Affinity

by Sarah Waters

  The ordinary wards seemed very chill and miserable, after the heat and bustle of that room. I did not make many visits, but went to two prisoners I had not seen before. The first of these was one of their ‘lady’ prisoners, a woman named Tully, who is there on a charge of jewel-swindling. She took my hand when I went to her and said, ‘Oh, for some sensible conversation at last!’ All she would ask for, however, were stories from the newspapers—and those, of course, I am forbidden to repeat there.

  She said, ‘But is the dear Queen well?—you may tell me that, at least.’

  She told me that she had been twice as a guest to parties at Osborne, and she mentioned the names of one or two grand ladies. Did I know them?—I did not. She wondered then ‘who my people were’; her manner seemed to cool, I thought, when I told her Pa had only been a scholar. She asked me, finally, if I might have any influence with Miss Haxby over the issue of fitting stays, and tooth-paste.

  I did not stay long with her. The second woman I saw, however, I liked much better. She is named Agnes Nash, and was sent to Millbank three years ago for passing bad coins. She is a stout girl, dark-faced and whiskery, but with very blue and handsome eyes. She rose when I entered her cell, did not curtsey, but offered me her chair and leaned, for the rest of the interview, against her folded hammock. Her hands were pale, and very clean. One finger ended at the second knuckle—she said the tip of it had been ‘bitten clean off, by a butcher’s dog, while she was quite a baby’.

  She was quite bold about her crime, and talked about it curiously. ‘I come from a neighbourhood of thieves,’ she said, ‘and ordinary people think us very bad sorts, but we are kind to our own. I was raised to steal when I had to—and did so, many times, I don’t mind telling you; but I never needed to much, for my brother was quite top-sawyer in the trade, and he kept us comfortable.’ She said that it was bad coining that proved her downfall. She had taken to it—she said many girls take to it, for the same reason—because the work is light and pleasant. She said: ‘They have me in here as a passer, but I never passed, I only worked the moulds at home and left the pitching to others.’

  I have heard many such fine distinctions made, upon the wards, between grades or kinds or qualities of crimes. Hearing this one I said, Was hers the lesser offence, then?—At which she replied, that she was not claiming it was lesser, but was only stating it for what it was. ‘It is,’ she said, ‘a business that is little understood. And it is on account of that that I am here at all.’

  I said then, What did she mean? It could never be right, could it, to be a counterfeiter? It was not fair, for one thing, on the person who received the bad coins.

  ‘It ain’t fair, no. But, bless you, did you think all our queer goes into your purse? Some of it does, I don’t doubt—and worse luck to you, when you gets a bit! But most of it we keep quietly, between ourselves. I might slip a coin to a chum of mine, for a tin of tobacco. My chum might pass it on to a chum of his own, and that fellow will give it to Susie or Jim—perhaps, for a bit of mutton off the barges. Susie or Jim will only hand it back to me. It is quite a family business, and no harm done to no-one. But the magistrates hear “bad coiner” and think they hear “thief”; and I am to pay for it, with five years . . .’

  I said I had not thought, before, that there might be such a thing as a thieves’ economy; and that her defence of it was terribly persuasive. She nodded at that. She said I must be sure and bring the subject up, next time I was having supper with a judge. ‘I aim to have my go at things, you see, bit by bit,’ she said, ‘through ladies like yourself.’

  She did not smile. I couldn’t tell if she was serious, or teased. I said that I would certainly study my shillings rather carefully, in future—now she did smile. ‘Do that,’ she said. ‘Who can say? Perhaps you have one in your purse, even now, as was moulded and trimmed by me.’

  But when I asked her how I should know such a coin from all the others, she grew modest—said, there was a little sign, but—‘Well, I must, you know, preserve my craft—even in here.’

  She held my gaze. I said I hoped she didn’t mean by that, that she planned to take to the work again when she was freed? She shrugged—said, what else should she hope to do? For hadn’t she told me, that she was bred to the trade? Her people would not think much of her, were she to go back to them saved!

