Spider Light(37)
She smiled, thinking how shocked most of Amberwood would have been to see the correct respectable Miss Forrester striding through London’s sleazier alleys, haggling with the cat-faced child over the purchase of a paper cone of opium. And how that impudent creature had haggled!
Thomasina had not really minded though–she had found the girl’s defiant bargaining exciting, and the girl had known it. When the opium had finally been bought, she had said, ‘Coming home with me now, are you, Thomasina? I got a lady to pleasure at five–she likes me to go to her own house, but we got an hour before that. Cost you double, though.’ Thomasina had so hated the thought of the girl going from her narrow bed in Seven Dials to that of some rich soft-living female, that she had offered her not twice, but three times the usual amount not to go. The girl had taken the money, and this time, as well as her lips and her hands, she had used one of the polished leather phalluses on Thomasina, saying three times the payment deserved three times the pleasure. When Thomasina walked down towards St Martin’s Lane, where she could get a hansom to take her to Waterloo, she had looked back and seen the girl leave the house, and had known she was going to that other woman anyway.
She turned away from these thoughts, and began to plan how she could make Maud’s second-floor prison as comfortable and as pleasant as possible.
However comfortable and pleasant the second-floor rooms might be–however many books and painting things were brought up here–there was still a locked door and there were still bars at the windows: Maud knew she was in a prison.
Every night after dinner Simon and Thomasina came up the stairs and unlocked the door. Maud’s world had shrunk to the sound of their step on the stairs and the turning of the key in the lock. And then, once the lock had been turned, came the slow opening of the door, exactly as the black door in her nightmare used to open, and with it came the crowding terror, because there was something dreadful waiting behind that door…
Once they were in the room–the key firmly turned again in the lock–Thomasina got undressed and Maud had to get undressed as well. Sometimes Thomasina undressed her and once Simon undressed her, which was dreadful. Then there was the stroking and licking with Thomasina that constituted ‘It’, and then Simon got undressed and there was the banging and pumping into her body and the wet stickiness that happened at the very end.
Twice Simon was flushed and slurry-speeched, and the pumping did not hurt as much and Maud was grateful. But both times Thomasina flew into a rage and said Simon was drunk and he had better go away and sleep it off. The second time, the colour suddenly drained from Simon’s face and he lurched off the bed and stumbled across to the washstand to be sick. Thomasina compressed her lips, and carried the bowl away to empty it in the bathroom, and Simon shambled back to his own bed. The following night they both pretended it had not happened.
A cottage piano arrived at the end of the first week and was carried up to the second-floor room, and until she could escape properly Maud escaped into music. She tried out the Chopin and Debussy pieces her father had enjoyed, and some of Beethoven’s compositions, although she had to stop playing the Pathétique after the first few bars, because it made her cry to think of Beethoven facing deafness, unable to properly hear this beautiful music.
But the best music of all for escaping was Paganini’s Caprice Suite. There was a piano arrangement of this by Schumann, and Maud resolved to master it. Paganini had known about being locked away and accused of madness–there was a story about how he had been accused of murdering his mistress while he was in the grip of insanity. Whether the story was true or not, prison had not killed his spirit: he had turned his mind to honing and polishing his marvellous musical gifts, and he had emerged stronger.
Maud would emerge stronger from all this as well. She would play Paganini’s music, and while she did so she would plan how to be revenged on Thomasina and Simon. Some of the plans she thought of shocked her with their brutality, but after a time she stopped being shocked, because such punishments were no more than those two deserved.
Thomasina was enjoying making plans. Since she had always adhered to the robust maxim of, no sooner the word than the deed, she went along to Twygrist the very next afternoon. Even without the dream of that young Josiah, there was no point in letting the place crumble into decay. She took the keys from her desk, and tucked a candle and matches in the pocket of her skirt, because parts of Twygrist were as dark as hell’s deepest caverns.
As she walked briskly along the lanes, she thought how pleased people would be if the mill were to come alive after so many years. The farmers would bring their corn again, and Twygrist would hum with life and activity. It would be as it had been when Thomasina and Simon had played their games there as children, and been smiled over and doted on by the workers. Young Mr Simon and little Miss Thomasina, the women had said, beaming, and the men had touched their caps politely. Thomasina had loved it.
She and Simon had made up a song about Twygrist to the tune of the old nursery rhyme, ‘The House that Jack Built’, which had been Simon’s favourite. ‘This is the mill that Joe built,’ they had sung–‘Joe’ had been Thomasina’s father, of course.
This is the mill that Joe built
This is the door, that creaks like a crone
That opens the mill that Joe built.
Twygrist’s door still creaked, and as Thomasina went inside the remembered atmosphere engulfed her: old timbers, because Twygrist was extremely old itself, the scent of machinery and a faint sourness of stagnant water. This last was not good; it was to be hoped that the sluice gates were not leaking and letting water seep in from the reservoir.