English winter is a season of dying things, of long waiting, and wool-thick skies. Underfoot the crunch of gravel, the wet slip of frost turning to mud, a meshwork of rotting leaves and damp grass. It was into such an afternoon that Pru and I were sent out the following day.
Linux had found us at the table, cutting old sheets into tinder to fill the boxes. Madame had flown the coop, she said, tucking chin to neck, like a skewer to a joint of pork. She was likely in the park, and we were to go down ourselves, the pair of us, and see if we could fetch her back in time for Lady Catherine’s morning call.
Pru said we should go our separate ways, for many hands made light work, so we separated when we came to a fork in the path. As soon as I was away from her I quickened my feet, heart keeping pace. The park that day was a stew of carriages and foot passengers, boiling in the fog. I soon came to a quieter part of it, a small garden leading down to a stand of elms, where mist hung white as milk, the air as clouded as my thoughts. Winter showed on the trees also, rough peeling aprons of black bark, and curling moss. After I came to the end of the path there, I saw her ahead. Wearing her black spencer, skirts flaring red beneath it, head tilted, dark hair swinging below her waist, hands gripped behind her. Something about her called to mind the image of a bird beating against glass.
I wiped my mouth, made my way towards her. When she heard me, she swung her head. Her eyes bright and wide as the eyes of a doll. Indigo-painted cotton. She smiled. ‘Oh! Frances. I’m so glad it’s you. I am tired of being hauled back by Charles.’
My own smile stumbled out and I followed a little behind her as we walked, struck so dumb with wanting to amuse her that at first I said nothing at all. Before I could, she was speaking again, saying she couldn’t imagine me learning to read in such a dreadful place, and I understood that she’d been talking about Paradise for several minutes.
People always ask the same question, wondering how I could’ve been so taken up with novels, there of all places. They blame me more for reading through it than suffering through it, I think. Novels are heresy, in their opinion; man creating man, no need for God. But how could I not read? I always want to ask. How else would I have survived it? What would you do, sitting in a dark, locked room, if someone brought in a lighted candle? I’ll tell you. You’d read your single copy of Moll Flanders over and over until you’d oiled the pages thin from your fingers. ‘It was a wager,’ I said abruptly. ‘Between your husband and my – between Mr Benham and Mr Langton. They wanted to see whether I could be taught.’
‘Oh!’ The wind shuffled her hair. She crossed her arms and gave a little shiver. ‘They made a wager of you, and then a gift? How perfectly awful of them. But sometimes they can be perfectly awful men.’
I coughed. I couldn’t speak about Paradise, but I couldn’t be silent either. ‘Books were my companions,’ I said at last, raising my voice above the wind sweeping the leaves and her skirts. ‘And I am grateful I could learn something, no matter how I came to do so. It was a way to know that lives could change, that they could be filled with adventures. There were times I pretended I was a lady in a novel or a romance myself. It might sound foolish. But it made me feel a part of a world that otherwise I could never belong to.’
I stopped. We’d come to the end of the path, I could see the gates that would lead us back to the street, black railings staked into the cobblestones, and Pru standing there waiting for us. I felt I’d made a fool of myself, but I’d also felt weight spilling out of me. My head going light. The memory flying into it of that other weight, wriggling in my hands. I’d thought to forget it, blot it like an error on a page. But everything a body does is still there inside it, even under all the time that bleeds over it.
I jumped in my skin. The memory seared my mind, like a kipper held in a hot pan.
When I looked up, she was watching me. ‘I know that feeling,’ she said. ‘Though I think the point of reading is not to feel more a part of the world, but less. To take oneself out of it. On paper, everything can be hammered into shape, though the world is shapeless.’ She reached up to hold her hair back. The wind knocked into her, made her seem to be swallowed by skirts and hair. ‘The trouble with writers is they spend their lives trying to lie to themselves.’
Mist suffocated trees and sky and grass, made everything so cool and quiet, like we walked under water. Two women passed us, turned and wagged their chins, and suddenly I didn’t know how to answer her. My throat closed like a fist. So, I started back, towards the gates, with her following me.
‘What did they speak about, in the library, after you went in?’ I asked, at last.
‘Nothing. Nonsense.’ She laughed. ‘Themselves. Nothing of any consequence, in other words.’
Here is another beginning. The moment I realized that the sensation she stirred in me was a feeling of wanting. Unlikely. Unnatural. Impossible. Because the thing I wanted was her.
There was a fair just beside the gates, I remember, and the three of us walked through it. Chestnuts and cider spiced the air; boards covered with paper spoke of mermaids, two-headed men, fire-eaters. Tops spun like wind. We stopped to watch a tightrope-walker, a rat frisking across a shorter rope strung beneath him. From a tent to the right of us, a man led an elephant tied with a length of hemp. An elephant! I’d seen a picture of one before, in a book written by a naturalist. But reading about something can never be the same as seeing it. The grey leathery wave rearing up and up, and then the quiet crash, the giant-legged curtsy. The people at the front hopped backwards, made a show of bringing their hands up to their mouths, shrieking laughter. Some people love to be frightened in a crowd, tossing fear around like a hot potato. ‘Step up! Step up! Ladies and gentlemen!’ the man cried. ‘All creatures, little or large, fall under man’s dominion!’
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!