Victorian Maiden (22 page)

They also told her that many people had thought Old Mother Shipton wicked whilst she lived. In fact, many had thought that she was a witch. They thought that her mama, Agatha Sontheil, was a wicked and sinful woman too, even that she was a harlot. They said that Mother Shipton had no mortal papa and wondered why they both hadn't been thrown into the witch pool to see if they drowned.

But maybe, Lizzie thought as she lay awake in her topmost cot, maybe Old Mother Shipton wasn't wicked at all. Maybe she was good and in Heaven at that very moment with the Lord Jesus and her own dear mama. Maybe she felt sorry for her, Lizzie Wilson, as she looked down from Heaven. Perhaps she even felt, just as Lizzie herself felt, that they were so very alike, with everyone thinking them wicked, with harlot mamas and with no papas. Maybe, just maybe, Mother Shipton wanted to help her.

One day, Tom told them that the great viaduct, built high over the River Nidd, was almost finished at last. The temporary wooden falsework arches supporting the spans were to be dropped clear, the rails laid, and Knaresborough was to be joined to the railway. He said that Mr John Walton intended to use the railway to take his famous ‘Knaresborough Linens' to the big cities across Yorkshire and even to London to be sold. It would of course be commercial folly not to.

But then, on March the Eleventh, as she could never forget, as she was fastening a broken thread for what seemed to be the hundredth time that day, there was a rumble exactly like that of thunder over the constant roar of the looms. The weavers, their work forgotten, ran to peer through the little grimy windows, and Lizzie ran with them. There was nothing outside but clear, blue skies. But there had definitely been a rumble exactly like thunder and she wondered, she wondered with all her heart, if it could be – if it could really be the End of the World.

A wave, a great boiling, angry wall of water surged round the curve of the river, dragging its arms along the banks and sweeping everything aside. Behind it, a grey, billowing storm cloud – no, not a storm cloud, a cloud of glory – was filling the gorge and smothering everything in its path.

Lizzie fell to her knees and sobbed in grateful relief. 

‘Oh, thank you, thank you, Mother Shipton.' 

Old Mother Shipton had smiled on her from Heaven. She had sent her moth and Lizzie was not afraid. She gave thanks that this was surely Armageddon, and the Lord Jesus was coming at last in His Clouds of Glory.

People were running. Everywhere, people were running and screaming and shouting. Then the word went round, from window to window, from bay to bay: 

‘The viaduct has collapsed. The railway bridge has fallen into the river!'

It was true. Even before it was finished, Thomas Grainger's great viaduct had fractured and collapsed, and been swallowed up by the Nidd. 

Hadn't it been foretold? Had Ursula Shipton not prophesied that once the high bridge fell, the End of the World would surely come? The viaduct was the highest bridge of all. One and eight and eight and one made eighteen. She was eighteen. One and eight and eight and one was the same whichever way you looked at it. She could hear her cousin's voice – John's voice – echoing through her mind. 

‘It's symmetrical, Lizzie. Look, it has a central line of symmetry.' 

The moth was the same, the moth that she was sure Ursula Shipton had sent to her – it was symmetrical too. And so was the bridge. Dear Lord, so was the bridge. It was perfectly symmetrical with four pillars just like the four numbers, two small at either end, two large in the middle. And more: When the perfect, round, falsework arches had reflected in the waters of the Nidd, they had formed the number eight. The pillars were number ones. The viaduct had formed an enormous number, just as Ursula Shipton had foretold: It was one and eight and eight and one, and now – now the bridge had fallen. It wasn't the road bridge Mother Shipton had spoken about in her prophesy, it was the rail bridge – the viaduct. The viaduct was – it truly was – the highest bridge of all.

She reeled, almost overwhelmed by the waves of sudden realisation that were sweeping over her:

‘Carriages without horses shall go,

And accidents fill the world with woe.'

Those were her words. Railway carriages had no horses and there didn't seem a day could go by when there wasn't a railway accident on some line or other… or bridge. And this bridge –the viaduct – was the highest bridge of all.

‘The World shall End when the High Bridge is thrice fallen.' 

Tom had told her – had promised her – that the old high bridge had fallen twice already. And now there was a new high bridge, and now it had fallen too. They were thrice fallen and the world was going to end.

