Affinity by Sarah Waters Page B

from it? Don’t make Priscilla miserable over this. Your father was her father too. Do you think it hasn’t been hard for her, to have to hold her wedding off?’
    I said that I remembered how Priscilla had cried herself into a fit when Pa was first found to be ill—that was because she had had a dozen new gowns made, that must be all returned and sent back black. When I wept, I asked her, what did they do with me?
    She answered, not looking at me, that when I had wept it had been different. She said, ‘Priscilla was nineteen, and very ordinary. She has had two hard years. We should be glad that Mr Barclay has been so patient.’
    I said, rather sourly, that she and Stephen had been luckier; and she answered levelly: ‘We were, Margaret—because we were able to marry and have your father see it. Priscilla won’t have that, but her wedding will be finer without your poor pa’s illness to rush the planning of it. Let her enjoy it, won’t you?’
    I stood, and went to the fireplace and put my hands before the flames. I said at last, that she was stern to-day; that it was dandling her baby and being a mother that did that to her. ‘Indeed, Mrs Prior , you sound like my own mother. Or would do, if you were not so sensible . . .’
    When she heard me say that she coloured and said I must hush. But she also laughed and put her hand across her mouth, I saw her in the glass above the mantel. I said then, that I had not seen her blush so since she was plain Miss Gibson. Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? ‘Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card—mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that?’
    She smiled, but had tilted her head. ‘There is Georgy,’ she said.—I had not heard him. ‘How his poor tooth makes him cry!’ And she rang for Burns, her maid, and had the baby brought again; and I did not stay long with her, after that.

6 October 1874
    I feel not at all like writing to-night. I have come up, pleading a head-ache, and soon I suppose Mother will follow, to bring my medicine. I have had a dreary day, at Millbank Prison.
    They know me there now, and are jolly with me at the gate. ‘What, back again Miss Prior?’ said the Porter when he saw me come. ‘I should’ve said you might have had enough of us by now—but there, it is remarkable how fascinating the penitentiary is, to those that do not have to work here.’
    He likes to call the prison by that older name, I notice; and he sometimes calls the warders turnkeys , the matrons taskmistresses , on the same principle. He told me once that he has been porter at Millbank for thirty-five years, and so has seen many thousand convicts pass through his gate and knows all the most desperate and terrible histories of the place. Today being another very wet day, I found him standing at the gate-house window, cursing the rain that made a slurry of the Millbank earth. He said the soil holds the water and makes the men’s work in the grounds very miserable. ‘This is an evil soil, Miss Prior,’ he said. He made me stand with him at the glass, and he showed me where there had once, in the first days of the penitentiary, been a dry trench, that must be crossed like the moat of a castle, with a drawbridge. ‘But,’ he said, ‘the soil would not have it. As fast as they set convicts to drain it, so the Thames could seep; and they would find it, every morning, full of black water. At last they had to earth it in.’
    I stayed a little while with him, warming myself before his fire; and when I went in to the women’s gaol I was passed on, as usual, to Miss Ridley, that she might take me round some of its sites. To-day she showed me the infirmary.
    Like the kitchen, this is situated away from the body of the women’s building, in the prison’s central hexagon. It is a bitter-smelling room, but warm and large, and it might be pleasant, for it is the only chamber in which the women associate for