How would I like living with a simpleton girl? She would not be like Dainty, who was only slightly touched and only sometimes
violent. She might be really mad. She might try and throttle me; and there would be no-one about, for miles and miles, to hear me calling. Gipsies would be no use, they were all for themselves. Everyone knows a gipsy would not cross the street to spit on you, if you were on fire.
I said, 'This girl— what's she like.'' You said she's queer in her head.'
'Not queer,' said Gentleman. 'Only what I should call fey. She's an innocent, a natural.
She has been kept from the world. She's an orphan, like you are; but where you had Mrs Sucksby to sharpen you up, she had— no-one.'
Dainty looked at him then. Her mother had been a drunkard, and got drowned in the river. Her father had used to beat her. He beat her sister till she died. She said, in a whisper:
'Ain't it terribly wicked, Gentleman, what you mean to do?' I don't believe any of us had thought it, before that moment. Now Dainty said it, and I gazed about me, and nobody would catch my eye.
Then Gentleman laughed.
'Wicked?' he said. 'Why, bless you, Dainty, of course it's wicked! But it's wicked to 19
the tune of fifteen thousand pounds— and oh! but that's a sweet tune, hum it how you will. Then again, do you suppose that when that money was first got, it was got honestly? Don't think it! Money never is. It is got, by families like hers, from the backs of the poor— twenty backs broken for every shilling made. You have heard, have you, of Robin Hood?' 'Have I!' she said.
'Well, Sue and I shall be like him: taking gold from the rich and passing it back to the people it was got from.'
John curled his lip. 'You ponce,' he said. 'Robin Hood was a hero, a man of wax. Pass the money to the people? What people are yours! You want to rob a lady, go and rob your own mother.'
'My mother?' answered Gentleman, colouring up. 'What's my mother to do with anything? Hang my mother!' Then he caught Mrs Sucksby's eye, and turned to me.
'Oh, Sue,' he said. 'I do beg your pardon.'
'It's all right,' I said quickly. And I gazed at the table, and again everyone grew quiet.
Perhaps they were all thinking, as they did on hanging days, 'Ain't she brave?' I hoped they were. Then again, I hoped they weren't: for, as I have said, I never was brave, but had got away with people supposing I was, for seventeen years. Now here was Gentleman, needing a bold girl and coming— forty miles, he had said, in all that cold and slippery weather— to me.
I raised my eyes to his.
'Two thousand pounds, Sue,' he said quietly.
'That'll shine very bright, all right,' said Mr Ibbs.
And all them frocks and jewels!' said Dainty. 'Oh, Sue! Shouldn't you look handsome, in them!'
'You should look like a lady,' said Mrs Sucksby; and I heard her, and caught her gaze, and knew she was looking at me— as she had, so many times before— and was seeing, behind my face, my mother's. Your fortune's still to be made.— I could almost hear her saying it. Your fortune's still to be made; and ours, Sue, along with it . . .
And after all, she had been right. Here was my fortune, come from nowhere— come, at last. What could I say? I looked again at Gentleman. My heart beat hard, like hammers in my breast. I said:
'All right. I'll do it. But for three thousand pounds, not two. And if the lady don't care for me and sends me home, I shall want a hundred anyway, for the trouble of trying.'
He hesitated, thinking it over. Of course, that was all a show. After a second he smiled, then he held his hand to me and I gave him mine. He pressed my fingers, and laughed.
John scowled. 'I'll give you ten to one she comes back crying in a week,' he said.
'I'll come back dressed in a velvet gown,' I answered. 'With gloves up to here, and a hat with a veil on, and a bag full of silver coin. And you shall have to call me miss.
Won't he, Mrs Sucksby?'
He spat. 'I'll tear my own tongue out, before I do that!'
'I'll tear it out first!' I said.
I sound like a child. I was a child! Perhaps Mrs Sucksby was
thinking that, too. For she said nothing, only sat, still gazing at me, with her hand at her soft lip. She smiled; but her face seemed troubled. I could almost have said, she 20
was afraid.
Perhaps she was.
Or perhaps I only think that now, when I know what dark and fearful things were to follow.
C h a p t e r T w o
The bookish old man, it turned out, was called Christopher Lilly. The niece's name was Maud. They lived west of London, out Maidenhead-way, near a village named Marlow, and in a house they called Briar. Gentleman's plan was to send me there alone, by train, in two days' time. He himself, he said, must stay in London for another week at least, to do the old man's business over the bindings of his books.
I didn't care much for the detail of my travelling down there, and arriving at the house, all on my own. I had never been much further west before than the Cremorne Gardens, where I sometimes went with Mr Ibbs's nephews, to watch the dancing on a Saturday night. I saw the French girl cross the river on a wire from there, and almost drop— that was something. They say she wore stockings; her legs looked bare enough to me, though. But I recall standing on Battersea Bridge as she walked her rope, and looking out, past Hammersmith, to all the countryside beyond it, that was just trees and hills and not a chimney or the spire of a church in sight— and oh! that was a very chilling thing to see. If you had said to me then, that I would one day leave the Borough, with all my pals in it, and Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, and go quite alone, to a maid's place in a house the other side of those dark hills, I should have laughed in your face.
But Gentleman said I must go soon, in case the lady— Miss Lilly— should spoil our plot, by accidentally taking another girl to be her servant. The day after he came to Lant Street he sat and wrote her out a letter. He said he hoped she would pardon the liberty of his writing, but he had been on a visit to his old nurse— that had been like a mother to him, when he was a boy— and he had found her quite demented with grief, over the fate of her dead sister's daughter. Of course, the dead sister's daughter was meant to be me: the story was, that I had been maiding for a lady who was marrying and heading off for India, and had lost my place; that I was looking out for another mistress, but was meanwhile being tempted on every side to go to the bad; and that if only some softhearted lady would give me the chance of a situation far away from the evils of the city— and so on.
I said, 'If she'll believe bouncers like those, Gentleman, she must be even sillier than you first told us.'
But he answered, that there were about a hundred girls between the Strand and Piccadilly, who dined very handsomely off that story, five nights a week; and if the 21
hard swells of London could be separated from their shillings by it, then how much kinder wasn't Miss Maud Lilly likely to be, all alone and unknowing and sad as she was, and with no-one to tell her any better?
'You'll see,' he said. And he sealed the letter and wrote the direction, and had one of our neighbours' boys run with it to the post.
Then, so sure was he of the success of his plan, he said they must begin at once to teach me how a proper lady's maid should be.
First, they washed my hair. I wore my hair then, like lots of the Borough girls wore theirs, divided in three, with a comb at the back and, at the sides, a few fat curls. If you turned the curls with a very hot iron, having first made the hair wet with sugar-and-water, you
could make them hard as anything; they would last for a week like that, or longer.