"The Fraud"

[fiefoe]

I was determined to finish one Zadie Smith novel at least. It was an okay decision, but I don't think I'll do that again. The three strands of the story don't really come together as an organic whole, though each has a lot to offer.

• The woman didn’t flinch. She struck the boy as both canny and hard, like most Scots... He spoke over his shoulder – ‘Cousin, I see you are bored and dangerous this morning!’ – and was gone.
• Cheek, but Mrs Touchet was amused. She thought of happier days in grand old Kensal Rise. Then of smaller, charming Brighton. Then of this present situation in which no window quite fit its frame. She thought of decline and the fact that she was tied to it. She stopped smiling.
• The pictures were of Venice, a place he’d always found hard to credit, but then you saw these dusty old prints in people’s houses so you had to believe. He felt sorry for Italian boys. How do you go about tiling a doorstep with water coming right up to it?
• He watched the maid grasp the child, too hard, by the wrist, as mothers did round his way. Off they went. ‘A late Ainsworth,’ explained the housekeeper,
• No one had ever accused William of being backward about putting himself forward.
• Somewhere Sarah had got the idea that ‘naturally’ was the mark of a distinguished speaker.
• 1745 was a subject close to Mrs Touchet’s heart. Her mother was a passionate Jacobite – the family porridge bowls had the Stuarts’ seal stamped on the bottom – and as a boy her father had been taken to Edinburgh, to witness Bonnie Prince Charlie entering Holyrood.
• She remembered Ann at the wake, her kindly hedgehog face
• A side of bacon was to be awarded to the couple who could prove, before a ‘jury of their peers’, that they had been blissfully married for a year, with no cross words spoken in the preceding twelve months. Mrs Touchet, the Mayor and William formed the jury. It was all very jolly,
• William had chosen the famed verse by Sir Chidiock Tichborne, that failed assassin of the Virgin Queen, that poor, misguided martyr to the true faith...  If old Tichborne could be hung, drawn, quartered, have his guts dragged through the streets of Elizabethan London, and still keep his eternal soul, so might Mrs Touchet keep hers, despite all her suffering.
• For three years she had been married. In the first year she learned she could not be a wife. In the second, that she could be a mother – that she was one. In the third she came to understand that no matter what she thought she was, a mother had no more rights over her child than a slave has over his life.
• The strange thing about good people, Eliza had noticed, was the manner in which they saw that same quality everywhere and in everyone, when in truth it is vanishingly rare.
• Am I not a Brother and a Man? <> Previously, whenever Mrs Touchet had considered this sentence, she had found it vaguely distasteful. She had never – when giving alms to beggars, prostitutes and worse – found it necessary to invent a sentimental family relation between herself and those to whom she gave charity.
• A grace that kept happening, extending itself through time, as if The Elms and everyone in it had fallen through an un-darned hole in the pocket of this world. Their little life of domestic contentment... One thing permitted and made possible the other, even if the logic was shrouded, too mysterious to penetrate. Like a finger. Like two penetrating fingers. Like two fingers penetrating a flower. In complete, candle-less darkness. As if the fingers and the flower were not separate but one, and so incapable of sinning the one against the other. Two fingers entering a bloom not unlike the wild ones in the hedgerow – layered like those, with the same overlapping folds – yet miraculously warm and wet, pulsing, made of flesh. Like a tongue. Like the bud of a mouth. Like another bud, apparently made for a tongue, lower down.
• This Crossley person was, in Eliza’s view, as responsible for William’s graphomania as distilleries are for the drunkards, and sweet tooths for the continued existence of the slaves.
• The plan was to take all he’d learned of the Gothic from Mrs Radcliffe and Sir Walter and apply it to a grand old English house... For William, this new location meant a new aesthetic. No more exotic counts and princes. No more evil monks or scheming Italian Doges. Instead: lords and ladies, highwaymen, gravediggers, Newgate types, and all manner of simple, English, country folk.
• ‘Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux. There’s cant on every page. Terrible character. Shocking. Inveterate swindler, pickpocket – the man was transported three times!
• But no story captured her quite like the saga of the Tichborne Claimant. It had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court Judges, snobbery, exotic locations, ‘the struggle of the honest working man’ – as opposed to the ‘undeserving poor’ – and ‘the power of a mother’s love’.
