She puts her hand upon mine. 'Well,' she says, 'but ain't you learning?'

I am, but not quickly enough. He suggests, in time, that we go walking in the park.

'We must work from nature now,' he says.

'I should rather not,' I tell him. I have my paths, that I like to walk with Sue beside me. I think that to walk them with him will spoil them. 'I should rather not,' I say again.

He frowns, then smiles. 'As your instructor,' he says, 'I must insist.'

I hope it will rain. But though the sky above Briar has been grey all that winter long—has been grey, it seems to me, for seven years!—it lightens now, ror him. There is only a quick, soft wind, that comes gusting about my un-skirted ankles as Mr Way tugs open the door.—'Thank you, Mr Way,' says Richard, bending his arm for me to take. He wears a low black hat, a dark Wool coat, and lavender gloves. Mr Way observes the gloves, then looks at me in a kind of satisfaction, a kind of scorn.

Fancy yourself a lady, do you? he said to me, the day he carried me, kicking, to the ice-house. Well, we'll see.

I will not walk to the ice-house today, with Richard, but choose another path—a longer, blander path, that circles my uncle's estate, rises and overlooks the rear of the house, the stables, woods, and chapel, I know the view too well to want to gaze at it, and walk with my eyes upon the ground. He keeps my arm in his, and Sue follows behind us—first close, then falling back when he makes our pace grow brisk. We do not speak, but as we walk he slowly draws me to him. My skirt rises, awkwardly.

When I try to pull away, however, he will not let me. I say at last: 'You need not hold me so close.'

He smiles. 'We must seem convincing.'

'You needn't grip me so. Have you anything to whisper, that I don't already know?'

He gazes quickly over his shoulder. 'She would think it queer,' he says, 'were I to let slip these chances to be near you. Anyone would think that queer.'

'She knows you do not love me. You have no need to dote.'

'Shouldn't a gentleman dote, in the springtime, when he has the chance?' He puts back his head. 'Look at this sky, Maud. See how sickeningly blue it shows. So blue'—he has lifted his hand—'it jars with my gloves. That's nature for you. No sense of fashion. London skies, at least, are better-mannered: they're like tailors' walls, an eternal drab.' He smiles again, and draws me closer. 'But of course, you will know this, soon.'

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I try to imagine myself in a tailor's shop. I recall scenes from The Whipping Milliners. I turn and, like him, quickly glance at Sue. She is watching, with a frown of what I take to be satisfaction, the bulging of my skirt about his leg. Again I attempt to pull from him, and again he keeps me close. I say, 'Will you let me go?' And, when he does nothing: 'I must suppose, then, since you know I don't care to be smothered, that you take a delight in tormenting me.'

He catches my eye. 'I am like any man,' he says, 'preoccupied with what I may not have. Hasten the day of our union. I think you'll find my attention will cool pretty rapidly, after that.'

Then I say nothing. We walk on, and in time he lets me go, in order to cup his hands about a cigarette and light it. I look again at Sue. The ground has risen, the breeze is stronger, and two or three lengths of brown hair have come loose from beneath her bonnet and whip about her face. She carries our bags and baskets, and has no hand free to secure them. Behind her, her cloak billows like a sail.

'Is she all right?' asks Richard, drawing on his cigarette. I turn and look ahead. 'Quite all right.'

'She is stouter than Agnes, anyway. Poor Agnes! I wonder how she does, hey?'

He takes my arm again, and laughs. I do not answer, and his laughter fades.

'Come, Maud," he says, in a cooler tone, 'don't be so spinsterish. What has happened to you?'

'Nothing has happened to me.'

He studies my profile. 'Then, why do you make us wait? Everything is in place. Everything is ready. I have taken a house for us, in London. London houses do not come cheaply, Maud…'

I walk on, in silence, aware of his gaze. He pulls me close again. 'You have not, I suppose,' he says, 'had a change of heart? Have you?'

'No.'

'You are sure?'

'Quite sure.'

'And yet, you still delay. Why is that?' I do not answer. 'Maud, I ask you again. Something has happened, since I saw you last. What is it?'

'Nothing has happened,' I say.

'Nothing?'

'Nothing, but what we planned for.'

And you know what must be done now?'

'Of course.'

'Do it then, will you? Act like a lover. Smile, blush, grow foolish.'

'Do I not do those things?'

You do—then spoil them, with a grimace or a flinch. Look at you now. Lean into my arm, damn you. Will it kill you, to feel my hand upon yours?— am sorry.' I have grown stiff at his words. 'I am sorry, Maud.'

'Let go of my arm,' I say.

We go further, side by side but in silence. Sue plods behind—I hear her breaths, like sighs. Richard throws down the butt of his cigarette, tears up a switch of grass and begins to lash at his boots. 'How filthy red this earth is!' he

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says. 'But what a treat for little Charles…' He smiles to himself. Then his foot turns up a flint and he almost stumbles. That makes him curse. He rights himself, and looks me over. 'I see you walk more nimbly. You like it, hmm? You may walk in London like this, you know. On the parks and heaths. Did you know? Or else, you may choose not to walk, ever again—you may rent carriages, chairs, men to drive and carry you about—'

'I know what I may do.'

'Do you? Truly?' He puts the stem of grass to his mouth and grows thoughtful. 'I wonder. You are afraid, I think. Of what? Being alone? Is it that? You need never fear solitude, Maud, while you are rich.'

'You think I fear solitude?' I say. We are close to the wall of my uncle's park. It is high, grey, dry as powder. 'You think I fear that? I fear nothing, nothing.'

He casts the grass aside, takes up my arm. 'Why, then,' he says, 'do you keep us here, in such dreadful suspense?'

I do not answer. We have slowed our step. Now we hear Sue, still breathing hard behind us, and walk on more quickly. When he speaks again, his tone has changed.

'You spoke, a moment ago, of torment. The truth is, I think you like to torment yourself, by prolonging this time.'

I shrug, as if in carelessness; though I do not feel careless. 'My uncle said something similar to me once,' I say. 'That was before I became like him. It is hardly a torment to me now, to wait. I am used to it.'

'I am not, however,' he replies. 'Nor do I wish to take instruction in the art, from you or anyone. I have lost too much, in the past, through waiting. I am cleverer now, at manipulating events to match my needs. That is what I have learned, while you have learned patience. Do you understand me, Maud?'

I turn my head, half-close my eyes. 'I don't want to understand you,' I say tiredly. 'I wish you would not speak at all.'

'I will speak, until you hear.'

'Hear what?'

'Hear this.' He brings his mouth close to my face. His beard, his lips, his breath, are tainted with smoke, like a devil's. He says: ' Remember our contract. Remember how we made it. Remember that when I came to you first I came, not quite as a gentleman, and with little to lose—unlike you, Miss Lilly, who saw me alone, at midnight, in your own room…' He draws back. 'I suppose your reputation must count for something, even here; I'm afraid that ladies' always do.—But naturally you knew that, when you received me.'

His tone has some new edge to it, some quality I have not heard before. But we have changed our course: when I gaze at his face the light is all behind him, making his expression hard to read.

I say carefully, 'You call me a lady; but I am hardly that.'

'And yet, I think your uncle must consider you one. Will he like to think you corrupted?'

'He has corrupted me himself!'

'Then, will he like to think the work taken over by another man's hand? I am speaking only, of course, of what he will suppose to be the case.'

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I move away. 'You misunderstand him, entirely. He considers me a sort of engine, for the reading and copying of texts.'

'All the worse. He shan't like it, when the engine bucks. What say he disposes of it and makes himself another?'

Now I can feel the beat of the blood in my brow. I put my fingers to my eyes.

'Don't be tiresome, Richard. Disposes of it, how?'

'Why, by sending it home…'

The beat seems to stumble, then quickens. I draw back my fingers, but again the light is behind him and I cannot quite make out his face. I say, very quietly,

'I shall be no use to you, in a madhouse.'

'You are no use to me now, while you delay! Be careful I don't grow tired of this scheme. I shan't be kind to you, then.'

'And is this kindness?' I say.

We have moved, at last, into shadow, and I see his look: it is honest, amused, amazed. He says: This is dreadful villainy, Maud. When did I ever call it anything else?'

We stop, close as sweethearts. His tone has grown light again, but his eye is hard—quite hard. I feel, for the first time, what it would be to be afraid of him. He turns and calls to Sue. 'Not far now, Suky! We are almost there, I think.'

To me he murmurs: 'I shall need some minutes with her, alone.'

'To secure her,' I say. 'As you have me.'

'That work is done,' he says complacently; 'and she, at least, sticks better.—

What?' I have shuddered, or my look has changed. 'You don't suspect her of qualms? Maud? You don't suppose her weakening, or playing us false? Is that why you hesitate?' I shake my head. 'Well,' he goes on, 'all the more reason for me to see her, to find out how she thinks we do. Have her come to me, today or tomorrow. Find out some way, will you? Be sly.'

He puts his smoke-stained finger to his mouth. Presently Sue comes, and rests at my side. She is flushed from the weight of the bags. Her cloak still billows, her hair still whips, and I want more than anything to draw her to me, to touch and tidy her. I think I begin to, I think I half-reach for her; then I become conscious of Richard and his shrewd, considering gaze. I cross my arms before me and turn away.

Next morning I have her take him a coal from the fire, to light his cigarette from; and I stand with my brow against my dressing-room window and watch them whisper. She keeps her head turned from me, but when she leaves him he raises his eyes to me and holds my gaze, as he held it once before, in darkness. Remember our contract, he seems again to say. Then he drops his cigarette and stands heavily upon it; then shakes free the clinging red soil from his shoes.

After that, I feel the mounting pressure of our plot as I think men must feel the straining of checked machinery, tethered beasts, the gathering of tropical storms. I wake each day and think: Today I will do it! Today I will draw free the bolt and let the engine race, unleash the beast, puncture the lowering clouds!

Today, I will let him claim me—!

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But, I do not. I look at Sue, and there comes, always, that shadow, that darkness—a panic, I suppose it, a simple fear—a quaking, a caving—a dropping, as into the sour mouth of madness—

Madness, my mother's malady, perhaps beginning its slow ascent in me! That thought makes me more frightened yet. I take, for a day or two, more of my drops: they calm me, but change me. My uncle marks it.

'You grow clumsy,' he says, one morning. I have mishandled a book. 'You think I have you come, day after day, to my library, to abuse it?'

'No, Uncle.'

'What? Do you mumble?'

'No, sir.'

He wets and purses his mouth, and studies me harder. When he speaks again, his tone is strange to me.

'What age are you?' he says. I am surprised, and hesitate. He sees it. 'Don't strike coy attitudes with me, miss! What age are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?—

You may show astonishment. You think me insensible to the passage of years, because I am a scholar? Hmm?'

'I am seventeen, Uncle.'

'Seventeen. A troublesome age, if we are to believe our own books.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Yes, Maud. Only remember: your business is not with belief, but with study. Remember this, also: you are not too great a girl—nor am I too aged a scholar—

for me to have Mrs Stiles come and hold you still while I take a whip to you. Hmm? You'll remember these things? Will you?'

'Yes, sir,' I say.

It seems to me now, however, that I must remember too much. My face, my joints, are set aching with the effort of striking looks and poses. I can no longer say with certainty which of my actions—which of my feelings, even— are true ones, which are sham. Richard still keeps his gaze close upon me. I will not meet it. He is reckless, teasing, threatening: I choose not to understand. Perhaps I am weak, after all. Perhaps, as he and my uncle believe, I draw a pleasure from torment. It is certainly a torment to me now, to sit at a lesson with him, to sit at a dinner-table with him, to read to him, at night, from my uncle's books. It begins to be a torment, too, to pass time with Sue. Our routines are spoiled. I am too conscious that she waits, as he does: I feel her watching, gauging, willing me on. Worse, she begins to speak in his be-half—to tell me, bluntly, how clever he is, how kind and interesting.

'You think so, Sue?' I ask her, my eyes upon her face; and her gaze might flutter uneasily away, but she will always answer: 'Yes, miss. Oh, yes, miss. Anyone would say it, wouldn't they?'

Then she will make me neat—always neat, handsome and neat—she will take down my hair and dress it, straighten seams, lift lint from the fabric of my gowns. I think she does it as much to calm herself, as to calm me. 'There,' she will say, when she has finished. 'Now you are better.'—Now she is better, she means. 'Now your brow is smooth. How creased it was, before! It mustn't be creased—'

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It mustn't be creased, for Mr Rivers's sake: I hear the unspoken words, my blood surges again; I take her arm in mine and pinch it.

'Oh!'

I do not know who cries it, she or I; I reel away, unnerved. But in the second I have her skin between my fingers, my own flesh leaps in a kind of relief. I shake, horribly, for almost an hour.

'Oh, God!' I say, hiding my face. 'I'm afraid, for my own mind! Do you think me mad? Do you think me wicked, Sue?'

'Wicked?' she answers, wringing her hands. And I can see her thinking: A simple girl like you?

She puts me into my bed and lies with her arm against mine; but soon she sleeps, and then draws away. I think of the house in which I lie. I think of the room beyond the bed—its edges, its surfaces. I think I shall not sleep, unless I touch them. I rise, it is cold, but I go quietly from thing to thing— chimneypiece, dressing-table, carpet, press. Then I come to Sue. I would like to touch her, to be sure that she is there. I dare not. But I cannot leave her. I lift my hands and move and hold them an inch, just an inch, above her— her hip, her breast, her curling hand, her hair on the pillow, her face, as she sleeps.

I do that, perhaps three nights in a row. Then this happens. Richard begins to make us go to the river. He has Sue sit far from me, against the upturned boat; and he, as always, keeps close at my side, pretending to watch as I paint. I paint the same spot so many times, the card starts to rise and crumble beneath my brush; but I paint on, stubbornly, and he will now and then lean close to whisper, idly but fiercely:

'God damn you, Maud, how can you sit so calm and steady? Hey? Do you hear that bell?' The Briar clock sounds clearly there, beside the water. 'There's another hour gone, that we might have passed in freedom. Instead, you keep us here—'

'Will you move?' I say. 'You are standing in my light.'

'You are standing in mine, Maud. See how easy it is, to remove that shadow? One little step is all that must be made. Do you see? Will you look? She won't. She prefers her painting. That piece of— Oh! Let me find a match, I shall burn it!'

I glance at Sue. 'Be quiet, Richard.'

But the days grow warm, and at last comes a day, so close and airless, the heat overpowers him. He spreads his coat upon the ground and sprawls upon it, tilts his hat to shadow his eyes. For a time, then, the afternoon is still and almost pleasant: there is only the calling of frogs in the rushes, the slapping of water, the cries of birds, the occasional passing of boats. I draw the paint across the card in ever finer, ever slower strokes, and almost fall into slumber. Then Richard laughs, and my hand gives a jump. I turn to look at him. He puts his finger to his lip. 'See there,' he says softly. And he gestures to Sue. She still sits before the upturned boat, but her head has fallen back against the rotten wood and her limbs are spread and loose. A blade of hair, dark at the

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tip where she has been biting at it, curves to the corner of her mouth. Her eyes are closed, her breaths come evenly. She is quite asleep. The sun slants against her face and shows the point of her chin, her lashes, her darkening freckles. Between the edges of her gloves and the cuffs of her coat are two narrow strips of pinking flesh.

I look again at Richard—meet his eye—then turn back to my painting. I say quietly, 'Her cheek will burn. Won't you wake her?'

Shall I?' He sniffs. 'They are not much used to sunlight, where she comes from.' He speaks almost fondly, but laughs against the words; then adds in a murmur: 'Nor where she's going, I think. Poor bitch—she might sleep. She has been asleep since I first got her and brought her here, and has not known it.'

He says it, not with relish, but as if with interest at the idea. Then he stretches and yawns and gets to his feet, and sneezes. The fine weather troubles him. He puts his knuckles to his nose and violently sniffs. 'I beg your pardon,' he says, drawing out his handkerchief.

Sue does not wake, but frowns and turns her head. Her lower lip slightly falls. The blade of hair swings from her cheek, but keeps its curve and point. I have lifted my brush and touched it once to my crumbling painting; now I hold it, an inch from the card; and I watch, as she sleeps. Only that. Richard sniffs again, softly curses the heat, the season. Then, as before, I suppose he grows still. I suppose he studies me. I suppose the brush in my fingers drops paint—for I find it later, black paint upon my blue gown. I do not mark it as it falls, however; and perhaps it is my not marking it, that betrays me. That, or my look. Sue frowns again. I watch, a little longer. Then I turn, and find Richard's eyes upon me.

'Oh, Maud,' he says.

That is all he says. But in his face I see, at last, how much I want her. For a moment we do nothing. Then he steps to me and takes my wrist. The paintbrush falls.

'Come quickly,' he says. 'Come quickly, before she wakes.'

He takes me, stumbling, along the line of rushes. We walk as the water flows, about the bend of the river and the wall. When we stop, he puts his hands to my shoulders and holds me fast.

'Oh, Maud,' he says again. 'Here I have been, supposing you gripped by a conscience, or some other weakness like that. But this—!'

I have turned my face from him, but feel him laugh. 'Don't smile,' I say, shuddering. 'Don't laugh.'

'Laugh? You might be glad I don't do worse. You'll know—you'll know, if anyone will!—the sports to which gentlemen's appetites are said to be pricked, by matters like this. Thank heavens I'm not a gentleman so much as a rogue: we go by different codes. You may love and be damned, for all I care.—Don't wriggle, Maud!' I have tried to twist from his hands. He holds me tighter, then lets me lean from him a little, but grips my waist. 'You may love and be damned,' he says again. 'But keep me from my money—keep us languishing here: put back our plot, our hopes, your own bright future—you shall not, no. Not now I know what trifling thing you have made us stay for. Now, let her wake up.—I promise you, it is as tiresome to me as to you, when you twist so!—Let her wake up and seek us out. Let her see us like this. You won't come to me? Very

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good. I shall hold you here, and let her suppose us lovers at last; and so have done with it. Stand steady, now.'

He leans from me and gives a wordless shout. The sound beats against the thick air and makes it billow, then fades to a silence.

'That will bring her,' he says.

I move my arms. 'You are hurting me.'

'Stand like a lover then, and I shall grow gentle as anything.' He smiles again.

'Suppose me her.—Ah!' Now I have tried to strike him. 'Do you mean to make me bruise you?'

He holds me harder, keeping his hands upon me but pinning down my arms with his own. He is tall, he is strong. His fingers meet about my waist— as young men's fingers are meant to do, I believe, on the waists of their sweethearts. For a time I strain against the pressure: we stand braced and sweating as a pair of wrestlers in a ring. But I suppose that, from a distance, we might seem swaying in a kind of love.

But I think this dully; and soon I feel myself begin to tire. The sun is still hot upon us. The frogs still chant, the water still laps among the reeds. But the day has been punctured or ripped: I can feel it begin to droop and settle, close about me, in suffocating folds.

'I am sorry,' I say weakly.

'You needn't be sorry, now.'

'It is only—'

'You must be strong. I have seen you be strong, before.'

'It is only—'

But, only what? How might I say it? Only that she held my head against her breast, when I woke bewildered. That she warmed my foot with her breath, once. That she ground my pointed tooth with a silver thimble. That she brought me soup—clear soup—instead of an egg, and smiled to see me drink it. That her eye has a darker fleck of brown. That she thinks me good…

Richard is watching my face. 'Listen to me, Maud,' he says now. He pulls me tight. I am sagging in his arms. 'Listen! If it were any girl but her. If it were Agnes! Hey? But this is the girl that must be cheated, and robbed of her liberty, for us to be free. This is the girl the doctors will take, while we look on without a murmur. You remember our plan?'

