Affinity

by Sarah Waters

  17 November 1872

  When I came out of my trance today I came out shaking, & Mrs Brink made me lie upon my bed & put her hand upon my forehead. She got her maid to fetch a glass of wine from Mr Vincy & then, when the wine came, she said it was very poor stuff, & she made Betty run to a public house to buy a better sort. She said ‘I have made you work too hard.’ I said it was not that, but that I often fainted or was ill, & then she looked about her & said she was not surprised, she thought it would make any person poorly to have to live in my room. She looked at her maid & said ‘Look at that lamp’, she meant the lamp that Mr Vincy has put red paint on, that smokes. She said ‘Look at this dirty carpet, look at these bed-clothes’, she meant the old silk cover that I brought from Bethnal Green, that Aunty sewed. She shook her head, then held my hand. She said I am far too rare a jewel to be kept in a poor box like this.

  17 October 1874

  A very curious conversation this evening, regarding Millbank, and spiritualism, and Selina Dawes. We had Mr Barclay to dinner; later came Stephen and Helen, and Mrs Wallace, to play at cards with Mother. We are all asked now, with the wedding so close, to call Mr Barclay ‘Arthur’; Priscilla, perversely, now calls him simply Barclay. They talk a great deal of the house and grounds at Marishes, and how it will be when she is mistress there. She is to learn to ride, and also to drive a carriage. I have a very clear vision of her, perched on the seat of a dog-cart, holding a whip.

  She says there will be a great welcome for us, at the house, after the wedding. She says there are so many rooms, they might put us all in them and nobody would know it. Apparently there is an unmarried cousin of the family’s there, that I am sure to take to: a very clever lady—she collects moths and beetles, and has exhibited, at entomological societies, ‘alongside gentlemen’. Mr Barclay—Arthur—said that he has written to tell her of my work among the prisoners, and that she has said she will be very pleased to know me.

  Mrs Wallace asked me then, when was I last at Millbank? ‘How is that tyrant, Miss Ridley,’ she said, ‘and the old lady who is losing her voice?’—she meant Ellen Power. ‘Poor creature!’

  ‘Poor creature?’ said Pris then. ‘She sounds feeble-minded. Indeed, all of the women that Margaret tells us of sound feeble-minded.’ She said she wondered how it was that I could bear their company—‘I am sure, you never seem able to bear our company for any time at all.’ She gazed at me, but it was really Arthur she spoke for and he, who was seated on the carpet at her feet, answered at once that that was because I knew that nothing she said was worth listening to. ‘It is all a lot of air. Isn’t that so, Margaret?’—he calls me that now, of course.

  I smiled at him, but looked at Priscilla, who had leaned to catch at his hand and pinch it. I said that she was quite wrong to call the women feeble-minded. It was only that their lives had been so very different from her own. Could she imagine, how different they had been?

  She said that she didn’t care to imagine it; that I did nothing but imagine it, and things like it, and that made the difference between us. Now Arthur held her wrists, her two slim wrists in one of his great hands.

  ‘But really, Margaret,’ Mrs Wallace went on, ‘are they all of that class? And are their crimes all so miserable? Have you no famous murderesses there?’ She smiled and showed her teeth—which have fine, dark, vertical cracks to them, like old piano keys.

  I said that the murderesses were usually hanged; but I told them about a girl there, Hamer, who battered her mistress with a skillet, but was let off when it was proved that the mistress had been cruel to her. I said that Pris ought to look out for that sort of thing, when she is at Marishes.—‘Ha ha,’ she said.

  ‘There is also a woman,’ I went on, ‘—quite a lady, they paint her on the wards—who poisoned her husband—’

  Arthur said, that he certainly hoped there would be nothing of that sort at Marishes. ‘Ha ha,’ said everybody, then.

  And while they laughed and began to talk of other things I thought, Shall I say, there is also a curious girl, a spiritualist . . .? I decided first, that I would not—then thought, Why shouldn’t I? And when I finally did say it, my brother answered at once, quite easily, ‘Ah yes, the medium. Now, what is her name? Is it Gates?’

  ‘It is Dawes,’ I said, in some surprise. I had never said the name aloud before, outside of Millbank Prison. I had never heard anyone speak of her, who was not a matron on the wards. But now Stephen nodded—of course, he remembered the case. The prosecuting lawyer in it had been, he said, a Mr Locke—‘a very fine man, retired now. I should like to have worked with him.’

