Tuppenny Times

by Beryl Kingston

  William Henry tried to comfort too. ‘Think what a joy this child will be, when it arrives, my dear,’ he said.

  But she felt too sick to respond. ‘I don’t know how I’m to manage,’ she said wearily. The difficulties this pregnancy brought seemed insurmountable to her. ‘Annie’s nearly two and a half and she still don’t know how to use a chamberpot and Billy cries all the time. I’m sure my milk don’t satisfy un.’

  ‘Perhaps you should wean him.’

  But she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I fed young Annie fifteen months and Billy should have the same.’

  ‘The sickness will pass,’ he tried to assure her. ‘When your strength returns, my dearest, you will feel quite differently.’

  ‘It en’t just a matter of strength,’ she told him sadly. ‘’Tis a matter of time. I spend so much of the day puking, there en’t the time for anything. If you want your clothes clean and mended, and your meals cooked, and the babies fed and sweet-smelling on top of all, I shall need forty-eight hours to the day, or a fresh pair of hands, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Rest now,’ he told her kissing her damp hair. ‘There is no more needs to be done tonight.’

  ‘Unless Billy wakes to be fed,’ she said. But for once and mercifully he didn’t.

  I must get some help for her, William Henry thought, as he watched her sleeping later that evening. He could ill afford it, but there was still some capital that could be used.

  William Henry was late back from the City the next afternoon and when he came tip-toeing into the bedroom where Nan was lying on the bed recovering from her latest bout of sickness, a small skinny girl crept quietly into the room behind him.

  She looked about ten or eleven years old but it was difficult to tell because she was so scruffy. She had thin, pale brown hair under her thick, dark brown cap and her face was gaunt, with dark shadows under her eyes, a sharp peaked nose and dirt on her chin. She was wearing an ill-fitting dress of brown holland and an apron made of sacking. Her stockings were black and much darned and her boots broken down. Charity school or workhouse, Nan thought, assessing her, half-fed and ignorant, if I’m any judge. And certainly the child’s skin had the dirty translucence of the very poor, and she stood subserviently, twisting the corner of that rough apron in very chapped hands.

  ‘This is Bessie Taylor, my dear,’ William Henry said, pushing her forward towards the bed. ‘I have hired her to be nursemaid to our two babies and to help you in every way she can. She has promised me that she will do her very best endeavour, have you not Bessie?’

  ‘Sir,’ the child mumbled, looking at the carpet.

  ‘She is to stay for ten days and then we will decide whether we wish to keep her or not.’

  A girl to help me, Nan thought, shifting her body to get a good look at the child, but carefully so as not to provoke the sickness again. Why she’s even smaller than I was at her age. They’ve kept her half-starved wherever she’s been. She’ll need some feeding up. Still, she could be stronger than she looks. ‘Come here,’ she ordered, and the girl walked meekly to the bed. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twelve, ma’am.’

  ‘Where d’you come from?’

  ‘The work’us, ma’am.’ Twisting the corner of her apron.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Mr Coram’s, ma’am,’ looking up at her new mistress for the first time with rather pretty blue eyes. A trusting face, Nan thought, for all its half-starved anxiety.

  ‘She was a foundling,’ William Henry said. ‘Were you not, Bessie?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Nan sighed. A foundling didn’t sound at all promising. ‘So I don’t suppose you know nothin’ about lookin’ after babies, do you?’

  ‘Oh yes, ma’am. I looks after the littl’uns, most the time, ma’am.’

  Nan looked at the child’s anxious face and the bony arms sticking awkwardly out of that faded bodice. ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘we shall see, shan’t we.’

  Bessie Taylor’s arrival in the Easter household was a blessing. Despite her reticence and her fragile appearance, she was actually as tough as a London sparrow and she knew a great deal about the way to handle and placate small babies. Within a day she had persuaded Nan to let her give baby William a titty-bottle, ‘jest ter top ’im up like, an’ get ’im ter sleep,’ which worked like a charm, to everybody’s relief, and within a week she had started to persuade Annie to do ‘ca-ca’s’ in a chamberpot instead of soiling her clout.