I nod. 'But—'

'What?'

'I begin to fear that, after all, I haven't the heart for it…'

'You've a heart, instead, for little fingersmiths? Oh, Maud.' Now his voice is rich with scorn. 'Have you forgotten what she has come to you for? Do you think she has forgotten? Do you suppose yourself anything to her, but that? You have been too long among your uncle's books. Girls love easily, there. That is the point of them. If they loved so in life, the books would not have to be written.'

He looks me over. 'She would laugh in your face, if she knew.' His tone grows sly. 'She would laugh in mine, were I to tell her…'

'You shall not tell her!' I say, lifting my head and stiffening. The thought is awful to me. 'Tell her once, and I keep at Briar for good. My uncle shall know how you've used me—I shan't care how he treats me for it.'

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'I shall not tell her,' he answers slowly, 'if you will only do as you must, with no further delay. I shall not tell her, if you will let her think you love me and have agreed to be my wife; and so make good our escape, as you promised.'

I turn my face from his. Again there is a silence. Then I murmur—what else should I murmur?—'I will.' He nods, and sighs. He still holds me tightly, and after another moment he puts his mouth against my ear.

'Here she comes!' he whispers. 'She is creeping about the wall. She means to watch and not disturb us. Now, let her know I have you…'

He kisses my head. The bulk and heat and pressure of him, the warmth and thickness of the day, my own confusion, make me stand and let him, limply. He takes one hand from about my waist and lifts my arm. He kisses the cloth of my sleeve. When I feel his mouth upon my wrist, I flinch. 'Now, now, he says. 'Be good, for a moment. Excuse my whiskers. Imagine my mouth hers.' The words come wetly upon my flesh. He pushes my glove a little way along my hand, he parts his lips, he touches my palm with the point of his tongue; and I shudder, with weakness, with fear and distaste—with dismay, to know Sue stands and watches, in satisfaction, thinking me his.

For, he has shown me to myself. He leads me to her, we walk to the house, she takes my cloak, takes my shoes; her cheek is pink, after all: she stands frowning at the glass, moves a hand, lightly, across her face… That is all she does; but I see it, and my heart gives a plunge—that caving, or dropping, that has so much panic in it, so much darkness, I supposed it fear, or madness. I watch her turn and stretch, walk her random way about the room—see her make all the careless unstudied gestures I have marked so covetously, so long. Is this desire? How queer that I, of all people, should not know! But I thought desire smaller, neater; I supposed it bound to its own organs as taste is bound to the mouth, vision to the eye. This feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin.

I think she must see it. Now he has named it, I think it must colour or mark me—I think it must mark me crimson, like paint marks the hot red points, the lips and gashes and bare whipped limbs, of my uncle's pictures. I am afraid, that night, to undress before her. I am afraid to lie at her side. I am afraid to sleep. I am afraid I will dream of her. I am afraid that, in dreaming, I will turn and touch her…

But after all, if she senses the change in me, she thinks I am changed because of Richard. If she feels me tremble, if she feels my heart beat hard, she thinks I tremble for him. She is waiting, still waiting. Next day I take her walking to my mother's grave. I sit and gaze at the stone, that I have kept so neat and free from blemish. I should like to smash it with a hammer. I wish— as I have wished many times—that my mother were alive, so that I might kill her again. I say to Sue: 'Do you know, how it was she died? It was my birth that did it!'—and it is an effort, to keep the note of triumph from my voice.

She does not catch it. She watches me, and I begin to weep; and where she might say anything to comfort me—anything at all—what she says is: 'Mr Rivers.'

I look from her in contempt, then. She comes and leads me to the chapel door—perhaps, to turn my thoughts to marriage. The door is locked and can't be

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passed. She waits for me to speak. At last I tell her, dutifully: 'Mr Rivers has asked me to marry him, Sue.'

She says she is glad. And, when I weep again—false tears, this time, that wash away the true ones—and when I choke and wring my hands and cry out, 'Oh!

What shall I do?', she touches me and holds my gaze, and says: 'He loves you.'

'You think he does?'

She says she knows it. She does not flinch. She says, 'You must follow your heart.'

'I am not sure,' I say. 'If I might only be sure!'

'But to love,' she says, 'and then to lose him!'

I grow too conscious of the closeness of her gaze, and look away. She talks to me of beating blood, of thrilling voices, of dreams. I feel his kiss, like a burn upon my palm; and all at once she sees, not that I love him, but how much I have come to fear and hate him.

She grows white. 'What will you do?' she says, in a whisper.

'What can I do?' I say. 'What choice have I?'

She does not answer. She only turns from me, to gaze for a moment at the barred chapel door. I look at the pale of her cheek, at her jaw, at the mark of the needle in the lobe of her ear. When she turns back, her face has changed.

'Marry him,' she tells me. 'He loves you. Marry him, and do everything he says.'

She has come to Briar to ruin me, to cheat me and do me harm. Look at her, I tell myself. See how slight she is, how brown and trifling! A thief, a little fingersmith—! I think I will swallow down my desire, as I have swallowed down grief, and rage. Shall I be thwarted, shall I be checked— held to my past, kept from my future— by her? I think, I shan't. The day of our flight draws near. I shan't. The month grows warmer, the nights grow close. I shan't, I shan't—

'You are cruel,' Richard says. 'I don't think you love me as you ought. I think—' and he glances, slyly, at Sue—'I think there must be someone else you care for…'

Sometimes I see him look at her, and think he has told her. Sometimes she looks at me, so strangely—or else her hands, in touching me, seem so stiff, so nervous and unpractised—I think she knows. Now and then I am obliged to leave them alone together, in my own room; he might tell her, then. What do you say, Suky, to this? She loves you!

Loves me? Like a lady loves her maid?

Like certain ladies love their maids, perhaps. Hasn't she found little ways to keep you close about her?—Have I done that? Hasn't she feigned troublesome dreams?— Is that what I have done? Has she had you kiss her? Careful, Suky, she doesn't try to kiss you back…

Would she laugh, as he said she would? Would she shiver? It seems to me she lies more cautiously beside me now, her legs and arms tucked close. It seems to me she is often wary, watchful. But the more I think it, the more I want her, the more my desire rises and swells. I have come to terrible life—or else, the things about me have come to life, their colours grown too vivid, their surfaces too

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harsh. I flinch, from falling shadows. I seem to see figures start out from the fading patterns in the dusty carpets and drapes, or creep, with the milky blooms of damp, across the ceilings and walls.

Even my uncle's books are changed to me; and this is worse, this is worst of all. I have supposed them dead. Now the words—like the figures in the walls—

start up, are filled with meaning. I grow muddled, stammer. I lose my place. My uncle shrieks—seizes, from his desk, a paperweight of brass, and throws it at me. That steadies me, for a time. But then he has me read, one night, from a certain work… Richard watches, his hand across his mouth, a look of amusement dawning on his face. For the work tells of all the means a woman may employ to pleasure another, when in want of a man.

' And she pressed her lips and tongue to it, and into it—'

'You like this, Rivers?' asks my uncle.

'I confess, sir, I do.'

'Well, so do many men; though I fear it is hardly to my taste. Still, I am glad to note your interest. I address the subject fully, of course, in my Index. Read on, Maud. Read on.'

I do. And despite myself—and in spite of Richard's dark, tormenting gaze—I feel the stale words rouse me. I colour, and am ashamed. I am ashamed to think that what I have supposed the secret book of my heart may be stamped, after all, with no more miserable matter than this—have its place in my uncle's collection. I leave the drawing-room each night and go upstairs—go slowly, tapping the toes of my slippered feet against each step. If I strike them equally, I shall be safe. Then I stand in darkness. When Sue comes to undress me I will myself to suffer her touch, coolly, as I think a mannequin of wax might suffer the quick, indifferent touches of a tailor.

And yet, even wax limbs must yield at last, to the heat of the hands that lift and place them. There comes a night when, finally, I yield to hers.

I have begun, in sleeping, to dream unspeakable dreams; and to wake, each time, in a confusion of longing and fear. Sometimes she stirs. Sometimes she does not. 'Go back to sleep,' she will say, if she does. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I rise and go about the room; sometimes, take drops. I take drops, this night; then return to her side; but sink, not into lethargy, but only into more confusion. I think of the books I have lately read, to Richard and to my uncle: they come back to me, now, in phrases, fragments— pressed her lips and tongue— takes hold of my hand— hip, lip and tongue— forced it half- strivingly— took hold of my breasts— opened wide the lips of my little— the lips of her little cunt—

I cannot silence them. I can almost see them, rising darkly from their own pale pages, to gather, to swarm and combine. I put my hands before my face. I do not know how long I lie for, then. But I must make some sound, or movement; for when I draw my hands away, she is awake, and watching. I know that she is watching, though the bed is so dark.

'Go to sleep,' she says. Her voice is thick.

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I feel my legs, very bare inside my gown. I feel the point at which they join. I feel the words, still swarming. The warmth of her limbs comes inching, inching through the fibres of the bed.

I say, 'I'm afraid…"

Then her breathing changes. Her voice grows clearer, kinder. She yawns.

'What is it?' she says. She rubs her eye. She pushes the hair back from her brow. If she were any girl but Sue! If she were Agnes! If she were a girl in a book—!

Girls love easily, there. That is their point.

Hip, lip and tongue—

'Do you think me good?' I say.

'Good, miss?'

She does. It felt like safety, once. Now it feels like a trap. I say, 'I wish— I wish you would tell me—'

'Tell you what, miss?'

Tell me. Tell me a way to save you. A way to save myself. The room is perfectly black. Hip, lip-Girls love easily, there.

'I wish,' I say, 'I wish you would tell me what it is a wife must do, on her wedding-night…'

And at first, it is easy. After all, this is how it is done, in my uncle's books: two girls, one wise and one unknowing… 'He will want,' she says, 'to kiss you. He will want to embrace you.' It is easy. I say my part, and she—with a little prompting—says hers. The words sink back upon their pages. It is easy, it is easy…

Then she rises above me and puts her mouth to mine.

I have felt, before, the pressure of a gentleman's still, dry lips against my gloved hand, my cheek. I have suffered Richard's wet, insinuating kisses upon my palm. Her lips are cool, smooth, damp: they fit themselves imperfectly to mine, but then grow warmer, damper. Her hair falls against my face. I cannot see her, I can only feel her, and taste her. She tastes of sleep, slightly sour. Too sour. I part my lips—to breathe, or to swallow, or perhaps to move away; but in breathing or swallowing or moving I only seem to draw her into my mouth. Her lips part, also. Her tongue comes between them and touches mine. And at that, I shudder, or quiver. For it is like the finding out of something raw, the troubling of a wound, a nerve. She feels me jolt, and draws away— but slowly, slowly and unwillingly, so that our damp mouths seem to cling together and, as they part, to tear. She holds herself above me. I feel the rapid beating of a heart, and suppose it my own. But it is hers. Her breath comes, fast. She has begun, very lightly, to tremble.

Then I catch the excitement of her, the amazement of her.

'Do you feel it?' she says. Her voice sounds strangely in the absolute darkness. 'Do you feel it?'

I do. I feel it as a falling, a dropping, a trickling, like sand from a bulb of glass. Then I move; and I am not dry, like sand. I am wet. I am running, like water, like ink.

I begin, like her, to shake.

'Don't be frightened,' she says. Her voice has a catch. I move again, but she moves, too, she comes nearer to me, and my flesh gives a leap, to hers. She is

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trembling, worse than before. She is trembling, from the closeness of me! She says, 'Think more of Mr Rivers.'—I think of Richard, watching. She says again,

'Don't be frightened.'—But it is she who seems frightened. Her voice still has its catch. She kisses me again. Then she raises her hand and I feel the tips of her fingers flutter against my face.

'Do you see?' she says. 'It is easy, it is easy. Think more of him. He will want—

He will want to touch you.'

'To touch me?'

'Only touch you,' she says. The fluttering hand moves lower. 'Only touch you. Like this. Like this.'

When she puts up my nightgown and reaches between my legs, we both grow still. When her hand moves again, her fingers no longer flutter: they have grown wet, and slide, and in sliding seem, like her lips as they rub upon mine, to quicken and draw me, to gather me, out of the darkness, out of my natural shape. I thought I longed for her, before. Now I begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, I fear it will never be assuaged. I think it will mount, and mount, and make me mad, or kill me. Yet her hand moves slowly, still. She whispers. 'How soft you are! How warm! I want—' The hand moves even slower. She begins to press. I catch my breath. That makes her hesitate, and then press harder. At last she presses so hard I feel the giving of my flesh, I feel her inside me. I think I cry out. She does not hesitate now, however, but comes nearer to me and puts her hips about my thigh; then presses again. So slight she is!—but her hip is sharp, her hand is blunt, she leans, she pushes, she moves her hips and hand as if to a rhythm, a time, a quickening beat. She reaches. She reaches so far, she catches the life, the shuddering heart of me: soon I seem to be nowhere but at the points at which my flesh is gripped by hers. And then, 'Oh, there!' she says. 'Just there!

Oh, there!'—I am breaking, shattering, bursting out of her hand. She begins to weep. Her tears come upon my face. She puts her mouth to them. You pearl, she says, as she does it. Her voice is broken. You pearl.

I don't know how long we lie, then. She sinks beside me, with her face against my hair. She slowly draws back her fingers. My thigh is wet from where she has leaned and moved upon me. The feathers of the mattress have yielded beneath us, the bed is close and high and hot. She puts back the blanket. The night is still deep, the room still black. Our breaths still come fast, our hearts beat loud—

faster, and louder, they seem to me, in the thickening silence; and the bed, the room—the house!—seem filled with echoes of our voices, our whispers and cries. I cannot see her. But after a moment she finds my hand and presses it, hard, then takes it to her mouth, kisses my fingers, lies with my palm beneath her cheek. I feel the weight and shape of the bones of her face. I feel her blink. She does not speak. She closes her eyes. Her face grows heavy. She shivers, once. The heat is rising from her, like a scent. I reach and draw the blanket up again, and lay it gently about her.

Everything, I say to myself, is changed. I think I was dead, before. Now she has touched the life of me, the quick of me; she has put back my flesh and opened me up. Everything is changed. I still feel her, inside me. I still feel her,

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moving upon my thigh. I imagine her waking, meeting my gaze. I think, 'I will tell her, then. I will say, "I meant to cheat you. I cannot cheat you now. This was Richard's plot. We can make it ours." ' —We can make it ours, I think; or else, we can give it up entirely. I need only escape from Briar: she can help me do that—she's a thief, and clever. We can make our own secret way to London, find money for ourselves…

So I calculate and plan, while she lies slumbering with her face upon my hand. My heart beats hard again. I am filled, as with colour or light, with a sense of the life we will have, together. Then I also sleep. And in sleeping I suppose I must move away from her—or she must move, from me—and then she must wake, with the day, and rise: for when I open my eyes she has gone, the bed is cool. I hear her in her own room, splashing water. I rise up from my pillow, and my nightgown gapes at my breast: she has undone the ribbons, in the dark. I move my legs. I am wet, still wet, from the sliding and the pressing of her hand. You pearl, she said.

Then she comes, and meets my gaze. My heart leaps within me. She looks away.

I think her only awkward, at first. I think her shy and self-conscious. She goes silently about the room, taking out my petticoats and gown. I stand, so she may wash and dress me. Now she will speak, I think. But, she does not. And when she sees the blush upon my breast, the marks left by her mouth, the dampness between my legs, it seems to me that she shudders. Only then do I begin to grow afraid. She calls me to the glass. I watch her face. It seems queer in reflection, crooked and wrong. She puts the pins to my hair, but keeps her eyes all the time on her own uncertain hands. I think, She is ashamed. So then, I speak.

'What a thick sleep I had,' I say, very softly. 'Didn't I?'

Her eyelids flutter. 'You did,' she answers. 'No dreams.'

'No dreams, save one,' I say. 'But that was a—a sweet one. I think you were in it, Sue…'

She colours; and I watch her rising blush and feel, again, the pressure of her mouth against mine, the drawing of our fierce, imperfect kisses, the pushing of her hand. I meant to cheat her. I cannot cheat her, now. 'I am not what you think,' I will say. 'You think me good. I am not good. But I might, with you, begin to try to be. This was his plot. We can make it ours—'

'In your dream?' she says at last, moving from me. 'I don't think so, miss. Not me. I should say, Mr Rivers. Look! There he is. His cigarette almost smoked. You will miss him—' She falters once; but then goes on, 'You will miss him, if you wait.'

I sit dazed for a moment, as if struck by her hand; then I rise, go lifelessly to the window, watch Richard walk, smoke his cigarette, put back the tumbling hair from his brow. But I keep at the glass, long after he has left the lawn and gone in to my uncle. I would see my face, if the day were dark enough; I see it anyway, though: my hollowing cheek, my lips, too plump, too pink—plumper and pinker than ever now, from the pressing of Sue's mouth. I remember my uncle—' I have touched your lip with poison, Maud' —and Barbara, starting

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away. I remember Mrs Stiles, grinding lavender soap against my tongue, then wiping and wiping her hands upon her apron.

Everything has changed. Nothing has changed, at all. She has put back my flesh; but flesh will close, will seal, will scar and harden. I hear her go to my drawing-room; I watch her sit, cover up her face. I wait, but she does not look—I think she will never look honestly at me, again. I meant to save her. Now I see very clearly what will happen, if I do—if I draw back from Richard's plot. He will go from Briar, with her at his side. Why should she stay? She will go, and I shall be left—to my uncle, to the books, to Mrs Stiles, to some new meek and bruisable girl… I think of my life—of the hours, the minutes, the days that have made it up; of the hours, the minutes and days that stretch before me, still to be lived. I think of how they will be—without Richard, without money, without London, without liberty. Without Sue.

And so you see it is love—not scorn, not malice; only love—that makes me harm her, in the end.

11

We leave, just as we have planned, on the last day of April. Richard's stay is complete. My uncle's prints are mounted and bound: he takes me to view them, as a sort of treat. 'Fine work,' he says. 'You think, Maud? Hmm?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Do you look?'

'Yes, Uncle.'

'Yes. Fine work. I believe I shall send for Hawtrey and Huss. I shall have them come—next week? What do you say? Shall we make an occasion of it?'

I do not answer. I am thinking of the dining-room, the drawing-room— and me, in some other shadowy place, far off. He turns to Richard.

'Rivers,' he says, 'should you like to come back, as a guest, with Hawtrey?'

Richard bows, looks sorry. 'I fear, sir, I shall be occupied elsewhere.'

'Unfortunate. You hear that, Maud? Most unfortunate…'

He unlocks his door. Mr Way and Charles are going about the gallery with Richard's bags. Charles is rubbing his eyes with his sleeve.—'Get on with you!'

says Mr Way savagely, kicking out with his foot. Charles lifts his head, sees us emerging from my uncle's room—sees my uncle, I suppose—and shakes in a sort of convulsion, and runs. My uncle also shakes, then.

'Do you see, Rivers, the torments to which I am exposed? Mr Way, I hope you will catch that boy and whip him!'

'I will, sir,' says Mr Way.

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Richard looks at me, and smiles. I do not smile back. And when, at the steps, he takes my hand, my fingers sit quite nervelessly against his own. 'Good-bye,'

he says. I say nothing. He turns to my uncle: 'Mr Lilly. Farewell to you, sir!'

'A handsome man,' my uncle says, as the trap is drawn from sight. 'Hmm, Maud? What, are you silent? Shan't you like it, to have to return to our solitary ways?'

