Affinity by Sarah Waters Page A

had had no word. When she caught my eye I turned from her, and left Miss Manning at her gate and found another matron to escort me to the men’s gaol. I was glad to go, glad even to step into the darkening grounds and feel the rain upon my face; for all that I had seen and heard of there—the sick women and the suicides, and the mad-woman’s rats, and the pals, and Miss Manning’s laughter—it had all grown horrible to me. I remembered how I had walked from the prison into the clear air after my first visit and imagined my own past being buckled up tight, and forgotten. Now the rain made my coat heavy, and my dark skirts grew darker at the hem, where the wet earth clung to them.
    I came home in a cab, and lingered over the paying of the driver, hoping Mother would see it. She didn’t: she was in the drawing-room examining our new maid. This is a friend of Boyd’s, an older girl, she has no time for ghost stories, and claims to be eager to take up the vacant place—I should say Boyd has been so terrorised by Mother she has bribed her to it, for the friend is presently used to rather better wages. She says, however, that she is ready to forfeit a shilling a month for the sake of a little room of her own and a bedstead all to herself: in her current place she must share her quarters with the cook, who has ‘bad habits’; besides that, she has a friend in another situation near to the river and would like to be near her. Mother said, ‘I am not sure. My other maid will not like it if you have ideas above your duties. And your friend should know, mind, that she is not to call on you here. Nor will I have you cutting your hours to go and visit her.’ The girl said she would never consider it; and Mother has agreed to try her for a month. She is to come to us on Saturday. She is a long-faced girl and her name is Vigers . I shall enjoy pronouncing that, I never much liked Boyd .
    ‘A shame she is so plain!’ said Pris, watching at the curtain as she left the house; and I smiled—then thought a terrible thing. I remembered Mary Ann Cook, at Millbank, being pestered by her master’s son; and I thought of Mr Barclay about the house, and Mr Wallace, and Stephen’s friends that sometimes come—and I was glad she is not handsome.
    And perhaps, indeed, Mother thought something similar, for at Prissy’s comment she shook her head. Vigers would be a good girl, she said. The plain ones always were, they were more faithful. A sensible girl, she would know her place all right. There would be no more nonsense, now, over creaks on the staircase!
    Pris grew grave, listening to that. She will have many girls to manage, of course, at Marishes.
    ‘It is still the custom in some great houses,’ said Mrs Wallace as she sat playing cards with Mother to-night, ‘to keep the maids in the kitchens, sleeping on shelves. When I was a child we always had a boy to sleep upon the box that held the plate. The cook was the only servant in the house to possess a pillow.’ She said she did not know how I could bear to lie with the tweeny fidgeting about in her room above me. I said I was ready to brave it for the sake of my view of the Thames, which I could not give up; and that anyway, in my experience tweenies—when they weren’t frightening themselves into fits—were generally too tired to do anything in their beds but sleep.
    ‘So they should be!’ she cried.
    Mother said then that Mrs Wallace should pay no mind to anything I might say on the subject of servants. ‘Margaret has as much sense of handling a servant,’ she said, ‘as she has of handling a cow.’
    Then, on a different tack, she asked us, Could we explain a curious matter to her? There were supposed to be thirty-thousand distressed needlewomen in the city, and she had yet to find a single girl capable of putting a straight seam, upon a linen cloak, for less than a pound . . . &c .
    I thought Stephen might come, bringing Helen with him; but he did not—perhaps the rain