Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

knocking at my door, I thought I was in my old room at Lant Street. I was sure she was a thief, broke out from gaol and needing her fetters filed free by Mr Ibbs. That happened, sometimes; and sometimes the thieves were kind men, who knew us, and sometimes they were desperate villains. Once a man put a knife to Mr Ibbs’s throat, because he said the file went too slow. So, hearing Margaret’s knock now, I started from the bed, crying out, ‘Oh! Hold!’—though what I meant to be held, and who ought to have done it, I could not tell you; and neither, I suppose, could Margaret. She put her face about the door, whispering, ‘Did you call, miss?’ She had a jug of warm water for me, and she came and set my fire; then she reached beneath the bed and took the chamber-pot, and emptied it into her bucket of slops, and wiped it clean with a damp cloth that hung against her apron.
    I had used to wash the chamber-pots, at home. Now, seeing Margaret tip my piddle into her bucket, I was not sure I liked it. But I said, ‘Thank you, Margaret’—then wished I hadn’t; for she heard it and tossed her head, as if to say, Who did I think I was, thanking her ?
    Servants. She said I should take my breakfast in Mrs Stiles’s pantry. Then she turned and left me—getting a quick look, I thought, at my frock and my shoes and my open trunk, on the way.
    I waited for the fire to take, then rose and dressed. It was too cold to wash. My gown felt clammy. When I drew the window-curtain back and let the daylight in, I saw—what I had not been able to see the night before, by the candle—that the ceiling was streaked brown with damp, and the wood at the walls stained white.
    From the next-door room there came the murmur of voices. I heard Margaret saying, ‘Yes, miss.’ Then there was the shutting of a door.
    Then there was silence. I went down to my breakfast—first losing my way among the dark passages at the bottom of the servants’ stairs, and finding myself in the yard with the privy in it. The privy, I saw now, was surrounded by nettles, and the bricks in the yard broken up with weeds. The walls of the house had ivy on them, and some of the windows wanted panes. Gentleman was right, after all, about the place being hardly worth cracking. He was right, too, about the servants. When I found Mrs Stiles’s pantry at last there was a man there, dressed in breeches and silk stockings, and with a wig on his head with powder on it. That was Mr Way. He had been steward to Mr Lilly for forty-five years, he said; and he looked it. When a girl brought the breakfasts, he was served first. We had gammon and an egg, and a cup of beer. They had beer with all their meals there, there was a whole room where it was brewed. And they say Londoners can lush!
    Mr Way said hardly a word to me, but spoke to Mrs Stiles about the running of the house. He asked only after the family I was supposed to have just left; and when I told him, the Dunravens, of Whelk Street, Mayfair, he nodded and looked clever, saying he thought he knew their man. Which goes to show you what a humbug he was.
    He went off at seven. Mrs Stiles would not leave the table before he got up. When she did she said,
    ‘You will be glad to hear, Miss Smith, that Miss Maud slept well.’
    I didn’t know what to say to that. She went on, anyway:
    ‘Miss Maud rises early. She has asked that you be sent to her. Should you like to wash your hands before you go up? Miss Maud is like her uncle, and particular.’
    My hands seemed clean enough to me; but I washed them anyway, in a little stone sink she had there in the corner of her pantry.
    I felt the beer I had drunk, and wished I had not drunk it. I wished I had used the privy when I came across it in the yard. I was certain I should never find my way to it again.
    I was nervous.
    She took me up. We went, as before, by the servant’s stairs, but then struck out into a handsomer passage, that led to one or two doors. At one of these she