Affinity

by Sarah Waters

  I had drawn away from her at once, and now pushed her pressing hand away. ‘A message?’ I said in surprise and dismay. Oh, but she knew very well that I mustn’t carry messages! What would Miss Haxby think of me if I did that? What would Miss Haxby think of her, for asking? The woman drew back a little, but still she kept on with it: it couldn’t harm Miss Haxby, for White to know that her friend Jane was thinking of her! She was sorry, she said, that she had asked me to spoil my book; but mightn’t I just pass a word on?—mightn’t I just do that?—mightn’t I just tell White that her friend Jane Jarvis was a-thinking of her, and wished that she might know it?

  I shook my head, and rapped at the bars of the gate for Mrs Jelf to come and free me. ‘You know you mustn’t ask,’ I said. ‘You know you must not; and I am very sorry that you have.’ At that, her sly look became sullen, and she turned away and hugged her arms about herself. ‘Damn you then!’ she said, quite plain—though not so plain that the matron could catch it, above the rasp of her prison boots upon the sanded passage-way.

  It was curious to know how little her curse moved me. I had blinked to hear her say it, but now I only gazed levelly at her; and she saw that, and looked sour. Then the matron came. ‘On with your sewing now,’ she said gently, as she released me from the cell and locked the gate. Jarvis hesitated, then drew her chair across the floor and took up her work. And then she looked, not sullen or sour but—as Dawes had—she looked only miserable, and ill.

  There were still the sounds of Mrs Bradley’s young ladies, working their way through the cells of Ward E; but I left that floor now, and went down to the First Class wards, and walked along them with their matron, Miss Manning. Gazing in at the women in their cells I found myself wondering, after all, which one of them it was that Jarvis was so eager to send word to. At last I said, very quietly, ‘Have you a prisoner named Emma White here, matron?’—and when Miss Manning said that she had, and should I like to visit her?, I shook my head, and hesitated, then said that it was only that another woman was keen for news of her, on Mrs Jelf’s ward. Her cousin, was it?—Jane Jarvis?

  Miss Manning gave a snort. ‘Her cousin, did she tell you? Why, she is no more cousin to Emma White than I am!’

  She said that White and Jarvis are notorious in the gaol as a pair of ‘pals’, and were ‘worse than any sweethearts’. She said I would find the women ‘palling up’ like that, they did it at every prison she ever worked at. It was the loneliness, she said, that made them do it. She herself had seen hard women there turn quite love-sick, because they had taken a fancy to some girl they had seen, and the girl had turned the shoulder on them, or had a pal already that she liked better. She laughed. ‘You must watch that no-one tries to make a pal of you, miss,’ she said. ‘There have been women here who have grown romantic over their matrons, and have had to be removed to other gaols for it. And the row they have raised, when they get taken, has been quite comical!’

  She laughed again, then led me a little further down the ward; and I followed, though uneasily—for I have heard them talk of ‘pals’ before, and have used the word myself, but it disturbed me to find that the term had that particular meaning and I hadn’t known it. Nor, somehow, do I care to think that I had almost played the medium, innocently, for Jarvis’ dark passion . . .

  Miss Manning brought me to a gate. ‘There’s White for you,’ she murmured, ‘that Jane Jarvis thinks so much of.’ I gazed into a cell to see a stout, yellow-faced girl, squinting at a row of crooked stitches in the canvas bag she had been set to sew. When she saw us watching her she rose and made a curtsey. Miss Manning said, ‘All right, White. Any news yet of your daughter?’—and then, to me: ‘White has a daughter miss, left in the care of an aunt. But we think the aunt a bad one—don’t we, White?—and are in fears she will let the little girl go the same way.’

