by Sara Collins
They looked at each other, then at me. Langton’s laugh scraped like rust.
I saw how it would be. Langton was nothing in London, and I would be nothing to him. His maid, that was all.
I swallowed, set down his glass of rum, eyed the candle. Would he stop me if I pulled out my worn copy of Moll? I wanted the comfort of it then, more than anything. But the sight of a nigger reading gets some men’s blood up, I knew. Both white and black. There’d been a kind of freedom in knowing the rules where I’d come from, where I could read, when. I didn’t know them here.
Without thinking, I reached over to lift the glass, hold it to Langton’s lips, to save him having to use his own hands. He reared backwards, shoved at me. ‘Where do you think you are?’
‘This one ‒’ Pomfrey whistled, letting his chair drop ‘– ain’t like any nigger I’ve come across before.’
Quod erat demonstrandum, I thought. Thus it has been shown. I let the heavy Latin words tumble around my head, same way I did around most white men. Reminding myself I knew things that he did not. I’m not a house-girl, not just a house-girl. The same old thing I always told myself.
‘Tell you what,’ Pomfrey said, stood abruptly, jostled the table. ‘I’ll do you even better than credit, old cove.’ He squirmed his hand onto my shoulder. ‘There’s a new academy down Marylebone. The School-house. God, is there any lass on any corner of this earth who knows how to wind a tongue around a cock like a nigger giggler? Let’s take your little wench there. Shame she doesn’t seem to have a tongue.’
I stood too, lifted his hand, like I’d seen Phibbah do once with a grass snake she caught in the grain shed.
‘Quod erat demonstrandum,’ I said.
But Langton left Pomfrey nursing his tankards, saying he had more pressing matters. He got a boy to fetch a carriage: he wanted to go to Montfort Street.
‘What’s in Montfort Street?’ I asked.
‘Benham.’
An awful twisting in my gut. It had been there since Langton had said the name out loud. George Benham. We were going to come face to face. What would I say to him? How would I be able to hold my tongue? Could I beg to be left at the inn instead? Those were my thoughts as we arrived at Levenhall, which shows you how little I knew of what lay in store.
Houses lined up like new ponies, holding their heads high like they could just prance right out into the street. Langton struck the knocker, a big brass lion’s head. The more swell those great houses think themselves, the more they collect jungle shapes to remember the beasts at the door. The walls around us threaded themselves into the shadows until the only solid thing left on the street was a single gas lamp with its yellowy yawning halo. The door swung half open, so I could see only a row of buttons, the corner of a mob cap, then an entire servant, a solemn-looking woman, with a face like a melting candle, the rest of her very stretched and thin, as was her voice.
She introduced herself to him as Mrs Linux, then looked me up and down. ‘This her?’
Langton coughed. She turned back to him. ‘We just lost a footman, you know. One of our pair. Married and . . . off! To his wife’s family. One of those is what we need.’ She gave me a sharp look, as if the loss had been my fault.
A strange way to answer the door, I thought. If I’d only caught her meaning then, I’d have run a mile, and I wouldn’t be where I am now.
Langton said it was quite all right, she mustn’t worry, and la-la-la. It was nothing like the way he talked to Phibbah or any other house-girl. Some kind of English music sneaking into his voice.
There was a tang of vinegar at the front door. The house stretched above us, a marble stair leading to a landing on the third floor. Portraits lined the wall, like captured thieves. As she led us to the back of the house I spied plainer wood stairs going up there. For the servants, I assumed. All quiet down below, windows covered with heavy damask drapes, but whispers through one of the closed doors, like scratches on wood. She left Langton in what she called the drawing room. He said I should follow her below, to the kitchen, which I did. It was inside, at least, unlike the cook-room at Paradise. There was a turnspit at one side of it, a maid cross-legged beside the fire with a bit of cheese. Linux lifted the kettle on the hob while I stood at a loss.
‘The first thing you’ll do is scrub your hands.’
I drew myself up. ‘I won’t be spoken to in that manner.’
‘I will not be spoken to in that manner,’ she said.
‘Is this how your guests are treated?’
