Affinity (33 page)

They found me with my hand upon the chair-back, trembling with fear and shame, the mark of the shelf I suppose at my cheek, my coat dusty. Miss Craven came close to me with the bottle of salts, but Miss Ridley’s eyes were narrow. Once I thought I saw her gazing at the ladder, and at the shelf, and at the boxes upon it—which, in my haste and nervousness, I may have left disordered, I cannot say. I did not turn to see. I looked only, once, at her; then turned away and shuddered harder. For it was those bare eyes, that gaze, which made me as ill at last as Miss Craven, with her salts, could have supposed me. For I knew at once what Miss Ridley would have seen, had she come sooner. I saw it all—I see it now, still, with a crisp and dreadful certainty.

It was myself, a spinster, pale and plain and sweating and wild, and groping from a swaying prison ladder after the severed yellow tresses of a handsome girl . . .

I let Miss Craven stand and hold a glass of water to my mouth. I knew that Selina sat, sad and expectant, in her cold cell; but I couldn’t bring myself to go to her—I should have hated myself, if I had gone to her now. I said I would not visit the wards to-day. Miss Ridley agreed that that was wise. She led me to the Porter’s lodge herself.

This evening as I read to Mother she said, What was that mark upon my face? and I looked in the glass to find a bruise there—the shelf had bruised me. After that my voice was unsteady, and I put the book aside. I said I should like to bathe, and had Vigers fill me a bath before my fire, and I bent my legs and lay in it, and studied my own flesh, then put my face beneath the cooling water. When I opened my eyes Vigers was there with the towel, and her gaze seemed dark, her face pale as my own. She said, as Mother had, ‘You have hurt your cheek, miss.’ She said she would put vinegar on it. I sat and let her hold the cloth to my face, meek as a child.

Then she said, What a shame it was that I had been from home to-day, since Mrs Prior—that is, Mrs Helen Prior, that was married to my brother—had come to the house, bringing her baby with her, and was sorry to have missed me. She said, ‘What a pretty lady she is, isn’t she, miss?’

I heard that, and thrust her from me, saying the vinegar made me sick. I said she must take away my bath, then tell my mother to bring my medicine: I wanted my medicine at once. When Mother came she said, ‘What is the matter with you?’ and I said, ‘Nothing, Mother.’ But my hand trembled so much she wouldn’t let me take the glass, but held it for me—just as Miss Craven had.

She said, Had I seen some hard thing at the prison, that had upset me? She said I mustn’t make the visits, if they left me like this.

After she went I paced my room, twisting my hands, thinking,
You fool, you fool . . .
Then I took up this diary, and began to turn the pages of it. I remembered that comment of Arthur’s, that women’s books could only ever be
journals of the heart
. I think I thought that, in making my trips to Millbank, in writing of them here, I would somehow disprove or spite him. I thought that I could make my life into a book that had no life or love in it—a book that was only a catalogue, a kind of list. Now I can see that my heart has crept across these pages, after all. I can see the crooked passage of it, it grows firmer as the paper turns. It grows so firm at last, it spells a name—

Selina
.

I almost burned this book to-night, as I burned the last one. I could not do it. But when I looked up from it I saw the vase upon my desk, that held the orange-blossoms: they have kept white and fragrant all this time, just as she promised. I went to them and pulled them dripping from the vase; and it was them I burned, I held them hissing on the coals, watching them twist and blacken. One bloom only I kept. I have pressed it here, and now shall keep these pages shut. For if I turn them again, then the scent of it will come, to warn me. It will come quick and sharp and dangerous, like the blade of a knife.

2 December 1874

I hardly know how to write of what has happened. I hardly know how to sit or stand or walk or speak, or do any ordinary thing. I have been out of my head for a day and a half, they have brought the doctor to me, and Helen has come to me—even Stephen has come, he stood at the foot of the bed and gazed at me in my night-dress, I heard him whispering when they thought I was asleep. And all the time I knew I should be well, if they would only leave me to myself and let me think, and write. Now they have set Vigers in a chair outside the door, and left the door ajar in case I should cry out; but I have come quietly to my desk, and have my book before me, at last. It is the only place I can be honest in—and I can hardly see, to fix the words upon the line.

They have put Selina in the darks!
—and I am the cause of it. And I should go to her, but am afraid.

