Victorian Maiden

by Gary Dolman

  Elizabeth wasn’t omniscient, but she still knew deep in her heart that the Lord Jesus would come for her in her eighteenth year. She would have to endure no more than that.

  ‘Hasten Thy Second Coming, Lord Jesus. Let there be a time soon when, “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.” Amen.’

  Chapter 31

  “So Price adopted her himself!”

  Dr Roberts looked squarely at Mary Lovell, whose crushed, shocked expression exactly mirrored his own.

  “Ye gods: I wonder how old she was when he first crept into her bed.”

  “Or brought her to the Friday Club, to pass around his friends,” Mary spat.

  Roberts looked away as her eyes closed over the horror of her own, brutal imaginings. He turned back to Lucie.

  “Are you sure of it?”

  She nodded.

  “I think so. Price’s wife wouldn’t admit anything of course, but then I remembered she couldn’t have children of her own.”

  “That’s quite right,” Mary confirmed. “She asked me many times if there was anything, anything at all, that she or I or Mr Price could do to help her become pregnant. I suggested in the end that she adopt one of the workhouse children, although I never dreamed for a moment that she would take Baby Sarah. Respectable people usually avoided illegitimate children in case they’d inherited the moral corruption of their parents.”

  “She had no inkling what a morally corrupt monster her own husband was then?” Roberts asked.

  “Who knows for sure,” Lucie replied. “She kept telling us over and over again that dear Barty was a great philanthropist.”

  She shrugged.

  “But then again, she said it a little too earnestly and a few too many times for my liking.”

  “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” Atticus agreed.

  “So what do we do about tracing Sarah now?” Roberts asked. “We don’t have long until my aunt goes to trial.”

  “Mrs Price told us that Sarah is married now, that she has a young family of her own, and that she is totally unaware of her history,” Atticus replied. “To trace her should be quite easy. The real question is whether we wish to upset all of that? Mrs Price begged us not to.”

  Roberts frowned. He turned to the nurse.

  “What do you think, Mary? Do we send Mr and Mrs Fox to speak with Sarah directly, or do we not?”

  “We do.”

  Mary didn’t hesitate for a second.

  “To know the truth is always the best. What if she finds out later through some other means – when it’s all too late? What if somehow, she knows already?”

  “Mary’s right, Atticus,” said Roberts. “Find her!”

  But the Lord Jesus did not heed her prayers and there was no end to her sorrow, or to her crying, or her pain, and the former things did not pass away.

  Elizabeth’s eighteenth year rolled into her nineteenth, and as it did, it was only her own world, her own precious hope, that was ended.

  She slid open the matchbox where she kept the long dead mother shipton moth and stared at the faces on its wings. But they did not look back. They just kept gazing at each other across the moth’s tiny, fragile body, as if sharing one huge private joke. Mother Shipton must after all have meant the year Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One. Dear Lord; Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One was thirty-two long years away. She would have to endure every day and every night for the next thirty-two years before the End of the World did come, before she could at last have blessed relief. She pushed the matchbox shut. It was too long.

  There was a strange and magical spring on the far side of the river, close to Mother Shipton’s cave. It was called the Dropping or the Petrifying Well, and it was a natural curiosity; a well that slowly turned objects into stone. Tom had once offered to take her to it one Sunday after church, but she hadn’t dared to go with him. One of the spinners had quipped at the time that she looked more petrified at the thought of going with Tom than anything the well could have done. But now, it seemed as if its waters must have touched her after all, because her heart felt just as if it might have turned to cold, heavy stone.

  She thought of the viaduct. It was being rebuilt, and already the four huge legs were reaching high out of the valley once more, spreading their wings towards one another like giant angels ascending. Tom had told her that the deck of the bridge was almost eighty feet above the river; high enough to carry the new railway line from one side of the gorge to the other; high enough to be one of the most spectacular railway bridges in the whole of Yorkshire; high enough to kill her.

  Six days each week, the bridge swarmed with men, hauling block after block up into the sky and setting them securely into place. On the seventh day they rested and prayed to God that He would bless their labours and the bridge would remain. On that day, the scaffold and the ladders were of interest only to the pigeons and to the crows, and to a little girl with a heavy heart, whose mama had left her for Heaven.

  She stood at the foot of a leg and gazed up its immense side into the bright, blue sky. Fluffy white clouds drifted past the tip and with a sudden, gripping angst, she wondered if perhaps her mama or if Baby Albert might be cocooned safely on the other side. The jagged tip of the leg seemed so close to the clouds she could almost imagine herself standing on its edge and reaching up to touch them.

  But then, in the dark places of her mind, she heard the bell on her mama’s coffin ringing and ringing, and growing louder and louder and louder. She imagined how the shadows under the coffin lid must have formed and moved as the demons crept inside to take her soul, to tear it out of her body and to drag it down to the Eighth Circle of Hell. Was she there, being tormented and punished still, or was she in Heaven with the Lord Jesus, at peace at last?