  I said then that I thought it a very great shame, that she had nothing better to think about than the crimes she would commit in two years’ time. She answered: ‘It is a shame. But, what else is there for me to do?—except, to count the bricks that make my cell, or the stitches in my sewing—I have done that. Or to wonder how my children do, without a mother—I have done that, too. That is very hard thinking.’

  I said she might think about why her children are motherless. She might think about all her old bad ways and where they have put her.

  She laughed. ‘I did that,’ she said. ‘I did that, for a year. We all do—you might ask any of us. Your first year at Millbank, you see, is a frightful thing. You will swear to anything, then—you will swear to starve and take your family with you, rather than do another wicked deed and get sent back here. You will promise anything to anyone, you are that sorry. But only for the first year. After that, you ain’t sorry. You think of your crimes—you don’t think, “If I had not done that, I wouldn’t be here”, you think, “If I had only done that better . . .” You think of all the tremendous swindles and snatches you shall pull off, when you are out. You think, “They have put me here because they think me wicked. Well, damn me if I don’t show them wickedness, four years from now!”’

  She gave me a wink. I stared at her. At last I said, ‘You cannot hope that I will say I’m pleased to hear you talk like that’—and she answered at once, still smiling, that of course she wouldn’t think of hoping such a thing . . .

  When I got up to leave her she rose too, and walked with me the three or four steps to the gate of her cell, as if showing me out of it. She said, ‘Well miss, I am glad to have spoke with you. You remember, now, about them coins!’ I said I would, then looked along the passage for the matron. Nash nodded. ‘Who are you visiting next?’ she asked me—and, since she seemed to mean no harm by it, I answered, guardedly, ‘Perhaps your neighbour, Selina Dawes.’

  ‘Her!’ she said at once. ‘The spooky girl . . .’ And she rolled her fine blue eyes, and laughed again.

  I did not like her quite so well, then. I called through the bars, and Mrs Jelf came and released me; and then I did go to Dawes. Her face, I thought, seemed paler than before, and her hands were certainly redder and rougher. I had a heavy coat upon me, folded close at the breast; I didn’t mention my locket to her, or refer to anything that she had said, last time. But I did say, that I had been thinking of her. I said I had been thinking of the things that she had told me, about herself. I asked her, Would she tell me more, to-day?

  She said, What should she tell me?

  I said she might tell me more about how her life had been, before they sent her to Millbank. ‘How long,’ I asked, ‘have you been—what you are?’

  ‘What I am?’—She tilted her head.

  ‘What you are. How long have you been seeing spirits?’

  ‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘For as long, I think, as I have been seeing anything at all . . .’

  And she told me then how it had been for her, when she was young—that she had lived with an aunt, and been many times ill; and that once, when she was iller than at any other time, a lady had come to her. The lady, it turned out, was her own dead mother.

  ‘So my Auntie told me,’ she said.

  ‘And weren’t you afraid?’

  ‘Auntie said I shouldn’t be afraid, because my mother loved me. That was why she came . . .’

  And so, the visits had continued, until at last her aunt had thought they ought to ‘make the best of the power in her’, and began to take her to a spirit-circle. Now there came raps, and shrieks, and more spirits. ‘Now I was a little frightened,’ she
said. ‘These spirits weren’t all so kind as my mother!’ And how old was she now?—‘Perhaps, thirteen . . .’

  I imagine her slender and terribly pale, calling ‘Auntie!’ when the table tilts. I do wonder at the older woman, exposing her to things like that; when I said as much, however, she shook her head, saying it was good for her that her aunt had done it. She said it would have been worse to have had to meet such spirits all alone—as some lonely mediums, she assured me, have to. And then, the things she saw, they grew familiar to her. ‘Auntie kept me very close,’ she said. ‘Other girls seemed dull, they talked about such ordinary things; and of course, they thought me queer. I might meet someone, sometimes, and I would know they were like me. But that was no good of course, if the person did not know it too—or, worse, if she guessed at it and was afraid . . .’