She drew in her lips, leaned forward. This is always the way of it. First I’m not seen, then I’m stared at too closely. ‘I suppose you’ll soon learn how our guests are treated,’ she said, at last. ‘But for now you’d better learn how our hands are treated, and the first thing you’ll do is scrub yours well.’
She knew the way, but I was angry as lightning and just as quick. I got there first, pulled Langton over to the window, while she hovered at the door. ‘Langton,’ I said. ‘She treats me like a servant here.’
He busied himself with the sash. ‘Frances.’ He looked up at me and there was something in his face that I had never seen there in all the years. I swear it looked like pity. I almost slipped and fell. ‘You are a servant here.’
It was then it came clear. I was to be Langton’s gift.
For a moment, I stood there, rooted to the spot, with that knowledge hammering inside, and his words flying away so I could catch only the tail end of them: ‘. . . important . . . girl, do not embarrass me.’
I nodded. ‘But you’re coming back?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Since when are your doings none of my business? Langton?’ I reached out.
‘Behave yourself.’ He pulled back, slapped me. Even Linux gasped. It was the shock of it that thundered into me, more than the strength, considering the state of his hands, how for years I’d thought he couldn’t muster anything out of them. You could have lit a spill off the force of my fury, then. But it knocked those words out of me all the same. Those two words I never used: Massa. Please.
But Linux pulled me away, by the arm, and Langton watched, and kept himself by the window, and said nothing.
Once we were in the passage, Linux called out, ‘Pru!’ and the kitchen maid appeared and I tugged and tugged, then gave in, knowing I had no choice but to follow her upstairs, feeling all the dread with which I’d have entered the house had I known what was waiting for me. Pru’s fuzzy braid batted at her hips, red as paint, and she looked behind, motioned me to shush. Only then did I hear the noise that was still pouring out of me, which had started downstairs, the terrible moaning. I put my hand over my mouth, stuttered out quaking breaths.
All around us a wavering dark. The carpets gave way to lime-washed wood and then a naked little room. Eaves hunkering over a small bed. A washstand and a pallet in the corner, right under the window.
Pru put a bowl, which smelt of sheep fat, on the bed. ‘That’s for my hands,’ she said. ‘But help yourself, if you want.’ The rushlight gobbled itself up and the room stood dark and still. I could see only snatches of her. One white arm, one foot rubbing against the other, the neck of her gown winking open as she lifted a nightgown from the nail above the bed. She gestured towards the pallet. ‘I’ve given you one of the blankets and you can take the warming pan. Only for tonight, mind.’ She pulled off her dress and stockings, leaned over and pinched her big toe. ‘I’ve never seen a blue-skin this close before.’
‘A blue-skin?’
‘A darky. Like you.’
I could’ve told her I’d never seen a slaving white girl, but unlike her I could keep my thoughts to myself. I stared down at the pallet. If I lay on it, I’d be stuck. I’d be a maid again. But where could I go? A branch struck the window and cold air brushed at my neck, though it was shut. Outside lay the river, the bone-rattling cold, the dark, twisting streets. Where could I go? I felt a sagging disappointment, the nasty twin of all the hope I’d shouldere
d at the docks. I thought of Langton, wondered if he was still downstairs, if I could run down there, plead with him again. I drew in a breath. Even my skin felt tight.
Pru reached under her bed and pulled out a bottle. ‘Don’t mind too much about Mrs Linux. She’s out of sorts at being caught short a footman ‒ well, truth be told, she’s none too happy about you either. Blacky servants might be all the rage with some houses. They used to have one here, though I never met him, but Mrs Linux says that ended in nothing but bother, so she’d rather not have another. She says it’s all savagery where you’re from . . .’
I cried out again. She gawped at me. When I sank to the pallet, her eyes followed, as if she feared I’d howl, bare my teeth, rip into her, like a dog into a hen.
I wanted to do all three.
Have you tallied the vertebrae in the warehouse of a man’s back? I wanted to ask. Read the Encyclopédie? Pulled a heart out of its cage, thick and slippery?
No doubt she couldn’t even read, signed herself with an X.
