by Katie Hutton
‘I want the baby, though nobody else does. And I’ll do anything to keep it.’
14 ‘Had a Romany man got you with child, then would I have said unto you girl, you are a wicked whore . . .’
15 Prostitute
16 Penis
CHAPTER 11
Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife.
John Wesley, 1743
Salvation
‘Who is it?’ growled Oliver from behind his front door.
‘Harold.’
‘Brother Chown!’ Oliver said, unbolting the door. ‘I expect you’ve come about our misfortin. Everyone else has.’
‘Um . . . I incline to believe that the fault is not mainly hers.’
‘That’s generous of you, and the sign of a forgiving Christian mind. But she knew better – brought up as she has been. Her poor mother is gone all to pieces.’
‘I was wondering if we might talk—’
‘Forgive me! I’m forgetting my manners with all this trouble. Come in, come in.’
Harold hesitated.
‘Could we walk instead, Oliver? I should find it easier to say what I want to say if we are outside – I would prefer Ellen and her mother not to hear this just yet.’
The door through to the scullery was open on this warm evening, and Flora Quainton, trying and failing to distract herself by paunching a rabbit, did hear, and wondered about the ‘just yet’.
*
They took the bridle path across the fields towards the next hamlet. Harold spoke first.
‘What do you intend to do about her, brother?’
Oliver stopped, looking away across a gate into a field of cows, anywhere but at Harold. He fumbled in a pocket and, pulling out a clean white handkerchief, blew his nose so fiercely that two sparrows perched on a hawthorn bush took flight. Harold realised that his old friend was weeping, and didn’t want him to see it.
‘I mun write to friends in the connexion – I think those in Birmingham might be best, so that she may go there. I don’t know . . . I’ve never had to deal with something like this before.’
‘You mean until the child is born?’
‘And after, mebbe. There is our own orphanage down at Alresford if the right couple can’t be found – they do good work there, thank the Lord. But they won’t take ’en before five years old. Otherwise there’s the poor ward and then the workhouse for the infant. There’s others would have her committed to Littlemore. But I wouldn’t wish that on the poor silly maidy.’
‘Um . . . can the man be found?’
‘The man be damned!’ shouted Oliver. ‘Forgive me, Harold . . . Even if he could be found and . . . and tamed, somehow, it would be no use. He has a wife already.’
‘Oh merciful heaven,’ murmured Harold. ‘And she knew it?’ He felt cold.
‘Oh, she knew it all right. From the start, too. So she must take the blame. He never spun her a yarn, I’ll give him that; no promising her a ring to get his hands on her.’
‘This is Ellen?’
‘It is, my own dear son’s child. She nearly threw the fact at me. She went running back to that wood where they met thinking to find ’en there. Grace Lambourne and your Judy brought her back. Sister Grace even said she’d wished Ellen had’ve disgraced herself with Charlie – though she used some other sentimental term, but disgrace was what she was talking about, however you dress it up. I said if she was thinking about that now to unthink it smartish – and she went off home wailing. No, the sooner Ellen’s away from here the better.’
‘And afterwards?’ croaked Harold. His mouth was dry.
‘I don’t know. But she can’t come back here.’
‘I might have a suggestion,’ began Harold.
‘You know where we might send her? Does your Mr Lightfoot deal with – oh, I don’t even know what to call ’em – when a man must pay vittles for the child he shouldn’t have?’
‘Oh no, it’s not that. I mean if she could be found a husband.’
‘A husband! Who’d want her now?’
‘I would, Oliver. I’d marry her.’
‘You’d do that? You’d take my poor soiled girl and make her right?’
‘I’m revolted by what she’s done – in that man’s hands – coupling like the beasts in the open air, they say! But no one can’t be saved, Oliver. The man has gone – that’s good.’ Harold kicked at a tussock of grass. ‘She was brought up on the path of righteousness and can be brought back to it now. Judy loves her and I’d always seen her as a good influence. My daughter might learn something, from all this.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’d be proud to marry her.’