She closed her eyes and hung her head, trembling in an obeisance of excitement and anticipation.

‘Oh, come for me, Lord Jesus. I am ready and I am waiting for Your loving embrace. There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away. Amen'

The waters of the Nidd turned black. They writhed and boiled and filled with the detritus of Armageddon itself: crushed and splintered falsework timbers, shredded canvass shrouds, chattels washed from the riverbanks, and a boy.

A boy!

Lizzie opens her eyes. She looks and sees him; she sees a boy lying face down in the icy waters of the North Sea, being pulled into a fishing coble, and she hears again Little Sarah's scream of terror. It compounds inside her head with the shrieks and the screams of the End of the World and with the clattering of the looms, and grows louder and louder and louder.

‘There's a boy. There truly is a boy in the water.'

She runs. She runs through the weaving shed to the stairwell beyond. Round and round, down and down the spiral stairway, as fast as her legs and the panic deep in her belly will let her. She heaves open the door at the bottom and runs out into the yard. The air, thick now with the Cloud of Glory, fills her mouth, her throat, choking her heaving lungs.

She kicks off her slippers and dodges and pushes her way to the engine shed, to where the river is grasping and clawing at the swarming crowd. 

“Where is he?” she screams, “The boy, where has he gone?” 

‘Oh, please, Lord Jesus, please don't let him have drowned. He is so very little.' 

The people from the mill have heard her and they look too, pressing around her, jostling like hydrangeas for a better view.

‘But why are they just standing there, staring but doing nothing? Why won't they help? Why don't they tell me where he is?' 

She runs along the bank, pleading with them. 

“Please, for the love of God, have you seen Peter Lovegood? No, not Peter Lovegood, the other boy.” she means. “Can you see him? Tell me! Help me, please?”

A white shape turns on the surface of the water and slides into the current of the old mill race. It's him! She leaps. The current, overpowering and unstoppable with the strength of twenty-five horses, pulls her down and suffocates her. It spins her around and pushes her into the narrow channel too. She sees him just ahead of her. Like something preternatural, the shape that is the boy twists and loops in the surging current, rushing further and further away. She reaches out, straining to catch it. The mill race bottoms; the shape slows, and becomes languid in the exhausted current, and she has it. She has it grasped in her hand – no, not it; him – she has him tight in her grasp. Her foot strikes something hard and she kicks against it. There is fresh, cool air on her face. She gasps at it and feels it rush into her lungs. 

And then a power that is not her own takes hold of her and she ascends from the water. It is the Lord Jesus come for her at last. 

But no, it's not the Lord Jesus; it's Tom, just Tom, in the water with her. He has Peter Lovegood – no, not Peter Lovegood – the boy; he has the little boy in his hands too, and he lifts both of them up onto the riverbank. The boy is coughing, coughing and vomiting out river water. He's alive. 

‘Oh, thank you, Lord Jesus for letting him be alive. He is so little, too little to be dead, and far too little to be lost to his dear mama.'

Because the next day was Sunday, that accursed day of rest, Mr John Walton himself invited her up to his big house outside the town. Tom was there too. He was there in his capacity as mill foreman, dressed in his very best Sunday clothes. They were to take tea with Mr Walton as a special treat and to celebrate her famous deed of courage.

Mr John Walton himself had declared that she, Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson, was a true North Country heroine. She had not of course saved as many lives as Grace Darling had done, but she had been very courageous nonetheless, considering that she was just a workhouse apprentice girl. And Mr John Walton had declared that if there had been a shipload of little boys in the Nidd that day, then Elizabeth surely would have saved them all too.

Grace Darling had saved thirteen souls from certain death and she, Elizabeth Wilson had saved just one, and he was very little. But she knew, and Tom knew that she had also saved the souls of the little girls in the apprentice house, and she knew, and perhaps Tom knew too, that she had saved a mama the agony of having her precious little boy taken away to Heaven.

It turned out that no-one except Tom and Mr John Walton had realised that she was a heroine, just as Grace Darling had been, and she was glad of that. She was relieved because with the collapse of the viaduct and the damming of the river and the flooding of the town, her famous act of heroism hadn't been reported in the Harrogate Advertiser at all. 

