"Fingersmith"

Definitely Sarah Waters's best work among the three books by her I've tried. So much suspense and so many repressed feelings and so much Victorian guckiness.

• I believe I learned my alphabet, like that: not by putting letters down, but by taking them out. I know I learned the look of my own name, from handkerchiefs that came, marked Susan.
• As for regular reading..., it was an idea—well, I should say, like speaking Hebrew or throwing somersaults: you could see the use of it, for Jews and tumblers; but while it was their lay, why make it yours?
• John had her at this time stitching dog-skins onto stolen dogs, to make them seem handsomer breeds than what they really were.
• That is how we said it, of course: not how a proper gent would say it, using all his teeth on it; but as if the word were a fish and we had filleted it— Ge'mun.
• 'She's rich, oh yes,' said Gentleman, nodding. 'But only as a caterpillar is rich in wings, or clover rich in honey.
• But it's wicked to the tune of fifteen thousand pounds—and oh! but that's a sweet tune, hum it how you will. Then again, do you suppose that when that money was first got, it was got honestly? Don't think it! Money never is. It is got, by families like hers, from the backs of the poor
• He squatted at the side of the chair and smoothed his fingers over the bulging skirts; then he dipped his hand beneath them, reaching high into the layers of silk. He did it so neatly, it looked to me as if he knew his way, all right; and as he reached higher his cheek grew pink, the silk gave a rustle, the crinoline bucked, the chair quivered hard upon the kitchen floor, the joints of its legs faintly shrieking. Then it was still.
• 'Three thousand pounds, Sue. Oh, my crikey! Dainty, pass me an infant, I want something to squeeze.'
• Then she came to me, and put her warm, dry hand to my cheek, and I said—just as if she had tickled or pinched me, and the words were a chuckle or a cry I could not stop—I said: <> 'What if I ain't up to it, Mrs Sucksby?
• 'The pieces of soap that Miss Maud leaves in her wash-stand, however,' she said, 'as being too dry to raise a lather from: those you may keep.'
• The dress was not mine, either; but I found the seams that Dainty had made, and smelled them. I thought that her needle had left the scent there, of John Vroom's dog-skin coat.
• It was odd to see her stepping out of that gloomy place, like a pearl coming out of an oyster. <> It was odder to watch her going back in, and see the oyster shell open, then shut at her back.
• My heart leapt so hard into my mouth, I seemed to taste it.
• 'No gentleman could but be,' he murmured, 'with you to be kind to.' <> Now his cheeks were pink as hers. I should say he must have had a way of holding his breath to make the blood come.
• * And I made another curtsey, and winked.— Two curious things to do together, as it happened, and I would not recommend you try it: for I fear the wink unbalanced the curtsey; and I'm certain the curtsey threw off the wink.
• 'But you have a gift, Miss Lilly, which surpasses mere technique. You have an eye for an essence. I am almost afraid to stand before you! I am afraid of what might be uncovered, were you to turn that eye upon me.'
• 'My happiness is nothing to him,' she said. 'Only his books! He has made me like a book. I am not meant to be taken, and touched, and liked. I am meant to keep here, in a dim light, for ever!
• I did not answer for a moment, but turned and gazed down at the wood of the door we stood against, and the rusting chain that held it closed, and the padlock. The padlock is the simplest kind of lock. The worst are the kind that keep their business parts guarded.
• Your heart—as you call it—and hers are alike, after all: they are like mine, like everyone's. They resemble nothing so much as those meters you will find on gas-pipes: they only perk up and start pumping when you drop coins in.
• I had a certain standing. I was the daughter of a murderess. I had expectations. Fine feelings weren't in them. How could they be?
• It was only, as I've said, that I thought of her so, that I felt her so. Her very clothes seemed changed to me, her shoes and stockings: they seemed to keep her shape, the warmth and scent of her—I didn't like to fold them up and make them flat.
• I saw the oars dip and rise, and scatter coins of moonlight;
• He went fast, and as he walked he took his robe off, and his clothes were black beneath it—he seemed to snuff himself out like a light.
• * Her dress was worn with use, like a servant's dress. Her eyes were wild, with tears starting in them; but beyond the tears, her gaze was hard. Hard as marble, hard as brass. <> Hard as a pearl, and the grit that lies inside it.