We go back into the house. Mr Way pulls closed the swollen door, and the hall grows dark. I climb the stairs at my uncle's side, as I once, as a girl, climbed them with Mrs Stiles. How many times, I think, have I mounted them, since then? How many times has my heel struck this spot, that spot. How many slippers, how many strait gowns, how many gloves, have I outgrown or outworn? How many voluptuous words have I silently read?—how many mouthed, for gentlemen?

The stairs, the slippers and gloves, the words, the gentlemen, will all remain, though I escape. Will they? I think again of the rooms of my uncles house: the dining-and drawing-room, the library. I think of the little crescent I once picked out in the paint that covers the library windows: I try to imagine it, eyeless. I remember how once I woke and watched my room seem to gather itself together out of the dark, and thought, I shall never escape! Now I know that I shall But I think that Briar will haunt me, too.—Or else, I will haunt it, while living out some dim and partial life beyond its walls.

I think of the ghost I shall make: a neat, monotonous ghost, walking for ever on soft-soled feet, through a broken house, to the pattern of ancient carpets. But perhaps, after all, I am a ghost already. For I go to Sue and she shows me the gowns and linens she means for us to take, the jewels she means to shine, the bags she will fill; but she does it all without meeting my gaze; and I watch, and say nothing. I am more aware of her hands than of the objects she takes up; feel the stir of her breath, see the movement of her lip, but her words slip from my memory the moment she has said them. At last she has nothing more to show. We must only wait. We take our lunch. We walk to my mother's grave. I stare at the stone, feeling nothing. The day is mild, and damp: our shoes, as we walk, press dew from the springing green earth and mark our gowns with streaks of mud.

I have surrendered myself to Richard's plan, as I once gave myself to my uncle. The plot, the flight—they seem fired, now, not so much by my wants as by his. I am empty of want. I sit at my supper, I eat, I read; I return to Sue and let her dress me as she likes, take wine when she offers it, stand at the window at her side. She moves fretfully, from foot to foot. 'Look at the moon,' she says softly, 'how bright it is! Look at the shadows on the grass.—What time is it? Not eleven, yet?—To think of Mr Rivers, somewhere upon the water, now …

There is only one thing I mean to do, before I go: one deed—one terrible deed—the vision of which has risen, to goad and console me, through all the bitten-down rages, the dark and uneasy sleeps, of my life at Briar; and now, as the hour of our flight nears, as the house falls silent, still, unsuspecting, I do it. Sue leaves me, to look over our bags. I hear her, unfastening buckles.— That is all I wait for.

I go stealthily from the room. I know my way, I do not need a lamp, and my dark dress hides me. I go to the head of the stairs, cross quickly the broken carpets of moonlight that the windows there throw upon the floor. Then I pause,

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and listen. Silence. So then I go on, into the corridor which faces mine, along a path which is the mirror of the path that has led from my own rooms. At the first door I pause again, and listen again, to be sure that all is still within. This is the door to my uncle's rooms. I have never entered here, before. But, as I guess, the handle and hinges are kept greased, and turn without a sound. The rug is a thick one, and makes a whisper of my step.

His drawing-room is even darker, and seems smaller, than mine: he has hangings upon the walls, and more book-presses. I don't look at them. I go to his dressing-room door, put my ear to the wood; take the handle and turn it. One inch, two inches, three.—I hold my breath, my hand upon my heart. No sound. I push the door further, stand and listen again. If he stirs, I will turn and go. Does he move? For a second there is nothing. Still I wait, uncertain. Then comes the soft, even rasp of his breathing.

He has his bed-curtains pulled close but keeps a light, as I do, upon a table: this seems curious to me, I should never have supposed him to be nervous of the dark. But the dim light helps me. Without moving from my place beside the door, I look about me; and at last see the two things I have come to take. On his dressing-stand, beside his jug of water: his watch-chain with, upon it, the key to his library, bound in faded velvet; and his razor.

I go quickly and take them up—the chain uncurling softly, I feel it slither against my glove. If it should fall—! It does not fall. The door-key swings like a pendulum. The razor is heavier than I expect, the blade is free of its clasp, at an angle, showing its edge. I pull it a little freer, and turn it to the light: it must be sharp, for what I want it for. I think it is sharp enough. I lift my head. In the glass above the mantel, picked out against the shadows of the room, I see myself—my hands: in one a key, in the other a blade. I might pass for a girl in an allegory. Confidence Abused.

Behind me, the drapes to my uncle's bed do not quite meet. In the space between them a shaft of light—so weak it is hardly light, but rather a lessening of darkness—leads to his face. I have never seen him sleep before. In form he seems slight, like a child. The blanket is drawn to his chin, uncreased, pulled tight. His lips let out his breath in a puff. He is dreaming—black-letter dreams, perhaps, or pica, morocco, calf. He is counting spines. His spectacles sit neatly, as if with folded arms, on the table beside his head. Beneath the lashes of one of his soft eyes there is a gleaming line of moisture. The razor is warming in my hand…

But this is not that kind of story. Not yet. I stand and watch him sleep for almost a minute; and then I leave him. I go as I have come—carefully, silently. I go to the stairs, and from there to the library, and once inside that room I lock the door at my back and light a lamp. My heart is beating hardest, now. I am queasy with fear and anticipation. But time is racing, and I cannot wait. I cross to my uncle's shelves and unfasten the glass before the presses. I begin with The Curtain Drawn Up, the book he gave me first: I take it, and open it, and set it upon his desk. Then I lift the razor, grip it tight, and fully unclasp it. The blade is stiff, but springs the last inch. It is its nature to cut, after all. Still, it is hard—it is terribly hard, I almost cannot do it—to put the metal for the first time to the neat and naked paper. I am almost afraid the book will shriek, and so discover me. But it does not shriek. Rather, it sighs, as if in

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longing for its own laceration; and when I hear that, my cuts become swifter and more true.

When I return to Sue she is at the window, wringing her hands. Midnight has sounded. She supposed me lost. But she is too relieved to scold me. 'Here's your cloak,' she says. 'Fasten it up now, quick. Take your bag.—Not that one, that one's too heavy for you. Now, we must go.' She thinks me nervous. She puts her finger to my mouth. She says, 'Be steady.' Then she takes my hand and leads me through the house.

Soft as a thief, she goes. She tells me where I may walk. She does not know that I have recently stood, light as a shadow, and watched my uncle sleep. But then, we go by the servants' way, and the naked passages and stairs are strange to me, all this part of the house is strange to me. She keeps her hand in mine until we reach the basement door. Then she sets down her bag, so she may smear the key and the bolts with grease, to make them turn. She catches my eye and winks, like a boy. My heart aches in my breast.

Then the door is opened and she takes me into the night; and the park is changed, the house seems queer—for of course, I have never before seen it at such an hour as this, I have only stood at my window and gazed out. If I stood there now, would I see myself running, Sue tugging my hand? Would I seem so bleached of depth and colour, like the lawn, the trees, the stones and stumps of ivy? For a second I hesitate, turn and watch the glass, quite sure that, if I only wait, I will see my face. Then I look at the other windows. Will no-one wake, and come, and call me back?

No-one wakes, no-one calls. Sue pulls at my hand again, and I turn and follow. I have the key to the gate in the wall: when we are through and the lock is fast again I let it fall among the rushes. The sky is clear. We stand in shadow, saying nothing—two Thisbes, awaiting a Pyramus. The moon makes the river half silver, half deepest black.

He keeps to the black part. The boat sits low upon the water—a dark-hulled boat, slender, rising at the prow. The dark boat of my dreams. I watch it come, feel Sue's hand turn in mine; then step from her, take the rope he casts, let him guide me to my seat, unresisting. She comes beside me, staggering, her balance all gone. He braces the boat against the bank with a single oar, and as she sits, we turn, and the current takes us.

No-one speaks. No-one moves, save Richard as he rows. We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells.

What follows? I know that the journey upon the river is a smooth one: that I should like to keep upon the boat, but am made to leave it and mount a horse. I should be afraid of the horse, at any other time; but I sit lifelessly upon it now, letting it bear me—as, I think, I would let it throw me, if it chose to. I remember the church of flint, the stalks of honesty, my own white gloves my hand, that is bared then passed from one set of fingers to another, then bruised by the thrusting of a ring. I am made to say certain words, that I have now forgotten. I remember the minister, in a surplice smudged with grey. I do not recall his face. I know that Richard kisses me. I remember a book, the handling of a pen, the

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writing of my name. I do not remember the walk from the church: what I recall next is a room, Sue loosening my gown; and then a pillow, coarse against my cheek; a blanket, coarser; and weeping. My hand is bare and has that ring upon it, still. Sue's fingers slip from mine. 'You must be different now,' she says, and I turn my face.

When I look again, she has left me. In her place stands Richard. He keeps for a second before the door, his eyes on mine; then he lets out his breath, puts the back of his hand to his mouth to stifle laughter.

'Oh, Maud,' he says quietly, shaking his head. He wipes his beard and lips.

'Our wedding-night,' he says; and laughs again.

I watch him and do not speak, the blankets pulled high before my breast. I am sober, now. I am quite awake. When he falls quiet, I hear the house beyond him: the stairs expand, throw off the pressure of his step. A mouse, or bird, moves in the space above the rafters. The sounds are wrong. The thought must show in my face.

'It's queer for you, here,' he says, coming closer to me. 'Don't mind it. You shall be at London soon. There's more life there. Think of that.' I say nothing.

'Will you speak? Hmm, Maud? Come, you needn't be fey; not now, with me. Our wedding-night, Maud!' He has come to my side. He raises his hand and grips the head-board above my pillow and shakes it, hard, until the legs of the bed lurch and grind against the floor.

I close my eyes. The shuddering continues another moment, then the bed grows still. But he keeps his arm above me, and I feel him watching. I feel the bulk of him—seem to see the darkness of him, even through my eyelids. I sense him change. The mouse or bird still moves in the ceiling of the room, and I think he puts back his head, to follow its path. Then the house falls quiet, and he studies me again.

And then his breath comes, quick, against my cheek. He has blown in my face. I open my eyes. 'Hey,' he says softly. His look is strange. 'Don't say you're afraid.' He swallows. Then he brings back his arm from the head-board, slowly. I flinch, thinking he might strike me. But he does not do that. His gaze moves over my face, then settles at the hollow of my throat. He looks, as if fascinated.

'How fast your heart beats,' he whispers. He lowers his hand, as if he means to test, with his finger, the racing of my blood.

'Touch it,' I say. 'Touch it, and die. I have poison in me.'

His hand stops, an inch from my throat. I hold his gaze, not blinking. He straightens. His mouth gives a twitch, then curls in scorn.

'Did you think I wanted you?' he says. 'Did you?' He almost hisses the words—for of course, he cannot speak too loudly, in case Sue should hear. He moves away, agitatedly smoothing his hair behind his ears. A bag lies in his path, and he kicks it. 'God damn it,' he says. He takes off his coat, then tugs at the link in a cuff, begins to work savagely at one of his sleeves. 'Must you stare so?' he says, as he bares his arm. 'Haven't I already told you, you are safe? If you think I am any gladder than you, to be married—' He comes back to the bed. 'I must act glad, however,' he says moodily. 'And this is a part of what passes for gladness, in marriage. Had you forgotten?'

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He has drawn back the blanket, exposing the sheet that covers the mattress, at the level of my hips. 'Move over,' he says. I do. He sits, and awkwardly turns. He reaches into the pocket of his trousers and draws something out. A penknife. I see it, and think at once of my uncle's razor. It was in a different life, however, that I went stealthily through that sleeping house, cut the pages of books. Now I watch as Richard puts his nail to the groove of the knife and eases free the blade. It is spotted black. He looks distastefully at it, then lays it against his arm. But he does it uncertainly, flinching when the metal touches. Then he lowers the knife.

'God damn it,' he says again. He smooths his whiskers, his hair. He catches my eye. 'Don't look, so uselessly. Have you no blood about you, to save me the pain? None of those— courses, that women suffer?' I say nothing. His mouth twists again. 'Well, that is like you. I should have thought that, being obliged to bleed, you might as well bleed to some advantage; but, no…'

'Do you mean,' I say, 'to insult me, in every possible way?'

'Be quiet,' he answers. We are still speaking in whispers. 'This is for both our good. I don't see you offering up your arm to the knife.' At once, I offer it. He waves it away. 'No, no,' he says. 'I shall do it, in a moment.' He draws in his breath, moves the blade further down his arm, rests it in one of the creases at the base of his palm, where the flesh is hairless. He pauses again, takes another breath; slices, quickly. 'Good Christ!' he says, wincing. A little blood springs to the cut—it seems dark, in the candle-light, upon the white heel of his hand. He lets it fall to the bed. There is not much of it. He presses with his thumb at the skin of his wrist and palm, and then it falls faster. He does not catch my eye. After a moment, however, he says quietly: 'Do you suppose that enough?'

I study his face. 'Don't you know?'

'No, I do not know.'

'But—'

'But what?' He blinks. 'You mean Agnes, I suppose. Don't flatter her. There are more ways of shaming a virtuous girl, than that one. You ought to know.'

The blood still feebly runs. He curses. I think of Agnes, showing me her red and swollen mouth. I turn away from him, in a sort of sickness. 'Come, Maud,'

he says then, 'tell me before I fall in a swoon. You must have read of such things. I am sure your uncle must have some entry on it in his damn Index—doesn't he? Maud?'

I look again, reluctantly, at the spreading drops of blood; and I nod. As a final gesture he puts his wrist to them, and smears them. Then he frowns at his cut. His cheek is quite white. He makes a face.

'How ill a man may grow,' he says, 'from the sight of the spilling of a little of his own blood. What monsters you females must be, to endure this, month upon month. No wonder you are prone to madness. See how the flesh parts?' He shows me his hand. 'I think after all I cut too deep. That was your fault, provoking me. Have you brandy? I think a little brandy would restore me.'

He has drawn out his handkerchief, and now presses it to his arm. I say, 'I have no brandy.'

'No brandy. What have you, then? Some draught or other? Come, I see by your face that you do.' He looks about him. 'Where is it kept?'

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I hesitate; but now he has named it, the desire for drops begins to make its creeping way about my heart and limbs. 'In my leather bag,' I say. He brings the bottle to me, draws out its stopper, puts his nose to it, grimaces. 'Bring me a glass, also,' I say. He finds a cup, adds a little dusty water.

'Not like that, for me,' he says, as I let the medicine slip. 'That will serve tor you. I want it quicker.' He takes the bottle from me, uncovers his cut, lets a single drop fall into the parted flesh. It stings. He winces. Where it runs, he licks it. Then he sighs, half closing his eyes, watching me as I drink then shiver then lean back upon my pillow, the cup at my breast.

At length, he smiles. He laughs. ' "The Fashionable Couple on their WeddingNight," ' he says. 'They would write a column on us, in the London papers.'

I shiver again, draw the blankets higher; the sheet falls, covering the smears of blood. I reach for the bottle. He reaches it first, however, and puts it out of my grasp.

'No, no,' he says. 'Not while you keep so contrary. I shall have it, tonight.' He puts it in his pocket, and I am too weary to try to take it from him. He stands and yawns, wipes his face, rubs hard at his eyes. 'How tired I am!' he says. 'It is past three o'clock, do you know?' I say nothing, and he shrugs. But he lingers at the foot of the bed, looking down, in a hesitating manner, at the place at my side; then he sees my face, and pretends to shudder.

'I should not be astonished, after all,' he says, 'to wake to the grip of your fingers at my throat. No, I shall not risk it.'

He steps to the fire, wets his thumb and finger upon his tongue, puts out the candle; then he sits in a huddle in the arm-chair and makes a blanket of his coat. He swears against the cold, the pose, the angles of the chair, for perhaps a minute. But he sleeps, sooner than I do.

And when he does, I rise, go quickly to the window, put the curtain back. The moon is still bright, and I don't want to lie in darkness. But after all, every surface that takes up the silver light is strange to me; and when once I reach, to put my fingers to some mark upon the wall, the mark and the wall in taking my touch seem only to grow stranger. My cloak and gown and linen are closed in the press. My bags are shut. I look, and look, for something of mine; and see only at last, in the shadow of the wash-hand stand, my shoes. I go to them, and stoop, and place my hands upon them. Then I draw back and almost straighten; then touch them again.

Then I lie in the bed, and listen hard for the sounds I am used to—for bells and growling levers. There are only those meaningless noises—the yawning boards, the creeping bird or mouse. I put back my head and gaze at the wall behind me. Beyond it lies Sue. If she turned in her bed, if she said my name, I think I would hear it. She might make any sound, any at all—I would catch it, I am certain I would.

She makes no sound. Richard shifts in his chair. The moonlight creeps across the floor. In time, I sleep. I sleep and dream of Briar. But the passages of the house are not as I recall them. I am late for my uncle, and lost.

She comes each morning, after that, to wash me, to dress me, to set food before me, to take away my untouched plate; but, as in the last of our days at

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Briar, she never meets my gaze. The room is small. She sits near me, but rarely do we speak. She sews. I play at cards—the two of hearts with the crease of my heel upon it, rough beneath my naked finger. Richard keeps all day from the room. At night, he curses. He curses the filthy lanes of the country, that muddy his boots. He curses my silence, my strangeness. He curses the wait. Above all, he curses the angular arm-chair.

'See here,' he says, 'my shoulder. You see it? It is rising from its socket—it is quite thrown out. I shall be deformed, in a week. As for these creases—' He angrily smooths his trousers. 'I should have brought Charles, after all. At this rate I shall arrive at London only to be laughed off its streets.'

London, I think. The word means nothing to me now.

He rides out, every other day, for news of my uncle. He smokes so many cigarettes the stain on his scorched forefinger spreads to the finger beside it. Now and then he lets me take a dose of my draught; but he always keeps hold of the bottle.

'Very good,' he says, watching me drink. 'Not much longer, now. Why, how thin and pale you've grown!—and Sue grows sleeker by the hour, like one of Mother Cream's black-faced sows. Get her into your best gown tomorrow, will you?'

I do. I will do anything, now, to bring an end to our long wait. I will pretend fear, and nervousness, and weeping, while he leans to caress or chide me. I will do it, not looking at Sue—or else, looking at her slyly, desperately, to see if she colours or seems ashamed. She never does. Her hands, that I remember sliding upon me, pressing, turning, opening me up—her hands, when they touch me now, are perfectly lifeless and white. Her face is closed. She only waits, as we do, for the coming of the doctors.

We wait—I cannot say how long. Two weeks, or three. At last: 'They come tomorrow,' Richard tells me one night; and then, next morning: They come today. You remember?'

I have woken from terrible dreams.

'I cannot see them,' I say. 'You must send them back. They must come another time.'

'Don't be tiresome, Maud.'

He stands and dresses, fastening his collar, his neck-tie. His coat lies neatly on the bed.

'I won't see them!' I say.

'You will,' he answers; 'for in seeing them you bring this thing to completion. You hate it here. Now is our time to leave.'

'I am too nervous.'

He does not answer. He turns, to raise a brush to his head. I lean and seize his coat—find the pocket, the bottle of drops—but he sees, comes quickly to me and plucks it from my hand.

'Oh, no,' he says, as he does it. 'I won't have you half in a dream—or risk you muddling the dose, and so spoiling everything! Oh, no. You must be quite clear in your mind.'

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He returns the bottle to the pocket. When I reach again, he dodges.

'Let me have it,' I say. 'Richard, let me have it. One drop only, I swear.' My lips jump about the words. He shakes his head, wipes at the nap of the coat to remove the impression of my fingers.

'Not yet,' he says. 'Be good. Work for it.'

