Victorian Maiden

by Gary Dolman

  You’ve been hurt in your fall, Lizzie; badly hurt. You could have easily died. I dare say you’ll be in this infirmary bed for a time to come yet.”

  “Where’s Rachel, Mary?”

  She felt Mary’s hands take her own.

  “Rachel died, Lizzie. It was a month or so back. She died very peacefully in her sleep.”

  Lizzie felt a deep stab of grief, and perhaps another of envy. A peaceful death in her sleep: Old Rachel had deserved that. It was a special death, just as Old Rachel herself was special. Grace Darling had not been allowed a peaceful death. Hers was a lingering, tortured death from consumption. But Grace had died when she was twenty-seven, and Rachel had been made to wait until she was old. But now Rachel would be in Heaven, watching over her like she always had, and watching over Baby Sarah.

  Sarah! Dear Lord, what if she’d died? What if the witch pool had drowned her with its icy fingers, or Tom had been right after all? What if the viaduct had been high enough to kill her? Mary had said that she could easily have died. What would Baby Sarah have done if she had come back to her and found that her dear mama was dead, just as her own dear mama was dead, and Old Rachel was dead? Dear, sweet Lord, what would have become of her then?

  How could she not have thought of little Baby Sarah? How could she have been so selfish?

  One and eight and eight and one, was Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One, when she now knew for sure the world to an end shall come.

  She knew also that she was bound, but not only bound; she was chained. She was bound and chained to this world until the day it ended, by her wickedness and by her love for Baby Sarah.

  The prosperous town of Gosforth lay just to the north of the great industrial engine of the Empire that was the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was just far enough from the city for the residents not to be unduly bothered by the noise, or the sight, or the smell, of the myriad mills and manufactories there; nor by the small armies of workers that laboured twelve hours each day in the murk and gloom within them. But it was also close enough for the owners of those same mills and manufactories to watch over them as geese might watch over their golden eggs. Like Harrogate, Gosforth was a town of estates and of villas, of polite conversation and of elegance.

  A long train journey up the East Coast Main Line of the North Eastern Railway, and a few polite questions, brought Atticus and Lucie Fox to the imposing front gates of one of the modern, red brick, Gosforth villas. An empty wicker bath chair by the prettily-painted front door confirmed that they were indeed at the house of Mr Samuel Elswick, esquire, and most importantly, of his wife Sarah Beatrice. It also confirmed just how difficult obtaining a private audience with Mrs Elswick was likely to be.

  Once again, Atticus took out one of their calling cards and wrote ‘Affaires’ neatly in one corner. Then he underlined it. The motto embossed onto each card read: Quo Fata Vocant. It translated as: ‘Whither the Fates call,’ and it seemed somehow especially appropriate with this commission, since so many parts of it seemed to lie so firmly in the unknown spinning of the Fates.

  “Do we have a plan for this?” he asked.

  Lucie glanced at the bath chair and shook her head.

  “I think we’ve no choice but to play this one as it comes, Ad libitum. So it would be better I think, Atticus, if I lead the conversation.”

  Atticus frowned, but nodded and reached for the latch.

  Their knock was answered promptly by a housekeeper, who took their card, and showed them into the drawing room, with the customary promise to enquire as to whether the master was at home. But it was not the housekeeper, but the master of the house himself, who returned a few short minutes later, and he was puce with rage.

  “How dare you!” he hissed without introduction. “How dare you come to my home, bringing your abominations with you? Tell me why I shouldn’t send for the police this very instant?”

  “Because you wouldn’t want a society scandal, most probably,” Lucie replied evenly, almost insolently.

  Elswick glared at her, his face a contortion of hatred and venom.

  “Let me tell you exactly what a scandal to society is, woman. It’s when people like you take your pieces of silver from monsters like the Roberts and don’t give a damn about the consequences or the pain they might cause.”

  “So you know why we’re here?”

  Atticus was shocked.

  Elswick turned his fury onto Atticus.

