The Fraud

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.

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.

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.

But it is the perverse business of mirrors never to inform women of their beauty in the present moment, preferring instead to operate on a system of cruel delay.

It is not the prisoner's right to open his cell that is in question, Mrs Touchet it is the gaoler's fraud in claiming to hold a man prisoner in the first place. The first is self-evident. The second, wholly criminal.

How easily it is to treat people well when things are going well for you! thought Mrs. Touchet. Aloud she said, 'Happy news.

Mrs Touchet allowed herself a private smile. As long as we profess to believe that two people may happily - or feasibly - invest all love and interest in the 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 those 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 ion which to love a single soul.

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. What strange lives women lead!

From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made.

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 conspired against it. Life itself.

Never again would he properly attend to the kinds of stories that were right in front of him. Stories like her own—or for that matter like Mr Bogle’s. Stories of human beings, struggling, suffering, deluding others and themselves, being cruel to each other or kind. Usually both.

God preserve me from novel-writing, thought Mrs Touchet. God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness! In a cold dormitory, two hundred miles away, three heartbroken, motherless girls had hoped to be visited by their father. But William was busy at his desk, dreaming up Jack Sheppard.

Some people live for love, or for work, or for their children. Eliza Touchet had lived for an idea: freedom.

When she was young, she had wanted to know everyone, touch everyone, be everyone, go everywhere! Now she thought that if you truly loved – and were truly loved by! – two people in your lifetime you had every right to think yourself a Midas.

Was he really so good or did he only want to be seen to be good? Does it matter?

a joyous yellow archipelago of dandelion.

The world was sunk in madness. It covered everything, like weather.

Until this moment she hqd not guessed that her cousin hoped for a knighthood, and she could not, from this distance, discern how likely it was ... What really interested her was the presumption. Of recognition, of respect -- of attention itself. Why did he assume such things as his due? Was this what men assumed?

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.

I know this country well. 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 selfevident to God is – unfortunately! – too often obscure or invisible to his flawed creations. The minds of men move peculiarly slowly.

Eliza had long understood her cousin to be beyond the reach of editorial intervention.

But such dry and inconvenient facts were of no consequence here, in this ocean of feeling.

How could she have lived so long and thought so hard and yet have understood so little! What was this intolerable feeling? Love? She had been avoiding it for so long she had forgotten how painful it truly is.

And heads have always turned for women, too, in tribute to their beauty. Being so tall and narrow and punishing of aspect, Mrs Touchet had been largely excluded from that arena of influence in her youth. Now she was old. The exclusion was total.

The pain had not gone though it had settled: it was the foundations of the house of herself

Cities were in her bones. Her fellow passengers could complain of smuts and smells, of the incredible chaos of carriages and wagons, but Eliza enjoyed her glimpses of a Mayfair wedding, a woman hitting another woman with a broom on the Charing Cross Road and a band of Ethiopian minstrels outside Westminster.

It was as if even the little misunderstandings were placed in their path deliberately, to better illustrate the workings of grace.

The only force comparable to an Ainsworth enthusiasm was the speed with which it passed.

A life is a long business, Mrs Touchet. What should I tell you of my life?" She almost reached a hand across the table. "Tell me everything.

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.