Oliver turned away, pulling out the handkerchief again. He talked quickly, falling over his words.
‘I wonder how we can do it . . . Send her away until the baby is born and taken care of. We tell everyone she has gone to the college, and that there never was no baby after all. She’s too clever to be a shop girl as it is. Then you mun come across her – we’ll make out you’ve been specially requested to preach outside the district – and she puts aside the college to marry you as she can’t be married and a teacher as well, so why go on with it . . . I think that might work. Oh Harold, you are a true Christian!’
‘Um . . . I was thinking to marry her straightaway.’
‘Straightaway? But what about the baby?’
‘No, Oliver, I meant marry her and take on the baby.’
‘And leave here?’
‘No.’
‘Are you mad, Harold Chown, or a saint?’ Oliver said at last. ‘I’m sure I don’t know which.’
‘I . . . I’ve said nothing to her, of course. But I don’t see why she would accept me unless it was for the baby. From what little Judith tells me, Ellen seems determined to find a way to keep the child. If she goes away, and the baby is given up, and she comes back, then all is as before—’
‘Nothing is as before.’
‘No, not quite, I see. But she’d have no reason to marry me if she had no child to support, would she? I’m not a catch for a girl like her.’
‘You are, though! The little fool should count herself lucky!’
‘I don’t believe she’d have me, though, unless she got to keep her baby.’
‘Chown, come back and ask her.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. I don’t want you to change your mind. But try first if she won’t have you without the little cuckoo. I say it for your sake, though I should have pity on the poor babe.’
*
Oliver opened the door to the staircase and called up: ‘Ellen?’
She raised her head from the damp pillow. Was it her imagination, or did he sound kinder?
Then she heard her grandfather’s voice rumbling down in the parlour. He was talking to her mother. All she made out in reply were murmurs, and an occasional ‘my poor child!’, but Ellen knew her mother would acquiesce in anything Oliver decided.
Perhaps if I went to my brother? She began to pin her hopes on John, that he would come home on a vegetable cart and bear her away – do what Sam had promised and never done. Her head sank back into the pillow. How can I saddle John with my problem? He’s his own life to lead, and so active in the connexion too – all his work with the poor. But Ellen had a strong sense of what she thought of as the ‘deserving poor’. She was not poor – yet – and she was not deserving. She scurried endlessly round this labyrinth of the mind, looking for a way out and meeting only dead ends. Ellen knew of at least two cottagers’ daughters who had got into trouble. There had been the obligatory raging to start with, but in their easy-going and ramshackle homes these inconvenient babies had eventually been accepted, and brought up under the same roof as their mothers as though they weren’t their children but their youngest siblings. Oliver, of course, frowned on such arrangements as encouraging a loose and irresponsible way of living, his head deep in his Old Testament for justification.
Ellen tried to take some comfort from the familiarity of her little room: the flower-sprigged curtains, the dark stained boards that creaked so familiarly she knew exactly where she stood even in pitch darkness, the rag rug she had made herself, the patchwork counterpane that her mother had stitched as a girl, the framed exhortation to recognise God’s love in all His works.
‘Ellen?’
She sat up on the bed. Oliver stood in the doorway. He’s looking me in the eye this time.
‘Harold Chown has called. He has a suggestion to make to you, dear. I think you might hear him out.’
‘About the baby,’ she said, a statement not a question, thinking of documents she would need to sign, of Sam’s child and hers being handed to strangers, of her whole life spent trying to remember what the baby had looked like, imagining what her child would grow into. Would they even let her know if it was a boy or a girl?
‘It has to do with the baby, yes. Will you come down? It would be better than him coming up here.’
‘Why not let him come up here? I’m a bad girl as it is. Let old Harold see me sitting here on my bed! I’ve nothing left to lose!’
Waiting downstairs in the little parlour, ‘old Harold’ winced. Her grandfather grasped the doorframe.
