by Sarah Waters
I had no sense at all that Pa was anywhere near me; but this, in itself, seemed a kind of blessing. I had gone to say good-bye to him. I think I will find him again, in Italy.
I went from the cemetery to the centre of the city, and then I walked from street to street, looking at all the things I shall not see again, perhaps for many years. I walked from two o’clock until half-past six.
Then I went to Millbank, for my last visit there.
I reached the gaol long after the suppers had been served and eaten and cleared away—a much later time than I have ever visited before. I found the women of Mrs Jelf’s wards at the last part of their labour. This is the kindest time of the day for them. When the evening bell is rung at seven, they put their work aside; the matron takes a woman from her cell and walks with her along the passages, collecting and counting all the pins and needles and blunt-edged scissors that have been used by the prisoners throughout the day. I stood and watched Mrs Jelf do this. She wore an apron of felt, to which she fixed the pins and needles; the scissors she put on a wire, like fish. At a quarter-to-eight the hammocks must be unfolded and tied up, and at eight o’clock the doors are fastened, and the gas shut off—until that time, however, the women may do just as they please. It was curious to see them—some reading letters, some learning their Bibles; one tipping water into a bowl, to wash with, another with her bonnet removed, and tying curls into her hair with a few poor lengths of wool saved from her day’s knitting. I have begun to feel myself a ghost, at Cheyne Walk; I might have been a ghost to-night, at Millbank. I walked the length of those two wards and the women hardly raised their eyes to me, and when I called to the ones I knew they came and curtseyed, but were distracted. They used to put aside their work for me, gladly enough; but their last, private hour of the day—well, I can see how it would be rather different to them, to surrender that.
I was not a ghost, of course, to Selina. She had seen me cross the mouth of her cell, and was waiting for me when I went back to her. Her face was very still and pale, but there was a pulse ticking fast beneath the shadow of her jaw—when I saw that, I felt my own heart kick.
It didn’t matter now, who knew how long I spent with her, who saw how near we stood. So we stood very close, and she spoke to me, in whispers, of how it will be tomorrow night.
She said, ‘You must sit and wait, and think of me. You must keep to your room, you must have a single candle by you, with its flame shielded. I shall come, some time before the light . . .’
She was so earnest, so grave, I began to be terribly afraid. I said, ‘How shall you do it? Oh, Selina, how can it be true? How shall you come to me, through the empty air?’
She looked at me and smiled, then reached and took my hand. She turned my fingers and eased back my glove, and held my wrist a little way before her mouth. She said, ‘What is there, between my mouth and your bare arm? But don’t you feel me, when I do this?’ Then she breathed upon my wrist, where the blood shows blue—she seemed to draw all the heat in me to that one spot, and I shivered.
‘Just so will I come to you, tomorrow night,’ she said.
I began to imagine then how it will be. I imagined her pulled long, like an arrow, like a hair, like the string upon a violin, like a thread inside a labyrinth, long and quivering and tight—so tight that, buffeted by rough shadows, she might break! When she saw me tremble she said that I must not be frightened—that if I was, it would make her journey all the harder. I had a sudden terror then of that—a terror of terror itself, which would tax and weary her, perhaps harm her, perhaps keep her from me. I said, What if I should spoil her powers, without meaning it? What if her powers should fail? I thought then of how it will be, if she does not come. I thought of how it will be, not for her, but for myself. I seemed suddenly to see myself as she has made me, I saw what I have become—I saw it, with a kind of horror.
I said, ‘If you don’t come, Selina, I shall die.’ She has told me as much herself, of course; but now I spoke so simply and so dully, she looked at me and her expression grew strange, her face became white and stretched and bare. She came to me and put her arms about me, and placed her face against my throat. ‘My affinity,’ she whispered. And though she stood very still, when she stepped from me at last my collar was wet with her tears.