She took a seat on the bed, still watching me. ‘Any house can be strange,’ she said. ‘But you just get used to it, don’t you? Though, mind you, I’ve only been in this one, and the one Ma birthed me in. But people are strange, and people live in houses, and make them strange . . .’
My thoughts scattered and drifted above her chatter. Ran like marbles. Smashed like glass. I cried out again.
‘Oi! None of that up here,’ she said. ‘You should just try to settle. It won’t be as bad as that.’
But I wouldn’t settle. Couldn’t. I pressed a palm out in front of me, felt along the cold stone. It seemed that in England the ground also could become air, slip right out from under you with no warning. Langton had made me disappear. That was some magic, to take a body thick with meat and blood and dreaming and turn it into air.
I cringed, then, remembering how I’d shamed myself. No, Massa. Please. Don’t leave me. No, Massa, please. Remembering the housekeeper, arms crossed like swords, face bleached in anger: ‘Was she not informed, sir, about these arrangements?’
Massa. Please.
It was the whine of my own voice, needling into me, that had finally driven me quiet. Not his hands, batting me away, or his own sharp words: ‘You’re embarrassing yourself, girl, you’re embarrassing me. Making a spectacle.’
For some things, there’s the same shame in fighting them as accepting them.
‘You should consider yourself lucky, you know,’ Pru said. She took a sip. ‘Being maid to George Benham. Many would give their eye-teeth, instead of howling about it.’
I huffed a breath. ‘One master’s as bad as another.’
‘True. Mr Benham’s no worse than the next one.’ Her eyes scuttled away and back. ‘But Mrs Linux says they call him the finest mind in England and we should be proud to work here. And he pays fair, and he stays out of your way, which is more than you can say for many of them. And he dotes on her. Madame. Though she doesn’t return it.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He can never be exciting enough for her – but nor can she ever be tame enough for him.’ Another sip. ‘You’d think ten years would be long enough married for her to settle into it. But I shouldn’t be tattling, for Mrs Linux don’t like us to be familiar.’ She set the bottle on the floor. ‘It is queer, you just being left here. Did you really not know anything about it?’
Not a thing.
I had pictured myself starting a new life in London. Even if it meant having to play maid to Langton. Instead I’d been left with a man I hated before we’d even met, and now had to play maid for him. I couldn’t think why Langton had done it. But I was always the last to know about a thing, before it happened to me.
Fear sent the walls tilted and black. Would the same work be required of me here that I’d done at Paradise? Was that why Langton had brought me? If anyone asked me, I decided – anyone – I’d do what I’d never done before: I’d refuse.
I gritted my teeth, sat upright, refusing to lie down, refusing to keep still. My mind skated and skated. A mind can always roam the possibilities, even when nothing else can. That’s the awful terror of it. Mine pushed its snout through the front door, into the streets. ‘How far are we from the river?’
‘What do you want with the river?’ She slanted her eyes at me.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just to know.’
‘Aye, well. Couldn’t be anything good, this time of night.’
When I could sit no longer, when my lids shuddered, I lay back, staring up at the ceiling. Pru turned over, sneezed, spoke to herself, ‘God bless me!’
I lifted my grey rag to my nose. Phibbah’s kerchief. The colour bleached out of it by the long ocean. The moon fingered the sill, trembled on the pane and along the wall. My thoughts trailed. Forward was all black, nowhere for them to go but into the past. Which was when I felt the pinch of memory, sharp as salt. I wrenched upright, breathing hard, stared down at the cold floor, at the long night.
After I closed my eyes it was the coach-house I saw behind the lids.
Chapter Ten
Next morning Linux was in the kitchen before us, frying kippers, calling out over the hissing of the oil, ‘Prudence. What time do you call this? Porridge is under the fire-cover. Fetch the bowls down.’ She turned. Eyes narrow as keyholes. I saw a scattering of scars across her cheeks. Smallpox, Pru was to tell me later. ‘As for you. You’ve taken this place with your elbow, haven’t you? Lifted the bread right out the mouth of so many English lasses, who’d have been perfectly good for it. Well. You’re here now.’ She squinted as if weighing me on a set of baker’s scales. I lifted my chin.
