Dorothy Eden (22 page)

“Little monster ain’t you,” she said good-humouredly.

Florence, a little behind in the crowd, thought Edwin shrieked again, but this time it was Hilda.

“Mother of Mercy!” she was crying in a distraught voice. “The baby’s gone!”

It was true. The perambulator was empty, as if Daisy, not quite three months’ old, but very bright for her age, had clambered out and walked away.

Hilda might be inclined to go into hysterics, but Lizzie was practical and quick-thinking. She saw a policeman on the edge of the crowd and pushed over to him with her extraordinary story.

“The gypsies has stolen the baby!” she gasped. “Come quick, officer.”

“Was the child left unattended?” the policeman asked, as he examined the perambulator, the cosy nest of blankets, the hollow in the pillow where Daisy’s head had lain.

“We was only watching Punch and Judy,” Lizzie said. “We only had our backs turned for five minutes.”

“Time enough, it seems,” said the policeman. “And what makes you think it’s gypsies who have stolen your child?”

“She isn’t my child, officer. She’s Miss Daisy Overton from the big house in Heath Street. I’m only the nursemaid. This is Miss Florence and Master Edwin. They’ll tell you we had Miss Daisy five minutes ago. And it’s always gypsies that steal babies, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily, madam.”

Lizzie gave a high-pitched giggle at being called madam, and the policeman waved back the crowd collecting curiously.

“Keep back, if you please. Now did anyone here see anything suspicious, such as someone making off with a baby out of this vehicle?”

Florence thought she heard a faint little cackle of laughter, an echo of the Punch and Judy show. Then an old man, very raggedly dressed and dirty, the sort of person Florence had always been strongly warned against, said he had seen a young woman carrying a baby. “A nice decent-looking young ’un,” he said. “But it looked like her own babby she was cuddlin’.”

“Where did she go?”

The old man pointed a disgracefully dirty finger.

“Towards village.”

The cold winter sun shone through a mist on the innocent Heath. Florence was shivering, her feet were frozen. Hilda had overcome her hysterics but was still beyond speech. It was left to Lizzie, goggle-eyed but reasonably calm, to obey the policeman’s orders and take the children home.

He himself was going to wheel the empty perambulator. He looked very silly, such a big man, in his policeman’s helmet, pushing a pram. He was taking it down to the station, he said. He or one of his colleagues would be round to Overton House in a little while. Lizzie was to tell the children’s parents to be available.

“The master’s abroad,” Lizzie said. “The mistress is at the shop.”

“Then get her home, my good woman.”

Dixon said he would drive hell-for-leather with the terrible news. Miss Daisy stolen! It wasn’t to be believed. Who had been careless, Lizzie or Hilda, or both of them?

But who was to think you could lose a baby in broad daylight. Cook and Annie and Hawkins had never heard the likes.

“It can’t be gypsies. That’s just Lizzie’s imagination. It’s a deliberate kidnapping,” said Miss Sloane, who seemed to know about such bizarre matters. “There’ll be ransom money demanded. This isn’t a rich house, such as the Duke of Devonshire’s, for instance, but it’s rich to a lot of people.”

Miss Sloane had what Cook disapprovingly called “a touch of socialism”, whatever that was. Florence found that her numb toes and fingers had prevented her ability to think. She only wanted to cry for dear sweet vanished Daisy, though that would do no good at all, Miss Sloane said in her dry unsympathetic way.

The first thing Mamma said, when she burst out of the carriage and ran indoors, was that Papa was not to be telegraphed for. Not yet, at least. Daisy would be found in a matter of hours and Papa would have been worried for nothing.

Then she was shut in the library with two policemen for a long time, and when she came out she said briskly to the servants who were gathered in the hall, “We mustn’t be too worried. We’re perfectly certain Daisy is being well-cared for by—by this woman. We don’t think it’s a kidnapping for money, just the act of some unbalanced person.”

“Why would this woman take
our
baby?” asked Cook indignantly.

“She’s probably childless, poor thing. Some women get a little strange about that. It’s good of you all to be concerned, but now get back to your work. I have every confidence in the police. Baby will be home before night.”

