The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  The woman raised her eyebrows because any comment on the weather would have been too obvious, I thought. She was a plump woman only a little younger than myself, and wore some kind of dark uniform, her hair drawn back from her face in quite a severe style that was not in fashion and probably never had been.

  ‘Are you here for the girls?’ she asked.

  ‘The girls?’ I echoed.

  She pointed to the little can I was holding. ‘Are you leaving the plant here in their memory?’

  ‘It’s only parsley,’ I said automatically, then I realised how stupid my words sounded because I had not expected her question and did not know what else to say.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I just thought a woman of your age would remember. A couple of girls went missing around here many years ago, and there was a bit of a to-do about it again in the papers this morning. This was the place where…’

  I did not want to hear it, so I nodded politely and tried to listen to the rain battering the leaves or the trickle of the rivulets on the track – anything to block out the sound of her words. As I watched the movement of her lips, I knew that she spoke of the foxholes dug deep under the knotted roots beneath our feet. It was twenty-five years ago in this place that a search party had been alerted by the bark of one of their foxhounds, and discovered the beast dragging itself from one of the holes, Iris Caldwell’s blood-soaked petticoat between its jaws.

  The woman spoke at length, but really there was little more to say as it was never known whether the remains of Iris Caldwell had been brought to this place by man or beast.

  ‘…it did not take the foxes long to return,’ the woman concluded, pointing at the tangle of twisted roots beneath our feet, ‘for they seem to rebuild their lairs no matter how many times they are dug out.’

  ‘I know what happened here,’ I snapped, but then I noticed a little bouquet of flowers by the twisted roots and I thought that she must have laid it. There were not many flowers that bloomed in mid-April but the bouquet was daffodils and not the gaudy blue garden irises that so many people had laid at the time – Irises for Iris, as if she were the only one who was remembered. Then I realised that this woman had not only spoken of a girl but ‘girls’ – I was sure that I had heard the ‘s’.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for remembering both of them, and for not thinking them both dead.’

  She turned to me and I saw her face had a plumpness to it that made it difficult to determine her age, but her cape seemed to billow rather than fall at her sides and I thought it concealed a waist that had become rounded with age. She was certainly old enough to remember what had happened and, when her eyes met mine, I sensed a familiarity, but one I could not place.

  ‘Oh, you are Mrs Ryland,’ she said. ‘I am sorry if I was insensitive to speak of your daughter. I recognise you now although I think we have never been acquainted.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am Agnes Ryland.’

  ‘I knew Nell,’ she ventured, ‘but only a little.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said surprised, for if Nell was alive she would be forty this year. I had thought this woman older and I struggled to think how she could have known my daughter and what trouble Nell might have caused her.

  ‘Nell was a good girl,’ the woman said quickly, as if reading my thoughts.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I know that not everyone saw her that way.’

  ‘I did not know there was any other way to see her!’ she said, but there must have been something that she saw in my expression because she added: ‘As I said, I did not know her that well. I met her just the once.’

  ‘Nell had her flaws…’ I began.

  The woman glanced away but I felt that I had to continue. I was sure that Nell’s exploits must have been well gossiped about around the town and I always thought that, if I mentioned them first, then others could not, for I did not want to give anyone the satisfaction of spreading gossip they thought I was not aware of.

  ‘My daughter was—’

  But she reached out and put her hand on my arm. ‘You don’t have to explain anything, Mrs Ryland. I will always think that Nell was—’

  ‘A drunkard,’ I said, for the woman’s reassurances had come too late and there was so much that I felt I had to explain. ‘When she was fourteen she stole a bottle of wine, which she drank inside the church, with a boy who was quite beneath her.’

  ‘I’m sure that it was not as bad as you make out, Mrs Ryland,’ she said. ‘For I did not know any of this.’