• everywhere he speaks there’s huge crowds, full of those what are despised like him, and forgotten like him – and they all put a penny or whatever can be managed into the Tichborne Fund. We feel for poor Sir Roger and vice-a versa. He’s for us and we’re for him.
• Sarah laughed: ‘Why, that’s exactly why we know it’s him. Let me ask you this: if you were a lowborn butcher pretending to be a Lord, wouldn’t you talk just so, and dress as you should, and mind all your ps and qs, and keep high company?
• From Gilbert he had learned how far a mind may go out of its own bounds, and he would not be moved from this position.
• Sometimes, listening to these twelve peculiar women sing in their thick Belgian accents, Mrs Touchet marvelled at so many bad teeth and big knuckles and unfortunate noses and thick leg hairs pushing through worsted tights. Their most ardently held precept – that love cannot be earned, merited or deserved, only generously given – seemed, to Mrs Touchet, to be most severely put to the test on the physical plane.
• For a moment she was indignant. Thackeray! That pig-nosed moralist! Disturbing her peace!
• A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica by James Hakewill. Crossley had sent them a handsome first edition, years ago, and she had sat with Frances in the old drawing room at The Elms, turning over the pages of plantation watercolours, marvelling at how a charnel house may be depicted as a very paradise.
• From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust.
• Why put such a steep value on self-knowledge? Victoria veritatis est caritas. But was the victory of truth really love? Sometimes Mrs Touchet suspected Augustine of Hippo of over-egging the pudding. There are easy, self-serving truths, after all. And difficult, generous lies.
• The sight of poor Gilbert and that idiotic woman slinging wooden balls at coconuts and missing every single one of them suddenly seemed a bitter allegory for the senselessness of all existence. Of her existence. The narrow world in which she lived. The banal company she kept. The other life she might have lived, had only every single thing been different.
• Gordon conspired with the . . . well, with this other negro lay-preacher fellow, and all the other conspirators. Eighteen white men died in the original disturbance.
• ‘Well, I still say you are unfair,’ complained Emily. ‘No one could be said to care more for people than Charles.’
  ‘Fictional people. Those he can control. I was not surprised in the least to see his name on that petition. Even as a young man, he feared chaos. And real life will ever incline towards chaos.’
  William scoffed, but uneasily, never knowing quite what to do with Mrs Touchet’s occasional flights of philosophy.
• ‘The Change’ marked, in the mind of Mrs Touchet, the final hurdle in the ladies’ steeplechase:
  The humiliations of girlhood.
  The separating of the beautiful from the plain and the ugly.
  The terror of maidenhood.
  The trials of marriage or childbirth – or their absence.
  The loss of that same beauty around which the whole system appears to revolve.
  The change of life.
• A third whack silenced him – bar a burbling murmur of pleasure. Did she really believe in miracles? There was a bracketed place in her brain where things were both true and not true simultaneously. In this same space one could love two people. Live two lives. Escape and be at home.
• She still looked – as one of the Kensal Lodge wits once had it – ‘like a narrow bell in a Gothic church’.
• But they’re patient, these Catholics. They lay in wait. Sit on their money, and keep it where we can’t see it. And here’s Sir Roger trying his best to pull back the veil over all that shadowy business! Now, naturally they don’t like that!
• Turn to literature? New rules apply. Good Chapman here binds my book and sells it: very good. Now what’s to stop any Soho sneak from copying any section of it and selling it on his own account? Or slicing out Cruikshank’s pictures, framing ’em, and making a pretty penny?’
• All three little girls nodded very solemnly. Prayer was the only power they had to modify the world, and they took the responsibility of it as seriously as any monk.
• Frances’ eyes had not changed: the gentle gaze was the same. The oceanic feeling for others... Eliza – to whom rage came as naturally as breathing – felt she had little choice but to take on the wound herself, although she knew from hard experience that being angry with William was pointless. It was like being furious with a child. He was never consciously cruel, only bewildered.
• Mrs Touchet did not believe that souls were fully contained or described by coats and shoes. But she knew she lived in an age of things, no matter how out of step she felt in it, and whatever else he was, Charles had been the poet of things. He had made animate and human the cold traffic and bitter worship of things. The only way she could make sense of the general mourning was to note that with his death an age of things now mourned itself.
