‘Yes,’ he said, remembering the bleakness he had felt when Harriet died. And still felt even now, sitting in this faded room that she had decorated and he had never changed. ‘Yes, Annie, that is true. We all need hope.’
Annie took a deep breath and began her appeal. ‘That being so,’ she said …
Annie and James returned to Bedford Square at a little after eleven o’clock with their good news.
‘We have prevailed upon your father to revoke ‘for ever’, Annie said, ‘haven’t we, James? Providing you are prepared to show your love for Mr Easter by waiting a twelvemonth before you see him again.’
‘A year!’ Caroline said, sucking in her breath ready to protest.
‘A year,’ Annie said firmly, ‘which is a good deal better than never at all. Especially when you know where and how it is to be spent.’
‘Where?’
‘In Saffron Hill with Matty and Jimmy. Not buried in the country, my dear, but right here in London, in the heart of things, with good works to keep you occupied and make the time pass quickly, and Matty and the children for company. There now, what do you say to that?’
It was a reprieve and Caroline had to admit it, even though a twelvemonth seemed a parlously long time.
‘I will keep you company, Carrie,’ Euphemia promised. ‘I may, mayn’t I, Mrs Hopkins? I could help with the good works too.’ It would give her an excuse to escape from Will, for ever since that evening at Vauxhall she had found his presence more painful than she could bear.
‘I see no reason why not,’ Nan said, ‘although why you should wish to share her punishment I cannot imagine.’
‘You may write one letter to Henry to explain what is happening,’ James said, ‘but then you must promise not to write again until the year is up.’
So the letter was written, with great care and several quiet tears, and then plans were made. And two days later, the carter called to take Caroline’s travelling box to Clerkenwell Green, and she and Euphemia kissed Nan and Annie and Bessie goodbye and were driven off to their new life by a cheerful Tom Thistlethwaite.
‘You’ll have a fine ol’ time with Mr Jimmy,’ he said encouragingly, because Miss Caroline was looking decidedly down, ‘and Mrs Jimmy and their little boys an’ all.’
But it was the ‘an’ all’ that was worrying Caroline.
‘If only I could have seen him, just once,’ she mourned to Euphemia as the carriage turned out of the square.
Chapter 14
Small dirty feet swung above sand-scrubbed floorboards, or splayed against the foot-rests of long benches to be surreptitiously scratched by black-rimmed broken fingernails. Their ankles were coated with grime, black tar oozed between their toes, and the skin on their heels was hardened to a scaly grey hide as if it belonged to an elderly elephant. Only their insteps were pink and young. It was afternoon and the Reverend Jimmy Hopkins’ ragged school was in session.
The room they occupied was an empty warehouse, its brick walls still dusted with grey flour. It was poorly lit by two long windows just below the ceiling and sparsely furnished with eight rows of benches, a Bible, a chair, a blackboard and a line of plain deal chairs. Each child had a slate and a stick of chalk, finger-marked with grime, and when Caroline and Euphemia arrived they were all busy copying their letters from the board. The stink of unwashed bodies and filthy clothes gradually heating was so awful it made Caroline gag.
But Jimmy Hopkins didn’t seem to notice it. ‘Children,’ he said, stooping before the blackboard in his usual mild way but holding up his right hand for silence with gentle authority. ‘I have come to give you the most splendid tidings.’ Then he paused to allow his scholars time to slide their soiled feet to the ground and stand politely before him. ‘We have two new teachers, come to help us in our work,’ he said. ‘Miss Easter and Miss Callbeck. Are we not blessed?’
Blessed! Caroline thought, still covering her nose with her hand. Blessed! In this stink? That’s not the word I’d use.
An urchin in the front row was quick to see the implication of his announcement. ‘Can our Joanie come ter school now, sir?’
‘Very likely,’ Jimmy said, ‘very likely. I will tell you on Monday afternoon. Meantime Mrs Hopkins and I will divide the class into four groups instead of two, now that we have four teachers. But first we will say a prayer to thank the Lord for our good fortune. Bow your heads.’