  ‘She ended up arrested and in a police cell,’ I continued. ‘My daughter was always bright. She liked reading and was going to stay on at the village school until she was old enough to train as a teacher, but in the end she left without so much as taking her labour exam.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we all make mistakes in our youth.’

  ‘But she was the daughter of the late vicar,’ I said, ‘and she brought disgrace upon his name!’

  ‘Still, I hardly think it a disgrace…’

  Suddenly I felt the raw humiliation of it all again. There was something about this woman – her age or the fact that her cape looked like some sort of uniform – that made me feel that I could talk to her in a way that I could not with Roy or Sir Howard and I found myself telling a stranger more than I had ever told these two men who I had known for so many years.

  I spoke of how Nell had never had any type of regular employment and had been reluctant to learn any trade, of how she never showed any interest in respectable gentlemen or marriage and instead spent her time reading cheap novels and spending all her money at the bookstand in Partridge’s Department Store. I told her of the lack of care that she had for her appearance and of the time she spent alone in her room, the door locked. I wanted this woman to understand all that I had been through with Nell, then only to lose her, but I could not find a way to voice my regret and the words fell from my mouth like a string of petty resentments.

  ‘…and she cut her hair short,’ I finished, my voice trembling.

  ‘Short?’ the woman echoed, and from the look on her face I realised how silly the words sounded. ‘Short hair is hardly…’ but she did not understand because she did not share my memory of the day I had found Nell, her chestnut curls fallen in her lap and my sewing box scissors clasped in her hands.

  ‘You forget this was in 1912,’ I said weakly. ‘It was a disgrace in those days to do such a thing.’

  But she offered not so much as a sympathetic nod. ‘She was still your daughter!’ she persisted, and suddenly I felt that I could say no more for, after all, there were things about Nell that I had never spoken of and did not dare to now – secrets that were even more shaming.

  We sat in silence, watching the drips of rainwater sliding from the elm leaves, and I fancied that she would have made her excuses and left me had it not been for the bad weather.

  I set the little can of parsley down next to where she had laid her flowers to show her that, despite what I had said, I did care for Nell and was not such a heartless person, but she did not seem to notice. Her outline seemed to blur a little and I realised it was not due to the rain or my cataracts. I took off my spectacles and quickly wiped the tears away with my sleeve.

  The woman cleared her throat and shook some droplets from her cape and I saw a red sash underneath and a flash of pale blue cotton.

  ‘Exactly how did you know my daughter?’ I asked.

  ‘In passing,’ she said. ‘I just knew her in passing.’ But she would not look at me as she said it.

  ‘You are one of the district nurses,’ I said. ‘You must work out of Missensham Cottage Hospital. You said that you had met her, but only on one occasion, how would that be?’

  ‘I don’t recall exactly,’ she said. ‘After all, the Cottage Hospital is just off the village green, and that is so near the church where your husband worked for all those years and—’

  ‘Did she come to you?’ I cut in. ‘Was she one of those women who came to you?’
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  ‘I don’t know of the women you speak of,’ she said flatly.

  But she did know of those women, and she must have known that I did too. As the vicar’s wife I had been well aware of the wicked things that happened in the nurses’ house behind the cottage hospital. I had heard whispers in the back pews during Sunday services and I had glimpsed little brown parcels in the handbags of parishioners as they left the long driveway that led to the cottage hospital. At best these women were the unmarried ones who wanted relations with men but none of the consequences. At worst, they were the ones for whom such measures had come too late.

  When Thomas was alive, these women would sometimes come to me for guidance. They would sit with me in the large parsonage sitting room and tell me of their plans to visit the nurses’ house as I poured tea and offered them fresh handkerchiefs. They would kneel with me on the rug by the fire and we would pray together, calling upon the Lord to banish their sinful thoughts. Then I would call Nell down from her bedroom and she would fetch my sewing box and the bag of offcuts and we would all sit together round the fireplace while we sewed. I would always invite the ladies to work on the same piece: a quilt with panels depicting the life of Eve – a theme that I thought was appropriate for a time of silent reflection.

