My pallet stayed in her room.
‘She wants you in there now?’ said Pru, watching from her bed as I lifted my dresses from the hook in the attic room. I left my blue serge, Candide still tucked in its hem, forgotten, with my grey rag. I took my time rolling my pallet. My nerves were tuning forks. I feared she’d see the change in me, seared across my face.
But she only smiled at me, shook her head. ‘It’s a bad idea,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘She’ll get bored. Never let your lady get bored. Courtesans always turf the fellows out afterwards, don’t they?’
Always a courtesan, never a bride, Frances.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘What would you know about being a courtesan?’ I asked.
She grinned. ‘Fair.’ She tilted her head. ‘But I know more than you about being a dressing maid. And, I’m telling you, for both, familiarity breeds boredom. And boredom breeds trouble.’
Pru had been skittish with me since the night in the attic. I fancied I saw pity, when she looked at me. We hadn’t spoken again about what I’d told her. Now I see what a friend she was. Steadfast. I should have said so then, but my head was turned, one foot already downstairs.
The next morning Charles brought up a package. Sweetmeats wrapped in parchment, trailing the label of one of those fancy Piccadilly emporiums, which Madame left in a china dish on her washstand. Gold rings, ear-bobs, pearls: she mixed the sweets with them as if they were the same. I went over and picked one out and held it to my nose. Marzipan. The same smell that glazed her breath.
‘He always plays husband after staying out all night,’ she said, from the bed. ‘The manners of a tomcat. Blow in at daybreak, snarl out complaints, eat, then sleep all morning.’
The gifts kept coming the whole time I stayed with her in that room: sweetmeats; nuts; jewelled pins; once, a kaleidoscope, the kind of gift you’d send a child. But the man himself never did. Which suited me, of course.
I crackled a sweet out of its wrapper. ‘Let him stay out all night.’
I asked her where he went. ‘I have never asked,’ she replied, ‘and he has never said.’
I remembered what she’d said to Linux, that night in the kitchen. How lonely she’d seemed. No doubt he keeps a mistress, I thought. There’d have been nothing odd in that: those ton marriages make a wife of one woman and a courtesan of the next. But I didn’t like to think about the times when she might be required to play wife to him, so I selected a little marzipan heart, just as if I was a lady in a shop, crossed the carpet to stand over her.
My hand skimming her thigh, lifting her gown. Her eyes flying open. A dart of shock. A smile. I snapped the heart between my teeth, and then put my tongue to hers. She pulled me to the bed. Came over me. A soft rain of hair falling against my face.
The other thing I didn’t like to think about. That now she was keeping a mistress of her own.
Then we had to go down for breakfast, though neither of us could bear to face him. But he wanted them to be seen taking meals together, she said. And if she had to, so did I. He was already at the table, lining up the cutlery beside his plate, even though Casterwick would have had the inch-rule to them twice that morning. I stopped at the sideboard, slid an egg into a cup, for her, poured her chocolate. There was a hush when we took our seats, but some men see silence as a net, to toss their own words into. ‘Good to see that you’re fit again, Meg. A man expects a sighting of his wife from time to time.’
‘I am lucky you have such low expectations.’
He made a noise like a laugh. ‘All the better for you to meet them, then, my dear.’
She sent a smile across to me, as if to say, Patience. The quicker we endure this, the quicker we go upstairs.
I leaned back into the pinch of my dress, kept my gaze to the window. The weather had turned, and there was a smell of grass, and coming rain, the garden littered with curling blooms that frisked across it, like mice, when the wind lifted. Birds crying out.
I lifted my cup, marzipan sticking on my tongue. Even my coffee tasted like her.
I sent her a look. Just know I’ll come apart if we don’t go now.
I tried to watch her without looking as if I was watching, wondering what he’d do to us if he knew what we did upstairs. Mr Casterwick came in to bring the newspapers and lift away Benham’s plate, smeared with kipper bones as fine as hair. I scarcely knew where to put my eyes, so kept them on Casterwick, thinking idle thoughts. How his wages would’ve been paid for by cane and that was where mine would come from too, if I ever got any.
He was still watching her. Taking narrow little bites of her bread and butter.
‘Oh, for God’s sake. Eat!’
When she jerked up in surprise, the egg tumbled to the floor and cracked, yolk spreading, like a slow breath. Spoon tinkling porcelain. We all turned to stare down at it. He rocked forward in his chair.
She took a small sipping breath, and I saw Casterwick slip out, as quietly as he’d come in.