‘No shirking,’ she said. ‘No skirt-twitching. No thieving. None of the kind of fuss you made last night. A new girl’s disturbance enough, the least you can do is be a quiet one. Understood?’ She snapped her tongs in the air. ‘Understood?’
‘She can speak,’ Pru muttered, clanking down the bowls from the dresser. ‘Cat’s got her tongue.’
Linux nodded. ‘Quiet is good. Last thing we want’s a vain bit of baggage. You’d do well to pipe down too, Prudence.’
She spoke to Pru, but kept her eyes on me. I lifted my chin. ‘No shirking. No disturbance. I understand.’
‘Ma’am.’
‘Ma’am.’
‘You’ll be given a rushlight when you need it, soap once a fortnight. I won’t abide strange smells.’
I won’t make them, I thought. She motioned for me to follow her to the table.
‘Do you use spoons?’ The question almost choked a laugh out of me. She held one up, tapped it against one of the clay bowls, which was yellow as a yolk. She leaned over, close, face like a palm-reader. ‘Bowls? Do you know how?’
I stuffed my voice full of English vowels. ‘I am well acquainted with all the customs and habits of English dining,’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’
‘Your speech is good, at least.’
‘Yes. I read. I write, too.’
‘Do you?’
That was a mistake. I should have remembered that there are many who find an educated black more threatening than a savage one.
Linux made me sweep the hearth and refill the kettle for the hob and scrub the flags on the kitchen floor with sand while we waited for the water to boil, then sent me with a broom and shovel to light the fires up in the drawing room. The manservant, Charles, showed me how to shovel up the coal, strike the steel and flint together, holding both away from me and over the tinderbox, then blow on the tinder, which was grudging and limp until it caught in a thin blue flame, and how to push in the taper. After the first flame caught, he showed me how to pump the bellows over it, and then I was on my own with the fireplaces in the dining room and the library to see to, and coal scuttles to fill from the box beside the kitchen, down to the basement and back up, over and over. I worked as quickly as I could, feeling the prickle of sweat at my armpits.
In my head, it was still yesterday. All my humiliation of the night before washed over me again. Those last few minutes
that Langton had doled out to me, like mash. The click of his nails against the window.
Massa. Please.
I stared down at my hands. Their new work was simple, numbing, requiring nothing but brute force or mute endurance. Work that had to be done without thinking. A red rash had crept across my palms, and I tucked my thumbs in, to scratch at them. When I felt the quick, sour crumple of tears, I swiped at them angrily.
I’d belonged to Langton, you must remember, grown as if from a mango pit he’d tossed out of a window, and therefore still thought I was his to give, strange as that may seem to you, reading this manuscript of mine in the comfort of your own chambers. This is what I was trying to tell you, when you asked, ‘Why didn’t you just run?’
‘I kept forgetting,’ I told you.
‘Forgetting what?’
‘That I was no longer owned.’
That first day was one long putting-away, though memory was a spike buried as deep as Langton’s long-ago words: ‘The limits of a man’s achievements lie at the limits of his desire. You know what that means, girl? Niggers don’t want. Therefore, niggers don’t do.’ Reminds me of a thing one of the turnkeys read out to me yesterday, from The Times: ‘Take freedom away from any man and you’ll make him a brute who doesn’t deserve it. That this might be true of blacks, especially of the Mulatta Murderess, proves only that which is already self-evident; namely, that so many of them have had their freedom taken away.’
Hunger drove me downstairs, but I stopped short on the bottom step. Oh, there was the usual kitchen song and clatter. Pots clanking, water mumbling on the stove. The smell of frying onions. But I heard them chatting among themselves: that was what stopped me. Everything that morning seemed a mountain to climb. I sat, and set the bucket down beside me, listened at the door. I heard Pru asking permission to brew more tea, then Linux murmuring about the carpets, that were Turkey carpets and very dear and possibly beyond saving, since Madame had spilled ink on them, but were to be scrubbed and laid out anyway against the hawthorn. ‘Herself’s been nothing but trouble this week,’ she said.