The Crimson petal and the white

TWENTY-FOUR

Madness! Sheer madness!

Half the problem with this house, if you ask the servants, is that the Rackhams have a wicked habit of staying up when they should be sleeping, and sleeping when they should be awake.

Take this very instant, for example. Clara tiptoes along the landing, candle in hand, at half past midnight, a time when long-suffering servants ought surely to be able to rest their heads on their pillows, secure in the knowledge that their masters and mistresses will cause no more trouble till the morning. But what's this? Clara confirms, by bending to squint into the key-hole of each of the bedrooms in turn, that not a single Rackham is asleep.

Madness, if you ask Clara. Just because William Rackham has increased her yearly wage by ten shillings, does he expect her to kiss his shoes in gratitude for the privilege of working here? Ten shillings is all very well, but how much is a good night's sleep worth? She's lost plenty of those! Take tonight, for example!

Doors opening and shutting, noises she simply must investigate, for who can tell what Mrs Rackham will do next? Ten shillings per year … What's that to a man whose face is engraved on placards in the omnibus? Why, she has half a mind to tell him she wants a shilling for every hour his mad wife keeps her awake!

What's the wretched woman up to now? Something daft, no doubt. And tomorrow, while the faithful lady's-maid is expected to stand at the ready, dead on her feet, Mrs Rackham will likely as not be lying in bed, snoring the day away, drooling onto her sunlit pillow.

As for the Rackham child, she ought to be put down at seven p.m. and stay put down till seven next morning. The new governess-Miss Sugar -clearly has no idea how to deal with children…

What foolishness is she up to? Clara peers through the key-hole of Sophie Rackham's bedroom, and sees-madness!-candle-light swaying this way and that, and the shadow of Miss Sugar enveloping the child's. Interfering with her, Clara shouldn't wonder. From the moment the woman set foot in the house, Clara could smell it on her: the stink of badness. This self-styled governess, with her highly suspect walk and her slut's mouth -where on earth did Rackham find her? The Rescue Society, maybe. One of Emmeline Fox's "success stories", come to fiddle with little Sophie in the middle of the night.

And Rackham himself? What's he doing awake? Clara peers through his key-hole, and has an unimpeded view of the great man's desk, with the great man busily scribbling. Can't he wait till morning to persuade more people to buy his perfumes? Or are these scribbles the novel he always used to tell his wife he was busy conceiving? Wlliam is going to publish a novel, Clara, Mrs Rackham would say, at least once a month during the lean years.

The best novel in the world. Soon we shan't need to put up with his father's bullying anymore.

Clara moves on to Agnes's door, and bends to peek. Mrs Rackham has all the lights on, and is decked out in a magenta gown.

Lunacy! At least she hadn't the nerve to summon her lady's-maid to help her dress … But why is she pacing to and fro? And what is that book she holds aloft like a hymnal? It looks like an accounts ledger-not that Mrs Rackham can add twelve and twelve, poor simpleton.

Clara would like to spy longer, but Agnes suddenly stops pacing and stares directly at the key-hole, as if she's noticed a glimmer of Clara's eye on the other side. Acute hearing? Animal cunning? The sixth sense of the mad? Clara doesn't know quite what it is, but she's learned to be wary of it. Holding her breath, she hurries back to bed on tiptoe.

Agnes Rackham stands tall-as tall as a person of her height can stand-and raises her eyes to the ceiling. There's a spider on it, climbing over the ridges of the plaster rosette.

Agnes isn't afraid of spiders, at least not thin wispy ones, and has no desire to have him removed. Freshly inspired by a pamphlet sent to her all the way from America-The Divine Enthreadedness of All Things, by Ambrosius M. Lawes-she knows that this little spider is a soul just like herself, albeit of a lower order.

Moreover, she feels unusually well just now. The bilious headache that ruined her day is gone, and the interior of her skull feels fresh and purified. She really must learn to act faster when her stomach tells her she oughtn't to have eaten her dinner-out with it at once! A moment of unpleasantness, and she's a new woman!

Accordingly, she has tonight begun a new diary-no, not a diary-that was a slip of the tongue, or a slip of the mind. No, she's already promised herself she shan't be writing any more diaries. Such tiresome things they are, full of complaints and grievances, which are better buried in case prying eyes should find them.

No, what she's writing now is something much greater and more profound. This past Season, for all its triumphs, was the last Season she'll ever take part in. A different destiny has grown to fruition inside her, and she must acknowledge its calling. For years she has moved as a fashionable lady among other fashionable ladies, denying her deeper nature. For years she has devoured every book of arcane knowledge she could find, and told herself she was merely doing it out of curiosity-now the time has come to declare the Truth.

She holds her new diary-no, not diary-up to the light. What is she to call it? It's a big, handsome thing, the size of a ledger, but without lines or columns. On its virgin first page, she has written, in her best Gothic calligraphy, The Illuminated Thoughts and Preturnatural Reflections of Agnes Pigott. For short, she'll call it…

"The Book".

She walks back and forth in her bedroom, re-reading that first page-full of words which, for the sake of ceremony, she refrained from penning until the stroke of midnight. Now it's a quarter to one, and here it is: inscribed for posterity, the inky o's still glistening!

Lesson 1. God and oneself

God is a Trinity. But what all-too-few people know is that we are all Trinities. We have firstly our First body, (which I shall call our Father Body), being the body we inhabit from day to day. We have secondly our Second body, (which I shall call our Sun Body. This body is kept safe for us, by the Angels of Paradise, in Secret Places all over the world, waiting for the Resurrection.

Thirdly we have our Third, or Spirit body, which I shall call our Holy Ghost Body, also known as the soul).