• And so a huge suburban cemetery had been built in Surrey to accommodate the overspill, and here was the dedicated platform that took you to it, and the special train that transported the dead and those who mourned them. She had read about these death trains but this was her first time seeing one.
• Other people are our obstacles. They are the force that we are up against. She felt this most strongly when in her lowest moods, that is, when furthest from Christ. Other people are our stumbling blocks and hurdles, our impediments and obstructions – they are sent to try us. And yet, left untried, left to our longed-for solitude – with no one to witness our many hypocrisies – how easily we deceive ourselves! <> ‘I will accept the money and follow your recommendation, Mr Atkinson, thank you. I think, all being equal, it is probably best if I know nothing more of these . . . these claimants.
• Simply by calling the Devil by his right name you vanquished him. Only in fairy tales.
• Mrs Touchet liked to examine her thoughts as she had them, and now, as she deliberately took an inconvenient road to keep sight of two curious women – one white, the other black, both dressed theatrically and walking at a clip, arm in arm – she asked herself what precisely was the nature of her interest in the foreign and unfamiliar. She knew she was often bored. Profoundly bored by the life around her: its familiar contours, its repetition, and the several people she knew very well, really too well.
• For she thought of herself as having several faces to show at different times to different people – as all women have, and must have, to varying degrees – but she had never seriously considered the idea that there might exist also a class of men (aside from the obvious case of the sodomites) who, like women, wrote the stories of their lives, as it were, in cipher. To be translated only by a few, and only when necessary...  this Bogle – not realizing that such a man could even possess an ulterior or private world
• Back in Kensal Rise, saddling the horses, Dickens had opened a sweepstake on the first mention of Byron, having it on good authority that their glamorous hostess ‘rarely got through five sentences without dropping the name of Byron on the carpet’. But William had trouble believing in the vulgarity of titled people:
• She certainly had the looks for salon life – and the luck. To reel in Lord Blessington had been tremendous luck; it had funded the whole enterprise. But looks are luck. Eliza’s own looks, by contrast, she had long understood to be too specific, an acquired taste. They had never garnered sufficient general interest to be useful, or never at the right moment.
• Sometimes envy is so much like a recognition of fundamental similarity that the two emotions prove hard to separate. Were not she and Blessington both dogs up on their hind legs?
• What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling. With things like angry letters to The Times.
• (Cruikshank:) ‘Yes, William – I really didn’t mean to . . . I only meant: without warning, you hired another man to do it instead. I mean, to illustrate St Paul’s. George had illustrated all the others. He felt dropped, I suppose. You do sometimes drop people, William. And Charles dropped everyone.’
• She felt the injustice of it, especially as she no longer had any arena in which to counter-parry. A long time ago there had been the riding crop, the silk ties, the tight grip. Nowadays, she only bit her tongue, like every other woman she had ever known.
• (Eliot:) Just a lot of people going about their lives in a village – dull lives at that. Even more boring a topic than a trial. Are we meant to be amazed it’s a woman? An obvious publicity trick by Blackwood’s, and look at how the public falls for it! Is this all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?’
• But the new Mrs Ainsworth had a way of making all reading, indeed all private contemplation or mental escape, entirely impossible. She kept a person usefully tethered to the present, like the stays on a hot air balloon.
• Young, beautiful and good... Only Dickens, thought Mrs Touchet, sourly. Only he could imagine those first two adjectives as having any possible relation to the third. Sentimentalist. And never more so than on this subject of his dead sister-in-law.
• Did he wonder, as she did, if Dickens’ domestic arrangements were as singular as his own? Perhaps it didn’t occur to him. So many things didn’t.
• As long as we profess to believe that two people may happily – or feasibly – invest all love and interest in this world solely in one another, till death do them part – well, then life, short as it is, will continue to be a human comedy, punctuated by tragedy. So she generally thought. Then there were these moments of grace when she startled herself with the idea that if anybody truly understood what is signified by the word ‘person’, they would consider twelve lifetimes too brief a spell in which to love a single soul.
• Not for the first time Mrs Touchet was struck by how much more passion may be aroused by phantom damages done to female ‘honour’ than by anything actually done to a woman herself. We are only ideas to them, she wrote, at the top of a page.
• Keep stealing, my friends! From life for fiction, and from fiction for life. What a terrible business. At least William did it clumsily, with benign incompetence. Whereas his friend Charles had done it like a master – like an actor. That was precisely what was so dangerous about him. Charles Dickens played a part, always.
