by Sara Collins
I stood on tiptoe to see over the heads in front, everyone jostling. A small boy turned, thin and dirt-smudged and bug-eyed, and tugged on the skirts of the woman beside him, and then she swung around, pursed her lips at me. ‘Imagine! A great beast like that right out in the street!’
Pru gasped. ‘Some folk should learn to keep their bone-boxes shut!’
That was when it came back. That gritted hum. Between my eyes, my teeth, my bones. Anger. It had slipped out of me momentarily while I’d walked with her, and I’d felt something like contentment. Now it was back. I gave them both a smile, tight as a well-made bed, let it go wide, to show it didn’t bother me. But, mercifully, while we’d been standing there, it had started to drizzle slow drops, and now rain pelted hard as rocks, forcing us to turn and flee. The crowd scattered, too, everyone running off in different directions. When we reached the street again, the fog hung in front of us like a grey cloud, black flakes of soot spiralling through it.
Back at Levenhall, Madame left us to go upstairs, calling for hot water, shaking off her damp skirts as she went, and Pru and I trudged back down, where the silver was waiting to be polished, set out on the table, like rib bones.
That night, I dreamed it was me being paraded through the Strand, the man calling out ahead of me: Step up, step up, lay-dees, gents! Come see the darky! All the way from the Indies. She’ll cook you in her pot! She’ll steal your babies, and cook them too!
MISS PRUDENCE RATTRAY, under-maid of Mr George Benham, sworn
Mr Pettigrew: Miss Rattray, you come here today to give the prisoner a character?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Tell these gentlemen, then, in your own words.
A. I don’t see how Frances – the prisoner, begging your pardon. Sir, I don’t see how she could have done this thing. I have heard such talk of how she must have been a savage and that’s the reason she did it. It made me so angry I knew I must come here to tell what I knew of her.
Q. What did you know of her?
A. She had two thumbs, sir, like the rest of us. [Laughter, gallery admonished by the court.] Mrs Linux said she was uppish, but I didn’t really see it. It’s true that she was not over-fond of taking advice, unless she got it in a book. Her own worst enemy, she was. I always told her I knew what her trouble was. I wanted to be a lady’s maid, but she wanted to be the lady. I’d never known a darky before ‒ you see them in the street, the soldiers and the beggars mostly, and there’d been a kitchen maid at one of the houses a few streets over from us, a young lass I sometimes saw in passing out on the steps pulling on her pipe. What I mean to say is, we are not accustomed to seeing them and don’t know their ways, I suppose. But with Frances – the prisoner, I mean – I found nothing so strange about her. She wasn’t used to some of the ways of an English house, perhaps, and she had very thin blood, she felt the cold, she did. But after she started waiting on Madame, a change came on her, her spirits improved. She was very fond of Madame. Truth is, Madame’s spirits improved also. The way Frances spoke of her. Well. Her feelings were so tender towards Madame I don’t see how she would have done this.
Q. And her feelings towards Mr Benham?
A. Sir. All the world loved Mr Benham except his wife.
Chapter Sixteen
White men dine with each other no matter their differences, and very often because of them. When Benham invited Langton to dinner, perhaps it was for both reasons.
They glared at each other, even as they came in, Madame a few paces behind, Langton’s eyes as murked as the dregs in a rum bottle. Seeing him again cut like a cow-hide whip, though I’d braced myself for it. I still felt a bitter snag in my throat. I fancied that he limped, that his shoulders drooped. New wrinkles crawled all over him. He was sweating in his black suit, took his seat without even looking at me. As soon as I laid eyes on him, I saw the old Frances. Skirts trailing like shadows. Thoughts swarming quick and sharp as wasps. Lanterns to be lit, quills to be hardened, books to be fetched down from their perches: Vesalius, Le Cat, Buffon. He’d want buns, buttered and warm; he’d need help to undress; he’d want her to write, scratch out, write again. Always writing. My memory wobbled. I snapped my eyes open, sipped small breaths that scraped through me. The table glowing white under its cloth, nodding yellow flowers, dark plums in silver bowls. Pru on one side, me opposite, so I stared at the back of his head, and his hand, fisted and trembling, around his spoon.