'I cannot! I shan't be calm, without a dose of it.'

'You shall try, for my sake. For our sake, Maud.'

'Damn you!'

'Yes, yes, damn us all, damn us all.' He sighs; then returns to the brushing of his hair. When after a moment I sink back, he catches my eye.

'Why throw such a tantrum, hey?' he says, almost kindly. And then: 'You are calmer, now? Very good. You know what to do, when they see you? Have Sue make you neat, no more than that. Be modest. Weep if you must, a little. You are sure what to say?'

I am, despite myself; for we have planned this, many times. I wait, then nod.

'Of course,' he says. He pats at his pocket, at the bottle of drops. 'Think of London,' he says. 'There are druggists on every street corner, there.'

My mouth trembles in scorn. 'You think,' I say, 'I shall still want my medicine, in London?'

The words sound weak, even to my ears. He turns his head, saying nothing, perhaps suppressing a smile. Then he takes up his pen-knife and stands at the fire and cleans his nails—now and then giving a flick of the blade, to cast slivers of dirt, fastidiously, into the flames.

He takes them first to talk with Sue. Of course, they suppose her his wife, turned mad, thinking herself a servant, speaking in the manner of a maid, keeping to a maid's room. I hear the creaking of the stairs and floorboards beneath their boots. I hear their voices—low, monotonous—but not their words. Sue's voice I do not hear at all. I sit upon the bed until they come, and then I stand and curtsey.

'Susan,' says Richard quietly. 'My wife's maid.'

They nod. I say nothing, yet. But I think my look must be strange. I see them studying me. Richard also watches. Then he comes close.

'A faithful girl," he says to the doctors. 'Her strength has been sadly overtaxed, these past two weeks.' He makes me walk from the bed to the armchair, puts me in the light of the window. 'Sit here,' he says gently, 'in your mistress's chair. Be calm, now. These gentlemen only wish to ask you a number of trifling questions. You must answer them honestly.'

He presses my hand. I think he does it to reassure or to warn me; then I reel his fingers close about one of mine. I still wear my wedding-ring. He draws it free and holds it, hidden, against his palm.

Very good,' says one of the doctors, more satisfied now. The other makes notes in a book. I watch him turn a page and, suddenly, long for paper. 'Very good. We have seen your mistress. You do well to think of her comfort and health for—I am sorry to tell you this—we fear she is ill. Very ill indeed. You

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know she believes her name to be your name, her history one that resembles yours? You know that?'

Richard watches.

'Yes, sir,' I say, in a whisper.

'And your name is Susan Smith?'

'Yes, sir.'

'And you were maid to Mrs Rivers—Miss Lilly, as was—in her uncle's house, of Briar, before her marriage?'

I nod.

'And before that—where was your place? Not with a family named Dunraven, at the supposed address of Whelk Street, Mayfair?'

'No, sir. I never heard of them. They are all Mrs Rivers's fancy.'

I speak, as a servant might. And I name, reluctantly, some other house and family—some family of Richard's acquaintance, who might be relied on to provide the history we need, if the doctors think to seek them out. We do not think they will, however.

The doctor nods again. 'And Mrs Rivers,' he says. 'You speak of her "fancy". When did such fancies begin?'

I swallow. 'Mrs Rivers has often seemed strange,' I say quietly. 'The servants at Briar would speak of her as of a lady not quite right, in the brain. I believe her mother was mad, sir.'

'Now, now,' says Richard smoothly, interrupting. 'The doctors don't want to hear the gossip of servants. Go on with your observations, only.'

'Yes, sir,' I say. I gaze at the floor. The boards are scuffed, there are splinters rising from the wood, thick as needles.

'And Mrs Rivers's marriage,' says the doctor. 'How did that affect her?'

'It was that, sir,' I say, 'which made the change in her. Before that time, she had seemed to love Mr Rivers; and we had all at Briar supposed his care, which was'—I catch Richard's eye—'so good, sir!—we had all supposed it would lift her out of herself. Then, since her wedding-night, she has started up very queer…'

The doctor looks at his colleague. 'You hear,' he says, 'how well the account matches Mrs Rivers's own? It is quite remarkable!—as if, in making a burden of her life, she seeks to hand that burden to another, better able to bear it. She has made a fiction of herself!' He returns to me. 'A fiction, indeed,' he says thoughtfully. 'Tell me this, Miss Smith: does your mistress care for books? for reading?'

I meet his gaze, but my throat seems to close, or be splintered, like the boards on the floor. I cannot answer. Richard speaks in my behalf. 'My wife,' he says,

'was born to a literary life. Her uncle, who raised her, is a man dedicated to the pursuit of learning, and saw to her education as he might have seen to a son's. Mrs Rivers's first passion was books.'

'There you have it!' says the doctor. 'Her uncle, an admirable gentleman I don't doubt. But the over-exposure of girls to literature— The founding of women's colleges—' His brow is sleek with sweat. 'We are raising a nation of brain-cultured women. Your wife's distress, I'm afraid to say, is part of a wider malaise. I fear for the future of our race, Mr Rivers, I may tell you now. And her wedding-night, you say, the start of this most recent bout of insanity? Could

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that'—he drops his voice meaningfully, and exchanges a glance with the doctor who writes—'be plainer?' He taps at his lip. 'I saw how she shrank from my touch, when I felt for the pulse at her wrist. I noted, too, that she wears no marriage ring.'

Richard starts into life at the words, and pretends to draw something from his pocket. They say fortune favours villains.

'Here it is,' he says gravely, holding out the yellow band. 'She put it from her, with a curse.—For she speaks like a servant now, and thinks nothing of mouthing filthy words. God knows where she learned them!' He bites at his lip.

'You might imagine the sensations that produced, sir, in my breast.' He puts his hand to his eyes, and sits heavily upon the bed; then rises, as if in horror. 'This bed!' he says hoarsely. 'Our marriage-bed, I thought it. To think my wife would rather the room of a servant, a pallet of straw—!' He shudders. That's enough, I think. No more. But he is a man in love with his own roguery.

'A wretched case,' says the doctor. 'But we will work on your wife, you may be sure, to shake her of her unnatural fancy—'

Unnatural?' says Richard. He shudders again. His look grows strange. 'Ah sir,' he says, 'you don't know all. There is something else. I had hoped to keep it from you. I feel now, I cannot.'

'Indeed?' says the doctor. The other pauses, his pencil raised. Richard wets his mouth; and all at once I know what he means to say, and quickly turn my face to his. He marks it. He speaks, before I can.

'Susan,' he says, 'you do well to feel shame in behalf of your mistress. You need feel none, however, in behalf of yourself. No guilt attaches to you. You did nothing to invite or encourage the gross attentions my wife, in her madness, attempted to force on you—'

He bites at his hand. The doctors stare, then turn to gaze at me.

'Miss Smith,' says the first, leaning closer, 'is this true?'

I think of Sue. I think of her, not as she must be now, in the room beyond the wall—satisfied to have betrayed me, glad to suppose herself about to return at last to her home, the dark thieves' den, in London. I think of her holding herself above me, her hair let down, You pearl…

'Miss Smith?'

I have begun to weep.

'Surely,' says Richard, coming to me, putting his hand heavily upon my shoulder, 'surely these tears speak for themselves? Do we need to name the unhappy passion? Must we oblige Miss Smith to rehearse the words, the artful poses—the caresses—to which my distracted wife has made her subject? Aren't we gentlemen?'

'Of course,' says the doctor quickly, moving back. 'Of course. Miss Smith, your grief does you credit. You need not fear for your safety, now. You need not fear for the safety of your mistress. Her care will soon be our concern, not yours. Then we shall keep her, and cure her of all her ills. Mr Rivers, you understand—

a case such as this—the treatment may well be a lengthy one… ?'

They rise. They have brought papers, and look for a surface on which to put them out. Richard clears the dressing-table of brushes and pins and they lay them there, then sign: a paper each. I don't watch them do it, but hear the grinding of the pen. I hear them moving together, to shake each others hands.

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The staircase thunders as they go down. I keep in my seat beside the window. Richard stands in the path to the house while they drive off. Then he comes back. He closes the door. He steps to me and tosses the wedding-ring into my lap. He rubs his hands together and almost capers.

'You devil,' I say, without passion, wiping the tears from my cheek. He snorts. He moves to the back of my chair and puts his hands to my head, one hand to either side of my face; then tilts it back until our gazes meet. 'Look at me,' he says, 'and tell me, honestly, that you don't admire me.'

'I hate you.'

'Hate yourself, then. We're alike, you and I. More alike than you know. You think the world ought to love us, for the kinks in the fibres of our hearts? The world scorns us. Thank God it does! There was never a profit to be got from love; from scorn, however, you may twist riches, as filthy water may be wrung from a cloth. You know it is true. You are like me. I say it again: hate me, hate yourself.'

His hands are warm upon my face, at least. I close my eyes. I say, 'I do.'

Then Sue comes from her room, to knock upon our door. He keeps his pose, but calls for her to enter.

'Look here,' he says when she does, his voice quite changed, 'at your mistress. Don't you think her eyes a little brighter… ?'

We leave next day, for the madhouse.

She comes to dress me, for the final time.

'Thank you, Sue,' I say, in the old soft way, each time she hooks a button or draws a lace. I wear, still, the gown in which I left Briar, that is spotted with mud and river-water. She wears my gown of silk—blue silk, against which the white of her wrists and throat is turned to the colour of cream, and the browns or her hair and eyes are made rich. She has grown handsome. She moves about the room, taking up my linen, my shoes, my brushes and pins, and putting them carefully in bags. Two bags, there are: one destined for London, the other for the madhouse—the first, as she supposes, for herself; the second for me. It is hard to watch her make her choices—to see her frown over a petticoat, a pair of stockings or shoes, to know she is thinking, These will surely be good enough for mad people and doctors. This she ought to take, in case the nights are cool. Now, that and those (the bottle of drops, my gloves) she must have.—I move them, when she leaves me, and place them deep in the other bag. And one other thing I put with them, that she does not know I keep: the silver thimble, from the sewing-box at Briar, with which she smoothed my pointed tooth.

The coach comes, sooner than I think it will. 'Thank God,' says Richard. He carries his hat. He is too tall for this low and tilting house: when we step outside, he stretches. I have kept to my room so long, however, the day feels vast to me. I

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walk with Sue's arm gripped in mine, and at the door of the coach, when I must give it up—give it up, for ever!—I think I hesitate.

'Now, now,' says Richard, taking my hand from her. 'No time for sentiment.'

Then we drive. I feel it, as more than a matter of galloping horses and turning wheels. It is like an undoing of my first journey, with Mrs Stiles, from the madhouse to Briar: I put my face to the window as the carriage slows, and almost expect to see the house and the mothers I was snatched from. I should remember them still, I know it. But, that house was large. This one is smaller, and lighter. It has rooms for female lunatics, only. That house was set in bare earth. This one has a bed of flowers beside its door—tall flowers, with tips like spikes.

I fall back in my seat. Richard catches my eye.

'Don't be afraid,' he says.

Then they take her. He helps her into their hands, and stands before me at the door, looking out.

'Wait,' I hear her say. 'What are you doing?' Then: 'Gentlemen! Gentlemen!'—

an odd and formal phrase.

The doctors speak in soothing tones, until she begins to curse; then their voices grow hard. Richard draws back. The floor of the carriage tilts, the doorway rises, and I see her—the two men's hands upon her arms, a nurse gripping her waist. Her cloak is falling from her shoulders, her hat is tilted, her hair is tearing from its pins. Her face is red and white. Her look is wild, already. Her eyes are fixed on mine. I sit like a stone, until Richard takes my arm and presses, hard, upon my wrist.

'Speak,' he whispers, 'damn you.' Then I sing out, clear, mechanically: 'Oh!

My own poor mistress!' Her brown eyes—wide—with that darker fleck. Her tumbling hair. 'Oh! Oh! My heart is breaking!'

The cry seems to ring about the coach, even after Richard has swung closed the door and the driver whipped the horse into life and turned us. We do not speak. Beside Richard's head is a lozenge-shaped window of milky glass, and for a moment I see her again: still struggling, lifting her arm to point or reach—

Then the road makes a dip. There come trees. I take off my wedding-ring and throw it to the floor. I find, in my bag, a pair of gloves, and draw them on. Richard watches my trembling hands.

'Well—' he says.

'Don't speak to me,' I say, almost spitting the words. 'If you speak to me, I shall kill you.'

He blinks, and attempts to smile. But his mouth moves strangely and his face, behind his beard, is perfectly white. He folds his arms. He sits, first one way and then another. He crosses and uncrosses his legs. At length he takes a cigarette from his pocket, and a match, and tries to draw down the carriage window. It will not come. His hands are damp, grow damper, and finally slide upon the glass. 'Damn this!' he cries then. He rises, staggers, beats upon the ceiling for the driver to stop the horse, then fumbles with the key. We have gone no more than a mile or two, but he jumps to the ground and paces, coughs. He puts his hand to the lock of springing hair at his brow, many times. I watch him.

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'How like a villain,' I say, when he takes his seat again, 'you are now.'

'And how like a lady, you!' he answers, with a sneer.

Then he turns his face from me, rests his head against the jolting cushion; and pretends, with twitching eye-lids, to sleep.

My own eyes stay open. I gaze through the lozenge of glass at the road we have travelled—a winding red road, made cloudy by dust, like a thread of blood escaping from my heart.

We make part of our journey like this, but then must give up the asylum carriage and take a train. I have never ridden a train before. We wait at a country station. We wait at an inn, since Richard is still afraid that my uncle will have sent out men to watch for us. He has the landlord put us in a private room and bring me tea and bread-and-butter. I will not look at the tray. The tea grows brown and cool, the bread curls. He stands at the fire and rattles the coins in his pocket, then bursts out: 'God damn you, do you think I take food for you, for free?' He eats the bread-and-butter himself. 'I hope I see my money soon,' he says. 'God knows I need it, after three months with you and your uncle, doing what he calls a gentleman's labour, receiving wages that would barely keep a proper gentleman in cuffs. Where's that damn porter? How much do they mean to swindle me of for our tickets, I wonder?'

At last a boy appears to fetch us and take our bags. We stand on the station platform and study the rails. They shine, as if polished. In time they begin to purr, and then—unpleasantly, like nerves in failing teeth—to hum. The hum becomes a shriek. Then the train comes hurtling about the track, a plume of smoke at its head, its many doors unfolding. I keep my veil about my face. Richard hands a coin to the guard, saying easily: 'You'll see to it, perhaps, that my wife and I are kept quite private, till London?' The guard says he will; and when Richard comes and takes his place in the coach across from me he is more peevish than ever.

'That I must pay a man to think me lewd, so I may sit chastely, with my own little virgin of a wife! Let me tell you now, I am keeping a separate account of the costs of this journey, to charge against your share.'

I say nothing. The train has shuddered, as if beaten with hammers, and now begins to roll upon its tracks. I feel the growing speed of it, and grip the hanging strap of leather until my hand cramps and blisters in its glove. So the journey proceeds. It seems to me that we must cross vast distances of space.—For you will understand that my sense of distance and space is rather strange. We stop at a village of red-bricked houses, and then at another, very similar; and then at a third, rather larger. At every station there is what seems to me a press of people clamouring to board, the thud and shake of slamming doors. I am afraid the crowds will overburden the train—perhaps overturn it. I think, I deserve to be crushed in the wreck of a train; and almost hope they do.

They do not. The engine speeds us onward, then slows, and again there are streets and the spires of churches—more streets and spires than I have yet seen; more houses, and between them a steady traffic of cattle and vehicles and people. London! I think, with a lurch of my heart. But Richard studies me as I

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gaze, and smiles unpleasantly. 'Your natural home,' he says. We stop at the station and I see the name of it: MAIDENHEAD.

Though we have come so swiftly we have travelled no more than twenty miles, and have another thirty to go. I sit, still gripping the strap, leaning close to the glass; but the station is filled with men and women—the women in groups, the men idly walking; and from them I shrink. Soon the train gives a hiss, and gathers its bulk, and shudders back into terrible life. We leave the streets of Maidenhead. We pass through trees. Beyond the trees there are open parklands, and houses—some as great as my uncle's, some greater. Here and there are cottages with pens of pigs, with gardens set with broken sticks for climbing beans, and hung with lines of laundry. Where the lines are full there is laundry hung from windows, from trees, on bushes, on chairs, between the shafts of broken carts—laundry everywhere, drooping and yellow. I keep my pose and watch it all. Look, Maud, I think. Here is your future. Here's all your liberty, unfolding like a bolt of cloth…

I wonder if Sue is very much injured. I wonder what kind of place they have her in, now.

Richard tries to see beyond my veil. 'You're not weeping, are you?' he says.

'Come on, don't trouble over it still.'

I say, 'Don't look at me.'

'Should you rather be back at Briar, with the books? You know you should not. You know you have wanted this. You'll forget, soon, the manner in which you got it. Believe me, I know these things. You must only be patient. We must both be patient now. We have many weeks to pass together, before the fortune becomes ours. I am sorry I spoke harshly, before. Come, Maud. We shall be at London, soon. Things will seem different to you there, I assure you…" I do not answer. At last, with a curse, he gives it up. The day is darkening now—or rather, the sky is darkening, as we draw close to the city. There come streaks of soot upon the glass. The landscape is slowly growing meaner. The cottages have begun to be replaced by wooden dwellings, some with broken windows and boards. The gardens are giving way to patches of weed; soon the weed gives way to ditches, the ditches to dark canals, to dreary wastes of road, to mounds of stones or soil or ashes. Still, Even ashes, I think, are a part of your freedom—and I feel, despite myself, the kindling in me of a sort of excitement. But then, the excitement becomes unease. I have always supposed London a place, like a house in a park, with walls: I've imagined it rising, straight and clean and solid. I have not supposed it would sprawl so brokenly, through villages and suburbs. I've believed it complete: but now, as I watch, there come stretches of wet red land, and gaping trenches; now come half-built houses, and half-built churches, with glassless windows and slateless roofs and jutting spars of wood, naked as bones.

Now there are so many smuts upon the glass they show like faults in the fabric of my veil. The train begins to rise. I don't like the sensation. We begin to cross streets—grey streets, black streets—so many monotonous streets, I think I shall never be able to tell them apart! Such a chaos of doors and windows, of roofs and chimneys, of horses and coaches and men and women! Such a muddle of hoardings and garish signs: SPANISH BLINDS.—LEAD COFFINS.—OIL

TALLOW & COTTON WASTE. Words, everywhere. Words, six-feet high. Words, shrieking and bellowing: LEATHER AND GRINDERY.—SHOP TO LET.—

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BROUGHAMS & NEAT CARRIAGES.—PAPER-STAINERS.—SUPPORTED

ENTIRELY.—TO LET!—TO LET!—BY VOLUNTARY SUBSCRIPTION.—

There are words, all over the face of London. I see them, and cover my eyes. When I look again we have sunk: brick walls, thick with soot, have risen about the train and cast the coach in gloom. Then comes a great, vast, vaulting roof of tarnished glass, hung about with threads of smoke and steam and fluttering birds. We shudder to a frightful halt. There is the shrieking of other engines, a thudding of doors, the pressing passage—it seems to me—of a thousand, thousand people.

'Paddington terminus,' says Richard. 'Come on.'

