The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  She’d never felt sorry for these men. They had it coming, after all, didn’t they? They were predators themselves.

  “I haven’t been before the judge,” she said.

  “Well, who knows—maybe ye won’t be sent away. Ye didn’t murder someone, did ye?”

  Evangeline wished Olive would keep her voice down. She hesitated, then shook her head.

  “Theft?”

  She sighed and chose the least incriminating charge. “I was accused—wrongly accused—of stealing a ring.”

  “Ah. Let me guess.” Lacing her fingers together, Olive cracked her knuckles. “Some cad gave it to ye in exchange for favors. Then denied it.”

  “No! It wasn’t in exchange for . . .” Was it? “He’s . . . away. I was accused in his absence.”

  “Uh huh. He knows you’re up the pole?”

  Evangeline had never heard the expression, but its meaning was obvious. She shook her head.

  Olive thumbed her chin, then looked Evangeline up and down. “Ye were the governess.”

  Was her tale of woe so utterly predictable? “How do you know that?”

  Lifting her hand to her mouth, Olive made a starburst with her fingers. “The way ye talk. Book smart. But ye don’t have the airs of a lady. Pity you’re not so smart in the ways of the world, Evange-a-leen.” She shook her head and turned away.

  As Evangeline well knew from her father’s sermons, a woman’s greatest possession was her chastity. While men were more advanced in nearly all ways—more intelligent and reasonable, stronger, more resourceful—they were also inclined to recklessness and impulsivity. It was the duty of women to slow them down, he always said, to bring forth their better natures.

  She thought she’d absorbed this lesson, but in the small village where she was raised, forty miles and a world away from London, it had never been put to the test. Most people in Tunbridge Wells stayed close to their parents and married their neighbors, sustaining and fortifying a web of relationships that became more tightly woven as each generation succeeded the last. But Evangeline had not been part of such a web. Her mother died in childbirth, and her widowed father lived a life of the mind, with little interest in quotidian earthly details. He’d preferred that Evangeline keep him company in the library, reading side by side, rather than performing the usual female duties—and anyway, the vicarage came with a housekeeper.

  Detecting a sharp curiosity in his only child, he hired a tutor to teach her Greek and Latin, Shakespeare and philosophy. These hours in the library of the vicarage shaped her destiny in a number of ways. She emerged far better educated than the average villager, but because she’d been raised without peers, she was woefully guileless. She had no confidantes with whom to gossip, and thus to learn. Her father wanted to insulate her, to shelter her from harm, and in doing so he denied her the inoculation required to survive. She could name the seven continents and identify the constellations, but she knew little, in a practical sense, about the world beyond her door.

  When Evangeline was twenty, her father died after a short illness. Two days after the funeral an emissary of the bishop appeared at the door, politely inquiring as to her plans. A young curate with a wife and small children had been appointed to take over the vicarage. How soon could she vacate the premises?

  With dismay, Evangeline realized that her father had given little—that is, no—thought to a future without him. And neither had she. Both of them had blithely assumed they’d go on reading together in the library, drinking tea in front of the fire. With only a small inheritance, no living relatives, and negligible practical skills, she had few options. She could marry, but whom? Despite her beauty, the eligible men in her village weren’t exactly clamoring for her hand. She was, by temperament, much like her father: diffident, with a shyness often mistaken for aloofness, a bookishness perceived as snobbery.

  Evangeline was in a quandary, the bishop’s emissary acknowledged—educated quite beyond her station but without the means or social status to attract a gentleman of superior rank. Which left her, he counseled, with one viable option: she must become a governess, teaching young children and living with a family. Prompting her to enumerate her skills, he listened carefully, scratching notes on parchment with his quill pen: English literature, grammar, arithmetic, religion, Greek and Latin and French, some drawing. A little piano. Then he submitted an advertisement to newspapers and circulars in and around London:

  GOVERNESS.—A clergyman is desirous of RECOMMENDING A YOUNG LADY, the orphan of a vicar, to the situation of GOVERNESS in a family where she will have charge of their young children. She has been expressly educated for the purpose. Apply by letter, postpaid, to the Rev. P.R. at 14 Dorchester Street, Tunbridge Wells.

