Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Read Free Book Online

her any better?
    ‘You’ll see,’ he said. And he sealed the letter and wrote the direction, and had one of our neighbours’ boys run with it to the post.
    Then, so sure was he of the success of his plan, he said they must begin at once to teach me how a proper lady’s maid should be.
    First, they washed my hair. I wore my hair then, like lots of the Borough girls wore theirs, divided in three, with a comb at the back and, at the sides, a few fat curls. If you turned the curls with a very hot iron, having first made the hair wet with sugar-and-water, you could make them hard as anything; they would last for a week like that, or longer. Gentleman, however, said he thought the style too fast for a country lady: he made me wash my hair till it was perfectly smooth, then had me divide it once—just the once—then pin it in a plain knot at the back of my head. He had Dainty wash her hair, too, and when I had combed and re-combed mine, and pinned and re-pinned it, until he was satisfied, he made me comb and pin hers in a matching style, as if hers was the lady’s, Miss Lilly’s. He fussed about us like a regular girl. When we had finished, Dainty and I looked that plain and bacon-faced, we might have been trying for places in a nunnery. John said if they would only put pictures of us in the dairies, it would be a new way of curdling milk.
    When Dainty heard that she pulled the pins from her hair and threw them at the fire. Some had hair still clinging to them, and the flames set it hissing.
    ‘Can’t you do anything to that girl of yours,’ said Mr Ibbs to John, ‘but make her cry?’
    John laughed. ‘I likes to see her cry,’ he said. ‘It makes her sweat the less.’
    He was an evil boy, all right.
    But he was quite caught up in Gentleman’s plot, despite himself. We all were. For the first time I ever knew, Mr Ibbs kept the blind pulled down on his shop door and let his brazier go cold. When people came knocking with keys to be cut, he sent them away. To the two or three thieves that brought poke, he shook his head.
    ‘Can’t do it, my son. Not to-day. Got a little something cooking.’
    He only had Phil come, early in the morning. He sat him down and ran him through the points of a list that Gentleman had drawn up the night before; then Phil pulled his cap down over his eyes, and left. When he came back two hours later it was with a bag and a canvas-covered trunk, that he had got from a man he knew, who ran a crooked warehouse at the river.
    The trunk was for me to take to the country. In the bag was a brown stuff dress, more or less my size; and a cloak, and shoes, and black silk stockings; and on top of it all, a heap of lady’s real white underthings.
    Mr Ibbs only undid the string at the neck of the bag, peeped in, and saw the linen; then he went and sat at the far side of the kitchen, where he had a Bramah lock he liked sometimes to take apart, and powder, and put back together. He made John go with him and hold the screws. Gentleman, however, took out the lady’s items one by one, and placed them flat upon the table. Beside the table he set a kitchen chair.
    ‘Now, Sue,’ he said, ‘suppose this chair’s Miss Lilly. How shall you dress her? Let’s say you start with the stockings and drawers.’
    ‘The drawers?’ I said. ‘You don’t mean, she’s naked?’
    Dainty put her hand to her mouth and tittered. She was sitting at Mrs Sucksby’s feet, having her hair re-curled.
    ‘Naked?’ said Gentleman. ‘Why, as a nail. What else? She must take off her clothes when they grow foul; she must take them off to bathe. It will be your job to receive them when she does. It will be your job to pass her her fresh ones.’
    I had not thought of this. I wondered how it would be to have to stand and hand a pair of drawers to a strange bare girl. A strange bare girl had once run, shrieking, down Lant Street, with a policeman and a nurse behind her. Suppose Miss Lilly took fright like that, and I had to grab