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• Then one of them quickly puts a pair of scissors to my head, to take a curl of hair to keep inside a locket; and, the others seeing her do that, they seize the shears from her, or take up knives and scissors of their own, and pluck and grasp at me until my hair tears at the root. They reach and squabble over the falling tresses like gulls—their voices rousing the lunatics in their own close rooms, making them shriek.
• when Mr Way makes me a bow, I think he does it to tease—for I have many times seen nurses curtsey, laughing, to lady lunatics. He shows me past him, into a darkness that seems to lap at my buff gown. When he closes the door, the dark at once grows deeper. My ears feel full, as if with water or with wax. That is the silence, that my uncle cultivates in his house, as other men grow vines and flowering creepers.
• at every turning there are passages. In the shadows of these, pale and half-hidden—like expectant grubs, in the cells of a hive—there stand servants, come to see me make my progress through the house.
• I long for my little wooden wand: I would show her all I'd learned of manners, then! But I have observed lunatics, too, and know how to struggle while only seeming to stand limp.
• I suppose that hymn-books, after all, might be bound in different hues, perhaps as suiting different qualities of madness. I feel this, as a great advance in thought.
• I go docilely back to my sewing. It is not the prospect of a whipping that makes me meek. It is what I know of the cruelty of patience. There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.
• Then he has my knife taken away, and I must eat with my fingers. The dishes he prefers being all bloody meats, and hearts, and calves' feet, my kid-skin gloves grow crimson—as if reverting to the substance they were made from.
• I should like to find a child. I should like it, not to keep it!— but to take its place in the basket and leave it at Briar to grow up to be me.
• imagines me an ageless child. Sometimes that is how I imagine myself—as if my short, tight gowns and velvet sashes keep me bound, like a Chinese slipper, to a form I should otherwise outleap.
• 'You are a man,' I answer. 'Men's truths are different from ladies'. I may do nothing, I assure you.'
• I am a sort of villain, and know other villains best. Your uncle is the worst kind, for he keeps to his own house, where his villainy passes as an old man's quirk.
• I hesitate, then shake my head. He names the figure. It is several hundred times the value of the costliest book upon my uncle's shelves; and many thousand times the price of the cheapest. This is the only measure of value I know.
• She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there.
• Your consolation is to be mistress of Briar—where the clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.'
• I read it, then fall back upon my pillow and hold the letter to my mouth. I put my lips to the paper. He might be my lover, after all—or, she might. For I could not want her now, more than I could a lover.
  But I could not want a lover, more than I want freedom.
• He chooses a book of little punishments for me to read from, after the meal: the steady recitation of cruelty makes me calmer.
• I am only amazed. Not to read! It seems to me a kind of fabulous insufficiency—like the absence, in a martyr or a saint, of the capacity for pain.
• not shuddering at the yielding of the yolk, not thinking, as she swallows, of the closing of her own throat about the meat. She wipes her lips with her fingers, touches her tongue to some spot upon her knuckle; then swallows again.
  You have come to Briar, I think, to swallow up me.
• already I seem to feel myself beginning to give up my life. I give it up easily, as burning wicks give up smoke, to tarnish the glass that guards them; as spiders spin threads of silver, to bind up quivering moths.
• Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with her unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text.
• Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart—I feel it pass from her to me and become mine.
• May a lady taste the fingers of her maid? She may, in my uncle’s books.—The thought makes me colour.
• When she turns back, I cannot look at her. I go to my dressing-room and close the door, lie face down upon my bed, and am seized and shaken by laughter—a terrible laughter, it courses silently through me, like filthy water—I shudder, and shudder, and finally am still.
• the room seems changed to me now. It seems filled with shining surfaces, each one an eye of hers.
• For of course, though she knows much, what she has is a counterfeit knowledge, and worthless; and her satisfaction in the keeping of it—in the nursing of what she supposes her secret—is awful to me.
• It mustn’t be creased, for Mr Rivers’s sake: I hear the unspoken words, my blood surges again; I take her arm in mine and pinch it.
  ‘Oh!’
  I do not know who cries it, she or I: I reel away, unnerved. But in the second I have her skin between my fingers, my own flesh leaps in a kind of relief. I shake, horribly, for almost an hour.