‘Come now, Ellen,’ he said. ‘There is no one who cannot be saved if they want it enough. Will you step down? He wants to speak to you alone.’
Ellen frowned. She had tried to avoid Harold since that day when he had talked of Charlie’s death as being a sign from the Almighty. What can he have to say to me now? Yet a tiny pinprick of light winked somewhere in her tired brain and would not be ignored. She followed her grandfather down the cramped staircase.
‘Here she be,’ said Oliver unnecessarily. ‘I shall be out the back with my beans along of her mother.’
‘Good evening, Ellen,’ said Harold. They stood facing each other, he turning his hat nervously, she holding one hand in the other.
‘You’re looking well,’ he added. She wasn’t, and she knew it. Her face was puffy and tired, her eyes smaller, her hair dull, her normally neat dress crumpled. He thought she looked older. With a little rush of pity and hope he thought: That Gypsy wouldn’t want her now.
‘Um . . . I have heard about your trouble, Ellen,’ he went on, looking down at the hat in his hands.
‘You and the world, I expect,’ she said.
‘I would like to help you.’
‘Everyone says that. But no one asks what I want. That’s because I’ve no right to say what that is.’
‘You want to keep this child?’
‘I do, – you’re the first person to ask me that,’ she said. ‘You!’
‘How will you?’
‘That I don’t rightly know. I shall have to go away, of course. London again, or Birmingham. Somewhere where I am not known. Where I can pretend to be a widow. If I put on my “good face” again I will probably be believed.’
Her ‘good face’? Do I really know this girl at all?
‘I can sew. I can write a good hand,’ she went on. ‘It must be possible to find something.’
That something hung in the air between them. She looked so undefended. Good God, he thought, if she’s lucky, she’ll find someone to keep her – but with a baby?
‘Marry me,’ he said.
‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me, I think. Marry me, Ellen.’
She laughed, a horrible, joyless sound. Harold flinched.
‘Marry me,’ he said for the third time, feeling a fool. ‘I’d take you tomorrow, baby and all.’
Ellen reached for a chair and sat down.
‘Of course, I quite forgot the form,’ apologised Harold, remembering his first wife, his Millie. He began to creak onto one knee.
‘Don’t!’ cried Ellen. ‘Get up, Mr Chown!’
He obeyed. ‘Call me Harold – please – whatever your answer is.’
‘Harold, then – but no romantic gestures. It doesn’t suit you, nor me, nor this fix I’m in. I thank you for your proposal. This is what you meant, then, when you said it was God’s will that Charlie had to die?’
‘Forgive me. I was clumsy and thoughtless.’
‘I expect you think that what you’re doing now is all part of the divine plan too. But it doesn’t matter. Would you, though, give me just a little time to think about your offer?’
‘Shall I come back tomorrow?’ asked Harold.
‘No, I meant only a short while. An hour.’ Anything to get out of this maze. ‘You’ve taken me completely by surprise,’ she went on. ‘Does my grandfather know?’
‘Oh yes. I spoke to him first.’
‘Of course, you would do that,’ she said. ‘What did he say?’
‘He was very pleased. But he thought I meant to have you without the baby – to marry you after . . . after the baby is settled. He thought that would be best.’
‘Oh he did, did he?’ I shall never forgive him for that. ‘But you didn’t agree?’
‘I said I didn’t think you’d have me unless it was with the baby.’
Ellen stood up. ‘All right, Harold.’
‘So I may come back in an hour?’
‘Never mind that. I’ll marry you, Harold. I’ve no choice, really. Grandfer would prefer his great-grandchild in the poor ward than for me to keep it. I doubt I’ll make you happy, but I will marry you.’
‘Oh Ellen!’ He grasped her hand and drew it to his lips. How Victorian he was! Oh, but whatever you do, do not kiss my palm! She felt warm breath on her knuckles, the dampness of his mouth, and gritted her teeth. Then she was released. She saw tears in his eyes.