  ‘You don’t want all that nasty ol’ cacky all over your bum, do yer pet,’ she said, when she was dressing the little girl on her first morning. ‘Not when you can be the cleverest gel alive.’

  The child was enraptured by such attention and praise, and was soon following her new friend about the house, baby’s pot in hand, declaiming that she was ‘c’ever gel’ and smiling like sunshine.

  Even when she ‘forgot’, the new comer was kind to her. ‘Ne’er mind,’ she said. ‘We all ’as our little mishaps now an’ then, don’ us. We won’t tell no one, eh? That’ll be our secret. Jest stand yerself still while I cleans yer bum down.’

  Long before her ten days’ probation were up, she was Ba-ba to little Annie, and ‘that dear gel’ to Mrs Dibkins, and an established member of the family. Whenever she wasn’t looking after the two babies or washing their dirty clouts or fetching and carrying for her poor sick mistress, she was industriously sewing, sitting beside her truckle bed in the nursery washroom, long after everyone else was asleep, with the work held close to the candle. For Mrs Dibkins had been sent down to the haberdasher’s on the very first morning to buy a length of pink cotton for dresses and heavy white linen for caps and aprons and even a quantity of cheap lawn for chemises and petticoats, and she couldn’t wait to get her new clothes sewn up and ready to wear. It took her more than a week, even with Mrs Dibkins to help her whenever she could, but the results were very pleasing. The master said so, when he passed her on the stairs on the eighth morning. ‘Uncommon neat and serviceable. Quite so.’

  But when ten days’ probation were up, she was cast into a gloom. Her arms felt like lead and her back ached and her mouth seemed determined to fold itself down and cry. ‘They won’t keep me on,’ she said to Mrs Dibkins when they sat down to their dinner after the Easters had dined. ‘They’ll send me back ter the work’us. I can feel it in me bones.’

  ‘You eat hearty, gel,’ Mr Dibkins advised, picking his teeth with the prong of his fork. ‘The world looks a deal better on a full stomach.’

  ‘Oh, lor,’ Bessie said, lifting a portion of mashed potato into her mouth to show that she was obeying him, ‘whatcher think they’re sayin’ up there?’

  Up in the double dining-room Mr and Mrs Easter had already made up their minds.

  ‘I wouldn’t be without her now,’ Nan said. ‘Annie’s like a new child. Well you’ve only to look at her to see that. And baby’s settled down. Think how much he cried afore she came. And I do declare my sickness is better too. If you send her back you’ll have me to reckon with.’

  ‘Which is not an eventuality I could face with equilibrium, my love,’ her husband said, smiling at her, ‘so I suppose she must stay.’ He took out his hunter and examined it closely.

  ‘They should have finished their meal by now. Would you be so kind as to ring the bell?’

  So the bell was rung and presently all three servants were standing before them, Bessie pale with anxiety and both Dibkins nodding and grimacing.

  ‘The matter we have to decide between us,’ William Henry told them, ‘is whether Bessie is to become a permanent member of this household. How say you, Mr Dibkins?’

  Mr Dibkins stamped his wash-dolly firmly onto the carpet and said he’d be jiggered if he could see any harm in it, savin’ your reverence, Mr William, sir.

  But when Mrs Dibkins was asked the same question, she seemed to have been struck with a kind of gibbering paralysis. She rolled her eyes and puckered her forehead and twisted her mouth and cheeks until
her face looked more like a piece of newly wrung washing than flesh, but words were beyond her.

  However, William Henry waited, smiling calmly, and after a final supreme struggle Mrs Dibkins gave her assent. ‘She’s a good gel, sir,’ she croaked.

  ‘That, Mrs Dibkins, is entirely our opinion,’ her master said. ‘My thanks to you both for your assistance. Bessie shall stay with us. And now my wife and I will take a little dish of tea, I think. Would you bring up the kettle for us, Bessie, now that you are part of the family?’

  ‘Why did you ask their opinion?’ Nan asked, when the kettle had been brought and all three servants had retired to the kitchen to scour the dirty dishes. The solemnity of the little ceremony had intrigued her.

  ‘It is necessary for servants to know that they are important to the family they serve,’ he said solemnly, watching as she unlocked the tea-caddy and measured out the tea, ‘that their wishes are considered, even if they may not be paramount.’