  The nurses’ house was a place that I had long known of, and now I feared that Nell had known of it too.

  ‘Did she come to you?’ I said slowly. ‘Did you ever see my Nell at the nurses’ house?’

  ‘Mrs Ryland,’ she began, ‘I could not possibly remember who I have seen at the Cottage Hospital, and in any case I could never discuss—’

  ‘But you would remember if you had seen Nell,’ I persisted. ‘It would have preyed on your mind because she was so young.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ryland,’ she said, standing up and wrapping her cape around herself. ‘Nell was someone who tried to do the right thing by everyone. It is hard to be that age—’

  ‘Was she a fornicator?’ I cried, standing up and grabbing her hand. ‘Was that another of her flaws?’

  She squinted into the rain, her face grim. ‘She was your daughter,’ she said sternly, pulling her hand from mine. ‘That is all you need to know about Nell, yet it is the one thing you seem to forget!’

  She stepped out on to the track and I watched her walk away from me, the wind buffeting the triangle of her cape until her outline dissolved into the rain.

  I had said too much. I had failed Nell when I should have been there for her and now I had failed her memory. I sat back down on the twisted elm branch, in silence but for the sound of footsteps growing fainter on the track.

  6

  It was not until Tuesday that I saw Roy again. He turned up at Oak Cottage unannounced, bearing gifts of rhubarb wrapped in a dishcloth and a well-thumbed book of poetry. I was pleased to see that he carried no newspaper. He had not found Sam but he suspected him to be at large on the common between Missensham and Oxworth. Roy thought that Sam should be easy to find because at some point he would try to recapture the horses he had set loose to graze. Then he told me not to worry – the police had everything in hand, but it would be best if I kept my door locked as there were undesirables about. I thought of what I had seen at Waldley Court – the clothes flung on to the fences, the toppled brazier and the terrified dog – and was inclined to agree.

  ‘When Sam returns, we have made sure that it will not be to Waldley Court,’ Roy said earnestly. Then, as if sensing my disapproval, added: ‘We did it for Nell.’

  I offered him more tea but he waved the raised pot away and leant back in the rocking chair smoothing his moustache, clearing his throat as if he had much more to tell me.

  As Roy spoke, I watched his lips move but found that I no longer heard his words. I no longer saw the man who had sat and sympathised with me over the years, nor the one who had invited me to his wedding, who sent me postcards from his holidays in Brighton and looked in on me at Christmas. Now I saw just a uniform – a man who had stood by and watched while his constables wrestled with a man much smaller than themselves.

  I thought of the scene I had imagined at the stable yard, though now it was not the straw mattress that I saw thrown to the ground, but Sam, flung from the arms of the constables, his face ground into the mud by the sole of a policeman’s boot. I did not see the clothes strewn on to the fences by frustrated officers once their target had fled, but I saw Sam restrained while they destroyed his home in front of him. I did not see the bucket kicked from under the pump, but an officer’s boot swung into a tethered dog. I no longer imagined Roy as a man who turned a blind eye to what he saw – I saw him as a man who watched and barked orders.

  And then I saw this man looking at me, as if waiting for a response. ‘Agnes?’ Now there was a tremor in his voice. ‘I don’t think you heard me,’ he said quietly. ‘I am asking if you would permit me to search Nell’s bedroom again?’

  My face must have told him the answer.

  He cleared his throat and poured himself some more tea at last, although it must have been quite stewed. Suddenly I saw the young constable again, the one who had sat in the same chair over two decades ago and blushed when he spoke.

  ‘What would be the point?’ I snapped. ‘You have already searched it twenty-five years ago and nothing has changed. What can you possibly learn from a bedroom where the owner has not been for so long?’

  ‘Not just the owner,’ he said.

  I lowered my spectacles and stared at him over the lenses.

