'For its own sake?' My uncle blinks at me. 'Maud, what do you
say?'
'I'm afraid I have no skill.'
'No skill? Well, that may be true. Certainly your hand, when I first had you here, was ungainly enough; and tends to slope, even now. Tell me, Rivers: should a course of instruction in drawing help the firmness of my niece's hand?'
'I should say it would, sir, most definitely.'
'Then, Maud, do you let Mr Rivers teach you. I don't care, anyhow, to imagine you idle. Hmm?'
'Yes, sir,' I say.
Richard looks on, a sheen of blandness across his gaze like the filmy lid that guards a cat's eye as it slumbers. My uncle bending to his plate, however, he quickly meets my look: then the film draws back, the eye is bared; and the sudden intimacy of his expression makes me shudder.
Don't misunderstand me. Don't think me more scrupulous than I am. It's true I shudder 149
in fear— fear of his plot— fear of its success, as well as of its failure. But I tremble, too, at the boldness of him— or rather, his boldness sets me quivering, as they say a vibrating string will find out unsuspected sympathies in the fibres of idle bodies. I saw in ten minutes what your life has made of you, he said to me, that first night. And then: I think you are half a villain already. He was right. If I never knew that villainy before— or if, knowing it, I never named it— I know it, name it, now.
I know it, when he comes each day to my room, raises my hand to his mouth, touches his lips to my knuckles, rolls his cold, blue, devilish eyes. If Agnes sees, she does not understand. She thinks it gallantry. It is gallantry!— The gallantry of rogues. She will watch while we put out paper, leads and paints. She will see him take his place at my side, guide my fingers in the making of curves and crooked lines. He will drop his voice. Men's voices do badly in murmurs, as a rule— they break, they jar, they long to rise— but his can
fall, insinuate, and yet, like a musical note, stay clear; and while she sits and sews, half the length of a room away, he will take me, in secret, point by point across his s c h e m e , u n t i l t h e s c h e m e i s p e r f e c t . ' V e r y g o o d , ' h e ' l l s a y — l i k e a p r o p e r drawing- master with an able girl. 'Very good. You learn quickly'
He will smile. He will straighten and put back his hair. He will look at Agnes and find her eyes on his. Her gaze will flutter away. 'Well, Agnes,' he'll say, marking her nervousness like a hunter marks his bird, 'what do you say to your mistress's gifts as an artist?' 'Oh, sir! I couldn't hope to judge.'
He might take up a pencil, go closer to her. 'You see how I have Miss Lilly hold the lead? Her grip is a lady's grip, however, and needs firming. I think your hand, Agnes, would bear a pencil better. Here, won't you try?'
Once he takes her fingers. She colours scarlet at his touch. 'Do you blush?' he says then, in amazement. 'You don't suppose I mean to insult you?' 'No, sir!'
'Well, why do you blush?' -
'I am only a little warm, sir.' 'Warm, in December
?'
And so on. He has a talent for torment, quite as polished as my own; and I ought, in observing this, to grow cautious. I do not. The more he teases, the more bewildered Agnes becomes, the more— like a top, revolving faster at the goading of a whip!— the more I taunt her myself.
Agnes,' I say, while she undresses me or brushes out my hair, 'what are you thinking of? Of Mr Rivers?' I stop her wrist, feel the grinding of the bones inside it. 'Do you think him handsome, Agnes? You do, I see it in your eye! And don't young girls want handsome men?'
'Indeed, miss, I don't know!'
'Do you say that? Then you're a liar.' I pinch her, in some soft part of her flesh— for of course, by now I know them all. 'You're a liar and a flirt. Will you put those crimes upon your list, when you kneel beside your bed and ask your Father to forgive you?
Do you
think He will forgive you, Agnes? I think He must forgive a redheaded girl, for she can't help it that she's wicked, it's in her nature to be so. He would be cruel indeed, to put a passion in her, and then to punish her for feeling it. Don't you think? Don't you 150
feel your passion, when Mr Rivers gazes at you? Don't you listen for the sound of his quick step?'
She says she doesn't. She swears it, against her own mother's life! God knows what she really thinks. She must only say it, or the play will founder. She must say it and be bruised, and keep the habit of her innocence complete; and I must bruise her. I must bruise her, for all the commonplace wanting of him that— were I an ordinary girl, with an ordinary heart— I would surely feel myself.
