The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  She smiled a little at first but then her face darkened as she gathered her thoughts. She sat up on the bed and straightened out the nightgown that lay beside her. ‘I want to have a family and live far away from here,’ she said, as she smoothed the sleeves. ‘Maybe in Brighton, or a little cottage by the sea.’

  ‘Do you want to have this baby?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course, but if I do not leave, my father will do all he can to stop me having it.’

  ‘He can’t!’ I said. ‘He can’t do that!’ but then I thought of the pills that her father was urging her to take and the corset wounds that dug deep into her back, and I realised that he could.

  I looked at the nightgown that lay on the bed, and I saw that she had folded the sleeves so that the arms were crossed over the chest once more – as if it was lying in readiness for what was to come.

  25

  ‘I think that my daughter is playing a game with you.’

  The words came from behind me and I turned to see Sir Howard standing at the foot of the grand staircase, although I had not heard his footsteps on the boards.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, taking a few steps away from him towards the front door. I had left Iris only moments before, her body curled on the bed next to the corpse-like nightgown. She had not moved when I had said goodbye, the touch of my hand on her shoulder doing nothing to soothe her.

  ‘After all,’ Sir Howard said, ‘Iris is just a child, and children will play games.’ He spoke in the same way that he always had – a slight curl to his lips, and creases round his eyes that made his whole face smile – but after what I had heard from Iris, his words seemed to take on a new meaning, although I was not sure what.

  ‘Well, I have to go now,’ I said, hoping to end the conversation.

  ‘Just be careful of her,’ he said, his voice deepening a little. ‘She tends to use others to get what she wants.’ Then he paused, his smile broadening. ‘She would not trick you in such a way, would she?’

  ‘No,’ I said but I heard a catch in my voice and knew that I should not say any more. I was not sure where he had been when Iris and I had talked in her bedroom, and I wondered if he had somehow overheard what we had said. I thought then that maybe he knew of his daughter’s plans to escape on the omnibus and of her dreams for a new life with Sam and the baby her father would not allow her to bear. I wondered also if he knew that I had felt the softness of his daughter’s flesh between the juts of her tiny hipbones and felt the warmth of her body through the thin fabric of her dress.

  ‘I expect you want to get home now,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you for receiving me.’ I nodded, then reached for the door but the large knob would only rattle when I turned it.

  He put his hand in his pocket and took out a long key, waving it in front of me like a magic wand.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly, ‘but I didn’t mean to trouble you. I would have been happy to wait for Dora.’

  ‘Dora has gone to the scullery,’ he said, pointing the key towards the door, ‘for the moment at least.’

  I barely had time to move aside as he approached the door and, as his shoulder brushed past mine, I felt the gust of warmth from his body, the tang of his sweat catching in the back of my throat. But then he stepped back again and I realised that I had not heard the snap of the lock and saw that the key was still in his hand.

  ‘I think that my daughter may have given you something,’ he said, but it was not a question.

  I felt a little flicker of warmth in my blood and the burn of guilt in my cheeks. ‘No!’ I replied but when he said nothing more, I added, ‘Nothing but a small Bible.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said flatly. ‘I expect that is the one that Iris uses for her studies. I think she must have forgotten that she will need it this evening. You will have plenty at home that you can use, I don’t doubt.’

  ‘No,’ I said weakly. ‘I don’t. Not like this one.’ But my hand went to my pocket all the same.

  ‘I thought you would have known better than to listen to her,’ he said, frowning. ‘As I have told you, my daughter likes to play games with people.’

  ‘But I promised her that I would take care of this one for her,’ I persisted, my fingers fumbling desperately with the pages hidden in my pocket. I could feel the omnibus timetable poking out from the pages of the Bible but the folds of paper were wedged firmly in the binding.

  He said nothing, just held his hand out flat in front of me.

  I took the Bible from my pocket and gave it to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, turning to the door again, but still he made no move to unlock it, just opened the front cover of the Bible and started to read.

  ‘“To my love,”’ his words were slow and mocking. ‘“One day we will be together”.’ He did not look up, just stared at the page, his eyebrows pulled low and his face reddening as if he hated the ink and paper itself.

  ‘I expect that she means her love for God,’ I began but my voice faltered when his stare moved from the text and on to me.

  ‘I will not permit anyone to take my daughter from me,’ he said, his voice deep and slow. ‘Her place is here with me. She is lady of this house and has promised me that she will always be. If she goes to that boy again. I will burn his home to the ground with him still inside it!’

  I heard a little chuckle at the back of my throat. I wanted him to laugh too. I wanted him to stop and explain that he was joking and for the smile to cover his face again.

  But his eyes bored into me. ‘The same goes for anyone who helps her.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I began, my legs starting to shudder beneath me.

  But my words were lost under the thunder of his voice: ‘Whatever favour you are trying to win from my daughter won’t work. She does not care for you. I have told you it is just her games!’