She was upset, though, for all her pretended calm. Her cheeks were bright pink, her eyes had an uncomfortable staring look. She saw Florence and Edwin because she spoke to them, but, Florence knew all she was seeing, really, was that woman running off with Daisy in her arms.

“Miss Sloane, take the children to the nursery and read to them, or play games with them. Lizzie, you go, too. Turn on the lights. It will be dark, soon.” A visible shudder swept over her, as if she were imagining poor little Daisy outdoors in the chilly misty dusk. Then she took Florence’s hand and motioned her towards Miss Sloane. “Run along, dear. Do as I ask.”

Her hand on Florence’s was stone cold, like a dead person’s. Like Grandmamma Overton’s, which Nanny Blair had made Florence touch before the coffin was closed.

Fear shivered through her. She began to sob, saying in a loud grieved voice that she wanted Miss Medway, it wasn’t fair that Miss Medway whom she dearly loved had gone away.

“B-baby would n-never have been stolen if Miss M-Medway was here,” she stuttered.

“Be quiet!” Florence jumped at the anger in Mamma’s voice. She obediently snuffled into silence. “Such nonsense!” said Mamma. “Go to the nursery at once.”

Later Doctor Lovegrove, wearing his familiar frock coat and tall hat, came into the firelit nursery. Someone must have fetched him. He felt Florence’s forehead, looked at the wreck of the battlefield where Edwin had been conducting a screaming battle, and said in his deep jovial voice, “I think small soothing draughts for you two whipper-snappers. A couple of drops of this in a glass of milk, Lizzie. Give ’em pleasant dreams.”

“And Baby?” Florence asked quiveringly.

“Oh, Baby’s been found, didn’t you know? She’s fine and dandy.”

It was after midnight, but Beatrice was still sitting in the library struggling over the letter that must be written to William.

She would dearly like to have kept silent about the whole dreadful affair, but it wasn’t possible. Her husband must come home, the police officer had said. He would probably be needed at the trial.

The trial!

Young woman charged with kidnapping baby with felonious intent…

She had protested that she had only wanted the baby for a night, a few hours even. She had intended to return it unharmed. No, she had no children of her own. She was unmarried.

Mary Medway’s tragic eyes glittering in her luminously white face came between Beatrice and the letter she was attempting to write.

Even in those dire straits Mary had kept to her peculiar code of honour. She had not betrayed William or given her child the brand of illegitimacy.

Beatrice guessed that she was simply torn to pieces by loneliness and longing. Her reason had given way.

But in the silent library, with the fire burned to ashes, Beatrice gripped the pen in determined fingers, and her mouth tightened. Here was no room for softness. The girl was mischievous, a felon, perhaps dangerous because of her unbalanced mental state.

She must be committed to an institution simply to save herself from some further crime.

Daisy, fortunately, had suffered nothing more serious than an overdue meal. She had been yelling angrily from hunger when found.

“The police were quite remarkably efficient in discovering where Miss Medway had taken our baby,” she wrote to William. “She had been seen hurrying down Downshire Hill, and had gone into one of the small cottages at the bottom where she had taken a room. Several people had noticed her, since it is unusual to see a woman running with a baby in her arms. She wasn’t as clever as one would have expected her to be, but perhaps it was scarcely surprising, in her confused mental state. Her one idea seemed to be to get Daisy to herself for a little while. It is all very sad and I am unutterably grieved at having to inflict this pain on you. However, it will soon be over…

It was not, of course. It was a wound that seemed as if it would never heal.

Mary Medway was committed to Holloway prison for eighteen months, sentence to be reduced to one year on good conduct.

She was safely out of the way temporarily, Beatrice told herself, and one could only try not to be vicious and wish that she were removed permanently. Transported to Australia, or something.

Because no one except Daisy had been quite the same since that disastrous day on the Heath.

Nothing now would induce Florence to watch a Punch and Judy show, she was even nervous of going on the Heath for a walk, and clung to Lizzie, Lizzie said, like a regular limpet. She had never been a demonstrative child, but now she didn’t seem to care for anybody, and was even jealous of innocent Baby. Why wasn’t it her who had been stolen, she demanded, not a new baby whom Miss Medway didn’t even know.