  ‘I am sorry, Agnes, but the village women say that nobody has been in that room since I was last in there all those years ago, and that you have not even been in yourself. They say that the door has been locked ever since—’

  ‘You should not listen to such gossip—’ I cut in.

  ‘It is not for me to judge you,’ he said quickly. ‘I care only that the room has been preserved and that going over it with fresh eyes might remind me of details that have been overlooked or forgotten.’

  But Nell’s bedroom was a place that I did not want anyone to return to. I thought of a day back in 1912 – the day after May Day – when I had stood on the landing outside Nell’s room, peering through the gap in the door as I watched the young officer rifle through my daughter’s belongings. I remembered his hands sorting through her books, her bed sheets and the toys that I had kept from her infancy, and I remembered the sound of my voice, the cries and the shouts, telling him to return things, to be gentle, to take care. There was the crucifix that her father had given her on her birthday, the ebony hairbrush matted with dark curls, and the lavender water she had borrowed from my room. There was the quilt of Bible scenes that we had sewn as we sat together in the parsonage and the Bible that we would read together before bedtime.

  Then there was the bottom drawer of her dressing table, and I remembered the clunk that it had made as it came off the runner, and the sight of Roy’s large hands feeling through the soft flannel of her underwear and unwrapping her monthly rags. I had watched until I could bear it no more, screaming at him to stop, and this large man had left, blushing and cowed, without further word.

  I had done my best to put things right. I had remade the bed, put a teddy back on the shelf and straightened a picture. Then I had returned the underwear back to the drawer and slotted it back on the runner. I had wiped the tears from my cheeks and left the room, locking the door behind me. I knew then that it was the only way I could keep the memories safe, the only way the room would be untouched for Nell’s return.

  ‘Well, these women you speak of can gossip all they like,’ I said. ‘I suppose they are saying I am mad for keeping Nell’s room as it was all those years ago?’

  ‘No, Agnes—’

  ‘Well, they don’t understand that I have practicalities to consider,’ I said. ‘You see, I have to keep that room free. You must understand why. Nell always hated it if she thought someone had disturbed her things. I have to keep it as it is, in case she—’ I knew that my last wor
d would sound strange and he seemed to wince as I said it ‘—returns.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said.

  ‘No, you don’t…’ I began, but I could not explain to him that searching Nell’s room would violate her all over again, so instead I said, ‘I saw what you and your men did to Sam’s place.’

  He opened his mouth, but there was no argument that he could make.

  ‘You speak of ensuring Sam would not return to Waldley Court,’ I said, ‘and I have seen with my own eyes what you meant by that.’

  He nodded. ‘I am sorry that you saw that, Agnes,’ he said, ‘but this is a very different matter. I will be very respectful. You know that my Susan is nearing the age that Nell was back then. I will treat Nell’s things as if they belonged to my own daughter.’

  There was a prickle of tears in my eyes and the room seemed to cloud, a vague outline forming in the chair by the window. I tried to blink her away but Nell had appeared in her usual spot and I fancied that she must have heard every word we said.

  ‘It has been a long time since I was here, working on this case,’ Roy continued. ‘This is the first time there has been anything new. Please help me to make sense of it.’

  I nodded reluctantly. ‘You’ll find the key to Nell’s bedroom on the ledge above the doorframe,’ I whispered, wiping my eyes. ‘She always kept it there. She thought that I didn’t know, you see. I put it back there after you left the last time.’

  Roy said nothing more, just nodded and left the room, the creak of the stairs coming moments later.

  Nell’s head turned towards the sound, her eyes large and her face pale. Then she looked back to me.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I am so sorry.’

  Then came the sound of the key in the lock.

  We sat together, our eyes fixed on one another, flinching at every noise that came from above us – the heavy footsteps, the creak of the floorboards and the grate of the hinge on the wardrobe door. I started to think of Roy’s hands again, hands that were now aged and gnarled, feeling through the soft cotton of her underwear and rags.