  Envelopes began appearing in the vicarage post box. One letter in particular stood out. A Mary Whitstone, writing from a quiet street in northwest London, described a comfortable life with her barrister husband and two well-behaved children, Beatrice and Ned. The children had been brought up by a nanny, but it was time for them to begin a proper education. The new governess would have her own accommodations. She’d be with the children six hours a day, six days a week, and might be expected to accompany them on holiday. Other than that, her time would be her own. A well-rounded education, Mrs. Whitstone wrote, should, in her view, include occasional excursions to museums and musical concerts and even perhaps the theater. Evangeline, who’d never done any of these things, was intrigued. She answered Mrs. Whitstone’s many questions dutifully and at length, sent off her letter, and waited for the reply.

  Despite her provincial ingenuousness, or perhaps because of it, she impressed the lady of the house sufficiently to receive an offer of employment: twenty pounds a year, plus lodging and meals. It seemed to Evangeline an extravagant sum. To the bishop, and the young curate poised to begin his new life in the vicarage, it was a godsend.

  Over the next few days at Newgate, Evangeline thought desperately about reaching out to someone, anyone, who might come to her aid, but could think of no one who might testify with great conviction to her good name. Though as the vicar’s daughter she’d been accorded a modicum of deference, her father’s decision to keep her close to home meant she’d made no real friends in the village. She wondered about contacting the housekeeper at the vicarage, or maybe the butcher or the baker or one of the shop clerks she’d been friendly with, but she suspected the word of an ordinary villager wouldn’t carry much weight. She didn’t know anyone in London other than the Whitstones.

  She hadn’t heard from Cecil.

  By now he would have returned from Venice. By now he should’ve gotten the news. A small part of her clung to the hope that he’d act honorably and step forward. Perhaps he’d send a letter: You were wronged. I’ve told them everything. Maybe he’d even come and find her.

  She needed to look presentable if he arrived. When the guards brought a clean bucket of water, she scrubbed her face and neck and swiped under her arms with a rag. She blotted her bodice and parted her hair with her fingernail and smoothed it down, tying it back with a strip of rag.

  “Who’re ye cleaning up for?” Olive wanted to know.

  “No one.”

  “Ye think he’ll come for ye.”

  “No.”

  “You’re hoping.”

  “He’s a good man, deep down.”

  Olive laughed. “He isn’t.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Oh, poor girl,” she said. “Poor Leenie. I probably do.”

  He was a good man, though. Wasn’t he? After all, he’d rescued her from loneliness in that house on Blenheim Road. She hadn’t known, when she accepted the position, how isolated she would feel. Evangeline was usually with the children until close to their suppertime; by the time she was free, the servants had finished their own meal and were busy serving the family dinner. Mrs. Grimsby, the cook, saved a plate for her, which she ate by herself. By seven o’clock she was holed up in her small bedroom for the night.

&
nbsp; Many evenings, down the hall from her room, she could hear the servants playing blackjack or hearts around the long table in the kitchen, their voices rising in a showy camaraderie that only made her loneliness more acute. On the few occasions when she ventured out, she’d stand awkwardly in the corner while they cheerfully avoided her. They considered her an odd duck, both an object of gossip for her eccentric habits (such as reading while eating), and a mystery they had little interest in solving. She spoke a vernacular that no doubt reminded them of their employers, and they were clearly relieved when she went back to her room and shut the door.

  Into this void came Cecil, three years older and infinitely more worldly. The brush of his fingertips against hers, a private wink over the heads of the children, the flat of his hand on the small of her back when no one was looking: in these small ways he telegraphed his intentions.

