After a week or two, I was the only one who still fretted about those minutes, like something that had rolled under a bed. That time when my head had gone dark and filled with blood. What terrified me was that the world hadn’t so much fallen away as fallen into place. That I was the one submitting, even when it was I who wielded the whip. For all those weeks, I lived in terror of closing my eyes. Whenever I did, there was the coach-house, burning to the ground, and me standing inside it, my hands moving, but the rest of me stuck in mud. At Paradise, time began and ended with the scalpel in my hand. In between, it seeped black. And it had been the same blackness with Henry; that very blackness you say I must use now, as the cornerstone of my defence. Telling me to say it must have been the drug, since I couldn’t have been in my right mind, if I killed them as they say I did.
I don’t want to say it, because I am terrified it might be true. I know that memories hide sometimes for the simple reason that we could not bear their weight. That sometimes it’s mercy that unwinds the clock.
When night comes now, it’s black as a rotted tooth, and I dream her into it. I hear her voice: Death is the only thing that scares me now. I see Benham shouting, and hear myself shouting too. Though that part isn’t a dream, but shreds of memory, torn from a black cloth.
But, in time, thoughts of what I’d done to Henry faded. I settled to my work. Five months I stayed. I got used to being with the other girls when the house was empty, playing at Loo and cribbage in the corridors, leaning against the walls, or sitting on the velvet settees in the parlour before it filled, watching the fire. Small threads of happiness. Come morning that whole corridor was a dawn chorus. Girls calling down for their ewers of vinegar and their gin. Seven of them, all waiting for Martha. I had a sheaf of paper I’d bought myself at Wickstead’s, though all I did was stare at it, spent so long thinking what to write I never wrote anything. Eating breakfast with the others, from the same table where someone had been served up for the customers’ dinner the night before. It could feel almost like a little family, if you ignored the Berkley horse in the attic, the planks nailed together with leather straps, and the human skeleton in one of the kitchen cupboards that had been bought from resurrectionists.
But that happier part of me strayed back to knit itself to the broken part. Like a cracked but still-living bone. Madame was a door that wouldn’t stay closed; I thought of her so often that when one of the other girls said the name ‘Benham’ one morning, pointing at a newspaper cartoon, I thought for a moment it was I who’d said it, and slung my hand up to my mouth. But it turned out Benham had written a ‘biographical sketch of his friend, John Langton’, which made the pair of them sound as saintly as chicks just hatched. That made me laugh, and so did the word ‘friend’. Then I looked closer and saw the announcement. Langton was dead. The news scrubbed my mind clean, like windows flung wide to let in air. Everything went black. I had to steady myself against the table before I could read on. In spite of their public differences, the celebrated natural philosopher and diarist George Benham would deliver the eulogy. When I read that aloud, the girl laughed too. ‘Oh, I know him,’ she said.
‘Langton?’
‘No, the other one.’
Sometimes, she said, when you whip a cove, pain goes inside them, and hooks their secrets right out.
But it wasn’t Benham I was concerned with then. The awful clock of Langton’s heart had stopped. He’d outlived his doctor and, now, a twin misfortune: he’d been survived by his own ambitions. Crania was to be published after all, in the light of the interest stirred up by the author’s death. But I took some small pleasure in knowing he hadn’t lived to see it. Later that morning, Sal propped herself on my pillows to listen to the details about the funeral. Miss-bella had been still in Jamaica and unable to attend. It had been a sudden death; the body had tripped a chambermaid bringing fresh sheets. Apoplexy. ‘Your old bastard get the same damn death as mine!’ Sal cried.
She knew better than to ask me how I felt about any of it. And I knew better than to tell her.
Even now, writing of it, I’m afflicted with some queer feeling that goes right through my spine. I fear to write about it. You will judge me for it. How could you not? The news cast me down, same way thinking about it casts me down now. One part of what I was feeling was regret.
He should have died before now, I thought, and I should have been the one to kill him.
The next day, work done for the night, Sal and I went down to Hyde Park Corner, to one of the kitchen stalls. We bought saveloys, and ham sliced right off the pig, took our food to eat in the park. My satin skirts trailed behind us, and so did Sal’s laugh, a scurry of fresh mint from the single leaf she chewed after smoking. If Sal had known what I was thinking, she’d have boxed my ears. Because I was wondering if she was there. Would I see her? Would I turn a corner on one of the paths, and find her there? It was the thing I wanted most, yet feared even more.
I leaned over for a bite of ham, which was hot and salty and coated my fingers with grease. ‘Sal. Do you know anything about George Benham?’
‘George Benham.’ She swung her head towards me. ‘Why you ask?’
‘I worked for him. That’s where I came from.’
‘That’s who your old bastard gave you away to?’
‘Do you know him?’
She sucked on her cigar. ‘And that’s who you white woman is.’
Something was hovering on her lips, and I had to wait for it. Her smoke stung my eyes and I fiddled with a button on my boot. ‘Don’t know much about George Benham,’ she said at last, ‘except to know if that’s where you was, you better off here.’
She ground her cigar out under her heel. ‘Saw her. Once.’
‘What? Where?’
She laughed. ‘Settle yourself! Not yesterday. I went to the fisticuffs. It was just before you came. Laddie Lightning was fixing to break his knuckles on one a their champs. Name slips me. Some big, lardy fellow. Drew all the niggers like flies, a course.’
‘I must have been under a bridge at the time,’ I said, trying to raise a laugh, drown out his name.
‘Oho. You missed something. He jumped them ropes afterwards, words flying, spit flying. Blood just lashing off him. But then him just stop – braps ‒ and bow, like so. Like him lifting a hat . . . but him never have no hat. Him staring at somebody. Everybody turn see who. Was like him put footlights on her. She the only white woman up front. Wearing some head-wrap, like she fooling a soul. She shook her head at him, then she left. But she was all the talk afterwards.’ She gave me a look. ‘That’s how I knew who she was.’
I twisted my hands into the grass. ‘Well. What were they saying?’
A pause. ‘Nothing kind.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Who? Lightning?’
‘Yes. To her.’
She looked up at the sky, dark as her cigar ash, stars simmering through the trees. Then she brushed down her skirts, sucked her teeth. ‘I never hear any of it.’