The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘That kind of thing is immoral. It is…’ I could not say the word because I realised that I was only repeating the things that my mother would say.

  ‘Ungodly?’ she concluded. ‘I see no God where these situations are concerned and I have seen a lot of them.’

  ‘Iris would not want that. I don’t think she even wants to take the pills. It seems to be her father who is forcing her to.’

  She shook her head slowly letting out a long breath as she did so, then took a drag of the cigarette. I fancied that she did it to stop herself cursing. I thought, from the look on her face, that I should not say anything more.

  Then she reached down to a large leather bag that she had stowed under the bench and took out a little white leaflet. ‘You can give this to Iris then,’ she said. ‘If it gets any further, for it may not.’

  I took the leaflet from her but it was just lines of text and my eyes skimmed over them.

  ‘It is a list of all the poor houses and homes for fallen women,’ she said. Then she lowered her voice. ‘She can go to one of these places if her father throws her out – it might be her only option if she is to go against his wishes and not starve. She must know that they will only care for her if she agrees to give up the child.’

  I nodded.

  ‘She will need to get far away, for gossip can travel a long way. Look,’ she said reaching over and jabbing her finger into the leaflet. ‘This one is in Brighton. You can tell her that there are as good finishing schools in Brighton as there are in Switzerland. It need not end in disgrace.’

  There was a smatter of applause from inside the hall and I realised that the music had stopped.

  She stood up, swinging the bag over her shoulder. ‘I wish her good luck,’ she said, ‘and you.’ She did not return to the hall but crossed the road and on to the village green, and I watched her as she strode across the grass in the direction of the cottage hospital.

  I looked down at the leaflet again. On the front was a sketch of a destitute woman reaching up to a large crucifix, a skinny baby tumbling from her naked breast. Then a picture of a plump infant, playing happily in the arms of a nurse, the crucifix was there again, this time on the front of the nurse’s apron.

  They were pictures that my mother would have liked because she always said God was everywhere. She would have seen God in those pictures but, as I looked at the inked outlines of the skinny baby and the destitute woman, however hard I tried to see him, I could not.

  24

  She had not wanted to see me that day, for she barely spoke, just stared into the mirror on her dressing table, her eyes still as if she did not see me and her only connection was with the world on the other side of the glass.

  I had been summoned to Haughten Hall that morning by a message from Sir Howard and I had set out immediately, leaving my disgruntled mother to finish the willow crown on her own. It had been a week since I had seen Iris, but a week in which I could not escape her. Over those days I had thought of nothing but her – the softness of her body as she inched forward in the saddle, and the embrace we had shared in understanding and consolation.

  But there were darker memories too, and I could not help but recall the sound of her laugh from the tack room, the quiver of the spider’s web, and my shock at the news that she had been carrying a secret that I was not part of. They were thoughts that seemed to battle in my head, but not one feeling would win through and they raged until my mind was numb.

  The Iris who sat in front of me now was not the girl that I remembered. Her face was pale and her features drawn just like the day she had walked into the study with her pinafore over her nightgown, yet now she wore a baggy housecoat and made no excuses about rotten mutton.

  Maybe if I had not met with Sadie that week, I would have thought nothing had changed, but what the nurse had told me caused me to see everything through different eyes and each little thing I noticed about Iris that day had new meaning: the vase of budding flowers on the dressing table that brought tears to her eyes; the smell of damp earth drifting through the window that she said turned her stomach; the embroidered nightgown that now lay alone on the bed, one sleeve folded so that the cuff rested in the middle as if showing where the baby would grow.

  The room no longer held the feeling of the embrace we had shared, as if the morning’s cold rain had brought with it a change of air and swept the memory away. I wondered if all the meaning I had connected to that moment had died during my meeting with Sadie and the knowledge that it had brought.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Iris said suddenly. The sound of her voice made me flinch a little as it was the first full sentence that she had spoken all day.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. But her voice had woken me from my thoughts, and I realised that I had stopped pulling the silver brush through her hair and my eyes had drifted to the little bottle of pills that had returned to the dressing table.

  I could hear the scrape of Dora’s broom on the stairs and the gentle rise and fall of Sir Howard’s gramophone music, so I put down the hairbrush and went to shut the bedroom door.

  When I returned, Iris had picked up the bottle of pills and was looking at it, her eyebrows lowered.

  ‘It need not come to that,’ I said.

  She looked up at me and then back at the bottle. ‘So,’ she said slowly, ‘you know.’

  I nodded though really I did not, not for sure, but somehow she must have known beyond doubt. After all, she would know better than any doctor for, whatever she might have told a family physician about sickness and missed bleeds, she would not have told him about what she did at the stable of Waldley Court. I realised now that what I had heard happening in the tack room that day could not have been the first time that Iris and Sam had lain together. Iris had been having an affair with a stable lad that, if discovered, would bring shame upon the Caldwells.

  ‘Did Sam tell you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, then I suppose everyone knows,’ she said wearily, putting her head in her hands. ‘Your mother must think me a harlot!’