  Over the weeks and months of their acquaintance, his ardor became more persuasive, his entreaties more endearing. “Dear Evangeline!” he whispered. “Even your name is picturesque.” He’d studied Chaucer at Cambridge for the sole purpose, he told her, of memorizing lines to whisper in her ear:

  She was fair as is the rose in May.

  And:

  What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.

  Everything about him awed her. This man had sat in cafés in Paris at midnight, traversed Venetian canals by gondola, swum in the ice-blue waters of the Mediterranean. And then there was the matter of that brown tendril of hair that feathered against his neck, those rangy shoulders under a crisp linen shirt, the aquiline nose and lush red lips . . .

  “You captivate me,” he said, tugging at the strings of her bodice.

  “You are the only woman for me,” he breathed into her hair.

  “But what about—what about . . .”

  “I adore you. I want to spend every hour of every day with you.”

  “It is . . . immoral.”

  “It is moral to us. Why should we concern ourselves with the chiding of provincial bores?”

  In the same way that it’s nearly impossible to imagine the brutal cold of winter on a hot summer day, Evangeline basked in the heat of Cecil’s affection with little thought of its ending. He promised just enough to persuade her that he shared the emotions she felt so deeply.

  It was surprisingly easy to keep their rendezvous secret. Evangeline’s small room was set apart from the other servants’ bedrooms, down a narrow hallway past the kitchen. Because she was on a different schedule than most of the staff, nobody paid much attention to her comings and goings. The proximity to London was its own alibi. Coming back to her room between lessons, she’d find notes slipped under her door—Half six, corner of Cavendish and Circus . . . Gloucester Gate, 7 p.m. . . . Dorset Square at noon—and hide them under her mattress. She told the cook she was going for a stroll, to see the lights on the Thames at dusk, to explore Regent’s Park on a Sunday, and she wasn’t even lying.

  Cecil’s best friend from Harrow was an amiable lad named Charles Pepperton. Unlike Cecil, who was studying to be a barrister like his father, Charles wasn’t expected to pursue a vocation. He would inherit both the family estate and his father’s seat in the House of Lords; all he needed to do for the next few decades was cultivate the proper friends, marry an age-appropriate woman from a comparable family (a minor royal, if possible), and improve his fox-hunting skills at the family’s country estate in Dorset. He spent a lot of time in Dorset. His home in Mayfair was spacious, well-appointed, and almost always uninhabited.

  The first time Cecil brought Evangeline to the house in Mayfair—early on a Saturday evening, when lessons were over and the Whitstones senior were at a party—she was shy and self-conscious in front of the servants. But soon enough she learned about the mechanisms in place designed to keep secrets, cover up indiscretions, and protect the upper classes from scandal. Cecil, well known to the staff, was treated with casual deference: a discreet lowering of the eyes, a careful coding of language. (“Will the lady be joining you for tea?”) As time went on, Evangeline became more comfortable, more brazenly open. When Cecil pulled her onto his lap in front of the butler, she no longer felt compelled to protest.

  It was in the shadowy parlor of Charles’s town house that Cecil gave her the ring. “To remember me while I’m on holiday. And when I’m back . . .” He nuzzled her neck.

  She pulled away, smiling uncertainly, trying to parse the meaning behind his words. “When you’re back?”

  He put a finger to her lips. “You’ll wear it for me again.”

  This was not, of course, the answer to the question she was asking. But it was the only answer he was prepared to give.

  It wasn’t until much later that she realized she had built gossamer connections between his words, sticky as spider silk, filling in the phrases she wanted to hear.