Benham heaved out of his chair and wavered there a moment, like a man consulting a map, speared the dribbling yolk with his spoon. She saw his hand lifting towards her and recoiled. ‘It has been on the floor.’ The spoon jumped in his hand.
I wanted to jump too. Leap at him, yell, ‘All this over an egg?’ But I held my tongue, though the words strained against it. I kept my eyes down, on the tiles, where yolk was drying, and screwed my thumbs into my palms. The thought came screaming. Don’t.
He lifted the spoon again, cleared his throat. ‘We can wait all morning, Meg. Choice is yours.’
At that, she leaned forward. After she’d taken one quick bite, then another, and another, he stepped back, shuddering his chair away from the table and the spoon onto it. I felt the wood shake. She drew in a breath, which shook too. He gave a little nod. ‘I suppose . . .’ he said, looking around him almost in confusion ‘. . . I suppose . . . it’s high time I got on with my day.’
She twisted her napkin up to her lips, coughed into it. Then it was me she was shrinking from, just as she’d shrunk from him. Because I’d been witness to the whole terrible scene.
‘Does he hurt you?’
The idea of her under his thumb sat in my stomach like soured milk. The thought of her eating that mangled egg. Of him pushing away from the table as if she was the one who disgusted him.
The rain had come. Branches close and dark and specked with drizzle. She slipped off her shoes, took her hair out of its coils, saying she’d have some brandy, and as I unlatched the cabinet the thoughts whispering at me sounded very like Phibbah: Drinking brandy for breakfast? And all that hair hanging loose, like her idle hands. But I tamped them back, like tobacco into a pipe. She picked up the hairbrush, beckoned me over to the bed.
‘You haven’t answered.’
A noise of frustration. She pressed the brush between her palms. ‘I am not sure how to answer you,’ she said. ‘He does not hurt me with his fists. He does not hurt me now.’
‘That could mean a hundred different things.’
‘It means he hurt me once upon a time . . .’
‘And?’
She dropped the brush on her lap. ‘Frannie. You have a choice. I will tell you. But telling you will hurt.’
She was steering me away, of course, and I was letting myself be steered, letting myself be pulled onto her lap while she whispered, ‘Will you let me brush your hair?’
My little smothered laugh swept away our conversation, like cobwebs. I touched the bristles, soft as her own hair. ‘That brush has met its match.’
Knowing a person’s story, and how they tell it, and where the lies are in it, is part of love. But I told myself there was no point knowing a thing you couldn’t change, though worry pinched at me all the same.
There was no use asking why she wouldn’t speak about it. I’d closed my own mind too, after all, to so many things. I gave myself over to her hands and the brush, letting my head go where she turned it, letting it tick from side to side. A tingle through my skull. I leaned into her, enjoying the tug-of-war between brush and scalp. I wanted to walk out of that house with her. If we were to leave, what could we take? The money was his. The dresses. The portmanteau. The drawers and all their contents. To all intents and purposes, so were we. The portrait and the egg-keeper were the only two things she owned.
She was in a writing mood afterwards. I remember this line: We go from birth to death. We go from love to marriage. Of each we may claim an equal understanding, which is to say none at all.
When Benham called me down to the library that afternoon, the piece of my mind I wanted to give him lay stuck in my throat. Hate can be as strong a draw as love, but it was love that drew me then, a strong rope pulling me back upstairs. I had to hold my own feet fast to the floor.
He was sipping his usual brew of gunpowder tea, toying with his snuff. The same fingers that had put the egg to her mouth. When I came in, he handed me a paper. The Case for Reform: Black River, Antigua.
‘Slavery,’ he said. Spat the word as if he couldn’t bear to keep it in his mouth. ‘Everybody’s scratching about for a solution. Either one thing or the next. Deciding which side will win. Forgetting Solomon’s wisdom. The best way to solve a conflict is to give both sides what they want.’
‘Didn’t Solomon offer each woman half an infant,’ I said, ‘knowing they each preferred it whole?’
He threw back his head, laughed. Oh, he always found me amusing, perhaps because he thought he had created me himself.
But only a man would think splitting a baby in two was a solution rather than a problem, just like only a white man would consider slavery a difficult question. Women focus on what they lack, men on what they want. In all those Bible stories, it’s always the women who look back, who eat the forbidden fruit, who weep over hollow wombs, and fruitful ones. Yearning is always a woman’s sin. The men never turn around, nor ever think twice about taking a knife – or a cross – to their own longed-for sons.
‘That is a paper I am writing on the topic,’ he said, taking a sip of his tea. ‘In support of proposals that will ensure the welfare of West India workers, while assuring planters of their livelihoods.’