Lesson 2. The mistake often made Most of the suffering in this World comes from ignorance of our Second body. We make the mistake of thinking that when our First body is gone, we must spend the rest of Eternity as a Ghost. Not so! All the great and reliable authorities, including Saint John the Divine, Mr Uriah Nobbs, amp;c, are agreed that the Afterlife will be conducted upon this Earth, and the Saved will be given new bodies for the occasion.

Lesson 3.

Agnes paces her bedroom, trying to decide on a sufficiently powerful Lesson 3. She considers writing about the Convent of Health and her own guardian angel, but rejects this as too personal. Everything she writes from now on must have universal appeal, illuminating essential truths. Discussing the particulars of her own situation would make "The Book" too much like a diary-and diaries are dead thoughts, lost yesterdays, vanity. Words for the grave.

Which is why she doesn't regret burying her diaries one little bit, and why they can be eaten by worms, for all she cares! From this night onward, all her words are immortal!

Safely back in bed after putting Sophie on the pot, Sugar opens another of Agnes Unwin's diaries and balances it in her lap.

She lifts one thigh slightly to catch the candle-light, then begins to read.

It's 1865 in Abbots Langley, and

Agnes considers herself a Lady at last.

By Sugar's standards, she hasn't yet done a single grown-up thing or thought a single grown-up thought, but in Agnes's view she is nearly "finished". The elegant mademoiselles of the ladies' journals, once her idols, are now rivals. She informs her diary, in case her diary didn't already know, exactly how she wears her hair (swept back from the ears, two thick ringlets on each side, "sealed" with a small chignon at the nape of the neck). She wears copies of the latest French fashions, constructed in needlework class. Although no mention is made of anything so gross as flesh, she's presumably near enough full-grown to fill the dresses she so lovingly sketches.

Her curriculum, now that she's thirteen, is even flimsier than when she was nine; everything has been reduced to the essentials: Dancing, Music, French and German. These last two are a stumbling block for Sugar: she has little French and no German, Mrs Castaway having been of the opinion that men are partial to a bit of French on a girl's tongue, but that German sounds like old clergymen vomiting. So, whenever Agnes starts a diary entry with Bonjour, mon cher journal, or Liebes Tagebuch, Sugar yawns, and flicks ahead.

Little Miss Unwin is learning the gavotte, the cachuca and the minuet but, despite the romantic purpose of such dances, seems wholly ignorant of the male sex. Her experience of courtship, aside from secretive and short-lived infatuations with schoolmistresses and other girls, amounts to nil. The hope she once had, of marrying a soldier who would set off in search of her real father, has been discreetly permitted to die; now her imaginary husband is a dashing nobleman with a winter residence in the south of France. Another fantasy, to be sure, but this one doesn't come out of thin air:

Eugenie was taken away from school today, in tears. She is to be married next month, to her secret correspondent from Switserland! In the circumstances, I thought it would be mean to remind her about my water-colour brushes. Perhaps she will post them.

Sugar snorts aloud, a helpless exclamation of contempt. How sweet it would be to cure Agnes's selfishness with a stinging slap to the cheek!

But then she remembers the time she helped Agnes in the Bow Street alley, when Mrs Rackham was nothing more than a bloodied and frightened child, trembling in Sugar's arms, pleading to be taken home.

In all the excitement, Eugenie has also forgotten her Scrapbook of kittens, writes the fourteen-year-old Miss Unwin. Some of the little darlings are not even paisted in yet! I do declare, if this Swiss banker loves Eugenie half as much as he says, he had better make sure she gets her Scrapbook back!

Now at last Sugar understands: this muddle-headed, minuetting adolescent is a lady, as fully adult as she'll ever be.

Yes, and all the ladies Sugar has ever seen, all those patrician damsels dismounting imperiously from their carriages, or promenading under parasols in Hyde Park, or parading in to the opera: they are children. Essentially unchanged from when they played with dolls and coloured pencils, they grow taller and gain a few "accomplishments" until, at fifteen or sixteen, still accustomed to being made to sit in a corner for failing to conjugate a verb or refusing to eat their pudding, they go home to their suitors. And who are they, these suitors? Self-assured young men who've already travelled the world, fathered illegitimate children and survived the pox. Bored with young men's pleasures, they turn their attention to the enterprise of marriage and, casting their eye over the new season's bloom of elaborately dressed children, they pick themselves a little wife.

Laetitia has lately begun to smell poor thing, writes Agnes on the final page of yet another journal. What a misfortune, to be first ugly and now smelly! But I am far too well-bred to tell her so. God bless Education, for it teaches us to spare the feelings of our fellow creatures. If all the girls in the World were sent to Abbots Langley, what a World this would be!-with ne'er a cross word spoken, and everyone knowing precisely how to behave. Is there any "mal du monde" that Education cannot cure? Je ne crois pas!

With an incredulous shake of her head, Sugar closes the volume and picks up the next in chronological sequence.

Liebes Tagebuch, it announces on its opening page. Ich hatte einen zehr ermudenden tag. Welche Erleichterung zu dir zusprechen…

Sugar lets the pages flutter shut, and blows out the candle.

Enough, for a while, of the yellowed pages of the past.

Life in the present goes on, and before we know it 1876 will be upon us.

Leaving aside Clara's opinion that the

Rackham residence is no better than

Bedlam, the days of November pass peacefully. Sunrise and sunset follow each other at the scheduled intervals, and the house in Chepstow Villas fails to echo with screams or altercations. The mourning period for Henry Rackham is at an end, and everyone dresses cheerfully once more. Meals are cooked and judged a success; servants beaver at their tasks without requiring chastisement or dismissal. William spends his days plotting a bumper Christmas for Rackham Perfumeries, a Christmas that will show his business rivals how much the runty firm of his father's day has grown. Agnes continues to commit her wisdom to "The Book" and has not the slightest inclination to dig up her diaries, no, none, despite the pitiful vision of them swelling up with wetness in the cold dirty ground. She has received a visit from Mrs Vickery and, instead of gossiping as usual, astonished her with an account of Mr Allan Kardec's excellent book, The Gospel as Explained by Spirits.

