Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

easily?’
    My words startled her - as well they might, for I had never spoken like this before, to her or to anyone. She looked away from me, about the room, and ran her tongue over her lips. ‘And all of them, downstairs?’ she said, nodding towards the door. ‘Your mother and father, your brother, Alice, Freddy?’ As she spoke there came a shout, and the sound of voices raised in friendly argument.
    They mean nothing to me, I wanted to say, compared with you ... But I only shrugged, and smiled.
    She smiled then, too. ‘And so you really will come? We must leave on Sunday, you know - a week from today. It doesn’t give you long.’
    I said it would be long enough; and she placed the faded rose upon the bed, and seized my hands and squeezed them hard.
    â€˜Oh Nan! My dear Nan! We’ll have such times together, I promise you!’ As she spoke, she flung my hands aside and gripped me in a fierce embrace, and laughed with pleasure, so that I felt her body shudder in my arms.
    Then, all too soon, she stepped away, and I had only empty air to clutch at.
    There was more noise from below, then the sound of a door opening, followed by the thud of feet upon the staircase, and a cry: ‘Nancy!’ It was Alice. She paused outside the bedroom door, but was too polite - or fearful - to turn the handle. ‘Everyone is leaving,’ she called. ‘Mother says will Miss Butler just step down for a moment, please, for them to say good-bye.’
    I looked at Kitty. ‘You go on,’ I said, ‘without me, and I shall come down in a minute. And don’t,’ I added in a lower voice, ‘say anything to them about - our plans. I’ll talk to them about it, later on.’
    She nodded, and gave my hand another squeeze; then she opened the door and joined Alice on the landing, and I heard them step below, together.
    I stood in the gathering shadows and put my trembling fingers before my face. I had taken to scrubbing my hands very carefully, since meeting Kitty Butler; and if they were ever a little stained at the creases now, it was as much with paint and hot-black and blanc-de-perle, as with vinegar. Even so, there was the scent of oysters on them still, and a slender thread - it might have been the bristle from the back of a lobster, the whisker from a shrimp - beneath one of my nails. How would it be, I thought, to surrender my family, my home, all my oyster-girl’s ways?
    And how would it be to live at Kitty’s side, brim-full of a love so quick, and yet so secret, it made me shake?

Chapter 3

    I wish, for sensation’s sake, I could say that my parents heard one word of Kitty’s proposal and forbade me, absolutely, to refer to it again; that when I pressed the matter, they cursed and shouted; that my mother wept, my father struck me; that I was obliged, in the end, to climb from a window at dawn, with my clothes in a rag at the end of a stick, and a streaming face, and a note pinned to my pillow saying Do not try to follow me ... But if I said these things, I would be lying. My parents were reasonable, not passionate, people. They loved me, and they feared for me; the idea of allowing their youngest daughter to travel in the care of an actress and a music-hall manager to the grimmest, wickedest city in England was, they knew, a mad one, that no sane parent should entertain for longer than a second. But because they loved me so, they could not bear to have me grieve. Anyone with half an eye could see that my heart lay all with Kitty Butler now; anyone might guess that, having once been offered the chance of a future at her side, and kept from it, I could never return to my father’s kitchen and be happy there, as I had been before.
    So when, an hour or so after Kitty’s departure, I nervously put her plan before my parents, and argued and pleaded for their blessing, they listened to me wonderingly, but carefully; and when, the next day, Father stopped