There came the sound of Mrs Jelf, then, calling an end to leisure-time, and Selina passed her hand across her eyes, and turned from me. I curled my fingers about the bars of her gate, and stood and watched her fastening her hammock to the wall, shaking free her sheet and blankets, hitting the dust from her grey pillow. Her heart still beat as fiercely as my own, I know it, and her hands shook a little, as mine did; and yet she moved and worked tidily, as a doll might, tying knots in the bed-ropes, folding back the prison blanket to show a border of white. It was as if, having been neat for a year, she must be neat even to-night—be neat, perhaps, for ever.
I couldn’t bear to see her. I turned away, and caught the sound of women, all down the ward, engaged upon the same routine; and when I looked at her again she had her fingers on the buttons of her gown, and had unloosed it. ‘We must all be in our beds,’ she said, ‘before the gas is put off.’ She said it self-consciously, not looking at me—still, however, I didn’t call for Mrs Jelf. I said only, ‘Let me see you’—I had not known I was about to say it, and was startled by the sound of my own voice. She also blinked, and hesitated. Then she let the dress fall from her, and removed the under-skirt and the prison boots and then, after another hesitation, the bonnet, until she stood, shivering slightly, in her woollen stockings and her petticoat. She held herself stiffly, and kept her face turned from me—as if it hurt to have me gaze at her, yet she would suffer the pain of it, for my sake. Her collar-bones stood out like the delicate ivory keys of some queer instrument of music. Her arms were paler than her yellowed under-clothes, and veined, from wrist to elbow, with a gentle tracery of blue. Her hair—I had never seen her naked head—her hair hung flat to her ears, like a boy’s hair. It was the colour of gold when a breath has misted it.
I said, ‘How beautiful you are!’ and she looked at me in a kind of surprise.
‘You don’t think me very changed?’ she whispered.
I asked her, How could I think that?—and she shook her head, and again she shivered.
There had begun to come, along the ward, the sound of slamming doors, the sliding of bolts, a crying and a murmuring; now the sound came closer. I caught the voice of Mrs Jelf—she was calling, at every door she fastened: ‘Are you all right?’ and the women were answering: ‘All right, mum’, ‘Good-night, mum!’ Still I gazed at Selina, not speaking—hardly breathing, I think. Then her gate began to shudder with the nearing of the slamming doors, and when she saw that she climbed, at last, into her bed and pulled the blanket high about her.
Then Mrs Jelf was there, twisting her key and pushing at the bars; and for a curious moment she and I stood hesitating, gazing together at Selina as she lay in her bed—like fretful parents at the nursery door.
‘Do you see how neatly she lies, Miss Prior?’ said the matron quietly. And then, in a whisper, to Selina: ‘Are you all right?’
Selina nodded. She was gazing at me, and still shivering—I think she could feel my flesh, that was tugging at hers. ‘Good-night,’ she said. ‘Good-night, Miss Prior.’ She said it very gravely—for the matron’s sake, I suppose. I kept my eyes upon her face as the gate was closed and the bars fixed between us; then Mrs Jelf swung the wooden door shut, put her hand to its bolt and moved on, to the next cell.
After a moment of staring at the wood, the bolt, the iron studs, I joined her, and walked with her along the rest of E ward, and then along ward F—she all the time calling in to the women, and they making her their quaint responses: ‘Good-night, mum!’, ‘God bless you, ma’am!’, ‘Here’s another day, matron, nearer my time!’
Roused and nervous as I was, I took a kind of comfort from the rhythm of her tour—from the cries, the steady slamming of the doors.
At last, at the furthest end of the second ward, she turned the tap that closed the gas-pipes that fed the mantles in the cells; and the jets all down the corridor seemed to jump, then flared a little brighter. She said quietly, ‘Here is Miss Cadman, the night-matron, come to take my place. How do you do, Miss Cadman? This is Miss Prior, our Lady Visitor.’ Miss Cadman wished me good-night, then drew off her gloves and gave a yawn. She was dressed in a matron’s bear-skin cloak, but had the hood set low about her shoulders. ‘Have we any trouble-makers to-day, Mrs Jelf?’ she asked, yawning again. When she left us, heading for the matron’s chamber, I saw that her boots were soled with rubber and struck the sanded flags quite noiselessly. The women have a name for those boots—I remember this, now. They call them sneaks.