  “I presume that you’ve come to take my daughter away with you – or try to, anyway, although I can’t see how you could possibly imagine you might succeed. I’m not some derelict who’d sell his daughter for a bottle of gin.”

  He looked conspicuously at the visiting card.

  “‘A and L. Fox, Commissioned Investigators.’ Commissioned procurers don’t you mean? My mother-in-law told me that you’d been creeping around her in Harrogate, and she warned me you might try to bother us here too. Now you listen to me, Fox: I don’t care a tinker’s cuss what happens to the reputation of Barty Price. He’s dead now anyway, and his widow can live here, with her daughter, well away from any ‘society scandal’ there might be if she chooses. But I will not give up my daughter to Roberts and his abomination of a Gentlemen’s Club. What sort of father do you think I am? Do you think I could just stand by and see another life ruined?”

  “Mr Elswick, Mr Elswick!”

  Lucie somehow didn’t need to raise her voice to break the force of his diatribe.

  “I don’t know what Mrs Price has told you, but we have no interest whatsoever in taking your daughter, or anyone else for that matter, anywhere.”

  As he stared, Elswick’s expression turned firstly to bewilderment, and then to guarded curiosity.

  “You don’t? Then why are you here?”

  Lucie silenced Atticus with a glance and said: “Roberts’ – Alfred Roberts’ Gentlemen‘s Club – closed years ago, and Alfred Roberts is dead. We represent his grandson Michael Roberts, who had nothing to do with the club, and who hated his grandfather and everything he stood for even more perhaps than you do. I presume you knew that your late father-in-law was a close associate of Alfred?”

  Elswick nodded.

  “I did, and he caused my wife – his own adopted daughter – more misery than you can possibly imagine.”

  “I can assure you that we have spoken to enough victims of the Friday Club to well imagine exactly what kind of misery your wife must have endured,” Lucie said.

  “So you know then?”

  Lucie nodded.

  “Michael Roberts told us. He’s an eminent psychiatrist who has devoted his life to helping people who have been forced to suffer exactly as your wife has.”

  Relief seemed almost to pour out of Elswick, and he turned his face suddenly away from them.

  “Did he take her to the Friday Club?” Lucie asked gently.

  Elswick turned back. His face was flushed and his eyes were moist and glistening.

  “No, Mrs Fox, in the end he never did. He kept her entirely for himself. She was threatened with it though. Yes indeed. He told her precisely what did happen to the young girls who passed through the doors of that Hell-hole: How they were kept locked in a dungeon by a monster of a steward; how they were passed from bed to bed for the gentlemen’s pleasure, and how eventually they would be shipped off to God-knows-where to work as whores and slaves for the rest of their lives. He told her that if she ever breathed a word about what he was doing to her, even to her own mother, then she would be taken there and left. He even took her and showed her the sign they had above the door, some Latin expression telling them to abandon all hope. She still sees it in her dreams now. But no, Mrs Fox, in the end she was spared the tender mercies of the Friday Club. She was his own adopted daughter, you see, and he loved her too much to share.”

  “And what do you know of her mother – of her natural mother?”

  “Oh, I know all about her mother too, Mrs Fox. She was a workhouse girl wasn’t she? Sarah – my wife
– had a blazing row with her father one day and he told her, in the heat of the argument, that she was the illegitimate daughter of a workhouse prostitute.”

  He shrugged.

  “It makes no difference to me who or what her mother was. She had no more control over her mother than this Michael Roberts had over his grandfather.”

  He managed a weak smile.

  “In the weeks leading up to our wedding day, Sarah became very anxious. It made her quite ill in the end. She seemed to me to be looking for a reason to call the whole thing off. Eventually we had sharp words and it all came out; who she really was and how she’d been born in a workhouse; how she had been adopted by her parents and eventually what… what her father used to do to her.”

  “I understand that one of Alfred Roberts’ associates took a young girl up to Roberts’ hunting lodge in Northumberland for a time,” Lucie said grimly. “A little time later that girl found out that she was with child.”

