Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Page B

the matron of a gaol. I said, before I could stop myself:
    ‘You’re not going to lock me in?’
    ‘Lock you in?’ she answered, with a frown. ‘Why should I do that?’
    I said I didn’t know. She looked me over, drew in her chin, then shut the door and left me.
    I held up my thumb. Kiss that! I thought.
    Then I sat upon the bed. It was hard. I wondered if the sheets and blankets had been changed since the last maid left with the scarlatina. It was too dark to see. Mrs Stiles had taken her lamp and I had set my candle down in a draught: the flame of it plunged about and made great black shadows. I unfastened my cloak, but kept it draped about my shoulders. I ached, from the cold and the travelling; and the mince I had eaten had come too late—it sat in my stomach and hurt. It was ten o’clock. We laughed at people who went to bed before midnight, at home.
    I might as well have been put in gaol, I thought. A gaol would have been livelier. Here, there was only an awful silence: you listened, and it troubled your ears. And when you got up and went to the window and looked outside, you nearly fainted to see how high you were, and how dark were the yard and the stables, how still and quiet the land beyond.
    I remembered the candle I had seen, fluttering at a window as I walked with William Inker. I wondered which room it was that that light had shone from.
    I opened my trunk, to look at all the things that I had brought with me from Lant Street—but then, none of them were really mine, they were only the petticoats and shimmies that Gentleman had made me take. I took off my dress, and for a second held it against my face. The dress was not mine, either; but I found the seams that Dainty had made, and smelled them. I thought that her needle had left the scent there, of John Vroom’s dog-skin coat.
    I thought of the soup that Mrs Sucksby would have made, from the bones of that pig’s head; and it was quite as strange as I knew it would be, to imagine them all sitting eating it, perhaps thinking of me, perhaps thinking of something else entirely.
    If I had been a crying sort of girl, I should certainly have cried then, imagining that.
    But I was never a girl for tears. I changed into my nightgown, put my cloak back on above it, and stood in my stockings and my unbuttoned shoes. I looked at the shut door at the head of the bed, and at the key-hole in it. I wondered if Maud kept a key on her side and had it turned. I wondered what I would see, if I went and bent and looked—and who can think a thing like that, and not go and do it? But when I did go, on tiptoe, and stoop to the lock, I saw a dim light, a shadow—nothing clearer than that, no sign of any kind of sleeping or wakeful or fretful girl, or anything.
    I wondered, though, if I might hear her breathing. I straightened up, and held my breath, and put my ear flat to the door. I heard my heart-beat, and the roaring of my blood. I heard a small, tight sound, that must have been the creeping of a worm or a beetle in the wood.
    Beyond that, there was nothing—though I listened for a minute, maybe two. Then I gave it up. I took off my shoes and my garters and got into bed: the sheets were cold and felt damp, like sheets of pastry. I put my cloak over the bed-clothes—for extra warmth; and also so that I might quickly seize it, if someone came at me in the night and I wanted to run. You never knew. The candle I left burning. If Mr Way was to complain that that was one stub less, too bad.
    Even a thief has her weak points. The shadows still danced about. The pastry sheets stayed cold. The great clock sounded half-past ten—eleven—half-past eleven—twelve. I lay and shivered, and longed with all my heart for Mrs Sucksby, Lant Street, home.

3.
    T hey woke me at six in the morning. It seemed still the middle of the night to me, for my candle of course had burned to nothing, and the window-curtains were heavy and kept the thin light out. When the maid, Margaret, came