Victorian Maiden (15 page)

The ringing silence enveloped them once more.

“What happened to the girls… and the boys then? What happened after they were finished with them?” Lucie whispered, aghast.

Mary Lovell answered.

“Any number of things, Mrs Fox. Many of the girls were taken to a farmhouse not far outside of the town, at Brimston. It was run by a procuress who called it a Home for Fallen Women and Girls. But don't be fooled for a moment by its charitable name; it was really nothing more than a brothel. She would use the women and the girls she kept there to accommodate a gentleman's every desire, his every fantasy, no matter how depraved that might be. Mr Alfred also used the procuress – Mrs Eire she was called – as an abortionist, and to sew the girls' maidenheads up again after they had been deflowered so that they could be violated once again. She would sew them up again and again until they were too cut up to allow it any more.

Other girls were sent to France, to work in brothels there, and others to the Orient. One of the Friday Club gentlemen – Mr James – was a ship owner you see, and he would transport them like slaves with no questions asked. The Arabs in particular prized them for their fair skin and for the fact that they were British. They fetched an excellent price in the slave markets. Mr James wasn't averse to buying up native girls there either, and bringing them back to Harrogate. The boys were generally thrown out onto the street.”

“Did they never say anything? Did they never tell anyone?” Atticus asked.

“No, Atticus, they never did.”

Roberts took up the tale once more.

“Remember that these were young girls and boys, anywhere from ten years of age upwards, who had been separated from their families, or who never had any families in the first place. They had been sullied and they had been brutalised. Society's attitude towards unchaste girls is bad enough now; forty or fifty years ago it was harsher still. And if they had managed to speak out, if they had told someone about any of it… Who would have believed them anyway? What would the word of one little whore girl have been worth against the solemn oaths and reputations of some of the great philanthropists of Harrogate?”

He laughed, harshly and mirthlessly.

“And the boys would always stay silent.”

He nodded his head towards the door to the stairway.

“And do you remember the words written above that door there?”

“I do,” Atticus replied, “‘Freya is the receiver of the slain. Lördag cleanses your body and your tongue,' or something very much like it.”

“That is exactly correct, Atticus,” Roberts confirmed. “Your memory remains quite excellent. Those words were put there to remind the children – and the gentlemen of the Friday Club themselves – that anyone who breathed a word of what went on in this Annexe to the world outside would be in mortal peril. Lördag is Saturday; it was the traditional Viking day to bathe. Not only were the gentlemen supposed to cleanse their bodies of the debaucheries of the night before, they were supposed to cleanse their minds too. They were supposed to wash away even the memories of what they had done, so that they could never spill the awful secrets afterwards.”

“Did they never tire of Miss Elizabeth, once they had deflowered her?” Lucie asked.

“Far from it,” Mary retorted. “She was a very beautiful girl and that held their interest all the while she was here. And because she had perfect manners and spoke very well, she would always be the one they took back to their houses and their hotels rooms with them, passing her off as their niece or their daughter or some other relative to anyone who bothered to enquire.”

“What about Mr Alfred's wife?” Lucie asked Roberts. “Where was your grandmother when all of this was happening?”

“She was where she always was, Mrs Fox – alone in her bed with her green faeries – her bottles of absinthe. My grandmama was another of my family's sordid secrets; drunk, incapable of coherent speech most of the time, and on the brink of madness. It was how she dealt with it all you see. It was the only way she knew of coping with the terrible knowledge of what my grandfather and his friends were doing.

A chambermaid was well paid to tend to her. In other words to feed her and to fetch her drink, and to empty her chamber pot. But most of all, to keep her mouth shut.”

“But the servants knew, or they suspected anyway,” Atticus countered, “And you knew, Miss Lovell; you said so yourself.”

Mary was staring again at the tea tray the parlour maid had left for them on the side table. She reached over and turned the teapot a fraction, and three sets of eyes silently followed the movement.

“Yes, Mr Fox, I did know. I cannot deny it. Lizzie confided in me exactly what her uncle and his friends were doing to her and to all the other children. But I knew anyway; the screaming and crying, the begging to be out was quite harrowing. There is not a day that goes by when I don't hate myself for my cowardice in not speaking out.

Dr Roberts is kind. He reminds me that I was hardly older than Lizzie myself at the time and I suppose if truth be told, I was afraid for my life too. Maybe I convinced myself that if I had told someone, I would have brought shame on Lizzie; that she would have been blamed as being the seductress of the great, good Mr Alfred Roberts. Perhaps, if I had said what was going on in here, people might have guessed that they had deflowered me too.”

“Oh, Mary,” Lucie cried.

“You don't need to tell, Mary,” Dr Roberts said gently.