• But all her life Eliza had refused to be the servant of pathos, and could never accept any argument on the basis of emotion alone:
• The past came to be patterned like the present. The present manipulated with an eye to the future – and to the main chance. By contrast, Bogle’s story never changed. It was this very persistence, this loyalty, that had cost the poor man his annuity
• Ruthland burned off their ears. Some unknown informant wrote to the sentimental Elletsons about all this: Ruthland lost his position.
• Little Derenneya stared up at Anaso. He knew that her name meant stay with mother, give her company, and that she was the first child of Mr Ballard’s that her mother had permitted to live. A special child, then. Powerful.
• The sentimental young widow Anna Eliza Elletson did not stay a widow long, marrying someone called the Marquis of Chandos the very next year. Ballard got the blacksmith to fashion a new brand, reflecting this change.
• But he had never, ever known a mulatto overseer to be anything but an unmitigated disaster. If mi for have massa or misses, give mi Buckra one – nah give mi mulatto, dem no use wi people well. So went the familiar saying among the blacks.
• He watched the bookkeeper write notorious runaway next to Johanna’s name, three years in a row, and marvelled at her persistence – at what it cost her. Two toes. A breast. The cleaving of her face, a scar that ran from eye to chin. <> Peachey worked the mill house. She fed cane into the new horizontal rollers, which were part of the humane plan, being less lethal than the vertical.
• Ballard, as a man of facts, felt he had no rational choice but to correct Johanna again, and publicly this time, although of course he had never meant to kill her. A miscalculation. On Hope, names drifted from people over time, and Big Johanna, as it turned out, was no longer the strong, hearty girl of times past.
• The boldest and most astonishing talk came from the boy Jack, who had no last name and ‘no parents to speak of’. This, too, reminded him of Hope, where the mouths that ran wildest tended to be the hungriest.
• Could this truly be the son of a slave? Every eye was upon him, and every ear. He held the very soul of the crowd in his palm, and Bogle realized that he had always thought of this commanding spirit as a feminine gift, because of the Johannas. But this man’s hate likewise stalked him everywhere. It flamed: you felt its warmth just being near him.
• In bed, he tried to envision this freedom that was not quite freedom. That was and was not. That was ‘here’, but also ‘not now’, and would arrive later for Johanna, because she worked outside, but sooner for Ellis, because he didn’t. A two-faced freedom, which already belonged to boys like Jack, even if they did the same labour and died like flies. His mind blanked at the paradox.
• Here, in England, love was not a passion but a kind of adding up – a consolidation – and Elizabeth’s parents were very poor but clean, as was she,
• So many people, caught in the turning gears. Women, men, children, babies. Generation after generation. His father. His mother. The noble line of Johannas. Ground down. Minds ploughed. Bodies mangled. Souls boiled until they evaporated. Human fuel. Round and round went the treadmill. A hundred years? Two? The philosophical stable boy had claimed three. Cut the people down, plant new ones in the holes. Cut off their hands and their ears and their breasts. The trough of blood.
• (Knowing Bogle:) Wonder had reduced Mrs Touchet to nunlike silence. All her life she had been trying to open a locked door. She had pushed as hard as she could upon it – using means both personal and metaphysical – in the belief that the door opened outwards, onto ultimate reality, and that this was a sight few people are ever granted in this lifetime – particularly if they happen to be born female. Now, without any effort on her part, the door had come loose on its hinges. Finally, she could open it! But to her astonishment, it opened inwards. She had been standing inside the very thing she’d been looking for... The door opened inwards! The exotic island of her conception was not some utterly different and unimaginable world. It was neither far away nor long ago. Indeed, it seemed to her now that the two islands were, in reality, two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined, and that this was a truth that did not have to be sought out or hunted down,
• a Tichborne biscuit tin with a badly drawn portrait of the Claimant upon the lid . . . All ordered by Sarah, paid for on subscription, and delivered straight to the house. It was like the Garibaldi mania all over again.
• Why had that court been packed with aristocrats? Why were no decent working men allowed in? How many Jesuits had been on that jury?... And what choice did government have but to accept the cost of cases imposed upon it? But such dry and inconvenient facts were of no consequence here, in this ocean of feeling.