  Would those same demons come for her? When she lay lifeless and broken beneath the part-formed arches of the viaduct, would they surround her body with their beastly, ravenous eyes and drag her down to Hell? Was she still wicked? Was she evil? Was Ursula Shipton, who had once sent her a moth, evil? Was she a seer or was she a witch? If Ursula Shipton was a witch, and she had sent her a messenger, then surely she must be evil too?

  And then all at once the answer came to her, and it was the simple answer to everything.

  The witch pool!

  She had once overheard Tom, in his capacity as mill foreman, telling some of the old women about a place just a few hundred yards upriver where the Nidd crashed off a shelf of rock into a deep, plunging pool. Here was where the ancestors of the townspeople had thrown those they suspected of witchcraft, bound and helpless, into the water. If they happened to drown, then their innocence was proven beyond dispute before man and God. But, if they lived, then such was the power of the pool that they could only have done so with the aid of the Devil himself.

  She knew then what she had to do. If she threw herself into the pool, and if, please God, if she drowned, then she must have been a good little girl – good enough to die – and she would be called up to Heaven at last.

  But what if she lived? Dear God, what if she is a witch?

  She has to find out. She has to know for sure. She begins to run. Her slippers pad soundlessly on the hard-packed stones of the road.

  God has said that no-one, not even He, can be busy that day. But as she runs and runs, he sets his church bells ringing. They erupt from the valley side above her, peeling and peeling, taking over her thoughts, taking over her mind, shutting it off to everything except their urgings for her to go faster, faster, faster.

  ‘Please, Lord Jesus, please let me be there. Please let me be at the witch pool so that the bells can stop, so that I can stop, and so I can know.’

  And the Lord Jesus must have heard her, because it seems that in that instant, she is there and she has stopped. She is standing over the abyss with its torrent that will peer into her very soul and judge whether or not she is worthy of death, just as i
t has for centuries.

  She stares into the waters plunging into the black, foaming vortex, and she knows at once that the ancients of Knaresborough had been right: Surely only a true witch could escape from this.

  She kicks her feet from her slippers, soaked now with dew and balled with the thick, red clay of the riverbank. The boiling waters seem to be drawing her in as they swirl around and around, down and down into the depths. Their roar fills her senses, shutting out everything except the coffin bell ringing and ringing, and her own voice crying for mercy, and her uncle’s rasping words: ‘Little girls who beg for mercy, seldom deserve it.’

  And then the roar ceases and she is engulfed in an icy, suffocating blackness.

  Needles of ice seem to pierce her head, her ears, her eyes, as the waters search her soul. She is pulled down, writhing and struggling against vast, unseen forces; surely the spirits of the river. They turn her, this way and that, squeezing her, mauling her. Something coarse and hard stings her fingertips, and a moment later, smashes against her chest. She gasps and rolls onto her back and her lungs fill with sweet, pure air.

  Her eyes open, and Lo, she beholds the Kingdom of Christ. There before her soft, white clouds drift serenely past. Her ears ring with the songs of the birds of Heaven.

  ‘Dear Lord Jesus, thank you.’

  She is in Heaven. Now there will be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; nor will there be any more pain, because like Grace Darling before her, her courage has been rewarded and she has passed mercifully, mercifully away.

  But if this is Heaven, where is her mama? Where are Baby Albert and her papa and where is the Lord Jesus? Why isn’t she cocooned on a soft, white cloud? And why, if there is to be no more pain, is she lying bleeding and bruised, sprawled across a wedge of rock with her legs floating in numbing, icy water?

  A magpie flutters across the face of the clouds, calling its harsh cry. The discordant sound echoes between the steep walls of the gorge and melts into the roar of the water. And it echoes between the steep walls of her mind – walls that already can barely contain her own anguished cries; cries which grow louder and louder and louder.

  She has not gone to Heaven. Oh, Lord Jesus, she has not even died. The spirits of the river have searched her soul with their long, icy fingers and discovered her wickedness. Her own wickedness binds her yet to this world. She can be permitted only to stare up into the next, like Moses before the Promised Land. She can only look to where her dead mama and Baby Albert surely are. It is her own wickedness that means she cannot be with them.

  But no! She has saved the life of the boy; she has saved the souls of the girls. She is a true heroine, just as Grace Darling had been, and Mr John Walton had invited her for tea.

  The blue of the sky becomes blindingly vivid; the leaves of the trees wonderfully green. She feels as if she can see every branch of every tree in the gorge, and her mind, racing as it has never raced before, tells her exactly what she must do.

  The people on the riverbank look at her – stare at her, as if she’s some kind of madwoman. An old lady turns, her mouth moving, her lips speaking unheard words, but Lizzie knows instantly that she’s no danger and runs on. The certainty of what she must do fills her and consumes her, and almost as if dreaming the dream of Jacob, she reaches the foot of the viaduct once more. She steps forward, towards the beckoning foot of a long, wooden ladder, knowing that this is a causeway, a pilgrim’s way, a stairway to Heaven.

  And then she is at the top, with the sparkling, blue river far below her and the soft blue sky above. The clouds are sweeping past just over her head, driven hard by a brisk, gusting wind that rattles the tarpaulins, and her mind, and the sheets that cover the workers’ tools.