  ‘I don’t think she knows,’ I said, ‘because she got you liver salts from the chemist. She must have believed you when you said it was something you ate. She does not believe you could lie because you fear that God would punish you.’ I had hoped to make her laugh, after all we had joked about my mother’s religious mania only a few weeks ago, but as I spoke, I heard a depth in my voice as if I thought her deserving of punishment.

  She said nothing, just glanced at me briefly then turned her gaze back to the little glass bottle.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I did not mean for it to come out that way.’ The leaflet that the nurse had given me was in my pocket and I fingered the pages, willing the courage to tell her what I knew. ‘You know there are finishing schools in Switzerland as well as Brighton,’ I said, but the thought had come too quickly and the words tumbled out in the wrong order. It had made sense on Sadie’s lips but not mine and I felt my cheeks warm.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, turning to face me at last.

  ‘All I mean is that…’ But I could not bring myself to say the words. I fumbled in my pocket and held the leaflet out to her. ‘I got this from a nurse at the cottage hospital.’

  ‘The cottage hospital?’ she said. ‘My father says that they do unlawful things in the nurses’ house there. Things that the doctor will not, but things that could sort it out.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have heard that they do such things.’

  ‘You know so much about these matters, Nell,’ she said.

  ‘I do,’ I said nodding earnestly, although I did not admit that I had only known of such things for barely a day.

  ‘But it’s not what I want,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him to arrange anything with those nurses and I don’t want to take those pills.’ She looked up at me, her eyes wide as if searching my face for an answer, as if I was someone who could help.

 
‘This isn’t those things,’ I said, pressing the leaflet into her hand. ‘You can go to these places and be away from your father. They would make sure that you don’t starve.’

  She squinted at the crumpled paper in her hand. ‘It’s just addresses,’ she said, and then, ‘oh,’ as she studied the text some more.

  ‘What I meant to say was that if you went away for a bit, somewhere far from here, like one of those addresses on the south coast, everyone would think you were at finishing school,’ I said. ‘You could even say you were at a school in Brighton.’

  ‘Do you think I could live here in this place?’ she said pointing at a jumble of words on the leaflet. ‘With Sam and the baby?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It is not like that.’ I grabbed the leaflet back from her, worried that I had given her some kind of hope for a life that would be impossible.

  ‘Oh,’ she said glumly. ‘Well, it probably won’t come to that anyway. I would not let my father take me to those nurses, so he has found other ways to sort the problem, ways to make sure that things don’t get that far.’

  ‘As far as Brighton?’ I said.

  She stared into the mirror, our eyes connecting for a moment in the glass.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I knew I had said something stupid but I did not know exactly what.

  I feared that she might cry but when she spoke her voice was steady. ‘We are looking to find somewhere we can be together,’ she said. ‘We have made plans.’

  ‘You and Sam?’ I said. ‘But Sam is—’

  ‘I know what you are going to say,’ she said, raising her hand to silence me. ‘You will tell me that Sam is irresponsible and just a simple boy with little money.’

  It was what I was going to say but it was not all of it, for there was so much more that I felt I could not say. I could not tell her how I had sat on the little bench outside the tack room, listening to her laughter as I watched the tremble of a cobweb through my tears. I could not tell her about the way Sam had touched me on that same mattress and of how I had once dreamed of our marriage. I could not talk about the way her plans tore me up inside because they included Sam and not me. I could not tell her about how I had always thought that it was Sam I had wanted until an embrace had shown me that it was not.

  ‘He will come and take me from here, Nell,’ she said, nodding her head slowly. ‘You must not tell a soul, but we will elope.’

  Elope – it was a word that I had only ever seen in romantic novels, the type of fantastical thing that would happen in the stories of Mrs Corelli or in the daring adventures of the Strand magazine. They were the type of literature that Iris had claimed not to read but the little table I had seen in the library had been piled high with such books and Iris must have spent her days in this lonely house reading them all from cover to cover. I might have been a vicar’s daughter, but just then I realised that I had always known more about life than her – for she had no view of the real world, a world where romance does not exist.

  ‘I promise I won’t tell,’ I said quietly, for I did not want her to hate me.

  ‘We will be leaving on Wednesday morning,’ she said.

  ‘So soon!’ I cried. ‘Surely you need more time to plan and to—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have it all planned. Sam will come here and we will leave together in the omnibus. Once a week it makes an early stop at the crossroads past the village green.’ She pulled a little timetable from the drawer of her dressing table and smoothed it on the desk so that I could see the time of the omnibus ringed in black ink. ‘I cannot wait another week or my father…’ Her voice tailed off.

  ‘Or your father what?’ I asked.

  But she did not answer; she just looked at the bottle of pills on the dressing table again. ‘He is losing patience,’ she said.

  I looked at the timetable. ‘Wednesday is May Day!’ I said. ‘You are the May Queen, you won’t be able to slip away unnoticed!’

