Victorian Maiden

by Gary Dolman

in Hell!”

  “Did he never regret his actions in the end, Dr Roberts?” Lucie asked.

  Roberts was silent and still for a moment, almost as if he hadn’t heard her speak at all, but then he shrugged.

  “Only God truly knows that, Mrs Fox. He said that he did. The death of his wife and the suicide of my father seemed to change something in him I suppose. But then occasionally one of the old Friday Club members would visit him here, and I would listen to them, revelling in their memories.

  There was also a young boy… Peter, I think he was called. They’d taken him up to the Holy Island off the Northumberland coast with some other child victims. They were going to sodomise him I imagine, because Mr James went with them. But it all went terribly wrong. Somehow he managed to escape from them in the dark, and then, as he ran away, he was caught up by the terrible tides they have up there, and he drowned.

  The Friday Club was eventually disbanded, and my grandfather began to pretend, even to himself, that it really had just been a philanthropic society. Then he pretended that it had never existed at all. That was when I had the photograph mounted on the wall in the smoking room, out of his reach and protected by the grill. It was to remind him constantly that it had.”

  Their thoughts turned automatically to the smoking room, and to the portrait of the gentlemen and steward of the Friday Club leering down from high on the wall. Was it their imagination or did there seem to be something more brutal, more bestial, in the rows of unblinking eyes?

  “I wanted my grandfather to be continually reminded of them,” Roberts went on, “And of his former self, and of what they had done together, every day for the rest of his life.”

  He smiled weakly.

  “It was only natural justice, you see.”

  The smile withered.

  “But it was not enough, it wasn’t nearly enough recompense for my father and my grandmother, or for poor little drowned Peter, and for the countless other little children who suffered at their hands.”

  He lifted his handkerchief once more and held it for a moment against his lips.

  “We knew that if we told him that Aunt Elizabeth was coming back, Grandpapa would never be able to resist the opportunity to see her once again after so many years. We also saw to it that when she did come, she’d have had the chance to pick up a knife; one that could be easily traced back to her. The rest of it followed a natural course. My aunt would have wanted to kill him, Mr and Mrs Fox, I’m sure of it. She’d told Mary as much, many times before her mind started to fail. We did too, Mary and I. We wanted him to pay the ultimate penance for what he’d done. We just made certain that Aunt Lizzie had the opportunity, and then perhaps, just perhaps, we might have offered the tiniest bit of… assistance.”

  His elbow twitched as he spoke.

  Atticus and Lucie stared wide eyed at his arm, as if willing it too to take up the confession.

  “So you all killed him – all three of you – together?”

  Lucie’s question wasn’t really a question at all.

  Roberts nodded.

  “I admit nothing of course, Mrs Fox, nor would we in a court of law. I was so sure that my aunt would be allowed to live here afterwards you see. She wouldn’t have known the difference, she truly wouldn’t. But now you know. Now you know the whole of it.”

  The relief seemed suddenly to be sweating out of him, forming into tiny beads on his brow.

  “But you can’t take the law into your own hands, Doctor,” Atticus protested.

  “You can’t administer summary retribution no matter how just you think it to be.”

  “But I had to, don’t you see? My grandfather and his friends were beyond the law of the land. No court would have even tried them, let alone convicted them, of anything. But they aren’t above the laws of natural justice, Atticus. No sir. They aren’t above the law of the Almighty. Their guilt was beyond dispute. The only question was the manner of their punishment: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life.”

  He paused to dab the sweat from his forehead.

  “I am your client of course, so you’re forbidden to testify against us.”

  “We’re investigators only, Doctor,” Atticus replied. “We aren’t lawyers, and we aren’t bound by any privilege.”

  “But nor would it be in anyone’s interests to pursue what you’ve just told us,” Lucie added, her voice firm. “Atticus and I have been agonising over the morality of all of this for most of the morning. We’ve agreed that if Miss Elizabeth was just a pawn in Alfred Roberts’ killing then, as my husband says, you were both white knights. He isn’t usually so poetic to be sure, but I think that he perfectly describes your motives. Call it natural justice if you will, but if ever a man was deserving of death, then I suppose it was Alfred Roberts. So, since Miss Elizabeth would stand trial anyway and since we can prove nothing, we shall let it lie.”

  “Thank God,” said Roberts, and Mary began to sob. “Thank God. We have such plans, you see, for the furtherance of natural justice. Mary and I vowed that after my grandfather’s death, we would turn this Annexe into a place for good – into a place of true philanthropy.

  Many years ago my grandfather named this house Sessrum House after Sessrúmnir, Freya’s own hall in Viking mythology. Sessrúmnir was supposed to have contained many rooms where Freya would bring back those slain in battle to be at peace.

