Free Affinity by Sarah Waters Page A

must ‘make her my special object’. It will be she, in all the gaol, who will require a lady’s attentions most . . .
    He had misunderstood me; but I could not talk further with him then, for as he spoke a warder came, to call him away. There was a party of ladies and gentlemen just arrived, that he must guide across the prison. I saw them gathered on the slip of gravelled earth beyond the gate. The men had stepped to one of the pentagon walls and were studying its yellow bricks and mortar.
    The day, after the closeness of the women’s wards, seemed pure to me, as it seemed pure last week. The sun had slipped beyond the windows of the women’s block, but was still high enough to make the afternoon a fine one. When the porter made to step into the road beyond the outer gate and whistle me a cab, I stopped him, and I crossed to the embankment wall. I had heard that there is still the pier there from which the prison ships took convicts to the colonies, and I went to look at it. It is a wooden jetty, with a dark, barred arch at the back of it: the arch leads to an underground passage, which connects the pier to the prison. I stood a while and imagined those ships, and how it must have been for the women who were confined in them; then, still thinking of them—and thinking again of Dawes, and Power and Cook—then I began to walk. I walked the length of the embankment, and only paused again before the house, where there was a man fishing in the water with a hook and line. He had two slim fish strung from a buckle at his waist, and their scales were silver in the sunlight, their mouths very pink.
    I walked, because I guessed that Mother would still be busy with Pris. When I went home, however, I found that she was not out as I had supposed, but had been back for an hour, and had been watching me. How long was it, she wanted to know, that I had been going about the city on foot? She had been about to send Ellis over for me.
    I had been a little moodish with her, earlier; I was determined not to be moodish now. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’ Then, as penance, I sat and let Priscilla tell me about her hours with Mr Cornwallis. She showed me again her blue gown, and how she is posed for the sake of the portrait—she sits as a young girl awaiting her lover, clasping flowers and with her face turned to the light. She said that Mr Cornwallis gives her paintbrushes to hold; but they will be lilies, in the final picture—I thought of Dawes then, and those peculiar violets. ‘The lilies and the background are to be done,’ she said, ‘while we are abroad . . .’
    Then she told me where they are going. To Italy . She said it without a hint of self-consciousness; it’s nothing to her, I suppose, what Italy might once have been to me. But when I heard it, I thought my penance was certainly complete. I left her, and only went down again when Ellis struck the supper-bell.
    Cook, however, had sent up mutton. It arrived at table rather chill, and with a film of grease upon it; I looked at it, and remembered the sour-smelling soup at Millbank, and how the women were suspicious of the unclean hands through which it had passed, and I had no appetite for it. I left the table early, and spent an hour looking through the books and prints in Pa’s room, and then another hour here, watching the traffic on the Walk. I saw Mr Barclay come for Pris, swinging his cane. He paused for a moment at the steps and put his fingers to a leaf to make them damp, then smoothed his moustache. He didn’t know I stood at my high window, gazing at him. After that I read a little, and then I wrote in here.
    Now my room is very dark, my reading-lamp the only light in it; but the glow of the wick is taken up by a dozen gleaming surfaces, and if I was to turn my head I would see my own face, lean and yellow, in the glass upon the chimney-breast. I do not turn. I look instead at the wall here, where to-night, beside the plan of Millbank, I pinned a print. I