Fingersmith

I am beaten very often, I believe in my first days there. How could it be otherwise? I have known lively habits, the clamour of the wards, the doting of twenty women; now the hush and regularity of my uncle's house drives me to fits and foaming tempers. I am an amiable child, I think, made wilfull by restraint. I dash cups and saucers from the table to the floor. I lie and kick my legs until the boots fly from my heels. I scream until my throat bleeds. My passions are met with punishments, each fiercer than the last. I am bound about the wrists and month. I am shut into lonely rooms, or into cupboards. One time—having overturned a candke and let the flame lap at the frienges of a chair until they smoke—I am taken by Mr Way into the park and carried, along a lonely path, to the ice house. I don't remember, now, the chill of the place; I remember the blocks of grey ice—I should have supposed them clear, like crystal—that tick in the wintry silence, like so many clocks. They tick for three hours. When Mrs Stiles comes to release me I have made myself a kind of nest and cannot be uncurled, and am as weak as if they had drugged me.