I never do feel it. Don't imagine I do. Does de Merteuil feel it, for Valmont? I don't want to feel it. I should hate myself, if I did! For I know it, from my uncle's books, for too squalid a thing— an itch, like the itch of inflamed flesh, to be satisfied hecticly, wetly, in closets and behind screens. What he has called up in me, set stirring in my breast— that dark propinquity— is something altogether rarer. I might say, it rises like a shadow in the house, or creeps like a bloom across its walls. But the house is full of shadows and stains, already; and so no-one marks it.
No-one, perhaps, save Mrs Stiles. For I think only she, of anyone there, ever gazes at Richard and wonders if he is all the gentleman he claims to be. I catch her look, sometimes. I believe she sees through him. I believe she thinks he has come to cheat me and do me harm. But, thinking it— and hating me— she keeps the thought to herself; and nurses her hope of my ruin, smiling, as she once nursed her dying child.
These, then, are the metals with which our trap is made, the forces that prime it and sharpen its teeth. And when it is all complete— 'Now,' says Richard, 'our work begins.
'We must get rid of Agnes.'
He says it in a whisper, with his eyes upon her, as she sits at the window bent over her work. He says it so coolly, with so steady a gaze, I am almost afraid of him. I think I draw back. Then he looks at me.
'You know that we must,' he says.
'Of course.'
'And you understand how?'
I have not, until this moment. Now I see his face.
'It's quite the only way,' he goes on, 'with virtuous girls like that. Will stop up a mouth, better even than menaces, or coins . . .' He has picked up a paintbrush, puts the hairs to his lip and begins to run them, idly, back and forth. 'Don't trouble with the details,'
he says smoothly. 'There's not much to it. Not much, at all— ' He smiles. She has looked up from her work, and he has caught her eye. 'How is the day, Agnes?' he calls.
'Still fair?'
'Quite fair, sir.'
'Good. Very good . . .' Then she must I suppose lower her head, for the kindness sinks from his face. He puts the paintbrush to his tongue and sucks the hairs into a point. 'I'll do it tonight,' he says, thoughtfully. 'Shall I? I will. I'll make my way to her room, as I made my way to yours. All you must do is, give me fifteen minutes alone with her'— again he looks at me— 'and not come, if she cries out.'
It has seemed, until this point, a sort of game. Don't gentlemen and young ladies, in country houses, play games— flirt and intrigue? Now comes the first failing, or shrinking back, of my heart. When Agnes undresses me that night, I cannot look at her.
151
I turn my head. 'You may close the door to your room, this once,' I say; and I feel her hesitate— perhaps catch the weakness in my voice, grow puzzled. I do not watch her leave me. I hear the clicking of the latch, the murmur of her prayers; I hear the murmur broken off, when he comes to her door. She does not cry out, after all. Should I really be able to keep from going to her, if she did? I do not know. But, she does not, her voice only lifts high, in surprise, in indignation and then— I suppose— a kind of panic; but then it drops, is stifled or soothed, gives way in a moment to whispers, to the rub of linen or limbs . . . Then the rub becomes silence. And the silence is worst of all: not an absence of sound, but teeming— as they say clear water teems, when viewed through a lens— with kicks and squirming
movements. I imagine her shuddering, weeping, her clothes put back— but her freckled arms closing, despite herself, about his plunging back, her white mouth seeking out his—
I put my hands to my own mouth; and feel the dry chafe of my gloves. Then I stop up my ears. I don't hear it when he leaves her. I don't know what she does when he is gone. I let the door stay closed; take drops, at last, to help me sleep; and then, next day, wake late. I hear her calling, weakly, from her bed. She says she is ill. She parts her lips, to show me the lining of her mouth. It is red and raised and swollen.
'Scarlet fever,' she whispers, not meeting my gaze.
There are fears, then, of infection. Fears, of that! She is moved to an attic, and plates of vinegar burned in her room— the smell makes me sick. I see her again, but only once, the day she comes to make me her good-bye. She seems thin, and dark about the eye; and her hair is cut. I reach for her hand, and she flinches, perhaps expecting a blow; I only kiss her, lightly, on her wrist.
Then she looks at me in scorn.
'You are soft on me now,' she says, drawing back her arm, pulling down her sleeve,