Montfort Street ran cobbled and straight. Like a spine. Houses huddled on either side of it, neat behind their little gold knockers. Linux sent me outside with Pru to wash the steps, and Pru went ahead, clumsy with the bucket, glancing back now and again as if to make sure I wasn’t going to stop, or cry out, like the night before. I kicked my heels out against my hems, and then, there being no other choice, I went to my knees and dipped my brush. For a time, there was only the scratching of brushes against stone, like mice in a cupboard. Sweat crawled at the backs of my knees and between my shoulder blades. Beside me, Pru’s arms moved steady as oars. Soot peeled away in waves under her brush, leaving the stones pale as sand, and I tried to copy her.
My hair broke out of its plait and swung in brown clouds across my face. It was the kind of work that leaves too much room for thought. My meeting with Benham that morning swilled around my head, like linens in a copper. And there was anger, too. The first cold spurt had come from thinking he wanted the same work out of me as Langton had. Then it had come from thinking he wanted what they all want, first my hair down, then my dress. But he’d wanted worse. ‘You’re going to tell me what happened there. Every last thing. Exactly what Langton did.’
No. My head swelled full of that single word. No.
I could hear our brushes loud on the steps. All else was black. Only a sliver of memory. The silk-cotton tree. The warm, squirming bundle, the milky smell. No! I thought. Never.
I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the bile rise, until Pru poked an elbow into me, sharp as a hook, and motioned for me to get on with it. I pushed down harder on my brush, water darkening the flags. My breath rasped like the bristles – in, out, in, out ‒ clawing at my chest until, after a time, my head hummed, empty and dark. Then the doors swung apart, pushing us backwards, and two women came out. One stout, dressed in a long pink gown that ended in a frill at her ankles. The other taller, slimmer, walking behind with her eyes cast downwards and a black book clutched to her chest. She was the kind of frog-belly pale that is coveted by Creoles of a certain class, that lamp-bright skin they all blister themselves with cashew oil to get, and her hair was scraped into a navy turban. A plume of feathers trailed against her cheek, dyed blue to match, and her walking gown was green, with an empire line. Her mouth wide and red like something in bloom, and neck-bones like the handles on a dresser. Pretty like the Devil. Anybody who pretty like the Devil bound to be just as sweet, Phibbah would have said.
I held my brush up, let the suds drip.
She stopped suddenly, on the bottom step, swung her eyes back to where we stood. Blue as those long-ago pails of indigo. Shocking, bright. Little puckers at the corners made her seem sad. ‘You are . . . ?’
‘She’s the new girl, Madame,’ Pru called out. ‘From the Indies.’
She squinted, little creases pulling like thread around her eyes.
‘I’m Frances,’ I said, trying to hold my hands over my skirts, where soap had scummed snail-tracks into the blue. The likes of her expect nothing but curtsies from the likes of me, I thought, so I lifted my chin, puffed the hair off my brow.
‘I see. Frances. How are you finding us?’
‘A shock.’
It sprang out, before I could think better of it. But she only laughed. Like coins jangling, copper chiming copper. ‘I suppose we are . . .’ she said ‘. . . or this place is.’ She motioned at the door behind me, where I imagined the lion knocker must still be making its awful grimace.
‘Meg!’ Pink-frock called out, from the pavement. ‘Will you come?’
She cocked her head and looked me up and down. Studied me the way the Surgeon used to study a body before cutting, a little stitch of worry between her brows. Suddenly she lifted her skirts and clicked her heels and nodded, the kind of bow a gentleman would make to a lady. How strange she is! I thought. Charles opened the carriage doors and helped them inside, leaving us to gape as it pulled away, all quiet again, except for the plink-plink-plink of water from our brushes. There being no help for it, I went back to my hands and knees, and Pru did the same, swiped at her forehead with the back of a wrist.
‘Madame must be feeling herself again,’ she said. Her voice had brightened ‒ the women had lit her up. ‘And didn’t she take a shine to you!’
I made no reply, rubbed my finger into a crack that was already damp with moss, for all the house was new. Green as a stale crust. She pursed her lips. ‘Friendliness makes the day go faster.’
She hadn’t sounded friendly in the kitchen, but I’d have to swallow my anger, I knew, just as I’d been doing all day. I squatted back on my heels. Thoughts of my new mistress had mercifully crowded Benham out of my head. She’d spoken to me as if we were being presented, one lady to another. I’d felt a tug. Quiet had slipped into me, like water into sand. Like those times when Phibbah pointed at a chicken hawk, or a pair of parrots, whatever she could find streaking across the sky, then dabbed whiskey on my cuts and bruises. Of all London’s surprises, I thought, she was the only pleasant one. I dropped my eyes, scraped my brush across the stone.
‘That was the mistress?’ I asked, though I knew full well.
‘Herself, yes. The one in green. With Lady Catherine, who’s married to the master’s brother.’
‘Are ladies so familiar with their servants, here?’
She snickered. ‘You want to know what Madame will do? Think of what’s expected, then imagine the opposite.’
‘She’s been unwell?’
Pru puffed her cheeks, poked at one with her tongue. ‘It’s one of those complaints that only ladies ever suffer from. Ones like her.’ She shrugged, sweeping her brush wide. I watched her hands move. Raw and chapped, shoulders broad as ships’ masts. I could hear her clogged breaths. ‘The poor are sad every day, and no one sends out to a doctor about it. She ‒ well, she’s lonely, if you ask me. That’s the trouble with ton marriages, though. Too much space. When you’ve got only the one room to share, you either kill each other or you make peace.’
I let out a laugh, surprising myself, but she fell quiet again, as if reminding herself that she shouldn’t speak so freely.
I stared over my shoulder at the dark cobbles and the tall houses. ‘True,’ I said, turning the brush over, poking a finger between the damp bristles. ‘But we are, each of us, sad in our own peculiar ways.’
‘Don’t you sound like one of them!’ She sank into a fit of giggles. ‘Airs and graces don’t carry buckets, you know.’
‘Suits me,’ I said, ‘since I don’t want to be carrying buckets.’
More of Langton’s long-ago words came back to me: The Negro is happy to serve. Born for it. They’ve never produced a genius, and to expect genius from them would only cause distress. They’re as different from us as dogs from cows. Let the Negro therefore do what he is happy doing, for freeing him would do nothing but put the Devil in his head.
But Pru was poking me, good-naturedly this time. ‘No buckets in Jamaica, then?’
I laughed, and she laughed too. ‘I’ve been in service since I was twelve,’ she said. ‘I swear I see buckets in my sleep. And I’m nothing but thankful for it. I was a skelf of a girl. Didn’t have the pair of arms on me that I have now. We went so hungry some nights I’d have eaten my elbow. Ma despaired of me ever getting a place. Mrs Linux said she’d take me on precisely because she knew no one else would, which is how I know she’s got a soft side, though she does keep it well hid.’ She looked at me. ‘But a good servant must know her place, to be content in it.’
That’s always been my trouble. Never knowing my place or being content in it.
She turned back to the scrubbing. But my mind swung like wind, so many new things rattled through it. London’s sour, clotted streets. Levenhall’s narrow hallways, its smells of wool and cold hearths. My new master, tossing questions, eyes big and black as ackee seeds. My new mistress ‒ who had bowed to me! Strange woman. A queer feeling came over me, like a hand tightening around my chest, tiny hammers knocking at my breastbone. It felt like fright. A new mistress is a thing to be afraid of, if you’re a maid and have any wits. But now I know how small the space can be, between being afraid of a thing and wanting it.