Home for Christmas (6 page)

Robert had been riding Copper, his chestnut pony, and had almost trotted over her until she’d popped up out of the grass in front of him.

The pony had shied and Robert had ended up beside her in the grass.

Footsteps pounded up the stairs. The smell of violets came into the little bedroom along with her mother. Her mother closed the pine plank door tightly behind her. Her expression was tense, the little cameo brooch at her throat moving in time with nervous swallowing, as though she were rehearsing the words she wanted to say.

‘Agnes Stacey, you were rude to that young man. Harry likes you. He’s always liked you. I think you should go down immediately and apologise.’

Agnes sighed and cupped her face in her hands.

‘I wouldn’t want to lead him on. He’s not the one for me and …’

‘Don’t say that you’re not curious about the picture house. I know my own daughter. I know you’d love to go.’

‘I don’t want to go with him. I don’t want to build up his hopes. I won’t ever marry him. I’m going to marry Master Robert. I think I’ll ask Lydia if she’d like to go to the pictures.’

‘Lydia?’

‘The doctor’s daughter. I can telephone her.’

Her mother did what she always did when she was agitated and not quite sure what to do. She began moving swiftly around the room, rearranging ornaments, straightening pictures, opening a drawer, tidying it, slamming it shut again and moving on to the next.

She shook her head before peering into the water pitcher sitting in its matching bowl on the washstand.

‘This room needs a thorough spring clean,’ Sarah murmured, mostly to herself.

Agnes sighed and clutched her chin more tightly. ‘I have to have feelings for someone and I don’t have any for Harry.’

‘Think carefully, Agnes.’ Her mother’s gaze was intent and her brow furrowed with concern.

‘I have thought about it. I only have feelings for Robert.’

Her mother spun round to face her.

‘Well, you can get that idea out of your head, young lady. It will do no good you setting your sights on the likes of him. He’s of a different class. He’s gentry and we’re working people. Nothing is ever going to change that unless the world itself changes. Get it into your head that the highest you’re likely to achieve is ending up as a cook like me. That is all you’ll ever be to Robert. Just a servant.’

She sounded angry, breathless and her neck was flushing red above the high collar of her cream lace blouse.

‘That’s not fair!’

‘You’ll learn as you get older that the world isn’t fair. That’s the way it is.’

Her mother turned from brushing away dust with her bare hand, dragged her off the bed and on to her feet.

Agnes winced. The redness of her mother’s neck had travelled up to her face. Her expression was unreadable and oddly guarded and when she began to speak, she drew in her breath as though she were afraid of the words she had to say.

‘You’re not listening.’ She delivered her words slowly and precisely. ‘You have to understand that he won’t ever marry the likes of you. He won’t. You should know that. I know he won’t. I know it for sure because …’

Sarah Stacey, Agnes’s mother, stopped herself from saying anything more and turned her face towards the window, seemingly watching the brisk wind that was blowing dead leaves up and over the rooftops.

She hated to disappoint the daughter she loved so much, but it had to be; not that she could tell Agnes the whole truth. A dreadful secret lay behind her warning, a secret few were privy to and she had sworn never to reveal. The truth was Sarah Stacey had difficulty dealing with Agnes; Sir Avis dealt with her far better.

‘She’s just like my Aunt Peridot,’ he was fond of saying to Sarah. ‘She was a wild one when she was young. So was I, come to that,’ he’d added with the boyish grin that had first seduced her.

Sarah Stacey knew Sir Avis far better than most. She knew he’d been a wild young man, an out and out womaniser and pursuer of pleasure. Sarah had been one of his pleasures, but there had been others, quite a few others.

‘I don’t believe anything you say,’ shouted Agnes as she bolted for the door.

There was a swishing of layers of petticoats as her mother headed after her.

‘Come back here, young lady. Come back here this minute,’ she shouted.

The vibration from the slammed door shook loose plaster from the ceiling.

Sighing, Sarah sank on to a chair and rubbed her aching forehead with her long, white fingers.

