by Sarah Waters
The vision and the whispers were so vivid I found I had to turn and press my fingers to my face to chase them away, and when I next looked at Miss Craven she had moved on to another box, and was giving a snort of laughter at what she saw within it. I watched her. It seemed all at once a shameful thing to do, to look upon the sad and slumbering remnants of the women’s ordinary lives. It was as if the boxes were coffins after all, and we were peeping, the matron and I, at their little occupants, while their mothers mourned, all unawares, above us. But what made it shameful also made it fascinating; and when Miss Craven moved on idly to another shelf, for all my squeamishness I couldn’t help but follow. Here there was the box of Agnes Nash, the coiner; and that of poor Ellen Power, with a portrait in it of a little girl—her grand-daughter, I suppose. Perhaps she had thought they would let her keep the picture in her cell.
And then, how could I help but think of it? I began to look about me, for Selina’s box. I began to wonder how it would be, to gaze at what it held. I thought, If I could only do that I should see something—I didn’t know what—something of hers, something of her—some thing, anything, that would explain her to me, bring her nearer . . . Miss Craven went on plucking at the boxes, exclaiming over the sad or handsome costumes they contained, sometimes laughing at an antique fashion. I stood near her, but did not look to where she gestured. Instead I raised my eyes and gazed about me, searching. At last I said, ‘What is the sequence here, matron? How are the boxes placed?’
Even while she explained and pointed, however, I found the plate I sought. It was above her reach; there was a ladder against the shelves, but she had not climbed it. Already, indeed, she had begun to wipe at her fingers, in readiness to escort me back to the wards. Now she rested her hands at her hips and lifted her eyes, and I caught her murmuring idly, beneath her breath: ‘Buzz buzz, buzz buzz . . .’
I must get rid of her; and could think of only one way to do it. I said, ‘Oh!’—I put my hand to my head. I said, Oh, I believed that all the gazing had made me faint!—and of course I did feel dizzy now—with apprehension—and I must have paled, for Miss Craven saw my face and gave a cry, and took a step towards me. I kept my hand at my brow. I said I would not swoon, but, could she—might she just—a cup of water—?
She led me to the chair and made me sit. She said, ‘Now, dare I leave you? There are salts in the surgeon’s office, I think; but the surgeon is at the infirmary, it will take me a minute or two to fetch the keys—Miss Ridley has them. If you was to fall—’
I said I would not fall. She put her hands together—oh, here was a piece of drama she had not bargained for! Then she hurried from me. I heard the ring of her chain, and her footsteps, and the banging of a gate.
And then I rose, and seized the ladder, and brought it to where I knew I must climb; and then I lifted my skirts and climbed it, then pulled Selina’s box to me and knocked back its lid.
There came, at once, the bitter smell of sulphur, that made me turn my head aside and narrow my eyes. Then I found that, with the light behind me, I was casting my own shadow into the box—I could make out nothing of what lay inside it, but must lean awkwardly from the ladder, placing my cheek against the hard edge of a shelf. Then I began to distinguish the garments that lay there—the coat, and the hat, and the dress, of black velvet; and the shoes, and the petticoats, and the white silk stockings . . .
I touched and lifted and turned them all—looking, still looking, though I did not know for what. But, after all, they might have been any girl’s clothes. The gown and coat seemed new, almost unworn. The shoes were stiff and polished, with unmarked soles. Even the plain jet earrings I found, knotted into a corner of a handkerchief, were neat, their wires untarnished—the handkerchief itself was very crisp, with a black silk edging, quite uncreased. There was nothing there, nothing. She might have been dressed, by a shop clerk, in a house of mourning. I could find no trace of the life I think she must have led—no hint, from any of those garments, of how her slender limbs had held them. There was nothing.
Or so I thought—until I turned the velvet and the silk a final time, and saw what else lay in that box, coiled in its shadows like a slumbering serpent—
Her hair. Her hair, bound tight and plaited into one thick rope, and fastened, where it had been cut from her, with coarse prison twine. I put my fingers to it. It felt heavy, and dry—as snakes are, I believe, for all their glossiness, said to feel dry to the touch. Where the light caught it it gleamed a dull gold; but the gold was shot through with other colours—with some that were silver, some that were almost green.
