Victorian Maiden (20 page)

“One of quite a large number of overseers, Mrs Fox, yes, but that was over thirty years ago now. Why do you ask?”

Lucie smiled her warmest and most radiant smile.

“The lady we have been asked to find was adopted as a small child from that workhouse into a wealthy local family. Your husband was the overseer who arranged it all, but unfortunately there were no records kept. We wondered if you might remember anything about it.”

Mrs Price turned and gazed for a few moments at the portrait on the wall.

“Dear Barty,” she said, “Always helping the poor, little children. He was a good friend of Alfred Roberts in his time, and something of a philanthropist in his own right.”

“We had heard something of the sort,” Lucie said, with a sharp warning glance to her husband.

Mrs Price took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.

“Please forgive me; Barty and I were together a long time and I do miss him dreadfully. He couldn't have been a better husband.”

“Of course,” Lucie threw another glance to Atticus.

“By chance, it's Alfred Roberts' grandson who has asked us to find this lady.”

Mrs Price looked up, her eyes moist and shining.

“Really? How strange. Then of course I shall do my very best to help you, although I never really got involved with the day-to-day running of the workhouse. Keeping proper records was never one of Barty's strongest cards.”

She made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“Tell me about this little girl then, Mrs Fox.”

Lucie looked visibly relieved.

“She was called Sarah, Mrs Price. Sarah Beatrice Wilson, and she was adopted out at the age of two. It would have been around Eighteen Forty-Eight.”

Then, after a moment she added: “Her mother is a relative of the Roberts family.”

Mrs Price stared into her teacup and slowly shook her head.

“She was a very pretty little girl by all accounts, with fair hair. Her mother was called Elizabeth Wilson – Lizzie.”

Mrs Price had begun to rock gently backwards and forwards in her tub chair. It reminded them sharply of Elizabeth herself.

Lucie pressed her.

“Do you remember Sarah, Mrs Price, or Lizzie?”

The old lady nodded, slowly and precisely.

“I remember her,” she said. “Her daughter was born out of wedlock, wasn't she?”

“Yes,” Atticus confirmed.

“Her mother had been taken advantage of,” Lucie added, her eyes sharp, her tone measured and even.

“Actually, in plain terms, she was raped. She was repeatedly raped by several men over the course of many months. She finally fled to the workhouse to escape them.”

Mrs Price looked as if Lucie might just have slapped her. Her eyes closed tight and she stopped rocking, and instead seemed to reel against the thick leather sides of the chair.

Atticus frowned. Surely his wife had been too graphic, too brutal for the old lady's sensitivities. But Lucie knew well what she was about, and reassured him with the shadow of a nod, and a quick and fleeting smile.

At last Mrs Price was able to recover herself. But when she opened her eyes once again, some of the pain of the words seemed to have lodged itself deep within them. Her voice too seemed weaker, and somehow diminished.

“I am truly sorry to hear that, Mrs Fox. But young women of that age do say all manner of things to cover up what they've done. As I said, I do remember Sarah, and I do remember her… mother; Lizzie, did you call her?”

Lucie nodded.

“Very pretty girl – beautiful even, and quite well spoken too as I recollect. I cannot say where my husband had her girl sent. I only remember now that it was to a respectable, loving home and that they cherished her and brought her up as their own. Any base morals from which her mother may have suffered were thankfully not passed on to her child, and Sarah is a model of respectability. You may tell Mr Roberts' grandson and whomever else it may concern exactly that, if it will help to settle their minds.”

“Mrs Price, I'm afraid the reason for our commission is a little more complicated than that…”

“Mr and Mrs Fox.”

The old lady's twinkling eyes and warm smile were gone. She banged her teacup onto its saucer with a clatter.

“You may have been asked – commissioned, or whatever it is you call it – to find Sarah, but tell me this: How do you know that she actually wants to be found? What if she has a new life? What if she has a husband and a family of her own now? What if she has no notion that she was ever adopted at all, that she's really the illegitimate child of a workhouse whore? Why, after over forty years, should I turn her life topsy-turvy? My husband was a great philanthropist. If he left no parochial record of where she had gone, then you can be sure it was for a very good reason. It was most probably to remove a lovely, innocent, little girl from the clutches of her harlot of a mother. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to rest now. I have a long journey ahead of me tomorrow and I have said all I wish to say on the matter.”

“I have said all I wish to say on the matter. It's out of my hands, Wilson. The overseers want you to be a pauper apprentice to Walton And Company, and so that is precisely what will happen. They have just taken over the linen mill at Knaresborough. Mr Walton has grand plans for it and he needs lots of skilled workers.”

“But please, Mrs Dixon, I need to see Mr Price – I need to ask him about my Baby Sarah.”

“Not that it is any of your business, Wilson, but it was actually Mr Price who paid them the three pounds they needed to take you off our hands. He paid it out of his own pocket too, hark ye. They usually take smaller girls than you as apprentices, so you can think yourself fortunate that Mr Price is such a kind philanthropist.”

Her stern expression softened a little. 