During the prayer Caroline sneaked a look at her new charges. They were like creatures from another world, dark and quick-eyed and horribly thin in their evil-smelling rags, their faces as dirty as their feet, and their hair so rough and uncombed it looked as dead as old twigs. But at least they stood quietly, eyes closed and palms pressed together, with a meekness and earnestness about them that she actually found quite touching, despite her abhorrence of their stench.
The quartering of the class was done very quickly and with no fuss. Five minutes after their arrival in the room, Caroline and Euphemia were taking their first class. Caroline’s was a group of ‘big-uns’ eager to read from the Bible, sitting up as straight as any teacher could possibly desire, wide-eyed as owls. Ah well, she thought, as I’m honour bound to stay here for a year, I’d better make the best of it I can. But I wish they didn’t smell so dreadfully.
‘The Gospel according to St Matthew, Chapter 24,’ she said, remembering Mrs Flowerdew. ‘The parable of the talents.’ And she handed the Bible to the first boy in the line. ‘What is your name?’
‘If you please, ’um, Josser. Josser Turner.’
She was rather taken back by such a peculiar name but she tried not to show it. ‘Very well, Josser,’ she said. ‘Start at verse 14, if you please.’
She was surprised by how well these scruffy children could read, and how hard they struggled to decipher words that were new to them. And when the lessons finally came to an end and Matty’s two scullery maids arrived to serve them all with lentil soup and hunks of bread, her surprise increased even further, for although they were obviously and ravenously hungry, they were all careful to eat politely and not to bolt their food. She noticed that every child retained a piece of bread to mop the last, least trace of soup from its bowl and when all the dishes and spoons were collected and carried away they followed the bowls with yearning eyes and were clearly wishing them full again.
‘I’ll wager your soup was the only meal those children had today,’ she said to Matty when the four of them sat down for their own meal later that evening, back in Clerkenwell Green, washed, and dressed in clean clothes, and rested and refreshed from the stink of the afternoon.
‘I’m sure of it,’ Matty said. ‘There’s precious little food to spare for children in Saffron Hill. In fact I’ve always thought they come to school as much for the soup as the learning.’
‘However, they do come for the learning, my love,’ Jimmy said, passing a plateful of roast beef across the table to Euphemia, ‘and make good use of it, what’s more.’
‘Thank you,’ Euphemia said, taking the plate. ‘So they do, poor little things. And they work so hard. I’m sure we never did half so much work at Mrs Flowerdew’s seminary, did we Caroline?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ Caroline said, rather crossly, spreading her napkin across her knees. It was foolish to compare these scruffy children with Mrs Flowerdew’s well-dressed pupils. They lived in different worlds. Why, you might as well compare them to Everard and Emmanuel, Matty’s two dear little boys, who’d been brought down to be kissed goodnight just before the meal, all pink and clean and delectable in their pretty nightgowns.
‘They might learn a little better if they were clean,’ Euphemia said. ‘I can’t bear to think of all the dirt they were putting into their mouths when they ate their bread.’ It made her shudder just to remember it.
‘We all have to eat a peck of dirt before we die,’ Matty said, cheerfully, spooning her nice clean vegetables onto her nice clean plate with her nice clean spoon.
‘That’s true, I suppose,’ Euphemia sa
id, ‘but I can’t help feeling the dirt they ate was rather excessive. Could we not provide them with soap and water just to wash their hands?’
‘We couldn’t afford to, I fear,’ Jimmy explained. ‘It would cost more money than we could spare. Lord Shaftesbury provides us with slates and benches and so forth, and the Church Commissioners pay the rent of the warehouse of course, since we are a church school, but I doubt whether I could prevail upon either of them, good and generous though they undoubtedly are, in a matter of soap and basins and such. What argument could I use to persuade them?’
‘That cleanliness is next to Godliness?’ Caroline suggested, half teasing, half cross.
‘Mr Chadwick of the famous report would certainly agree with you as to that,’ Jimmy said, smiling at her.
Neither Caroline nor Euphemia knew who he was talking about. So he explained.
