Anonymous - Laura

“Would such have disturbed you? Have you known evil, Sutcliffe?”

“I have known confusions, Miss, but no evil. Miss Elizabeth now-I knew she had a lostness about her. I have been five years with her and never knew a day that she didn't have me out with her, looking for you. You or your cousin. Charlotte she called her. You have to forgive my impertinence, Miss, in taking upon your person as I did, but she instructed it, said it would calm you first then bring you on to heat and that as you thereafter desired I might have the pleasure of both your persons until you was sent up.”

“Which is not evil, you think?”

“Oh no, Miss. I was taught early that a woman has to be put to it sometimes. Not always, not too regular, for it kills their spirit too much then. I mean not every day or night, that is, for they lie abed and will do no nothing else. A woman should go quiet in her ways and receive what she is to receive without fuss or hindrance. When I was seventeen I had then a fair prodder on me and my mother saw to it that I was put to her sister, who was younger than she and had a fair piety. She struggled a bit the first time but was held and so I got the conquering of her. She had lovely smooth limbs on her and a bottom round and full. I never took her but that way and so she got her dosage once a week. If there was recalcitrance-a word she taught me later when she was mollified to it-then my mother put the strap to her first while I held ready. There was no remorse of it in the end and she would come to me when bidden, whether light or dark in the house, but never more often than I've said. It was a discipline upon us, my mother said, and not an evil for she would not have evil in the house.”

“If I were to return there now-to Elizabeth's house, I mean, Sutcliffe.”

“We cannot, Miss. She told me ever that if she were left alone in there, then the door would not open again. The day I arrived, the first day, there was a maid upon the threshold who was being dismissed. She stood upon the threshold exactly. Nor one of us could move a step until I stood with her, under the lintel, and we passed without and within at the same moment. It was a strangeness, that. Miss Elizabeth held her arms until I was secure within. The maid was crying, I remember, and said she had been whipped awful but would forgive your sister if she could stay. There was no reply upon that and she was put out while I gained the entrance.”

I had learned at last the identity of Charlotte-if she had one. I in my passing perhaps have none and am mirage even to myself. There was a shipwreck once, close upon Hastings, of which my father spoke and read aloud from The Times. Though I listened to him not much on that occasion, for he was addressing my mother and my aunts, I remember a vision coming upon me of any who survived the wreck and came from it speaking perhaps in foreign tongues, syllabic sounds, their attire not as ours, and having smells upon their bodies that would have come from the sea and their native habitations. I thought then of the things they had been forced to abandon, but more importantly their small possessions, which at the last would slip and slide into the waves and there forever float, dip, dive, and sometimes on the seabed rest as if they were waiting to become themselves again.

Looking upon Sutcliffe, I-wonder if we are as those who come from the wreck or whether we are the possessions, severed and falling yet ever borne by the sea, here and there or elsewhere. I would ask him but I think he is close only to those questions with which he has lived and that he has no reaching out to others but only receiving as he received once in some dark and dusty room the pale orb of his aunt in her quiescence.

“Then we must go about our ways, Sutcliffe. Have you money? I must reward you for your diligence in finding me.”

Even as I speak I do not wish to speak and yet I do not want him in this moment gone.

“I have a couple of bob in my pocket, Miss. Enough to bide me until I find a place.”

“Such as you have returned to me is worth more than that.”

There is stillness and desire. I find neither here. When I was first brought unto desire, I knew the stillness, the applications of quiet, broken only by such murmurings of instructions to me as were requisite. I seek such stillness now and yet, were I to come upon it, would wish to escape it. When the trees beyond the house and in the grounds stood quiet in their unknowing and the strap would drop, then I received the long, thick piston's steady urging-on, my sheened globe rolling to the pulsing thrusts that kept my cheeks asunder for the sperm.

“Elizabeth never held me before.”

My voice comes sudden upon me and to him.

“There were holdings before, Miss, seizings and holdings, but never of you that I heard of. She said you would come willing to it and ever had.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Sutcliffe?”

“I have had no experience of them, Miss, but has heard of a few who have. Terrible sights and wailings in the night, they say. I wouldn't as near go into a graveyard at night, not for a sovereign I wouldn't.”

“Ghosts are intangible, are they not? They have no bodily substance, no solidity.”

“Anyone as is solid couldn't be a ghost, Miss. What brought you to think of such a thing? Besides which, they wouldn't come here and not in the daylight, neither. They comes only in old houses where they have lived and died. They come to wail their passing, or to give warnings some say. Is it that you don't like sleeping alone, Miss?”

His question is hopeful but ill advised. Upon the closest of observation his eyes are smaller than I had thought. He is perhaps a loafer and an opportunist. I delve into my purse and give him a sovereign. He accepts it with a mumbling of thanks, which falls ill beside his earlier loquacity, and then is gone. Outside, as I suspected to find him, he lurks upon the footway as one who knows not which direction to take. Having no hesitation upon the matter, this way, that way, here or there or gone, I make my way to Kingsway and pause at a bookshop. There is a sense of dark within that attracts me. The stock is well arranged upon shelves grown long too old for their tasks in their slow-yielding dips and bends.

My glancings are cursory. I seek comfort merely in the silent presence of the books. Such bindings as are ribbed I touched with my fingertips. Dip and rise. Rise and glide.

“You may come within, Madam, if you wish.”

At the sounding of a voice, I turn. A brown door panelled with frosted glass over which a green curtain hangs stands open. A man of middle years, nor tall nor short, nor slim nor fat, removes his pince-nez to survey me. His glance is one of approbation. A twittering of sparrows comes unexpectedly from beyond, perhaps through some window open in the further room. I do not speak, nor do I return his gaze but let my own fall all about. A wooden tray holds maps, their edges curled as if they would sleep yet are hesitant to do so beneath the eyes of watchers.

“Some of my customers like to read here, within. Or to write. I do not mind the writing. Do you wish to write? There is a desk in waiting.”

“Do all write who come here?”

“Some do and some do not. If the whim takes them, I have had them write sonnets and essays here, but not all can spell. That is the sadness of it. Some scribble and splotch upon the paper. I have known them dig the nibs into the paper like claws.”

“It is a resting place between places?”

“There are such. You have the tongue for such things-the apprehensions. Are you from afar? You have not the London accent.”

He has stepped beyond, the floorboard creaking. In their brownness is ever a complaining. I skirt a trough of cheaper volumes such as housemaids read and enter where the green curtain stirs upon the frosted glass. The room within is long and narrow. It gives, as I thought, upon a window at the further end, where stand a small nonentity of trees, a larch, a willow, and an unknown. A wall beyond the small garden prevents their escape. They can neither come within nor steal back to their kind. Engravings for which I have no taste subdue the bright pink covering of the walls. An escritoire holds-still and small-paper, ink, and pen, upon it.