  ‘I-I’m not,’ I whispered. ‘I—’

  But the words were knocked from me. Everything seemed to darken for a moment and I felt a thud on my head, the scrape of his fingers on the top of my scalp and the crack of his knuckles against my skull. Then I saw his chest large against my face, a button on his jacket scraping my cheek. My chin was forced back, a line of heat burning across my throat, pulling tighter and tighter until I felt the strings of my bonnet snap from under my chin and I fell backwards against the door, my shoulder striking the hard wood.

  He towered over me – his large arm stretched out in front of him, my little lace bonnet hanging limply from his fingers.

  And then I realised that my head was not covered. I pulled my knees up to my chest and buried my face in them, my fingers laced over my naked head. He could see how my hair was no longer than the fur of an animal. He could see the pitted areas where I had pulled it from my scalp and the straggled ends that my mother had tried to save. He could see what I had done, and he could see my shame.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I always suspected that your mother was covering something up, but I never expected you to be a lunatic. You must tell the boy to get away from here or I will have you put away where your kind belong!’

  ‘Yes,’ I sobbed. ‘I will tell him.’

  There was a bang on the wall above me, the Bible landing at my feet as the sound echoed along the corridor.

  ‘Sir Howard?’ It was Dora’s voice, but it was faint as if muffled by a maze of walls and corridors.

  He threw my bonnet back at me and I grabbed it, frantically trying to pull the thin material back over my head.

  ‘You cannot speak of this,’ he hissed. ‘On May Day you will meet us in the village as if nothing has happened and you will walk with Iris in the procession. After that she will no longer have any visitors. You will not see her again.’

  I nodded, but I could not look at him.

  ‘Sir Howard?’ Dora’s voice was now closer, her footsteps echoing along the corridor. ‘I heard a bang. Is everything alright? I heard it all the way from the scullery.’

  He did not ans
wer her, just stared at me.

  ‘You cry when things do not go your way,’ he said bitterly, ‘just like she does.’

  Then he walked slowly to the door, turned the key in the lock and opened it wide for me.

  ‘Goodbye, Miss Ryland,’ he called loudly.

  I scrambled to my feet and stepped through the doorway.

  ‘Time to go home,’ he said, smiling once more. His words were not a farewell but a warning – a command that I had to obey.

  I ran.

  * * *

  There was no sound but the whirl of the wind in my ears. Trees and hedgerows skimmed across the fields and the ground blurred beneath my feet. I do not know how long I ran for or where I thought I was going, but after a while I began to stumble over rocks in the path and my stockings became snagged in gorse and bracken. Then it all came spinning to a halt.

  It was only once I had stopped to catch my breath that I looked around me. I had not run back home to Oak Cottage with my comfy chair by the window, the warmth from the fire and the familiar smells of aired washing and broth simmering on the stove – I had come to another place.

  The door in front of me was closed, just as it had been the last time I had visited – the time that I had sat on the bench under the window and listened to the laughter coming through the walls and watched the spider’s web quivering on the pump handle. I did not know why I had come to the tack room and I thought of turning back, but then the door opened.

  Sam’s face seemed to freeze when he saw me and I suddenly realised how I must have looked to him. I felt the dampness of my dress around my armpits and the hardness at the back of my stockings where the blood was starting to dry from the blisters that had been re-cut. My face itched with sweat, and my eyes felt raw from tears and the dry wind of the common. And then there was my head, naked without the bonnet that I could not refasten. I heard Sir Howard’s words in my head again – ‘lunatic’ – and I wondered if this was also what Sam saw in front of him now.

  ‘Oh, Sam!’ I said but then nothing more because I realised that I did not need to.

  Sam dropped the basket he had been carrying and hurried over to me. He took my hand and led me into the tack room, where he sat me down on his bed and carefully removed my boots. He put his pillow behind my back and stoked the brazier in the corner, testing the old blackened kettle with the tip of his finger. Then he put a blanket round my shoulders and gently folded down my stockings, carefully loosening the crusted blood from my skin. He poured the warm water from the kettle into a bucket and washed my feet with his bar of carbolic soap, then he patted the wounds dry and bound my ankles with strips of linen. All this time he did not question me. In fact, he did not say a word and I thought it because he knew that I did not have the voice to answer him.

  Then the sounds, sights and smells of the world around me came flooding back and I realised that my senses had been muffled – a numbness that I was only aware of now that it was gone. I felt a warm weight in my limbs and I sank back into the softness of the bed and started to become aware of the things around me once more – the smell of the soap, the warmth of Sam’s hands as he lifted my feet on to a little cushion and the glint of russet stubble on his cheek.

  He took the kettle from the brazier once more and poured the rest of the water into a battered teapot, setting two tin mugs down beside it.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s not wine,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘I wouldn’t expect it,’ I said. ‘Not in this village, for I haven’t seen another bottle since my father’s wake.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for bringing the wine into the church with me that day. I just thought that you needed cheering up and that it would not be missed at the wake. I wasn’t thinking of what would happen to you.’

  ‘You came back to the church with me,’ I said. ‘That is what matters. No one else even noticed that I was gone.’

  He parted his lips slightly as if trying to think of a question, the right one, but I knew that whatever words he used, I could not answer him.