  My grandfather offered no peace to those he brought here, but don’t you see how we could now? The Annexe does have many rooms. Both on this floor, where those children bound to him in blood, the ones he thought could never run away were accommodated and on the floor below us. That was where my grandfather used to lock the children he procured from the streets. Mr Otter the steward lived down there too. He would guard the children, and take them to Mrs Eire to be certified as Virgo intacta, or to have their maidenheads stitched back up after they had been deflowered. He would drag them up the stairs to be raped. Sometimes he would rape them himself.”

  He began to soundlessly pace the bedroom, his eyes suddenly alight with passion.

  “So wouldn’t it be fitting, wouldn’t it be perfect, natural justice if this Annexe was turned into a refuge for ill-used children, where they could be brought after their own infernal battles, to find peace? The defloration mania continues; the maidens are still being offered as tribute, and the rooms could be filled many times over. But what was originally designed as a Hell could serve equally well as a Heaven.

  As I know only too well, to find true solace, those poor children must feel safe. They must feel secure against those who would torment them. The thick walls, the locked doors, the bars on the windows would provide exactly that. We have a scullery, we have a common room, and we even have a medical room here should we need it. And beyond the walls is Harrogate, the greatest place of healing on earth.

  Of course we would need to get rid of the images of Freya and everything else my grandfather thought she stood for. We would need to replace them with something more fitting but that could be easily accomplished.

  Mary and I – a psychiatrist and a nurse – both with an intimate knowledge of what it is to be exposed to the most degrading and bestial of treatment, couldn’t be better placed to help those poor unfortunates. We…”

  There was a sudden mumble of voices in the hallway beyond the door. One of them, the deepest, had the distinct lilt of a Geordie accent, and Atticus was reminded immediately of Liddle, the workhouse Master.

  “Damn these double-carpets,” muttered Roberts under his breath.

  But it wasn’t Liddle who appeared along with Mr Petty in the doorway to Elizabeth’s bedroom, but Samuel Elswick.

  “Mr Elswick,” Atticus exclaimed.

  “Mr Fox, Mrs Fox.”

  Elswick greeted them with a polite bow of his head. He padded silently into the room and held out his hand towards Roberts.

  “And you, sir, must be Alfred Roberts’ grandson.”

  Roberts grasped the outstretched han
d and shook it once.

  “I am Dr Michael Roberts, Mr Elswick, and I cannot help my ancestry. May I also introduce my Aunt Elizabeth Wilson, and her nurse and friend, Miss Mary Lovell?”

  Elswick turned, nodded his head to Mary, and then stared at the old woman as she lay peacefully sleeping.

  “I had an idea that she might look a little like the devil incarnate, you know,” he murmured after a time. “But she doesn’t. She doesn’t at all.”

  He shook his head sadly and turned to the doorway where Petty still stood, stiff and formal.

  “Sarah,” he called.

  Mr Petty took a dutiful step back, and a woman took his place. Although now past the flush of youth, she was still an exquisitely beautiful woman, with carefully styled blonde hair, and clear, blue eyes. She carried a young baby in the crook of one arm, and in her other hand, she held the tiny fingers of a girl of around three years old, a perfect miniature of her mother.

  Elswick seemed to struggle with himself for a moment, and then addressed the room.

  “Dr Roberts, Miss Wilson, Mr and Mrs Fox and Miss Lovell, may I present to you all my wife, Mrs Sarah Elswick, and my children, Beatrice and Bartholomew. My wife, as you know, is Miss Wilson’s natural daughter, and I understand that after so many years, they are both anxious to meet with each other once again.”

  Sarah advanced purposefully into the room, her eyes fixed on Elizabeth’s.

  “She has been heavily sedated, Mrs Elswick,” Mary said. “And she has senile dementia. It will be very difficult to converse with her.”

  “That is a very great pity,” Sarah said in a soft, cultured voice. “I understand that she suffered greatly at the hands of my father, and I very much wanted to ask her, I very much wanted to understand, why in God’s name she would consent to give me away to such a monster to suffer a similar fate.”

  “Your mother knew nothing about your adoption until it was too late, until you had already gone,” Mary replied. “Your father – Mr Price – was an overseer at the workhouse, and he arranged it all himself. There weren’t even any records kept. You just simply disappeared one day. She almost died with grief.”

  Sarah stood motionless for a while and then she nodded.

  “I wanted to know too if Price was my real father.”

  “She wouldn’t have known.”

  Mary reached instinctively for Elizabeth’s fingers.

  “She was abused by so many different men at the Friday Club, it could have been any one of them. I’m so sorry, Mrs Elswick.”

  “That was his excuse too – Price’s. That was how he was able to rationalise what he did to me, to his own daughter. He said that there was a possibility he wasn’t my natural father after all, so whatever he chose to do to me was fine.”

  Elizabeth stirred and her eyelids drifted open. She blinked sluggishly. Dr Roberts leant across to her and softly called her name: “Lizzie,” as he peered into each of her pupils in turn.

