by Sarah Waters
‘You have made many ladies better, I suppose?’—‘Yes.’
‘Will you give us their names?’—[Witness hesitates.] ‘I would not think it very proper to do that. It is a private thing.’
‘I think you are right, Miss Dawes. It is a very private thing. So private, indeed, that my friend Mr Williams can find not a single lady willing to stand before this court and testify to the efficacy of your powers. Do you find that curious?’—[Witness does not reply.]
‘How large, Miss Dawes, is Mrs Brink’s house at Sydenham? How many rooms has it?’—‘It has, I suppose, nine or ten.’
‘It has thirteen, I believe. How many rooms had you the tenancy of, in your hotel at Holborn?’—‘One, sir.’
‘And what was the nature of your relationship with Mrs Brink?’—‘What do you mean?’
‘Was it professional? Affectionate?’—‘It was affectionate. Mrs Brink was a widow, and had no children of her own. I am an orphan. There was a sympathy between us.’
‘She regarded you, perhaps, as a kind of daughter?’—‘Well, perhaps.’
‘Did you know she suffered from a weakness of the heart?’—‘No.’
‘She never discussed that with you?’—‘No.’
‘Did she ever discuss with you how she planned to settle her goods and property, after her death?’—‘No, never.’
‘You spent many hours alone with Mrs Brink, I believe?’—‘Some hours.’
‘Her maid Jennifer Wilson has testified that it was your custom to spend an hour or more alone with Mrs Brink, each night, in her own chamber.’—‘That was when I would consult the spirits in her behalf.’
‘You and Mrs Brink would spend an hour at the close of each night, consulting spirits?’—‘Yes.’
‘Consulting one spirit in particular, perhaps?’—[Witness hesitates.] ‘Yes.’
‘On what matters did you consult it?’—‘I cannot say. It was a private matter of Mrs Brink’s.’
‘The spirit said nothing to you about weak hearts, or wills?’ [Laughter.]—‘Nothing at all.’
‘What did you mean when you said to Mrs Silvester, on the night of Mrs Brink’s death, that Madeleine Silvester was “a silly girl, and thanks to her you had lost everything”?’—‘I don’t remember saying that.’
‘Do you mean to imply by that, that Mrs Silvester has lied to the court?’—‘No, only that I don’t remember saying it. I was very upset, because I thought that Mrs Brink might die; and I think it is rather hard of you to tease me about it now.’
‘It was a terrible thought to you, that Mrs Brink might die?’—‘Of course.’
‘Why did she die?’—‘Her heart was weak.’
‘But Miss Silvester has testified to us that Mrs Brink appeared very healthy and calm, only two or three hours before she died. It was on opening the door to your chamber, it seems, that she became ill. What was it that so frightened her then?’—‘She saw Miss Silvester in a fit. She saw a spirit handling Miss Silvester rather roughly.’
‘She did not see you, garbed as a spirit?’—‘No. She saw Peter Quick, and the sight upset her.’
‘She saw Mr Quick—Mr Quick-tempered, perhaps we should call him. This is the Mr Quick whom you were in the habit of “materialising”, at séances?’—‘Yes.’
‘Whom you “materialised”, in fact, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings—and at other times, for single ladies at private sittings—throughout the whole of a six-month period, from February this year until the night of Mrs Brink’s death?’—‘Yes.’
‘Will you “materialise” Mr Quick for us now, Miss Dawes?’—[Witness hesitates.] ‘I don’t have any of the proper equipment.’
‘What do you need?’—‘I would need a cabinet. The room would have to be made dark—no, it cannot be done.’
‘It cannot be done?’—‘No.’
‘Mr Quick is rather shy, then. Or is Mr Quick afraid he will be charged in your place?’—‘He could not appear in any place where the atmosphere is so unspiritual and repellent. No spirit could.’
‘That is a pity, Miss Dawes. For the fact remains that, with no Mr Quick to speak on your behalf, the evidence is rather pointed. A mother entrusts a delicate girl into your care, and that girl is distressed and queerly handled—so queerly, that the sight of you with your hands upon her is enough to send your patron, Mrs Brink, into a fit that soon proves fatal.’—‘You have it absolutely wrong. Miss Silvester was only made afraid, by Peter Quick. She has told you as much, herself!’
