I need not ask a single question. You need not speak a single word. For I know that I love you so deeply, so strongly, and I know what words can and cannot do. I have lived my new life within these four walls like I lived my previous life, when I spent my days reading filth alongside Uncle. The difference is that now I am the writer as well as the reader, and I only read that which I write. I know the prose, the pace, and the terms, and this is what I create: volumes full of words that strive to capture the intensity, the physicality… everything, from the way you moved your hands about me when you undressed me, to the way you called me “Miss”, to your blush, or the fall of your eyelashes when you looked at me and pretended to be innocent in your way while I pretended to be innocent in mine. This has helped me discover the usefulness of words, but also how imprecise, how blunt they are now that I know how it really feels like.
Those girls in my stories… they are and are not us at the same time - although none of the respectable gentlemen reading them will ever know where I get my ideas from. Writing has helped me at times, but it has also flushed and frustrated me almost every day.
However, I was never as aware of my frustration and the ineffectiveness of the written word as when I raised my head from my papers and saw you standing there, like you used to, behind the old mark on the floor: the line, pointed by the simplified drawing of a finger. In those days, I came to associate you with the discharge of my duties, and so you would always bring me the sense of temporal liberation, something I had never felt and thus could not miss. But I was fast in learning how to miss you beside me. How I cursed you in silence for having taught me to feel your absence; and then I cursed myself for having played out the plan until the end.
But this is not a story; there is no real “The End”, with the exception of death. Life went on, whether I liked it or not. It went on with the lack of you -which I most certainly did not like-, and I had to work to survive, doing the only thing I was ever taught to do. My trade was my curse as well, and I took them in together: I chained myself to the memories and to Briar. You would appear constantly, like a spectre, both in my mind and in my rooms, haunting me, reminding me of everything I had done... Then, at night, I stared at your imagined figure undressing at the foot of the bed and then hurrying to get into the warmth of the covers.
You need not speak, for I do not have questions for the answers you want to give me. Rather, I’m the one who needs to explain who I really am, and bear the risk of losing you again, now that I have you here. I need to tell you the truth about what happened in this house. It functioned as a convent, but a convent of filth, and I was its only nun: fed, kept and bound like one of those precious books, away from the world. My eyes have grazed words and illustrations put together with such reverence that one would think them sacred books - Uncle certainly did. He had me read them with the coldness and accuracy of a surgeon, but I knew what lay underneath its smooth and respectable layer, and it was the hunger and lust of men. No matter how detached those gentlemen seemed while I read, smoking their cigars or their pipes, sipping their drinks. I was aware of how they looked at me. I knew what was happening underneath their trousers; I knew they were about to explode, like the men in the books.
I am sorry. There is no meek, innocent girl. There is only me, and everything I know is dirty, and everything I do is poisoned. I was poisoned by the hunger of others, and then by my own, and thus I managed to do away with the only pure thing I have ever known. You thought I was good, but I am not good and I am not pure. I am afraid of myself, of the rot inside me. Somehow, with you, I managed to become something of what I could’ve been if I hadn’t lived my life locked inside two different madhouses. With you I could smile and hear my own laughter. I felt your eyes and they were kind; I felt your hands and they were warm. For the first time I knew what little girls feel like when they dance or play. Furthermore, for the first time, I felt what girls my age should feel... what Uncle’s books talked about.
During the day, I squirmed in my seat for you. During the night, I bit on my gloved fingers. My hand hovered above your body while you slept - just a little space and a little fabric between us, but I was so scared that you would notice, that the warmth emanating from me would give me away. The scent of my own wetness came to me so clear that I was sure you would smell it. The men in Uncle’s books could always follow the smell of a woman’s wetness like bloodhounds, and then got under their skirts, gobbling it up with gluttony. Would you do that as well if you found me out? I feared it and desired it at the same time.
I honestly thought that you came to kill me. What did they do to you in the madhouse? What is it like, living among the insane? I honestly cannot say; I lived above them, not among them. I was raised by twenty women who enjoyed watching me play the “little nurse” -they called me that-; they dressed me like them and even gave me a small wooden wand to strike the inmates, persuade them to be good. Thus, I never put myself in their place - I did not know how to do it then, but I learned later, when I thought about you in that place. I understood if you wanted to kill me. I expected it.
However, I did not expect you to come towards me in peace, not in rage, and call me Maud so softly... It was a completely different name in your lips, different than other times. You looked so thin and slight, but so strong at the same time... I, on the contrary, felt weak and surprised, but I gathered what strength I could, for there was one last straw. I needed to explain who I really was, even if that would surely mean losing you. I spoke self-loathingly, and read from one of Uncle’s books with spite. For the first time, I wasn’t reading like a surgeon; there was a force behind my dissection of body parts. Oh, how you looked at me! You even tore the book from my hands unbelievingly, to look at it personally, and you saw the engraving, even if you could not decipher the strange symbols which spelt the various bodily fluids with fancy names, such as honey and milk. I knew them all by heart. My heart had been poisoned by it, year after year.
How could you look at me still? How could you touch me? You, the real you, not one of my spectre-memories. Here, I’ll read to you. These are all the words I have ever written, these papers, these books, and they have all been incited by you. If you could read them, they would tell you a story: the story of a smuggled glove and a folded card with two hearts; the story of a lady and her maid; the story of an intricate scheme like a spider’s web, and, finally, the story of the good thing that bloomed from it. All these words -and they’re not nearly enough-, they say how I want you. How I love you.