• I would like to touch her, to be sure that she is there. I dare not. But I cannot leave her. I lift my hands and move and hold them an inch, just an inch, above her—her hip, her breast, her curling hand, her hair on the pillow, her face, as she sleeps.
• ‘Oh, Maud,’ he says.
  That is all he says. But in his face I see, at last, how much I want her.
• —see her make all the careless unstudied gestures I have marked so covetously, so long. Is this desire? How queer that I, of all people, should not know! But I thought desire smaller, neater; I supposed it bound to its own organs as taste is bound to the mouth, vision to the eye. This feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin.
• I think I will swallow down my desire, as I have swallowed down grief, and rage.
• Sometimes I see him look at her, and think he has told her. Sometimes she looks at me, so strangely—or else her hands, in touching me, seem so stiff, so nervous and unpractised—I think she knows.
• She reaches. She reaches so far, she catches the life, the shuddering heart of me: soon I seem to be nowhere but at the points at which my flesh is gripped by hers.
• I am filled, as with colour or light, with a sense of the life we will have, together.
• Still, it is hard—it is terribly hard, I almost cannot do it—to put the metal for the first time to the neat and naked paper. I am almost afraid the book will shriek, and so discover me. But it does not shriek. Rather, it sighs, as if in longing for its own laceration; and when I hear that, my cuts become swifter and more true.
• No-one speaks. No-one moves, save Richard as he rows. We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells.
• ‘How ill a man may grow,’ he says, ‘from the sight of the spilling of a little of his own blood. What monsters you females must be, to endure this, month upon month. No wonder you are prone to madness.
• ‘There you have it!’ says the doctor. ‘Her uncle, an admirable gentleman I don’t doubt. But the over-exposure of girls to literature—The founding of women’s colleges—’ His brow is sleek with sweat. ‘We are raising a nation of brain-cultured women. Your wife’s distress, I’m afraid to say, is part of a wider malaise.
• You think the world ought to love us, for the kinks in the fibres of our hearts? The world scorns us. Thank God it does! There was never a profit to be got from love; from scorn, however, you may twist riches, as filthy water may be wrung from a cloth.
• And one other thing I put with them, that she does not know I keep: the silver thimble, from the sewing-box at Briar, with which she smoothed my pointed tooth.
• I gaze through the lozenge of glass at the road we have travelled—a winding red road, made cloudy by dust, like a thread of blood escaping from my heart.
• ‘that you mean me any kind of good, since you persist in keeping me here, when I so clearly wish to leave.’ <> She tilts her head. ‘Hear the grammar in that, Mr Ibbs?’ she says. The man says he does.
• The boy makes a final stab with his knife, his face darkening. ‘Fuck!’ he says.—The first time I have ever heard the word used as a curse.
• That girl is lost! She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones, stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the words have peeled and drifted—’
• Think how it begins to come clear, when I meets Gentleman—think how quick my fear that you might be secretly married, turns into my knowing that he is the chap that must secretly marry you . . .
• I push myself up, away from her; but am too giddy, still, to stand. ‘You are mad,’ I say to them both. ‘You are mad! I—Pass me off as Sue?’
• For in a madhouse in the country are a pair of doctors—they’ll remember you, I think. For didn’t you, only yesterday, give them your hand and make them a curtsey, and stand in a good light before them, for quite twenty minutes, answering questions to the name of Susan?’
• Don’t ladies take companions? Only wait till I have got my hands on your fortune; then see if we don’t take the grandest house in London! See what carriages and footmen we’ll have then!
• The petticoats astonish me: for I have always supposed that linen must be white—just as, when I was a child, I thought that all black books must turn out Bibles.
• It is the brooch of brilliants I once imagined Sue breathing upon, and polishing, and gazing at with a squinting eye. Now Mrs Sucksby holds it up and studies it with her own eye narrowed. It sparkles. It sparkles, even here.
• how about we take the gown off and try the green and silver? Only a touch of arsenic in that green—won’t harm you at all, so long as you keep from sweating too hard in the bodice.’
• A tumbling stream of things—not like the books that came to Briar, that came as if sinking to rest on the bed of a viscid sea, through dim and silent fathoms; nor like the things the books described, the things of convenience and purpose—the chairs, the pillows, the beds, the curtains, the ropes, the rods . . .