He moves and speaks more quickly here. He is changed. He does not look at me—I wish he would, now. He finds a man to take our bags. We stand in a line of people—a queue, I know the word—and wait for a carriage—a hackney, I know that word also, from my uncle's books. One may kiss in a hackney; one may take any kind of liberty with one's lover; one tells one's driver to go about the Regent's Park. I know London. London is a city of opportunities fulfilled. This place, of jostling and clamour, I do not know. It is thick with purposes I do not understand. It is marked with words, but I cannot read it. The regularity, the numberless repetition, of brick, of house, of street, of person— of dress, and feature, and expression—stuns and exhausts me. I stand at Richard's side and keep my arm in his. If he should leave me—! A whistle is blown and men, in dark suits—ordinary men, gentlemen—pass by us, running. We take our place in the hackney at last, and are jerked out of the terminus into choked and filthy roads. Richard feels me tense. 'Are you startled, by the streets?' he says. 'We must pass through worse, I'm afraid. What did you expect? This is the city, where respectable men live side by side with squalor. Don't mind it. Don't mind it at all. We are going to your new home.'

'To our house,' I say. I think: There, with the doors and windows shut, I will grow calm. I will bathe, I will rest, I will sleep.

'To our house,' he answers. And he studies me a moment longer, then reaches across me. 'Here, if the sight troubles you—' He pulls down the blind. And so once again we sit, and sway to the motion of a coach, in a kind of twilight; but we are pressed about, this time, by all the roar of London. I do not see it when we go about the park. I do not see what route the driver takes, at all: perhaps I should not know it, if I did, though I have studied maps of the city, and know the placing of the Thames. I cannot say, when we stop, how long we have driven for—so preoccupied am I with the desperate stir of my senses and heart. Be bold, I am thinking. God damn you, Maud! You have longed for this. You have given up Sue, you have given up everything, for this. Be bold! Richard pays the man, then returns for our bags. 'From here we must walk,'

he says. I climb out, unassisted, and blink at the light—though the light here is dim enough: we have lost the sun, and the sky is anyway thick with cloud—

brown cloud, like the dirty fleece of a sheep. I have expected to find myself at the door to his house, but there are no houses here: we have entered streets that appear to me unspeakably shabby and mean—are hedged on one side by a great, dead wall, on the other by the lime-stained arches of a bridge. Richard moves off. I catch at his arm.

'Is this right?' I say.

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'Quite right,' he answers. 'Come, don't be alarmed. We cannot live grandly, yet. And we must make our entrance the quiet way, that's all.'

'You are still afraid that my uncle may have sent men, to watch us?'

He again moves off. 'Come. We can talk soon, indoors. Not here. Come on, this way. Pick up your skirts.'

He walks quicker than ever now, and I am slow to follow. When he sees me hanging back he holds our bags in one hand and, with the other, takes my wrist.

'Not far, now,' he says, kindly enough; his grip is tight, however. We leave that road and turn into another: here I can see the stained and broken face of what I take to be a single great house, but which is in fact the rear of a terrace of narrow dwellings. The air smells riverish, rank. People watch us, curiously. That makes me walk faster. Soon we turn again, into a lane of crunching cinders. Here there are children, in a group: they are standing idly about a bird, which lurches and hops. They have tied its wings with twine. When they see us, they come and press close. They want money, or to tug at my sleeve, my cloak, my veil. Richard kicks them away. They swear for a minute, then return to the bird. We take another, dirtier, path—Richard all the time gripping me harder, walking faster, faster, certain of his way. 'We are very close now,' he says. 'Don't mind this filth, this is nothing. All London is filthy like this. Just a little further, I promise. And then you may rest.'

And at last, he slows. We have reached a court, with a thick mud floor and nettles. The walls are high, and running with damp. There is no open route from here, only two or three narrow covered passages, filled with darkness. Into one of these he makes to draw me, now; but, so black and foul is it, I suddenly hesitate, and pull against his grip.

'Come on,' he says, turning round, not smiling.

'Come to where?' I ask him.

'To your new life, that has waited for you to start it, too long. To our house. Our housekeeper expects us. Come, now.—Or shall I leave you here?'

His voice is tired, hard. I look behind me. I see the other passages, but the muddy path he has led me down is hidden—as if the glistening walls have parted to let us come, then closed to trap me.

What can I do? I cannot go back, alone, to the children, the labyrinth of lanes, the street, the city. I cannot go back to Sue. I am not meant to. Everything has been impelling me here, to this dark point. I must go forward, or cease to exist. I think again of the room that is waiting for me: of the door, with its key that will turn; of the bed, on which I shall lie and sleep, and sleep—

I hesitate, one second more; then let him draw me into the passage. It is short, and ends with a flight of shallow stairs, leading downwards; and these, in turn, end at a door, on which he knocks. From beyond the door there comes at once the barking of a dog, then soft, quick footsteps, a grinding bolt. The dog falls silent. The door is opened, by a fair-haired boy—I suppose, the housekeeper's boy. He looks at Richard and nods.

'All right?' he says.

'All right,' answers Richard. 'Is Aunty home? Here's a lady, look, come to stay.'

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The boy surveys me, I see him squinting to make out the features behind my veil. Then he smiles, nods again, draws back the door to let us pass him; closes it tightly at our backs.

The room beyond is a kind of kitchen—I suppose, a servants' kitchen, for it is small, and windowless, dark and unwholesome, and chokingly hot: there is a good fire lit, and one or two smoking lamps upon a table and—perhaps, after all, these are the grooms' quarters—a brazier in a cage, with tools about it. Beside the brazier is a pale man in an apron who, on seeing us come, sets down some fork or file and wipes his hands and looks me over, frankly. Before the fire sit a young woman and a boy: the girl fat-faced, red-haired, also watching me freely; the boy sallow and scowling, chewing with broken teeth on a strip of dry meat, and dressed—I notice this, even in my confusion—in an extraordinary coat, that seems pieced together from many varieties of fur. We holds, between his knees, a squirming dog, his hand about its jaws to keep it from barking. He looks at Richard and then at me. He surveys my coat and gloves and bonnet. He whistles.

'What price them togs,' he says.

Then he flinches as, from another chair—a rocking chair, that creaks as it tilts—a white-haired woman leans to strike him. I suppose her the housekeeper. She has watched me, more closely and more eagerly than any of the others. She holds a bundle: now she puts it down and struggles from her seat, and the bundle gives a shudder. This is more astonishing than the lighted brazier, the coat of fur—it is a sleeping, swollen-headed baby in a blanket. I look at Richard. I think he will speak, or lead me on. But he has taken his hand from me and stands with folded arms, very leisurely. He is smiling, but smiling oddly. Everyone is silent. No-one moves save the white-haired woman. She has left her chair and comes about the table. She is dressed in taffeta, that rustles. Her face has a blush, and shines. She comes to me, she stands before me, her head weaves as she tries to catch the line of my features. She moves her mouth, wets her lips. Her gaze is still close and terribly eager. When she raises her blunt red hands to me, I flinch.—'Richard,' I say. But he still does nothing, and the woman's look, that is so awful and so strange, compels me. I stand and let her fumble for my veil. She puts it back. And then her gaze changes, grows stranger still, when she sees my face. She touches my cheek, as if uncertain it will remain beneath her fingers.

She keeps her eyes on mine, but speaks to Richard. Her voice is thick with the tears of age, or of emotion.

'Good boy,' she says.

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Then there comes a kind of chaos.

The dog barks and leaps, the baby in its blanket gives a cry; another baby, that I have not noticed—it lies in a tin box, beneath the table begins to cry also.

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Richard takes off his hat and his coat, sets down our bags, and stretches. The scowling boy drops open his mouth and shows the meat within.

'It ain't Sue,' he says.

'Miss Lilly,' says the woman before me, quietly. 'Ain't you just the darling. Are you very tired, dear? You have come quite a journey.'

'It ain't Sue,' says the boy again, a little louder.

'Change of plan,' says Richard, not catching my eye. 'Sue stays on behind, to take care of a few last points.—Mr Ibbs, how are you, sir?'

'Sweet, son,' the pale man answers. He has taken off his apron and is quieting the dog. The boy who opened the door to us has gone. The little brazier is cooling and ticking and growing grey. The red-haired girl bends over the screaming babies with a bottle and a spoon, but is still stealing looks at me. The scowling boy says, 'Change of plan? I don't get it.'

'You will,' answers Richard. 'Unless—' He puts his finger against his mouth, and winks.

The woman, meanwhile, is still before me, still describing my face with her hands, telling off my features as if they were beads upon a string. 'Brown eyes,'

she says, beneath her breath; her breath is sweet as sugar. 'Pink lips, two pouters. Nice and dainty at the chin. Teeth, white as china. Cheeks—rather soft, I dare say? Oh!'

I have stood, as if in a trance, and let her murmur; now, feeling her fingers flutter against my face, I start away from her.

'How dare you?' I say. 'How dare you speak to me? How dare you look at me, any of you? And you—' I go to Richard and seize his waistcoat. 'What is this? Where have you brought me to? What do they know of Sue, here?'

'Hey, hey,' calls the pale man mildly. The boy laughs. The woman looks rueful.

'Got a voice, don't she?' says the girl.

'Like the blade on a knife,' says the man.'That clean.'

Richard meets my gaze, then looks away. 'What can I say?' He shrugs. 'I am a villain.'

'Damn your attitudes now!' I say. Tell me what this means. Whose house is this? Is it yours?'

'Is it his!' The boy laughs harder, and chokes on his meat.

'John, be quiet, or I'll thrash you,' says the woman. 'Don't mind him, Miss Lilly, I implore you now, don't!'

I can feel her wringing her hands, but do not look at her. I keep my eyes upon Richard. 'Tell me,' I say.

'Not mine,' he answers at last.

'Not ours?'

He shakes his head. 'Whose, then? Where, then?'

He rubs at his eye. He is tired. 'It is theirs,' he says, nodding to the woman, the man. 'Their house, in the Borough.'

The Borough… I have heard him say the name, once or twice before. I stand for a moment in silence, thinking back across his words; then my heart drops.

'Sue's house,' I say. 'Sue's house, of thieves.'

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'Honest thieves,' says the woman, creeping closer, 'to those that know us!'

I think: Sue's aunt! I was sorry for her, once. Now I turn and almost spit at her. 'Will you keep from me, you witch?' The kitchen grows silent. It seems darker, too, and close. I still have Richard gripped by the waistcoat. When he tries to pull away, I hold him tighter. My thoughts are leaping, fast as hares. I think, He has married me, and has brought me here, as a place to be rid of me. He means to keep my money for himself. He means to give them some trifling share for the killing of me, and Sue—even in the midst of my shock and confusion, my heart drops again, as I think it— Sue they will free. Sue knows it all.

'You shan't do it!' I say, my voice rising. 'You think I don't know what you mean to do? All of you? What trick?'

'You don't know anything, Maud,' he answers. He tries to draw my hands from his coat. I will not let him. I think, if he does that, they will certainly kill me. For a second we struggle. Then: The stitching, Maud!' he says. He plucks my fingers free. I catch at his arm instead.

'Take me back,' I say. I say it, thinking: Don't let them see you are afraid! But my voice has risen higher and I cannot make it firm. Take me back, at once, to the streets and hackneys.'

He shakes his head, looks away. 'I can't do it.'

'Take me now. Or I go, alone. I shall make my way—I saw the route! I studied it, hard!—and I shall find out a—a policeman!'

The boy, the pale man, the woman and girl, all flinch or wince. The dog barks.

'Now now,' says the man, stroking his moustache. 'You must be careful how you talk, dear, in a house like this.'

'It is you who must be careful!' I say. I look from one face to another. 'What is it you think you shall have from this? Money? Oh, no. It is you who must be careful. It is all of you! And you, Richard—you—who must be most careful of all, should I once find a policeman and begin to talk.'

But Richard looks and says nothing.

'Do you hear me?' I cry.

The man winces again, and puts his finger to his ear as if to clear it of wax.

'Like a blade,' he says, to no-one, to everyone. 'Ain't it?'

'Damn you!' I say. I look wildly about me for a moment, then make a sudden grab at my bag. Richard reaches it first, however, he hooks it with his long leg and kicks it across the floor, almost playfully. The boy takes it up, and holds it in his lap. He produces a knife and begins to pick at the lock. The blade flashes. Richard folds his arms. 'You see you cannot leave, Maud,' he says simply.

'You cannot go, with nothing.'

He has moved to the door, to stand before it. There are other doors, that lead, perhaps to a street, perhaps only into other dark rooms. I shall never choose the right one.

'I am sorry,' he says.

The boy's knife flashes again. Now, I think, they will kill me. The thought itself is like a blade, and astonishingly sharp. For haven't I willed my life away, at Briar? Haven't I felt it rising from me, and been glad? Now I suppose they

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mean to kill me; and I am more afraid than I have imagined it possible to be, of anything, anything at all.

You fool, I say to myself. But to them I say: 'You shan't. You shan't!' I run one way, and then another; finally I dart, not for the door at Richard's back, but for the slumbering, swollen-headed baby. I seize it, and shake it, and put my hand to its neck. 'You shan't!' I say again. 'Damn you, do you think I have come so far, for this?' I look at the woman. 'I shall kill your baby first!'—I think I would do it.—'See, here! I shall stifle it!'

The man, the girl, the boy, look interested. The woman looks sorry. 'My dear,'

she says, 'I have seven babies about the place, just now. Make it six, if you want. Make it'—with a gesture to the tin box beneath the table—'make it five. It is all the same to me. I fancy I am about to give the business up, anyway.'

The creature in my arms slumbers on, but gives a kick. I feel the rapid palpitation of its heart beneath my fingers, and there is a fluttering at the top of its swollen head. The woman still watches. The girl puts her hand to her neck, and rubs. Richard searches in his pocket for a cigarette. He says, as he does it,

'Put the damn child down, Maud, won't you?'

He says it mildly; and I become aware of myself, my hands at a baby's throat. I set the child carefully down upon the table, among the plates and china cups. At once, the boy takes his knife from the lock of my bag and waves it over its head.

'Ha-ha!' he cries. 'The lady wouldn't do it. John Vroom shall have him— lips, nose and ears!'

The girl squeals, as if tickled. The woman says sharply, 'That's enough. Or are all my infants to be worried out of their cradles, into their graves? Fine farm I should be left with then. Dainty, see to little Sidney before he scalds himself, do. Miss Lilly will suppose herself come among savages. Miss Lilly, I can see you're a spirited girl. I expected nothing less. But you don't imagine we mean to hurt you?' She comes to me again. She cannot stand without touching me—now she puts her hand upon me and strokes my sleeve. 'You don't imagine you ain't more welcome here, than anyone?'

I still shake, a little. 'I can't imagine,' I say, pulling myself away from her hands, 'that you mean me any kind of good, since you persist in keeping me here, when I so clearly wish to leave.'

She tilts her head. 'Hear the grammar in that, Mr Ibbs?' she says. The man says he does. She strokes me again. 'Sit down, my darling. Look at this chair: got from a very grand place, it might be waiting for you. Won't you take off your cloak, and your bonnet? You shall swelter, we keep a very warm kitchen. Won't you slip off your gloves?—Well, you know best.'

I have drawn in my hands. Richard catches the woman's eye. 'Miss Lilly, he says quietly, 'is rather particular about the fingers. Was made to wear gloves, from an early age'—he lets his voice drop still further, and mouths the last few words in an exaggerated way—'by her uncle.'

The woman looks sage.

'Your uncle,' she says. 'Now, I know all about him. Made you look at a lot of filthy French books. And did he touch you, dear, where he oughtn't to have? Never mind it now. Never mind it, here. Better your own uncle than a stranger, I always say.—Oh, now ain't that a shame?'

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I have sat, to disguise the trembling of my legs; but have pushed her from me. My chair is close to the fire and she is right, it is hot, it is terribly hot, my cheek is burning; but I must not move, I must think. The boy still picks at the lock. 'French books,' he says, with a snigger. The red-haired girl has the fingers of the baby's hands in her mouth and is sucking on them, idly. The man has come nearer. The woman is still at my side. The light of the fire picks out her chin, her cheek, an eye, a lip. The lip is smooth. She wets it. I turn my head, but not my gaze. 'Richard,' I say. He doesn't answer.

'Richard!' The woman reaches to me and unfastens the string of my bonnet and draws it from my head. She pats my hair, then takes up a lock of it and rubs it between her fingers.

'Quite fair,' she says, in a sort of wonder. 'Quite fair, like gold almost.'

'Do you mean to sell it?' I say then. 'Here, take it!' I snatch at the lock she has caught up and rip it from its pins. 'You see,' I say, when she winces, 'you cannot hurt me as much as I can hurt myself. Now, let me go.'

She shakes her head. 'You are growing wild, my dear, and spoiling your pretty hair. Haven't I said? We don't mean to harm you. Here is John Vroom, look; and Delia Warren, that we call Dainty: you shall think them cousins, I hope, in time. And Mr Humphry Ibbs: he has been waiting for you—haven't you, Mr Ibbs? And here am I. I've been waiting for you, hardest of all. Dear me, how hard it has been.'

She sighs. The boy looks up at her and scowls.

'Jigger me,' he says, 'if I know which way the wind is blowing now.' He nods to me. 'Ain't she meant to be'—he hugs his arms about himself, shows his tongue, lets his eyes roll—'on a violent ward?'

The woman lifts her arm, and he winks and draws back.

'You watch your face,' she says savagely. And then, gazing gently at me: 'Miss Lilly is throwing in her fortunes with ours. Miss Lilly don't know her own mind just yet—as who would, in her place? Miss Lilly, I daresay you ain't had a morsel of food in hours. What we got, that will tempt you?' She rubs her hands together. 'Should you care for a mutton chop? A piece of Dutch cheese? A supper of fish? We got a stall on the corner, sells any kind of fish— you name me the breed, Dainty shall slip out, bring it back, fry it up, quick as winking. What shall it be? We got china plates, look, fit for royalty. We got silver forks— Mr Ibbs, pass me one of them forks. See here, dear. A little rough about the handle, ain't it? Don't mind it, darling. That's where we takes the crest off. Feel the weight of it, though. Ain't them prongs very shapely? There's a Member of Parliament had his mouth about those. Shall it be fish, dear? Or the chop?'

She stands, bending to me, with the fork close to my face. I push it aside.

'Do you suppose,' I say, 'I mean to sit and eat a supper with you? With any of you? Why, I should be ashamed to call you servants! Throw in my fortunes with yours? I should rather be beggared. I should rather die!'

There is a second of silence; then: 'Got a dander,' says the boy. 'Don't she?'

But the woman shakes her head, looks almost admiring. 'Dainty's got a dander,' she answers. 'Why, I've got one myself. Any ordinary girl can have one of them. What a lady has, they call something else. What do they call it, gentleman?' She says this to Richard, who is leaning tiredly to tug upon the ears of the slavering dog.

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' Hauteur,' he answers, not looking up.

' Hauteur,' she repeats.

' Mersee,' says the boy, giving me a leer. 'I should hate, after all, to have mistook it for common bad manners, and punched her.'

He returns to the clasp of my bag. The man watches, and winces. 'Ain't you learned yet,' he says, 'the handling of a lock? Don't prise it, boy, and mash the levers. That's sweet little work. You are just about to bust it.'

The boy makes a final stab with his knife, his face darkening. 'Fuck!' he says.—The first time I have ever heard the word used as a curse. He takes the point of the blade from the lock and puts it to the leather beneath, and before I can cry out and stop him he slices it, swiftly in one long gash.

'Well, that's like you,' says the man complacently.

He has taken out a pipe, and lights it. The boy puts his hands to the slit in the leather. I watch him do it and, though my cheek is still burning from the heat of the fire, I grow cold. The cutting of the bag has shocked me, more than I can say. I begin to tremble.

'Please,' I say. 'Please give me back my things. I shall not trouble about the policeman, if you will only give back what is mine, and let me go.'