  ‘I can’t tell you what happened to me, Sam,’ I said. ‘I can’t say any more.’

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘He has driven you here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

  He shook his head wearily. ‘Does he know it was me?’ he asked. ‘Does he know that it was me who got Iris in trouble.’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘He talked of “that boy”.’

  ‘I knew she would say something,’ he said. ‘I knew he would get it out of her in the end.’

  ‘It’s not her fault,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen what he’s like. He ripped my bonnet from my head and said that he would have me put away.’ I heard the tremble in my voice as I spoke, but I could not say the word that Sir Howard had called me, for I feared that saying it aloud would somehow make it true. Instead I raised my chin to show him the skin on my neck that had been rubbed raw by the bonnet strings. ‘Look!’

  He bit down on his lip, his eyes staring past me, but he had never been good with words and I understood his silence.

  ‘Will you go with Iris?’ I asked. ‘You could marry when you are both twenty-one.’

  ‘I can’t support a wife—’

  ‘You can’t stay here!’ I cried. ‘Sir Howard said that if he finds that you and Iris have been together again, he would burn this place down with you still inside it.’

  ‘He does not hate me for being with Iris,’ he said. ‘Only for what she has told me about him and what he is really like.’

  ‘Then me also,’ I said. ‘She has not told me so much but I have seen the ways in which he is trying to control her.’

  He said nothing further and I feared that whatever Iris might have told him had not been enough to convince him of the help she needed.

  ‘She gave me a Bible to give to you,’ I said, ‘but Sir Howard made me return it to him, and then he threw it at the wall. I don’t have it anymore but Iris had written inside that she loves you.’

  ‘She knows I don’t care for those things,’ he muttered.

  And then I remembered that he did not. He was the boy who ate with his hands and slept with the windows open in all weathers. He did not care for Bibles and flowery sentiments and I started to worry for what Iris would do if Sam would not support her.

  ‘She put this inside the Bible,’ I said, handing him the omnibus timetable. ‘I managed to shake it out from between the covers while I was hiding it in my pocket.’

  He took the timetable from me and looked at the little printed numbers and the inky ring scrawled round the time of the omnibus on May Day morning. I had hoped to encourage him, to reassure him that there was a plan, but there was no change in his expression and his eyes seemed to wonder over the numbers. I remembered how he had struggled with the lessons when we sat together in the village school, even though he was four years older than me. In fact, I could not recall him ever spelling a word or recognising the simplest number. I wondered at the connection he must have to Iris – this girl who had read a whole library of leather-bound books.

  ‘It is an omnibus timetable,’ I said, pointing to the inky ring. ‘The omnibus for London will arrive in Missensham on Wednesday at daybreak.’

  He nodded, but would not look at me again, his eyes still wondering over a page of symbols that were strange to him and I knew that his thoughts must be elsewhere.

  ‘The tea will be ready now,’ he said after a while.

  We did not talk about it again for there was nothing more to be said. Instead we drank tea together and talked about the times we had shared in the parsonage: of the day that my father had slipped in a puddle after chasing Sam from the house; of the frosty morning that a magpie had taken my mother’s thick drawers from the washing line; of the day that I had forgotten to take Sam’s birthday cake from the oven. I told him about the time that my mother had lost her spectacles and mistook the flour for custard powder, about when she had patched a hole in her sleeve
only to find that she had stitched the cuff shut, and about how she could never catch the little grey mouse that ran through the kitchen. We laughed together but he often called her ‘poor Agnes’ and his voice lacked the mockery that mine had.

  We talked until we heard the faint chime of the midday bell carried on the breeze from St Cuthbert’s, and I knew that it was time to leave.

  Sam helped me to pull my boots back on, carefully sliding the leather over the bandages, then he tied the laces loosely at the tops of my ankles and held my arm as I stood up shakily.

  ‘Goodbye, Sam,’ I said.

  ‘Goodbye, Nell.’

  I walked slowly back across the yard.

  But when I got to the gate he called, ‘I’m sorry, Nell.’

  I did not need to ask what for.

  Then he added quietly, ‘Can you forgive me?’

  I turned back and opened my mouth. But my lips could not form the words that my mind was so unsure of. ‘We should not speak of it,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think it is better that way?’ Despite all our years of shared bedrooms and school desks, I could say no more.

  Then I turned away from him. It was only as I walked down the lane that I realised Sam had not answered me. He had neither nodded nor moved to show that he had heard me, and I realised I’d seen a strange expression in his eyes at that moment – an expression I would not come to understand until it was too late.

  26

  ‘Hurry up, Nell, or we will be late!’

  I sat down slowly and looked into the dressing table mirror, covering my ears to my mother’s calls and the patter of rain on the window. It was now only four days until May Day but Sir Howard had claimed that Iris’s nightgown needed adjustment and we had found it one morning in a basket on the porch, with a note to say that Sir Howard would be in London for a couple of days. My mother had spent a long, rainy night letting out the seams and was now insisting that we walk to Haughten Hall to return her handiwork.