The Sleeping Sword (38 page)

He had first found her ten months ago, standing in a cottage doorway, thin and pale but with a kind of taut resolution about her that had reminded him of a young knight undergoing the exhausting but ecstatic process of initiation. She had been neither glad nor sorry to see him, had treated him politely but with her mind very obviously elsewhere, her interest in him entirely without depth, as if they had been twenty years apart and now discovered themselves to be strangers. His visit, he believed, had seemed irrelevant to her. He wondered if she would bother to mention it to Robin, or even remember it herself. She was living in a small mining town, in a rough community where violence was commonplace, yet she had smiled when he had asked her to promise that she would contact him in case of need. And having promised, she had smiled again, waiting politely for him to leave, so distant and somehow so pure that he had not dared to offer her the twenty guineas he had brought with him but had sent the money on to her later, and had never learned what she had done with it.

She had been, not happy exactly—not in the sense he understood it—but exalted, yes, that was the word—
exalted
. And although he wrote her several letters in the following months, he had received no answer, her silence confirming his impression that she was in need of nothing he could give.

But her situation had altered. She had called him and he had gone to her, not quite at once, since there were other demands on his time, but within the week, at the address she had given in Glasgow.

‘Well, you'll see for yourself, Grace. It's a bad place, but that's not the worst of it. I reckon I was prepared for that.'

The facts then—the points of which Liam was certain—were these. She had joined Robin Ashby in that pit-head cottage and had remained there until the local coal-baron, who was also their landlord, had discovered Robin's intentions, branded him a troublemaker and made it impossible for him to get work anywhere in the district. They had moved first to Glasgow, then Newcastle, Liverpool, back to Glasgow again, living by his itinerant journalism, which meant very meagrely, Liam thought. Shortly after their return to Glasgow, Robin had met a man—another thin, intense, exalted individual like himself—who had spent some time among the sweatshops in the East End of London where poor immigrants were herded into the tailoring trade like cattle, fifteen or twenty to a steamy, insanitary room, and forced to labour for considerably longer hours than the law allowed. Factory inspectors, this man alleged, could rarely gain admittance to these ‘sweaters'dens'—in fact the reforms for which men like Robin and himself had fought so hard were not being carried out. It was the spark of another crusade.

By morning Robin Ashby had already made up his mind to travel south and no doubt expected Venetia to go with him. But he believed a woman should be an independent individual, entitled to think and decide for herself, not merely a possession who must automatically follow her man. They were comrades, partners, together because they wished to be together, not because the law or the Church or some intricate financial settlement insisted they should. And so—overestimating her strength or believing her to be as strong as she wished to be, overlooking the biological and social conditioning which had created her weakness—he asked her if she was ready for this new venture. She replied that, on the contrary, she had decided to return to her husband. And when he left, a few days later, she did not tell him that she was expecting his child.

I had never entered a common lodging-house before, but imagination had prepared me for the smell of damp and vermin, the peeling walls, the fouled staircase where those who had not even the price of a bed in such a place as this would huddle for warmth of winter nights. But at least—as Liam informed me—there were worse places, kennels not fit for dogs, where one did not rent a room but a
place
on a straw mattress thrown down on bare boards with a dozen others, men and women all together. And it was not until I had picked my way through the filth and litter of those stairs and entered a narrow, foetid corridor, that he said gruffly, ‘You'll find her much changed. Some women bloom in pregnancy, others don't. As I say, you'll find her—different.'

She had asked him to bring me, and after a moment he left us alone together, Venetia sitting on the hard plank bed while I took the only chair. There was nothing else in the room but a low table, a high, uncurtained window, a cracked water jug, one small bag in a corner, and my own great astonishment at Venetia's calm. She was extremely thin, without any colour, her skin a dull chalk-white, her hair faded from its deep auburn to light brown, her dress, from which all the trimming had been removed, too big for her and not clean. She looked as I had sometimes felt, like a woman sitting an inch or two away from reality, no longer entirely in the world but conscious of its garishness and its clamour, too numb to feel pain but still able to recognize it; watching herself bleed, in fact, with a faint surprise, a certain cool pity.

