A Dark Dividing (14 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
The child was watching us closely. Then it said, ‘But you want to know things about us as well, don’t you? That’s why most grown-ups come here. We know that.’
‘There might be a little baby we would need to bring here to live.’ But even as I said it I already knew I was not letting Maisie’s child come here, not if I had to adopt it myself and defy Edward and his mother.
‘Oh, a bastard,’ said the child, in a dismissive, is-that-all, voice. ‘They bring lots of those to live here.’
The off-hand use of the word and the tacit comprehension of its meaning ought not to have shocked me, but it did. I said, ‘Are there many children living here?’
‘Sometimes there’s more than others. Some get taken away, though.’
‘To new homes?’ Because if Mortmain was, after all, an honest-dealing place where orphans were found respectable places—
‘Homes?’ said the child scornfully. ‘No.’ It was nearly, but not quite, Nah. ‘Where’ve you been living, missus? When we’re old enough it’s the men take us.’
‘The men? I don’t understand—’ Oh don’t be naif, Charlotte, of course you do!
The child was regarding me with pitying contempt. ‘It’s for the places in London. They buy children for them. Don’t you know anything?’
Brothels. Houses of ill-repute. But children? Yes, children, Charlotte. You knew it went on, didn’t you?
I had known, of course I had. But I said, disbelievingly, ‘People come here to—to take little girls away with them?’
‘Not only girls.’
‘Boys are taken as well?’
‘Some men like boys, didn’t you know that?’
I let that one pass. ‘But can’t you do anything about it?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name—?’
‘Robyn.’ It was a boy’s name, but from the way she said it I realized that this was the feminine version. This was a little girl whose hair ought to be in ring-lets, and who ought to be dressed in ruffles and laces, instead of this horrid no-colour, no-shape garb.
‘Then, Robyn, isn’t there someone here that you could tell? About the men who come?’
‘Who would we tell?’ Again the note of scorn. ‘They’re all in the dodge anyway. So we don’t trust anyone. Specially not visitors.’ This last was said with contempt.
‘You can trust me. Truly you can. Perhaps I could do something to help you.’
She looked at me thoughtfully, as if trying to decide how far we could be trusted. I thought she assessed my outfit and its probable cost as well, and I was absurdly relieved that although I was still wearing mourning for my babies, I had put on a plain merino wool costume of dark grey that afternoon, with a very unassuming hat. (‘Always dress suitably for the occasion, Charlotte, never embarrass those less fortunate than yourself.’)
‘Anyway, we’ve found our own way of dealing with the Pigs,’ said the child.
Pigs. Most children think pigs are rather sweet creatures—curly-tailed and daintily and pinkly fat like the fables and the fairytales—but when the child, Robyn, said the word it was filled with such loathing that I saw the men through her eyes: I saw their mean little pig-eyes and snouty faces. They would tramp through Mortmain’s vastness, slyly pointing with thick fingers. We’ll take this one today and that one, and those two we’ll leave for a couple more years until they’re ripe…
‘What do you mean, “deal with them”?’ I said. ‘How do you deal with them?’
Again the assessing look. It was extraordinarily piercing and very disturbing. For a moment I thought she was not going to answer, and then she seemed to come to some kind of decision. She said, ‘All right. I’ll show you. But you must promise never to tell.’
I looked at Maisie, and said, ‘I promise.’ Maisie nodded, too afraid to speak, and I said, ‘We both promise. You have our solemn word.’
‘That’s not enough. You got to promise on the thing you hold most sacred in the world. That’s what we do in here. Usually it’s our mothers if we can remember them, or a brother or sister. You got to promise on something like that.’
Without hesitation, I said, ‘Then I promise on the memory of my two babies who died. I promise on the memories of Viola and Sorrel that I’ll never tell.’ I looked at her. ‘That is the most sacred and most precious promise I can possibly make, Robyn.’
‘All right. I believe you. But first,’ said the odd little creature, ‘we have to spit on our hands and press them together.’
