The Captain's Daughter (21 page)

May sat on the park bench rereading this epistle and shaking her head. Who’d have thought Celeste would make a run for it? How on earth could she be part of these mad schemes? Her husband would be on the next ship, demanding her return. What would poor Canon Forester make of it all? How could she, May, deceive him? But she must if Celeste was in danger. She owed Celeste her life.

Lichfield was all of aflutter organizing homes for Belgian refugees and putting up posters warning of spies. There were guards on the railway lines and troops on the march. She couldn’t cross the streets for convoys of lorries and wagons. The whole world was going mad and now Selwyn was off on training exercises and his brother Bertram was already overseas.

May pushed the baby up the hill towards the cathedral. It was a good place to cool off and just think. It had stood through many wars and troubled times; the tattered banners hanging from the ceilings of the side chapels spoke of conflicts. What should she do?

They paused by the marble effigy of
The Sleeping Children
tucked at the back of the Lady Chapel. The Robinson sisters were buried together. Eliza Jane’s nightdress had caught fire and she had died of her burns, while Marianne had caught a chill and had died soon after. How their parents must have grieved, as she grieved for Ellen; such a beautiful memorial glossing over such awful deaths. If only she had a place to mourn her lost loves. No one was ever alone with their troubles. Everyone had them, and now Celeste was having hers. You don’t walk past someone in trouble, she reasoned, especially a friend. Celeste had been a good friend to her when she had been more alone in the world than ever. She must now grant her friendship in return, no matter the cost. She must do what she could to help.

‘Do I have to stay?’ Roddy argued. Celeste knew he didn’t like Thursday afternoons. All the boys in his class were allowed to run home and play ball or ride on their bicycles round the Washington streets, but he had to change into his best knickerbocker suit, comb his hair and open the door to their guests. He hated standing there as a troop of girls, towering above him, flounced in one by one to be announced at the drawing-room door.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wood, how are you today? Good afternoon, Roderick.’ One by one they curtsied and bobbed in pretty dresses with ringlets in their hair, smelling of rosewater and lavender. He helped serve tea in china cups on a lacy tray and hand round sandwiches and then pass the cake stand on which sat dainty cakes, iced fancies, to be eaten with cake forks.

Each of the girls had rehearsed a poem to recite and Celeste helped them when they stumbled. He had to clap and look pleased.

‘Why do we have to do this?’ he asked time and time again.

‘This is how I earn my living now, teaching girls to refine their accents and learn deportment,’ she replied, ‘teaching girls to be ladies.’

‘But why do I have to stay and watch?’

‘Because you are such a help to me, Roddy. This is something we can do together and when the young ladies are here I still need to be keeping an eye on you.’

‘But Pa should do that,’ he argued.

‘Not Pa, Father . . . I told you before, we don’t live with Father any more, and won’t for a very long time.’

In truth, Roddy could hardly recall his father’s face. It was over a year since they’d fled south. At first they had lived in a room crammed with other women, sleeping on a camp bed on the floor until Celeste found them a little house to rent in D Street at the back of Capitol Hill close to Eastern Market. Roddy had to go to the public school down the road, coming home with bruises until one of her friends taught him some self-defence moves which had proved useful to her when they were cornered on suffrage marches.

They attended rallies but Celeste made sure they stood at the back and melted into the crowd when it got noisy or there were photographers taking snaps. Roddy liked walking down the Mall and standing outside the White House gates, crushed up with other kids. While the mothers were huddled together, they got to play ball or sneak off while all the shouting was going on.

But Thursdays were his bugbear, when she earned extra, taking girls through their paces so they walked and talked like little ladies, not the noisy cackling hens who jumped down the porch steps when they closed the door after the two hours of refinement they must endure.

It was through contacts at St John’s Episcopal Church that Celeste had had the idea of this class. Sometimes the President and his family came to worship. Newly married officers’ wives came in the evening to learn how to set the table with forks and knives, or how to greet people. Others came for elocution lessons, wanting to copy her accent. They liked the way the English spoke in a slow, quiet, deliberate manner, and everybody who came wanted to be seen as refined.

Had she done right to rob Roddy of a normal family life? They were poor now. She counted out the dollars and put some in the special tin: ‘For when we go home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘It’s across the ocean in a city called Lichfield.’

Home was where her brothers lived, she sighed, not smiling in their smart uniforms from her mantlepiece. Sometimes she’d pull out an atlas and point to the pink bits belonging to England. ‘One day we’ll go home, where we’ll be safe, Roddy, one day soon,’ she whispered.