Had she sent Robin away in spirit of self-sacrifice? She shrugged her brittle shoulders and smiled. It may have seemed so to her at the time, but what else could she have done? Naturally, if he knew of her condition he would look after her, as he would care for anyone else he called comrade. She did not want that. Were she to write to him now and tell him the truth, then he would return, she knew. And if it became necessary, he would ask help from his family in Wiltshire and accept the terms on which they chose to give it. She knew that too, and refused to be the cause of his surrender.

They had never discussed the possibility of children. Neither Charles Heron nor Gideon had impregnated her and certainly Gideon had tried hard enough, she told me in her cool, toneless manner, since he had believed motherhood would steady her down. She had considered herself to be sterile. The mistake had been hers and now she must take the responsibility. She could not avoid becoming a mother. But she would not be the means of forcing Robin Ashby back into the conventional mould which had so nearly destroyed him. Her own female biology had trapped her. She would not allow it to trap him too. So she had thought to begin with, and for a little while she had felt herself to be quite heroic. But very soon she realized that there was no self-sacrifice—no heroics—involved at all. Her decision was the only possible one to take, which made it inevitable, easy, and absolutely right. ‘What happens to such men when they get old?' Liam had asked of Robin Ashby and had answered his own question. ‘Perhaps they never do.' And a man whose own future was so limited, so soon to be burned out, perhaps, in its own fierce flame, could have no place in the future of a child.

She had never known freedom herself, merely an illusion of freedom in her younger days, and she accepted now that she never could be free. She was a woman, and as such could only escape from one captivity to another, not the least of these being her own unwelcome fertility. But she had desired freedom all her life, she desired it still, so intensely that she could not deny it to another. She had failed at everything else in her life but now—for the first and final time—she would succeed in this.

Yet there remained the question of the child, and she had had plenty of time these last weeks to contemplate the helplessness of her situation. She was acquainted now with the raw facts of poverty and knew that the moment her condition became apparent she would be turned out of her lodgings and into the street to wander and to beg—there being no work she was fit to do—and then to give birth and lose her child among the faceless infant multitudes of a workhouse.

Her intentions were very clear. She had no hopes and no desires for herself. Her own mind was, strangely enough, peaceful. But nevertheless she
was
pregnant, her child—in this masculine world—might well be a girl and she had seen—oh yes, she had seen at close quarters, the drudgery, the squalor, the exploitation of a working woman's life. She had herself been bred as an ornament for a man's pleasure and the propagation of his name, and had suffered for it. She had been imprisoned by trivialities until she had felt unable to breathe. But in the pit villages she had met old women who had been harnessed to coal-carts in their youth like brute beasts and forced to crawl down black underground passages where no beasts could be made to go. She had seen for herself other old women of nineteen with four or five infants trailing at their skirts and nothing in their futures but the prospect of four or five more. She had met cheerful young harlots in Glasgow of twelve or thirteen years old, and then seen them again six months later, eaten alive by the harlot's disease. She had seen death by violence and by starvation, death by the desire for death which had caused a woman on the floor below to drown herself only last week, and, in the lodging-house before this, a girl—a child, in fact, no more than fourteen—to strangle her new born baby and then hang herself. And they had died partly from ignorance and poverty, mainly because they were women.

She had seen it. She knew. Women
were
weak, as everyone had always told her, not in their spirits but in these fertile, female bodies which continued year after year to give birth, and in these fertile, female emotions which caused them to love each unwanted child. Theirs was the crusade she had wanted to fight, but she was a woman too, her body draining itself to produce another life, and she believed the fight to be hopeless in any case. Once, a long time ago, she had wanted to have a child, had seen it as ‘half me and half some wonderful man'. It was not so for the women of the pit villages and the workhouse hospitals, the mean streets of Cullingford, and she asked herself now what relevance such lofty ideals as the vote could have for them? What mattered was food and shelter, a blanket in winter, a few coppers to call a doctor to a difficult confinement and something put aside to pay for a funeral.