  ‘Mr Halford Locke?’ said Mother then. ‘He came to dinner once. Do you remember, Priscilla? No, you were too young to sit at table with us then. Do you remember, Margaret?’

  I don’t remember it. I am glad I don’t. I looked from Stephen to Mother—and then I turned to Mrs Wallace and stared at her. ‘Dawes, the medium?’ she was saying. ‘Oh, I know her! It was she who struck Mrs Silvester’s daughter on the head—or throttled her—or, anyway, nearly killed her . . .’

  I thought of the Crivelli portrait that I have sometimes liked to look at. Now it was as if I had brought it shyly down and had it snatched from me, and was watching it being passed about the room and growing grubby. I asked Mrs Wallace, did she really know the girl in the case, the girl that was injured? She said she knew the mother; that the mother was American, and ‘quite infamous’, and the daughter had a fine head of red hair, but also a white face and freckles. ‘What a stink Mrs Silvester raised about that medium! Still, the girl, I think, was made very nervous by her.’

  I told her what Dawes has said to me: that the girl was only frightened rather than hurt, and that another lady was frightened by that, and then died. The lady was named Mrs Brink. Did Mrs Wallace know her?—No, she did not. I said, ‘Dawes is quite firm. She says a spirit did it all.’

  Stephen said that he would say a spirit did it all, too, in her place—indeed, he was astonished they don’t hear the claim more often in the courts. I told him that Dawes seemed to me quite guileless. He answered that, of course, a spirit-medium would seem guileless. He said they school themselves to seem so, for the sake of their trade.

  ‘They are an evil crew, the lot of them,’ said Arthur briskly then. ‘A lot of clever conjurers. And they make a very handsome living, preying on fools.’

  I put a hand to my breast, to the spot at which my locket should have been hanging; though whether I meant to draw attention to the loss of it—or to conceal it—I could not say. I looked at Helen, but she was smiling with Pris. Mrs Wallace said she was not sure that every medium was wicked. Her friend had been once to a spiritualist ring, and a gentleman had told her a very many things he could not possibly have known—about her mother, and about her cousin’s boy, who was burned in a fire.

  ‘They have books,’ said Arthur then. ‘They are famous for it. They keep books of names, like ledgers, which they circulate amongst themselves. Your friend’s name, I am afraid, is probably in one. Your name is probably in one.’

  Mrs Wallace heard that and gave a cry: ‘A spiritualist blue-book! Not really, Mr Barclay?’ Pris’s parrot shook its feathers. Helen said, ‘There was a place at the turn of my grandmother’s stairs where one was said to be able to see a ghost, of a girl who had fallen there and broken her neck. She had been on her way to a dance, in silken slippers.’

  Mother said, ghosts!—It was all anyone in this house seemed capable of talking of. She could not say why we didn’t just go down and join the servants in the kitchen . . .

  After a time I went to Stephen’s side and, while the others still talked, I asked him if he really thought Selina Dawes quite guilty?

  He smiled. ‘She is at Millbank. She must be guilty.’

  I said that that was the sort of answer he had used to make to tease me, when we were children; that he might as well have been a barrister, even then. I saw Helen watching us. There were pearls at her ears—they looked like d
rops of wax, I remember seeing them upon her in the old days and imagining them melting with the heat of her throat. I sat upon the arm of Stephen’s chair and said, To think of Selina Dawes so violent, and so calculating. ‘She is so young . . .’

  He said that that meant nothing. He said he frequently sees, in court, girls of thirteen and fourteen—little girls, who have to be placed on boxes so that the juries might view them. But he added, that with girls like that there is invariably an older woman or a man at the back of them, and that if Dawes’s youth points to anything, it is probably to that—that she ‘fell foul of some sort of influence’. I told him how certain she seems, that the only influences there were, were spiritual ones. He said, ‘Well, then there may be a person whom she wishes to protect.’

  A person for whom she would spend five years of her life in prison? In Millbank Prison?

  Such things occur, he said. Was Dawes not young, and rather handsome? ‘And was the “spirit” in the case—now I remember it—not supposed to be some sort of fellow? You know that most of the ghosts performing tricks at séances are actors, dressed in muslin.’

  I shook my head. I said I was sure he was not right! I was sure of it!