Sometimes Celeste wept with tiredness. It was hard keeping up appearances. Eastern Market was smart, full of naval families living in elegant, expensive houses. She felt she was split in two, pretending to be a colonial widow fallen on hard times and a modern office worker with bobbed hair and shortened skirts. It had taken such an effort to escape from Akron, and Grover’s clutches, and then having to reinvent herself here, hide her true identity and live a life of lies, was so difficult. But it was so much easier to bear than her life with Grover.

How glad she was to have sent the letter to England from Halifax, the letter to Grover ending her marriage. She could still recall every word she’d said, sitting in the train station with a writing pad on her lap, crying as she poured out her feelings.

It was a harsh letter for any man to receive but she would not alter one word of it. Once it was in the post, she felt as if a great burden had been lifted from her heart. There were no regrets, only sadness that the two of them had been so ill suited from the start and that her innocence and naivety had ensured his behaviour had gone unchecked for so long.

May had done her part to throw Grover off the trail, sending Celeste’s letters as if from England. There were letters in his handwriting, from their lawyers, from Harriet, but they were gathering unopened until she could face them. He would not follow her during the war but when peace came, perhaps he might search them out. She must remain careful.

When they first arrived in Washington, DC, Celeste had turned up at the offices of the suffrage society in desperation. There’d been a spate of arrests and force feedings, and a safe house was set up where women could recuperate from their ordeals out of the public eye. She’d offered her services as a dogsbody, anything to get a bed for them both. The condition in which some of her friends arrived shocked her. It was much worse than anything she’d endured because it was chosen and borne for their cause: emaciated bodies, swollen throats, eyes filled with fear and anguish from the treatments – how could her heart not go out to them? Having Roddy around gave some of the older suffragettes a source of amusement, helping them to forget their suffering for an hour or two.

Working part time in the office, Celeste found herself alongside brave single women who broke every convention. They were militants, loud and courageous in their fight to get the vote and rights for female employees. She wondered if any of them would have been subjected to the humiliation she’d allowed for so long. They had borne imprisonment and public derision for the cause, sustained by friendship. She’d been starved of women’s company for such a long time.

‘When you put your hand to the plough you can’t put it down until you get it to the end of the row,’ their leader, Alice Paul, used to say.

Celeste had put her hand to it the night she’d fled from Halifax, taken the long train south to Washington and sought out Margaret Tobin Brown’s advice by letter. They’d met in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, amidst the grandeur of marbled pillars and a floor that gleamed. Her words had given Celeste the courage to forge a new life.

So far Grover hadn’t sought her out but she was always wary. It was Roddy he would snatch, not her. She assumed he’d hire private investigators to find her in England but where better to hide in the States than in the capital, amongst the crowds. She was free to work and was learning to live on her wits.

Only May knew the truth and she did her best to glean news of the family as best she could while not pushing her for answers. Now Celeste must stick it out and stay her hand to the plough with this new life for her son’s sake. His future had been sacrificed for her bid for freedom. She couldn’t afford to send him to private school. He was growing coarser, tougher and more defiant, and, at times, she saw a flash of Grover’s petulance in his eyes.

What else could she do? She earned more on a Thursday and in the evening than from the humble office work she did all week. It kept them in decent clothes and in a reasonable property in a safe district. May had parcelled up a few pieces of precious china, which somehow arrived intact, much admired by her students. They still had the smell of home on them, mementoes she’d have to sell if times got tough.

She steered clear of the few young English wives that she came across in church. They were all excited about building the new cathedral and busy raising funds. She had neither the money nor the interest in its erection, magnificent though it was going to be. She yearned for the ancient quietude of Lichfield. Their English voices reminded her of home and she wouldn’t relax until she and Roddy had made the journey back to England. This time she’d applied for the right documents to get an entry back home but the passport rules were stricter now and Roddy would have to go on hers. She claimed his father was dead and she was a widow. What else could she do? Every penny she could save went on tickets and preparations for this homecoming.

How they’d live once they were there was no matter. One thing Celeste had learned over the past year was to survive on little, to exaggerate the truth where necessary and to take one day at a time. She hardly recognized who she’d become in a year: older, more suspicious of folk, careful with every dime and not so easily impressed by outward show.

Why was she surprised? A woman who had defied the ocean and survived the
Titanic
sinking knew how precious life was. A woman who’d endured physical humiliation at the hands of a brutal husband valued the shutting of her own front door without fear. She may now be a woman who lived hand to mouth from month to month but she managed their meagre budget as if it was that of the State Treasury Department.

One thing was certain: her aching hand was welded to this damned ploughshare and she was not turning back when the end of the row was almost in sight. No one was going to stop her and her son returning to where she belonged.

Lichfield
June 1915