  White said she had had no word. When she caught my eye I turned from her, and left Miss Manning at her gate and found another matron to escort me to the men’s gaol. I was glad to go, glad even to step into the darkening grounds and feel the rain upon my face; for all that I had seen and heard of there—the sick women and the suicides, and the mad-woman’s rats, and the pals, and Miss Manning’s laughter—it had all grown horrible to me. I remembered how I had walked from the prison into the clear air after my first visit and imagined my own past being buckled up tight, and forgotten. Now the rain made my coat heavy, and my dark skirts grew darker at the hem, where the wet earth clung to them.

  I came home in a cab, and lingered over the paying of the driver, hoping Mother would see it. She didn’t: she was in the drawing-room examining our new maid. This is a friend of Boyd’s, an older girl, she has no time for ghost stories, and claims to be eager to take up the vacant place—I should say Boyd has been so terrorised by Mother she has bribed her to it, for the friend is presently used to rather better wages. She says, however, that she is ready to forfeit a shilling a month for the sake of a little room of her own and a bedstead all to herself: in her current place she must share her quarters with the cook, who has ‘bad habits’; besides that, she has a friend in another situation near to the river and would like to be near her. Mother said, ‘I am not sure. My other maid will not like it if you have ideas above your duties. And your friend should know, mind, that she is not to call on you here. Nor will I have you cutting your hours to go and visit her.’ The girl said she would never consider it; and Mother has agreed to try her for a month. She is to come to us on Saturday. She is a long-faced girl and her name is Vigers. I shall enjoy pronouncing that, I never much liked Boyd.

  ‘A shame she is so plain!’ said Pris, watching at the curtain as she left the house; and I smiled—then thought a terrible thing. I remembered Mary Ann Cook, at Millbank, being pestered by her master’s son; and I thought of Mr Barclay about the house, and Mr Wallace, and Stephen’s friends that sometimes come—and I was glad she is not handsome.

  And perhaps, indeed, Mother thought something similar, for at Prissy’s comment she shook her head. Vigers would be a good girl, she said. The plain ones always were, they were more faithful. A sensible girl, she would know her place all right. There would be no more nonsense, now, over creaks on the staircase!

  Pris grew grave, listening to that. She will have many girls to manage, of course, at Marishes.

  ‘It is still the custom in some great houses,’ said Mrs Wallace as she sat playing cards with Mother to-night, ‘to keep the maids in the kitchens, sleeping on shelves. When I was a child we always had a boy to sleep upon the box that held the plate. The cook was the only servant in the house to possess a pillow.’ She said she did not know how I could bear to lie with the tweeny fidgeting about in her room above me. I said I was ready to brave it for the sake of my view of the Thames, which I could not give up; and that anyway, in my experience tweenies—when they weren’t frightening themselves into fits—were generally too tired to do anything in their beds but sleep.

  ‘So they should be!’ she cried.

  Mother said then that Mrs Wallace should pay no mind to anything I might say on the subject of servants. ‘Margaret has as much sense of handling a servant,’ she said, ‘as she has of handling a cow.’

  Then, on a different tack, she asked us, Could we explain a curious matter to her? There were supposed to be thirty-thousand distressed needlewomen in the city, and she had yet to find a single girl capable of putting a straight seam, upon a linen cloak, for less than a pound . . . &c.

  I thought Stephen might come, bringing Helen with him; but he did not—perhaps the rain kept them at home. I waited until ten, then came up here, and now Mother has been, to give me my dose. I was sitting in my night-dress when she came, and had the rug about me, and because I had taken off my gown my locket showed at my throat. She noticed that, of course, and said, ‘Really, Margaret! To think of all the handsome pieces of jewellery you have, that I never see on you, and yet you still wear that old thing!’ I said, ‘But I had this from Pa,’—I didn’t tell her about
the curl of pale hair that lies inside it, she doesn’t know I have that. She said, ‘But, such a plain old thing!’ She asked me, if I wanted a keepsake of my father, why I never wore the brooches or the rings she had had made up after he died? I didn’t answer her, but tucked the locket inside my gown. It was very cold against the bare flesh of my bosom.