It was a childish ritual, but Robyn somehow imbued it with such solemnity that I found myself doing what she asked, and making Maisie do it as well. After we had all spat and clasped hands, Robyn said, ‘That means that you can’t ever betray me and I can’t ever betray you. We’re friends now, and we’re bound together for the rest of our lives.’
Bound together. I stood staring down at the odd ragged child with the huge intense eyes, and thought: so that is now four—no, five—people to whom I have become bound in the course of my life: I am forgetting Edward, and certainly I am bound to Edward—we were bound together in matrimony two years ago in the church across the fields behind Mortmain.
And I am bound to Viola and Sorrel, inextricably and for ever and no words are needed for that.
And Floy. No words are needed for that, either. Because if I am bound to anyone in the entire history of the world, I am certainly bound to Floy.
H
ARRY HAD NOT read more than three pages of
The Ivory Gate
before he realized that Philip Fleury had been an extremely good writer. Fleury had the ability to paint vivid, evocative word-pictures, and also an extraordinary ability to slide inside his characters’ minds, scraping out their inner emotions, and then offering those emotions to the reader with a kind of uncaring arrogance. Take it or leave it, but this is how it was.
It was necessary to turn the pages of the book with caution because they were so extremely old and brittle, but despite this the story and the people—particularly Fleury’s central heroine—came strongly up from the musty paper and took on substance.
As a baby, the heroine had been summarily taken to one of the dreadful institutions that scarred Victorian and Edwardian English life: as far as Harry could tell it was a cross between a workhouse and an orphanage, with the worst characteristics of both. He glanced at the publication date, but there was nothing about ‘originally published…’, only a publishers’ note to say that this edition had been printed in 1916.
The child—her name was Tansy—had been taken to the institution shortly after she was born. Philip Fleury made a reference to her birth being ‘shameful in the eyes of the pious, fraudulent world’, and just as Harry was thinking this bland euphemism struck a discordant note against the image he had begun to form of Fleury, on the next line Fleury added, ‘A love-child. By any other name, a bastard,’ and Harry relaxed, because for some inexplicable reason, whatever else he wanted Philip Fleury—Floy—to be, he did not want him to be a prig.
But Floy was not a prig. So far was he from being a prig that, like Charles Dickens fifty or sixty years before him, he must have stirred up a good deal of resentment by his graphic descriptions of workhouse conditions in general, and by his scathing denouncement of the beadle-bureaucracy that had held sway. He must also have disturbed a great many of his readers by his accounts of the sufferings endured by the residents of his own mythical workhouse-cum-orphanage. Harry found it harrowing to read the book, but despite this he could not put it down. You were a spell-weaver, Floy, he thought. What we’d call today a page-turner. My God, I hope you got proper acknowledgement of your work. I hope you made a fortune out of it. I hope that ‘C’ and Viola and Sorrel, whoever ‘C’ and Viola and Sorrel were, got a share in it.
Floy’s story was woven out of very dark strands indeed—at least, its opening was—and the small Tansy’s story was perforce set in a dark landscape. From the age of four she was made to pick oakum in what was called the Women’s Workshop, which meant unravelling old lengths of rope in order to scrape out the tar. She lived and slept with the adult women, and ate with them in the long, wooden-floored refectory; most days the food consisted of thin gruel and occasionally salt pork, and coarse bread, with water to drink. I still hope you made a fortune, Floy, thought Harry, but I’m starting to hope you’ll give Tansy a happy ending. Or were you one of the morbid writers of your era, immersing your readers in angst and weltschmerz and whatnot, without any glimmer of hope or happiness at the end of the tunnel?
Tansy’s early life was not precisely unhappy though, mostly since she had never known any other way of living. But her creator was unhappy for her, and the reader was unhappy for her as well. Harry, able to visualize all too clearly the small docile figure with its shorn hair and shapeless clothing, had to keep reminding himself that this was fiction, for God’s sake, it was a story that had existed in the imagination of a man who had lived nearly a hundred years ago. But the setting for Tansy’s story was not fiction, and some of the players were probably not fiction, either.