As for Sugar, her fears of being unequal to the task of teaching Sophie have faded. She'd imagined tantrums and cruel insolence-the sort of thing that happens in novels, where the poor governess is reduced to sobs of humiliation-but once again, novels are proved wrong, and her pupil is as diligent and placable as any teacher could hope for. Indeed, Sophie seems to regard her with awe, if only for her miraculous power to cure bedwetting. Each morning, Sophie wakes in a dry, warm bed, blinking in disbelief at the wonder of it. What an extraordinary person Miss Sugar must be, to understand the Roman Empire and be able to control the flow of another person's naughty wee-wee in the night!

Sugar is proud of her success, prouder than she's been of anything else she can remember. The urine rash has faded entirely, leaving a pale pink bud between Sophie's chubby thighs. This is how it should be. This is how everything should be.

Sugar basks in the child's admiration, and gives her ten new words to spell each afternoon. She's even been so bold as to write William a note, signed "Miss Sugar", in which, rather than beseeching him to visit her bed, she primly requested the purchase of more books for the school-room. The act of inserting that letter under the door of his study felt, in its own way, every bit as roguish as her parlour trick with the squirting quim.

To Sugar's surprise, her audacity is rewarded within thirty-six hours. On yet another rainy morning, she and Sophie enter the school-room, both half-asleep, and find a mysterious parcel perched on top of the writing-desk.

"Ah!" says Sugar as she unwraps the brown paper. "These are the books I asked Wi- uh… your father to get."

Sophie is wide-eyed, impressed not just by the immaculate new volumes but by this clear evidence of Miss Sugar's intimacy with the enigma that is her father.

"Are they… presents?"' she asks.

"Not at all," declares Sugar. "They are highly necessary items for your learning." And she lets Sophie see the spoils: a history book with engravings on every page, a country-by-country guide to the British Empire, a compendium of things to do with paper, glue and string, and a smart, slim volume of poems by Edward Lear.

"These are modern books, up-to-date books," enthuses Sugar. "Because you're a modern person, living today, don't you see?"'

Sophie's eyes threaten to revolve in confusion, at this amazing notion that History is on the move, like a vehicle in which a six-year-old girl may ride. She's always imagined History as a cobwebbed edifice, to whose colossal pedestal the insignificant speck of Sophie Rackham adheres like dirt.

By midday, Sophie has already memorised some of the verses of Mr Lear, a writer who is still alive-indeed, who wrote these words after Sophie Rackham was born!

"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat.

They took some honey, and plenty of money Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked into the stars above,

And sang to a small cigar,

"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are, What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

And Sophie does a quick curtsy, a rare gesture of jaunty exuberance.

"Not quite right, Sophie," says Sugar, smiling. "Let's read it again, shall we?"' Her smile hides a secret: this is not patience for its own sake, but a blow of revenge against her mother. Sugar has never forgotten the day in Church Lane when, as a child of seven, she made the mistake of reciting, once too often in Mrs Castaway's hearing, a favourite nursery rhyme.

"No, my poppet," Mrs Castaway said, in the gentle tone she reserved for threats.

"We've had enough of that now, haven't we?"' This was always her mother's final word on any matter, and so the nursery rhyme was dead, dead as a cockroach stamped underfoot.

"It's time," announced Mrs Castaway,

"you learned some grown-up poetry." Standing at the bookcase, she ran her fingers-already red-nailed by then-along the spines. "Not Wordsworth and such," she murmured, "for then you might get a taste for mountains and rivers, mightn't you, and we shan't ever live anywhere near those…" With a smile, she extracted two volumes, weighing them in her hands. "Here, child. Try Pope. No, better still: try Rochester."

Sugar took the dusty book away with her into a corner, and how earnestly she studied it! But she found that with every line she read, she entirely forgot what little she'd understood of the last one, leaving only an odour of male superiority clinging to her brain.

"Is there any other poetry you like, Mother?"' she ventured to ask when, shamed by her own stupidity, she handed back the volume.

"I never said I liked poetry, did

I?"' rejoined Mrs Castaway sourly, replacing the Rochester in the bookshelf with a hard shove, so that the book hit the wall behind.

"Hateful stuff."

How charmingly sweet you sing, Sugar now recites to Sophie, in her sincerest, most encouraging voice. Oh, let us be married; too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring? Can you repeat that after me, Sophie, and practise it until I return?"'

Sophie and Sugar smile at each other. The child is imagining owls and pussycats. The governess is imagining Mrs Castaway perched on a dunce's stool, her red-nailed hands trembling in impotent fury as a roomful of little girls circle her, reciting the same nursery rhyme for the thousandth time.

"Let me hear it as I walk out," says

Sugar, at the nursery door.

Ensconced in her bedroom during the midday interval, whiling away the hours until Sophie's lessons resume, Sugar applies herself to Agnes's diaries. She finds that Miss Unwin's schooldays are, at long last, drawing to a close.

Thank God for that! She's read so many thousands of words, waded through a silky, satiny, cottony tide of make-believe gowns and gauzy friendships and woolly thoughts, in the hope that she'll turn a page and there, suddenly, William's tormented wife will stand starkly revealed. Instead, these schoolgirl journals have been like a novel whose cover trumpets gruesome deeds and mad passions, but which proves dull as an invalid's omelette.

In her final days at Abbots Langley, the fifteen-year-old Agnes remains frivolously sane, and the final entry written on the last morning, dated May 3rd 1867, is a model of convention. She even composes a poem in honour of her school-seven stanzas so limp with feminine rhymes as to be almost boneless.

For none can thwart the Future onward rushing! she concludes, though the Future in her poem has long since stopped moving, stunned in its tracks by deadly sedatives of sentimentality.