“I do, Doctor, I do,” Mary replied, dabbing her eyes with a pocket handkerchief. “Mr and Mrs Fox need to know exactly what it was like here in Alfred's day.”

She dabbed at her reddening eyes a little more and said: “Mr Alfred usually told the other gentlemen and that ogre of a steward he had to leave me alone. He was afraid that, because I was a servant of sorts, then if they attacked me, word would get out to the rest of the household. But one night, in August I think it was, they got especially rowdy and very, very drunk. Mrs Eire had only managed to procure one or two virgin girls that week, so once they had finished with them, once they had ‘buttered' them as they used to call it, they were still howling and shouting for more. Lizzie had run away to the workhouse by then, or she surely would have been ‘buttered' too.

Then they saw me, finishing off some dainty-cakes for them in the scullery.

‘Why you've a lithe, tender young lamb tethered over there, Roberts,' roars Mr Price, pointing at me through the door. ‘The hounds are still ravenous hungry, so how about throwing your pretty young governess to us then?' The others started shouting and crying, just exactly like dogs baying at a fox-hole, so I dropped my dainties there and then, and ran out towards the main house. But the steward, Mr Otter, was blocking the way, and he caught me before I was even half way down the hall. I was picked up and thrown onto Lizzie's old bed, held down whilst I was given a dose of chloral hydrate to stop me struggling, and then, Mr and Mrs Fox, then I was stripped of my clothing and brutally deflowered. I was raped by each and every one of them in turn – including Otter – while the rest of them looked on and jeered.

I resigned my position the very next day of course and fled the house, but even now, I still wake in the night feeling them on me, hearing their jeering and having that awful, bitter taste in my mouth.

Mr Alfred naturally tried to stop me from leaving. He offered to pay me handsomely if I would stay and take up procuring girls for them in place of Mrs Eire. He said that Mrs Eire hadn't really been much good since she had been indiscrete and was barred from the workhouses. When I refused – I could never put another child through what I'd suffered – he promised that if ever I breathed a word about them or about what they did to a single living soul, he would send Mr Otter to hunt me down and rip my tongue from my head. I heard afterwards that he'd spoken to Mr James about having me drugged and shipped out to the Sudanese slave markets, but I never gave him the chance.

I knew that when Elizabeth ran away, she would have likely gone to the Harrogate Workhouse, which was in Starbeck at the time. It was before the parish unions, you understand. More than ever, I was racked with guilt that I had never said anything to help her, so I determined to track her down.

She had indeed gone to the workhouse as I thought she would. I sought and was given a position there as nurse, and I've spent the rest of my life watching over and caring for her and the other little children. It's my penance you see. It's the very least I can do to make amends for my months of silence.”

“Did you tell the magistrate any of this?” Atticus asked.

Roberts looked horror-struck.

“No, Atticus, and please, I would greatly prefer not to. The scandal, you know, and the shame on Aunt Elizabeth and Mary and… Well, the scandal would be unbearable.

I can only hope that if my lawyer can't persuade that fool magistrate to reconsider his decision, then surely the judge will see that her trial is a mockery of justice. If that fails and the trial goes ahead, then I'll say that in killing my grandfather, Aunt Elizabeth was acting, in a way, in self defence; that it was a natural reaction to the two years of horror she suffered at my grandfather's hands.”

“And then what, Doctor?” Lucie asked.

“Then I'll press to have a guardianship order passed to deliver her back into my care and keeping. Mary can continue her life's work in caring for her and yes, she can be seen to be guarding her too, if that's what they want. Aunt Elizabeth in her current state will know no difference anyhow and she can eke out her few remaining years in comfort. It's the only just and fair way.

Aunt Elizabeth might be locked in this Annexe awaiting trial for murder, but for the first time in nearly half a century, she's free, just as Mary and I are now free. Did you see how content she looks? She knows that he's dead; that he's gone forever. One part of her torment is finally over.”

“One part of her torment is over?” Lucie repeated, “You mean there is more to it yet?”

“Oh, yes,” Roberts said quickly, as if he had been expecting, maybe even hoping for the question. “There is much more to it yet. Do you recall when you first brought Aunt Elizabeth back here, that I said I had two further tasks for you? The first was to restore her mother's inheritance to her. The second, however, is of much greater importance given the present situation. I'll ask the parlour maid to bring us some fresh tea whilst Mary checks on my aunt. Then, I shall tell you all about it.”

“Ye'll be able to see t' magpies on t' Stray, Lizzie. Ye like to watch t' magpies, don' ye?”