And if a woman must either be an idle ornament or a beast of burden, then she would rather condemn her own daughter to a life of frustration than of endless, brutalizing toil. I had money of my own, she knew, and Gervase did not interfere with my spending. Would I take the child when it was born and make the necessary arrangements? I could afford it, she said, raising her shoulders once again in a listless shrug, and if the child could be placed in some school, some establishment which would give it a measure of respectability, then she would be content. She had once scoffed at respectability, but she was tired now and she no longer scoffed at anything. She accepted her error. She had overstepped the limits of her femininity, of the role men like her father and Gideon had designed for women to play, and she knew now—had known for some time—that she could not win.
They
would always win—her father and Gideon, Charles Heron, the men who exploited women, the men who feared women, the men who desired women—and that being the case she wanted her daughter to be the kind of woman men desired, the kind of woman who did not threaten them and so did not require to be punished by them—a woman like Blanche.

She supposed I would be glad to help her and she would put herself entirely in my hands. She had discovered in herself these last few days a growing inability to concentrate, a buzzing in her ears and a loss of balance whenever she tried to fix her mind in positive thought.

I picked up her bag, wrapped her in her cloak, Liam paid what was owing to her landlady and together we took her to the station, both of us appalled by her weightlessness, her dreaminess, the way she drifted between us, passive and insubstantial as a curl of mist. I had no immediate plan beyond getting her to a warm, dry bed, a hot dinner, a doctor.

‘Where?' said Liam, as we boarded the train for Leeds.

‘I'll let you know.'

And we were nearing the end of our journey before I told him to take her, as a temporary measure, to her mother at Galton.

She went with him, willing, it seemed, to be taken anywhere, while I found my way back to Tarn Edge, changed my clothes and thought—as Venetia did not appear to have done—of next October and the October after that, when she would have had her child and recovered at least something of her spirits. She was in a state of grief and shock, I knew, overwhelmed by a sense of failure, exactly as she had been on her forlorn return from Charles Heron. But she had overcome that, and she would overcome now. Her child would be born, her body freed of its obligations. Life would still be there, stretching ahead of her, to be lived, endured, enjoyed, and any arrangements I made for her now must take account of that. She no longer believed in the future, had given up all her desires, but the future existed and I had no intention of allowing her to produce her child as a cow drops her calf and then go drifting off again to certain disaster. I made up my mind that she must give birth to her baby in comfort, which was easy enough to contrive, but I was also determined that it would be no furtive, hole-in-the-corner confinement, no hurried whisking away of the child afterwards to some secret destination, never to be seen again.

She would love her child when she saw it, not because it was Robin Ashby's but because it was her own, and although I was not yet certain how to go about it, I was adamant that she and her baby would not only live together but would live in peace.

Left to himself, I did not think her father would stand in the way of anything I wished to do for her. My own father would support me. Aunt Faith would do her part. But Aunt Caroline would surely oppose the return of so disastrous a daughter-in-law, Sir Dominic would see no sense to it, now that Gideon had shown he could manage his affairs very profitably without her. And what might Gideon feel? But I could not think of Gideon in terms of feeling or sensation, could not even contemplate the possibility of his distress, preferring to regard him—certainly in this instance—as a survivor, a victor, an adversary. For he was Venetia's guardian and the decision would be his.

I ordered the victoria and drove to Nethercoats Mill, my carriage in the yard occasioning no comment, the clerk who showed me to Gideon's splendid, oak-panelled room being more concerned with the details of my dress—presumably in order to tell his wife—than with the nature of my business. I was, after all, the ‘young squire's wife', and so I walked boldly through the double doors, drew off a glove and smiled with far more composure than I was actually feeling as I saw how much I had taken Gideon by surprise. For we had kept very separate from one another while Venetia had been away—very separate, elaborately polite—and I could not expect the next half-hour or so to be easy.