Valedictory ode dispensed with, Agnes turns to the challenge of finding a keepsake of Abbots Langley to take home with her.

The other girls, I'm afraid to say, have purloined every concievable trifle. Linen-clips, chalks, sheets of music, hair-pins fallen from Miss Wick's head, honour cards: all have been gathered up. I even detected a shortage of spoons at the dinner table today.

On the next double page, the signatures of Abbots Langley's twenty-four girls are committed, in blotchy rows, to the yellowed paper.

Overleaf, Agnes continues:

As you see, I asked them all to sign, and so they did, even Emily, whose sins against me in Calisthenics I have decided to forgive. Dear Diary, I shall not have such friends again! How I wept when I had all their names before me! The paper was quite wet when the tears were fresh-fallen, as you may see from the blurrs on the ink.

How various are the Hopes of we parting young Ladies! Some will soon be Married, but that is not for me, for Mama is ill and I must help her get Well. Some, with slimmer Prospects, are going to be governesses: may they find generous masters and agreable pupils! Of the ones who have failed to become Ladies (eg, Emily) I cannot imagine what will become.

Dear Diary, I had hoped to write so much more, but the day is almost gone, and I must rise early for my journey tomorrow. What a sorry Farewell this is! and what a muddle I am in!

I shall write to you next from Home!

Your loving friend,

Agnes.

With these words, the volume ends.

The next, in a script so minuscule and clotted it's like hemming stitch, begins:

My Mama is dead, and I am soon to follow. Lord have mercy upon us. Spare my Mama from Thy wrath, from the rigour of Thy justice, from eternal flames. Thou who forgavest Magdalen, I beseech Thee. But no One hears. My prayers turn to sweat on the cieling and drip down again. Mama bled until she was empty; He (her "husband") stood by and did nothing. Now my Mama has been removed, to a grave in a cemetery where no one knows her. Day by day, our house becomes more infested with Demons.

They chuckle in the rafters. They wisper behind the skirting-boards. They wait to have their way with me.

He waits to have his way with me.

Sugar rummages through the stack of diaries and checks the opening pages, in case an intervening volume has escaped her notice. But no.

One week it's callisthenics and hollyhocks, the next it's a smear of dried blood in the shape of a crucifix. Nor is this blood from a pinprick on the thumb, solemnising a schoolgirl pledge; this is thicker matter, incorporating a stiff clot at the point of the crucifix where Christ's head might be.

Here you see my own blood, Agnes explains underneath. Blood from deep within me, flowing from a hidden wound. Whatever killed my Mama, now kills me. But why? Why, when I am Innocent?

Sugar turns the page, and there's more, much more: a welter of ink so thick as to turn the paper purple.

In the Dark of my sleep, the iron curls of the bed-frame become soft, and pout up like lips, to recieve the droplets of my blood through the honeycomb of the matress. Under the bed, demons as grey as mushrooms wait until the blood trickles down to them, then they suck and become pink. They suck until they are red and almost bursting. How tasty this one is, they cry! So much tastier than her mother! Give us more of this divine juice!

There can be no Rescue in this house where even the Rosary is forbidden. At His command, all who might help me are locked out. On the window of my bedroom is the cloud of steam Our Lady's nose made as She pressed against it, and the marks of Her fingers.

How I long to lie down! But I will not give them my blood! I shall walk on, round and round my room, writing this in the crook of my arm. Their demon mouths will suck at nothing. When I can walk no longer I shall crawl into the fireplace, and give them such a bitter, ashen broth to feed on!

A brave declaration, but evidently Agnes weakened and went to bed after all. The next day's entry begins:

I wake in a bed of blood, and yet I live.

Another tirade follows, though less fervid than the first. Despite frequent recourse to words like "doom" and "the end", Agnes is niggled by the suspicion that Death has rather missed His moment.

A sumpcious dinner was served just now, with everyone urging me to join in. Mama is dead, and my own life ebbes away, and they expect me to dine on snipe and quail! I had a single ortolan on buttered toast, and a few mouthfuls of dessert, then begged to be excused.

Each day that follows, Agnes has greater difficulty maintaining the high pitch of her despair. Normalcy nibbles at the edges of her madness, infecting it with mundane thoughts. Lord Unwin, for all that she styles him Satan's accomplice, takes her to a concert of "Mendelshon" at the Crystal Palace one Saturday afternoon. Agnes's terror of expiring in a pool of blood proves unfounded, and she "almost forgets" her fatal affliction for the duration of the "really quite beautiful" concert. When, on the fifth day, the bleeding ceases altogether, Agnes concludes that a compassionate angel must have interceded on her behalf. Her handwriting grows bigger, the demons in the rafters become pigeons and, within a few entries, she's complaining that Cook put too much pepper in the kedgeree.

Thus does Agnes Unwin survive her passage to adulthood. Everyone, from her step-father to the man who delivers the woodfowl, compliments her on how she has blossomed into a lady, but no one informs her she has become a woman.

"And when his prick comes out all bloody, you say, "Oh, sir, you have taken my maidenhood!" And weep a little, if you can."

So speaks the long-forgotten voice of

Sadie, a prostitute at Mrs Castaway's in the Church Lane days, instructing Sugar how to make the most of the curse while she's still young.

"What if he doesn't believe me?"'

"Of course he'll believe you. You're shaved smooth as a baby, and you've nothing on your chest-what's to betray you?"' "What if he's seen me before?"' "No chance. For deflowerings, Mrs Castaway does her soliciting outside London. Madams all over England spread the word, put a whisper in ears that are waiting to hear.

He'll be a merchant or a clergyman, this fellow, and he'll towk lahhk thaabbt."

"What if I bleed before he even comes into me?"' "Do I have to teach you every little thing? Just keep yourself clean as a whistle! If he's slow to start, bid him look at something amusing outside your window, and give yourself a quick wipe while his face is turned."

"Nothing outside my window is amusing."