‘She has told us what she fancied she believed, under your influence. I think she was certainly made very afraid—so afraid, indeed, that she called out that you meant to murder her! Now, that was rather troublesome, wasn’t it? I should think you would try any kind of rough handling, to silence cries like those, that would bring Mrs Brink; that would bring Mrs Brink and expose you to her, dressed as the spirit you had cheated her with. But Mrs Brink came anyway. And what a vision she had then, poor lady! A vision hard enough to break her heart—to make her call, in her distress, on her own dead mother! Then she remembered, perhaps, how “Peter Quick” had come to her, night after night; then she remembered, perhaps, how he had spoken of you—how he had praised you and flattered you, called you the daughter she had never had, made her give you gifts, and give you money.’—‘No! It isn’t true! I never took Peter Quick to her. And what she gave me, she gave me for my own sake, because she loved me.’
‘Then she thought, perhaps, of all the ladies that had come to you. Of how you had made them your particular friends, and flattered them, had raised in them—in Mrs Silvester’s words—an “unhealthy excitement”. Of how you had extracted from them gifts, and money, and favours.’—‘No, no, that is perfectly untrue!’
‘I say it is not untrue. How otherwise can you explain to me your interest in a girl such as Madeleine Silvester—a girl your junior in years, and very much your superior in social standing; a girl of evident fortune, and uncertain health; a frail and vulnerable girl? What was your interest, if not a mercenary one?’—‘It was of the highest and the purest and the most spiritual kind: a desire to assist Miss Silvester in knowing her own clairvoyant powers.’
‘And that was all?’—‘Yes! What else could there have been?’
There are shouts from the public gallery at this, and also hisses. It is quite true, what Selina told me at Millbank: the paper makes a kind of champion of her at first, yet, as the trial proceeds, its sympathies wane. ‘Why are there no ladies willing to advertise their experiences of Miss Dawes’s methods?’ it asks, early on, in a kind of outrage; the question sounds rather different, however, when repeated after Mr Locke’s examination. Then there comes the testimony of a Mr Vincy, proprietor of the hotel at which Selina lodged, at Holborn. ‘I always found Miss Dawes a very designing sort of girl,’ he says. He calls her ‘artful’, a ‘provoker of jealousies’, and ‘prone to fits of temper . . .’
Finally there is a cartoon, reprinted from the pages of Punch. It shows a sharp-faced medium drawing a necklace of pearls from the throat of a timid young lady. ‘Must the pearls come off, too?’ asks the timid girl. The cartoon is entitled ‘Un-Magnetic Influences’. It was drawn, perhaps, while Selina stood pale and received her verdict, or was led, hand-cuffed, into the prison van—or sat shivering while Miss Ridley put the scissors to her head.
I found I did not like to gaze at it. Instead, I looked up—and when I did that, I at once caught the eye of the lady who was seated at the far end of the table.
She had been there, with her head bowed over Odic Power, while I had written out my notes. I think that we had sat there together for two hours and a half, and I had not thought of her once. Now, seeing me raise my eyes, she smiled. She said she never saw a lady so industrious! She believed there was an aura to that room, that inspired one to marvellous feats of learning. ‘But then’—she nodded to the book before me—‘I think you have been reading about poor Miss Dawes. What a story hers is! Do you mean to act
in her behalf? I went very frequently, you know, to her dark circles.’
I gazed at her, and almost laughed. It seemed to me suddenly that if I were to go into the street and touch any person on the shoulder and say ‘Selina Dawes’ to them, they would have some queer fact or article of knowledge for me, some piece of the history that had been shut off by the closing of the Millbank gates.
Oh yes, said the lady, seeing my face. Yes, she had been to the séances at Sydenham. She had many times seen Miss Dawes entranced, she had seen ‘Peter Quick’—she had even felt his hand grip hers, felt him place a kiss upon her fingers!
‘Miss Dawes was such a gentle girl,’ she said. ‘You could not look at her and not admire her. Mrs Brink would bring her into us and she would be dressed in a simple gown, with all her golden hair let down. She would sit with us, and have us pray a little; and even before the prayer was said, she would have slipped into a trance. She would do it so neatly, you would hardly know that she was gone. You would only know when she began to speak, for then of course the voice would be not her voice, but a spirit’s . . .’