  “She’s in deep, Mary,” he muttered, and the nurse nodded.

  Sarah closed her eyes for one, two, three seconds, and then opened them once again. They were precisely the same blue as her mother’s. She bent slowly forward and said, “Mama?”

  She knew that she was dying at last.

  ‘Oh thank you, Lord Jesus.’

  The beastly eyes had gone, and she had finally, finally, been punished enough.

  She felt as if she was detaching from her mortal body, spreading and becoming somehow infinite. Everything around her was warm and soft and white, and her mind seemed to be floating in some kind of benign mist.

  And then she saw him once more, the beneficent, bearded man, the Lord Jesus before her at last, and he was smiling. Oh, blessed, blessed relief. She was dead. The Lord Jesus himself was speaking to her, calling her name. And then, yes, there she was, just as she always remembered her; it was her dear mama, with her beautiful, golden hair and bright eyes of clearest blue. Her mama had come to welcome her to Paradise, and with her she had brought her darlings. Her mama, weeping with joy, held out Baby Albert for her to see: Dear tiny, perfect Baby Albert, a cherub for Jesus, and yes, Baby Sarah, just as beautiful and as full of joy as she had remembered her, every single day since they parted.

  Sarah reached out and touched the cheek of her mama and the years were nothing. Lizzie said, “Mama,” and Sarah nodded.

  “Yes, I know you’re my mama.”

  She laid her head on her dear mama’s breast, and felt again as if she were a girl of two, and not a grown woman at all. She watched her mama’s head gently nodding as each tired beat of her heart pushed the chloral hydrate from the big glass bottle further and further through her veins. There had been a lot of chloral hydrate in the big glass bottle by the bed, and now it was empty.

  “Shall we leave Mrs Elswick with her mama now?” Roberts whispered. “I fear that she hasn’t long left now, and they have so much to say. We can talk in the smoking room.”

  Without wanting to desecrate the moment with more words, Atticus and Lucie, Dr Roberts and Mr Elswick, all slipped quietly out through the door, closing it gently behind them.

  Mary Lovell kissed Elizabeth’s forehead and followed them, pausing for a moment only to lift the sash of the window just a fraction. After all these long years, it wouldn’t do to keep her shade lingering.

  “So this is the Friday Club,” Elswick growled.

  Atticus could sense him smoulder as his eyes crept around the big room. They took in the walls, with their hateful tapestries and depictions of Freya; they took in the empty chaises longues standing ready, expectant even of reliving past glories, and finally, they came to rest on the photograph set high on the wall. His eyes flared in recognition of his wife’s tormentor, and he glared as if almost to deflagrate it with his hatred.

  “I’d have torn it down, stone by stone, if it were me.”

  “Dr Roberts has plans to turn it into a refuge for ill-used children,” Atticus told him.

  “For just as long as such a thing is needed,” Roberts added. “After that, I may well tear it down with my own bare hands and you, Mr Elswick, can depend upon receiving the first invitation to help me to do it.”

  Elswick grunted, but with the retort came what might have been the merest hint of a smile.

  “That time may not be too far away,” Roberts continued. “The newspapers are shining the bright light of enquiry into every dark place in our society where the abuse of little children still happens. The cockroach perpetrators are running, and at long, long last, the will of the government is beginning to stamp down on them.

  We’re just ten short years away from the dawn of a new century, Mr Elswick: the Twentieth Century. I would like to think that, by then, there will be no more defloration mania, and no more maiden tribute; that little girls and boys will be able to walk this earth in safety and enjoy a normal, happy life. I hope that by the end of the Twentieth Century, mankind will look back on our time and say: ‘Yes, some truly horrific things were done to the very weakest in society, but, thank God, theirs was the generation that finally ended it.”

  “I hope so too, Dr Roberts,” said Elswick, “But I fear that your faith in society is misplaced. I have real cockroaches by the thousand in my factories, and I find that as fast as I can stamp them out, more come in their stead. That’s not to say that we should keep from stamping on them,” he added; “We shouldn’t, of course. But I believe that your annexe may well be standing for some years to come.”

  In her bed, Lizzie Wilson smiled. She smiled as if she too were a little girl and not a dying old woman at all. Her heart, full and content now was tired, but there was no pain. Mary, dear Mary, had promised her that, and that no-one would hurt her ever again.

  And then, as she lay in her bed, her breaths slowly faded, the heart beneath her breasts stopped beating, and little Lizzie died.

  Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

  A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,

  Atoms or systems into ruin hur
led,

  And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

  Like her mama so many years before, but nine long years too late, maybe a lifetime too late, maybe a lifetime too early; a hero perished and a world burst, and little Lizzie Wilson, smiling and with her hand in her dear, dear mama’s, at long last entered the final and the eternal relief of Paradise.