To which Sadie's response was a raised eyebrow, as if to say, I can see why your mother calls you ungrateful.

Sugar closes Agnes's diary, irritated by the need to blow her nose. Watery snot dampens her handkerchief, along with the tears on her cheeks. It's November the 30th, 1875, and Sadie's been dead for years, murdered not long after she left Mrs Castaway's for Mrs Watt's.

"Gone to a better place" was Mrs Castaway's arch comment when she got the news.

"She did say she would, didn't she?"'

Sugar drops her sodden handkerchief to the floor and wipes her face on her sleeve, then wipes her forearm on the bed. This black dress she's wearing hasn't been washed since she came to the Rackham house. She, who until recently wore a different gown every day of the week, now wears the same weeds day in, day out.

The fringe of her hair has grown long; she ought to have it cut, but for the moment combs and pins keep it under control.

Her little room is as modest as it was when she first arrived. Aside from a few toiletries-old gifts from William-she's imposed nothing of her own. The prints and knick-knacks from Priory Close, as well as her favourite clothes, are still packed up in her suitcases, which in turn are stacked on top of the wardrobe. There are other clothes too, boxes full, whose whereabouts she doesn't even know; William has them "in storage" somewhere.

"You need only ask," he assured her, in that distant part of her life, little more than a month ago, when she was his mistress in rooms that smelled of perfumed baths and fresh sweat.

Sugar stands to look out of her window. The rain has eased off, and the well-manicured bushes and hedges of the Rackham grounds glisten spinach-green and silver. Shears the gardener is patrolling the faraway fences, checking that his Hedera helix is fanning out nicely against the latticework, for there have been too many nosy folk peering at the house lately. It's five to two in the afternoon, almost time for a governess to return to her pupil. What the master of the Rackham house is up to, and who he's thinking of, God knows.

Sugar scrutinises her face in the mirror, applies a little powder to her nose and peels a fleck of dry skin off her lower lip. She has run out of Rackham's Cr@eme de Jeunesse, and doesn't know how to ask for more, short of adding it to a list of books for Sophie.

On the landing, as she walks towards the school-room, she pauses first outside William's door, then Agnes's, and peeks furtively through the keyholes. William's study is flooded with afternoon sunlight, but vacant; he must be out in the world at large, bending it to his will. Agnes's bedroom is dark;

Mrs Rackham's day is either already over, or has not yet begun.

On impulse, Sugar peeks through the nursery key-hole, in case the child should be revealed, vignetted in an act of misbehaviour. But no. Sophie sits on the floor next to her writing-desk, tidying up the carpet's tufted edges with her stubby fingers, staring down contentedly at the faded Turkish patterns.

"Small guitar, small guitar, small guitar…" she murmurs, to brand the words indelibly on her brain.

"God bless Papa," says Sophie that evening, her hands clasped over the coverlet, casting a steepled shadow in the candlelight.

"God bless Mama. And God bless Miss

Sugar."

Sugar shyly reaches out to stroke the back of the child's hair, but the candle-flame enlarges the shadow of her hand grotesquely, and she withdraws with a jerk.

"Are you cold, Sophie?"' she asks, when the child lies shivering in the crisp sheets.

"Not-not very more-much, More-miss."

"I'll speak to Rose about getting you another blanket. Your bedding is quite wrong for this time of year."

Sophie looks up at her in wonder: to the great inventory of things Miss Sugar understands, must now be added the precise relation between bedlinen and the seasons.

Half past eight. The Rackham house is muffled in darkness, quiet and orderly. Even Clara would be satisfied, if she weren't already resting in her room, nose stuck in a periodical called The Servant. Mrs Rackham is downstairs in the parlour, re-reading a novel called Lady Antonie's Abduction-not strictly a book of arcane philosophy, she'll admit, but a rattling good read nonetheless, especially when one has a headache. William is in Plymouth -or Portsmouth-something-mouth, anyway.

Overnight excursions of this kind-ever-more-frequent-are essential, my dear, if the Rackham name is to be spread far and wide.

The key-holes on the landing, should Clara feel inclined to inspect them, reveal nothing that would annoy her. All the rooms are dark except the governess's, whose light is demure and static.

That's how Clara prefers the inhabitants of the Rackham house: asleep, like Miss Sophie, or reading in bed, like Miss Sugar.

Sugar rubs her eyes, determined to finish another of Agnes's diaries. If nothing else, the task will keep her awake until midnight, when she'll put Sophie on the pot as usual. The child needs less and less prompting each time; before long, a whisper from the doorway will do it, and soon after that, perhaps just the memory of a whisper. The history of the world and the function of the universe may take a little longer for Sophie to grasp, but Sugar is determined to get her house-trained before the year is out.

In the diaries, Agnes Unwin has just turned sixteen.

How proud Mama should have been of me, she reflects wistfully. Although I suppose she looks down upon me from Limbo-if she can recognise me from the top of my head, at such a distance. Exactly what Mrs Unwin might be proud of in her daughter is left unspecified, though Agnes has become (if she does say so herself) very beautiful.

Whenever I am tempted to despair, she declares, by the cruelty of Fate and my loneliness in this God-forsaken house, I count my blessings. Principle among which, my hair and eyes…

Grief and menarche have made of Miss Unwin a most peculiar little creature, demented and conventional by turns. When not bleeding, she divides attention more or less equally among clothes, garden parties, balls, shoes, hats, and secret rituals for maintaining a spotless Catholic soul while going through the motions of Anglican observance. She shuns the sun, avoids all but the feeblest exercise, eats like a bird, and seems in good health, mostly.