“I'm sorry, Elizabeth, but there is no point in you being a burden on the parish when you can pay your own way in a mill. You've no daughter to worry yourself about now, so you will leave the workhouse today.”

And then she had been fetched, along with a pauper boy of around ten who made her think of little Peter Lovegood, by an enormous man called Tom. Tom was the foreman at Messieurs Walton and Company of Knaresborough, and he had a big, round face and twinkling eyes that reminded her of Old Rachel. 

She gasped. Rachel! 

She hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to Old Rachel or to thank her for being her only friend in the world until Mary had come back to her. Nor to Mary! They had just found each other again; surely they couldn't be separated now without a word. And she needed Mary; she needed Mary to make Mr Price let little Baby Sarah come back to her, back to her mama where she belonged and back to where she would be safe from all the bad things that would surely happen.

She turned back, instinctively, desperately, just as the great front door banged shut.

“Where are ye going lass?” Tom had asked in his deep, measured voice, that sounded to her like the tick-tock of a grandfather clock.

“I can't go, I can't!” 

Elizabeth dropped the brown paper parcel which had her clothes neatly folded inside it and hammered on the solid timber with her fists. She drummed until each blow began to leave a little smudge of red on the fresh, white paint. But the door stayed shut. The mouth was closed. It remained as it ever was; silent and unmerciful. It had witnessed too many tears and too much heartbreak over the years, and now it refused to heed her shrieking, shrieking cries of despair.

She felt a huge arm encircle her waist and she froze as it plucked her easily away.

“Come with me, little lassie; you'll be all right.”

The huge arm set her gently onto her feet and through the mists of her terror she heard the deep voice speaking once again: “We're not going to eat you, lass,” it said, “We only want you to come and spin yarn for t' linen.”

She stared at him as he smiled amiably down at her, and through the mists of her mind, his words ticked and tocked, and ticked and tocked, and raced, and grew louder and louder and louder. 

‘We only want you to spin yarn for the linen; we only want you to spin; we only want you; we want you, we want you, we want you…'

And she could think only of what would happen when the day's work was done, when it was night. Night was when they would want her, when they would do bad things to her. Night was when the shadows on the door would begin to move, and they would come to her bed. Night was when they would take her away to be punished. Tom was bigger and stronger even than Mr Price, and she was sure that he would punish her terribly.

She seemed to float down the road to Knaresborough as light as a gossamer thread. In the far, far distance, she could hear the boy who reminded her so much of little Peter Lovegood chattering excitedly to Tom about the Castle Mill; about the spinning machines and the great power-looms and about how he would earn tuppence a week for his very own. She could hear Tom laughing his deep, belly laugh in return. She could hear him as he patiently explained about retting and scutching, about how the spinning machines and the power-looms worked, and how they turned the flax into linen. But she thought she could also hear an echo of Mr James as he made polite conversation with her cousin John in the Annexe, with that awful catch in his voice. And then she heard echoes of her cousin John, screaming and screaming as Mr James laughed and dragged him away.

 

“I don't want to have to repeat myself, Mrs Fox. I've told you; that is all I have to say on the matter.”

Mrs Price carefully smoothed her rug again. Then she looked up and glared at them defiantly, as if daring them to stay.

It was all or nothing, and with a silent plea to the Fates, Lucie Fox shook the die once again.

“Lizzie Wilson was no harlot, Mrs Price.”

The old woman's defiance boiled up into anger. Under the heavy rug on her lap, she stamped her foot.

“How dare you contradict me in my own home? She was most certainly a harlot. You will leave – now – before I summon the gardener and have you thrown out.”

Lucie ignored the tantrum, and the threat. She cast the die.

“I believe your husband was a member of a gentlemen's club, Mrs Price; a gentlemen's club called the, ‘Friday Club'?”

Mrs Price froze.

“My husband was a philanthropist, Mrs Fox. He was a celebrated philanthropist. It was a philanthropist's club.”

Lucie shook her head.

“It was from various, shall we say, philanthropists, of the Friday Club that Lizzie Wilson fled. The father of her baby was one of those very gentlemen, who had raped her.”

“No, Mrs Fox, you're quite wrong; everyone knows that they were great and good men.”

The fury had gone and the old lady's tone was imploring.

Lucie sounded calmer now too, reasonable and persuasive.

“Mrs Price, I have spoken with another person in the last few days who was also ill-used in the Friday Club. She too was a young girl at the time, barely older than Elizabeth.”

“No. No, you lie. They were philanthropists. They did many good works.”

Once again, Lucie ignored her pleas.

“Alfred Roberts had a wife, Mrs Price – Agnes Roberts – who by all accounts spent her later life entirely in her bed. She coped with her husband's, shall we call them, proclivities, only by living in a permanent stupor enabled by the drinking of absinthe. If I may say so, your denial is your own absinthe.”

“You may not say so. You are a vile and a wicked woman and you may not.”

She stamped her foot once more.

“What I naturally need to be sure of, and what our client needs to be sure of, is that little Sarah Wilson didn't fall prey to those very same proclivities as her poor mother.”