Him not just the devil you know, Phibbah would have said. You and him the same devil. I shook it off; shook her off.
He looked across the table at Madame. ‘I hope Frances is making herself useful.’
‘Frances?’ The light made her face all shadows and sharp bones. She raised her glass, so that champagne clouded her from view, stared at him through it, eyes squeezed as if she was trying to remember who I was. ‘Oh, yes. I am sure she is.’
Her cold words knocked me like a beaten rug. She picked up her spoon and pecked it at her bowl of soup. She didn’t say, ‘Frances? She and I have become such friends.’ She didn’t look at me at all. You’d never have believed she was the same woman who’d twirled in the kitchen hand in hand with her servants. I might as well have been a book-end, for all the attention either of them paid me. Useful. There to serve. Staying where I was put. She was a show pony, glossed by candlelight so her powder-blue dress shone, bright as false coins. I was a mule. My thoughts went roaming out of the room again, to the woman in the park, wind giving her little taps, holding her loose hair back. I began to wonder, had I imagined her?
Ha! Niggers have no imagination. I heard Langton’s voice in my head.
Soup, then sweetbreads with caviar. Fried soles and button mushrooms. Tomatoes stuffed with olives. Tongue, glistening pink in its little paper crown. Then beef. The kitchen had smelt of bacon all morning from the white soup simmering on the stove. Each dish was to appear at their elbows, as if they’d conjured it themselves. Dining à la Russe, Linux called it. ‘Make sure you’re neither seen nor heard.’ Well, I’d wished to be invisible, hadn’t I? There I was, put in my place.
I remember now, writing this, something else Linux had said, when she’d been undressing me in the scullery, stuffing me into the linsey dress. I’d asked why she hated me, and she’d jerked her head up in surprise. ‘Hate you? Oh. No. The Lord made you, girl, just as He made me, just as He made Charles and Prudence and Mr Casterwick. Just as He made Mr Benham. Just as He made the King. God is our superintendent. We are, all of us, and every bird and every flower and every leaf, under His hand. But we are in different ranks! You do not even begin to understand the work Mr Benham does. Nor do I. Nor he ours. There is a natural order and when you know your part in it, and do your work, no matter what it is, in the knowledge that it is God’s work, then you will work with all your heart, for you will be working for the Lord and not for human masters.’
Madame lifted her glass again. Watching her, I was ashamed to recognize the stirring of the admiration I’d felt in the park, in spite of my thoughts. The curse of a kicked dog’s devotion. ‘Have you been enjoying your visit to our little hamlet, Mr Langton?’
‘Hardly. I’m here mainly to persuade old friends to behave like friends.’
Benham’s forehead shone. He forked up mushrooms, spoke with his mouth full. ‘John’s had his manuscript knocked back by the Society.’
‘Oh?’ She cocked her head. ‘Is that your skull thing?’
‘A trifle more than that.’ He set his shoulders back, put his fork aside.
‘Is that right?’ Her smile spread slow, wide.
‘It would only bore you, Mrs Benham, I’m sure,’ he said, after a pause.
‘Go slowly, Mr Langton.’ She peered at him, her voice sharp. ‘And let us see whether my womanly brain can keep astride.’
Benham coughed out a brittle laugh. I kept my eyes on the back of Langton’s head. I was all anger. Anger a drumbeat. Anger, steady as rain on glass. Anger, like a hot spurt of blood from a wound. For a moment he simply sta
red up at the dark ribs of the ceiling. I thought he wouldn’t speak, and felt cold relief. The sins of Paradise should not be set down on that clean table. I couldn’t bear to stand there, while he crowed about Crania. But then he turned towards Benham, as if addressing him. ‘It’s a . . . study. We applied the scientific method to studying the anatomy . . . not only identifying the origin of skin colour, but examining its effects. We extracted out those parts of the Negro ‒ blood, and brain matter, and skin ‒ that are blackened, you see, reasoned out why. Why are they blackened, and how does this account for his excess of fear and stupidity? Your husband and I had agreed to collaborate ‒’
‘We were interested in the same question, that’s all,’ interrupted Benham, waving his knife. ‘And in no time disagreed on everything but. You insisted on all that nonsense with skin ‒’
‘What question?’