Each time she's struck down by her "affliction"-which comes at erratic intervals-she regards it as a life-threatening illness caused by evil spirits. The day before the bleeding starts, she'll be complaining that there was indisputably a finger-mark on the inside of the soup tureen at the Grimshaws; the day after, she bids farewell to all earthly affairs and devotes her few remaining hours to fasting and prayer. Demons creep out from wherever they have been hiding, hungry for her blood. Agnes, terrified they'll crawl into bed with her, keeps herself awake with smelling-salts ("I think I may have sniffed too deeply and too often last night, as I began to imagine I had twenty fingers and a third eye"). She refuses to allow her servants to dispose of the soiled napkins, for fear the demons will scavenge them; instead she burns the bloodied wads of cotton in the fireplace, causing an almighty stench which Lord Unwin is forever summoning chimneysweeps to investigate.

Lord Unwin, for all Agnes's efforts to malign him, fails to live up to his reputation for monstrosity; indeed, to Sugar he appears an innocuous enough step-father. He doesn't beat her; he doesn't starve her (she does that for herself, while he cajoles her "most cruelly" to put some meat on her bones); he chaperones her to concerts and dinner parties. An indulgent if not attentive guardian, he funds his step-daughter's most wanton extravagances without objection.

On one matter only he will not bend: Agnes is to attend Anglican worship. And not only that: she's to attend as the sole representative of the Unwins, for he himself is disinclined to put in an appearance. "Faith is a woman's province, Aggie dear," he tells her, and she must go and suffer horrid songs that aren't even in Latin.

I mouth the words, but don't sing them, she assures her diary, like one prostitute assuring another that she'll suck but not swallow.

Aside from this weekly humiliation, and the curse that attacks her innards every few months, Agnes's sense of herself as the miraculous survivor of a million horrific onslaughts seems rather at odds with reality. She is constantly being invited to garden parties, balls and picnics by all the right people, and having an "immensely pleasant" time there. By her own account, she has at least half a dozen suitors, whom Lord Unwin neither encourages nor opposes, so she maintains a coy flirtation with all of them. None of these suitors, as far as Sugar can tell from the scanty descriptions, is a professional man: rosy-cheeked aristocrats all.

Elton is sweet, and manly too, says Agnes at one point. He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves, in order to punt our little Boat. He did frown terribly, but we went almost in a straight line, and when we chose our spot, he helped us all back onto the bank.

To read one of these accounts is to have read them all. It's a high-born world, a world in which ambitious merchants who arrange meetings with sweaty dock-workers in Yarmouth, or argue over the cost of burlap, simply don't exist. That is to say, a world in which men such as William Rackham are inconceivable.

From downstairs, in the world of November 30th, 1875, comes the muted toll of the doorbell, then:

"Willi-a-a-am, you blackguard, show yourself!"

This bellowing male voice, bursting the silence of the Rackham household, makes Sugar jump.

"Coward! Poltroon! Draw your sword and come out of hiding!"

A different, but equally loud, male voice.

There are intruders downstairs! Sugar slips out of bed and kneels at her bedroom door, opening it a crack to peer through. She can see nothing except the silhouetted bars of the landing's balustrade, and the gaudy glow of the chandelier. Still, the voices are more distinct: Philip Bodley and Edward Ashwell, uproariously drunk.

"What d'you mean, he's in Yarmouth?

Hiding under his bed, more like! Avoiding his old friends!

We demand shatish… shatisfaction!"

For another thirty seconds or so, Rose's flustered pleas are intermingled with Bodley and Ashwell's jovial blustering, then-to everyone's surprise-Mrs Rackham arrives on the scene.

"Do let Rose take your coats, gentlemen," she says sweetly, her breathy lilt amplified by the acoustics of the receiving hall.

"I'll try to entertain you as best I can, not being my husband."

A remarkable invitation, given how fastidiously Agnes has avoided Bodley and Ashwell in the past. It certainly has the effect of quietening the two men, reducing them to snorts and mumbles.

"I hear," says Agnes, "that you have another book about to… ah… issue forth?"' "Tuesday next, Mrs Rackham. Our best yet!"

"How very gratifying for you, I'm sure.

What's it called?"'

"Oh, um… its title is p'raps not fit for the ears of a lady…"

"Nonsense, gentlemen. I'm not quite the fragile flower William thinks I am."

"Well…" (self-conscious clearing of throats) "The War with the Great Social Evil-Who is Winning?"' (inebriated snigger).

"How interesting," coos Agnes, "that it should be possible for you to have so many books published, and none of them novels, but merely your own opinions! You really must tell me how you manage it. Is there a particular publisher who likes to help you? You know, I've become awfully interested in this subject lately…"

The voices grow more muffled; Agnes is leading the men towards her parlour.

"The subject of… the Great Social

Evil?"' enquires Ashwell incredulously.

"No no no," trills Agnes coquettishly, as she passes under the stairs,

"the subject of publication…"

And they are gone.

For a couple more minutes Sugar kneels at her bedroom door, but the house is quiet again, and cold air is draughting through the crack, bringing gooseflesh to her barely covered arms and chest.

Scarcely able to believe what she's just witnessed, Sugar returns to bed and takes up Agnes Unwin's diaries where she left them.

She reads on, with one ear cocked for further developments down below, breathing shallowly in case one of the men should raise his voice. She tries to be disciplined and read every word, but her patience with Agnes's exhaustive cataloguing of balls and dressmakers has snapped, or perhaps the presence of Bodley and Ashwell downstairs has spoiled her concentration. Whatever the reason, she skims, looking for tell-tale signs of something more interesting: the clotty, minuscule handwriting of madness, for instance.

Pages rustle over one another, full of words, empty of meaning, and the months flutter by.

It's not until July 1868 that Agnes Unwin first mentions William Rackham. Ah, but what a mention it is!

I have today been introduced to the most extraordinary person, the seventeen-year-old writes. Part barbarian, part oracle, part swell!

