The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  He smiled politely and I saw the eyes of the young man again, even if the face around them had aged.

  ‘You knew my daughter Nell better though,’ I said. ‘The girl who went missing along with Iris Caldwell.’

  He opened his mouth a little and for a moment I thought he might say more but he did not. I thought it odd that he did not mutter the empty words of condolence that I had become so accustomed to hearing.

  ‘I still see Nell,’ I said, ‘or at least I used to. I would see her in her chair in my front room. Sometimes I would talk to her, although she would never answer me. She is faded now, and I worry that I will never see her again.’

  Francis said nothing. He did not even smile or nod his head, but I heard the shuffle of his shoes on the floor and he glanced away awkwardly.

  I had been encouraged by the understanding Roy had shown when I had told him that Nell was still with me, but I had forgotten that Francis was practically a stranger – I was embarrassed that my intimate confession had flowed so freely.

  ‘Mrs Ryland,’ Francis said at last. ‘I—’

  ‘No!’ I said firmly. ‘I know that I am not mad. I do not believe in ghosts of that kind. I think the reason that I still see Nell is something to do with my own regret. You see, I was a terrible mother to her and I made a lot of mistakes that led her to behave the way that she did.’

  ‘I only heard that she was drunk on one occasion,’ he said, ‘and no more than—’

  ‘It was here that I found her,’ I said.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In this place. ‘You see it was on the day of her father’s funeral. She had taken a bottle of wine from the wake and she had walked from Oak Cottage in her mourning dress and brought the wine here, where she drank it in the pews with a stable hand. I marched her to the police station myself. All I saw was her disrespect for her father and for God, and the disgrace that she had brought on us. I did not see that she wanted to be close to her father again. I did not see her pain.’

  He reached forward and took my hand again.

  ‘Nell always loved her father more than she loved me,’ I said, my voice wavering. ‘I was scared when his death moved her so much because I thought that, on my own, I could never be enough for her.’ There was so much more that I could have said but I found myself too weary to continue. ‘Nell’s behaviour was all down to me,’ I concluded. ‘Maybe even what happened to her in the end, in some way. I had my flaws.’

  Francis looked down at our joined hands, his eyebrows lowered and his large forehead furrowed, and I think we both realised that there could be no words to soothe me. I could not even find God in this place today.

  ‘There has already been enough suffering over what happened back then,’ he said after a while. ‘There should not be any more. It makes no sense for you to torment yourself this way.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, but I was tired and there was really nothing more that I could say, and I feared that I was no more than a lonely old woman off-loading her troubles on the first stranger who would listen. ‘You should go,’ I said, taking my hand back from his. ‘I feel that I should probably take some time alone to reflect.’

  He cleared his throat awkwardly and stood up again. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘and I have a train to catch.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You have probably missed it.’

  ‘There will be another,’ he said, ‘but as I said before I have heard all that I need to.’

  I nodded.

  He stood up and walked back down the aisle, his footsteps echoing along the pews.

  It was not until he reached the porch that I jumped to my feet. ‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘I remember more about you now. You were the one with the cine camera. It was you who took the film of Iris and the man in the cloth cap as they walked across the village green on May Day. You were there. You have to go to the police station. You…’

  But he was gone.

  Then the bell started to toll and my words were lost in the sound. It was a bell that long ago had rung at the start of funerals, but times were changing and the modern world was a strange upside-down place where nothing made sense. To my ears the bell did not mark the end of Howard’s funeral but reminded me of the old passing bell, which warned of an impending death. I started to worry again, not for the man just buried, but for the one who now faced the noose.

  Nell

  1912

  22

  It was the events of just one morning near the end of March that changed everything. There are things about that morning that I remember quite clearly: the little callus on my mother’s finger as she pushed her needle into the cotton irises on the nightgown; the bright green stripe of a tin inside a paper bag and my protests at the errand I was to run; the bulbous silhouette of an expectant woman resting by the wych elms and her warning to me to turn back; the spider hunched on the trembling cobweb and the ripples on the surface of the bucket; the smell of his carbolic soap and the sound of her laugh. For anything else that I witnessed that day, I cannot speak of.

  It is what happened after I found them together that I cannot account for. I do not remember walking home, nor going into the house and sitting on the chair by the window. I do not remember the blisters swelling on my heels nor how I got mud on the hem of my dress and tore my stockings. It was only seeing my mother’s face that broke the fog of my memory, for I recall how it seemed to crumple when she arrived home and saw me.

  My mother had run in and out of the room – sometimes no more than a blur in the light from the window, and sometimes her face large as she clamped her hands over my ears and stared into my eyes. I do not remember what she said or did, only the little fragments of colour that I saw around me – the vivid green of my shawl on the back of the chair, the red tinge to the water in a little metal pie dish and the spool of white gauze, the silver sheen of the sewing scissors and the rich brown of the strands that choked the blades. I remember my fists in my lap, mats of hair between fingers that would not unclench, and my mother’s hands shaking as she pulled the brush through my hair, wiping her tears on her sleeve.

