Affinity (13 page)

Her words were satisfying ones for me to hear, and made me like and pity her all the more. We talked a little, about the habits of the gaol. I said, ‘I think you might be moved from here, in time, to a kinder prison—perhaps, to Fulham?’—and she only shrugged, saying one prison was as good as any other.

I might have left her then, and gone on to another woman, and been tranquil now; but I was too intrigued by her. At last I could not help myself. I said that one of the matrons had told me—quite in the friendliest fashion, of course—that she received no letters . . .

I asked her, Was that true? Was there really no-one, beyond Millbank, to take an interest in her sufferings there? She studied me for a moment, so that I thought she might grow proud again, and not answer. But then she said, that she had many friends.

Her spirit-friends, yes. She had told me of them. But, there must be others, from her life outside, who missed her?—Again she shrugged, saying nothing.

‘Have you no family?’

She had an auntie, she said, ‘in spirit’, who sometimes visits her.

‘Have you no friends,’ I said, ‘who are
alive
?’

Then I think she did grow a little proud. How many friends, she wondered, would come to visit
me
, if
I
were put in Millbank? The world she moved in before, she said, it wasn’t a grand world, but it wasn’t a world of ‘thieves and bullies’, like many of the women’s there. Besides, she ‘doesn’t care to be seen’, she said, in such a place. She prefers the spirit-people, who do not judge her, to those people who have only laughed at her in her ‘misfortune’.

That word seemed carefully chosen. Hearing it I thought, reluctantly, of those other words, marked on the enamel tablet outside her gate:
Fraud and Assault
. I told her that the other women I visit sometimes find it comforting to talk to me about their crimes.—She said at once, ‘And you would have me tell you about mine. Well, and why shouldn’t I? Except that there was no crime! There was only—’

Only what?

She shook her head: ‘Only a silly girl, who saw a spirit and was frightened by it; and a lady who was frightened by the girl, and died. And I was blamed, for all of it.’

I had had this much already, from Miss Craven. I asked her now, Why was the girl made afraid? She said, after a second’s hesitation, that the spirit had turned ‘naughty’—that was the word she used. The spirit had turned naughty, and the lady, ‘Mrs Brink’, saw it all and was so startled—‘Well, there was a weakness about her heart that I never knew of. She fell in a faint, and later died. She was a friend to me. No-one ever thought of that, all through my trial. They only must find some cause for it, some thing that they could understand. The mother of the girl was brought to say her daughter had been harmed, as well as poor Mrs Brink; and then the cause of it all was found to lie with me.’

‘When all the time it was the—naughty spirit?’

‘
Yes.
’ But what judge is there, she said, what jury—unless a jury made of spiritualists, and God knows how she longed for that!—what judge is there, that would believe her? ‘They only said it couldn’t be a spirit, because spirit-people don’t exist’—here she pulled a face. ‘In the end they made it a case of fraud, as well as assault.’

I asked her then, What had the girl said—the girl who was struck? She answered that the girl had certainly felt the spirit, but had grown confused. ‘The mother was rich, and had a lawyer that could make the best of things. My own man was no good, and still cost all my money—all the money I earned, through helping people, all gone—like that!—on nothing.’

But if the girl had seen a spirit?

‘She didn’t
see
him. She only felt him. They said—they said it must be my hand she had felt . . .’

I remember her now pressing her two slender hands close together, and slowly working the fingers of one across the rough and reddened knuckles of the other. I said, Had she had no friends, to support her? and her mouth gave a tilt. She said she had had many friends, and they had liked to call her a ‘martyr to the cause’—but only at first. For she was sorry to say that there were jealous people, ‘even in the spiritual movement’, and some were very glad to see her brought low. Others were only frightened. In the end, when she was found guilty, there was nobody to speak in her behalf . . .

She looked miserable at that, and terribly delicate and young. I said, ‘And you insist it was a
spirit
that should have the blame?’—She nodded. I think I smiled. ‘How hard it seems,’ I said, ‘that you were sent here, while it got off quite free.’

