Fingersmith Read Free Page A

passed me on to the poorhouse. She might have left me crying in a draughty crib. Instead she prized me so, she would not let me on the prig for fear a policeman should have got me. She let me sleep beside her, in her own bed. She shined my hair with vinegar. You treat jewels like that.
    And I was not a jewel; nor even a pearl. My hair, after all, turned out quite ordinary. My face was a commonplace face. I could pick a plain lock, I could cut a plain key; I could bounce a coin and say, from the ring, if the coin were good or bad.—But anyone can do those things, who is taught them. All about me other infants came, and stayed a little, then were claimed by their mothers, or found new mothers, or perished; and of course, no-one claimed me, I did not perish, instead I grew up, until at last I was old enough to go among the cradles with the bottle of gin and the silver spoon myself. Mr Ibbs I would seem sometimes to catch gazing at me with a certain light in his eye—as if, I thought, he was seeing me suddenly for the piece of poke I was, and wondering how I had come to stay so long, and who he could pass me on to. But when people talked—as they now and then did—about blood, and its being thicker than water, Mrs Sucksby looked dark.
    ‘Come here, dear girl,’ she’d say. ‘Let me look at you.’ And she’d put her hands upon my head and stroke my cheeks with her thumbs, brooding over my face. ‘I see her in you,’ she’d say. ‘She is looking at me, as she looked at me that night. She is thinking that she’ll come back and make your fortune. How could she know? Poor girl, she’ll never come back! Your fortune’s still to be made. Your fortune, Sue, and ours along with it . . .’
    So she said, many times. Whenever she grumbled or sighed—whenever she rose from a cradle, rubbing her sore back—her eyes would find me out, and her look would clear, she’d grow contented.
    But here is Sue, she might as well have said. Things is hard for us, now. But here is Sue. She’ll fix ’em . . .
    I let her think it; but thought I knew better. I’d heard once that she’d had a child of her own, many years before, that had been born dead. I thought it was her face she supposed she saw, when she gazed so hard at mine. The idea made me shiver, rather; for it was queer to think of being loved, not just for my own sake, but for someone’s I never knew . . .
    I thought I knew all about love, in those days. I thought I knew all about everything. If you had asked me how I supposed I should go on, I dare say I would have said that I should like to farm infants. I might like to be married, to a thief or a fencing-man. There was a boy, when I was fifteen, that stole a clasp for me, and said he should like to kiss me. There was another a little later, who used to stand at our back door and whistle ‘The Locksmith’s Daughter’, expressly to see me blush. Mrs Sucksby chased them both away. She was as careful of me in that department, as in all others.
    ‘Who’s she keeping you for, then?’ the boys would say. ‘Prince Eddie?’
    I think the people who came to Lant Street thought me slow.—Slow I mean, as opposed to fast. Perhaps I was, by Borough standards. But it seemed to me that I was sharp enough. You could not have grown up in such a house, that had such businesses in it, without having a pretty good idea of what was what—of what could go into what; and what could come out.
    Do you follow?

    You are waiting for me to start my story. Perhaps I was waiting, then. But my story had already started—I was only like you, and didn’t know it.

    This is when I thought it really began.
    A night in winter, a few weeks after the Christmas that marked my seventeenth birthday. A dark night—a hard night, full of a fog that was more or less a rain, and a rain that was more or less snow. Dark nights are good to thieves and fencing-men; dark nights in winter are the best nights of all, for then regular people keep close to their