  ‘We will catch the first departure,’ she said, pointing to the black ring on the timetable. ‘It is so early in the morning that we will be gone by the time most people are risen.’

  ‘You can’t!’ I cried. ‘What about your dress that my mother has worked so hard on, and the willow crown and the maypole?’ But I only had to look at her to realise that these little things that had meant so much to her just six weeks ago, no longer mattered. I no longer saw a girl sat in front of the mirror but a lady, even if she was one who had been forced into her womanhood.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Will you give this timetable to Sam? I must let him know of the omnibus. He must know when to come for me. You must tell him that I will be looking out from my bedroom window, waiting for him.’

  ‘I don’t know, Iris,’ I said. ‘I don’t know that I will be able.’ It was a weak excuse, but I could not tell her that I did not want to face Sam again, not after all that had happened.

  ‘Please,’ she urged. She took a small Bible from the drawer of her dressing table and folded the timetable between the pages. ‘Nobody will know, and the Bible is a gift from me to him.’

  I took the small book from her. It was not much bigger than the palm of my hand.

  ‘Look inside,’ she said.

  I opened the front cover, the inky swirl of ornate handwriting at the top of the page:

  To my love, one day we will be together

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I said. ‘I am sure he will like it.’ But the swirls of ink were already starting to blur through my tears.

  ‘I know you understand,’ she said. ‘You have to get it to him.’

  ‘I will try,’ I said, blinking the tears away, ‘but I can’t promise anything. Like I said, I don’t know if I will be able.’ I wondered if she heard the hollowness in my voice, for I did not know if I would see Sam again. I did not know if I would even try to.

  I closed the book and put it in my pocket. I did it to please her more than anything, as I was still unsure of what I would do.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You know this is my only chance.’ Then she locked her eyes on me, her voice steady. ‘My mother died giving birth to me.’

  I glanced at the photograph on the dressing table. The one in which her mother lay dead, looking quietly on the world through eyes that no longer saw. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘and I am sorry. I know how upset you must be.’

  She stood up and I hoped for a moment that she might embrace me again, but instead she took my hand in hers and led me over to the bed where she lay down next to her crumpled nightgown.

  ‘Here,’ she said, pulling me down so that I knelt next to the bed. ‘Put your hand on me.’

  I tried to pull free from her but she gripped my fingers hard and pressed my hand between the folds of her housecoat and on to where the thin fabric of her dress was stretched tight across her middle.

  ‘I can’t feel anything yet,’ I said. ‘I don’t know about these things. I would not know if there was a baby.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not that.’ She put her hand on top of mine and moved it downwards so my wrist rested on the jut of her hip bone.

  ‘What do you feel?’ she said.

  I thought of when our nightgowns had been set out on the bed the previous week, and of how I had panicked when I imagined the cuff of her nightgown to be touching mine, where my hip would have been. ‘No, Iris,’ I said, trying to pull my hand away. ‘Don’t do this!’

  But she held my hand firmly. ‘What do you feel?’ she said again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I could not mention the softness of the material, nor the warmth of her body that rose through it, nor the shame she made me feel from such an intimate touch. I feared that she was taunting me again.

  ‘The doctor says that my hips are the problem,’ she said. ‘My hips are too small and they are misshapen.’

  She loosened her grasp on my hand but I no longer wanted to pull it away. I flexed my fingers and flattened my palm, pressing my hand against her body. I could feel the jut of her hipbone un
der my wrist and felt the other at the tip of my fingers. The space seemed tiny to me but I had never touched myself in such a way and had nothing to compare it to.

  I took my hand away. ‘I don’t know, Iris,’ I said. ‘I had always thought you small but maybe you would have a small baby. My mother made sure that we learnt nothing about the human body while I was at the village school. She even got the biology textbooks confiscated because she thought them wicked.’

  ‘The doctor says that if I give birth to this baby then I will die,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, but there was nothing more I could say, and she did not seem upset by her words.

  ‘They say that my mother died because she had small hips,’ she continued. ‘I became stuck on the way out. They cut me out of her but they had not had time to clean the room and she died of blood poisoning. Doctor Crawford told my father that I am made the same way – that I cannot bear a child – but my father would not allow a baby to be cut from me as he fears that I would die in the same way as my mother. The way that my father sees it, that leaves only one choice.’

  ‘Oh, Iris, I’m sorry,’ I said, but they were the same words I would have said if she had told me that it had rained on her birthday or if she had stubbed her toe, and I knew they had little meaning. I looked her up and down. I had always thought myself ungainly when I was with her, but now I realised that this was only because she was so much smaller than me – smaller than any other girl of our age. Under her housecoat, I saw the white trim of the navy blue dress that she had worn so often before – the one that her mother had worn in the photograph where she had posed with buckets and spades. There had been so much passed down from mother to daughter – the fair hair and the delicate features – but also this body, the body of a child-woman.

  ‘Maybe you should stop thinking about your father,’ I said, ‘and decide what it is that you want. What would you want if you could have anything at all?’