• Mrs Touchet observed this peculiar man as he accepted the public’s adulation without a moment’s anxiety, as if it were only to be expected. A pulse of doubt ran through her mind. Wouldn’t a fraud be nervous? Wouldn’t a fraud make more of an effort to convince?
• Eliza listened along with them, but felt that she alone truly heard the man, pierced as she was by a new awareness, a subterranean insight. A person is a bottomless thing! She might rush the stage to proclaim it: A person is a bottomless thing! The people saw only the battered hat, the rigid fingers, the sparse tufts of hair, the dark skin, so unlike their own. They heard only the quiet voice, speaking lilting words in a certain arrangement. And mistook all of this for a person. Kindly, simple, old ‘Black Bogle’. They could not know what he had seen, nor where he had been. But perhaps, reflected Mrs Touchet, this is always the case. We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen. If they knew what I knew they would feel as I do! Yet even once one had glimpsed behind the veil which separates people, as she had – how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself.
• Take Dickens! Remembering his well-aired opinions on the matter of feminine public oration, Mrs Touchet felt freshly murderous: she wished she could raise him from the grave with a stroke of her pen the better to put him back down in the ground again.
• Still, more and more these days she suspected that women, too, could possess magnetic powers of attraction – above and beyond mere beauty – and that she might herself be such a woman, and that, moreover, there might be a great deal more of such women than was commonly supposed.
• How easy he was to love when he was happy! How easy everyone is to love in that state.
• Getting old turned out to be a very strange business. She was learning so many new things about time. It could twist and bend until the past met the present, and vice versa. She was both here and there, then and now, it was invigorating, but also sometimes confusing.
• Frequently, she heard the cry: A hanging’s too good for them! She tried to remind herself that what she was witnessing was a sincere mass emotion – dispossession – being twisted and manipulated for ulterior purposes. Still, they frightened her. Were these ‘the people’? Were these her people?
• God preserve me from novel-writing, thought Mrs Touchet. God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness!
• Charles laughed. Forster frowned greatly: ‘Men are perverse. Working men especially. How rarely they seem to know their own interests!’ <> It was said with weary superiority and decorated with a sigh.
• listened to the tale of how this happy transformation had come to pass. The low price of cotton was at the heart of it. The story went on a long time. She looked about her. She found that if she squinted the place looked less like a factory spinning distant human suffering for profit, and more like a series of hard-faced local girls turning an endless row of printing presses.
• And what if you weren’t so good, thought Mrs Touchet, and chose to keep the windows shut? And what if, instead of providing good, clean clothes for ‘your girls’, you instead let them go about in rags or sackcloth? What if you are less rich next month? Is benevolence to rise and fall like a market?... At the time, four talkative men – two of them jovial, one vampiric, and the last just incredibly loud – were altogether too much for her. They were four sides of a box through which no noise of her own could escape.
• Instead, they were discovered amongst the crew of the Middleton, which was the ship upon which a certain teenage Arthur Orton had sailed from Wapping to Tasmania, many years ago. (How like a novelist! thought Mrs Touchet. How he lies to tell the truth!)
• She had been listening to the French evidence for two months already, and there was no rhyme or reason to the modes of questioning. No one ever seemed to know how to begin or where to end, which information was pertinent and which purely extraneous. It was like reading a novel by William.
• She would tell William, when she got home. He would understand. He always did. Theirs was a fellowship in time, and this, in the view of Mrs Touchet, was among the closest relations possible in this fallen world. Bookended by two infinities of nothing, she and William had shared almost identical expanses of being. They had known each other such a long time. She still saw his young face. He still saw hers, thank God.
• She had worried that ‘the law’ needed a theory of law. Eighty-five court days later, she was having similar trouble with ‘the truth’. Did the truth require a theory of truth? <> Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus – so went Kenealy’s. He used it liberally, brandishing it against witnesses, lawyers, the judges, Cockburn himself, the Catholic Church, the press, Westminster, the entire judicial system.
• the Metropolitan Tabernacle came into view – she grew uneasy... From the water it looked impressive, almost as large as the Vatican. Once inside, though, the design proved reassuringly rational and without beauty, like Protestantism itself.
• (After a transporting concert:) This she delivered in the admonishing voice of her own, long-dead mother. In response, Miss Jackson smiled tightly and said nothing. She seemed oddly resistant to Mrs Touchet’s own sense of a momentous event. Why was this young lady so determined to behave as if she had done nothing more remarkable this evening than clean a kitchen or serve a meal?