  And with the wind comes her rhyme:

  ‘Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree top,

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

  When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

  First to the poorhouse, now to the grave.’

  The bridge is high – almost eighty feet above the river and the hard, tarmacadamed road that tracks along its gorge. She knows that it is high enough to kill her. Tom has promised that it is high enough to kill her. Tom knows that she is a heroine, and Tom will know why she must do this. Tom knows everything.

  Thomas Grainger has embellished his viaduct with battlements in homage to the real castle that stands guard over it. So for a moment, she’s back at Budle, leaning through the battlements, gazing down at the whinstone beckoning her from below, and wishing she could fling herself to it. She has wished every night since that she had.

  Now she looks down and imagines stepping into the void. She leaves her body and watches herself floating gently down, light as a gossamer thread, into the gorge and onto the hard stones of the tarmacadamed road below. She sees her body slowly being crushed and broken and she smiles as she thinks how not even the gentlemen of the Friday Club will want to touch it now.

  Not worth a tramp’s farthing.

  Her mind is racing as it has never raced before, and she knows now they wanted to touch her. It was no sad duty at all. They wanted to touch her; they enjoyed touching her, because they enjoyed punishing a wicked little girl who was begging them for mercy. And then she smiles again as she sees her soul lifting from her body and ascending serenely into the skies, into the welcoming arms of the Lord Jesus and her dear, dear mama.

  She walks forward. The solid stones of the bridge become gently bouncing scaffold boards which themselves abruptly stop and become thin air. Her gut lurches as she plummets down and down and down. No floating, gossamer thread is she. Her scream of terror is just rising, as it becomes a grunt of pain that is cut brutally short. She smashes into the thick timbers of the falseworks and flies back, limp and broken as a little bird, to lie unconscious and bleeding amongst the stone chips and gobs of cement at its very bottom. And there is no serene ascension and no welcoming embrace. There is no causeway to Heaven.

  Chapter 32

  As Detective Inspector Douglas had pointed out so vehemently, re-uniting long lost relatives was a task to which privately commissioned investigators were particularly suited. Even so, it took Atticus and Lucie Fox several long and mentally shattering days of searching the parochial registers to find that Miss Sarah Beatrice Price, spinster, had indeed been married to a Samuel Elswick esquire, a man ten years her junior. What had caused them so much time and effort in their search was the fact that she hadn’t actually been married until the Eighth of July of the year Eighteen Eighty-Five, by which time she was fully in her thirty-ninth year. It was also, by coincidence, the day the police were finally called to the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette in London in order to control the morally-outraged crowds baying for copies of Mr William T. Stead’s next article in his series: ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.’

  Mr Samuel Elswick, the society report in the Harrogate Advertiser had noted, was the son of a wealthy industrialist of the City of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

  A tiny voice in her dream was nagging. It was nagging at her to wake up. She dearly wished it would stop, because she was still so very tired. But it persisted; it wouldn’t heed the anguished, anguished pleas of her brain begging for it to be silent, to be still, so that she could sleep forever in peace. Again and again, it urged her to wake, goaded her to open her eyes. She tried. Light flooded in – light so very bright that it hurt.

  The voice nagged again. She needed to ignore it. It really was just too much effort to keep trying to obey. She drifted back to the womblike safety of sleep. But the voice was still there and it was getting louder and louder and more insistent. Now that she thought about it, she did vaguely recognise it. She thought it might have been the voice of a friend she had had when she was alive. Or it might have been her dear mama!

  She forced her eyes to open and the light burned again. This time she could just about make out what might have been a face peering down at her. Was it – could it really be her mama? She blinked, awkwardly and painfu
lly, and the shapes and shadows merged into human form. But it wasn’t the face of her mama gazing fondly down at her; it was the face of Mary – dear Mary Lovell. She could hear snippets of her voice as if in the far distance.

  “Lizzie – Lizzie, it’s me – it’s Mary. Please wake up.”

  She retched and the face dissolved into shapes and shadows once more.

  “Lizzie, you’re back at Starbeck – in the infirmary; you’re back at the workhouse.”

  So she wasn’t dead at all, and Tom had lied to her. The bridge hadn’t been high enough to kill her, and she was still here, still bound and imprisoned in her body. In her broken, mortal body.

  “They found you on Monday morning, soaking wet and lying inside the bridge works,” Mary continued. “What on earth were you doing up there?”

  Elizabeth tried to lift her head and the movement filled her eyes with a million dancing stars. She waited for them to fade and settle before she dared to whisper her answer.

  “I wanted it to be the End of the World.”

  “I don’t know about the End of the World,” Mary said, “But it’s the end of your work at the Castle Mill for a while. The foreman – a man called Tom – tried to keep you. He tried to have you treated in the apprentice house there until you were well enough to get back to work. He even tried to have the mill pay for you to be treated in one of the Harrogate hospitals, but the owner, Mr John Walton, said no. He said that it would be commercial folly to do that when there is a perfectly good infirmary here.