  But as I said it I saw him studying me, thinking, What do you know, about the passions that might drive a pretty girl to prison for the sake of her young man?

  And what do I know about such things? I felt my hand move to my breast again, and tugged at the collar of my gown, to hide the gesture. I said, Did he really think spiritualism a nonsense? And all mediums frauds? He raised his hand—‘I did not say all, I said most. It is Barclay who believes them all a pack of crooks.’

  I didn’t want to talk to Mr Barclay. ‘What do you think?’ I asked again. He answered that he thought what any rational man should think, given all the evidence: that most spirit-mediums undoubtedly were simple conjurors; that some were perhaps the victims of an illness or a mania—and Dawes might well be one of those, and in that case was to be pitied rather than mocked; but that others—‘Well, our age is a marvellous one. I may go to a telegraph office and communicate with a man, in a similar office, on the other side of the Atlantic. How is that done? I could not say. Fifty years ago such a thing would have been deemed perfectly impossible, a contradiction of all the laws of nature. But when the man sends me his message I do not suppose, for that reason, that I have been tricked—that there is a fellow secreted in the room next door and it is he that is tapping out the signal. Nor do I assume—as some ministers, I believe, assume of spiritualism—that the gentleman addressing me is really a demon in disguise.’

  But the telegraph machines, I said, are connected by a wire. He said that there are already engineers who believe there can be developed similar machines, working without the wire. ‘Perhaps there are wires in nature—little filaments—’ he waggled his fingers, ‘so fine and strange that science has no name for them; so fine that science cannot even see them yet. Perhaps it is only delicate girls, like your friend Dawes, who can sense these wires and hear the messages that pass along them.’

  I said, ‘Messages, Stephen, from the dead?’ and he answered, that if the dead do live on in another form, then we should certainly need very rare and curious means to hear them speaking . . .

  I said if that was true and Dawes was innocent—

  But he didn’t say that it was true, of course; he only said it might be. ‘And even if it were true, it doesn’t mean that she is to be trusted.’

  ‘But if she is really innocent—’

  ‘If she is, then let her spirits prove it! Besides, there is still the question of the nervous girl, the lady frightened to death. I shouldn’t like to have to argue against them.’ Mother had rung for Vigers, and now he leaned to take a biscuit from her plate. ‘I think after all,’ he said, brushing crumbs from his waistcoat, ‘that I was right the first time. I prefer the beau in muslin to the little filaments.’

  When I looked up I found Helen still watching us. I suppose she was glad to see me being kind and ordinary with Stephen—I am not always, I know. I might have gone to her then, but Mother called her to the card-table, to join Pris and Arthur and Mrs Wallace. They played at Vingt-et-un, for half an hour or so; then Mrs Wallace cried that they would beggar her of all her buttons, and rose to go upstairs. When she came back, I stopped her, and made her talk to me again of Mrs Silvester and her daughter. How had the daughter seemed to her, I asked, when she had seen her last? She said that she had seemed ‘as miserable as mud’—that her mother had matched her with a gentleman with a great black beard and red lips, and ‘all Miss Silvester would say to those who asked after her was, “I am to be married”—thrusting her hand at them, that had an emerald upon it the size of an egg, and with all that red hair, too. You know, of course, that she is quite an heiress.’

  I said then, where did the Silvesters live? and Mrs Wallace looked arch. ‘Gone back, my dear, to America,’ she said. She had seen them once before the trial was ended, then next anyone knew their house was all sold up, the staff cleared out—she said she never saw a woman in such a haste as Mrs Silvester was then, to take her daughter home and marry her. ‘But there, where there’s a trial there’s always a scandal, I suppose. I dare say they do not feel such things so keenly, in New York.’

  At that, Mother—who had been directing Vigers—said ‘What’s that? Who are you talking of? Not ghosts, still?’ Her throat was green as a toad’s, from the reflection of the table she sat at.

  I shook my head, and let Priscilla speak again. ‘At Marishes,’ she began, as the cards were dealt to her; and then, a moment later: ‘In Italy . . .’

  There was some broken talk, then, about the wedding-trip. I stood at the fire and watched the flames, and Stephen sat and dozed over a newspaper. At last I heard Mother saying, ‘. . . never been, sir, and have no wish to! I could not bear the upset of the journey, the heat, the food’—she was talking of Italy, still, with Arthur. She told him of Pa’s trips there, when we were small; and of the visit he had planned to make, with Helen and me to help him. Arthur said that he had not known that Helen was such a scholar, and Mother answered, Oh, but it was Mr Prior’s work we had to thank, for Helen being among us at all!