Oh, she said then, I must not think that ‘Peter Quick’ was free! She gazed past me, at the iron gate that Mrs Jelf had fastened at my back. ‘They have their own kind of punishments,’ she said, ‘in the other world. Peter is in as dark a place as I am. He is only waiting—quite like me—to serve his term out and move on.’

Those were her words; and they seem odder to me as I write them here, than they seemed then, as she stood, gravely and earnestly, answering my questions, point for point, with her own neat logic. Even so, to hear her talk, familiarly, of ‘Peter’, of ‘Peter Quick’—again I smiled. We had moved rather near to one another. Now I stepped away a little, and when she saw that she looked knowing. She said, ‘You think me a fool, or an actress. You think me a sharp little actress, like they do—‘
No
,’ I answered at once. ‘No, I don’t think that of you’—for I don’t, and didn’t, even talking with her then—not quite. I shook my head. I said it was only that I was used to thinking very different sorts of things. Ordinary things. My mind, I supposed, must be ‘very uninstructed as to the limits of the marvellous’.

Now she smiled, but very faintly.
Her
mind, she said, had known too much of the marvellous. ‘And my reward for it was, that they put me here . . .’

And she made one small gesture with her hand as she spoke, that seemed to describe the whole hard colourless gaol, and all her sufferings in it.

‘It is very terrible for you here,’ I said, after a moment.

She nodded. ‘You think spiritualism a kind of fancy,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it seem to you, now you are here, that
anything
might be real, since Millbank is?’

I looked at the bare white wall, the folded hammock—the slop-box, that had a fly upon it. I said, I was not sure. The prison might be hard—but that did not make spiritualism any truer. The prison was at least a world that I could see, and smell and hear. Her spirits, however—well, they might be real, but they meant nothing to me. I could not talk of them, did not know how.

She said I must talk of them how I pleased, because talking of them would ‘give them power’. Better still I ought to listen to them. ‘Then, Miss Prior, you might hear them talking of
you
.’

I laughed. Of me? Oh, I said, but it must be a very quiet day indeed in Heaven, if they had only Margaret Prior to discuss there!

She nodded, and tilted her head. She has a way about her—I have noticed it, before to-day—a way of shifting mood, of changing tone, and pose. She does it very subtly—not as an actress might, with a gesture that must be seen across a dark and crowded theatre; she does it as a piece of quiet music does it, when it falls or rises into a slightly different signature.

She did it now, as I stood smiling, still saying, how dull the spirit-world must be, if they had only me to talk of! She began to look patient. She began to look wise. And then she said, gently and quite evenly: ‘Why do you say such things? You know there are spirits to whom you are very dear. You know there is
one
spirit, in particular—he is with us now, he is closer to you than I am. And you are dearer to him, Miss Prior, than anyone.’

I stared at her, feeling the breath catch in my throat. This was not at all like hearing her talk of spirit-gifts and flowers: she might have cast water in my face, or pinched me. I thought stupidly of Boyd, hearing Pa’s feet upon the attic stairs. I said, ‘What do you know, of him?’—She didn’t answer. I said, ‘You have seen my dark coat, and made a guess—’

‘You are clever,’ she said. She said that what she is, that has nothing to do with cleverness. She must be what she is, as she must breathe, or dream, or swallow. She must be it—even there, even at Millbank! ‘But do you know,’ she said, ‘it is an odd thing. It is like being a sponge, or a—what are those creatures, that don’t care to be seen, and change their skins to suit their settings?’ I did not answer. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘I used to think, in my old life, that I must be a creature just like that. People would come to me sick sometimes and, sitting with them, I would grow sick too. A woman came to me once who was with child, and I felt her baby, inside
me
. Another time a gentleman came, wanting to speak with his son in spirit: when the poor boy came through, I felt the breath pressed out of me, my head crushed as if it would burst! It turned out he had died in a falling building. His last sensation, you see,
I
felt.’

Now she put her hand upon her breast, and drew a little closer to me. She said, ‘When
you
come to me, Miss Prior, I feel your—sorrow. I feel your sorrow as a darkness,
here
. Oh, what an ache it is! I thought at first that it had emptied you, that you were hollow, quite hollow, like an egg with the meat blown out of it. I think you think that, too. But you are not empty. You are full—only shut quite tight, and fastened like a box. What do you have here that you must keep locked up like that?’ She tapped at her breast. Then she raised her other hand and touched me, lightly, where she had touched herself . . .