  Newgate Prison, London, 1840

  There were some things she would never get used to: the screams that spread like a contagion from one cell to the next. The vicious fistfights that broke out abruptly and ended with an inmate spitting blood or teeth. The lukewarm midday broth that floated with bony pig knuckles, snouts, bits of hooves and hair. Moldy bread laced with maggots. Once the initial shock subsided, though, Evangeline found it surprisingly easy to endure most of the degradations and indignities of her new life: the brutish guards, the cockroaches and other parasites, the unavoidable filth, rats scurrying across the straw. The constant contact with other women, cheek to cheek, their sour breath on her face as she tried to sleep, their snoring in her ears. She learned to dim the noise: the clanging door at the end of the hall, the tapping spoons and wailing babies. The stink of the chamber pot, which had so sickened her when she’d first arrived, receded; she willed herself to ignore it.

  Her relationship with Cecil had been so consuming that while she was at the Whitstones’ she’d barely had a moment to miss the life she’d led before. But now her life in Tunbridge Wells was what came to mind most often. She missed her father: his mild temperament and small kindnesses, how they’d chat for hours in the evening, watching the fire settle as rain pattered the roof tiles. She’d adjust the blanket on his legs and he’d read to her from Wordsworth or Shakespeare, lines she now mouthed to herself as she lay in the small space she’d carved out on the cell floor:

  There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light . . .

  We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.

  When she closed her eyes, Evangeline found comfort in recalling even the small routines she used to complain about: heating a kettle to wash dishes in the sink, scooping coal from the bin to keep the fire going in the stove, heading to the bakery with her shopping basket on a cold February morning. Ordinary pleasures now seemed unimaginable: black tea sweetened with sugar in the afternoon, with apricot cake and custard; her mattress at the rectory, stuffed with goose feathers and cotton; the soft muslin gown and cap she wore to sleep; calfskin gloves, dark brown, with mother-of-pearl buttons, molded to the shape of her hands through years of wear; her wool cape with its rabbit-fur collar. Watching her father at his writing desk as he worked on his weekly sermons, his tapered fingers holding a quill. The smell of the streets of Tunbridge Wells when it rained in the spring: wet roses and lavender, horse manure and hay. Standing in a meadow at dawn, watching a lemony sun rise in a wide-open sky.

  She remembered something her father had told her as he knelt at the hearth one evening, building a fire. Holding up the cut end of a log, he showed her the rings inside, explaining that each one marked a year. Some were wider than others, depending on the weather, he said; they were lighter in winter and darker in summer. All of them fused together to give the tree its solid core.

  Maybe humans are like that, she thought. Maybe the moments that meant something to you and the people you’ve loved over the years are the rings. May
be what you thought you’d lost is still there, inside of you, giving you strength.

  The prisoners had nothing to lose, which meant they had no shame. They blew their noses into their sleeves, picked lice from each other’s hair, crushed fleas between their fingers, kicked slithering rats out of the way without a second thought. They swore at the slightest provocation, sang bawdy songs about randy butchers and barmaids with swollen bellies, and openly inspected their monthly rags, stained dark with blood, to assess whether they could use them again. They had strange scabbed rashes and phlegmy coughs and sores oozing with neglect. Their hair was matted with dirt and vermin, their eyes bloodshot and runny with infection. Many spent their days hacking and spitting, a telltale sign, according to Olive, of gaol fever.

  Accompanying her father on visits to the ailing and infirm, Evangeline had learned to tuck a blanket around a feeble form or spoon broth into a slack mouth, to murmur psalms to the dying: Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion. But she had not actually empathized. Not really. Even after leaving the home of a sickly parishioner, she would turn with thinly veiled distaste from a beggar in the street.

  How young she’d been, she realized now, how easily shocked, how quick to judge.

  Here she couldn’t pull the door behind her or turn away. She was no better than the sorriest wretch in the cell: no better than Olive, with her coarse laugh and rough manners, who sold her body on the street; no better than the unfortunate girl singing the lullaby, who held her infant for days until someone noticed it was dead. The most private, shameful parts of being human—the bodily fluids people spent their lives trying to contain and conceal—were what most deeply connected them: blood and bile and urine and shit and saliva and pus. She felt horrified to have been brought so low. But she also felt, for the first time, a twinge of true compassion for even the most despicable. She was one of them, after all.