Elizabeth turned and looked into Old Rachel's eyes, full as they were of concern. She desperately wanted to speak, desperately wanted to say, ‘Yes, I love to watch them. I'd love to be a bird myself, free to fly wherever I choose, free to fly to my mama,' and, ‘Thank you, Rachel, for being so kind when the rest of the world despises me for being a whore.' 

But the blackness, the deep, impenetrable blackness, held her fast.

“It will be a lovely day, Lizzie, wit' t' fine racin' hosses gallopin' across t' Stray.”

The blackness pressed still closer.

“An' t' overseers 'ave said ye may take yer yellow jacket off while ye're out.”

The blackness dissolved just a little, became perhaps a fraction less dense. It eased just enough for her to whisper “Thank you,” and for her almost to fall to the floor in relief.

“Tha's better, Lizzie; I thought t' cat 'ad run off wit' ye tongue. Ye need 'ave no jacket on so there will be no-one a-calling ye names.”

Lizzie nodded, and the sneering, disdainful faces of the other inmates flashed through her mind, one after another, like so many magic-lantern slides. In public, they all taunted her, mocked her, calling her ‘hedge whore,' ‘trollop,' and ‘Lizzie-leap-a-bed.' They would bump into her in the corridors, and knock her brutally against the hard walls; they would spit onto her newly polished brass, or smear mud across her clean-swept floor. In private though, when she was alone, the men would creep near her and brush against her. They would push their rough, dirty hands into her shift and whisper. They would whisper the things, the horrible things, that they longed to do to her, into her ears, and leave them to seep into her mind.

And then she was outside the workhouse, jacketless, in her best gingham dress. 

The sun was shining. It was shining brighter than the yellow jacket, brighter even than the whitewash of the walls, now that the blackness had dissolved, and the other paupers, even the men, were just ignoring her; all, that is, except Old Rachel.

“Ye look as pretty as a picture, Lizzie,” she said. “Ye'll be a match for any o' them fine ladies o' Harrogate.”

“She'll be hoping that she gets ridden as well as the horses, Rachel,” a woman's voice cackled from behind them.

“Don' mind wha' she says, Lizzie,” Rachel retorted, her voice raised and her tone acid, “She's jus' envious o' how pretty ye are.”

Lizzie waited for the woman's own retort, waited to hear more of how slatternly even the paupers thought she was. But it never came. Instead, the two short lines of inmates suddenly straightened and stiffened, as rigid as the ash-wood handles she spent so many hours binding with whin bush to make brooms. A smart black carriage with two liveried coachmen swept between the stone gateposts and arced gracefully to a halt outside the workhouse porch.

“It be one o' t' overseers,” Old Rachel whispered.

Lizzie didn't reply. Her whole body, and the very spirit within it, was trembling uncontrollably. She knew that glossy black carriage only too well, as too she did the arms painted proudly below the window; the gold shield with a black lion rampant. One of the coachmen clambered from his seat and pulled the carriage door respectfully open. The black lion moved and seemed suddenly to be stalking her. A walking cane appeared – a familiar, black walking cane – followed by an even more familiar arm. It was an arm she knew, only too well, was overpowering and unstoppable, and her trembling grew worse. She wanted to cry out, she wanted to beg someone – anyone – for mercy, but the words gagged in her throat. She wanted to turn, wanted to flee to the sanctuary of her bed, but her limbs had turned to cold, heavy lead, and they refused to heed the shrieking, shrieking screams of her brain.

‘Oh Lord Jesus, please don't let it be him; please let it be someone else, anyone else. Please don't let them have found me at last.'

But even the Lord Jesus refused to hear the anguished cries of her mind. It was him; it was another of the great philanthropists of the Friday Club, greeting the Master and his wife, and all of them had smiling,
laughing faces. 

‘Please don't know him. Please don't let him be your gentleman friend too,' she begged. But she remembered how her flesh had crawled when the workhouse Master – her master – had first looked upon her nakedness. She remembered the gleam of lust in his eyes, and she knew how it must be.

“Mr Price,” she whispered.

“Do ye know t' O'erseer, Lizzie?” Rachel sounded astonished. Lizzie could feel her intelligent old eyes lying on the back of her head, but the blackness was beginning to bind her once more and she couldn't speak
the words. 

Mr Price was talking to Mr Wright, the Medical Officer, as if he were an old friend, and all the while his eyes were searching the ranks of the inmates, surely seeking her out. And then Mr Wright pointed directly at her. Mr Price looked and the black lion rampant looked, and her heart stopped beating.

“Are ye ailin', Lizzie? Ye've gone as pale as a ghost.” 

It was Old Rachel again, but she could hardly hear the words she was saying for the blood pounding and pounding and pounding in her head.

“Very well, inmates,” the Master called, and the spell was broken. 