‘Shall we go out and tell them now?’ he said. He tried humour: ‘Before you change your mind?’
‘I shan’t do that,’ she said, unsmiling.
‘Would you take my arm, Ellen? Then we don’t need to say anything.’
*
‘So you’re to marry Pa? Are you mad, Ellen?’
‘He’s asked me, and I said yes, that’s all.’
‘There has to be some other way!’
‘No, Judy, if there had been I’d’ve taken it, with all respect to your father. If they took my baby away I think I’d die.’
‘It’s a cheek of him to ask you!’
‘It’s not, you know. I should be grateful to him.’
‘You in the same bed as Pa! I can’t think of anything worse!’
‘I can. My baby taken from me.’
‘What’ll you do, shut your eyes and think of Sam?’
‘Oh, Judy, no, please . . .’ Ellen started to cry. ‘I’m not meant to love, am I? Charlie gets killed, and Sam abandons me. This poor baby is all I’ve got now . . . I can’t lose it too!’
‘Oh, Lord, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just vexed with Sam for running away, and Pa for doing his holy and righteous bit. Using you to make himself a martyr! He’s old enough to be your pa. That’s not decent!’
‘I’ve no choice, Judy! And if you care for me at all, don’t mention Sam to me ever again. He’s forgotten me, and the only thing to be grateful for is that he knew nothing about this baby. If I’d had a chance to tell him he’d probably have taken off even sharper.’
‘I suppose you’re right. Oh well, gel, at least you and I rub along well enough.’
‘Oh Judy, it’s you that’ll keep me sane! I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘Ellen, come here till I give you a hug! You’ll not expect me to call you ma, will you?’
Ellen collapsed into hysterical giggles. ‘Oh Judy!’
‘He never talks about Ma, you know.’
‘Never?’
‘No. Ten years old I was and I’m expected to get over it on my own. A squeeze of the hand and told it’s God’s will. It’s always God’s will, but then why don’t the bad people get their comeuppance? God’s will that poor Reggie came back in bits and too ashamed to see me anymore, though I’d have taken him in any
state, I would indeed. God’s will that your Charlie didn’t come back at all. I’ll tell you something, Ellen Quainton: I’ve had a bellyful of God’s flamin’ will! What’s that you say?’
‘Your mother. Tell me about her.’
‘I’d be glad to. He gev all her dresses and shoes away, said there was those that needed them more. I wanted to keep something, something that smelled of her for a bit longer. I saw things I’d loved to see on her and told her so, hanging on other women, with the wrong hat, the wrong stockings – just all wrong, you know. And when I tried to say something I was told: “Don’t be selfish, it’s what your mother would have wanted”, though I’m blowed if he’d ever even noticed what she was wearing, so long as it wasn’t showy.’
‘Men aren’t good at these things, Judy.’ Though Ellen thought of Sam’s grumbling about her dowdy togs, his admiration for her pretty hands, his beautiful words. ‘But perhaps he did love her, Judy, and just didn’t know how to show it. He’s stayed unwed a very long time.’
‘I don’t know what Dad thinks. All I know is that he’s always been set on “bettering hisself”, as he puts it. No job out of doors for him! Always a stiff collar and tie, even if he lives in a cottage. Somebody needs to till the earth and make chairs, as long as he doesn’t have to. That’s not progress, as far as he’s concerned. He’s always needing to be looked up to, studying – to get to be what? Lightfoot’s clerk! Calls it using his talents, like in the parable. Anything but work with his hands.’
‘Wedding me is hardly going to help him then, is it?’
‘I don’t think my father has ever done anything just for the joy of it. He’d consider that sinful, I should think. So he’s never put his head in a book unless he thought he was going to learn something useful. I’ve never known him to read a novel – only those dull ones that come out in instalments in the Prim magazine. He keeps telling me to read them, says they’re uplifting. Yawn! He’s mortal scared of anything or anyone that’s not respectable – as if it’s catching – tramps, hawkers—’