I remembered studying Selina’s picture, and seeing the fancy twists and coils of her hair then. It had made her vivid to me; it had made her real. The coffinlike box, the airless room—it seemed suddenly a dark and terrible place for her hair to be confined in now. I thought, If it might only have a little light upon it, a little air . . . And I had again that vision of the whispering matrons. Suppose they should come and laugh over her tresses, or stroke and finger them with their own blunt hands?
It seemed to me then that, if I did not take it, they would certainly come and spoil it. I grasped it, and folded it—I meant, I think, to thrust it in the pocket of my coat or behind the buttons at my breast. But as I held it, fumbling, still reaching awkwardly from the ladder, still feeling my cheek ground hard against the shelf—as I did that, I heard the door at the end of the passage-way slam, and then the sound of voices. It was Miss Craven, and with her, Miss Ridley! The fright of it made me almost fall. The plait of hair might really have been a snake, then: I flung it from me as if it had suddenly woken and shown me its fangs, then I pulled at the lid of the box, and stepped heavily to the floor—the voices of the matrons coming closer, closer, all the time I worked.
They found me with my hand upon the chair-back, trembling with fear and shame, the mark of the shelf I suppose at my cheek, my coat dusty. Miss Craven came close to me with the bottle of salts, but Miss Ridley’s eyes were narrow. Once I thought I saw her gazing at the ladder, and at the shelf, and at the boxes upon it—which, in my haste and nervousness, I may have left disordered, I cannot say. I did not turn to see. I looked only, once, at her; then turned away and shuddered harder. For it was those bare eyes, that gaze, which made me as ill at last as Miss Craven, with her salts, could have supposed me. For I knew at once what Miss Ridley would have seen, had she come sooner. I saw it all—I see it now, still, with a crisp and dreadful certainty.
It was myself, a spinster, pale and plain and sweating and wild, and groping from a swaying prison ladder after the severed yellow tresses of a handsome girl . . .
I let Miss Craven stand and hold a glass of water to my mouth. I knew that Selina sat, sad and expectant, in her cold cell; but I couldn’t bring myself to go to her—I should have hated myself, if I had gone to her now. I said I would not visit the wards to-day. Miss Ridley agreed that that was wise. She led me to the Porter’s lodge herself.
This evening as I read to Mother she said, What was that mark upon my face? and I looked in the glass to find a bruise there—the shelf had bruised me. After that my voice was unsteady, and I put the book aside. I said I should like to bathe, and had Vigers fill me a bath before my fire, and I bent my legs and lay in it, and studied my own flesh, then put my face beneath the cooling water. When I opened my eyes Vigers was there with the towel, and her gaze seemed dark, her face pale as my own. She said, as Mother had, ‘You have hurt your cheek, miss.’ She said she would put vinegar on it. I sat and let her hold the cloth to my face, meek as a child.
Then she said, What a shame it was that I had been from home to-day, since Mrs Prior—that is, Mrs Helen Prior, that was married to my brother—had come to the house, bringing her baby with her, and was sorry to have missed me. She said, ‘What a pretty lady she is, isn’t she, miss?’
I heard that, and thrust her from me, saying the vinegar made me sick. I said she must take away my bath, then tell my mother to bring my medicine: I want
ed my medicine at once. When Mother came she said, ‘What is the matter with you?’ and I said, ‘Nothing, Mother.’ But my hand trembled so much she wouldn’t let me take the glass, but held it for me—just as Miss Craven had.
She said, Had I seen some hard thing at the prison, that had upset me? She said I mustn’t make the visits, if they left me like this.
After she went I paced my room, twisting my hands, thinking, You fool, you fool . . . Then I took up this diary, and began to turn the pages of it. I remembered that comment of Arthur’s, that women’s books could only ever be journals of the heart. I think I thought that, in making my trips to Millbank, in writing of them here, I would somehow disprove or spite him. I thought that I could make my life into a book that had no life or love in it—a book that was only a catalogue, a kind of list. Now I can see that my heart has crept across these pages, after all. I can see the crooked passage of it, it grows firmer as the paper turns. It grows so firm at last, it spells a name—
Selina.