  ‘Helen attended Mr Prior’s lectures,’ she said, ‘and, Margaret meeting her there, she was brought to the house. She was always a great guest of ours after that, and always a favourite with Mr Prior. Of course, we did not know—did we, Priscilla—that it was all on Stephen’s account that she came here.—You must not blush, Helen dear!’

  I stood at the fire, and heard it all. I watched Helen colour, but my own cheek stayed cool. After all, I have heard the story told that way so many times, I am half-way to believing it myself. And besides that, my brother’s words had made me very thoughtful. I didn’t speak to anyone else; but before I came up here I went again to Stephen and I woke him from his doze and said, ‘That fellow in muslin you spoke of—well, I have seen the prison post-mistress, and do you know what she tells me? Selina Dawes has received not a single letter, in all her time at the gaol—nor has she written one. So you tell me this: who would go voluntarily to Millbank Prison to protect a lover who sent nothing—not a letter, not a word?’

  He could not answer me.

  25 November 1872

  An awful row tonight! I had Mrs Brink with me all afternoon, & so was late to the dinner-table. Mr Cutler is very often late & no-one minds it. Mr Vincy seeing me slip in now however, said ‘Well Miss Dawes, I hope Betty has kept some meat back for you & not given it to the dog. We thought you might be grown too fine to eat with us.’ I said I was sure that such a day would never come. - To which he answered ‘Well you, with your rare gifts, you should be able to look into the future & tell us all that.’ He said there was a time 4 months ago when I had been very glad to take a little place in his establishment, now however it seemed I had my eye on better things. He passed me my plate, that had a bit of rabbit on it & a boiled potato. I said ‘Well, it certainly would not be
hard to find a better thing than Mrs Vincy’s dinners’, at which everyone put down their forks & looked at me, & Betty laughed, & Mr Vincy slapped her, & Mrs Vincy began to call out ‘O! O! I have never been so insulted, at my own table, by one of my own paying guests!’ She said ‘You little trollop, my husband took you in, on a low rent, out of the hugeness of his heart. Don’t think I haven’t seen you cutting your eyes at him.’ I said ‘Your husband is a beastly old medium-farmer!’, & I took the boiled potato from my plate & threw it at Mr Vincy’s head. I did not see if it hit him. I only ran from the table, I ran up every stair to here & I lay upon my bed & wept, & then laughed, but finally was sick.

  And out of all of them, only Miss Sibree has come to see me, to bring me some bread & butter & a taste of port from her own glass. Mr Vincy I heard talking in the hall downstairs. He said he never wanted another girl medium under his roof, not even if she had her own father with her. He said ‘I’ve heard them called powerful, & powerful they might be. But a young woman in the grip of a spiritual passion - by God, Mr Cutler, that is a frightful thing to see!’

  21 October 1874

  Can one grow used to chloral? It seems to me that Mother must measure me ever larger quantities of it in order for me even to grow weary. And when I do sleep, I sleep fitfully, there seem to come shadows across my eyes, or murmurings at my ear. They wake me, and I rise and look across the empty room, bewildered. Then I lie another hour, hoping to grow tired again.

  It is the losing of my locket that has made me like this. It keeps me restless in the night and, in the day, dull. This morning I was so stupid over some little matter to do with Prissy’s wedding, Mother said she does not know what has become of me. She says that mixing with the coarse women at Millbank is making me simple. To spite her, I made a visit there—now, because of it, I am very wakeful indeed . . .

  They showed me, first, the prison laundry. This is a frightful room, low and hot and damp and stinking. There are huge, cruel-looking mangles in it, and pots of boiling starch, and lines of racks suspended from the ceiling, from which various nameless shapeless yellow-white items—sheets, under-vests, petticoats, I could not tell—dangle and drip. I could only bear to stay a minute there before I felt the heat begin to draw upon my face and scalp. And yet, the matrons say that the women prefer laundry work over any other kind. For the launderers are allowed a better diet than the regulars, and have eggs, and new milk, and meat above the ration, to keep them strong. And of course, they work together, and I suppose must sometimes talk.