remember what it is. I knew it once but have forgotten. He wants something. It may be something small. It may be the pivot. Of course – he wants the maid. Let him have her then. If that is all. What is it to me?
I have Milton bring me back to my
'Stay with me,' I say. And she sits on a little folding stool by my side.
The maid. She has a good enough profile, quite pure, in the way that simple faces sometimes are. A hidden saint. Her father is a dolt and her mother a whore, and there she is – my clever girl Francine. The tricks that she knows. The secrets she has been obliged since youth to keep. Which is why she was for me such a very excellent maid.
Sent by Dolores the Spaniard because she was getting too pretty. And I looked at her, and thought her perfectly fine, and not too pretty at all. ? will call you Francine,' I said, and she bobbed a little and was pleased to be hired.
I wonder what her given name is.
'What's your name?' I say.
'Why, Francine, ma'am.' She seems perfectly surprised by the question. And so I let it go.
Now that she is beside me, my dear friend comes as far as my pavilion on his endless round, and he bows on the turn. Beside me, I feel her prickle and go still. And by the fourth or fifth turn I am bored by it – but massively so -and I tell her to go inside.
I want to tell the silly girl that she might get a marriage out of it, as M. Raspail married me to Quatrefages. And even though this is not Paris, it still might be done. The equerry Valera might suit, or someone a little lower down. Though any hopes of Whytehead are perhaps now gone.
'Would you like to know how I got married?' I say as she folds up the stool. She looks up from her crouch.
'Why yes, ma'am.'
But I find I cannot do it. 'Another time,' I say.
She leaves, and I lapse into a greedy silence. And so the ship ploughs on, while I rehearse my woes.
He wants the maid.
Dressing for dinner, I am so overcome by the tedium of it all, I must chuck the string of pearls on to the table in front of me. The maid absents herself, as does the valet, and my friend comes over to fasten the string himself. We watch one another in the mirror.
I say I will not have the equerry Valera about me, I do not like the look of him. My friend says he is a very effective young man, and I say that I do not care how effective he is, I do not want him outside my door at night, because I don't like his long nose and the way he looks down it, at me.
He says, in that case, he will have him flogged.
Tor what?'
'For impudence, my love.'
But that is not it, either.
I turn from the mirror and stand. I am close to tears now. I want to run away from him, but there is nowhere to go. He takes me by the shoulders, and looks at me, and shakes me a little – tenderly. Then he slips his palm along the length of my arm to find my hand, which he touches, holds, and lifts for a kiss: all the while fixing me with a stare.
And his eyes promise everything.
I want to sneer. But this is not a vulgar bargain. It is an invitation. He is inviting me to join him in his life -his impossible life, where the sky is more blue, and the grass more green, where you can have things just by taking them. He is telling me to hold my nerve. He is saying that if I hold my nerve, like him, then I can have anything I want.
'Francine!' I call her back.
When she comes in, Lopez squeezes past her in the narrow doorway and makes a clicking noise with his tongue. Then he is gone.
The room is so small. The maid looks at me, then she tucks her head down and strikes out for the dressing table, but I halt her where she is. I tell her to stand so I can look at her, and she fumbles one hand in the other, while I take my fill.
She is seventeen. She has already one child, dead or abandoned, and the marks must be under there somewhere, to prove it. I pull the hair behind her ear to check for lice eggs. I want to slap her, but instead I point to the soap and say, as I leave the room,
'Wash.'
It is very nice soap. Attar of roses.
I can not smell it off her, when she comes through after dinner. Perhaps she does not like attar of roses. This annoys me. It puts me in a perfect rage.
And so we sit for cards.
'And what are the stakes, tonight?' asks Stewart. 'Another story? A kiss?'
So he can sense it, too. Francine does not even blush. My friend leans back from the table and casually gropes for the decanter behind him. I bustle around and serve him myself. I say it is too dull – Mr Whytehead is to blame; we must play for money, because what is an evening without the promise of ruin? I turn to my dear friend and I say, 'You must give Mr Whytehead more money, my dear, so that he can overcome his scruples and play. (I think I am a little drunk.) Or give the maid money, at least, so we can have a proper game.'
It seems I have stumbled on a solution. And a charming one at that. My friend looks at me, and lifts his glass. And so he is pleased with me, at last.
'Here's to the generosity of Madame Lynch.'
And he shouts through the open door for, 'Money!'
We play just as we were some nights ago. My friend looks at his hand in easy contemplation. Stewart is massive again, heaving and glowering over two hearts and a spade. Across the table, Whytehead leans stiffly in, over the shoulder of the trembling maid.
From time to time, he whispers. And once, he points.
So at least I have some pleasure. To see the girl hazard more than she could earn in a year. To see her handle it – the heft and clink of it in her palm, the gathering feel of the metal rims as they slither into a column between finger and thumb, which she then sets down on the baize. The hand withdrawn. So careful.
I can see a vein flutter on her neck.
I know money. I know the value of, for example, three hundred pounds – how a maid could live a lifetime on such a sum, how my father could live a month, how my mother might have raised her children on it for more than a year. I burned a note, once, that belonged to Mr Bennett. A fifty. I said to him, as I did it, 'This afternoon, I think I'll love you for free.'
These are the things I could tell the maid as she makes a timorous throw into the centre of the table, and then flinches when one of the coins begins to roll. I could tell her, as she loses, hand after hand, a modest dowry – which is to say, a life; a husband, a child she might keep – that money is the least of it, my dear.
And my goodness, she does lose. It takes a little over an hour. It takes a minute at a time. Whytehead leans over her shoulder, his superior mind in a welter of calculation, and is no use to her. Stewart, who bets promissory notes on his future salary, takes her money too. He reaches over and pulls it across the baize: once, twice. He takes it five times or more. The solid fact of it goes into his pocket when the game is done. Which it is done when the maid has nothing left to lose.
? have the best of it, tonight, it seems,' says Stewart, all good humour – as though she might get it back from him, another time. Then he makes his way to the decanter, with ponderous regret. But his hand trembles, as he pours.
