At a ladies’ gaming parlour she went to with Hep Elliot, she and I managed to find ourselves alone in the withdrawing room, behind one of the screens. I’d brought along her little travelling pot, which she called a bourdaloue. It was yellow as piss itself, but painted with gay dancing maids in blue bonnets to trick you that a lady might travel with one in case struck by a sudden craving for soup or blancmange wherever she might be. She had stretched herself out on the bench, her body pressed against the window, gazing out at the brick wall of the next-door building. I knelt and fitted myself to her, fingers to ankles, forehead to knees. She looked down and saw my intention, my fingers on her thighs, her skirts wagging like tails, then looked up at the door.
‘Do you do this with him?’
‘Mr Benham?’
‘Who else?’
I could not bear to think of it.
She looked down at me. ‘When would I? You are always with me, so you know he is not.’ She hesitated. ‘Besides . . . he does not want children.’
Good, I thought, though I’d never come across a man who didn’t want children, especially one as pleased with his own image as Benham was.
But the question nagged at me, drove me to seek out Pru in the scullery next wash-day, to ask what she knew. ‘Only bits I picked up here and there,’ she said. ‘Madame wasn’t considered first water when she came out. Pretty, yes. But French. Nothing she could do to change that. And too eccentric as well, I suppose. Came with too much gossip. Most people will say she was lucky to nab him.’ She swilled one of Benham’s cravats in the rice-water. ‘There was a time I didn’t know who to be sorrier for, out of the pair of them. I overheard them once, arguing. Her saying he was only wealthy on the surface, him saying that must make them a match since that was the only place she was pretty.’
The following week Madame told me part of the story herself. Her mother had said she was lucky to have an offer: eccentric Meg Delacroix, still on the shelf after four Seasons. Benham heard the rumours about her only after they were married, when it was too late. Divorce would have tainted him as well as her, which made it out of the question. He blamed her for that, too, as if he’d been the victim of some trick. The worst of it, she said, was how he’d played husband all this time, in public or where any of the servants might see. How he made her play wife. The appearance of marriage with none of its effects, save the roof over her head.
The year after her wedding, her mother had died, leaving her truly alone.
Madame announced that she intended to form a committee to plan a debate. For many of those ladies, time trickled through their hands. They might as well make themselves feel pious and useful with it. Though pious is hardly ever useful. Nevertheless, I helped. I copied out the proposed motion into her letters. What is the purpose of variety in the species of humankind?
‘What do you think?’ she said.
I thought she was turning Langton’s and Benham’s very own question against them, and said the pair of them would find it instructive to hear sensible opinions on it, for a change.
The anti-slaving business lifted her spirits, and when she was happy so was I. Her friends pressed her to join the boycott. Even if she’d had any say at all in that household, which it seemed she didn’t, I couldn’t see what good it would do to refuse to buy sugar with all that sugar money. In any event, she was too fond of her sweetened chocolate to go that far.
It was a gasp of rebellion, pitting herself against him, and she knew it. She decided she’d plan first and ask him later. Put the cart before the horse, so to speak. In the meantime, the meetings would be social affairs. In that way, when she announced her intention, he’d be unable to refuse without it becoming a public spectacle. There was nothing he hated more than that.
One day, she was too low for hosting, or for gadding about in the park, and said we’d have to make do with the garden. It was very hot, coming towards the start of June. The flowers were out at Levenhall, and I decided to fetch a basket from the scullery, and asked Pru if I could borrow her pearl-handled dressmaker’s scissors to snip some for Madame’s mantelpiece. I found her unpicking silk rosettes from the hem of an evening gown. Poor Pru could have done with a day in the garden herself. Her eyes and cheeks were red and raw, no doubt stung by lye, and her shoulders drooped. ‘I’m fine, Fran,’ she said, when I asked how she was. ‘You know how it is, or perhaps you’ve forgot already. There’s enough work to kill an ox.’
In the kitchen, Linux had a goose splayed out on the table for plucking. I went carefully around her, wrapped some slices of bread and cheese and a pat of butter I’d brought from the larder. When I set the basket on the table, she stared hard at the scissors, which were peeking up over the rim. ‘What is it you think you want with those?’
I wanted nothing with them, I said, but Madame had asked me to snip some of the flowers in the garden so that I might fill her vase. My nerves were all over the place in those days, so I am sure my voice shook. I was lying about that one thing, which I fear now made everything I said sound like a lie. She looked at me askance. The truth was that I was full of some of the savage intents she had suspected of me all along. Lust, chief among them. The truth was that by then I was a threat to the master of the house. I wanted what he had. There were too many things I wanted. I can hardly confess them all. There isn’t paper enough, or time.
Linux folded her arms and tried to bar my way, but I held my ground and asked, did she want to keep Madame waiting?
It would be me keeping Madame waiting, she replied, unless I handed those scissors over. Her hands were cloaked with blood and feathers. But then Benham’s bell rang, and she had to answer it herself, with Pru busy in the laundry. She cast me a hard look as she went, but said no more about the scissors.
The garden was hemmed in by high walls. The pond lay at the end, and the gate that led to the mews. The sun was high. Light spilled like lamp oil over the new grass, and made the air hazy. I set the blanket out under the ash tree and laid the food atop a piece of oilskin. She arranged herself under the tree, opened her book – a small volume of poetry – and read aloud. Her voice drifted like a bee between the flowers. The scissors shook in my hand as I clicked at the roses. I decided to thread some of them through her fringe, and so came behind her with the scissors still in my hand. She gave a start, and looked up towards the house, nervous. Her hair was damp and had started to curl and I had to smooth it out between my fingers. By the time I’d finished, several of the petals lay around us, smashed into the blanket by my knees, and the smell rose heavy into the air.
She drummed her fingers on the book, sang some tune she was always singing. ‘It’s called Chanson pour Marguerite,’ she would say. ‘One of my papa’s.’ It was the most drear thing you ever heard, the same repeating, whining notes, but she loved it the way a mother loves an ugly child.
A lather of fear came upon me.
There’s the same lather of fear upon me now. Not just the terror of any woman in my situation. It’s the fear of the teeming brain. That I might cease to be before I can finish setting it down. I find myself scribbling furiously. As if I must finish it, or look up and discover that none of it happened at all. While I write it, I can still believe it did.
I steadied my fingers, kept them brushing through her hair. Before I knew it, I blurted: ‘Is this love, between us?’
She tipped her head back into the silence. ‘Oh, there are many ways to be mad,’ she said. ‘Love’s the surest one.’
It was so close to my own fears, it made my heart thud.
A thud came from behind us as well. A sudden bang that wrenched my head up. I looked towards the house. A figure in one of the upstairs windows. Linux. Black as a moth, her mouth twisting. She had slapped the window, and stood gurning down at us. Even from so far away I could see her eyes, and the scars that leaped across her cheek and her pale palm smeared across the glass. She shook her head, drew her shoulders back, and moved away down the passage. Madame jerked the basket towards her, shoving in book and food and blanket. Cramming everything atop the flowers. ‘We must go in,’ she said. She blinked around at the garden as if she’d never seen it before.
I felt again that same pricking of fear, the cold wash of terror, which I couldn’t quite explain.