Uncle Alfie read the Harrogate Advertiser, and she shuddered to think how he might have read about her and her famous deed of courage, and how, in a philanthropic moment, he might have come to seek her out once more.

She didn't suppose the Lord Jesus read the Harrogate Advertiser, because as she had learned at Sunday school, He was omniscient. So she was sure that He would have known about her famous deed of courage, and so would her mama and Old Mother Shipton. Mother Shipton had sent her moth to tell her that the End of the World would surely come. One and eight and eight and one made eighteen and the bridge had fallen. Now she had saved a boy and the souls of the girls and she was a heroine, just like Grace Darling had been a heroine and Grace had only to endure life until she was twenty-seven.

Elizabeth wasn't omniscient, but she still knew deep in her heart that the Lord Jesus would come for her in her eighteenth year. She would have to endure no more than that. 

‘Hasten Thy Second Coming, Lord Jesus. Let there be a time soon when, “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.” Amen.'

“So Price adopted her himself!”

Dr Roberts looked squarely at Mary Lovell, whose crushed, shocked expression exactly mirrored his own.

“Ye gods: I wonder how old she was when he first crept into her bed.”

“Or brought her to the Friday Club, to pass around his friends,” Mary spat.

Roberts looked away as her eyes closed over the horror of her own, brutal imaginings. He turned back to Lucie.

“Are you sure of it?”

She nodded.

“I think so. Price's wife wouldn't admit anything of course, but then I remembered she couldn't have children of her own.”

“That's quite right,” Mary confirmed. “She asked me many times if there was anything, anything at all, that she or I or Mr Price could do to help her become pregnant. I suggested in the end that she adopt one of the workhouse children, although I never dreamed for a moment that she would take Baby Sarah. Respectable people usually avoided illegitimate children in case they'd inherited the moral corruption of their parents.”

“She had no inkling what a morally corrupt monster her own husband was then?” Roberts asked.

“Who knows for sure,” Lucie replied. “She kept telling us over and over again that dear Barty was a great philanthropist.”

She shrugged.

“But then again, she said it a little too earnestly and a few too many times for my liking.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” Atticus agreed.

“So what do we do about tracing Sarah now?” Roberts asked. “We don't have long until my aunt goes to trial.”

“Mrs Price told us that Sarah is married now, that she has a young family of her own, and that she is totally unaware of her history,” Atticus replied. “To trace her should be quite easy. The real question is whether we wish to upset all of that? Mrs Price begged us not to.”

Roberts frowned. He turned to the nurse.

“What do you think, Mary? Do we send Mr and Mrs Fox to speak with Sarah directly, or do we not?”

“We do.”

Mary didn't hesitate for a second.

“To know the truth is always the best. What if she finds out later through some other means – when it's all too late? What if somehow, she knows already?”

“Mary's right, Atticus,” said Roberts. “Find her!”

 

But the Lord Jesus did not heed her prayers and there was no end to her sorrow, or to her crying, or her pain, and the former things did not pass away.

Elizabeth's eighteenth year rolled into her nineteenth, and as it did, it was only her own world, her own precious hope, that was ended.

She slid open the matchbox where she kept the long dead mother shipton moth and stared at the faces on its wings. But they did not look back. They just kept gazing at each other across the moth's tiny, fragile body, as if sharing one huge private joke. Mother Shipton must after all have meant the year Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One. Dear Lord; Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One was thirty-two long years away. She would have to endure every day and every night for the next thirty-two years before the End of the World did come, before she could at last have blessed relief. She pushed the matchbox shut. It was too long.

There was a strange and magical spring on the far side of the river, close to Mother Shipton's cave. It was called the Dropping or the Petrifying Well, and it was a natural curiosity; a well that slowly turned objects into stone. Tom had once offered to take her to it one Sunday after church, but she hadn't dared to go with him. One of the spinners had quipped at the time that she looked more petrified at the thought of going with Tom than anything the well could have done. But now, it seemed as if its waters must have touched her after all, because her heart felt just as if it might have turned to cold, heavy stone.

