Fingersmith

Sue is alienated from the other ladies at the psychiatric hospital because they take her natural manner of speaking to be fake or irreverent, and they believe that she gets “special attentions from Dr. Christie” (401). She finally sees herself in a mirror and observes that she now looks mad. Her hair has been stitched to her head but is coming loose in wild ways; she is marked with bruises and scratches; her dress is too large on her increasingly starved body. Seeing herself and thinking of her ill-treatment leads Sue to ranting again—which certainly only cements the view that she is, indeed, mad. She tries to keep her sanity by observing everything and plotting her escape.

As the weather grows hotter, everyone suffers—even the nurses. One night, they celebrate a birthday with beer, which unleashes their inhibitions, and they engage in an escalating series of contests. First, they measure the circumference of their arms, then decide to see who weighs the most. They will press their weight on an inmate until she makes a sound to determine who is the heaviest. They choose Maud—that is, Sue—as their victim. She suffers through the nearly unbearable weight of the first two nurses, but the third—Nurse Bacon—not only lies upon her, but she begins thrusting her hips toward her: “‘Like it, do you?’ she said, still moving. ‘No! We heard you did’” (413). At this taunt, Sue breaks and smashes her skull into Nurse Bacon’s face. A melee ensues, and the doctors come running. They decide to treat her with the “water plunge,” dipping her into freezing cold water repeatedly (414).

After this torture, Sue’s spirit is broken: “Suddenly, my memories of Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, of Gentleman, even of Maud, seemed to grow dim” (415). She is stuck in this torpor until she is notified of an unexpected male visitor: It is Charles, “the knife-boy from Briar” (417). He thought he had tracked down Maud herself, enjoying a honeymoon with Gentleman. He wants to offer himself as an apprentice to Gentleman in London—he cannot stand Briar now that Gentleman has departed—but he has instead found Sue, who everyone believes to be Maud. Sue begs Charles to go along with this fiction; she is hatching a plan. She tells him to buy a blank key and a file and then bring these back to her the following week; Wednesdays are the only days the doctors are absent from the property, so there will be no awkward questions asked about Charles’s visit.

He returns, though she fears he will not, and she now has the tools to make her own key. She tells Charles to wait for her after midnight outside the gates for the next three nights—if she cannot manage to escape by then, he should make his own way. Determined as she is, though, she manages to make a workable key that very night. She volunteers to rub Nurse Bacon’s hands with cream—the Nurse has felt guilty over her mistreatment of Sue, so she readily obliges—and presses the Nurse’s key into the ointment to make an impression. After everyone falls asleep, she returns to the cabinet with the ointment and painstakingly files her key from the impression.

Once free, she and Charles run in the direction of London, some 50 or more miles away. Sue stops to steal some more appropriate clothes—she feels guilty for tricking a young girl in the process—and they sleep in a barn. The next morning, they climb a hill, and she can see “the threads of smoke more thick” that signals London off in the distance (436).

The two hitch a ride on the vegetable wagon that travels into London for the last part of their journey, but once they are there, Sue becomes cautious: What if they should run into Gentleman before she can find Mrs. Sucksby? She pawns Charles’s coat to get enough money to let a room across the street from her old house so that she can watch the household’s comings and goings. The first night she glimpses Mrs. Sucksby in her room and Maud—despised Maud, who has taken her place in Mrs. Sucksby’s affections. This sends her into a rage, yet again, and she decides to plot Maud’s murder, waving an impatient Charles off. This will take time to plan.

She has Charles write a letter for her to Mrs. Sucksby and steals a watch from a lady in the park. She tells Charles to barter with Mr. Ibbs over the watch’s price—this is his entry into the house—to get the letter to Mrs. Sucksby, and to trust nobody else. She watches eagerly from their room, but he returns quickly and in a panic. Maud has intercepted the letter and read it. Sue, of course, has no way of knowing that Mrs. Sucksby is behind the entire plot, including having Sue put into the psychiatric hospital, and she still believes that Maud is as much, or more, the villain as is Gentleman. Maud has sent a cryptic reply with Charles: the old Two of Hearts playing card that Maud had once stepped on, causing a characteristic crease.