‘Is the Negro a separate species? It’s important work, and should be published,’ he said, staring at Benham.
She cut him off. ‘That old polygenist argument. Dogs and cows? That stale old dispute should have been buried long ago.’ She frowned. ‘You say you experimented on people?’
‘Cadavers, when we could get them.’
‘But . . . you were a grave robber, Mr Langton!’
‘Well . . . we can’t learn anything about bodies without cutting them ‒’
‘Not the cutting. The using people who cannot consent.’
‘Dead people –’
‘Slaves.’
‘What would you know about it?’
‘The better question is whether you were merely seeing what you wanted to see when you opened those bodies.’
‘Skin doesn’t lie.’
‘And hearts?’
‘The heart is nothing but a machine ‒’
She laughed. ‘That is an anatomist’s answer, if ever I heard one.’
Her husband gave her a sharp look and, for a moment, there was only the quiet spitting of the candles, but then came a strangled noise from Langton, who bowed his neck and swayed as if trying to catch his breath. I almost forgot myself and struck him between the shoulder blades, as I would have done at Paradise. I felt myself tipping forward, my throat clogged with anger, thick and dry as cotton. I let it swell inside. I welcomed it. Into the silence tipped this truth: my anger was aimed at myself. I stepped back, and my wrist struck the sideboard and the plates there joggled like loose stones.
He’d set me down. And I’d stayed where he’d put me. A nail in a plank.
I took a step. The words jolted out of me. ‘What have you done to me? What have you done? Why have you left me?’
I went over to him. I raised my hand, slapped him.
She looked up, Benham too. But Langton did not.
‘Will you ever suffer for what you’ve done?’ I asked his bent head. The strangled noise grew louder, became a cawing, choking sound. A spatter of fingers across the cloth, juddering the table, clutching plate, fork, knife. He wagged his lips, but no sound came out. The knife fell from his hands to the floor. ‘Oh!’ I cried.
I clasped his head to my chest, and the fit passed through us both and hammered his skull to my breastbone. The same devil. The same devil. When he went quiet, the room did. I looked up, saw Linux at the door, holding the bowl of compôte and the plate of madeleines. Her eyes flashed, like knitting needles.
In the kitchen, the kettle steamed quietly on the hob. The coal irons were still laid out on the hearth, where Pru and I had left them so we could polish them with beeswax before we put them away. Something sizzled, like hot tongs on hair. Mr Casterwick sat at the table, filling Benham’s decanter, and looked up when she dragged me in. I turned. ‘I’m sorry. I –’ But she slapped me. The floor slipped away, like a tooth from a gum. Cold stone slammed the back of my head. Her shadow came over me. ‘Savage, cunning little chit. You have disgraced this house.’
‘Mrs Linux –’ Mr Casterwick lifted his bottom off his seat, hovered like a fog, thought better of it.
‘I’ll thank you, Mr Casterwick, to keep out of matters that are not your affair.’ She turned around, and I saw a glint of kettle. ‘What did you do?’ she cried. I said nothing, kept my eyes on the kettle. She tugged at me; I drew back.
‘No, no, no, no!’ I screamed, pulling away, but I’d already been splashed, burned along my wrist. Everything gone bleached and cool and dark. She gripped me by the neck, pulled me to the door. The truth is she wouldn’t have got me back upstairs if I’d thought to fight.
Darkness crept across the attic room. I kicked out into it. My wrist stung, the soreness drumming like a heartbeat. A rattle at the door. ‘Who’s there?’ I called out, and then the knob turned, and when I looked up it was Pru, holding her bowl of mutton fat and her rushlight. She knelt beside me, and took up my hand in hers without saying a word, dabbed a scoop of fat onto my wrist.
I looked down at my hand. ‘She’s going to turn me out.’