I made a bitter kind of resolution to keep from her, after my last visit to the gaol. I knew my trips to her had made me strange, not like myself—or worse, that they had made me
too much like
myself, like my old self, my naked
Aurora
self. Now, when I tried to be
Margaret
again, I couldn’t. It seemed to me that she had dwindled, like a suit of clothes. I couldn’t say what she had done, how she had moved and spoken. I sat with Mother—it might have been a doll that sat there, a paper-doll, nodding its head. And when Helen came, I found I could not look at her. When she kissed me I would shudder, feeling the dryness of my cheek against her lips.

So my days passed, since my last trip to Millbank. And then yesterday I went, alone, to the National Gallery, hoping the pictures would distract me. It was the students’ day, and there was a girl there, she had set her easel before Crivelli’s
Annunciation
, and she was marking on her canvas, with a stick of lead, the face and hands of the Virgin—the face was Selina’s, and seemed realer to me than my own. And then I didn’t know why I had kept away from her. It was half-past five, and Mother had invited guests, for dinner.—I didn’t think of any of this. I only went at once to Millbank and had a matron take me to the cells. I found the women finishing their suppers, wiping their trenchers with crusts of bread; and when I arrived at the gate of Selina’s ward, I caught the voice of Mrs Jelf. She was standing at the angle of the passages, calling out an evening prayer, and the acoustics of the wards made her voice tremble.

When she came and found me waiting for her she gave a start. She took me to two or three of the women—the last of these was Ellen Power, and she was so changed and so ill and so grateful to have me go to her that I couldn’t hurry my visit, but sat with her and held her hand, passing my fingers over her swollen knuckles, to calm her. She cannot speak, now, without coughing. The surgeon has given her medicine to take, but they cannot put her in the infirmary, she said, because the beds are filled with younger women. Beside her was a tray of wool and a pair of half-finished stockings—they still make her sit and sew, ill as she is, and she said she prefers to work than to lie idle. I said, ‘It cannot be right. I shall speak to Miss Haxby.’ But she said at once that it would do no good; and that anyway she would rather I did not.

‘My time is up in seven weeks,’ she said. ‘If they should find me out as a trouble-maker they might put back the date.’ I said it would be I that was making the trouble, not her—and even as I said it, I felt the pricking of a shameful fear, that if I
did
interfere in her case, then Miss Haxby might use it in some sly way against me—perhaps, to have my visits stopped . . .

Then Power said, ‘You mustn’t think of doing it, miss, indeed you mustn’t.’ She said that she saw twenty women, at exercise, as poorly as herself; and if they changed the rules for her, they must be changed for all of them. ‘And why would they do that?’ She patted her chest. ‘I have my bit of flannel,’ she said, with an attempt at a wink. ‘I still have that, thank God!’

I asked Mrs Jelf, when she released me, was it true that they would not give Power a bed in the infirmary? She said that when she had attempted to speak to the surgeon on Power’s behalf he had answered her frankly, that he thought he knew his own business better. She said he calls Power ‘
the bawd
’.

‘Miss Ridley,’ she went on, ‘might have some weight with him; but Miss Ridley has strong opinions on the matter of punishments. And it is to her that I must answer, not—’ here she looked away ‘—not to Ellen Power, nor to any of the women.’

I thought then,
You are as snared by Millbank as they are.

Then she took me to Selina; and I forgot Ellen Power. I stood at her gate and shook—Mrs Jelf watching me, saying, ‘You are cold, miss!’ I had not known it, until that moment. I might have been, until then, quite frozen, quite numb; but Selina’s gaze sent the life trickling back into me, and it was marvellous, but achingly painful and hard. I understood then that I had been a fool to keep away from her—that my feelings had grown, in my absence, not dulled and ordinary, but more desperate and more quick. She looked fearfully at me. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. I asked her, What was she sorry for? She answered, Perhaps, the flowers? She had meant them as a gift. Then, when I kept away, she remembered how I had said, last time, that they had frightened me. She had thought perhaps I meant to
punish
her.

I said, ‘Oh, Selina, how could you think that? I have only kept away because, because I feared—’

Feared my own passion
, I might have said. But I didn’t say it. For I was visited again by that gross vision, of the spinster, grasping after the switch of hair . . .