‘Mr Edwin Chadwick,’ he said. ‘The author of the report on the sanitary conditions of the labouring poor. There was a great to-do about it in the papers when it was first produced.’
‘Ah, now I recall it,’ Euphemia said. ‘Mrs Flowerdew read us extracts from it, on the day she told us about that lady called by God to nurse the sick and succour the poor. You remember, Carrie.’
‘I can’t say I remember the report,’ Caroline admitted, ‘but I remember the lady. She had the same name as a bird. Skylark or Mistlethrush or some such.’
‘Her name was Miss Nightingale,’ Euphemia told her. ‘She wanted to start a school for nurses. I thought it was an admirable idea.’ Then she turned to Jimmy. ‘But you were speaking of Mr Chadwick’s report.’
‘I have a copy of it should you care to see it,’ Jimmy told them.
‘Yes,’ Euphemia said seriously. ‘We should like that very much.’
You would, Caroline thought, but you speak for yourself. It’ll be some dry dusty old thing, I’ll lay any money, and I shall be bored to tears by it. Oh, if only I could see my dear Henry again. And she ate her last mouthful of beef and horseradish, sighing with self-pity.
After dinner they adjourned to the parlour and the book was lifted down from the top shelf of the bookcase. It was a weighty tome, in every sense of the word, just as Caroline had feared. Even the title was so long it covered more than a quarter of the front cover. ‘Report to her Majesty’s principal Secretary of State for the Home Department for the Poor Law Commissioners on an inquiry into the sanitary condition of the labouring population of Great Britain,’ by Edwin Chadwick, July 1842.
Euphemia was fascinated by it and she and Jimmy spent the rest of the evening reading the wretched thing. ‘Look at this, Caroline,’ she said. ‘“Evidence given by Mr John Liddle, medical officer Whitechapel.” Why, he could be describing our pupils here.’ And she read the words aloud.
‘“How do they get the water they use? – they get it for the most part from a plug in the courts. When I have occasion to visit their rooms, I find they have a very scanty supply of water in their tubs, consequently they do not wash their bodies and when they wash their clothes the smell of dirt mixed with the soap is the most offensive of all smells I have to encounter. It must have an injurious effect on the health of the occupants.”’
‘And on everyone who comes into contact with them,’ Caroline said sourly. It was bad enough to have spent the afternoon among smelly children without reading about them all evening.
‘Oh, we really should try to make some provision for them here,’ Euphemia said. ‘How can we expect them to keep clean when they have no water in their homes?’
‘Read the section headed “Conclusions and suggestions”,’ Jimmy said, taking the book and turning the pages.
Euphemia thought that the most sensible part of the report, for here the authors suggested that all slum houses should be provided with a clean water supply and that refuse and sewage should be removed from their homes ‘by suspension in water in cylindrical glazed bore sewers’.
Well really, Caroline thought, what a topic for an after-dinner conversation!
‘It seems so sensible and so obvious,’ Euphemia said. ‘Nothing but good could come of cleaning the slums.’
‘I would pull them all down,’ Caroline said, scowling at the thick boring mass of the report where it lay in her cousin’s lap. It was creasing her skirt quite horribly.
‘But what would happen to the people then?’ Euphemia said.
Caroline was just about to tell her she really didn’t care what happened to the people when the door opened and Mary Ann, the parlour maid, came in with a letter on a tray.
‘What a very late post!’ Matty said, glancing at the clock.
‘If you please, mum, it ain’t the post,’ Mary Ann told her. ‘The young gent’man delivered it puss’nal. Onny ‘e wouldn’t give ‘is name nor a card nor nothink. ‘E jest said I was ter be sure ter give it in ter Miss Easter directly.’ Which she did.
Inside the envelope were two sheets of paper. The first was a letter from Henry. ‘It’s Henry,’ she explained rapturously, reading as she spoke. ‘My dear, dear Henry.’