  And as I drank the chloral for her, I saw her looking at the pictures I have pinned at the side of my desk, and then at this book. I had closed the covers, but had my pen between the pages to keep the place. ‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘What are you writing there?’ She said it was unhealthy to sit at a journal so long; that it would throw me back upon my own dark thoughts and weary me. I thought, If you don’t want me to grow weary, then why do you give me medicine to make me sleep? But I did not say it. I only shut the book away—then took it out again when she had gone.

  Two days ago, Priscilla put a novel aside and Mr Barclay picked it up, and turned its pages, and laughed at it. He does not care for lady authors. All women can ever write, he says, are ‘journals of the heart’—the phrase has stayed with me. I have been thinking of my last journal, which had so much of my own heart’s blood in it; and which certainly took as long to burn as human hearts, they say, do take. I mean this book to be different to that one. I mean this writing not to turn me back upon my own thoughts, but to serve, like the chloral, to keep the thoughts from coming at all.

  And oh! it would do, it would do, were it not for the queer reminders Millbank has thrown at me to-day. For I have catalogued my visit, I have traced my path across the female gaol, as I have before; but the work has not soothed me—it has made my brain sharp as a hook, so that all that my thoughts pass over they seem to catch at and set wriggling. ‘Think of us,’ said Dawes to me last week, ‘the next time you are wakeful’—and now, as wakeful as she could wish me, I do. I think of all the women there, upon the dark wards of the prison; but where they should be silent, and still, they are restless and pacing their cells. They are looking for ropes to tie about their own throats. They are sharpening knives to cut their flesh with. Jane Jarvis, the prostitute, is calling to White, two floors below her; and Dawes is murmuring the queer verses of the wards. Now my mind has caught the words up—I think I shall recite them with her, all night long.

  What sorts of grain best suit stiff soils?

  What is that acid which dissolves silver?

  What is relief, and how should shadows fall?

  12 October 1872

  Common Questions and their Answers

  on the Matter of the Spheres

  by

  The Spirit-Medium’s Friend

  Where does a spirit travel when it leaves the body that has held it?

  It travels to the lowest sphere that all new souls must come to.

  How does the spirit remove there?

  It removes there in the company of one of those guides or guardian spirits whom we call angels.

  How does the lowest sphere appear to the spirit that is fresh departed from the earth?

  It appears to it as a place of great calmness, brightness, colour, joy, &c., any pleasant quality may be substituted here, this sphere has all of them.

  By whom in this sphere is the new spirit received & made welcome?

  On attaining this sphere, the spirit is taken by the guide that we have spoken of to a place wherein are gathered all those friends & family members who have preceded him there. They will greet him with smiles, then lead him to a pool of shining water & there let him bathe. They will give him garments to cover his limbs; they will have made ready a house for him. The garments & the house will be of gorgeous substances.

  What are the spirit’s duties, while he resides in this sphere?

  His duties are to purify his thoughts in preparation for his elevation to the next sphere.

  How many spheres are there, that a departed spirit must pass through in this way?

  There are seven, & the highest of them is the home of LOVE that we call GOD!

  What expectations of successful promotion through these spheres may be entertained by the spirits of persons not more than averagely religious, benevolent, well-placed &c.?

  Persons cultivating a kind & gentle disposition will make an easy progress, whatever their station on the earth-plane. Persons of low, violent or vindictive tempers will find their passage - here the paper has been torn, I think the word must be hindered. Persons of especial baseness will not be admitted even into that lowest sphere we have described above. They will be taken instead to a place of darkness, & made to toil there until they have admitted & repented of their wrongs. This process may take many millennia to achieve.

  How does the spirit-medium stand in relation to these spheres?

  The spirit-medium is not permitted to enter the seven spheres, but he or she may sometimes be taken to the gate of them, & so catch glimpses of their marvels. He or she may also be taken to that dark place where toil the wicked spirits, & invited to gaze at that.

  What is the spirit-medium’s proper home?