“Get out of my house, both of you. Get out!”

Mrs Price's face was a twisted mask of hatred and of fear.

“Get out, get out, get out!”

A thick shroud of mist had settled at the foot of the deep gorge of the River Nidd, where it skirted the ancient town of Knaresborough. The throngs of people bustling about their daily business along the riverside seemed to Elizabeth almost like angels walking on clouds. 

“Old Mother Shipton's cave is ower yonder,” she heard Tom tell them, and he waved his arm towards the riverbank. “She was a prophetess who was born in the cave hundreds o' years ago and she foretell'd the future. This bridge ower t' river 'ere,” he pointed to a broad, stone bridge just ahead of them, starkly black against the pure white of the mists. “The High Bridge it's called. Owd Mother Shipton said that if it was ever to fall down three times, it'd mean t' end o' the world was upon us. Now I'll tell thee both truly; it's fallen twice afore already.”

The boy looked thunderstruck.

“Aye it's true,” Tom continued, looking solemn, “An' she said when it would happen too. She said: ‘The world to an end shall come, in Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One.'

Now there's some that believes it, and then there's some, like Mr Walton, the owner of t' mill that don't, but she said that the world would end in Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One and every one o' her other prophesies has come true.”

Elizabeth felt a tiny surge of hope. Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One! Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One was thirty-four years away. So even if her mama didn't come for her before then, even if the Lord Jesus said she couldn't be like Grace Darling and be allowed to die young, then she would still see her dear mama again, and Baby Sarah, and Baby Albert, before she was fifty-two years old. But fifty-two was so old, and so far away. She would be old then, old and wizened and not worth a tramp's farthing, never mind two hundred pounds. How good, how wonderful that would be. And then, then she could die at last, because everyone would die at the End of the World. Even Uncle Alfie and Mr James and Mr Price would die at the End of the World, along with Mr Otter and all of their gentlemen friends.

Suddenly, she realised that Knaresborough, with its river of mist, its narrow, twisting streets and its rows of ancient cottages, was surely the most beautiful place on earth.

They crossed over the High Bridge and turned into the narrow riverside lane that footed the immense crags reaching up out of the gorge to an old, ruined castle.

“What are they a-building there, Tom?” the boy asked pointing ahead of them. 

Lizzie looked. Four great, flat columns of stone, laced all about with scaffolding and swarming with men, seemed to be racing each other to get to the sky.

“That,” announced Tom, “Is a new viaduct that they're building.”

“What's a viaduct, Tom?” the boy asked.

Tom laughed his deep, slow laugh.

“It's a bridge, Peter; a special bridge for t‘ railway to go ower.” 

Lizzie started; the boy was called Peter too. 

“Knaresborough,” Tom continued, “Is going to get a railway line.”

They approached the nearest of the columns and a whistle seared a shrill, burning path through her mind. The noise of the men working; the chiselling, the hammering, the rattle of the blocks-and-tackle, all abruptly stopped, and the whole world seemed to be holding its breath and looking at her. Lizzie dropped her head and stared at the broken rocks that littered the crag bottom, wishing and wishing that more would fall and bury her from sight. 

‘Please Lord Jesus, please don't let them look at me; please don't let them look at me and see me for what I am.'

But she knew that they would look, and she knew they would know, just as they always looked, and they always knew; and she waited for the shouts and the jeers that would surely follow.

A shout – a mocking, jeering shout stopped her heart. Her ears didn't need to make sense of the words because the laughter that followed told her exactly what they would be. She cringed yet deeper and turned her head in shame.

There was a flash of movement. Tom had picked a workman from the pulley-chain he was holding and pitched him bodily into the river. The mists parted and swallowed him, and it seemed an age of raucous shouting and laughter later that he emerged coughing and gasping from the unseen waters. Tom stabbed an enormous finger at him. 

“Don't ye ever insult a lady again,” he bellowed.

And then, as they walked, the sounds of laughter and of ridicule slowly faded. They faded everywhere, that is, except inside her head. There they compounded with the silent screams of her anguish and grew louder and louder and louder. 

But there was a new sound too; a distant sound of gushing water, a sound that also grew louder and louder until it became a muffled roar. It was a weir, she heard Tom explain to Peter, who made her remember the Holy Island and a game that had gone terribly wrong; a double-weir with a mill-race that powered the machines which made the flax into fine linen. The waterwheel it fed already had the power of twenty-five horses, but Mr John Walton, the new owner of the mill, had a grand plan to install a steam engine. He had already built an engine house in readiness for it with a short, square stack. Only a modern steam engine, Tom told them, could provide enough power to drive the rows of looms that would soon fill bay after bay of the celebrated Castle Mill.

And then the muffled roar became deafening, and she saw at last where she'd been sold into apprenticeship. It was a huge, square, grit-stone building, with rows and rows of small-paned windows, just like those of the workhouse. But unlike the workhouse, Castle Mill had no pretence of ornamentation or finery. It rose, plain and austere, like the old, ruined castle in whose shelter it worked.