She thought of the viaduct. It was being rebuilt, and already the four huge legs were reaching high out of the valley once more, spreading their wings towards one another like giant angels ascending. Tom had told her that the deck of the bridge was almost eighty feet above the river; high enough to carry the new railway line from one side of the gorge to the other; high enough to be one of the most spectacular railway bridges in the whole of Yorkshire; high enough to kill her.

Six days each week, the bridge swarmed with men, hauling block after block up into the sky and setting them securely into place. On the seventh day they rested and prayed to God that He would bless their labours and the bridge would remain. On that day, the scaffold and the ladders were of interest only to the pigeons and to the crows, and to a little girl with a heavy heart, whose mama had left her for Heaven. 

She stood at the foot of a leg and gazed up its immense side into the bright, blue sky. Fluffy white clouds drifted past the tip and with a sudden, gripping angst, she wondered if perhaps her mama or if Baby Albert might be cocooned safely on the other side. The jagged tip of the leg seemed so close to the clouds she could almost imagine herself standing on its edge and reaching up to touch them.

But then, in the dark places of her mind, she heard the bell on her mama's coffin ringing and ringing, and growing louder and louder and louder. She imagined how the shadows under the coffin lid must have formed and moved as the demons crept inside to take her soul, to tear it out of her body and to drag it down to the Eighth Circle of Hell. Was she there, being tormented and punished still, or was she in Heaven with the Lord Jesus, at peace at last?

Would those same demons come for her? When she lay lifeless and broken beneath the part-formed arches of the viaduct, would they surround her body with their beastly, ravenous eyes and drag her down to Hell? Was she still wicked? Was she evil? Was Ursula Shipton, who had once sent her a moth, evil? Was she a seer or was she a witch? If Ursula Shipton was a witch, and she had sent her a messenger, then surely she must be evil too?

And then all at once the answer came to her, and it was the simple answer to everything. 

The witch pool!

She had once overheard Tom, in his capacity as mill foreman, telling some of the old women about a place just a few hundred yards upriver where the Nidd crashed off a shelf of rock into a deep, plunging pool. Here was where the ancestors of the townspeople had thrown those they suspected of witchcraft, bound and helpless, into the water. If they happened to drown, then their innocence was proven beyond dispute before man and God. But, if they lived, then such was the power of the pool that they could only have done so with the aid of the Devil himself.

She knew then what she had to do. If she threw herself into the pool, and if, please God, if she drowned, then she must have been a good little girl – good enough to die – and she would be called up to Heaven at last. 

But what if she lived? Dear God, what if she is a witch?

She has to find out. She has to know for sure. She begins to run. Her slippers pad soundlessly on the hard-packed stones of the road. 

God has said that no-one, not even He, can be busy that day. But as she runs and runs, he sets his church bells ringing. They erupt from the valley side above her, peeling and peeling, taking over her thoughts, taking over her mind, shutting it off to everything except their urgings for her to go faster, faster, faster. 

‘Please, Lord Jesus, please let me be there. Please let me be at the witch pool so that the bells can stop, so that I can stop, and so I can know.'

And the Lord Jesus must have heard her, because it seems that in that instant, she is there and she has stopped. She is standing over the abyss with its torrent that will peer into her very soul and judge whether or not she is worthy of death, just as it has for centuries. 

She stares into the waters plunging into the black, foaming vortex, and she knows at once that the ancients of Knaresborough had been right: Surely only a true witch could escape from this.

She kicks her feet from her slippers, soaked now with dew and balled with the thick, red clay of the riverbank. The boiling waters seem to be drawing her in as they swirl around and around, down and down into the depths. Their roar fills her senses, shutting out everything except the coffin bell ringing and ringing, and her own voice crying for mercy, and her uncle's rasping words: ‘Little girls who beg for mercy, seldom deserve it.'

And then the roar ceases and she is engulfed in an icy, suffocating blackness.

Needles of ice seem to pierce her head, her ears, her eyes, as the waters search her soul. She is pulled down, writhing and struggling against vast, unseen forces; surely the spirits of the river. They turn her, this way and that, squeezing her, mauling her. Something coarse and hard stings her fingertips, and a moment later, smashes against her chest. She gasps and rolls onto her back and her lungs fill with sweet, pure air.