‘Take courage, my dearest love,’ he wrote. ‘I know the worst. Your father’s letter arrived in the same post as your own dear note. I cannot tell you how glad I was to receive it (your note I mean, not your father’s) and to know that you love me and will wait out this dreadful year for me, as I love you and would wait for you until the end of time if need be, which please God it need not be.
‘All the greatest lovers in history have been parted, my dearest, Eloise and Abelard, Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet. It is as if the greater the love we feel the more we have to suffer for it. This year will pass, watered by our tears and blown along by our sighs. You must never despair, nor ever doubt,
That I am, your most loving,
Henry.
P.S.I enclose a poem I wrote for you last night.’ Underneath that another postscript was added in pencil.
‘P.P.S. If you look out of the window you will see me standing underneath the chestnut tree in the centre of the green. I will wait there every evening at this time, no matter what the weather, so that if we may not speak we may at least see each other. I love you. H.O.’
‘Oh, my dear Henry,’ she said, beaming at her cousins. ‘He’s out there on the green this very minute, waiting to see me.’ And she ran to the window and pulled back the curtains.
And there he was, standing under the tree with a lantern held aloft on a pole to light his dear handsome face. She could see him smiling at her quite clearly. ‘Oh quick, quick,’ she said, ‘fetch a lamp so that he can see me too.’
Eager hands set the lamp beside her on the window sill. And Henry looked up and saw her and waved and blew kisses. She still had his letter in her hand, so she kissed that and waved it at him, to show how much she loved him and how glad she was to receive it. For several blissful minutes the two of them waved and yearned at one another. But after a while their speechless communion grew rather difficult and continual waving felt foolish, so he began to walk out of the green, pausing at every third step to wave again and smile and blow yet another kiss. And his visit was over.
But the glow of it stayed with her, bright and warm as the lamp beside her fingers. And there was still the poem to read. She drew it gently from the envelope and read it still standing at the window.
‘You are my love and always will be so
Until the mighty sea runs dry,
Until the bright stars lose their everlasting glow
And the eternal moon falls from the sky.
When you are sad and tears bedim your sight
Look up and see the moon still shining in the sky
And know that we will be together at the end of our long night,
And I will love you till the day I die.
It doesn’t quite scan properly, so I shall have to work on it further. However I thought you would like to see it. H.O.’
Oh she did, she did. It was the most wonderful, romantic, loving poem, and she didn’t ca
re a bit whether it scanned or not.
‘Now,’ she said, turning back to her family, ‘we will plan how to clean those children. I will write to Nan this very evening, that’s what I’ll do, and we’ll ask her to provide us with soap and basins. And the minute they arrive we will set about it. What do you think of that, Euphemia?’ She was charged with triumphant energy.
‘Will she agree?’ Euphemia said, looking from one to the other.
But Caroline had no doubts at all. Not now. ‘Of course she will,’ she said.
* * *
‘You’ll be pleased to know that Caroline is in a better humour,’ Nan said, passing her letter across the boardroom table to John at the end of their September meeting. She was in high good humour herself, having just announced her intention to extend their headquarters by renting the property next door and knocking down the intervening walls. The stationery business was booming and their warehouse was full to overflowing.
‘Yes,’ John agreed when he’d read the letter. ‘That seems encouraging.’ At least she’d made no mention of the Ippark boy. ‘Shall you send her the things she needs? It’s a civil request.’
‘They were ordered this afternoon,’ Nan said. ‘Will is to deliver them this evening.’
‘Then perhaps he will deliver a little parcel for me.’
‘A peace offering, eh?’ Billy smiled.
‘Something o’ that,’ John admitted. But he didn’t tell them what it was.
‘She’ll come round,’ Billy said comfortingly. ‘There’s a deal too much affection in the girl for her to keep up a quarrel for ever.’
‘Yes,’ his brother agreed, with unhappy patience, ‘that is true, Billoh. We shall reconcile in time, I know it. She’s a most loving child even if she is headstrong.’
‘There you are then.’
‘I had to forbid this marriage, Billoh. I love her too dearly to let her make such a match. But I miss her cruelly.’
‘She’ll come round,’ Billy promised again, nodding encouragement.
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