‘… with the white people …’
‘… and be judged only on my own merit; I wish for them to converse with me and come to know me, and accept me on my own account and nobody else’s.’
‘Then you will be nothing but a curiosity.’
‘Better than joining a mob. ’Tis a very fine thought, sir, but one unfortunate cannot help another; if they could all we girls here would have a vastly different life.’
‘We have comradeship,’ rejoins he. ‘It is not nothing to commune with others who understand our own experience.’
‘But nobody does,’ she says firmly. ‘What in your life is comparable to anything in mine? If you believe the colour of our skin – or the ancestry you suppose we share – bonds us, you are stupider even than I thought.’ She bends once more over her meagre effects and dons her spectacles before turning her face coolly upon him. ‘Thank you, Simeon, you may go now.’
He looks her in the eye and makes sure she watches as he puts the paper down on the washstand. ‘I thank you for your time,’ he says.
She sits quite still while he departs. As he descends the stairs, she presses her hand to her heart, which is pounding. When she is quite sure he is gone, she gets up and locks the door fast behind him.
Ay me!
Once I was we. Roiling in the water beyond light, we heard our sisters’ calls upon us. That was how we knew we were alive. Far away, they were, an age away, but our voices swam together, our songs wrapped tight one around the other. Our every thought had its own chorus; to speak was to be agreed with, replied to; to hear was to respond. However far distant we were, we were a shoal, a one, our voices darting and swathing and weaving together for drowned mariners to hear. We enclosed everything that descended. We shoaled towards it and about it, our singing cradled the curved backs of corpses whose fingers were drawn upwards as if still reaching; and we poured into the mouths of cracked vessels, and we crept with the barnacles over prized booty.
We investigated everything that came, and whispered to one another across the depths:
this is a man, linen-wrapped
this is a great ship ruptured
this is a chain come adrift
these are the bodies of children, flayed
this is blood, here in the water
And we knew everything, all the doings of the water.
I find myself an I. An only. How has this come to be? I am enclosed. I cry out and my cry cannot swim, cannot speed away from me; it bounces back. It is trapped with me, and with it I explore the space I find myself in, but truly it is no space at all. I am caught in a bubble, in a box, in a vessel, and there is no expanse any more, across which my sisters’ voices reach me. I do not hear them call at all, I cannot ask them, what is this? For they do not know where I am, and I am all alone.
I cry out and there is a dull nothing.
I cry out and hear my own voice back.
TWELVE
January 1786
Polly and Nell, hired to celebrate Twelfth Night in a great house at Portland Square, arrive that afternoon in as voluble and merry a mood as might be desired. Their hair has already been dressed under Mrs Chappell’s own direction, and they find great hilarity in the crackle and rustle of the brown paper bound all about their persons, to protect their fine gowns against the journey. The young men – who are fourteen in number, and boisterous, and admiring of the ladies although they do not dare lay finger upon them yet – gather delightedly in the hall, in the well-mannered excitement of a pack of hunting hounds, to greet their female playmates. Elinor would by instinct plunge head first into the party; she leans from the carriage as it approaches, and halloos into the brisk cold air, but Polly places a hand on her arm and says loudly for the coachman, ‘We’ll not descend here in view of the street; we wish to go first to our rooms.’ Mrs Chappell’s instruction is clear in her mind: ‘Do not go along with any amusement they demand of you; you are not their servant or their whore. Refuse them a small thing immediately: that will help train them.’
‘Only allow us a little time to compose ourselves,’ Elinor calls as the carriage bowls past the bloods’ faces arrayed at the window, ‘then you will have our undivided attention,’ and they speed away to the mews beyond.
The house, where they are ushered through the back door and into the now empty hallway, is every bit as marvellous as Mrs Chappell’s. ‘Perhaps nicer,’ Polly remarks, ‘for there is no mistaking real cultivation of taste,’ by which she means that the antiquities at Portland Square are cut from real marble and their members a fraction of the comparative size. The entire place smells of cloves and oranges, and roasting meats, and the resiny boughs that adorn the walls; in one of the grand front parlours the men can be heard whooping and guffawing. ‘Quickly, Nell, do not let them see us so,’ whispers Polly, and indeed their paper robes are not only a peculiar sight but one markedly lacking in allure.
To the consternation of the panting footmen labouring with their trunk behind, they rustle at double speed up the great staircase to the top of the house, where they find their own adjoining rooms. ‘I like to have a quiet place to retire to,’ says Polly, divesting herself of her papers and fluffing her hair as the footmen leave, perspiring.
‘I like it all,’ says Elinor, testing the tautness of her mattress. ‘D’ye think there will be much retiring?’
‘No,’ and they snigger together. ‘And look, Nell, we have our own bell pull.’
‘What is it for? Is’t really for us?’
‘Of course. We are guests here. Shall I call for something?’ They jig with excitement. ‘Oh, I dare not! They have only just left us alone!’
‘Go on!’
Polly yanks it with all her might and then skips back, her hand clapped to her mouth. ‘I did it! Oh, what shall I say, what shall I say?’
‘Someone comes!’ cries Elinor.
‘Remarkable prompt. Oh, you talk, I dare not.’ The step of the servant on the stair is clearly audible. ‘I shall hide!’ whispers Polly. ‘If I must look upon them, I think I shall die laughing.’ She darts into the other room, and only a tuft of her powdered hair peeps about the door frame when the footman attends once again, somewhat discomposed from his second ascent.
‘You rang for me, madam?’
‘I did.’ Elinor’s voice quakes – how will she maintain her composure? ‘Now, we are hungry and thirsty after our travelling. Would you bring us please a little Portugal wine – it must be very good, I will know at once – and a bowl of oranges? A big bowl.’
From behind Polly’s door there comes a squeak. If Elinor’s face twitches it is only for the briefest moment; she smiles most bland, and inclines her head in gratitude to the servant.
‘Certainly,’ he says. ‘Is there anything else you would have brought up? To save your ringing again?’
‘Walnuts. I should like some walnuts, and a copy of the afternoon paper.’
‘Any one in particular?’
She considers. ‘All of them.’ There is a discernible quiver to her delivery; she must gabble quickly if she is to survive the interview. ‘And a jug of hot chocolate and that will be quite everything, thank you very kindly and goodbye.’ She slams the door upon him and leans upon it, weeping with hilarity; Polly staggers from the other room, scarlet in the face; she has stuffed her fist in her mouth to keep from howling, but now they lean upon one another and laugh until they cannot breathe. ‘Walnuts!’ gasps Polly. ‘Walnuts and newspapers!’
‘I like walnuts,’ says Elinor.