Her eyes open, and Lo, she beholds the Kingdom of Christ. There before her soft, white clouds drift serenely past. Her ears ring with the songs of the birds of Heaven. 

‘Dear Lord Jesus, thank you.' 

She is in Heaven. Now there will be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; nor will there be any more pain, because like Grace Darling before her, her courage has been rewarded and she has passed mercifully, mercifully away.

But if this is Heaven, where is her mama? Where are Baby Albert and her papa and where is the Lord Jesus? Why isn't she cocooned on a soft, white cloud? And why, if there is to be no more pain, is she lying bleeding and bruised, sprawled across a wedge of rock with her legs floating in numbing, icy water?

A magpie flutters across the face of the clouds, calling its harsh cry. The discordant sound echoes between the steep walls of the gorge and melts into the roar of the water. And it echoes between the steep walls of her mind – walls that already can barely contain her own anguished cries; cries which grow louder and louder and louder.

She has not gone to Heaven. Oh, Lord Jesus, she has not even died. The spirits of the river have searched her soul with their long, icy fingers and discovered her wickedness. Her own wickedness binds her yet to this world. She can be permitted only to stare up into the next, like Moses before the Promised Land. She can only look to where her dead mama and Baby Albert surely are. It is her own wickedness that means she cannot be with them. 

But no! She has saved the life of the boy; she has saved the souls of the girls. She is a true heroine, just as Grace Darling had been, and Mr John Walton had invited her for tea. 

The blue of the sky becomes blindingly vivid; the leaves of the trees wonderfully green. She feels as if she can see every branch of every tree in the gorge, and her mind, racing as it has never raced before, tells her exactly what she must do.

The people on the riverbank look at her – stare at her, as if she's some kind of madwoman. An old lady turns, her mouth moving, her lips speaking unheard words, but Lizzie knows instantly that she's no danger and runs on. The certainty of what she must do fills her and consumes her, and almost as if dreaming the dream of Jacob, she reaches the foot of the viaduct once more. She steps forward, towards the beckoning foot of a long, wooden ladder, knowing that this is a causeway, a pilgrim's way, a stairway to Heaven. 

And then she is at the top, with the sparkling, blue river far below her and the soft blue sky above. The clouds are sweeping past just over her head, driven hard by a brisk, gusting wind that rattles the tarpaulins, and her mind, and the sheets that cover the workers' tools.

And with the wind comes her rhyme:

 

 

The bridge is high – almost eighty feet above the river and the hard, tarmacadamed road that tracks along its gorge. She knows that it is high enough to kill her. Tom has promised that it is high enough to kill her. Tom knows that she is a heroine, and Tom will know why she must do this. Tom knows everything.

Thomas Grainger has embellished his viaduct with battlements in homage to the real castle that stands guard over it. So for a moment, she's back at Budle, leaning through the battlements, gazing down at the whinstone beckoning her from below, and wishing she could fling herself to it. She has wished every night since that she had. 

Now she looks down and imagines stepping into the void. She leaves her body and watches herself floating gently down, light as a gossamer thread, into the gorge and onto the hard stones of the tarmacadamed road below. She sees her body slowly being crushed and broken and she smiles as she thinks how not even the gentlemen of the Friday Club will want to touch it now. 

Not worth a tramp's farthing. 

Her mind is racing as it has never raced before, and she knows now they wanted to touch her. It was no sad duty at all. They wanted to touch her; they enjoyed touching her, because they enjoyed punishing a wicked little girl who was begging them for mercy. And then she smiles again as she sees her soul lifting from her body and ascending serenely into the skies, into the welcoming arms of the Lord Jesus and her dear, dear mama.

She walks forward. The solid stones of the bridge become gently bouncing scaffold boards which themselves abruptly stop and become thin air. Her gut lurches as she plummets down and down and down. No floating, gossamer thread is she. Her scream of terror is just rising, as it becomes a grunt of pain that is cut brutally short. She smashes into the thick timbers of the falseworks and flies back, limp and broken as a little bird, to lie unconscious and bleeding amongst the stone chips and gobs of cement at its very bottom. And there is no serene ascension and no welcoming embrace. There is no causeway to Heaven.