He went on to explain that Black River was his own experiment, his family’s Antigua estate, which his brother allowed him to run. He ran it like an English tenant farm, he said. His workers received religious instruction, holidays, their own little patches of land to plant. He believed the solution to keeping slaves was legislation that would ensure their fair treatment and guarantee everybody’s happiness, including theirs, and that the key was to convince the planters to do it themselves. ‘The guiding principle at Black River is virtue, and benevolence, and therefore affection is not only possible but mutual. My Negroes call me Mister, never Master.’
I had to bite my lip, so I wouldn’t laugh. ‘And you call them your Negroes and not your slaves?’
He flexed his jaw. ‘I’m interested in your opinion, girl.’
Anybody who wants a former slave’s opinion is looking to find either a happy slave, or a stricken one. The former doesn’t exist, and as for the latter, you already know my thoughts. I saw that part of Benham’s interest in Paradise was to set his own methods in opposition to Langton’s, and that was why he needed me. His object: not to abolish, but to preserve.
I found I could not hold my tongue. ‘About what happened this morning.’
‘This morning?’
‘At breakfast.’
Surprise crawled onto his face. ‘Nothing happened at breakfast.’
‘You were harsh with Madame.’
His hands flew off the desk; he pushed to his feet. ‘You speak out of turn, about matters that don’t concern you. A piece of advice. In this house, you’re better off taking your cues from me.’
I looked down at his sheet of paper, thin as a slip between my fingers. Weightless. White as nothing. I felt a springing anger. ‘I don’t know the first thing about running a West India estate,’ I said.
‘All I want is the truth.’
Truth had never set a foot between us.
You own me, I thought. You own her. You own all of us. Where is the virtue in that?
I decided to be frank. ‘It is a waste of time,’ I said, handing him back his paper.
His head jerked. ‘How so?’
‘There’s no reforming what’s already rotten.’
There’s wickedness in all men. The ones we call good are the ones who care to hide it. And George Benham knew that the surest way to hide your sins is to write your own account.
Langton pretended Negroes didn’t have the same red blood as his, but Benham turned his blind eye on his own estate. Even the way they’d trained me seemed to have been their same old nonsense science, very little rhyme or reason. I asked Benham about it, once, when I found him in a talking mood. They’d both been curious about the limits of a mulatta’s intelligence, Benham convinced Negroes could be taught to some extent, and that a greater capacity for learning might result after the mixing of white lymph with black. Was Langton eager by then to give him whatever he wanted, so long as the money came back? Benham wanted a mulatta to be educated, so that was what Benham got. In any event, Langton had only finished what Miss-bella had started, though it was just like him to cut the truth in half. And the other truth was that I was the only mulatta he’d kept on that entire estate.
It was my own sins Benham thought to write about for all that they were tangled up with theirs. Which is why three weeks later, seeing my chance when he’d gone out to his gentleman’s club, I stole his journal, tucked it into the lining of my pallet. Those pages are still there for all I know – though it’s possible Linux has already scrubbed out every inch of me that was left behind.
I suppose you’ll go looking for them, or someone else will. Just remember not to believe everything you read.
I should have stolen Madame’s journals too, if I’d thought of it, if I had known our days were numbered. They would have been more useful to me. A way to keep her. Which was what I wanted most of all. The pair of us trapped together, pinned like butterflies under glass.
As soon as I went back up, she drew me close, and the smell of her flooded me. The very bones slid out of me. La petite mort, she called it. A little death. Benham forgotten. When she kissed me, I tasted myself. Like the sea, like salt. Like tears. We slipped together into her bath, which she filled herself. That was a sight, more water spilling on the floor than in the tub. She poured water like she knew she wouldn’t be the one to mop it up. But for the span of that afternoon, I was the one being waited on. Tended. She made me feel like a queen. She took my damp hair in her hands and gathered it off my brow and peppered me there with kisses and, after we’d settled in the water, her back to my front, she said, ‘Read to me,’ and rested her head on her knees to listen. Steam rose in wet curls, and her hair fell likewise. I held the book away from me. The water lapped quietly. Beside us, the candle flickered to a stub. The door stayed safely on its latch.
How can I describe it?
I was a knot, untangled. The weight of all my memories was gone.
Night came, to strip another day from whatever tally we had. We blew out the candles, turned over the pillows, and laid our heads together on them, for sleep.
We were happy, no matter what is said about it now, no matter that they’re saying it was me who broke her happiness, and broke her. As soon as I write that, as soon as I even think it, my hand trembles. I must stop here. I fear I’ll dig this nib through the paper, to keep from turning it on myself.