What came most strongly from the dry, brittle pages was the atmosphere of a child’s fear and despair, and with it, the kind of surreal, Salvador Dali images that might have scalded a six-year-old’s mind. The women who lived in the workhouse… Their faces were like melted tallow candles, Tansy said. As if they had got too near to the stove, and their faces had run a bit. This puzzled Harry for a moment, but then he understood that the lack of fresh air and the unrelentingly hard work would make the women pallid and lifeless, and that they were most probably lumpily fat from the unhealthy food they would be given.
There were overseers—hard-faced women—who walked around making sure everyone worked hard enough. Tansy said they had fingers like whips to sting you with, and if you saw them in the dark you might find that their eyes were red, like rats’ eyes were red in the dark. So she knew what rats looked like in the dark, thought Harry, appalled and pitying. And then with an exasperated shake of his own mental processes—oh, for goodness’ sake, this is
fiction
! She never actually existed, this odd, shorn-headed child with the bright, original imagination.
The grown-ups who Tansy sometimes sat with to work or eat had talked about something called the Speenhamland System, doing so furtively and fearsomely, stopping at once if any of the rat-eyed overseers or the beadle came along. Tansy did not know what the Speenhamland System was, but there was a man who had explained it to them all one night in the dormitory when they were supposed to be asleep. It was something about a village called Speen, where some men called magistrates had said that poor people should be given more help and more sympathy.
Tansy had still not really understood, but she had listened because it was quite exciting to be having this secret meeting with the grown-ups, and also the man who talked to them looked a bit like you imagined the devil would look when he had put on a human disguise in order to tempt you. The children all knew about the devil because of church every Sunday, and because of the Bible class with Mrs Beadle’s sister on Sunday afternoons, when there were sometimes biscuits given out. The devil could be very cunning indeed, so you had to keep a sharp look-out. But no one thought it was very likely that the devil would bother to put on his man-disguise and get himself shut away with paupers, so it was probably all right to listen to the dark-haired man. He said words differently because he had lived in another country, which was interesting. He said they should all band together and insist on the Speenhamland System being operated here; it was the law and their right, he said, and he wanted them to stage a rebellion, but when it came to it nobody was brave enough. Shortly after this the man vanished, and Tansy never found out what had happened to him.
Sometimes her friends, the other children, vanished as well. Somebody said it was because when you were nine you could be sent to work in the mills and that this was where the children were taken, but somebody else said, in a whisper that made Tansy feel very frightened indeed, No, it was not the mills at all, it was because the pig-men took them. Tansy had seen the pig-men; they had thick, coarse skins, shiny with grease from too-rich food, and small mean eyes, and fat hands with rings on, and everyone knew you had to keep out of their way if you possibly could.
The pig-men carried the children off to London to the stews. That was why you had to keep out of their way if you could, although one day the children would do what the dark, devil-man had said, and they would fight back at the pig-men. But nobody could see how that could be done, and even if a way could be found, nobody was really brave enough to do anything.
But Tansy thought that one day somebody would be brave enough, or perhaps it was simply that one day somebody would be frightened enough. She thought that if it came to it—if it was ever her turn and the turn of her friends to be carried off to the stews—she might be sufficiently frightened to fight the pig-men. She thought she might hate them enough to even kill them.
She did not entirely understand about the stews, because stews meant something you ate, and that meant that her friends were being taken away for people to eat them in a hot, savoury stew. She could not think of a way to cheat the pig-men and neither could any of her friends, so in the meantime she made a vow—a proper solemn vow, kneeling down at the side of her bed and praying to Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look on me a little child—that she would never let the pig-men take her away to be put in the stews. She promised to be good for ever and ever if Jesus would make sure that never happened, and she asked Jesus to help her and her friends to find a way to escape if the pig-men ever came to take them to London and the stews.
The thought of somehow being able to escape was like a strong light pulling her forwards.