She eyed the closed door. It had not been easy bringing Agnes up, and not at all easy deciding to keep her. Sir Avis had been good about it all. Few would have been so generous to a servant like her. Women who got pregnant by the master of the house usually had a bleak future. They lost their position and the income that went with it. Some ended up in workhouses, some on the street. The lucky few were paid a fee for their silence and were taken in by their families.

Sarah had been very lucky. Sir Avis had genuinely cared for her, and paid for her lying-in at a handsome nursing home in the country. He’d also had her back to work for him. Sir Avis was genuinely fond of her just as she was of him. They were closer than many a man and wife no matter their class or status in life.

Sarah fiddled with the cameo brooch at her throat, gazing out to where a blood-red setting sun barely peered over the rooftops. She couldn’t help feeling unnerved. Agnes was no longer a child. The time was coming when she would have to be told the truth.

Sarah looked down at her fidgeting fingers. There had been instances when she could have told, but her courage had failed her.

On her daughter’s birth certificate, in the space reserved for the name of the father, were the condemning words,
Father Unknown
. There was no Tom Stacey. Sir Avis had promised her nothing. ‘I cannot even acknowledge the child as mine whilst Julieta is alive,’ he’d said to her. ‘Should my wife die, then I will reconsider.’

He never spoke of marriage, but then he wouldn’t. Despite his professing to be a modern, forward-thinking man, he knew society would shun both him and possibly his family if he married his cook.

Unfortunately for Sarah, Julieta appeared in the very best of health. It seemed there was nobody to place his name in that box marked
Father Unknown.
Yet she desperately wanted there to be a name, even if it meant marrying someone willing to insert their name, even if they were not Agnes’s natural father. So far, George Jarman was the only candidate worth considering. However, she’d got used to being unattached – at least in the accepted meaning of the term.

The last rays of the setting sun finally disappeared. Sarah sat and took deep breaths. It had hurt her to quash any aspirations her daughter had towards Master Robert, but very necessary. Firstly it was Sarah’s dearest wish that her daughter should benefit from her own experience. Secondly, she was privy to a very dark secret she had sworn never to reveal.

Sir Avis freely admitted that he loved women. The fact was that they loved him too. He could charm the haughtiest woman off her feet and into his bed. Lady Julieta, his wife, had been one of many; a vibrant, black-haired creature, daughter of an American industrialist of Hispanic descent sent to England to find herself a titled husband.

Besides her beauty, her fortune had been the key to Avis’s heart. However, it had not altered his habits; one woman was never enough.

‘But I will never share a house with any woman save you. But then, you are the best cook I’ve ever had,’ he’d said to Sarah.

As usual, she had swallowed the stinging comment, accepting that cook and mistress was all she would ever be to him.

She loved him with all her heart, but had no wish for her daughter to fall into the same trap, although with Robert there was no question of them marrying.

Sarah was no fool and was in no doubt as to who Robert’s father really was. She’d seen Sir Avis exiting Lady Jacintha’s bedroom whilst her husband, Avis’s brother, was still in Australia. There had been no issue up until that stage, no son to carry on the name or daughter to marry well. Robert had been born almost nine months later.

In time, Robert would marry a young woman of his class and approved by his family. Agnes would find somebody of her own class to marry and the secret would stay a secret.

During winter, it was the duty of the student nurses to crack the ice on the water used to wash the patients and to add a little hot water to the bowl.

‘Just enough to take away the chill. Too hot is as bad as too cold,’ instructed their matron, a heavy woman named Sister Bertha who was a deaconess in the Lutheran church as well as being a highly qualified nurse.

The women’s wards occupied the east end of the building, the men’s wards at the other end. In between were the children’s wards, Lydia’s particular favourite. At the very far end of the east wing was the nursery for the few new-borns that were born at the hospital.

Lydia had asked why the new-borns were not next door to the children’s wards. Sister Bertha had drawn herself up to her loftiest and widest before informing her that small children carry infection and were best kept away from babies.

‘Babies have little resistance to infection during their early years. We must do the best we can to help them achieve some immunity before they go home to mix with older children.’

