Night Light
By Laura Schiller
Based on: Little Dorrit
Copyright: Public Domain/BBC
The Clennams' new house, though in a quiet part of town, and in much better repair than the one in which Arthur had grown up, still creaked and muttered sometimes in disquieting ways. With Arthur on his way to St. Petersburg to help Daniel Doyce oversee the opening of their factory, and Amy herself prevented from coming with them by her condition, she slept lightly and woke often in the night.
Therefore, when a high, gasping scream sounded from upstairs, it woke her with a jolt.
By instinct, she stretched out her arm across the bed. Finding the left side cool and empty, she remembered her situation; she was not in the Marshalsea, and so the scream could not have come from any of its inmates. She was home, Arthur was away, and there was only one other person in this house. Only one direction from which it could have come.
Still disoriented, she lit the candle on the nightstand, wrapped herself in a shawl, and tiptoed upstairs. The voice, a thin, cracked voice belonging to an old woman, was fading into quiet, half-smothered sobs. Amy followed it up to a small, slant-ceilinged room in the attic, which its owner had humbly insisted on taking in spite of her master's protests that she deserved better, and knocked on the door.
"Affery?" she whispered. "May I come in?"
A gasp of surprise, and possibly embarrassment, was her only answer.
She opened the door anyway. The flickering light of her candle revealed the frail shape of her housekeeper, sitting up in bed with her face pressed into her drawn-up knees, her gray-blond hair like dry wisps of straw. When she looked up, her pale blue eyes looked washed out, as if she had been weeping all the color out of them for the past forty years. She squeezed them shut again, flinching from the sudden light.
"Oh, Miss Amy!" she croaked. "Did I wake you?"
'Miss Amy' was what Affery had taken to calling her recently, as opposed to the 'Little Dorrit' who had been her co-worker at the old house. As for the name 'Mrs. Clennam', Affery would forever associate that name with the cold, forbidding lady in the wheelchair who had been her first mistress, and she could not bring herself to use it for anyone else.
"Beg your pardon, ma'am, I didn't mean to …I was only dreamin'." She shuddered, her body betraying all the terror her words could not.
"I know," Amy murmured, taking a slow step closer, just enough to illuminate the room a little further. "It's all right, Affery. I … I have them too, you know. Nightmares. I believe everybody does."
She thought of Arthur, holding her close at night, whispering to her about his love-starved childhood and the mocking ghost of Rigaud. She thought of her father's dying hallucinations in Italy. She thought of her own nightmares, beating uselessly against the iron bars fencing in her loved ones, powerless to set them free. The candle flickered just a little more in her trembling hands.
"They are only dreams," she said firmly, to convince herself as much as Affery. "They cannot hurt you."
"But what if they could?" The old woman shook her head and let out a sob. "What if Jeremiah comes back to punish me? You didn't know him, ma'am, not really, you've no idea what he's capable of! If he finds me … if … " She trailed off into incoherence, rocking back and forth, holding her blanket over her face as if to shut out the horror of her memories.
Amy remembered the first time she had met that horribly mismatched couple; Flintwinch had had a way of shoving his wife out of the way like a rag doll, snarling at her from behind, holding his fist into her face. She couldn't recall if he had ever actually struck Affery, but the suggestion of it had always been there, every bit as damaging to the frail little woman's nerves as the reality would have been.
Suggestion. Like Blandois – Rigaud – running his black-gloved finger along Amy's cheek, smiling, leaving it to her imagination what he would have done to her if only he had the opportunity.
Flintwinch was gone for good, of that she was certain. With his brother gone, Mrs. Clennam dead and a stolen fortune in his hands, he had no reason to return. Another employer might have told Affery not to be foolish, that her terrors were all in her mind, but not Amy. She understood them all too well.
"If he ever should return, which is unlikely, Arthur and I will protect you." Amy sat down cautiously on the bed, picked up the edge of the blanket, and gave a gentle tug. It slipped away to reveal Affery's tear-streaked face. "No harm will ever come to you in this house, I promise."
"Oh, Miss Amy … " Affery rewarded her with a tiny, trembling smile.
Amy smiled back and, following the caretaker's instinct that had grown in her over the many years of looking after her father, she brushed some damp wisps of hair away from Affery's face. For once, the old housekeeper did not flinch away from being touched.
"Is there anything I can bring you, Affery? Some water perhaps?"
If it was possible to look exhausted, grateful, and scandalized at the same time, in that moment Affery did. Her pale eyes went wide and she wiped her face with more energy than she had shown during the whole conversation.
"Thank you kindly," she said, "But no. It's not your place to wait on your own servant, especially a broken-down old thing like me I ain't worth that, Miss Amy. You know I ain't."
"You are," Amy retorted. "You forget that I have been in service myself. If knowing my place means turning away from a fellow creature in distress, I never shall learn to do so." She was not usually given to irony, but she smiled wryly now at the thought of her former governess in Venice. If only Mrs. General could see her now! "As for you, Affery, don't you know that you are a great deal more than a housekeeper to my husband and me?"
The puzzled frown on Affery's face made her sad; she really did not seem to know.
"Arthur remembers you as the saving grace of his childhood," Amy continued. "If not for you, he might never have learned the meaning of kindness. If not for you, the man I love might not exist today."
The man she loved and the father of her unborn child. Her hand went involuntarily to her still-flat stomach. God willing, this child would never have to endure what Arthur had.
"But Mr. Arthur was the finest little lad as ever breathed," said Affery, with an almost reproachful shrug, as if stating something completely obvious. "How could I not do everything I could for him? Anyone in my place would've done the same."
"I'm sure they would," agreed Amy, trying not to show her faint amusement at hearing her tall, strong husband referred to as a 'little lad'. Then, thinking of him, she sighed.
"You miss him too, don't you, ma'am?" said Affery, patting Amy's hand with her own hot, damp one. "Though it was you that talked him into going in the first place."
Arthur, concerned about his wife's delicate condition, had been reluctant to travel with Daniel at first. It was only Daniel's blunt admission that he would be lost without his friend's business acumen, combined with Amy's assurance that their friends would take excellent care of her (Flora, the Meagleses, Harriet and even Pet were well within call) that had finally convinced Arthur to look after his interests in Russia. Still, she waited every day for his letters, and every night she imagined she was back in his arms.
"He will come back to us," she said. "There will be no fifteen-year absences this time."
The two women shared a look of mutual sympathy, drawn together by their love for the man who had saved them both from loneliness and despair. It was not only Affery who would sleep more soundly tonight, knowing that a friend was only one flight of steps away.
"God bless you both," whispered Affery, her eyes filling with much happier tears than those of a few moments ago. "And bless the day you came to Clennam House."
"It was certainly a blessed day for me." Amy stood up, smoothed the blankets, and set her candle down on washstand before she left. "You need that more than I do," she said, in response to Affery's look of protest. "Good night, Affery."
"Good night, Miss Amy dear."