I suppose my voice has some new, piteous note to it; for now they all turn their heads and study me, and the woman comes close again and again strokes my hair.

'Not frightened, still?' she says amazedly. 'Not frightened, of John Vroom? Why, he is just being playful.—John, how dare you? Put your knife away and pass me Miss Lilly's bag.—There. Are you sorry for it, dear? Why, it's a creased old thing, that looks like it ain't been used in fifty years. We shall get you a proper one. Shan't we, though!'

The boy makes a show of grumbling but gives up the bag; and when the woman hands it to me I take it and hug it. There are tears, rising in my throat.

'Boo hoo,' says the boy in disgust, when he sees me swallow. He leans and leers at me again. 'I liked you better,' he says, 'when you was a chair.'

I am sure he says that. The words bewilder me, and I shrink away. I twist to look at Richard. 'Please, Richard,' I say. 'For God's sake, isn't it enough to have tricked me ? How can you stand so coolly while they torment me ?'

He holds my gaze, stroking his beard. Then he says to the woman: 'Haven't you a quieter place, for her to sit in?'

'A quieter place?' she answers. 'Why, I have a room made ready. I only supposed Miss Lilly should like to warm her face first down here. Should you like to come up dear, now? Make your hair neat? Wash your hands?'

'I should like to be shown to the street, and a hackney,' I answer, 'Only that, only that.'

'Well, we shall put you at the window; and you shall see the street from there. Come up, my darling. Let me take that old bag.—Want to keep it? All right. Ain't your grip a strong one! Gentleman, you come along too, why don't you? You'll take your old room, at the top?'

'I will,' he answers, 'if you'll have me. For the wait.'

They exchange a glance. She has put her hands upon me and, in drawing from her grasp, I have risen. Richard comes and stands close. I shrink from him,

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too, and between them—as a pair of dogs might menace a sheep into a pen—

they guide me from the kitchen, through one of the doors, towards a staircase. Here it is darker and cooler, and I feel the draught perhaps of a street-door, and slow my steps; but I think, too, of what the woman has said, about the window: I imagine I might call from it, or drop from it—or fling myself from it—should they try to hurt me. The staircase is narrow, and bare of carpet; here and there, on the steps, are chipped china cups half-filled with water, holding floating wicks, casting shadows.

'Lift your skirts, dear, above the flames,' says the woman, going up before me. Richard comes, very close, behind.

At the top there are doors, all shut: the woman opens the first, and shows me through it to a small square room. A bed, a wash-hand stand, a box, a chest of drawers, a horse-hair screen—and a window, to which I instantly cross. It is narrow, and has a bleached net scarf hung before it. The hasp has been broken long ago: the sashes are fixed together with nails. The view is of a slip of muddy street, a house with ointment-coloured shutters with heart-shaped holes, a wall of brick, with loops and spirals marked upon it in yellow chalks. I stand and study it all, my bag still clutched to me, but my arms growing heavy. I hear Richard pause, then climb a second set of stairs; then he walks about the room above my head. The woman crosses to the wash-hand stand and pours a little water from the jug into the bowl. Now I see my mistake, in coming so quickly to the window: for she stands between me and the door. She is stout, and her arms are thick. I think I might push her aside, however, if I was to surprise her.

Perhaps she is thinking the same thing. Her hands are hovering about the wash-hand stand, her head is tilted, but she is watching me, in the same close, eager, half-awed, half-admiring way as before.

'Here's scented soap,' she says. 'And here's a comb. Here's a hair-brush.' I say nothing. 'Here's a towel for your face. Here's eau-de-Cologne.' She draws the stopper from the bottle and the liquid slops. She comes to me, her wrist bared and made wet with a sickening perfume. 'Don't you care,' she says, 'for lavender?'

I have stepped away from her, and look at the door. From the kitchen, the boy's voice comes very clearly: ' You tart!'

'I don't care,' I say, taking another step, 'to be tricked.'

She steps, too. 'What trickery, darling?'

'Do you think I meant to come here? Do you think I mean to stay?'

'I think you are only startled. I think you ain't quite yourself.'

'Not quite myself? What's myself to you? Who are you, to say how I might or might not be?'

At that, her gaze falls. She draws her sleeve over her wrist, returns to the wash'hand stand, touches again the soap, the comb, the brush and towel. Downstairs, a chair is drawn across the floor, something is thrown or falls, the dog barks. Upstairs, Richard walks, coughs, mutters. If I am to run, I must do it now. Which way shall I go? Down, down, the way I have come. Which was the door, at the bottom, that they led me through?—the second, or the first? I am not sure. Never mind, I think. Go now! But I do not. The woman lifts her face, catches my eye, I hesitate; and in the moment of that hesitation Richard crosses

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his floor and steps heavily down the stairs. He comes into the room. He has a cigarette behind his ear. He has rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, and his beard is dark with water.

He closes the door, and locks it.

'Take your cloak off, Maud,' he says.

I think: He is going to strangle me.

I keep my cloak quite fastened, and move backwards, slowly, away from him and from the woman, back to the window. I will smash it with my elbow if I must. I will shriek into the street. Richard watches me and sighs. He makes his eyes wide. 'You need not,' he says, 'look so like a rabbit. Do you think I would bring you all this way, to hurt you?'

'And do you think,' I answer, 'I will trust you not to? You told me yourself, at Briar, what lengths you will go to, for money's sake. I wish I had listened harder, then! Tell me now you don't mean to cheat me of all my fortune. Tell me you shan't get it, through Sue. I suppose you will fetch her, after some slight delay. She will be cured, I suppose.' My heart contracts. 'Clever Sue. Good girl.'

'Shut up, Maud.'

'Why? So you may kill me in silence? Go on and do it. Then live with the deed upon your conscience. I suppose you have one?'

'Not one,' he says, quickly and lightly, 'that would be troubled by the murder of you, I assure you.' He presses his fingers to his eyes. 'Mrs Sucksby, however, would not like it.'

' Her,' I say, with a glance at the woman. She is still gazing at the soap, the brush, not speaking. 'You do everything, at her word?'

'Everything in this case.' He says it meaningfully; and when I hesitate, not understanding, he goes on: 'Listen to me, Maud. The scheme was hers, all of it. From start to finish, hers. And, villain that I am, I am not so great a swindler that I would swindle her of that.'

His face seems honest—but then, it has seemed honest to me before. 'You are lying,' I say.

'No. This is the truth.'

'Her scheme.' I cannot believe it. 'She that sent you to Briar, to my uncle? And before that, to Paris? To Mr Hawtrey?'

'She that sent me to you. No matter all the twisting paths I took to reach you. I might have taken them anyway, and not known what lay at the end of them. I might have passed you by! Perhaps many men have. They have not had Mrs Sucksby, guiding their steps.'

I glance between them. 'She knew of my fortune, then,' I say after a moment.

'So anyone might, I suppose. She knew—who? My uncle? Some servant of the house?'

'She knew you, Maud, you; before almost anyone.'

The woman lifts her eyes to mine again at last, and nods.

'I knew your mother,' she says.

My mother! My hand goes to my throat—a curious thing, for my mother's portrait lies with my jewels, its ribbon fraying, I have not worn it in years. My mother! I came to London to escape her. Now all at once, I think of her grave in the park at Briar—untended, untrimmed, its white stone creeping with grey.

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The woman still watches. I let my hand drop.

'I don't believe you,' I say. 'My mother? What was her name?—tell me that.'

She begins to look sly. 'I know it,' she says, 'but won't say it just yet. I'll tell you the letter that started it, though. That was a M, like what starts your name. I'll tell you the second letter. That was a A.—Why, that's like your name, too!

The next letter, though, is where they runs off different. That was a R…'

She knows it, I know she knows it. How can she? I study her face—her eye, her lip. They seem familiar to me. What is it? Who is she?

'A nurse,' I say. 'You were a nurse—'

But she shakes her head, almost smiles. 'Now, why should I have been that?'

'You don't know everything, then!' I say. 'You don't know that I was born in a madhouse!'

'Was you?' she answers quickly. 'Why do you say so?'

'You think I don't remember my own home?'

'I should say you remember the place you lived in when you was little. Why, so do we all. Don't mean we was born there.'

'I was, I know it,' I say.

'You was told it, I expect.'

'Every one of my uncle's servants knows it!'

'They was told it, too, perhaps. Does that make it true? Maybe. Maybe not.'

As she speaks, she moves from the wash-hand stand to the bed, and sits upon it, slowly and heavily. She looks at Richard. She puts her hand to her ear, and strokes the lobe. With a show of lightness she says, 'Find your room all right, Gentleman?'—I have guessed at last that this is some name he goes by here, among the thieves. 'Find your room all right?' He nods. She gazes at me again.

'We keeps that room,' she goes on, in the same light, friendly, dangerous tone,

'for Gentleman to kip in when he comes. A very high, out-of-the-way sort of room it is, I can tell you. Seen all manner of business up there; all sorts of tricks. People been known to come here, rather quiet'—she pretends surprise—'why, just as you have come!—to spend a day, two days, two weeks, who knows how long? tucked away up there. Chaps, maybe, that the Police would like a word with. Can't be found—do you see?—when they come here. Chaps, girls, kids, ladies…'

After this last word she pauses. She pats the space at her side. 'Won't you sit, dear girl? Don't care to? Hmm? Perhaps in a minute, then.' The bed has a blanket upon it—a quilt of coloured squares, roughly knitted, and roughly sewn together. She begins to pluck at one of its seams, as if in distraction. 'Now, what was I speaking of?' she says, her eyes on mine.

'Of ladies,' says Richard.

She moves her hand, lifts her finger. 'Of ladies,' she says. 'That's right. Of course, there come so few true ladies, you find they rather sticks in the mind. I remember one, particular, that came—oh, how long ago? Sixteen years? Seventeen? Eighteen… ?' She watches my face. 'Seems a long time to you, sweetheart, I dare say. Seems a lifetime, don't it? Only wait, dear girl, till you are my age. The years all run together, then. All run together, like so many tears…'

She gives a jerk of her head, draws in her breath in a backwards sigh, quick and

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rueful. She waits. But I have grown still, and cold, and cautious, and say nothing. So then she goes on.

'Well, this particular lady,' she says, 'she wasn't much older than you are now. But wasn't she in a fix? She had got my name from a woman in the Borough, that did girls and their complaints. You know what I am saying, dear? Made girls be poorly, in the regular way, when their poorliness had stopped?' She moves her hand, makes a face. 'I never bothered with that. That was out of my line. My idea was, if it wasn't going to kill you on its way out, then have it, and sell it; or what's better, give it to me and let me sell it for you!—I mean, to people that want infants, for servants or apprentices, or for regular sons and daughters. Did you know, dear girl, that there were people in the world, like that?—and people like me, providing the infants? No?' Again, I make no answer. Again she moves her hand. 'Well, perhaps this lady I am speaking of now didn't know it either, till she came to me. Poor thing. The Borough woman had tried to help her, but she was too far on, she had only got sick. "Where's your husband?" I said, before I took her in. "Where's your ma? Where's all your people? Won't follow you here, will they?" She said they wouldn't. She had no husband—that was her trouble, of course. Her mother was dead. She had run away from a great, grand house, forty miles from London—up-river, she said…' She nods, still keeping her eyes on mine. I have grown colder than ever. 'Her father and her brother were looking for her, and seemed likely to just about kill her; but would never find their way to the Borough, she swore it. As for the gentleman that had started her troubles all off, by saying he loved her—well, he had a wife and a kiddie of his own, and had given her up as ruined, and washed his hands.—As gentlemen, of course, will do.

'Which, in a line like mine, you say thank heavens for!' She smiles, almost winks. This lady had money. I took her, and put her upstairs. Perhaps I oughtn't to have done it. Mr Ibbs did say I oughtn't to. For I had five or six babies in the house already, and was worn out and fretful—more fretful, through having just borne a little infant of my own, that had died—' Here her look changes, and she waves a hand before her eyes. 'I won't talk of that, however. I won't talk of that.'

She swallows and looks about her for a moment, as if in search of the fallen threads of her story. Then she seems to find them. The confusion passes from her face, she catches my eye again, then gestures upwards. I glance, with her, at the ceiling. It is a dirty yellow, marked grey with the smoke of lamps.

'Up there we put her,' she says, 'in Gentleman's room. And all day long I would sit beside her and hold her hand, and every night I would hear her turning in her bed, and crying. Nearly broke your heart. She had no more harm in her than milk does. I supposed she might die. Mr Ibbs supposed it. I think even she supposed it, for she was meant to go another two months, and anyone could see that she wouldn't have the strength to go half that time. But maybe the baby knew it, too—they do know, sometimes. For we only have her here a week, before her water busts and it starts coming. Takes a day and a night. Means to come, all right! Even so, it's a shrimp of a thing, but the lady—being so poorly already—is quite made rags of. Then she hears her baby cry, and picks up her head from her pillow. "What's that, Mrs Sucksby?" she says. "That's your baby, my dear!" I tell her. "My baby?" says she. "Is my baby a boy, or a girl?" "It's a girl," I say. And when she hears that she cries out with all her lungs: "Then God help her! For the world is cruel to girls. I wish she had died, and me with her!"'

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She shakes her head, lifts her hands, lets them fall upon her knees. Richard leans against the door. The door has a hook, with a silk dressing-gown hanging from it: he has taken up the belt of the gown and is idly pass-ing it across his mouth. His eyes are on mine, their lids a little lowered; his look is unreadable. From the kitchen below us there comes laughter and a ragged shrieking. The woman listens, gives another of those backwards, rueful sighs.

'There's Dainty, crying again…' She rolls her eyes. 'But how I have run on!—

haven't I, Miss Lilly? Not finding me tiresome, dear? Ain't much to hold the interest, perhaps, in these old tales…'

'Go on,' I say. My mouth is dry, and sticks. 'Go on, about the woman.'

'The lady, what had the little girl? Such a slight little scrap of a girl, she was: fair haired, blue-eyed—well, they all come out blue, of course; and brown up, later…'

She looks, meaningfully, into my own brown eyes. I blink, and colour. But my voice I make flat. 'Go on,' I say again. 'I know you mean to tell me. Tell me now. The woman wished her daughter dead. What then?'

'Wished her dead?' She moves her head. 'So she said. So women do say, sometimes. And sometimes they mean it. Not her, though. That child was everything to her, and when I said she had much better give her up to me, than keep her, she grew quite wild. "What, you don't mean to raise her yourself?" I said. "You, a lady, without a husband?" She said she would pass herself off as a widow—meant to go abroad, where no-one knew her, and make her living as a seamstress. "I'll see my daughter married to a poor man before she knows my shame," she said. "I'm through with the quality life." That was her one thought, poor thing, that no amount of sensible talking from me could shake her of: that she would sooner see her girl live low but honest, than give her back to the world of money she come from. She meant to start for France so soon as her strength was all back—and I'll tell you this now, I thought she was a fool; but I would have cut my own arm to help her, she was that simple and good.'

She sighs. 'But it's the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world—ain't it, though! She kept very weak, and her baby hardly grew. Still she talked, all the time, of France, it was all she thought of; until one night, I was putting her into her bed when there comes a knocking on our kitchen door. It's the woman, from the Borough, what first put her on to me: I see her face, and know there's trouble. There is. What do you think? The lady's pa and brother have tracked her down after all. "They're coming," says the woman. "Lord help me, I never meant to tell them where you was; but the brother had a cane, and whipped me." She shows me her back, and it's black. "They've gone for a coach," she says, "and a bully to help them. I should say you've an hour. Get your lady out now, if she means to go. Try to hide her and they'll pull your house apart!"

'Well! The poor lady had followed me down and heard it all, and started shrieking. "Oh, I'm done for!" she said. "Oh, if I might only have got to France!"—but the trip downstairs had half-killed her, she was so weak. "They'll take my baby!" she said. "They'll take her and make her theirs! They'll put her in their great house, they might as well lock her into a tomb! They'll take her, and turn her heart against me—oh! and I haven't even named her! I haven't even named her!" That's all she would say. "I haven't even named her!"—"Name her now, then!" I said, just to make her be quiet. "Name her quick, while you still got the chance." "I will!" she said. "But, what name shall I give her?" "Well," I said,

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"think on: she's to be a lady after all, there's no helping it now. Give her a name that'll fit her. What's your own name? Give her that." Then she looked dark. She said, "My name's a hateful one, I'd sooner curse her before I let anyone call her Marianne—" '

She stops, seeing my face. It has jumped, or twisted—though I have known that the story must reach this point, and have stood, feeling my breath come shorter, my stomach grow sourer, as the tale proceeds. I draw in my breath. 'It's not true,' I say. 'My mother, coming here, without a husband? My mother was mad. My father was a soldier. I have his ring. Look here, look here!'

I have gone to my bag, and I stoop to it, and pull at the torn leather and find the little square of linen that holds my jewels. There is the ring that they gave me in the madhouse: I hold it up. My hand is shaking. Mrs Sucksby studies it and shrugs.

'Rings may be got,' she says, 'from just about anywhere.'

'From him,' I say.

'From anywhere. I could get you ten like that, have them atamped V.R.—

Would that make them the Queen's?'

I cannot answer. For what do I know about where rings come from, and how they may be stamped? I say again, more weakly, 'My mother coming here, without a husband. Ill, and coming here. My father— My uncle—' I look up. 'My uncle. Why should my uncle lie?'

'Why should he tell the truth?' says Richard, coming forward, speaking at last. 'I dare swear his sister was honest enough, before her ruin, and only unlucky; but that's the sort of unluckiness—well, that a man doesn't care to talk about too freely…'

I gaze again at the ring. There is a cut upon it I liked, as a girl, to suppose made by a bayonet. Now the gold feels light, as if pierced and made hollow.

'My mother,' I say, doggedly, 'was mad. She bore me, strapped to a table.—

No.' I put my hands to my eyes. 'That part, perhaps, was my own fancy. But not the rest. My mother was mad—was kept in the cell of a madhouse; and I was made to be mindful of her example, lest I should follow it.'

'She was certainly, once they had got her, put in a cell,' says Richard; 'as we know girls are, from time to time, for the satisfaction of gentlemen.— Well, no more of that, just yet.' He has caught Mrs Sucksby's eye. 'And you were certainly kept in fear of following her, Maud. And what did that do to you?—save make you anxious, obedient, careless of your own comforts—in other words, exactly fit you to your uncle's fancy? Didn't I tell you once, what a scoundrel he was?'

'You are wrong,' I say. 'You are wrong, or mistaken.'

'No mistake,' answers Mrs Sucksby.

'You may be lying, even now. Both of you!'

'We may be.' She taps her mouth. 'But you see, dear girl, we ain't.'

'My uncle," I say again. 'My uncle's servants. Mr Way, Mrs Stiles…'

But I say it, and I feel—the ghost of a pressure—Mr Way's shoulder against my ribs, his finger in the crook of my knee: Fancy yourself a lady, do you?—

And then, and then, Mrs Stiles's hard hands on my pimpling arms and her breath against my cheek:

Why your mother, with all her fortune, should have turned out trash—.'

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I know it, I know it. I still hold the ring. Now, with a cry, I throw it to the floor—as I once, as a furious child, threw cups and saucers.

'Damn him!' I say. I think of myself at the foot of my uncle's bed, the razor in my hand, his unguarded eye. Confidence Abused. 'Damn him!' Richard nods. I turn upon him, then. 'And damn you, with him! You knew this, all along? Why not tell me, at Briar? Don't you think it would have made me the likelier to go with you? Why wait, and bring me here—to this foul place!—to trick and surprise me?'