  ‘How of a wife?’ she asked, feeling well enough to tease him. ‘Are a wife’s wishes to be considered?’

  ‘Indeed yes,’ he said, taking his cup. ‘You have only to tell me what you want, my dear, and you shall have it.’

  But what she wanted was not to be pregnant, and even Mr Easter, with all his love for her, couldn’t grant her that.

  Chapter Nine

  Despite Bessie Taylor’s help, the Dibkins’ devoted nursing and William Henry’s most tender concern, Nan’s third pregnancy continued to be excessively uncomfortable. From very early on, the child had kicked with uncommon strength, banging its head against her bladder, pounding its feet against her ribs, wriggling and heaving almost as though it sensed how unwelcome its presence was and was struggling to get out. As the spring dragged on, it grew more and more tightly packed inside her ugly belly, but that only increased its endeavours. By May, its incessant squirming had irritated her beyond appetite and was preventing her from more than an hour’s sleep at a time.

  ‘I tell you, Bessie,’ she said, when her little maid brought up her chocolate after one particularly sleepless night, ‘even if I hadn’t a’ made my mind up to it already, this would most certainly be my last baby, if I knew how to bring such a thing about. I’m sick of it already and it en’t even born.’

  ‘Be better when it’s ’ere mum,’ Bessie said, trying to comfort. ‘Be a lovely little baby when it’s ’ere.’

  But Nan had her doubts. Which in the event proved justified.

  The child, a long skinny boy, was born at midnight on the first of July 1792 after a labour that lasted thirty-six hours and left his mother totally exhausted. Afterwards, she lay among the pillows, yellow with fatigue, while Bessie wrapped the awkward limbs of her new charge in soft linen and sponged the matted blood from his shock of black hair and crooned commiserations to his shrieks. ‘’E got a good strong pair a’ lungs, ain’cher my pet,’ she said. She didn’t seem to notice what an ugly baby he was.

  ‘Give un to me,’ Nan said wearily. ‘He’d best be fed or he’ll waken the house.’ But she didn’t feel any emotion for him and she hadn’t the slightest urge to feed him. It was as if her capacity for love had been drained with her energy. She begrudged him her milk as she begrudged him the agony and effort of his birth, her flesh recoiling from him, so that he fought her nipple and glared at her balefully even as he sucked.

  If she hadn’t been so exhausted she would have been upset by her lack of feeling for this child. She loved his brother and sister so dearly. They were so pretty and so affectionate, and so recognizably her children, with their fair hair and their little round faces and their snub noses and their babbling ways. But this child was foreign to her, like a gipsy, or a changeling. He had brown skin and little screwed-up eyes and a positive beak of a nose and a tangled mess of thick black hair that grew low on his forehead and extended into sideburns down his cheeks, like a grown man. A fuzz of it even grew down his back and along his arms. ‘’Tis the ugliest baby I ever did see, poor little mite,’ she said. ‘He look like a monkey, so he do.’

  Bessie was shocked. ‘Oh, don’t say that, mum,’ she begged. ‘Poor little thing. Not when ’e’s your own dear baba. ’E’ll grow ’andsome, you’ll see, when ’e’s rounded out.’

  But he didn’t. Although the gypsy darkness of his skin lightened after a week or so, and the worst of his hair could be hidden under a cap, he remained scraggy and long-legged well into his second month, watching with the solemn face of a miniature adult while his brother and sister played piggyback rides with their father and laughed and babbled beside him.

  It worried William Henry that the baby didn’t smile. ‘’Tis an odd child in all conscience, my dear,’ he said. ‘What does he enjoy, poor little man?’

  She couldn’t think of anything. He slept fitfully and woke screaming, and he fought at her breast every time he fed, stopping every few minutes to grizzle and protest, as if he liked her as little as she liked him. ‘’Tis an ill-humoured baby, I fear,’ she said. She was gaunt with fatigue, and try as she might she still couldn’t feel any emotion for the child. ‘We must wait for him to grow out of it, I suppose. What else is there to do?’

  ‘My poor John Henry,’ his father said, patting the baby’s bonnet, and full of aching pity.