Edwin, who had never cared for discipline, grew more rumbustious as Florence became quieter, and it was obvious that he would have to be sent off to school in the near future. Seven was not a bit too young, his father said. Besides, he was backward at his lessons and one assumed he would respond better to a master than to Miss Sloane. It seemed that he could scarcely read yet, which was a deplorable state of affairs. Though Lizzie said he peered too closely at the pages, as if he couldn’t see properly.

William, after the trial in the Old Bailey which had lasted only a few hours, to be sure, but which had seemed an eternity, had come down with a bad chest cold that later turned to pneumonia. He was dangerously ill, and in delirium kept calling out, “Don’t let her go down those stairs!” Beatrice knew all too well what he meant. He had had to watch the melancholy sight of Mary Medway going down the stairs from the dock, leading to the cells, after being sentenced.

She had had a fair trial, and the services of a brilliant defence counsel, who had been engaged and paid by William, a fact which Beatrice knew, though did not comment on.

She didn’t resent it. Indeed, it eased her own conscience. She, too, wanted to be absolutely fair.

Nursing her husband and coaxing him back to life and some sort of cheerfulness was an all-absorbing task that gave Beatrice no time to brood. Otherwise she might have wanted to curse Mary Medway for the unhappiness she had brought into their home.

All the same, with her usual uncomfortable honesty, she asked herself if the unhappiness were Miss Medway’s fault entirely.

Hadn’t the seeds been sown when she herself had so willingly and optimistically entered into a marriage of convenience, and then ruined its slender chance of success by being too over-bearing, too confident, too possessive? Was she the kind of woman who should have confined herself solely to a career in business, for which she was eminently well suited? Had her strong and determined nature had the effect of killing love rather than nurturing it? Trying to shape someone to her will—were the far-reaching effects even going to harm innocent children?

Those thoughts were too disastrous to believe. She simply could not allow herself to believe them.

What about her understanding, her tact, her patience, her lack of recrimination, her uncomplaining loneliness?

Were these qualities which simply did not appeal to a man? Or were they too obscured by her “Queen Bea” tendency?

She must take stock of herself as factually as she took stock in Bonnington’s. Unwanted characteristics must be thrown out, more appealing ones cultivated. She must mould herself into being the kind of woman who was acceptable to William’s sensitive romantic spirit.

At least she was humbly grateful that he did not seem to object to her nightly vigil at his bedside. Once he stretched out his hand and took hers in a hot dry clasp. He may still have been delirious, even though he murmured her name. But her natural ebullient optimism was rising. She took it as a sign of his not actually hating her. That was something. Under the circumstances, it was really a very great deal.

A
FTER PLUNGING INTO MOURNING
for the untimely death of Prince Albert, who had been betrothed to Princess Mary of Teck, only a year later Bonnington’s was bedecked in flags and bunting. It had been decided to marry the Princess Mary to Prince Albert’s younger brother George, and the handsome phlegmatic young lady had apparently made the adjustment without too much difficulty.

The bizarre situation suited Bonnington’s very well. They had been able to sell not only a lot of mourning clothes, top hats, black veils etcetera, but now had the more cheerful task of dressing wedding guests.

It was mid-summer, and just the weather for royal panoply, with the trees in Hyde Park a lush green and the lawns like watered silk. It had been a wonderful summer for roses. A deputation from Bonnington’s had been up very early that day and bought hundreds of blooms from the Covent Garden flower market with which to decorate the shop entrance. Mostly white, Beatrice had ordered. As symbols of purity, virginity, innocence and so on, though one wondered if the Princess was full of rapture about her second attempt at marriage into the British royal family.

Beatrice, with no intention of leaving the shop to join the thousands lining the route of the wedding procession, nevertheless felt a sympathetic rapport with the stiff shy royal bride. She would have liked to have told her that marriages of convenience could be a great success, although requiring patience and self-sacrifice. And, it need hardly be said, a dedicated and durable love.

Florence and Edwin had been permitted to go to watch the procession, so long as both Miss Sloane and Lizzie accompanied them and never let them out of their sight. Baby, naturally, was much too young although she had begun both walking and talking at a precociously early age.