The main thing Lydia learned in those early days was that the regime at the hospital was strict, but their attention to detail and their attitude to modern medicine was quite astonishing.

In order to retain what she learned, Lydia didn’t just study, she kept notes on her patients, sticking them into an exercise book for future reference.

One of the other nurses asked her whether she would have a bonfire of those notes once she’d passed her finals.

Lydia shook her head, her eyes sparkling and a faint smile on her wide pink mouth.

‘They might come in useful. I might need to refer to them in future. Isolate infection. That’s what Sister Bertha says.’

The nurse, Sally Hoffman, shrugged. ‘You are the most dedicated student here. I’m only going to be a nurse until I marry.’

Lydia laughed. ‘I might marry too, but still, if I have children it pays to know how to keep them healthy. Whooping cough, measles and chicken pox can kill the very young. If I can learn something about isolation, I will.’

Although founded by Lutherans in the nineteenth century ostensibly to cater for the German community in the East End of London, the German hospital offered treatment to anyone.

One of the deaconesses, Sister Ursula, was a midwife who made home visits. Only the more difficult births were hospitalised, mothers preferring to give birth at home.

Lydia felt extremely privileged to be chosen to accompany her on a home visit. This was the sort of thing she wanted to do, reaching out in the wider community, to those crammed into the narrow, damp tenements in the East End of London.

Sister Ursula flitted around, adding the things they would need to her bag. To Lydia’s surprise, forceps were included. Sister Ursula noticed her surprise, keeping up her speed of preparation as she explained their presence.

‘I know that only doctors are supposed to use forceps except in dire emergency. I have a mother who has been in labour for twenty-four hours. The father is worried. It would be good if both the forceps and you came with me.’

Sister Ursula stopped tipping things into her bag to eye her sceptically, almost as though she might or might not tip her into the bag too.

‘I hope you will be up to this. The place we are going to is not Kensington. It is not pretty and not very clean.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Lydia declared, aware that Sister Ursula was studying her, though in truth she had visualised a cosy bedroom, a mother’s joy on bringing a baby into the world.

Sister Ursula was weighing up whether her confidence might dissolve once faced with dire reality. Finally, she nodded. ‘All right. We will now go. Come along.’

It was no surprise, of course, that most mothers gave birth at home, usually attended by a midwife who might or might not be qualified. Some mothers to be did not send for someone qualified, but preferred ‘a woman that knew’, someone from their own community, which might mean the next street, or could just as easily mean of the same nationality, someone who spoke their language. In their hour of need, they didn’t care about the law that had been passed in 1902 specifically stating that only qualified midwives should attend a birth. The habits of centuries were hard to break – together with the financial considerations.

The house they went to was at the very end of a series of squat-fronted houses in a narrow street, squashed up against the wall of a railway viaduct. At the passing of a train, the windows of the house rattled in their frames and steam fell in thick clouds.

Ragged children stopped playing with marbles or at hopscotch, and followed on behind, asking them if they had any sweets or a penny to spare.

Women, their faces etched with the lines of poverty, their bodies worn out with too many pregnancies and too many mouths to feed, came out on to doorsteps, nodding an acknowledgement and warning the children to leave them alone.

Even so, Lydia glanced nervously over her shoulder.

‘Take no notice. All will be well,’ Ursula assured her. ‘They are poor but they respect and appreciate what we do for them.’

The moment they entered the house, Lydia knew that the smell of poverty would stay with her for the rest of her life. Bare boards, boiled potatoes, clothes worn for at least a week and washed in carbolic, ash smouldering in the fireplace, and children with that peculiar smell of sticky jam mixed with peed pants.

The father excused himself, telling them he was on night shift at the docks and had to get some sleep before he clocked on.

‘If I get picked,’ he told them.

Lydia didn’t know what that meant and this must have shown on her face.

‘The dockers have to stand in a row and wait to be selected,’ explained Sister Ursula. ‘Sometimes they are picked and get to earn some money, and sometimes they are not. It depends if your face fits; if the ganger favours you.’