  The air in the room froze.

  “What did you say?” Elswick asked.

  “We’ve been told that the girl was used wretchedly whilst she was up there,” Lucie continued, “And that not long after her return, she ran away to the workhouse to have her baby. It was a baby girl.”

  “An associate of Alfred Roberts took a girl up to Northumberland and left her with a baby girl? Who was that?”

  Atticus and Lucie’s brutal silence served as answer enough.

  “Price – you mean that Sarah was Price’s own daughter, his real daughter?”

  The relief in its turn vanished from his face, and he reeled visibly.

  “We don’t know that for certain,” Atticus interrupted hurriedly, “But it appears your father-in-law for one was convinced that she was his own daughter.”

  “Price used a prostitute?”

  Lucie shook her head.

  “Elizabeth Wilson, your wife’s real mother, was no prostitute, Mr Elswick. She was an innocent young girl who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Friday Club. Your wife – her daughter – was the result of her rape, most likely by your father-in-law. I say most likely because it’s quite possible it could have been by any one of a number of other men, including her own uncle. Mr Elswick, I’m so sorry.”

  “So where is this Elizabeth Wilson now?”

  “She’s presently awaiting trial for the murder of that same uncle, Alfred Roberts.”

  “Dear God, her mother’s a murderess!”

  Lucie waited until the dust of the cataclysm had settled. Then she said: “Nothing has been proven yet. Elizabeth Wilson has senile dementia and I, as a nurse, don’t believe she is capable of murder. But it’s her dearest wish to see her daughter once more before her mind goes completely – or before she is hanged or locked away forever in an asylum.”

  Elswick bit his lip and said, “I see, Mrs Fox.” Then after a moment of pensiveness, “My wife is older than me by quite a margin, do you know?”

  “We saw that in the parish register. It’s neither here nor there.”

  “Oh, but it is, Mrs Fox, it is. You see, the reason she married so late in life was because her father left her with a profound mistrust – a fear, even – of men.”

  He coughed, suddenly nervous.

  “Even after we were wed, we had certain, shall we call them, difficulties, in our marriage that we needed to overcome before we could have children.”

  Atticus coloured deeply and Lucie said, “I perfectly understand what you mean, Mr Elswick. It must have been very difficult for you both. Perhaps Michael Roberts could help her?”

  “What I’m saying is that Sarah has reached a level now where she can function perfectly well as a wife and as a mother. You are asking me to jeopardise all of that, all of her pain and struggle, for the sake of someone she hasn’t even seen since she was a tiny girl and someone she can only just remember?”

  “I suppose we are,” Lucie conceded.

  Elswick’s eyes flickered past her head and widened in guilt. He looked like a boy caught with his hand in the sugar bowl.

  “Anne!” he exclaimed.

  Lucie turned and Atticus looked up. There, leaning on a walking stick, her face radiating indignation and anger, and perhaps fear, was Mrs Price.

  “Not content with bothering me in my own home, you’ve come to hound my family here too.”

  Her voice was like the exhalation of a blast furnace.

  “These people are relentless, Samuel. I trust that you are going to throw them out before they succeed in destroying both your wife and your marriage?”

  “I was just explaining, Mother… and yes, I was about to ask that they leave.”

  She waved the point of her walking stick somewhere between Atticus and Lucie and the blast furnace ran cold.

  “We will not tolerate these intrusions any longer. You will leave my son-in-law’s house, and you will leave Northumberland this very instant.”

  “Mother, I already knew about the Friday Club. Sarah told me everything, long ago.”

  Elswick’s voice sounded suddenly weary.

  “So I already knew about her father and I already knew about what he used to do to her.”

  “Her father was a philanthropist, a great philanthropist like Alfred Roberts,” Mrs Price protested indignantly.

  “Mother, if Barty Price was such a philanthropist, then why after he died did you have his rooms exorcised?”

  Atticus glanced at him, horrified, but Elswick looked away and said: “For my mother-in-law’s sake, Mr Fox, please, just do as she asks and go.”