I took Mrs Jelf’s hand, and found I was sorry to be leaving her—sorry to be leaving her there, while I moved on. ‘You are kind,’ I said to her. ‘The kindest matron in the gaol.’ She pressed my fingers and shook her head, and the words, or my mood, or her evening tour, seemed to make her mournful. ‘God bless you, miss!’ she said.
I did not meet Miss Ridley on my journey across the gaol—I had almost hoped to. I did see Mrs Pretty, talking on the tower stairs with the night-matron of her wards, drawing on a pair of dark gloves, flexing her fists against the leather; and I also passed Miss Haxby. She had been called to reprimand a woman who was making a stir in a cell on the lowest floor. ‘How late you stay, Miss Prior!’ she said to me.
Will it sound strange if I write, that it was almost hard to leave that place at last?—that I walked slowly, and lingered on the tongue of gravel, dismissing the man who had escorted me there? I have often thought that I should be turned by my visits into a thing of lime or iron—perhaps I have been, for to-night Millbank seemed to pull at me like a magnet. I walked as far as the gate-house and then stopped, and turned; and after a minute there came a movement beside me. It was the Porter, come to see who was hesitating at his door. When he recognised me in the darkness he wished me good-night. Then his gaze followed my own, and he rubbed his hands together—to keep the cold from them, perhaps; but also with a kind of satisfaction.
‘She’s a grim old creature, ain’t she, miss?’ he said, nodding towards the gleaming walls, the lampless windows. ‘A terrible creature—though I say it, who is her keeper. And she’s leaky—did you know that? There were floods, in the old days—oh yes, many times. It is this ground, this wretched ground. Nothing will grow in it, and nothing will sit in it straight—not even a great old, grim beast like Millbank.’
I said nothing, only watched him. He had taken a black pipe from his pocket and pressed his thumb into the bowl, and now he turned to draw a match along the bricks, and then to bend into the shelter of the wall—his cheeks grew hollow, and the flame rose and dipped. He cast the match from him, and nodded again towards the prison. ‘Would you think,’ he went on, ‘that such a thing as that could wriggle about so devilishly on its foundations?’—I shook my head. ‘No more would any soul. But the man that was porter here when I took on the job—now, he could tell about the wriggling, the floods! He could tell of cracks, like thunder in the night! Of the governor arriving one morning to find a pentagon split smart down the middle, with ten men running through the break! Of six more men drowned in the darks, from where the prison sewers had bust and let the Thames in. There was gallons of cement put into the foundations, then; but does that stop her from heaving about? You ask the warders, Is there trouble with the locks ever, because the doors have shifted on their hinges and got stuck? Are there windows that shatter and crack, with no-one by them? She seems quiet to you, I dare say. But some nights, Miss Prior, when there ain’t a breath of wind, I have stood where you are standing now and heard her groan—plain as a lady.’
He put a hand to his ear. There came the far-off slapping of the water of the river, the rumble of a train, the ringing of the bell upon a carriage . . . He shook his head. ‘She’ll come down one day, I am certain of it, and take the lot of us with her! Or else, this wicked earth that they have set her in will give one great swaller, and we’ll all go down like that.’
He drew on his pipe, then gave a cough. Again we listened . . . But the gaol was silent, the earth quite hard, the blades of sedge as sharp as needles; and at last the breeze became so raw we could not stay in it, I had begun to shiver. He ushered me into his lodge, and I stood before his fire until a cab was found for me.
While I waited there, a matron came. I didn’t recognise her until she pushed her cloak a little from her face, and then I saw that it was Mrs Jelf. She nodded to me once, and was let out by the Porter; and from the window of my cab I think I saw her again, then, stepping swiftly along an empty street—eager, I suppose, to snatch up the dark and slender ribbons of her ordinary life.
What must that life be like? I cannot guess.
20 January 1875
St Agnes’ Eve—it is come at last.