I only took her hand in mine, once, very briefly; and then I let the fingers fall. ‘Feared nothing,’ I said, and turned from her. I said that I had many things to do at home, now that Priscilla was married.

We talked on like this—she watchful, still half-fearful; me distracted, afraid to go too close to her, afraid even to look too hard at her. And then there were footsteps, and Mrs Jelf appeared at the gate, with another matron beside her. I didn’t know this matron until I saw her leather satchel, and then I recognised her as Miss Brewer, the chaplain’s clerk, who brings the women their letters. She smiled at me, and at Selina, and there was a kind of knowledge behind the smile. She was like a person with a gift, keeping the gift half-hidden. I thought—I knew it at once! and I think Selina knew it too—I thought: She has something with her that will disturb us. She has
trouble
.

Now I hear Vigers, shifting in her seat beyond the door and sighing. I must write quietly, quietly, or she may come and take the book from me, to make me sleep. How can I sleep, knowing what I know? Miss Brewer came into the cell. Mrs Jelf drew closed the gate but did not lock it, and I heard her walk a little way along the ward, then halt—perhaps, to look in upon another prisoner. Miss Brewer said that she was glad to find me there; that she had news for Dawes, that she knew I should be pleased to hear. Selina’s hand moved to her throat. She said, What news was that? and Miss Brewer coloured, with the pleasure of her task. ‘You are to be moved!’ she said to her. ‘You are to be moved, in three days’ time, to the prison at Fulham.’

Moved? said Selina. Moved, to Fulham? Miss Brewer nodded. She said the order had been brought, that all the Star-class prisoners were to be transferred. Miss Haxby had wanted the women told of it at once.

‘Only think of it,’ she said to me. ‘The habits at Fulham are kind ones: the women work together there, and even talk together. The food, I think, is a little richer. Why, they have chocolate at Fulham, instead of tea! What will you make of that, Dawes?’

Selina said nothing. She had grown very stiff, and her hand was still at her throat; only her eyes seemed to move a little, like the tilting eyes of a doll. My own heart had given a terrible kind of twist at Miss Brewer’s words, but I knew I must speak and not betray myself. I said, ‘To Fulham, Selina’—thinking, How, oh how, shall I visit you there?

My tone, my face, must have betrayed me anyway. The matron looked puzzled.

Now Selina spoke. She said: ‘I won’t go. I won’t go from Millbank.’ Miss Brewer glanced at me. Not go? she said. What did Dawes mean? She hadn’t understood. It wasn’t a punishment, what they meant to do for her.—‘I don’t want to go,’ said Selina.

‘But you must go!’—‘You must go,’ I echoed bleakly, ‘if they say you must.’—‘
No.
’ Her eyes still moved, but she had not looked at me. She said now, Why should they send her there? Hadn’t she been good and done her work? Hadn’t she done all the things they wanted, and not complained? Her voice sounded odd, not like itself.

‘Haven’t I said all my prayers, at chapel? And learned my lessons, for the school-mistresses? And taken my soup? And kept my cell neat?’

Miss Brewer smiled, and shook her head. She said, it was because Dawes had been good that they were moving her. Didn’t Dawes want that—to be rewarded? Her voice grew gentle. She said that Dawes was only startled. She said she knew that it was hard for the women at Millbank to understand that there were other, kinder places in the world.

She took a step towards the gate. ‘I shall leave you with Miss Prior now,’ she said, ‘and let her help you grow used to the idea.’ She said that Miss Haxby would come later, to tell Selina more.

Perhaps she waited for a reply and, hearing none, looked puzzled again. I am not sure. I know she turned to the gate—perhaps she put her hand to it, I cannot say. I saw Selina move—she moved so sharply, I thought she had swooned, and I took a step to catch her. But she had not swooned. She had darted for the shelf behind the table, she had reached for something that lay upon it. There was a clatter, as her tin mug and her spoon and book went tumbling—at that, of course, Miss Brewer heard, and turned. Then her face gave a twist. Selina had lifted her arm, and now swung it; and what she held in her hand was her wooden trencher. Miss Brewer raised her own arm, but not quickly enough. The trencher struck her—edge-on, I think, upon the eyes, for she put her fingers to them, and then her arms, to protect her face from further blows.