In a passion, Sue cannot help herself. She grabs a knife and bursts into the house, filled with murderous rage. Seeing Mrs. Sucksby, Sue breaks down, telling her pseudo-mother that she has been tricked, double-crossed by Gentleman and Maud. Mrs. Sucksby is more than a little surprised to see Sue: “Mrs. Sucksby had her hand at her heart. She looked so surprised and afraid, it might have been her I was pointing the knife at” (454). Maud tries to intervene without saying anything to trigger any reaction from anyone, cautioning Sue to leave before Gentleman returns. Maud knows that Sue’s very life is in danger should he return. Sue does not know whom she can trust: Mrs. Sucksby tries to negotiate her way out of the bind, while Maud tries desperately to get Sue to leave. Maud does not want to tell her the truth—that Mrs. Sucksby is the one who has so cruelly tricked her—because she knows it will break Sue’s heart. Mrs. Sucksby also does not want the truth to come out because it will spoil her plan. Sue notices that everything has changed; there are no babies, and the house is unusually quiet.

Alas, all of Maud’s pleading is for naught because Gentleman arrives upon this scene, drunk and dangerous. He has been informed that Sue has escaped, so he knows that their delicate plans to have her fortune could easily unravel. Gentleman has nothing to lose other than the money, so he immediately alludes to the fact that Mrs. Sucksby is Maud’s real mother. Sue is confused, and both Maud and Mrs. Sucksby rush at Gentleman; Sue has set her knife down on the table and sees a flash in the thick of the fight. When Maud and Mrs. Sucksby pull away from Gentleman, everyone sees that he has been fatally stabbed. Blood pours from his gut, but everyone at the house knows not to alert the authorities—except Charles, who goes running into the streets bellowing for help. When the police arrive, Gentleman is dead. They ask who is responsible for the “filthy murder” (474). Mrs. Sucksby steps forward.

The trial that follows is sensational, captivating the interest of much of London. Sue has been interrogated, as has Maud and the others, but she cannot quite say if it was Maud or Mrs. Sucksby who did the deed. In the end, it does not matter because Mrs. Sucksby has confessed; she was covered in Gentleman’s blood at the scene, as well. Sue’s reputation in the street has suffered. Her former friends and allies, except for simple Dainty, think that she has betrayed Mrs. Sucksby and broken the thieves’ agreement. Sue attends the trial, waving her hand to Mrs. Sucksby on the stand, but the elder woman seems to be looking for someone else. During the trial, scandalous material is recounted, but “[n]o-one is told about me, and Maud” (482). When Mrs. Sucksby is sentenced to hanging, Sue catches a glimpse of Maud at the back of the courtroom.

Sue visits Mrs. Sucksby before her sentence is carried out, and Mrs. Sucksby implores her to make one promise: “‘Watch me, tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Watch me. Don’t cover your eyes. And then, if you should ever hear hard things of me when I am gone, think back—’” (485). Sue does not have the courage to watch the moment of the hanging, but she does see the body—“a dangling tailor’s figure, done up to look like a woman” (489). She cannot believe it is Mrs. Sucksby herself.

Sue must decide what to do for money, and she decides that she will likely leave the house that carries so many painful memories. Before she leaves, she receives a package of Mrs. Sucksby’s things from the jail. It holds the black taffeta gown she was wearing the night of the murder. She and Dainty decide to try to clean the bloodstains, and Sue hears a rustle at the bodice. She has found a letter, many years old by its look. Since neither she nor Dainty can read, they pay a street vendor to read it to them. It is, indeed, the letter that Susan Lilly’s mother has written, promising to leave half her fortune to her daughter, Susan, and the other half to Mrs. Sucksby’s daughter, Maud. Thus, Sue finally gleans the whole truth. While her feelings for Mrs. Sucksby grow confused—she now knows why Mrs. Sucksby said she might learn of bad intentions—her love for Maud comes rushing back. Maud is also a victim of the whole scheme, though Sue still does not know to what extent.

At first, Sue mourns the loss, and then slowly, she determines to find Maud. She will return to Briar, knowing that Maud is almost certainly not there, but it will be her first lead. When she reaches town, she learns that Mr. Lilly has died and that only one servant stayed behind. Still, she decides she will get as much information as she can from the servant, and she makes the trek to the gloomy old house. Nobody answers her knock, so she steals in, walking “as a ghost might walk” through the house (504). She goes to the library where she used to wait for Maud and hears a murmur beyond the door. It is Maud, sitting at a desk and working under a lamplight. Maud tells her that Mrs. Sucksby never wanted Sue to know and that she had been wrong to try to make a common girl out of a lady. Maud also reminds her that Briar is Sue’s, should she want it. Maud also reveals the nature of her uncle’s library, which initially shocks Sue—and embarrasses her, for Maud understood everything about their first encounter, while Sue herself was yet an innocent. Still, her love for Maud overcomes her reticence over the material. The book ends with Maud reading her latest work to Sue.