  She held my gaze, until I flinched from it and looked away. ‘Well,’ she said, more briskly, ‘the circle helped my powers grow better.’ Soon she knew when to turn ‘low’ spirits back and reach for the good ones; soon they began to give her messages, ‘for their dear friends on earth’. And then, that was a happy thing for people, wasn’t it? To have kind messages brought to them when they were grieving and sad?

  I thought of my absent locket, and of the message she once brought to me—still we had made no reference to it. I said only, ‘And so, you were established as a spirit-medium. And people came to you, and paid you money?’

  She said very firmly that she had ‘never taken a penny’ for her own sake; that sometimes people gave her gifts—which was quite a different thing; and that anyway the spirits were known to say that there was never any shame for a person in receiving coins, if it let her or him do spiritual work.

  When she spoke about this time in her life, she smiled. ‘They were pleasant months for me,’ she said, ‘though I think I hardly knew that as I lived them. My aunt had left me—gone over, as we would say, to the spirit-side. I missed her, but she was more content there than she had ever been on earth, I could not long for her. I lived for a time in a hotel at Holborn: that was with a spiritualist family, who were kind to me—though they turned against me later, I am sorry to say. I did my work, that made people so glad. I met many interesting people—clever people—people like yourself, Miss Prior! I was several times, indeed, in houses at Chelsea.’

  I thought of the jewel-swindler, talking boastfully of her visits to Osborne. Dawes’s pride seemed terrible, with the close cell walls about her. I said, ‘And was it in one of those houses, that the girl and lady that you are charged with hurting, were made ill?’

  She looked away from me. No, she said quietly, that was in a different house, a house at Sydenham.

  Then she said, What did I think? There had been such a great stir at morning prayers! Jane Pettit, from Miss Manning’s ward, had thrown her prayer-book at the chaplain . . .

  Her mood had changed. I knew she wouldn’t tell me any more, and I was sorry—I had wanted to hear more about that ‘naughty’ spirit, ‘Peter Quick’.

  I had been sitting very still to listen to her. Now, becoming more aware of myself, I found that I was cold, and I drew my coat a little closer about me. The action made my note-book show at my pocket, and I saw her looking at it. All the time we talked, then, her gaze kept returning to that edge of book; until at last, when I rose to leave her, she said, Why did I always carry a book with me? Did I mean to write about the women of the gaol?

  I told her then that I take my note-book with me wherever I go—that it was a habit I had fallen into when helping my father with his work. I said I should feel very strange without it, and that what I wrote in it I sometimes later put into another book, that was my diary. I said that that book was like my dearest friend. I told it all my closest thoughts, and it kept them secret.

  She nodded. My book was like her, she said—it had no-one to tell. I might as well say my closest thoughts there, in her cell. Who did she have, to pass them on to?

  She spoke not sulkily, but almost playfully. I said that she might tell her spirits—‘Ah,’ she said, and she tilted her head. ‘They, you know, see everything. Even the pages of your secret book. Even should you write it’—here she paused, to pass a finger, very lightly, across her lips—‘in the darkness of your own room, with your door made fast, and your lamp turned very low.’

  I blinked. Now, I said, that was very odd, for that was just how I did write my journal; and she held my gaze for a second, then smiled. She said that that was just how everybody wrote. She said she used to keep a diary herself, when she was free, and she always wrote in it at night, in the darkness, and writing it would make her yawn and want to sleep. She said she thought it very hard that now, when she kept wakeful and had all the hours of the night to write in, she must write nothing.

  I thought of the wretched sleepless nights I passed, when Helen first told me she was to marry Stephen.—I don’t believe I slept three nights together, in all the weeks that passed between that day and the day of Pa’s death, when I first took morphia. I thought of Dawes lying open-eyed in her dark cell; I imagined taking morphia or chloral to her, and watching her drink . . .