  Then her words cut through the fog at last: ‘I am here for you, Nell. You are home now.’

  It was not until much later that I felt her pain.

  * * *

  ‘You are wearing the bonnet again,’ she said.

  I looked at Iris’s reflection in her dressing table mirror and then back to my own as I stood behind her but said nothing. It had been hard to return to Haughten Hall after all that had happened, but in the end I could not give my mother a reason to stay away. I had not told my mother a thing about what I had witnessed in the stable yard of Waldley Court and even now, after almost a month had passed, I thought that she would only accuse me of telling lies about her precious Iris.

  ‘Is it really so cold in here as it is outside?’ Iris tilted her head and looked at me, her eyebrows raised.

  ‘My mother makes me wear it,’ I said quietly. It was a line I had rehearsed with my mother every day since my ‘little mishap’ as she liked to call it. For a whole month she had regularly scrutinised my scalp and run her fingers through my tufts of hair, measuring them with the width of her fingers as they grew back to something that was not respectable but something that she said suggested neither illness nor madness. These were also days in which she had increased my Bible readings and hidden all the knives and scissors in the cottage. It was a time that she had forbidden me from leaving the cottage because, no matter how caring my mother had suddenly become, what she feared most was village gossip about her daughter.

  Iris narrowed her eyes.

  ‘You must have noticed that my hair was quite short already,’ I recited woodenly. ‘I like it this way but my mother does not so she makes me wear the bonnet. I wanted to look like Vesta Tilley and Mother does not approve of the music halls.’

  ‘Vesta Tilley dresses as a man, in shirt, tie and top hat,’ she said flatly, ‘and sings songs about her lady l
oves.’ But there was no malice in her voice, her brow only creased slightly as if I somehow fascinated her.

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I still like her even though I have only ever seen photographs and heard “Burlington Bertie” on the school gramophone, for Mother will not let me go to the music halls.’

  ‘I have not seen her at a music hall either,’ Iris said, ‘but Francis says that she acts like a sapphist.’

  I did not answer for I did not know what the word meant. ‘Your father likes the bonnet,’ I said quickly, remembering his nod of approval when I had worn it on my first visit.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He likes things like that.’ I saw that she was wearing the navy blue dress with the white trim again and I realised now that it was the same dress that her mother had worn in the photograph that sat on the desk in the study, the one in which she posed with a bucket and spade. It was a childish dress that fell well above her ankles, and would not have looked out of place with a bonnet. I realised then why Sir Howard had never found my bonnet strange in the way that everyone else did.

  I looked out of the long window and down on to the little lawn where my mother and Sir Howard had set deck chairs out on the grass by the sunken fence and were shielding a page of a book from the glare of the sun.

  ‘The weather is nice,’ I said. ‘Will you not be riding over to Waldley Court today?’

  But she did not pick up on the real meaning of my question, nor the hint that I knew of her affair. ‘I can’t ride today,’ she said. ‘My father will not allow it anymore.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘Are you still ill?’ But she did not look ill; as I studied her reflection, I saw that her cheeks were now quite rosy.

  ‘It comes and goes,’ she said, but only that. She stared into the mirror, our eyes meeting in the glass, and I looked away quickly. ‘In fact, I am starting to feel a little queasy again,’ she said. ‘You do not seem quite yourself either, Nell. Maybe it is best that we are alone up here so that we don’t infect others with our ills. Won’t you tell me what is wrong because your voice is strained and you will not look at me?’

  A shrill laugh drifted on the breeze and I glanced out of the open window to see my mother’s hand reaching out from under a parasol and patting Sir Howard’s sleeve.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said but there was a catch in my voice that showed I was not. I cleared my throat. ‘I think I am just under the weather with a cold that is going around,’ I said with some effort. ‘Would you like me to get you something if you think you might become unwell again? You will have some liver salts around somewhere – my mother got them from the chemist for you.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I have not had any of those. I did not know we had any. Maybe my father forgot about them.’

  ‘I gave them to Dora,’ I said. ‘Maybe she put them in the bathroom cabinet.’

  I left her without further word and headed for the bathroom, locking the door behind me and breathing heavily. I found the liver salts in the medicine cabinet but the tin was already empty.

  There was a brown paper bag alongside the tin, like the one my mother had given me from the chemist, but when I looked inside there were no liver salts, just a little glass bottle of pills. They were small, white and round and I remembered the ones that her father had urged her to take – the ones she said made her feel worse. I picked up the bottle and looked at the label. There was a name – Doctor Young’s Purification Pills – but nothing to indicate what the bottle actually contained, just a few more words printed in a small banner: ‘Cures female irregularities and obstructions’.

  I thought of girls who were small and delicate, like Iris, and of the swooning women in the novels that I read. I was not sure what an obstruction was but I fancied it meant something like a clot or swelling that would block blood flow or breath. Suddenly I wondered if Iris’s illness might be serious.

  I returned to the bedroom empty-handed. ‘It seems you have run out of liver salts after all for I couldn’t find any,’ I said. ‘There were just some pills, white ones.’