• What’s Sue, to me? I’m afraid, here, to remember the pressing of her mouth, the sliding of her hand. But I’m afraid, too, of forgetting. I wish I could dream of her. I never do. Sometimes I take out the picture of the woman I supposed my mother, and look for her features there—her eyes, her pointed chin.
• May one take a fever, from a draught of foetid air? I lie down at her side until she sleeps; then go back to the window, press my face to the gap between the sashes, breathe deeper.
• There is a break in the wall at the start of the bridge with, set into it, a shallow stone bench. Hung up beside it is a belt of cork—meant for throwing, it says upon a sign, to those in difficulties upon the river.

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• but I had walked and torn and bitten that glove all night, it was all I had to keep my nerve up. I had the idea that, if they were to take it, I should be like a Samson shorn.
• the floors had used to have rugs; but that now, it had all been made over to mad-women—that it was, in its way, like a smart and handsome person gone mad itself.
• It was a husband, I think, who signed your order? It is my brother who keeps me here. But men want wives, when they may do without their sisters.’
• The other nurse came back with a length of ribbon and a ruler, and they took it in turns to measure their muscles. I watched them do it, as a man in a darkened wood might, disbelieving his own eyes, watch goblins; for they stood in a ring and moved the lamp from arm to arm, and it threw strange lights and cast queer shadows; and the beer, and the heat, and the excitement of the measuring made them seem to lurch and hop.
• There had come on a light in my head, that was brighter than all the rest. I took his hand again. ‘Black-faced pigs?’ I said, screwing up my eyes. He nodded. <> His aunty was Mrs Cream.
• Really, Mr Way was right: he was far too big a boy to be so tearful, and at any other time, in any other, ordinary place, I should have hit him myself. But for now, I looked at his tears, and to my bruised and desperate eyes they were like so many pick-locks and keys.
• I only know, it took hours—for of course, though the file was a fine one, and though I worked with the sheets and blankets bunched about my hands to muffle the sound, still the rasp of the iron seemed loud, and I dared only cut in time to Nurse Bacon’s snores.
• until at last, at the farthest point of all, they made a smudge, a stain, a darkness—a darkness, like the darkness of the coal in a fire—a darkness that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and the golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light. <> ‘London,’ I said. ‘Oh, London!’
• There came, from a gash in his waistcoat, a bubble—like a bubble of soap, but swirling red—and then a spurt of blood, that fell and struck the floor with a splash—an ordinary splash, like water or soup would make.
• finally Dainty ran to the door, caught up the chamber-pot that had been left there, and brought it and set it down beside the chair. The sound of the blood striking the china—and the sight of the red of it, against the white, and against that great dark eye—was worse than anything.
• But what happened, was this: he took one look at her, was seen to stagger and grow white; then declared himself only overcome with emotion, to find her so perfectly cured.
• even then, I did not really feel it as you would suppose I might, did not believe, I think, that so many dark and sober gentlemen speaking so many grave and monotonous words could pinch out the spirit and the heat and the colour from the lives of people like me and Mrs Sucksby.
• I saw her, not expecting to see her: and I’ll tell you this, my heart flew open; then I remembered everything, and my heartflew shut.


• The candles I had lit had burned to puddles of wax, and their flames were like so many ghosts;
• it seemed to me, even in my grief, that I understood. She’s dead, they might as well have been calling. The thought was rising, quicker than blood, in every heart. She’s dead—and we’re alive.
• I was thinking of Maud, starting up with the knife. I was thinking of Maud, letting me hate her. I was thinking of Maud, making me think she’d hurt me, to save me knowing who had hurt me most . . .
• When she came back, she was clutching a pound. It was the pound she had put, so long ago, in the wall of the starch-works, that she had said we must use to bury her when she had died.
• Only love you, I wanted to say. I didn’t say it, though. What can I tell you? If she could still be proud, then so, for now, could I . . . I didn’t need to say it, anyway: she could read the words in my face.

https://greensdictofslang.com/
https://www.reddit.com/r/bookclub/comments/12dnuyo/discussion_mod_pick_fingersmith_by_sarah_waters/#:~:text=Here%20are%20some%20of%20the,on%20the%20prig%20%2D%20to%20steal
https://www.reddit.com/r/bookclub/?f=flair_name%3A%22Fingersmith%22
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Lustful_Turk