Yes, much to Sugar's bafflement, here is William, the dashing young dandy, fresh from continental travels, flamboyant and full of mystery. Tall, too! (although, to a woman as tiny as Agnes, perhaps all men are tall). Still, whatever William's true height in inches, he stands out signally from those pea-brained sons of the peerage to whom Agnes is more accustomed.

This vigorous young Rackham moves in Miss Unwin's circle with presumptuous nerve, apparently fearless, despite his dubious credentials, of being snubbed. He has the knack of strolling through a crowd and disarranging it so that it regroups in half-reluctant crescents around him, whereupon he pushes (by means of superior wit) the other males to the periphery, leaving a preponderance of young females for him to entertain with tales of France and Morocco. It's from within this covey of ladies that Agnes prefers, at first, to experience him, to prevent his fierce aura shining exclusively on her blushing face. But, in a turn of events that Agnes bemoans as tellement g@enant!, Rackham selects her out of all her set, and finds ways of getting her alone. Lest her dear diary accuse her of complicity in this, Agnes emphatically denies any, complaining that whenever William Rackham is about, her companions abruptly move off without her, and there he'll be, grinning like the cat that got the cream!

While claiming his attentions to be "most worrisome", Agnes describes her pursuer thus:

He is robust but yet he has a fine-boned face and hands, and abundant curly hair of gold. His eyes have an insouicant sparkle to them, and he looks at everyone too directly, though he affects not to be aware of this. He dresses as few men Nowadays dare to dress, in check trousers, canary-yellow waistcoat, hunting caps, and suchlike. I have only seen him once in sober Blacks (and a handsome figure he cuts too!) but when I asked him why he does not wear them more often, he replied, "Black is for Sundays, Funerals and dull men. What have I to fear from dressing as I do? That I might be refused admission to Churches, Funerals, or the company of dull men? Why then, I will go about in deerstalker and dressing-gown!"

His father is a man of Business-this he does not conceal. "It is my father's affair how he makes his way in the world, and mine how I make mine." I cannot determine to my satisfaction from what source he derives his income: perhaps it is from his Writings. He is certainly ineligible to appear very high on my list of Suitors.

This half-hearted attempt to be severe fails to impress Sugar, for not only does she already know how the story ends, but also she can't help noticing that the half-dozen barely differentiated suitors of earlier months have all but vanished from the diary, and more ink is expended on William Rackham than ever was spilt for any of them.

Before long, Agnes is recording entire conversations from hello to adieu, rushing to transcribe them immediately afterwards so that none of the man's sagacious pronouncements will be lost or misquoted. By Autumn 1868, those entries in which William features have grown so vivid they read like episodes from a novel:

"Let us have done with this small talk," he said suddenly, extending a forefinger to either side of my open fan, and clapping it shut right in front of my nose. I was frightened, but he was smiling.

"In ten years," he said, "Will either of us remember any of it?"

I was all a'blush, but my wits did not desert me. "I do not presume we shall have each others acqaintance in ten years," I said.

Hereupon he clapped his hand to his breast, as though I had shot him through the heart. Loath to offend him, I hastened to add-"In any case, I confess I've nothing but small talk to offer you: it is all I have been taught. I am untravelled and a most uninteresting and shallow little thing, compared to you."

I hoped to flatter him with this speech, but he took it very seriously, and insisted, "Oh, but you are more interesting and less shallow than any young lady I know! There are desires deep within you, which no one can imagine-no one but me. You move as one young lady among other young ladies, but you are not really one of them. You are different, and whats more, I can tell that you know it."

"Mr Rackham!"-was all I could say -he had made me blush so. Whereupon he did a most peculiar thing, namely he reached forward, took the edges of my fan once more, and spread it open, so that my face was hidden from him. I heard his voice explain it thus:

"Now, I see that I was wrong to shine my light into the secrets of your soul: it has frightened you, and I would not frighten you for all the world. Let us return, then, to small talk. Look over there, Agnes, at the Garnett girls, and the hats they are wearing. I saw you coveting those hats earlier this afternoon-yes I did, theres no use denying it.

Well, covet them no longer! I was in Paris not two weeks ago, and everyone there agrees that the moment for those hats has passed."

This encounter is a turning-point in Agnes's feelings for William Rackham; hereafter, she ponders his every word like a devoted disciple. No remark of his, however lighthearted, can be without deeper significance and, when he deigns to be wise, he is wiser than anyone she's ever met. Knowledgeable about a host of religions, he sums up their shortcomings with such a fine phrase-something about there being "more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of by their philosophy". (ah, if only she hadn't eaten dinner before writing her diary, she might have recalled it exact!) He attends Anglican worship when he attends any, but he's of the heretical opinion that English religion has been in a shambles ever since Henry VIII-A conviction Agnes naturally shares. He's expert in the identification of flowers, can predict the weather, knows the stuffs from which women's garments are made, and is a personal friend of several artists regularly exhibiting at the Royal Academy. What a man! Only the precise sources of his income remain difficult to map, but, as Agnes puts it:

He is an Author, a Scholar, a Man of Science, and cleverer than any Statesman.

Why should he not be undecided which path to follow, when he may yet follow them all? I feel my heart thump in my breast when I draw near to him, and am enfeebled when we part. Though I am sure I should repel him if he dared lay his hands upon me, I half wish that he would do it, and sometimes in idle moments after he has left me I fancy I can feel his arms clasped around me. Each morning I wake wishing that the first thing I saw was his face, and when I go to bed at night, the first face I see in my dreams is his. Am I going mad?

Downstairs, an almighty crash. Glassware or china-gruff exclamations of surprise-the smack of a door against a wall, sending a jolt right through the house.

"Out with you! Out of my sight!" screams Agnes.

In an instant, Sugar is kneeling at her door again, face pressed to the crack. Shadows and light are gyrating below the landing, as a scuffle spills out into the receiving hall. So violently was the parlour door flung open that the chandelier in the hall still sways gently under the ceiling.

"Mrs Rackham!" protests one of the men.