  The spirit-medium’s proper home is neither this world nor the next, but that vague & debatable land which lies between them. - At this spot Mr Vincy has pasted a notice, Are you a spirit-medium in search of your proper home? You will find it at - & he gives the address of this hotel. He has had the book from a gentleman at Hackney, & means to pass it to another on the Farringdon Road. He brought it to me very quietly, saying ‘Mind, I don’t show such things to everyone. I won’t, for example, be passing this to Miss Sibree. I keep books like this only for those persons about whom I have a feeling.’

  To keep a flower from fading. - Add a little glycerine to the water in the flower’s vase. This will keep the petals from falling or turning brown.

  To make an object luminous. - Purchase a quantity of luminous paint, preferably from a shop in a district where you are not known. Thin the paint with a little turpentine, & soak strips of muslin in it. When the muslin is allowed to dry & then shaken, a luminous powder will fall from it, that may be collected & used to cover any object. The odour of the turpentine may be disguised with a little perfume.

  15 October 1874

  To Millbank. I arrived at the inner gate to find a little knot of warders gathered there, and a pair of matrons—Miss Ridley and Miss Manning—their prison gowns hidden beneath bear-skin cloaks and their hoods pulled high against the cold. Miss Ridley saw me and nodded. They were expecting a delivery of prisoners, she said, from the police cells and other gaols, and she and Miss Manning had come to take off the women. I said, ‘Will you mind, if I wait with you?’ I had never seen before, how they deal with newcomers. We stood a while, the warders blowing on their hands; then there came a cry from the porter’s lodge, and the sound of hooves and iron wheels, and a grim-looking, windowless vehicle—the prison van—swung into Millbank’s gravelled courtyard. Miss Ridley and a senior warder stepped up to greet its driver, and then to open its doors. ‘They will let the women off first,’ said Miss Manning to me. ‘Here they come, look.’ She moved forward, pulling her cloak a little closer about her. I, however, hung back, to study the prisoners as they emerged.

  There were four of them—three girls, quite young, and one middle-aged woman with a bruise upon her cheek. Each had her hands held fast and stiff before her in a pair of handcuffs; each stumbled a little as she dropped from the van’s high back step, then stood a second and gazed about her, blinking at the pale sky, and at Millbank’s ghastly towers and yellow walls. Only the older woman seemed unafraid—but she, it turned out, was used to the sight, for as the matrons stepped up to chivvy the women into a ragged line and lead them off I saw Miss Ridley narrow her eyes. ‘You again, then, Williams,’ she said; and the woman’s bruised face seemed to darken.

  I walked at the rear of the little group, behind Miss Manning. The younger women continued to look about them rather fearfully, and one leaned to murmur something to her neighbour, and had to be scolded. Their uncertainty reminded me of my own fi
rst visit to the gaol—less than a month ago, still; but how familiar have I grown, since then, with the plain, monotonous routes, that once so baffled me!, and with the warders, the matrons, the very gates and doors of the place, its locks and bolts—each of which has a subtly different slam or click or thud or creak, depending on its strength and purpose. It was curious to think this, half satisfying and half alarming. I recalled Miss Ridley saying that she had crossed the prison corridors so often, she could walk them blindfolded; and I remembered how I had once pitied the poor matrons, for being as subject to the grim routines of Millbank as their prisoners.

  So I was almost pleased to find us entering the female building by a doorway I did not know, and passing through it into a series of rooms that I had never visited before. In the first of these we found the reception-matron, the officer responsible for examining the papers of all new convicts, and entering their details in a thick prison ledger. She too looked hard at the woman with the bruise. ‘No need to tell me your name,’ she said, as she wrote upon the page before her. ‘What are the horrible particulars, Miss Ridley?’

  Miss Ridley had a paper, and was reading from it. ‘Thievery,’ she said shortly. ‘And assaulting the officer that apprehended her, very viciously. Four years.’ The reception-matron shook her head: ‘And you were just sent out of here last year, weren’t you, Williams? And in high hopes of a situation, I recall, in a Christian lady’s household. What happened there then?’