She said she had heard her own grandmother speak to her, through Selina’ s mouth. She had told her not to grieve; and that she loved her.
I said, Would she bring messages like that, to all the people in the room?
‘She would bring messages until the voices proved too feeble or, perhaps, too loud. Sometimes the spirits would crowd about her—spirits, you know, are not always polite!—and that would make her tired. Then Peter Quick would come, to chase the spirits away—only he, of course, was sometimes as rowdy as they. Miss Dawes would say, that we must take her to the cabinet, very quickly; that Peter was coming, and would pluck the life from her, if we did not place her in her cabinet at once!’
She said ‘her cabinet’ as if she might be saying ‘her foot’, ‘her face’, ‘her finger’. When I asked about it, she answered in surprise, ‘Oh! but every medium has their cabinet, their place from which they make the spirits come!’ She said the spirits will not come in the light, because it hurts them. She said she had seen cabinets specially made, of wood, with locks upon them, but that Selina’s was only a pair of heavy curtains, that they hung before a screen, across a hollow in the wall. Selina would be placed between the curtains and the screen; and it was as she sat in that darkness that Peter Quick would come.
‘He would come,’ I asked her, ‘how?’
They would know when he arrived, she said, for Selina would cry out. ‘That was the not quite pleasant part of it, for she of course must give her spirit-matter up, for him to use, and it was painful to her; and I think, in his eagerness, he was rough with her. He was always a rough spirit, you see, even before the death of poor Mrs Brink . . .’
She said that he would come, and Selina would cry out; then he would appear before the curtain—no bigger, at first, than a ball of ether. But the ball of ether would grow, it would shake and lengthen until it was as tall as the curtain itself; and slowly it would take on the appearance of a man—at last, it was a man, a man with whiskers, bowing to you, and gesturing. ‘It was the queerest, quaintest sight you ever saw,’ she said; ‘and I saw it, I can tell you, many times. He would always begin, then, to speak of spiritualism. He would tell us of the new time that is coming, when so many people will know spiritualism to be true, spirits will walk the pavements of the city, in the day-light—that is what he said. But, well, he was mischievous. He would start to say this, but then he would grow tired of it. You would see him look about the room—there was a little light, a little phosphorised light, a spirit can bear that. You would see him look about him. Do you know what he was looking for? He was looking for the handsomest lady! When he found her, he would step very close to her and say, How would she like to walk with him, upon a London street? And then he would take her up, and have her walk with him about the room; and then he would kiss her.’ She said he was ‘always one for kissing ladies or bringing them gifts, or teasing them’. The gentlemen he never cared for. She had known him pinch a gentleman, or pull his beard. She once saw him strike a man upon the nose—so hard, the nose was bloodied.
She laughed, and coloured. She said that Peter Quick would go among them like this, perhaps for half-an-hour; but then he would grow weary. He would return to the cabinet curtains and then, just as before he had grown, so now he would shrink. At last there would be nothing left of him but a pool of shining stuff upon the floor—then even that would dwindle and grow dim. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘Miss Dawes would cry again. Then there would be silence. There would come knocks, to tell us to draw back the cabinet curtain; then one of us would go to Miss Dawes and untie her, and bring her out—’
I said, untie her?—again her cheeks grew flushed. She said: ‘Miss Dawes would have it. I think we should never have minded had she been kept quite at her liberty—or, perhaps, with a simple ribbon about her waist, to fix her to her chair. But she said it was her task to show proofs to the faithful and the doubting both alike, and would have herself perfectly tied at the start of each showing. Mind, she never had a gentleman do it: it was always a lady that tightened the ropes—always a lady that took her and searched her, and always a lady that tied her . . .’
She said that Selina’s wrists and ankles would be bound to her chair, and the knots then sealed with wax; or else, her arms would be folded behind her, and her sleeves sewn to her gown. A band of silk would be placed across her eyes and another put over her mouth, and sometimes a length of cotton might be threaded through the hole in her ear and fixed to the floor outside the curtain—more usually, though, she would have them put ‘a little velvet collar’ about her throat, and a rope would be attached to the buckle of that and held by a lady that was seated in the circle. ‘When Peter came the rope might be tugged a little; when we went to her later, however, those bonds would be all tied fast, and the wax unbroken. She would be only then so weary and so weak. We would have to place her upon a sofa and give her wine, and Mrs Brink would come and chafe her hands. She would sometimes have a girl or two to sit with her then—but I would never stay. It seemed to me, you know, that we had tired her enough.’