  Chapter 33

  “We’re all moving to Knaresborough, Lizzie.”

  Mary’s face shone with eager excitement as she made the announcement.

  “The parishes have decided to join together into a union, and they’re building a brand new workhouse, just behind the High Street.”

  Elizabeth looked at Mary and tried to comprehend her joyous enthusiasm.

  ‘How,’ she thought bleakly, ‘Can you be so happy about it? How can you be so happy about anything?’

  Knaresborough. In her mind, she pictured again the great viaduct over the River Nidd, and thought of how one and eight and eight and one never did add up to eighteen. She pictured Tom, dear Tom, now gone forever, and felt the heavy timbers of the false-work arch rushing up to shatter her.

  “There’s to be a new uniform for the inmates,” Mary continued, “With pretty blue stripes, and you, Lizzie, are to work in the bake house,”

  At last Elizabeth felt the tiniest shiver of interest. There would be knives in the bake house – sharp knives. There would be knives with shining, silver blades, with rainbows at their edge, which could slice deeply into flesh and blood. They could push away the anger and the hatred; they could push away the memories; those awful, awful memories, whenever they fell from that foul, dark, demon-infested place she kept especially for them – whenever they came to hurt her.

  The fleeting shadow of a smile flitted across her face and Mary sobbed for her.

  “Oh, Lizzie, I’m so glad you’re happy about it. There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll be going and all the other inmates here will be going. And, Lizzie, you know how you like to watch the railway? You know how you watch out for trains for hours and hours and look in all of the carriage windows as they pass, just as if there might be someone in there you know? Well, the new Union Workhouse is right next to a railway cutting, and the bake house and the bread store are to be just over the yard from it. You’ll be able to look out and see the trains all day long if you want to.”

  And then, in the time it took for a tiny, broken bird to fall from a bridge, she was there; in the brand new bread store of the brand new workhouse, watching through the tiny panes of the window. She was waiting for the train.

  She knew it was coming; she had no need for the clock. She knew that for a few minutes each hour, the deep cutting that ran by the workhouse would tremble, and the air would be filled with smoke and steam like the coming of the Apo
calypse. And then the monster beneath it would shriek, and plunge into the black tunnel mouth and be gone.

  Mary was right. The railway both drew her and utterly repelled her.

  ‘Carriages without horses shall go, And… fill the world with woe.’

  And when the monster beneath the smoke shrieked so that the windows of the bread store rattled, and when it plunged headlong into the blackness of the tunnel, so she too would hear the shrieking of her own mind, and it would be louder than any locomotive, and so she too would be plunged into blackness.

  One of Old Mother Shipton’s prophesies had come true. Whenever the shrieking of the train lashed the walls of the workhouse, lashed the walls of her mind, it would shake loose her memories of the railway, of the carriages, and of what happened when the carriages did go.

  They were laughing at her, jeering her. Their hands were prodding her, touching her, grasping at her clothes, pushing her from one to the other, the other to the next, round and round and round the carriage.

  From below her she heard the rhythmic clicking of the carriage wheels. It was as if the train had a heart that was beat-beat-beating in anticipation of what was to come. But before it did, she desperately needed it to be a different little girl, being pushed, being pulled, half-naked now between the gentlemen; a different little girl being forever ‘it’ in this hellish game of kiss-chase where she was always caught, caught, and caught again.

  She stumbled to the floor and, as the gentlemen closed in, so she closed her thoughts to everything except her urgings of the train to go faster, for its heart to beat louder, faster, more staccato, to overwhelm her, to crowd out whatever it was they were taking turns to do to her body.

  ‘Please, Lord Jesus, please make the train get to the station, please make it stop, so that finally they will stop.’

  But it was when they stopped; when she had to stop being a different little girl and become Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson once again, that she had to stand, as naked and as sinful and as exposed as Eve, to gather together what clothes and dignity she could. It was only then that she could begin once more to hide away the memories.