‘Should have thought of that, shouldn’t you?’ She laid my hand back in my lap. ‘Needs linseed oil, but I haven’t got any.’
‘Pru.’ I looked at her.
‘Maybe. What can you do about it? What can any woman do?’ she said. ‘You get married, or you go into service.’ She crossed her hands, gave me a hard look. ‘You’d need a character to get a place and you won’t get one from her, not now. My ma used to tell us, “Speak when you’re spoken to, do what you’re bidden, come when you’re called and you’ll not be chidden.”’ She shook her head. ‘I knew something bad was coming, you know. A coal spat from the grate and landed at my feet after I lit the fire in Madame’s bedchamber this morning, and the day before I saw a winding sheet in the tallow candle in Mrs Linux’s parlour. And then there they were tonight, three at a table.’
‘What does all that mean?’
‘Death.’ She made wide eyes. I said nothing. A tight thread of silence stretched between us. Langton is dying, I thought. I had seen it. There was no hope that he would be coming back for me. At last, she squinted up at the latch, gave out a sigh. ‘I’ll have to shift, get back down before I’m missed.’
‘You risked coming up, for me.’
She shrugged. ‘My nan always said mercy is a soothing balm, just as good to give as to receive.’ She yawned, held one hand up to her mouth. ‘No use greetin’ over it now. Whatever it is in the morning, it won’t be this.’ She patted my arm and then pulled herself to her feet, gathering up her bowl and her light. At the door, she stopped, hand on the knob. ‘Frances . . . who is Mr Langton to you?’
I slid one hand over the opposite palm, kept them busy with each other. My wrist was numb under the grease, pink as a newborn. I pressed it to a sting, trying to scour the dark thoughts from my head, kept my eyes down so I wouldn’t have to look her in the face when I answered.
Pru’s still the only person I ever told out loud.
‘He’s my father.’
Chapter Seventeen
What did that make me? A patchwork monster. A thing sewn from Langton’s parts. The sum of his seed, for all I knew: Miss-bella was childless.
It was she who told me, though she waited until it was too late. And, oh, I wanted to kill him, when I learned it, but I wanted to kill her also, for that.
It was all quiet in those days. No Phibbah, no snick of peas, no floorboard cracks. The river through the hills, like a long black scar. The sun high as noon. But that’s what Jamaica days were like. Either morning sun, noon sun, evening sun, or rain. Never anything different. We stood outside together on the porch. She had stopped me, on my way to the coach-house. ‘I want you to tell me what my husband thinks he’s doing in there . . .’
‘No, Miss-bella.’
‘Some brand of wickedness, I just want to know what brand.’
I shook my head, but I couldn’t say yes or no. It was some brand of wickedness. I had seen it.
‘Girl.’ She shook her head, sniffed. ‘I speak frankly, and I expect you to do the same unto me.’
‘
Yes.’ I started to say more, then stopped. There was nothing frank about me, not any more.
When she turned her eyes on me, they were windowpanes. ‘I want you to consider . . .’ She stopped, bent over to set her flask on the doily, her hands slow as tar. ‘That man is your father.’
‘No.’ It slid out quick as a cough.
‘Look around, girl. Look around you.’
My voice went small, crawling back to the past, the old talk, my mind scrabbling, clutching on the overseer, the book-keeper, men I had never given any thought to before. ‘There are other white men here,’ I said. And then I staggered away from her, vomited into her roses. Head swirling like stirred soup. Everything around me stained to the same rust, the colour of the dry dirt, the walls, the bushes, even the dogs.
It was his sickness that had saved me, in the end. His body had long grown too weak to be a burden, to me or anyone else. But not before it had already happened, that first night, the nights that followed it. I would have killed him, had I known it then. I let that dark shard in, and had to keep it stored, and hurting, in my chest.
I went down early. Linux was in the kitchen alone, nursing a cup of tea. She was staring down at a pile of coins, and looked up when I came in and said they were for me, so it came to me that she must be turning me out, that they were my wages and, without thinking, I reached out a hand –