I almost burned this book to-night, as I burned the last one. I could not do it. But when I looked up from it I saw the vase upon my desk, that held the orange-blossoms: they have kept white and fragrant all this time, just as she promised. I went to them and pulled them dripping from the vase; and it was them I burned, I held them hissing on the coals, watching them twist and blacken. One bloom only I kept. I have pressed it here, and now shall keep these pages shut. For if I turn them again, then the scent of it will come, to warn me. It will come quick and sharp and dangerous, like the blade of a knife.
2 December 1874
I hardly know how to write of what has happened. I hardly know how to sit or stand or walk or speak, or do any ordinary thing. I have been out of my head for a day and a half, they have brought the doctor to me, and Helen has come to me—even Stephen has come, he stood at the foot of the bed and gazed at me in my night-dress, I heard him whispering when they thought I was asleep. And all the time I knew I should be well, if they would only leave me to myself and let me think, and write. Now they have set Vigers in a chair outside the door, and left the door ajar in case I should cry out; but I have come quietly to my desk, and have my book before me, at last. It is the only place I can be honest in—and I can hardly see, to fix the words upon the line.
They have put Selina in the darks!—and I am the cause of it. And I should go to her, but am afraid.
I made a bitter kind of resolution to keep from her, after my last visit to the gaol. I knew my trips to her had made me strange, not like myself—or worse, that they had made me too much like myself, like my old self, my naked Aurora self. Now, when I tried to be Margaret again, I couldn’t. It seemed to me that she had dwindled, like a suit of clothes. I couldn’t say what she had done, how she had moved and spoken. I sat with Mother—it might have been a doll that sat there, a paper-doll, nodding its head. And when Helen came, I found I could not look at her. When she kissed me I would shudder, feeling the dryness of my cheek against her lips.
So my days passed, since my last trip to Millbank. And then yesterday I went, alone, to the National Gallery, hoping the pictures would distract me. It was the students’ day, and there was a girl there, she had set her easel before Crivelli’s Annunciation, and she was marking on her canvas, with a stick of lead, the face and hands of the Virgin—the face was Selina’s, and seemed realer to me than my own. And then I didn’t know why I had kept away from her. It was half-past five, and Mother had invited guests, for dinner.—I didn’t think of any of this. I only went at once to Millbank and had a matron take me to the cells. I found the women finishing their suppers, wiping their trenchers with crusts of bread; and when I arrived at the gate of Selina’s ward, I caught the voice of Mrs Jelf. She was standing at the angle of the passages, calling out an evening prayer, and the acoustics of the wards made her voice tremble.
When she came and found me waiting for her she gave a start. She took me to two or three of the women—the last of these was Ellen Power, and she was so changed and so ill and so grateful to have me go to her that I couldn’t hurry my visit, but sat with her and held her hand, passing my fingers over her swollen knuckles, to calm her. She cannot speak, now, without coughing. The surgeon has given her medicine to take, but they cannot put her in the infirmary, she said, because the beds are filled with younger women. Beside her was a tray of wool and a pair of half-finished stockings—they still make her sit and sew, ill as she is, and she said she prefers to work than to lie idle. I said, ‘It cannot be right. I shall speak to Miss Haxby.’ But she said at once that it would do no good; and that anyway she would rather I did not.
‘My time is up in seven weeks,’ she said. ‘If they should find me out as a trouble-maker they might put back the date.’ I said it would be I that was making the trouble, not her—and even as I said it, I felt the pricking of a shameful fear, that if I did interfere in her case, then Miss Haxby might use it in some sly way against me—perhaps, to have my visits stopped . . .
Then Power said, ‘You mustn’t think of doing it, miss, indeed you mustn’t.’ She said that she saw twenty women, at exercise, as poorly as herself; and if they changed the rules for her, they must be changed for all of them. ‘And why would they do that?’ She patted her chest. ‘I have my bit of flannel,’ she said, with an attempt at a wink. ‘I still have that, thank God!’
I asked Mrs Jelf, when she released me, was it true that they would not give Power a bed in the infirmary? She said that when she had attempted to speak to the surgeon on Power’s behalf he had answered her frankly, that he thought he knew his own business better. She said he calls Power ‘the bawd’.
