Tipping the Velvet: A Novel by Waters Sarah

Author:Waters, Sarah [Waters, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781101075333
Publisher: Riverhead
Published: 2000-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

She took me to her home, in St John’s Wood; and the house, as I guessed it must be, was grand - a high, pale villa in a well-swept square, with a wide front door and tall casement windows with many panes of glass. In one of these a single lamp sat gleaming; the neighbouring houses, however, presented only black, shuttered windows, and the clatter of our carriage sounded atrocious, to me, in the stillness - I was not then used to that total, unnatural hush which fills the streets and houses of the rich, when they are sleeping.

She led me to her door, saying nothing. Her knock was answered by a grim-faced servant, who received her mistress’s cloak, looked once at me from beneath her lashes, but after that kept her eyes quite lowered. The lady paused to read the cards upon her table; and I, self-conscious, looked about me. We were in a spacious hall, at the bottom of a wide staircase winding up to darker, higher floors. There were doors - closed - to the left and the right of us. The floor was paved with marble, in squares of black and pink. The walls, to match it, were painted a deep, deep rose; and this darkened further, where the staircase curved and lifted, like the interior whorls of a shell.

I heard my hostess say, ‘That will do, Mrs Hooper’, and the servant, with a bow, took her leave. The lady lifted the lamp from the table at my side and, still with no word for me, began to ascend the stairs. I followed. We climbed to one floor, and then another. At each step the house grew darker, until at last there was only the narrow pool of light from my chaperon’s hand to guide my uncertain footsteps through the gloom. She led me down a short passage to a closed door, then turned and stood before it, one hand raised upon the panels, the other with the lamp held at her thigh. Her dark eyes gleamed, with invitation or perhaps with challenge. She looked, to tell the truth, like nothing so much as the ‘Light of the World’ that hung above the umbrella-stand in Mrs Milne’s hallway; but her gesture was not lost on me. This was the third and most alarming threshold I had crossed for her tonight. I felt a prick, now, not of desire, but of fear: her face, lit from beneath by the smoking lamp, seemed all at once macabre, grotesque. I wondered at this lady’s tastes, and how they might have decked the room that lay behind this unspeaking door, in this silent house, with its curious, incurious servants. There might be ropes, there might be knives. There might be a heap of girls in suits - their pomaded heads neat, their necks all bloody.

The lady smiled, and turned. The door swung open. She led me in.

It was, after all, a kind of parlour; nothing more. A small fire had

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