2. If I could write this
I came back to Briar to look for some clue of your whereabouts, now that I knew Mr. Lilly was dead. The house looked dead and empty. I was sure that I wouldn’t find no one there, just the old furniture and the moss growing on the outside walls. Walking around the house gave me a strange feeling alright, as if somebody was going to jump out at me, even if I was sure there was no one, and I don’t believe in no ghosts either. It was a different kind of feeling. I looked out the window and for a moment I thought I saw two girls, similar in height, wearing frocks and hats, giggling and running, arm in arm. It was the memories, clouding up around me like the fog in the road. It was like a living dream, after all I’d been through... Sometimes the madhouse seemed to be the dream, and sometimes, it was the weeks spent at Briar.
When I opened the door of your uncle’s office and saw you sitting in his place, writing, I couldn’t believe my eyes. However, I’d never seen you sitting there and I hadn’t seen you writing, so I knew that it couldn’t be another haunting memory. It was you, surrounded by sheets of paper, filling them with those wavy lines of ink that I could not understand. It seemed like you hadn’t even heard me open the door. For a moment there, I was so struck with having found you that I couldn’t move a muscle; I could only look at you. You were not wearing gloves. But then, I think you felt my eyes on you, and you raised your head and you saw me. And I saw all that I ever wanted. I stepped over the mark of the finger and went towards you, unafraid.
You sat back in your chair and very royally asked me if I had come to kill you. The mere thought terrified me, it was so contrary to my feelings and my intentions. It was different when I thought that you didn’t love me, when I thought you had stolen from me what I had, what I counted on always having: my home and Mrs. Sucksby. One minute I was giddy and dazzled by the familiar stink of London, and the next I saw you looking out from my very window! I’m not ashamed to say that I cracked a little then. I thought you mocked me with that card, the two of hearts!
It was our own two hearts, Maud, now I know it. I wasn’t aware of the journey we needed to make in order to be face to face, clean of lies at last. I was blinded by all the wrongness that had been done to me. Even my reputation had been blundered and I wasn’t an honest thieve anymore! Everybody thought I had ran away with all the spoils, like a rat! Me, who always handed over everything to Mrs. Sucksby! I’m sorry to have grabbed that knife, I’m sorry to have jumped at you with it, but I couldn’t even think, I believed that every one of my feelings was spoilt and worthless.
After that, you disappeared, and the sorrow for Mrs. Sucksby covered up everything else. She looked so small, standing on the platform... and then, swinging from the rope, already dead -for they make it quick for women-, she didn’t look more than a little sack. Everybody becomes smaller when they die, I guess. Even Gentleman looked like a boy, lying on our floor, and we discovered that his origins were much less noble than what he had us all believing.
I wasn’t a girl anymore, Mrs. Sucksby’s death made me grow up. And then I found the letter written by the woman who was my real mother. My mother hadn’t been a killer after all, she hadn’t been hanged. She had left me with Mrs. Sucksby and had taken you instead. She had saved me; and you, Mrs. Sucksby’s very daughter, had paid the price.
There was no way I could stop thinking about you. I knew that I had to find you, no matter how long it took me, after your uncle died. We had both gone too far and suffered too much. You were bearing the sadness and emptiness alone, writing in that hollow house as if you accepted that you were going to stay there for the rest of your life - I’m sure you did. You thought that you had done something so wretched that I wouldn’t want to see you ever again, or, if I did, I would want to kill you. You looked at me like you thought you deserved it, but all I wanted was to be close to you, at last, without the plans and the lies between us. How could I harm you?
Then, you suddenly seemed stronger. You told me that I didn’t know you at all, that you weren’t a sweet girl, and began reading out from a book. At first the words made no sense to me, I didn’t understand what the dusty old books had to do with it, but then my mind seemed to click. Tongues and lips? Bottom? I took the blasted book from your hands and stared first at the tiny blocks of letters and then at the drawing beside them, which I could understand. Naked figures! Was it a dirty book? Were they all like that, all that time you were with Mr. Lilly? The filthy bastard! How could he make you do that?
But you had more to say. You were writing those books yourself now, to earn a living, and you said it not without some self-satisfaction. You thought you were going to drive me away with that, didn’t you? Did you expect me to cringe, to think you dirty? All I wanted was to cross those few steps that separated us and have you in my arms again. You were shaken, talking about Mrs. Sucksby, and your eyes were huge. I could never resist those eyes or the corners of your lips, which frame all the kisses that I still haven’t given you.
Your lips twitched into unsure smiles when I brought a hand to your face, when I tried to rub off the smudge of ink on your temple. I wanted nothing else than to remain there and take care of you, and you seemed to sense it, but some part of you couldn’t quite believe it. I’ll work hard to erase that part of you that thinks you deserve to be despised.
Part of me still finds it hard to believe that all this time you’ve really loved me, that all those words you write are ways to say how you want me. You hesitated when you said that those words also spell out how you love me, as if I was going to scorn you for that, or as if it was too much to say it that simply. But I love you too, and now that I’ve found you, I’m here to be with you every day of my life. I’m here to bask in you every night and every day - your skin, your scent. You were shut inside this shell of a house, but I have found you now, gleaming and pure, no matter what you say. You pearl, you pearl.
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