‘Miss Ridley,’ she went on, ‘might have some weight with him; but Miss Ridley has strong opinions on the matter of punishments. And it is to her that I must answer, not—’ here she looked away ‘—not to Ellen Power, nor to any of the women.’
I thought then, You are as snared by Millbank as they are.
Then she took me to Selina; and I forgot Ellen Power. I stood at her gate and shook—Mrs Jelf watching me, saying, ‘You are cold, miss!’ I had not known it, until that moment. I might have been, until then, quite frozen, quite numb; but Selina’s gaze sent the life trickling back into me, and it was marvellous, but achingly painful and hard. I understood then that I had been a fool to keep away from her—that my feelings had grown, in my absence, not dulled and ordinary, but more desperate and more quick. She looked fearfully at me. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. I asked her, What was she sorry for? She answered, Perhaps, the flowers? She had meant them as a gift. Then, when I kept away, she remembered how I had said, last time, that they had frightened me. She had thought perhaps I meant to punish her.
I said, ‘Oh, Selina, how could you think that? I have only kept away because, because I feared—’
Feared my own passion, I might have said. But I didn’t say it. For I was visited again by that gross vision, of the spinster, grasping after the switch of hair . . .
I only took her hand in mine, once, very briefly; and then I let the fingers fall. ‘Feared nothing,’ I said, and turned from her. I said that I had many things to do at home, now that Priscilla was married.
We talked on like this—she watchful, still half-fearful; me distracted, afraid to go too close to her, afraid even to look too hard at her. And then there were footsteps, and Mrs Jelf appeared at the gate, with another matron beside her. I didn’t know this matron until I saw her leather satchel, and then I recognised her as Miss Brewer, the chaplain’s clerk, who brings the women their letters. She smiled at me, and at Selina, and there was a kind of knowledge behind the smile. She was like a person with a gift, keeping the gift half-hidden. I thought—I knew it at once! and I think Selina knew it too—I thought: She has something with her that will disturb us. She has trouble.
Now I hear Vigers, shifting in her seat beyond the door and sighing. I must write quietly, quietly, or she may come and take the book from me, to make me sleep. How can I sleep, knowing w
hat I know? Miss Brewer came into the cell. Mrs Jelf drew closed the gate but did not lock it, and I heard her walk a little way along the ward, then halt—perhaps, to look in upon another prisoner. Miss Brewer said that she was glad to find me there; that she had news for Dawes, that she knew I should be pleased to hear. Selina’s hand moved to her throat. She said, What news was that? and Miss Brewer coloured, with the pleasure of her task. ‘You are to be moved!’ she said to her. ‘You are to be moved, in three days’ time, to the prison at Fulham.’
Moved? said Selina. Moved, to Fulham? Miss Brewer nodded. She said the order had been brought, that all the Star-class prisoners were to be transferred. Miss Haxby had wanted the women told of it at once.
‘Only think of it,’ she said to me. ‘The habits at Fulham are kind ones: the women work together there, and even talk together. The food, I think, is a little richer. Why, they have chocolate at Fulham, instead of tea! What will you make of that, Dawes?’
Selina said nothing. She had grown very stiff, and her hand was still at her throat; only her eyes seemed to move a little, like the tilting eyes of a doll. My own heart had given a terrible kind of twist at Miss Brewer’s words, but I knew I must speak and not betray myself. I said, ‘To Fulham, Selina’—thinking, How, oh how, shall I visit you there?
My tone, my face, must have betrayed me anyway. The matron looked puzzled.
Now Selina spoke. She said: ‘I won’t go. I won’t go from Millbank.’ Miss Brewer glanced at me. Not go? she said. What did Dawes mean? She hadn’t understood. It wasn’t a punishment, what they meant to do for her.—‘I don’t want to go,’ said Selina.
‘But you must go!’—‘You must go,’ I echoed bleakly, ‘if they say you must.’—‘No.’ Her eyes still moved, but she had not looked at me. She said now, Why should they send her there? Hadn’t she been good and done her work? Hadn’t she done all the things they wanted, and not complained? Her voice sounded odd, not like itself.