I gave a twitch, as if her fingers had some charge to them. Her eyes widened, and then she smiled. She had found—it was the purest chance, the purest, queerest chance—she had found, beneath my gown, my locket; and now she began to trace its outline with her fingertips. I felt the chain tighten. The gesture was so close and so insinuating, as I write it here it seems to me that she must have followed the line of links to my throat, have curled her fingers beneath my collar and drawn the locket free—but she did not do this, her hand remained at my breast, only delicately pressing. She stood very still with her head a little cocked, as if she was listening to my heart where it beat against the gold.

Then her features gave another, stranger kind of shift, and she spoke, in a whisper. ‘He is saying,
She has hung her care about her neck, and will not put it aside. Tell her she must lay it aside
.’ She nodded. ‘He is smiling. Was he clever, like you? He was! But he has learned many new things now, and—oh! how he longs for you to be with him and learn them too! But what is he doing?’ Her face changed again. ‘He is shaking his head, he is weeping, he is saying,
Not that way! Oh! Peggy, that was not the way! You shall join me, you shall join me—but, not like that!
’

I find I am trembling as I write the words here; I trembled worse, hearing her say them, with her hand upon me and her face so strange. I said quickly, ‘That’s enough!’ I knocked her fingers from me and drew away from her—I think I struck against her iron gate and made it rattle. I placed my own hand where hers had been. ‘That’s enough,’ I said again. ‘You are talking nonsense!’ Her cheek had grown pale, and when she looked at me now it was with a kind of horror, as if she saw it all—all the weeping and the shrieking, and Dr Ashe and Mother, the bitter reek of morphia, and my tongue swollen from the pressing of the tube. I had come to her, thinking only of her, and she had thrust my own weak self at me again. She looked at me, and
her
eyes had pity in them!

I could not bear her gaze. I turned away from her and put my face to the bars. When I called to Mrs Jelf, my voice was shrill.

As if she had been very near, the matron appeared at once and proceeded, silently, to free me. She sent a single sharp, anxious glance over my shoulder as she did so—perhaps she had caught the strangeness of my cry. Then I was in the passage-way, with the gate refastened. Dawes had picked up a length of wool, and was drawing it mechanically through her fingers. Her face was lifted to mine, and her eyes seemed full, still, of an awful knowledge. I wished I might say something, some ordinary thing. But I was terribly afraid that if I did she would begin again to speak—would speak of Pa, or
for
him or
as
him—would speak of his sorrow or his anger, or his shame.

So I only turned my head, and moved away from her.

On the ground-floor wards I found Miss Ridley, delivering the women whose reception I had witnessed earlier. I should not have known them, but for the older woman’s bruised cheek, for they all looked alike now, in their mud-coloured frocks and their bonnets. I stood and watched until the gates and doors were closed on them, then I came home. Helen was here, but I did not want to talk with her now; I only came straight here and made my own door fast. I have had Boyd in here, only—no, not Boyd, Boyd has gone, it was Vigers, the new one—bringing me water for a bath; and lately Mother has come with the phial of chloral. Now I am so cold, the flesh is shivering upon my back. Vigers has not built my fire high enough, she doesn’t know how late I like to sit. But I mean to keep here now, until the tiredness comes. I have screwed my lamp down very low, and sometimes set my hands upon the globe of it, to warm them.

My locket hangs in my closet beside the glass, the only shining thing among so many shadows.

16 October 1874

I woke bewildered this morning, after a night of terrible dreams. I dreamt my father was alive—that I glanced from my window to see him leaning on the parapet of Albert Bridge, gazing bitterly at me. I ran out, and called to him: ‘Good God, Pa, we thought you were dead!’ ‘Dead?’ he answered. ‘I have been two years at Millbank! They put me on the treadmill and my boots are worn to the flesh beneath—look here.’ He lifted his leg, to show me his soleless shoes and his cracked and battered feet; and I thought, How strange, I don’t believe I ever saw Pa’s feet before . . .