“This day at the Stray races is a reward for your cheerful undertaking of various disagreeable tasks. You will conduct yourselves properly at all times, and normal workhouse rules will apply. Any breaches of those rules will be met with punishment in the usual ways.”

‘Will be punished in the usual ways, will be punished in the usual ways, but how can that be?' 

Memories cascaded over her of the way Mr Price usually did punish wicked little girls. She remembered him towering over her as she knelt before him, remembered his arms coiling around her like some huge serpent; remembered his crushing weight and his little, sharp teeth biting into her flesh.

Something grabbed at her arm and she gasped, crying out in fear. But it was only Rachel, grinning toothlessly, and she breathed once again.

“Come along, li'le Miss Daydream, we don' wan' to be left behin' now, do we?”

The two whispering ranks of inmates became two laughing, chattering files. Like one huge family, they began walking up the road behind the Master and Mr Price. Mrs Dixon ambled along just behind them, and Elizabeth walked in silence, just as these days she always walked in silence, with her eyes fixed on the broad back of the Overseer's frock coat.

And then they were part of the laughing, chattering crowds at the racecourse, and she could see him no longer amongst all of the other gentlemen in their own frock coats.

‘Where did he go? Where is he now? Dear God, where is he now?' 

She had relaxed, just for a second. How could she have let him disappear like that? How could she have let herself be distracted so? How could she have been such a stupid, stupid girl?

“Miss Elizabeth Wilson, how delightful it is to see you again.”

Her limbs turned instantly to cold, heavy lead and kept her there, held her there in front of him, trapped in his mocking smirk like a tiny snared rabbit caught in a poacher's lantern light. 

‘Rachel!' she wanted to shriek, wanted to scream for all the world to hear. 

But the word refused to pass her lips, and Rachel was gone. She was alone – alone with Mr Price, amid the laughing, chattering crowd.

His hand crept around her fingers and held them tight. 

“Your Uncle Alfred will be very pleased indeed that I've met up with you, Miss Elizabeth.” 

He squeezed her fingers viciously and then gently lifted them to his lips. She felt the rough scratch of his whiskers as they raked across the soft skin of her hand. 

“He was very concerned indeed as to where you might have got to,” he continued, his tone as mocking as his eyes, “And what you might have said.” 

He squeezed her fingers once more, crushing them cruelly and she gasped. 

“You haven't said anything, have you, Miss Elizabeth, about Mr Alfred or about the other members of the Friday Club?”

“No, Mr Price,” she whispered. 

A woman in a fine, silk dress looked inquisitively over at them for a moment. ‘Please come!' Lizzie tried to beg, tried to plead with her eyes. ‘Please come and help me; please come and make him go away.' The woman shook her head in contempt and turned away.

“The Medical Officer tells me that you're with child again.” 

Price was smiling but he had the smile and the voice of a serpent.

“Yes I am, if you please, Mr Price.”

“Have you been whoring yourself since you left Sessrum House?”

“No, Mr Price.”

“It is against the law of the land to whore yourself. Shall I call the constable and have you thrown into prison, Lizzie?”

“Please no, sir.”

“So you have been whoring yourself?”

“Yes, sir; I mean no, sir. No I haven't.”

“So is the baby mine?”

She stared at him, not comprehending the words. Surely it was her baby, hers to love and to hold and to be with always.

“I asked, Miss Elizabeth, if the child is mine.”

“I don't know, sir.”

Price crushed her fingers again and she cried out in pain. His smile grew wider and more fixed, like the villain of a magic lantern show. 

“How can you not know whose it is, you stupid child? It must be mine. It must be from the time I took you up to Alfred's hunting lodge for the week. Hell and Damnation! How could you have been so careless, you silly little hussy?” 

He stared at her for a moment longer and said, “Damnation!” again.

“Are ye a'right, Lizzie?” 

It was Rachel. 

‘Oh, thank you, thank you Lord Jesus for sending her to save me.' 

Rachel peered at Mr Price and at his massive hand, as it lay coiled tightly around Elizabeth's fingers. 

“Lizzie, are thee a'right?” she repeated.

Price released her fingers but his smile remained. 

“Miss Elizabeth and I were just renewing our acquaintance, pauper,” he said stiffly, “Not that it is any concern of yours. I was assuring her that I don't need to tell her uncle where she is, just so long as she promises to be very careful.” 

He paused to allow Elizabeth to comprehend the full meaning and import of his words, and in that time, it seemed somehow as if he had to come to a decision. 

“And what's more, like her uncle, I am a philanthropist. I will personally ensure that she and her baby are cared for properly in the workhouse, and that the child, if it lives, is given every opportunity to better its situation.”