  Then I looked at her again, and saw that she still had her eyes upon the book at my pocket—that made me put my hand to it. And when she saw the gesture, her look grew a little bitter.

  She said I was right to keep it so close—that they were all wild for paper there, paper and ink. ‘When they bring you to the gaol,’ she said, ‘they make you put your name upon the page of a great black book’—that was the last time she held a pen and wrote her own name with it. That was the last time she heard her own name spoken—‘They call me Dawes here, like a servant. If anyone were to say Selina to me now, I think I should hardly turn my head to answer. Selina—Selina—I have forgotten who that girl is! She might be dead.’

  Her voice shook a little. I remembered the prostitute, Jane Jarvis, who had asked me once for a page of my book, to send a message to her pal White—I never called on her again, after that day. But to want a sheet of paper, only to write one’s name upon it, so that one might feel oneself conjured through it into life and substance—

  It seemed a very little thing to want.

  I think I listened once, to make sure that Mrs Jelf was still busy further down the ward. Then I took the note-book from my pocket, opened it to a blank page and placed it flat upon the table; and then I offered her my pen. She gazed at it, and then at me; she held it in her hand, and clumsily unscrewed it—the weight and shape of it, I suppose, were unfamiliar. Then she held it, trembling, above the page, until a glistening bead of ink welled at its nib; and then she wrote: Selina. And then she wrote her name in full—Selina Ann Dawes. And then the christian name alone again: Selina.

  She had come to the table to write, her head was very near my own, and her voice, when she spoke, was little more than a whisper. She said, ‘I wonder, Miss Prior, if you ever, when you are writing in your diary, write this name there?’

  I couldn’t answer her for a moment; for, hearing her murmur, feeling the warmth of her in that chill cell, I was struck with the thought of how often I have written of her. But then, why shouldn’t I write of her, since I write of the other women there? And it is surely better to write of her, than of Helen.

  So what I said was only, ‘Should you mind it, if I did write of you?’

  Mind it? She smiled. She said she would be glad to think of anyone—but especially of me, seated at my desk—writing of her, writing, Selina said this or Selina did that. She laughed: ‘Selina told me a lot of nonsense about the spirits . . .’

  She shook her head. But then, as swiftly as it had risen in her, her laughter died and, as I watched, her smile faded. ‘Of course,’ she said in a lower tone, ‘you would not say that. You would say only Dawes, like they do.’

  I told her, that I would say any name she liked.

  ‘Would you?’ she asked me then. ‘Oh,’ she added, ‘you mustn’t think that I would ever ask to call you anything
but “Miss Prior”, in return . . .’

  I hesitated. I said, that I supposed the matrons would not think it very proper.

  ‘They would not! And yet,’ she looked away from me, ‘I would not say the name upon the wards. But I find, when I think of you—for I do think of you, at night, when the gaol is quiet—and it is not “Miss Prior” that I say then. It is—well, you were kind enough to tell it to me, once, the time you said you came to be my friend . . .’

  A little awkwardly, she placed the pen upon the page again and wrote, beneath her own name: Margaret.

  Margaret. I saw it, and flinched: she might have put some oath there, or drawn my features in a caricature. She said at once, Oh! She shouldn’t have written it, it was too familiar of her! I said, No, no, it was not that, ‘It is only—well, it is a name I never cared for. It is a name that seems to have all the worst of me in it—my sister, you know, has a handsome name. When I hear it, I hear my mother’s voice. My father called me “Peggy” . . .’

  ‘Then let me say that,’ she said. But I remembered then that she had said it once to me already—and I still cannot think of that, without shuddering. I shook my head. She murmured at last, ‘Give me another name, then, to call you by. Give me any name but “Miss Prior”—which might be the name of a matron, or of any common visitor; which might as well be nothing to me. Give me a name that will be something—give me a secret name, a name that has, not the worst of you, but the best . . .’