Fingersmith

by Sarah Waters

It was odd to see her stepping out of that gloomy place, like a pearl coming out of an oyster. It was odder to watch her going back in, and see the oyster shell open, then shut at her back.

I took up a pair of kitchen shears and put them to his neck. I said, ‘Bad blood carries. Bad blood comes out.’ And the look on his face was something! I wondered how Maud would look, if she knew what bad blood flowed in me.

But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, ‘She’s nothing to you’, the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there. All day I sat or walked with her, so full of the fate I was bringing her to I could hardly touch her or meet her gaze; and all night I lay with my back turned to her, the blanket over my ears to keep out her sighs. But in the hours in between, when she went to her uncle, I felt her—I felt her, through the walls of the house, like some blind crooks are said to be able to feel gold. It was as if there had come between us, without my knowing, a kind of thread. It pulled me to her, wherever she was. It was like— It’s like you love her, I thought.

You thought her a pigeon. Pigeon, my arse. That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start.