The night is a bitter one. The wind is moaning in the chimney and rattling the windows in their frames; the coals of the fire are struck by hail, and hiss. It is nine o’clock, and the house is still. I have sent Mrs Vincent and her boy out for the night, but keep Vigers here. ‘If I should grow afraid,’ I said to her, ‘and call to you, will you come?’—‘Afraid of burglars, miss?’ she answered. Then she showed me her arm, which is very thick, and she laughed. She said she would be sure to make all the doors and windows very fast, and I must not worry. But though I heard her slamming the bolts, I think she has gone back to them now, as if to check their fastenings.—Now she is making her noiseless way upstairs, and turning the key in her own lock . . .
I have made her nervous, after all.
At Millbank, the night-matron Miss Cadman walks the wards. It has been dark there for an hour. I shall come some time before the light, said Selina. Already the night beyond my window seems thicker than I ever knew it. I cannot believe it will ever be dawn.
I don’t want the dawn to come again, if she does not come first.
I have kept to my room since the light first began to fail at four o’clock. It looks strange to me, with its empty shelves—for half my books are packed in boxes. At first, I put them all into a trunk; but then, of course, the trunk could not be lifted. We must take only what we can carry, I hadn’t thought of that before to-day. I wish I had, for then I might have sent a box of books to Paris—it is too late now. And so I had to choose which ones to take, and which to leave. I have taken a Bible where I might have taken Coleridge, and all because the Bible has Helen’s initials in it—the Coleridge I suppose I can replace. From Pa’s room I took a paperweight, a half globe of glass that has a pair of sea-horses fixed in it, that I used to like to study when I was a girl. I have all Selina’s clothes packed in one trunk—all, save the wine-coloured travelling-gown and the coat, and a pair of shoes and stockings. These I have laid out ready upon the bed, and if I gaze at them now, through the shadows, it might be her lying there, in a slumber or a swoon.
I do not even know if she will come clad in her prison costume, or whether they will bring her naked to me, like a child.
There is the creak of Vigers’ bed, and the spitting of the coals.
Now it is quarter-to-ten.
Now it is almost eleven.
This morning a letter came, from Helen at Marishes. She says the house is grand, but Arthur’s sisters rather proud. She says that Priscilla believes herself to be with child. She says that the estate has a frozen lake in it, on which they have been skating. I read that, and closed my eyes. I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates—I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister’s house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her—
I cannot say what would frighten them most—her being a spirit-medium, or a convict, or
a girl.
‘We have heard from Mrs Wallace,’ says Helen in her letter, ‘that you are working, and bad-tempered.—From that I know you must be well! But you must not work so hard that you forget to join us here. I must have my own sister-in-law, to save me from Priscilla’s! But will you write to me, at least?’
I wrote to her this afternoon, then gave the letter to Vigers, and stood and saw her carry it, very carefully, to the post—now there is no recovering it. I addressed it, however, not to Marishes, but only to Garden Court; and I marked it, ‘To be kept until Mrs Prior’s return’. It says this:Dear Helen,
What a very curious letter this is to write!—the most curious letter I think, that I have ever written to anyone, and a kind, of course, that—so long as I am successful in my plans!—I am likely never to be obliged to write a second time. I wish that I could make it very clever.
I wish you will not hate or pity me, for what I am about to do. There is a part of me that hates myself—that knows that this will bring disgrace on Mother, on Stephen and on Pris. I wish you will only regret my going from you, not cry out against the manner of it. I wish you will remember me with kindness, not with pain. Your pain will not help me, where I am going. But your kindness will help my mother, and my brother, as it helped them once before.
I wish that, if anyone should look for faults in this, then they will find them with me, with me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content. That this has always been true—well, you of course know that, better than anyone. But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me! I have been led to it, Helen, by someone marvellous and strange. You won’t know this. They will tell you of her, and they will make her seem squalid and ordinary, they will turn my passion into something gross and wrong. You will know, that it is neither of those things. It is only love, Helen—only that.