or sne— will be saved. I hide my face against her and seize her hand. But her hand is pale where it used to be freckled. I gaze at her, and do not know her.
She says, in a voice that is strange to me: 'It's Sue, miss. Only Sue. You see me? You are dreaming.'
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'Dreaming?'
She touches my cheek. She smooths my hair— not like Agnes, after all, but like—
Like no-one. She says again, 'It's Sue. That Agnes had the scarlatina, and is gone back home. You must lie down now, or the cold will make you ill. You mustn't be ill.'
I swim in black confusion for another moment; then the dream slips from me all at once and I know her, and know myself— my past, my present, my ungaugeable future.
She is a stranger to me, but part of it all.
'Don't leave me, Sue!' I say.
I feel her hesitate. When she draws away, I grip her tighter. But she moves only to climb across me, and she comes beneath the sheet and lies with her arm about me, her mouth against my hair.
She is cold, and makes me cold. I shiver, but soon lie still. 'There,' she says then. She murmurs it. I feel the movement of her breath and, deep in the bone of my cheek, the gentle rumble of her voice. 'There. Now you'll sleep— won't you? Good girl.'
Good girl, she says. How long has it been since anyone at Briar believed me good?
But she believes it. She must believe it, for the working of our plot. I must be good, and kind, and simple. Isn't gold said to be good? I am like gold to her, after all. She has come to ruin me; but, not yet. For now she must guard me, keep me sound and safe as a hoard of coins she means, at last, to squander—
I know it; but cannot feel it as I should. I sleep in her arms, dreamless and still, and wake to the warmth and closeness of her. She moves away as she feels me stir. She rubs her eye. Her hair is loose and touches my own. Her face, in sleep, has lost a little of its sharpness. Her brow is smooth, her lashes powdery, her gaze, when it meets mine, quite clear, untinged with mockery or malice . . . She smiles. She yawns. She rises. The blanket lifts and falls, and
sour heat comes gusting. I lie and remember the night. Some feeling— shame, or panic— flutters about my heart. I put my hand to the place where she has lain, and feel it cool.
She is changed with me. She is surer, kinder. Margaret brings water, and she fills me a bowl. 'Ready, miss?' she says. 'Better use it quick.' She wets a cloth and wrings it and, when I stand and undress, passes it, unasked, across my face and beneath my arms. I have become a child to her. She makes me sit, so she may brush my hair. She tuts:
'What tangles! The trick with tangles is, to start at the bottom ..."
Agnes had used to wash and dress me with quick and nervous fingers, wincing with every catching of the comb. One time I struck her with a slipper— so hard, she bled.
Now I sit for Susan— Sue, she called herself, in the night— now I sit patiently while Sue draws out the knots from my hair, my eyes upon my own face in the glass . . .
Good girl.
Then: 'Thank you, Sue,' I say.
I say it often, in the days and nights that follow. I never said it to Agnes. 'Thank you, Sue.' 'Yes, Sue,' when she bids me sit or stand, lift an arm or foot. 'No, Sue,' when she is afraid my gown must pinch me.
No, I am not cold.— But she likes to look me over as we walk, to be quite sure; will gather my cloak a little higher about my throat, to keep off draughts. No, my boots are 159
not taking in the dew.— But she'll slide a finger between my stockinged ankle and the leather of my shoe, for certainty's sake. I must not catch cold, at any cost. I must not tire. 'Wouldn't you say you had walked enough, miss?' I mustn't grow ill. 'Here is all your breakfast, look, untouched. Won't you take a little more?' I mustn't grow thin. I am a goose that must be plump, to be worth its slaughter.
Of course, though she does not know it, it is she who must be plump— she who will learn, in time, to sleep, to wake, to dress, to walk, to a pattern, to signals and bells.
She thinks she humours me. She thinks she pities me! She learns the ways of the house, not understanding that the habits and the fabrics that bind me will, soon, bind her. Bind her, like morocco or like calf ... I have grown
used to thinking of myself as a sort of book. Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with her unread-ing eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh— Ain't you pale!' she says— but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.
I oughtn't to do it. I cannot help it. I am too compelled by her idea— her idea of me as a simple girl, abused by circumstance, prone to nightmare. No nightmares come, while she sleeps at my side; and so, I find ways to bring her to my bed, a second night and a third.— At last she comes, routinely. I think her wary, at first; but it is only the canopy and drapes that trouble her: she stands each time with a lifted candle, peering into the folds of cloth. 'Don't you think,' she says, 'of the moths and spiders that might be up there, miss, and waiting to drop?' She seizes a post, and shakes it; a single beetle falls, in a shower of dust.
Once grown used to that, however, she lies easily enough; and from the neat and comfortable way she holds her limbs, I think that she must be used to sleeping with someone; and wonder who.
'Do you have sisters, Sue?' I ask her once, perhaps a week after she has come. We are walking by the river.
'No, miss.'
'Brothers?'
'Not as I know of,' she says.
'And so you grew up— like me— quite alone?'
'Well, miss, not what you would call, alone . . . Say, with cousins all about.'
'Cousins. You mean, your aunt's children?'
'My aunt?' She looks blank.
'Your aunt, Mr Rivers's nurse.'
'Oh!' She blinks. 'Yes, miss. To be sure . . .'
She turns away, and her look grows vague. She is thinking of her home. I try to imagine it; and cannot. I try to imagine her cousins: rough boys and girls, sharp-faced like her, sharp-tongued, sharp- fingered— Her fingers are blunt, however; though her tongue— for sometimes, when putting the pins to my hair, or frowning over slithering laces, she shows it— her tongue has a point. I watch her sigh.
'Never mind,' I say— like any kindly mistress with an unhappy maid. 'Look, here is a barge. You may send your wishes with it. We shall both send wishes, to London.' To London, I think again, more darkly. Richard is there. I will be there, a month from 160
now. I say, 'The Thames will take them, even if the boat does not.'
She looks, however, not at the barge, but at me.
'The Thames?' she says. *
'The river,' I answer. 'This river, here.'
'This trifling bit of water, the Thames? Oh, no, miss.' She laughs, uncertainly. 'How can that be? The Thames is very wide'— she holds her hands far apart— 'and this is narrow. Do you see?'
I say, after a moment, that I have always supposed that rivers grow wider as they flow.
She shakes her head.
'This trifling bit of water?' she says again. 'Why, the water we have from our taps, at home, has more life to it than this.— There, miss! Look, there.' The barge has passed us. Its stern is marked in six- inch letters, ROTHERHITHE; but she is pointing, not to them, but to the wake of grease spreading out from the spluttering engine. 'See that?'