All the time she spoke, she made small gestures with her grubby white hands—showing me where Selina would have the ropes tightened and fixed, how she would sit, how Mrs Brink would rub her. In the end I had to turn in my chair and look away from her, her words and gestures made me queasy. I thought of my locket, and of Stephen and Mrs Wallace, and of how I had come across that reading-room—by chance, it was by chance, and yet it had so much of Selina in it . . . It didn’t seem comical to me now. It seemed only queer. I heard the woman stand and draw on her coat, and still I kept my eyes from her. But she stepped to replace her book upon the shelves, and that brought her closer to me; and then she gazed at the page before me and shook her head.
‘They mean it for Miss Dawes,’ she said, indicating the caricature of the sharp-faced medium, ‘but no-one could see her and draw her like that. Did you ever know her? She had the face of an angel.’ She bent, and turned the pages of the book until she found another picture—or, rather, two pictures, that had been published in the month before Selina’s arrest. ‘Look here,’ she said. Then she stood a moment and watched me gaze at them; and then she went.
The pictures were portraits, set side-by-side upon the page. The first was an engraving taken from a photograph, dated June 1872 and showing Selina herself, aged seventeen. It showed her rather plump, and with brows that are dark and shapely: she is clad in a high-necked gown, perhaps of taffeta, and there are jewelled pendants at her neck and her ears. Her hair is rather fussily dressed—a shop-girl’s Sunday coiffure, I thought it; but one can see, for all that, that it is thick and fair and very handsome. She looks not at all like the Crivelli Veritas. I should say that she was never stern, before they sent her to Millbank.
The other portrait might be comical, if it were not so queer. It is a pencil drawing by a spiritual artist, and shows a bust of Peter Quick as
he appeared for the dark circles at Mrs Brink’s house. There is a cloth of white about his shoulders and a cap of white upon his head. His cheek seems pale, his whiskers full and very dark; dark, too, are his brows and lashes, and his eyes. He is set upon the paper in a three-quarter profile, facing the picture of Selina—and so appears to gaze at her, as if compelling her to turn her eyes to his.
So, anyway, it seemed to me this afternoon; for I sat and studied those portraits, after the lady had left, until the ink upon the page appeared to waver and the flesh upon the faces to give a twitch. And as I sat and stared, I remembered the cabinet, and the yellow wax mould of Peter Quick’s hand. I thought, ‘Suppose that is quivering, too?’ I imagined I might turn and see the hand jerk, might see it pressed to the glass of the cabinet with one gross finger crooked and beckoning to me!
I didn’t turn; but still I sat, a little longer. I sat, and looked at Peter Quick’s dark eyes. They seemed—how odd it sounds!—they seemed familiar to me, as if I might have gazed at them already—perhaps, in my dreams.
9 December 1872
Mrs Brink says I must never think of rising in the mornings before 10. She says we must do everything we can to preserve my powers & make them stronger. She has given her own maid Ruth entirely over to the care of me & has taken another girl, named Jenny, for herself. She says her own comforts mean nothing to her compared with mine. Now Ruth brings me my breakfast & handles my gowns, & if I let my napkin or my stocking or any slight thing fall she picks it up, & if I say ‘Thank you’ she smiles & says ‘I’m sure, miss, you don’t have to thank me.’ She is older than me. She says she came to the house when Mrs Brink’s husband died 6 years ago. I said to her this morning ‘I think Mrs Brink might have had many spirit-mediums come here, since then?’ & she answered ‘She has had just about a thousand, miss! All trying for the one poor spirit. They all proved crooks however. We soon saw through them. We saw all their tricks. You will understand, how a maid feels about her mistress. I would sooner break my heart 10 times, than have a hair upon my mistress’s head hurt once, by a person like that.’ She said this, fastening my gown about me, looking at me in the glass. All my new gowns close at the back, & need her hand to fasten them.