Fingersmith

by Sarah Waters

She spoke quietly, about nothing.

Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.’

It is not the prospect of a whipping that makes me meek. It is what I know of the cruelty of patience. There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged. I have seen lunatics labour at endless tasks—conveying sand from one leaking cup into another; counting the stitches in a fraying gown, or the motes in a sunbeam; filling invisible ledgers with the resulting sums.

The lamp smells, as it heats, of smouldering dust: a curious smell—I shall grow to hate it!—the smell of the parching of my own youth.

You may trust yourself, till then, not to my honour—for I have none—but, say, to my cupidity; which is anyway a greater thing than honour, in the world outside these walls.

My liberty beckons: gaugeless, fearful, inevitable as death.

But I tremble, too, at the boldness of him—or rather, his boldness sets me quivering, as they say a vibrating string will find out unsuspected sympathies in the fibres of idle bodies.

Is this desire? How queer that I, of all people, should not know! But I thought desire smaller, neater; I supposed it bound to its own organs as taste is bound to the mouth, vision to the eye. This feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin.

I think I will swallow down my desire, as I have swallowed down grief, and rage.

It is thick with purposes I do not understand. It is marked with words, but I cannot read it.

‘Dear girl, all right?’ she says, as she will say every day, every day; and the idiocy or perversity of the question—when