  But John Henry opened the black cavern of his mouth and screamed again, shrill piercing cries that Nan disliked more than anything else about him, for he screamed at her no matter what she tried to do to placate him, and the screams made her feel inadequate and guilty and, it had to be admitted, more than a little afraid of him. ‘Take him away, Bessie,’ she begged, ‘for pity’s sake. I thought I should be better once he was born, but I declare it makes me worse just to look at him.’

  The summer progressed and baby Billy learned to stand erect and stagger about from chair to chair, and three-year-old Annie took charge of him, because Bessie said Mama was a-weary and she was to be a good little duck and help all she could. When she wasn’t acting as a nursemaid the child spent the rest of her day chattering to anybody who would listen, and during the long, hot days of July, William Henry taught her the alphabet. She learned quickly and easily, and he was inordinately proud of her. But little John Henry continued fractious, and the more he screamed, the more melancholy and lethargic Nan became, as if his excess of energy was draining hers away.

  William Henry did everything he could to restore her, buying fruits and sweetmeats to tempt her appetite and escorting her to as many entertainments as he could afford, but all to no avail. After a single dance at the Rotunda she was too fatigued to stir from her chair, and even a spectacular firework display only served to weary her.

  ‘We are invited to supper at Mr Johnson’s,’ he tried. ‘A little lively company my dear, and who knows how you may feel.’

  Unfortunately on the very morning of the supper party the London papers were loud with the news that the Paris mob had stormed the King’s palace and butchered his Swiss guard, and that the entire royal family was now imprisoned in a place called the Temple.

  ‘’Tis exceedingly grave, my dear,’ William Henry told Nan over breakfast. ‘If the French people go so far as to kill their King, then there will be war between our two nations, I fear.’

  But she had very little interest in the French or their affairs. ‘If only baby wouldn’t scream so,’ she said, ‘I do believe I could take to un.’ It grieved her that she still had so little feeling for this child. And her sigh grieved him.

  ‘What a blessing it is that we dine at Mr Johnson’s tonight, my love,’ he said. He always found his old friend’s company so invigorating. It would be bound to cheer her.

  It did nothing of the sort. It was very dull company indeed. Sophie wasn’t there, Mrs Wotherspoon was asleep, and the only other lady at table was a scruffy looking creature called Mary Wollstonecraft, who was a writer and talked politics as loudly as any of the men in a rough dominant voice. Nan didn’t take to her at all and couldn’t understand half she said, for the talk was
all of France and what the revolutionaries would or would not do. For although King Louis had been making speeches promising to support the Revolution ever since his nobles took fright and fled, it was now horribly plain that the French people did not trust him at all. Which Mr Johnson declared was hardly to be wondered at, since the gentleman was as wily as all the Bourbons and had long been secretly conniving at the overthrow of the revolution. The gentlemen around the supper table that evening were passionately interested in the constitutional problem this situation posed, and they spent hours happily discussing it. But Nan was profoundly and miserably bored.

  By the time September began and baby John was three months old, she had sunk into such a gloom she barely stirred from the house. William Henry grew more and more alarmed by her lethargy, for she wouldn’t allow him to send for a doctor and the change in her was becoming so noticeable he was fearful of some terrible disease. Finally he left Dibkins with a note for Sophie Fuseli when she next came to tea, urging her to do all she could to help her friend.

  ‘Pray my dear,’ he wrote, ‘do see if you could prevail upon her at least to walk in the air. I do not mean to alarm you, howsomever I am most seriously concerned for her health, for I fear she may fall into a decline if she does not improve soon. Perhaps you could persuade her to take an expedition to Mr Rogers’ in the Strand, where she may care to choose a shawl, or to Reeves Hosiery Warehouse. I leave it entirely to your discretion. Should you have any thoughts you might wish to communicate with me upon this matter, perhaps you would be so kind as to take coffee with me at Mr Galloway’s coffee house, in the Strand, on Thursday morning.’

  Sophie was rather surprised to receive such a request for she’d been visiting Nan nearly every week since the baby had been born, and although she was often listless, she did not think her melancholy, for she listened to the gossip and took tea and made no sad comment. Nevertheless she decided to do as he asked.