"There's no need…"

A loud clatter and an alarming spoinggg: the hat-stand being thrown across the floor. "Don't tell me what there's a need for, you fat drunken dog!" Agnes cries. "You are useless and… and ridiculous, the pair of you!"

"My dear Mrs Rackham…"

"Nothing is dear to you except filth!

Muck-sniffers! Sewer-rats! Your hair smells like rotten banana! Your skulls are full of slime! Get out of my house!"

"Yesh, yesh…" mutters one of the men.

"Our coats, Bodley…" his companion reminds him, as a harsh influx of icy air barges into the house.

"Coats!" cries Agnes witheringly.

"Your fat oily skins will keep you warm! That, and your prostitutes!"

"Ah, Rose-there you are!" says Ashwell, in a stab at genial good grace. "I think your mistress may be… ah… having one of her turns…"

"I am not having "one of my turns"!" rages Agnes. "I'm merely trying to rid my house of some garbage before I step in it!

No, don't touch them, Rose: if you knew where they have been…!"

Bodley, the drunker of the two, can bear the provocation no longer. "If I may shay so, Mrs Rackham," he declaims, "your a-ashitude is half the reason why proshtishushion is shpreading so… so muchly!

If inshtead of inshulting us, you took the chubble to read our researches on the shubject…"

"You conceited fool-you think I don't even know what prostitutes are!" shrieks Agnes, discordant harmonics of her voice seeming to ring out from every metal and glass surface in the house.

"Well, I do! They are sly, common women who will stoop to kiss your ugly faces for money!

Hah! Why don't you kiss each other for nothing, you apes!"

And with that, Bodley and Ashwell flee, the front door slams, Agnes utters one last throaty cry of frustration, and there's a muffled thud of flesh on the hall floor.

After a few moments' silence, Rose's voice pipes up, thin and anxious. "Miss Tillotson! Miss Tillotson!"

Still on her hands and knees, Sugar scuttles backwards from the crack in her door, and jumps into bed like a good girl.

"A night like this…" (pant) "is worth ten shillings alone," complains a voice on the stairs.

"Watch her fingers," whines another.

With no master in the house to carry the insensible Agnes upstairs, the task is being shouldered by Rose, Letty and Clara. They take a long time over it, too, puffing and grunting, but eventually the procession passes Sugar's room and, soon afterwards, silence is restored.

Sugar waits as long as she can bear for everyone to be asleep. Enthralling though this fiasco has been, it must not undo her good work with Sophie.

Off to bed, everyone, and let a poor governess come out to play!

Sugar checks the time. A quarter to midnight -surely the last of the servants must be in the Land of Nod by now. They have to rise again early in the morning: they ought to keep that in mind, if they know what's good for them. Clara especially, with her sullen mouth and her glittering suspicious eyes -she should give those a rest until tomorrow, the poisonous little shrew. Lay her nasty pock-marked cheek on her pillow and let the world turn without her for a few hours…

Ten minutes to twelve. Sugar tiptoes along the frigid landing towards Sophie's bedroom. All the hearths in the house have cooled, and the warmth has ceased to rise; the rafters creak in the wind and there's a pattering of hail on the roof. Sugar slips inside Sophie's room like a ghost, but finds the child already sitting erect in bed, eyes wide in the candlelight.

"Bad dream, Sophie?"' enquires Sugar gently, taming the unstable shadows by settling the candle on top of the dresser, right next to the nigger doll, which, she notes, has been swaddled in a white knitted scarf.

"My Mama," announces Sophie, in a queer didactic tone, "has fits, Miss.

She's awful rude, and she shouts, and then she falls over."

"It's all right, Sophie," says Sugar, knowing it's not all right, but unable to come up with a better reassurance. "Have you… done your doings yet?"' The euphemism, her own coinage, sounds prissy on her lips-those lips which until recently exhorted William to fill her cunt with spunk.

Sophie clambers out of her bed and squats obediently on the pot. Euphemisms are all she knows; and, if Sugar can manage it, they're all she ever will know.

"Nurse told me," quotes Sophie as a puppyish squirt of piss hisses onto the porcelain, "that my Mama will end her days in a mad-house." A moment later she adds (just in case her governess's encyclopaedic knowledge is missing this one lurid titbit): "A house where they keep mad people, Miss."

Ugly old tattle-tale, die and rot in

Hell, thinks Sugar. "What an unkind remark for your Nurse to make," she says.

"But Mama will have to go there, won't she, Miss?"' persists the child as she's helped back into bed.

Sugar sighs. "Sophie, the middle of the night, when we should all be sleeping, is not the time to worry about such things."

"What time is it, Miss?"' asks the child, wide awake.

Sugar glances at the clock on the mantel.

"A minute to midnight." She tucks the blanket up to Sophie's neck. The room is so cold her hands are trembling. Yet the child's eyes are imploring her not to go.

"I have to get back into my own bed now, Sophie."

"Yes, Miss. Is it tomorrow yet?"'

Sugar checks, considers lying. "Not quite yet," she admits. "Here, let me show you the clock." She fetches the heavy time-piece from the mantel; it's steel-grey, pitted, and shaped like a jelly-mould, a most unsightly thing. She cradles it in her hands and lets Sophie watch the seconds ticking away under its jaundiced glass face. The wind howls outside, overriding the mechanism of the time-piece.

"Now it's tomorrow," Sophie declares, relieved, as if an unpleasant disagreement has been settled to universal satisfaction.

"Not only that, little one," says Sugar, suddenly remembering the date. "It's December. The last month of the year, the one that brings us Winter and Christmas. And when December is over, what comes then, Sophie?"'

Sugar waits, willing to accept either

"January" or "1876". The house creaks in the heavy rain, infiltrated by all sorts of mysterious noises louder than the soft breaths of a child. When it's clear no answer is going to come, she blows out the candle.