Free Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Page B

lifted up a lantern, to look at my face.
    ‘You’ll be Susan Smith,’ he said, ‘come down from London. Miss Maud’ve been fretting after you all day.’

    He was an oldish man and his name was William Inker. He was Mr Lilly’s groom. He took my trunk and helped me into the seat beside his own, and geed up the horse; and when—being struck by the breeze as we drove—he felt me shiver, he reached for a tartan blanket for me to put about my legs.
    It was six or seven miles to Briar, and he took it at an easy sort of trot, smoking a pipe. I told him about the fog—there was still something of a mist, even now, even there—and the slow trains.
    He said, ‘That’s London. Known for its fogs, ain’t it? Been much down to the country before?’
    ‘Not much,’ I said.
    ‘Been maiding in the city, have you? Good place, your last one?’
    ‘Pretty good,’ I said.
    ‘Rum way of speaking you’ve got, for a lady’s maid,’ he said then. ‘Been to France ever?’
    I took a second, smoothing the blanket out over my lap.
    ‘Once or twice,’ I said.
    ‘Short kind of chaps, the French chaps, I expect? In the leg, I mean.’
    Now, I only knew one Frenchman—a housebreaker, they called him Jack the German, I don’t know why. He was tall enough; but I said, to please William Inker,
    ‘Shortish, I suppose.’
    ‘I expect so,’ he said.
    The road was perfectly quiet and perfectly dark, and I imagined the sound of the horse, and the wheels, and our voices, carrying far across the fields. Then I heard, from rather near, the slow tolling of a bell—a very mournful sound, it seemed to me at that moment, not like the cheerful bells of London. It tolled nine times.
    ‘That’s the Briar bell, sounding the hour,’ said William Inker.
    We sat in silence after that, and in a little time we reached a high stone wall and took a road that ran beside it. Soon the wall became a great arch, and then I saw behind it the roof and the pointed windows of a greyish house, half-covered with ivy. I thought it a grand enough crib, but not so grand nor so grim perhaps as Gentleman had painted it. But when William Inker slowed the horse and I put the blanket from me and reached for my trunk, he said,
    ‘Wait up, sweetheart, we’ve half a mile yet!’ And then, to a man who had appeared with a lantern at the door of the house, he called: ‘Good night, Mr Mack. You may shut the gate behind us. Here is Miss Smith, look, safe at last.’
    The building I had thought was Briar was only the lodge! I stared, saying nothing, and we drove on past it, between two rows of bare dark trees, that curved as the road curved, then dipped into a kind of hollow, where the air—that had seemed to clear a little, on the open country lanes—grew thick again. So thick it grew, I felt it, damp, upon my face, upon my lashes and lips; and closed my eyes. Then the dampness passed away. I looked, and stared again. The road had risen, we had broken out from between the lines of trees into a gravel clearing, and here—rising vast and straight and stark out of the woolly fog, with all its windows black or shuttered, and its walls with a dead kind of ivy clinging to them, and a couple of its chimneys sending up threads of a feeble-looking grey smoke—here was Briar, Maud Lilly’s great house, that I must now call my home.
    We did not cross before the face of it, but kept well to the side, then took up a lane that swung round behind it, where there was a muddle of yards and out-houses and porches, and more dark walls and shuttered windows and the sound of barking dogs. High in one of the buildings was the round white face and great black hands of the clock I had heard striking across the fields. Beneath it, William Inker pulled the horse up, then helped me down. A door was opened in one of the walls and a woman stood gazing at us, her arms folded against the cold.
    ‘There’s Mrs Stiles, heard the trap come,’ said William. We crossed the yard to join her. Up