'Surprise you?' he says, with a curious laugh. 'Oh, Maud, sweet Maud, we haven't begun to do that.'

I don't understand him. I hardly try to. I am thinking still of my uncle, my mother—my mother, ill, ruined, coming here… Richard puts his hand to his chin, works his lips. 'Mrs Sucksby,' he says, 'do you keep any drink up here? I find myself rather dry about the mouth. It's the anticipation, I think, of sensation. I am the same at the casino, at the spinning of the wheel; and at the pantomime, when they're about to let fly the fairies.'

Mrs Sucksby hesitates, then goes to a shelf, opens a box, lifts out a bottle. She produces three short tumblers with gold about the rim. She wipes them, on a fold of her skirt.

'I hope, Miss Lilly, you won't suppose this sherry,' she says, as she pours. The scent of the liquid comes sharp and sickly upon the close air of the room. 'Sherry in a lady's chamber I could never agree to; but a bit of honest brandy, meant for use now and then as a bracer—well, you tell me, where's the harm in that?'

'No harm at all,' says Richard. He holds a glass to me and, so confused am I—

so dazed and enraged—I take it at once, and sip it as if it were wine. Mrs Sucksby watches me swallow.

'Got a good mouth for spirits,' she says approvingly.

'Got a mouth for them,' says Richard, 'when they're marked up, Medicine. Hey, Maud?'

I will not answer. The brandy is hot. I sit, at last, upon the edge of the bed and unfasten the cord of my cloak. The room is darker than before: the day is turning into night. The horse-hair screen looms black, and casts shadows. The walls—that are papered here in a pattern of flowers, there in muddy diamonds—

are gloomy and close. The scarf stands out against the window: a fly is caught behind it, and buzzes in hopeless fury against the glass.

I sit with my head in my hands. My brain, like the room, seems hedged about with darkness; my thoughts run, but run uselessly. I do not ask—as I would, I think, if this were some other girl's story and I was only reading it or hearing it told—I do not ask why they have got me here; what they mean to do with me now; how they plan to profit from the cheating and stunning of me. I only rage, still, against my uncle. I only think, over and over: My mother, ruined, shamed, coming here, lying bleeding in a house of thieves. Not mad, not mad…

I suppose my expression is a strange one. Richard says, 'Maud, look at me. Don't think, now, of your uncle and your uncle's house. Don't think of that woman, Marianne.'

'I shall think of her,' I answer, 'I shall think of her as I always have: as a fool!

But, my father— You said, a gentleman? They have made me out an orphan, all these years. Does my father still live? Did he never—?'

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'Maud, Maud,' he says, sighing, moving back to his place at the door. 'Look about you. Think how you came here. Do you suppose I snatched you from Briar, did the deed I did this morning—ran the risks I have run—so that you might learn family secrets, no more than that?'

'I don't know!' I say. 'What do I know, now? If you will only give me a little time, to think in. If you will only tell me—'

But Mrs Sucksby has come to me, and lightly touches my arm.

'Wait up, dear girl,' she says, very gently. She puts a finger to her lip, half closes one eye. 'Wait up, and listen. You ain't heard all my story. The better part's to come. For there's the lady, you remember, that's been made rags of. There's the father and the brother and the bully, due in one hour's time. There's the baby, and me saying, "What'll we name her? What about your own name, Marianne?", and the lady saying as how she'd sooner curse her, than call her that. You remember, my dear? "As for being the daughter of a lady," says the poor girl next, "you tell me this: what does being a lady do for you, except let you be ruined? I want her named plain," she says, "like a girl of the people. I want her named plain." "You name her plain, then," I say still meaning, as it were, to humour her. "I will," she says. "I will. There was a servant that was kind to me once—kinder than ever my father or my brother was. I want her named for her. I shall call her for her. I shall call her—" '

' Maud,' I say, wretchedly. I have lowered my face again. But when Mrs Sucksby is silent, I lift it. Her look is strange. Her silence is strange. She slowly shakes her head. She draws in her breath—hesitates, for another second—and then says:

'Susan.'

Richard watches, his hand before his mouth. The room, the house, is still. My thoughts, that have seemed to turn like grinding wheels, now seem to stop. Susan. Susan. I will not let them see how the word confounds me. Susan. I will not speak. I will not move, for fear I should stumble or shake. I only keep my eyes upon Mrs Sucksby's face. She takes another, longer sip from her glass of brandy, then wipes her mouth. She comes and sits again, beside me, upon the bed.

'Susan,' she says again. 'That's what the lady named her. Seems a shame to have named that baby for a servant, don't it? So I thought, anyway. But what could I say? Poor girl, she was quite off her head—still crying, still shrieking, still saying as how her father would come, would take the child, would make her hate her own mother's name. "Oh, how can I save her?" she said. "I would rather anyone got her, than him and my brother! Oh, what can I do? How can I save her? Oh, Mrs Sucksby, I swear to you now, I would rather they took any other poor woman's baby, than mine!"'

Her voice has risen. Her cheek is flushed. A pulse beats, briefly—very fast—in the lid of her eye. She puts her hand to it, then drinks again, and again wipes her mouth.

'That's what she said,' she says, more quietly. 'That's what she said. And as she says it, all the infants that are lying about the house seem to hear her, and all start up crying at once. They all sound the same, when you ain't their mother. They all sounded the same to her, anyway. I had got her to the stairs, just outside that door'—she tilts her head, Richard shifts his pose and the door gives a creak—'and now, she stops. She looks at me, and I see what she's thinking, and

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my heart goes cold. "We can't!" I say. "Why can't we?" she answers. "You have said yourself, my daughter shall be brought up a lady. Why not let some other little motherless girl have that, in her place—poor thing, she shall have the grief of it, too! But I swear, I'll settle a half my fortune on her; and Susan shall have the rest. She shall have it, if you'll only take her for me now, and bring her up honest, and keep her from knowing about her inheritance till she has grown up poor and can feel the worth of it! Don't you have," she says, "some motherless baby we can give to my father in Susan's place? Don't you? Don't you? For God's sake, say you do! There's fifty pounds in the pocket of my gown. You shall have it!—I shall send you more!—if you'll only do this thing for me, and not tell a living soul you've done it."'

Perhaps there is movement in the room below, in the street—I do not know, I do not hear it if there is. I keep my gaze on Mrs Sucksby's flushed face, on her eyes, her lips.—'Now, here was a thing,' she is saying, 'to be asked to do. Wouldn't you say, dear girl? Here was a thing, all right. I think I never thought harder or quicker before in all my life. And what I said at last was: "Keep your money. Keep your fifty pounds. I don't want it. What I want, is this: Your pa is a gentleman, and gents are tricky. I'll keep your baby, but I want for you to write me out a paper, saying all you mean to do, and signing it, and sealing it; and that makes it binding." "I'll do it!" she says, straight off. "I'll do it!" And we come in here, and I fetch her a bit of paper and ink, and she sets it all down—just as I have told you, that Susan Lilly is her own child, though left with me, and that the fortunes are to be cut, and so on—and she folds it and seals it with the ring off her finger, and puts on the front that it ain't to be opened till the day her daughter turns eighteen. Twenty-one, she wanted to make it: but my mind was running ahead, even as she was writing, and I said it must be eighteen—for we oughtn't to risk the girls taking husbands, before they knew what was what.' She smiles. 'She liked that. She thanked me for it.

'And then, no sooner had she sealed it than Mr Ibbs sends up a cry: there's a coach, pulled up at his shop door, with two gents—an old one, and a younger—

getting out, and with them, a bully with a club. Well! The lady runs shrieking to her room and I stand, tearing the hair out of my head. Then I go to the cribs, and I fetch up this one particular baby that is there—a girl, same size as the other, looks to turn out fair, like her—and I carry her upstairs. I said, "Here!

Take her quick, and be kind to her! Her name's Maud; and that's a name for a lady after all. Remember your word." "Remember yours! the poor girl cries; and she kisses her own baby, and I take it, and bring it down and lay it in the empty cot . . '

She shakes her head. 'Such a trifling little thing it was to do!' she says. '—And done in a minute. Done, while the gentlemen are still hammering at the door.

"Where is she?" they're crying. "We know you've got her!" No stopping them, then. Mr Ibbs lets them in, they fly through the house like furies— see me and knock me down, next thing I know, there's the poor lady being dragged downstairs by her pa—her gown all flapping, her shoes undone, the mark of her brother's stick on her face—and there's you, dear girl—there's you in her arms, and nobody thinking you was anyone's but hers.—Why should they? Too late to change it, then. She gave me one quick look as her father took her down, and that was all; I fancy she watched me, though, from the window of the coach. But if she was ever sorry she done it, I can't tell you. I dare say she thought often of Sue; but no more than— Well, no more than she ought.'

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She blinks and turns her head. She has placed her glass of brandy upon the bed between us; the seams in the quilt keep it from spilling. Her hands she has clasped: she is stroking the knuckles of one with the blunt red thumb of the other. Her foot in its slipper goes tap upon the floor. She has not taken her eyes from my face, all the time she has spoken, until now.

My own eyes I close. My hands I place before them, and I gaze into the darkness that is made by my palms. There is a silence. It lengthens. Mrs Sucksby leans closer.

'Dear girl,' she murmurs. 'Won't you say a word to us?' She touches my hair. Still I will not speak or move. Her hand falls. 'I can see this news've dashed your spirits, rather,' she says. Perhaps she gestures then to Richard, for he comes and squats before me.

'You understand, Maud,' he says, trying to see about my fingers, 'what Mrs Sucksby has told you? One baby becomes another. Your mother was not your mother, your uncle not your uncle. Your life was not the life that you were meant to live, but Sue's; and Sue lived yours…'

They say that dying men see, played before their eyes with impossible swiftness, the show of their lives. As Richard speaks, I see mine: the madhouse, my baton of wood, the gripping gowns of Briar, the string of beads, my uncle's naked eyes, the books, the books… The show flickers and is gone, is lost and useless, like the gleam of a coin in murky water. I shudder, and Richard sighs. Mrs Sucksby shakes her head and tuts. But, when I show them my face they both start back. I am not weeping, as they suppose. I am laughing—I am gripped with a terrible laughter—and my look must be ghastly.

'Oh, but this,' I think I say, 'is perfect! This is all I have longed for! Why do you stare? What are you gazing at? Do you suppose a girl is sitting here? That girl is lost! She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones, stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the words have peeled and drifted—'

I try to take a breath; and might as well have water in my mouth: I draw at the air, and it does not come. I gasp, and shake and gasp again. Richard stands and watches.

'No madness, Maud,' he says, with a look of distaste. 'Remember. You have no excuse for it now.'

'I have excuse,' I say, 'for anything! Anything!'

'Dear girl—' says Mrs Sucksby. She has caught up her tumbler of liquor and is waving it close to my face. 'Dear girl—' But I shudder with laughter still—a hideous laughter—and I jerk, as a fish might jerk on the end of a line. I hear Richard curse; then I see him go to my bag and grope inside it, bring out my bottle of medicine: he lets the liquid drop, three times, into the glass of brandy, then seizes my head and presses the glass to my lips. I taste it, then swallow and cough. I put my hands to my mouth. My mouth grows numb. I close my eyes again. I do not know how long I sit, but at length I feel the blanket that covers the bed come against my shoulder and cheek. I have sunk upon it. I lie—still twitching, from time to time, in what feels like laughter; and again Richard and Mrs Sucksby stand, in silence, and watch me.

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Presently, however, they come a little nearer. 'Now,' says Mrs Sucksby softly,

'are you better, darling?' I do not answer. She looks at Richard. 'Oughtn't we to go, and let her sleep?'

'Sleep be damned,' he answers. 'I still believe she thinks we have brought her here for her own convenience.' He comes, and taps my face. 'Open your eyes,' he says.

I say, 'I have no eyes. How could I? You have taken them from me.'

He catches hold of one of my lids and pinches it hard. 'Open your damn eyes!'

he says. 'That's better. Now, there is a little more for you to know— just a little more, and then you may sleep. Listen to me. Listen! Don't ask me, how you are meant to, I shall cut the fucking ears off the sides of your head if you do. Yes, I see you hear that. Do you feel this, also?' He strikes me. 'Very good.'

The blow is not so hard as it might have been: Mrs Sucksby has seen him lift his arm and tried to check it.

'Gentleman!' she says, her cheek growing dark. 'No call for that. No call at all. Hold your temper, can't you? I believe you've bruised her. Oh, dear girl.'

She reaches towards my face. Richard scowls. 'She ought to be grateful,' he says, straightening, putting back his hair, 'that I have not done worse, any time in the past three months. She ought to know I will do it again, and count it nothing. Do you hear me, Maud? You have seen me at Briar, a sort of gentleman. I make a holiday from gallantry, however, when I come here. Understand?'

I lie, nursing my cheek, my eyes on his, saying nothing. Mrs Sucksby wrings her hands. He takes the cigarette from behind his ear, puts it to his mouth, looks for a match.

'Go on, Mrs Sucksby,' he says as he does it. 'Tell the rest. As for you, Maud: listen hard, and know at last what your life was lived for.'

'My life was not lived,' I say in a whisper. 'You have told me, it was a fiction.'

'Well'—he finds a match, and strikes it—'fictions must end. Hear now how yours is to.'

'It has ended already,' I answer. But his words have made me cautious. My head is thick with liquor, with medicine, with shock; but not so thick that I cannot, now, begin to be fearful of what they will tell me next, how they plan to keep me, what they mean to keep me for…

Mrs Sucksby sees me grow thoughtful, and nods. 'Now you start to get it,' she says. 'You are starting to see. I got the lady's baby and, what's better, I got the lady's word.—The word's the thing, of course. The word's the thing with the money in—ain't it?' She smiles, touches her nose. Then she leans a little closer.

'Like to see it?' she says, in a different sort of voice. 'Like to see the lady's word?'

She waits. I do not answer, but she smiles again, moves from me, glances at Richard, then turns her back to him and fumbles for a second with the buttons of her gown. The taffeta rustles. When the bodice is part-way open she reaches inside—reaches, it seems to me, into her very bosom, her very heart—and then draws out a folded paper. 'Kept this close,' she says, as she brings it to me, 'all these years. Kept this closer than gold! Look, here.'

The paper is folded like a letter, and bears a tilting instruction: To Be Opened on the Eighteenth Birthday of My Daughter, Susan Lilly.—I see that name, and shudder, and reach, but she holds it jealously and, like my uncle— not my uncle,

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now!—with an antique book, won't let me take it; she lets me touch it, however. The paper is warm, from the heat of her breast. The ink is brown, the folds furred and discoloured. The seal is quite unbroken. The stamp is my mother's—

Sue's mother's, I mean; not mine, not mine—

M.L.

'You see it, dear girl?' Mrs Sucksby says. The paper trembles. She draws it back to herself, with a miser's gesture and look—lifts it to her face and puts her lips to it, then turns her back and restores it to its place inside her gown. As she buttons her dress, she glances again at Richard. He has been watching, closely, curiously; but says nothing.

I speak, instead. 'She wrote it,' I say. My voice is thick, I am giddy. 'She wrote it. They took her. What then?'

Mrs Sucksby turns. Her gown is closed and perfectly smooth again, but she has her hand upon the bodice, as if nursing the words beneath. The lady?' she says, distractedly. The lady died, dear girl.' She sniffs, and her tone changes.

'Bust me, however, if she didn't linger on another month before she done it!

Who would have thought? That month was against us. For now her pa and her brother, having got her home, made her change her will.—You can guess what to. No penny to go to the daughter—meaning you, dear girl, so far as they knew—till the daughter marries. There's gentlemen for you—ain't it. She sent me a note to tell me, by a nurse. They'd got her into the madhouse by then, and you alongside her—well, that soon finished her off. It was a puzzle to her, she said, how things might turn out now; but she took her consolation from the thought of my honesty. Poor girl!' She seems almost sorry. '—That was her slip.'

Richard laughs. Mrs Sucksby smooths her mouth, and begins to look crafty.

'As for me,' she says,'—well, I had seen from the first that the only puzzle was, how to get the whole of the fortune when I was only due to have half. My comfort must be, that I had eighteen years for figuring it out in. I thought many times of you.'

I turn my face. 'I never asked for your thoughts,' I say. 'I don't want them now.'

'Ungrateful, Maud!' says Richard. 'Here has Mrs Sucksby been, plotting so hard in your behalf, so long. Another girl—don't girls seek only to be the heroines of romance?—another girl might fancy herself distinguished.'

I look from him back to Mrs Sucksby, saying nothing. She nods. 'I thought often of you,' she says again, 'and wondered how you got on. I supposed you handsome. Dear girl, you are!' She swallows. 'I had two fears, only. The first was, that you might die. The second was, that your grand-dad and uncle should take you away from England and have you married before the lady's secret come out. Then I read in a paper that your grand-dad died. Then I heard how your uncle lived quietly, in the country; and had you with him, and kept you in a quiet way, too. There's my two fears both gone!' She smiles. 'Meanwhile,' she says—and now her eye-lids flutter—'Meanwhile, here's Sue. You have seen, dear girl, how close and quiet I have kept the lady's word.' She pats her gown. 'Well, what was the word to me, without Sue to pin it to? Think how close and quiet I have kept her. Think how safe. Think how sharp such a girl might have grown, in a house like this one, in a street like ours; then think how hard Mr Ibbs and me have worked to keep her blunt. Think how deep I puzzled it over—knowing I must use her at the last, but never quite knowing how. Think how it begins to

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come clear, when I meets Gentleman—think how quick my fear that you might be secretly married, turns into my knowing that he is the chap that must secretly marry you… It's the work of another minute, then, to look at Sue and know what ought to be done with her.' She shrugs. 'Well, and now we've done it. Sue's you, dear girl. And what we brought you here for is—'

'Listen, Maud!' says Richard. I have closed my eyes and turned my head. Mrs Sucksby comes to me, lifts her hand, begins to stroke my hair.

'What we brought you here for,' she goes on, more gently, 'is for you to start being Sue. Only that, dear girl! Only that.'

I open my eyes, and suppose look stupid.

'Do you see?' says Richard. 'We keep Sue as my wife in the madhouse, and with the opening of her mother's statement, her share of the fortune— Maud's share, I mean—comes to me. I should like to say I will keep every cent of it; but the scheme was Mrs Sucksby's after all, and half goes to her.' He makes a bow.

'That's fair, ain't it?' says Mrs Sucksby, still stroking my hair.

'But the other share,' Richard goes on,'—which is to say, Sue's real share—

Mrs Sucksby stands also to get. The statement names her Sue's guardian; and guardians, I am afraid, are often less than scrupulous in the handling of their wards' fortunes… That all means nothing, of course, if Sue herself has vanished. But then, it's Maud Lilly—the true Maud Lilly'—he blinks—'by which I mean of course, the false Maud Lilly—who has vanished. Isn't that what you wanted? To vanish? You said, a minute ago, that you have excuse for anything now. What will it hurt you, then, to be passed off as Sue, and so make Mrs Sucksby rich?'

'Make us both rich, darling,' Mrs Sucksby says quickly. 'I ain't so heartless, dear, as to rob you quite of everything! You're a lady, ain't you, and handsome? Why, I shall need a handsome lady, to show me what's what when I comes into my fortune. I got plans for us both, sweetheart, that grand!'—She taps her nose. I push myself up, away from her; but am too giddy, still, to stand. 'You are mad,' I say to them both. 'You are mad! I— Pass me off as Sue?'

'Why not?' says Richard. 'We need only convince a lawyer. I think we shall.'

'Convince him, how?'