• When young, she had never understood why old women dithered so. Why they led conversations down dead ends and almost always overstayed their welcome. She did not know then what it was to have no definition in the world, no role and no reason. To be no longer even decorative. All too easy to lose your footing, to misunderstand everything, get the wrong end of every stick.
• Mrs Touchet watched the literary men troop in and out of the house of a man they didn’t respect, whose table was only passable, who frequently ran out of port. The base, transactional nature of it all! Was this what daughters were for? Even the girls themselves seemed only too aware of the conditional basis of their appearance at table, as if they had always known they owed men their beauty and now the time had come to pay that debt in full. The mutuality Mrs Touchet had always believed possible, an idealized table, around which men and women met as equals, employing only their wits – this was revealed to be a hopelessly naive vision.
• ‘Mr Edgar Allan Poe is the true author of this particular article. It was written for the amusement of the public – although the greater part of them apparently believed it!’
  ‘But – why? I still don’t understand. You are in the basket? For what purpose?’
  ‘ “I” write a diary of this imaginary event.
• Mrs Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England. Only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies. Everything else, everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded – all of that they did elsewhere.
• It was simply inevitable, given the progress everywhere. Only a few ‘odd, barbarous, or eccentric’ nations would be exempt from this Eden, and only because they were too stuck in their ways, perversely refusing to board the Scottish-built locomotives presently hurtling towards utopia. China and the Chinese were the favoured example... The moral, according to Mr Dickens and Mr Horne, was progress. Forward. Ever forward... Yet these ivory balls, offering infinity in the palm of your hand, had been, for Mrs Touchet, the only moment of sublimity – the only touch of the sacred – to be found in the whole crystal warehouse.
• her wards to the Queen’s ward, the ‘African Princess’, whom the Queen, in her wisdom, had now married off to a Captain,... Even more astounding was the wedding party, which had apparently been designed with symmetry in mind, like a piece of wallpaper. Eight English bridesmaids rode with eight African grooms.
• Mrs Touchet had long believed there was something in coincidence. She could not say what, exactly. Something. The mirroring of feeling or gesture, the echo of one thing in another. Fortuitous crossroads of time and place. The doubling of victories, and collisions of defeat.
• ‘Feminine Troubles’ remained a demigod in the Ainsworth home and met with no opposition or questions of any kind, ever. Approaching Cordwainers’ Hall, she wondered if she was lying to tell the truth, like a novelist.
• Three years of not seeing this man had not succeeded in tempering her loathing of him, and of all men of his kind. There are lawyers who combine the qualities of leech, prude, and hypocrite. Forever guarding and profiting from the borders between things – between people.
• Mrs Touchet sat back in her chair, defeated. Atkinson could not say he was surprised. It was as he had supposed: imagination had its limits. Even the imagination of a woman of such notably keen sensibility as Mrs Touchet.
  ‘But they simply must have the money,’ she said, again, quietly.
  Atkinson did his best estimation of a smile: ‘That is very charitable of you, Mrs Touchet, I am sure. But a hundred pounds a year is a vertiginous amount to settle upon two unlettered and unsupervised girls who may not—’
  ‘It was never my husband’s money! Much less mine! It is Samuel Touchet’s money! I do not wish to touch money that was earned as his money was! I tell you they must have it!’
  The lawyer Atkinson now looked away, out of the window. Had this peculiar woman not lived off Touchet money these past forty years? But it was always best to save the blushes of a flustered client caught in the trap of her own conscience:
• ‘Mrs Touchet, my freedom is as fully my inheritance as it is any man’s. It has no time, I need not wait for it, it was mine from the moment of my birth. Does it surprise you to hear me say so?’
  ‘Well, for one thing you speak as if my freedom is perfect.’
  ‘I know it is not. And where freedom is concerned, Mrs Touchet, I would advise you not to wait for others to present a false gift of it to you. You will be waiting a long time. Better to “take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them”.
• Well enough to understand that justice takes time, and that the freedoms of a minority are rarely self-evident to the majority. What is perfectly self-evident to God is – unfortunately! – too often obscure or invisible to his flawed creations. The minds of men move peculiarly slowly. Those of Englishmen in particular.