was the unclothed body of a girl. I could not see her face, for she was floating with her back to me, but her flesh was so fair and free of blemish that I guessed her to be perhaps thirteen. The flame was so transparent that I could see her breathe, and knew thereby that she was alive, but sleeping. The flame did not harm her at all, it merely bore her aloft and made her hair swirl gently, all about her neck and shoulders. I nerved myself to extend one hand towards the glow, guessing that it must be something like the flame that issues from burning brandy. But it was more peculiar even than that — I was able to put my fingers quite inside it, for it was cool as water — indeed it felt just like water running over my hand. I do not know why this should have startled me more than getting burned, but I cried out in surprise and snatched my hand away. The great flame was disturbed by the motion, and wobled irregularly, and to my very great alarm the girls body began to turn!

  I was too awestruck to move an inch, until the floating body had turned entirely around, and I could see that it was — my own!

  Yes, dear readers, this was my Second Body, my Sun Body — utterly perfect–every mark that Suffering ever inflicted upon me, gone. So eager was I to see its flawless state, that I leaned my face right into the flame, a most delicious sensation.