  She groaned. ‘No. My father has me taking those – they don’t seem to work.’

  ‘Then why does he insist you take them?’ I asked.

  She hesitated, a strange expression on her face. ‘I think he is desperate to cure me, so he thinks anything is worth trying. I suppose that he fears me dying,’ she said. ‘The way my mother did.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  Then she laughed. ‘He is just fussing, but still he fears it. I see him wringing his hands and watching over me all the time.’

  ‘But just because your mother died, it doesn’t mean that the same will happen to you,’ I said. ‘Does it?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ she said quietly. Then her mood seemed to brighten. ‘We should cheer ourselves up. Dora has left our gowns on the bed; we should go and see them.’

  ‘Our gowns?’ I repeated.

  ‘I mean our nightgowns,’ she said. ‘Your mother brought them both over last week.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

  But she had already stood up and was walking over to the bed, so I followed.

  The long white nightgown that my mother had been embroidering lay flat on the counterpane, the full sleeves crossed over the chest like a corpse in a romantic painting. Next to it was my own nightgown, plainer, yellowed and made only of linen compared to the fine cotton of Iris’s gown, but lain out in a similar way. Next to each nightgown was a frilled petticoat – Iris’s embroidered with yellow flowers to match her nightgown, while mine was faded and plain. The fabric of the nightgowns had been ironed flat, with neat creases at the seams and I fancied that they looked like dead bodies that had been interred together – the May Queen and her attendant lying side by side.

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘I don’t want this.’

  ‘But your mother said that you would—’

  ‘She did not ask me because she knew I would say “no”!’

  ‘Please, Nell,’ she said. ‘You must. We thought that it would cheer you up. Anyway, you must do it for me because the other attendants are Emma Flanagan and Rosalie Harris – they are both just twelve years old, and Rosalie still has gappy teeth! I will look foolish among them – my father thinks I am still a child. If I can show people that I have an attendant who is my age, a friend, then I might just bear it.’

  ‘No,’ I said again. ‘I…’

  But she reached across the bed and took a sleeve of her nightgown in each hand, uncrossing them and placing them at the sides of the garment. The she leant over further and did the same to my nightgown.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘That looks better, we look happier now and not so much like corpses.’

  ‘I still don’t—’

  ‘Then how about this?’ She looked at me and smiled then took the sleeve of her dress and pulled it across the counterpane towards mine so that the fine lace of her cuff lay on top of my rough linen gown.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Put it back!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ She laughed.

  ‘You know what I mean!’ I cried. ‘The hand of your gown is touching my…’ but I did not know what to say next as I could not speak words that I did not know. I remembered how we had ridden together and she had put her hands on my waist and hips, and suddenly the memory warmed my blood again.

  ‘Take it off,’ I said firmly.

  ‘They are only holding hands!’ she protested.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You have put them that way to make it look as if your hand is reaching to my…’ But again, the words did not come. ‘You did that on purpose. You…’

  But when I looked at the gowns again, it was only the cuffs that were touching, as if they were doing no more than holding hands, just as she had said.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I would call that holding hands, but if there are other things you would like, Nell, let’s see…’ She reached over to my gown again and took up the sleeve, folding it upwards so that the cuff rested
firmly on the little yellow irises – the chest of her gown. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘that is how Vesta Tilley would want it.’ She looked at me squarely. ‘Isn’t it, Nell?’

  I felt my face burn and found that I could not look at her.

  ‘Oh, come on, Nell,’ she said. ‘I am only joking with you.’

  ‘It is not a joke,’ I said quietly. ‘I have to go.’ I took a step towards the door but she grabbed my hand quickly.

  ‘Will you brush my hair?’ she said. ‘Like you did last time.’

  ‘I am not your maid!’ But the words were only in my head and I followed her silently back to the dressing table, the sting of tears in my eyes.

  She sat down on the little stool and I stood behind her, taking up the silver brush, my cheeks still warm. I started to draw the brush through her long strands of hair. She winced a little as the silver hit the boning of her corset and I remembered the marks I had seen under her shoulder blades. This time was not like the last, for now her shoulders were completely covered by the childish blue dress and the jut of her collarbone and paleness of her skin were no more than a memory.

  I looked into the mirror and saw that our reflections could not have been more different. The bonnet hugged my head like a white eggshell and my nose and chin seemed large with no tresses or fringe to soften them, and there was nothing to hide the scar on my cheek. Iris’s small nose and her deep, bright eyes made my own features look dull and clumsy in comparison. She was as delicate as any of the portraits of her mother, and I understood why Sam would want her over me.

  My thoughts turned to that day at the stables of Waldley Court – of what I had seen and what I had not – and suddenly I thought I could see the outline of Iris’s face caught in the little window and the curve of her thighs as she drew up her petticoat, Sam’s fingers stroking the collarbone I had admired, then moving down to the jut of her breasts. But these were scenes that existed only in my imagination and I wondered why such thoughts had come into my head.