'How? Why, here are Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs—that have been like parents to you, and so might be supposed, I think, to know you, if anyone might. And here are John and Dainty, too—they'll swear to any kind of mischief with money in, you may be sure. And here am I—that met you at Briar, when you were maid to Miss Maud Lilly, later my wife. You've seen, haven't you, what gentlemen's words are worth?' He pretends to be struck with the thought. 'But of course you have! For in a madhouse in the country are a pair of doctors—they'll remember you, I think. For didn't you, only yesterday, give them your hand and make them a curtsey, and stand in a good light before them, for quite twenty minutes, answering questions to the name of Susan?'

He lets me consider that. Then he says, 'All we ask is that, when the moment arrives, you give the performance over again, before a lawyer. What have you to lose? Dear Maud, you have nothing: no friends in London, no money to your name—why, not so much as a name!'

I have put my fingers to my mouth. 'Suppose,' I say, 'I won't do it? Suppose, when your lawyer comes, I tell him—'

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'Tell him what? Tell him how you plotted to swindle an innocent girl?—

looked on, while the doctors dosed her and carried her off? Hmm? What do you think he will make of that?'

I sit and watch him speak. At last I say, in a whisper: 'Are you truly so wicked as this?' He shrugs. I turn to Mrs Sucksby. 'And you,' I say. 'Are you so wicked? To think, of Sue— Are you so vile?'

She waves her hand before her face, says nothing. Richard snorts.

' Wickedness,' he says. ' Vileness. What terms! The terms of fiction. Do you think, that when women swap children, they do it, as nurses do it in the operettas—for comedy's sake? Look about you, Maud. Step to the window, look into the street. There is life, not fiction. It is hard, it is wretched. It would have been yours, but for Mrs Sucksby's kindness in keeping you from it.— Christ!' He moves from the door, puts his arms above his head and stretches. 'How tired I am! What a day's work I have done today—haven't I? One girl pressed into a madhouse; another—

Well.' He looks me over, nudges my foot with his. 'No arguments?' he says. 'No bluster? That may come later, I suppose. No matter if it does. Sue's birthday falls at the start of August. We have more than three months, to persuade you into our plot. I think three days— of Borough living, I mean—will do that.'

I am gazing at him, but cannot speak. I am thinking, still, of Sue. He tilts his head. 'Don't say we have broken your spirit, Maud,' he says, 'so quickly? I should be sorry to think it.' He pauses. Then: 'Your mother,' he adds, 'would have been sorry, also.'

'My mother,' I start to say.—I think of Marianne, with lunacy in her eye. Then I catch my breath. Through all of it, I have not thought of this. Richard watches, looks sly. He puts his hand to his collar and stretches his throat, and coughs, in a feeble, girlish and yet deliberate kind of way.

'Now, Gentleman,' says Mrs Sucksby anxiously as he does it, 'don't tease her.'

'Tease her?' he says. He still pulls at his collar as if it chafes him. 'I am only dry about the throat, from talking.'

'You have said too much, that's why,' she answers. 'Miss Lilly—I'll call you that, shall I, my dear? Seems natural, don't it?—Miss Lilly, don't mind him. We've plenty of time for talking of that.'

'Of my mother, you mean,' I say. 'My true mother, that you made out to be Sue's. That choked—you see, I know something!—that choked, on a pin.'

'On a pin!' says Richard, laughing. 'Did Sue say that?' Mrs Sucksby bites her mouth. I look from one to the other of them.

'What was she?' I ask wearily. 'For God's sake, tell me. Do you think I have it in me, now, to be astonished? Do you imagine I care? What was she? A thief, like you? Well, if I must lose the madwoman, a thief I suppose will do…'

Richard coughs again. Mrs Sucksby looks away from me, and joins and works her hands. When she speaks, her voice is quiet, grave. 'Gentleman,' she says,

'you ain't got nothing more to tell Miss Lilly, now. I have some words, however. The sort of words a lady likes to say to a girl in private.'

He nods. 'I know,' he says. He folds his arms. 'I am dying to hear them.'

She waits, but he will not leave. She comes and, again, sits beside me; again, I flinch away.

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'Dear girl,' she says. 'The fact of it is, there ain't a pleasant way to tell it; and I ought to know, if anyone ought!—for I told it once already, to Sue. Your mother—' She wets her lips, then looks at Richard.

'Tell her,' he says. 'Or I will.'

So then she speaks again, more quickly. 'Your mother,' she says, 'was took before the courts, not just for thieving, but for killing a man; and—oh, my dear, they hanged her for it!'

'Hanged?'

'A murderess, Maud,' says Richard, with relish. 'You may see the place they hanged her, from the window of my room—'

'Gentleman, I mean it!'

He falls silent. I say again, ' Hanged!'

'Hanged game,' says Mrs Sucksby—as if this, whatever it means, will make me bear it better. Then she studies my face. 'Dear girl, don't think of it,' she says.

'What does it matter now? You're a lady, ain't you? Who'll trouble with where you come from? Why, look about you here.'

She has risen, and lights a lamp: a score of gaudy surfaces—the silk dressinggown, the cloudy brass of the bedstead, china ornaments upon the mantelshelf—

start out of the darkness. She goes again to the wash-hand stand, and again she says: 'Here's soap. What soap! Got from a shop up West. Come in a year ago—I saw it come and thought, "Now, shan't Miss Lilly like that!" Kept it wrapped in paper, all this time. And here's a towel, look—got a nap like a peach. And scent!

Don't care for lavender, we'll get you one of rose. Are you looking, dear?' She moves to the chest of drawers, pulls the deepest drawer open. 'Why, what have we here!' Richard leans to see. I also look, in a kind of horrified wonder.

'Petticoats, and stockings, and stays! Bless me, here's pins for a lady's hair. Here's rouge for a lady's cheek. Here's crystal drops—one pair of blue, one red. That comes of my not knowing, darling, the shade of the eyes they was to match!

Well, Dainty shall have the blue pair…'

She holds the gaudy beads up by their wires, and I watch the crystals turn. The colour seems to blur. I have begun, in hopelessness, to weep. As if weeping could save me.

Mrs Sucksby sees me, and tuts. 'Oh, now,' she says, 'ain't that a shame!

Crying? And all these handsome things? Gentleman, you see her? Crying, and for what?'

'Crying,' I say bitterly, unsteadily, 'to find myself here, like this! Crying to think of the dream I lived in, when I supposed my mother only a fool! Crying in horror at the closeness and foulness of you!'

She has stepped back. 'Dear girl,' she says, dropping her voice, gazing quickly at Richard, 'do you despise me so, for letting them take you?'

'I despise you,' I say, 'for bringing me back!'

She stares, then almost smiles. She gestures about the room. 'Don't think,'

she says, with a look of amazement, 'I mean for you to keep at Lant Street! Dear girl, dear girl, you was taken from here so they might make a lady of you. And a lady they've made you—a perfect jewel! Don't think I shall have you wasting your shine in this low place. Haven't I said? I want you by me, dear, when I am rich. Don't ladies take companions? Only wait till I have got my hands on your

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fortune; then see if we don't take the grandest house in London! See what carriages and footmen we'll have then!—what pearls, what dresses!'

She puts her hands on me again. She means to kiss me, to eat me. I rise and shake her off. 'You don't think,' I say, 'I shall stay with you, when your wretched scheme is done?'

'What else?' she says. 'Who ought to have you, if not me? It was fortune took you; it is me that has got you back. I been working it over for seventeen years. I been plotting and thinking on this, every minute since I first laid you in the poor lady's arms. I been looking at Sue—'

She swallows. I cry still harder. 'Sue,' I say. 'Oh, Sue…'

'Now, why look like that? Didn't I do everything for her, just as her mother wanted?—kept her safe, kept her tidy, made a commonplace girl of her? What have I done, but give her back the life you had from her?'

'You have killed her!' I say.

'Killed her? When there's all those doctors about her, all supposing her a lady?—And that don't come cheap, I can tell you.'

'It certainly doesn't,' says Richard. 'You're paying for that, don't forget. I should have had her in the county asylum, were it down to me.'

'You see, dear girl? Killed her! Why, she might have been killed any day of her life, but for me! Who was it nursed her, when she took sick? Who kept the boys off her? I should have given my hands, my legs, my lungs, for the saving of hers. But do you think, that when I did those things I was doing them for her? What use will a commonplace girl be to me, when I am rich? I was doing them for you! Don't think of her. She was water, she was coal, she was dust, in comparison with what's been made of you.'

I stare at her. 'My God!' I say. 'How could you? How could you?'

Again, she looks amazed. 'How could I not?'

'But, to cheat her! To leave her, there—!'

She reaches, and pats my sleeve. 'You let them take her,' she says. Then her look changes. She almost winks. 'And oh, dear girl, don't you think you was your mother's daughter, then?'

From the rooms below there come again shrieks, and blows, and laughter. Richard stands watching, with folded arms. The fly at the window still buzzes, still beats against the glass. Then the buzzing stops. As if it is a signal, I turn, and sink out of Mrs Sucksby's grasp. I sink to my knees at the side of the bed, and hide my face in the seams of the quilt. I have been bold and determined. I have bitten down rage, insanity, desire, love, for the sake of freedom. Now, that freedom being taken from me utterly, is it to be wondered at if I fancy myself defeated?

I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may never again be required to lift my head to the light.

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13

The night which follows I remember brokenly. I remember that I keep at the side of the bed with my eyes quite hidden, and will not rise and go down to the kitchen, as Mrs Sucksby wishes. I remember that Richard comes to me, and again puts his shoe to my skirts, to nudge me, then stands and laughs when I will not stir, then leaves me. I remember that someone brings me soup, which I will not eat. That the lamp is taken away and the room made dark. That I must rise at last, to visit the privy; and that the red-haired, fat-faced girl—Dainty—is made to show me to it, then stands at the door to keep me from running from it into the night. I remember that I weep again, and am given more of my drops in brandy. That I am undressed and put in a night-gown not my own. That I sleep, perhaps for an hour—that I am woken by the rustling of taffeta—that I look in horror to see Mrs Sucksby with her hair let down, shrugging off her gown, uncovering flesh and dirty linen, snuffing out her candle, then climbing into the bed beside me. I remember that she lies, thinking me sleeping—puts her hands to me, then draws them back—finally, like a miser with a piece of gold, catches up a lock of my hair and presses it to her mouth.

I know that I am conscious of the heat of her, the unfamiliar bulk and sour scents of her. I know that she falls swiftly into an even sleep, and snores, while I start in and out of slumber. The fitful sleeping makes the hours pass slowly: it seems to me the night has many nights in it—has years of nights!—through which, as if through drifts of smoke, I am compelled to stumble. I wake now, believing I am in my dressing-room at Briar; now, in my room at Mrs Cream's; now, in a madhouse bed, with a nurse vast and comfortable beside me. I wake, a hundred times. I wake to moan and long for slumber—for always, at the last, comes the remembrance, sharp and fearful, of where I truly lie, how I arrived there, who and what I am.

At last I wake and do not sleep again. The dark has eased a little. There has been a street-lamp burning, that has lit the threads of the bleached net scarf hung at the window; now it is put out. The light turns filthy pink. The pink gives way, in time, to a sickly yellow. It creeps, and with it creeps sound—softly at first, then rising in a staggering crescendo: crowing cocks, whistles and bells, dogs, shrieking babies, violent calling, coughing, spitting, the tramp of feet, the endless hollow beating of hooves and the grinding of wheels. Up, up it comes, out of the throat of London. It is six or seven o'clock. Mrs Sucksby sleeps on at my side, but I am wide awake now, and wretched, and sick at my stomach. I rise, and—though it is May, and milder here than at Briar—I shiver. I still wear my gloves, but my clothes and shoes and leather bag Mrs Sucksby has locked in a box—'In case you should wake bewildered, darling, and, thinking you was at home, get dressed, walk off and be lost.'—I remember her saying it, now, as I stood dosed and dazed before her. Where did she put the key?—and the key to the door of the room? I shiver again, more violently, and grow sicker than ever; but my thoughts are horribly clear. I must get out. I must get out! I must get out of London—go anywhere—back to Briar. I must get money. I must, I think—this is the clearest thought ot all—I must get Sue! Mrs Sucksby breathes heavily, evenly. Where might she have put the keys? Her taffeta gown is hanging from the horse-hair screen: I go silently to it and pat the pockets of its skirt. Empty. I

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stand and study the shelves, the chest of drawers, the mantelpiece—no keys; but many places, I suppose, where they might be concealed.

Then she stirs—does not wake, but moves her head; and I think I know—

think I begin to remember… She has the keys beneath her pillow: I recall the crafty movement of her hand, the muffled ringing of the metal. I take a step. Her lips are parted, her white hair loose upon her cheek. I step again, and the floorboards creak. I stand at her side—wait a moment, uncertain; then put my fingers beneath the edge of pillow and slowly, slowly, reach. She opens her eyes. She takes my wrist, and smiles. She coughs.

'My dear, I loves you for trying,' she says, wiping her mouth. 'But the girl ain't been born that's got the touch that will get past me, when I've a mind to something.' Her grip is strong about my arm; though turns to a caress. I shudder. 'Lord, ain't you cold!' she says then. 'Here, sweetheart, let us cover you up.' She pulls the knitted quilt from the bed and puts it about me. 'Better, dear girl?'

My hair is tangled, and has fallen before my face. I regard her through it.

'I wish I were dead,' I say.

'Oh, now,' she answers, rising. 'What kind of talk is that?'

'I wish you were dead, then.'

She shakes her head, still smiles. 'Wild words, dear girl!' She sniffs. There has come, from the kitchen, a terrible odour. 'Smell that? That's Mr Ibbs, a-cooking up our breakfasts. Let's see who wishes she was dead, now, that's got a plate of bloaters before her!'

She rubs her hands again. Her hands are red, but the sagging flesh upon her arms has the hue and polish of ivory. She has slept in her chemise and petticoat; now she hooks on a pair of stays, climbs into her taffeta gown, then comes to dip her comb in water and brush her hair. 'Tra la, hee hee,' she sings brokenly, as she does it. I keep my own tangled hair before my eyes, and watch her. Her naked feet are cracked, and bulge at the toe. Her legs are almost hairless. When she bends to her stockings, she groans. Her thighs are fat and permanently marked by the pinch of her garters.

'There now,' she says, when she is dressed. A baby has started crying. 'That will set my others all off. Come down, dear girl—will you?—while I give 'em their pap.'

'Come down?' I say. I must go down, if I am to escape. But I look at myself.

'Like this? Won't you give me back my gown, my shoes?'

Perhaps I say it too keenly, however; or else my look has something of cunning, or desperation, in it. She hesitates, then says, 'That dusty old frock? Them boots? Why, that's walking-gear. Look here, at this silken wrapper.' She takes up the dressing-gown from the hook on the back of the door. 'Here's what ladies wear, for their mornings at home. Here's silken slippers, too. Shan't you look well, in these? Slip 'em on, dear girl, and come down for your breakfast. No need to be shy. John Vroom don't rise before twelve, there's only me, and Gentleman—he's seen you in a state of dishabilly, I suppose!— and Mr Ibbs. And him, dear girl, you might consider now in the light of— well, let's say an uncle. Eh?'

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I turn away. The room is hateful to me; but I will not go with her, undressed, down to that dark kitchen. She pleads and coaxes a little longer; then gives me up, and goes. The key turns in the lock.

I step at once to the box that holds my clothes, to try the lid. It is shut up tight, and is stout.

So then I go to the window, to push at the sashes. They will lift, by an inch or two, and the rusting nails that keep them shut I think might give, if I pushed harder. But then, the window frame is narrow, the drop is great; and I am still undressed. Worse than that, the street has people in it; and though at first I think to call to them—to break the glass, to signal and shriek—after a second I begin to look more closely at them, and I see their faces, their dusty clothes, the packets they carry, the children and dogs that run and tumble at their sides. There is life, said Richard, twelve hours ago. It is hard, it is wretched. It would have been yours, but for Mrs Sucksby's kindness in keeping you from it… At the door to the house with the shutters with the heart-shaped holes, a girl in a dirty bandage sits and feeds her baby. She lifts her head, catches my gaze; and shakes her fist at me.

I start back from the glass, and cover my face up with my hands.

When Mrs Sucksby comes again, however, I am ready.

'Listen to me,' I say, going to her. 'You know that Richard took me away from my uncle's house? You know my uncle is rich, and will seek me out?'

'Your uncle?' she says. She has brought me a tray, but stands in the door'

place until I move back.

'Mr Lilly,' I say, as I do it. 'You know who I mean. He still thinks me his niece, at least. Don't you suppose he will send a man, and find me? Do you think he will thank you, for keeping me like this?'

'I should say he will—if he cares so much about it. Ain't we made you cosy, dear?'

'You know you have not. You know you are keeping me here against my will. For God's sake, give me my gown, won't you?'

'All right, Mrs Sucksby?'—It is Mr Ibbs. My voice has risen, and has brought him out of the kitchen to the foot of the stairs. Richard, too, has stirred in his bed: I hear him cross his floor, draw open his door, and listen.

'All right!' calls Mrs Sucksby lightly. There, now,' she says to me. 'And here's your breakfast, look, growing chilly.'

She sets the tray upon the bed. The door is open; but I know that Mr Ibbs still stands at the foot of the stairs, that Richard waits and listens at the top. 'There, now,' she says again. The tray has a plate and a fork upon it, and a linen napkin. Upon the plate there are two or three amber-coloured fish in a juice of butter and water. They have fins, and faces. About the napkin there is a ring of polished silver, a little like the one that was kept for my especial use at Briar; but without the initial.

'Please let me go,' I say.

Mrs Sucksby shakes her head.'Dear girl,' she says, 'go where?'

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She waits and, when I do not answer, leaves me. Richard closes his door and goes back to his bed. I hear him humming.

I think of taking up the plate, hurling it against the ceiling, the window, the wall. Then I think: You must be strong. You must be strong and ready to run. And so I sit and eat—slowly, wretchedly, carefully picking out the bones from the amber flesh. My gloves grow damp and stained; and I have none with which to replace them.

After an hour, Mrs Sucksby comes back, to take the empty plate. Another hour, and she brings me coffee. While she is gone I stand, again, at the window, or press my ear to the door. I pace, and sit, and pace again. I pass from fury to maudlin grief, to stupor. But then Richard comes. 'Well, Maud—' is all he says. I see him, and am filled with a blistering rage. I make a run at him, meaning to strike his face: he wards off the blows and knocks me down, and I lie upon the floor and kick, and kick—

Then they dose me again with medicine and brandy; and a day or two passes in darkness.

When I wake next, it is again unnaturally early. There has appeared in the room a little basket chair, painted gold, with a scarlet cushion on it. I take it to the window and sit with the dressing-gown about me, until Mrs Sucksby yawns and opens her eyes.

'Dear girl, all right?' she says, as she will say every day, every day; and the idiocy or perversity of the question—when all is so far from being right, as to be so wrong I would almost rather die than endure it—prompts me to grind my teeth or pull at my hair, and gaze at her in loathing. 'Good girl,' she says then, and, 'Like your chair, do you, dear? I supposed you would.' She yawns again, and looks about her. 'Got the pot?' she says. I am used in my modesty to taking the chamber-pot behind the horse-hair screen. 'Pass it over, will you, sweetheart? I'm ready to bust.'

I do not move. After a second she rises and fetches it herself. It is a thing of white china, dark inside with what, when I saw it first, in the half-light of morning, I queasily took to be clumps of hair; but which proved to be decoration merely—a great eye with lashes, and about it, in a plain black fount, a motto: