As it happened, Miss Brookfield went off to Italy a couple of days later with Master Edward’s proposal still hanging in the air. She hadn’t said yes, Mr Goddard told Mr Wilkins who told Mary, who told Becky, Jane, Megan and me - but she hadn’t said no, either. Edward would have to wait for her decision until Christmas, and so would the rest of us.
And what of the plan to save Miss Habershon? ‘It worked like clockwork,’ Miss Harriet told me the next day. ‘If only I’d been there to see what happened. Miss MacIntyre told my stepmother how impressed she was by my knowledge of plants, and how excellently I had been taught. Was there any chance she might be persuaded to part with that young governess, because she happened to know that the Gore-Smythes were in urgent need of a tutor for their three daughters and Lord Gore-Smythe hadn’t been able to find anyone in London with the slightest knowledge of botany, let alone any of the other sciences. And he was prepared to pay up to forty guineas a year.’
‘Wasn’t that a risk?’ I asked. ‘What if Her Ladyship had said yes?’
‘But she wouldn’t, you see - that was the clever part. If Lord Gore-Smythe’s daughters are to be taught science, then it must be the done thing and perfectly all right for me. The Gore-Smythes set the tone in London, Miss MacIntyre says - she has designed their garden in Bedford Square. Then apparently someone leaned across the table said that if there was any talk of the Vyes’ governess being let go, they would like to have her for their children and would pay quite as much as Lord Gore-Smythe if not more because she was obviously quite a find.’
More than forty guineas! Some folks certainly have more money than sense, I decided.
‘So then,’ Harriet went on, ‘my stepmother said firmly that Miss Habershon was staying at Swallowcliffe for the foreseeable future, and she hoped no one would think of trying to tempt her away. She told Miss Habershon this morning that there seemed to have been some misunderstanding - she would like her to continue to teach me and would leave the subject matter in her hands, so long as I worked hard.’
‘Well, good for Miss MacIntyre. Only, it might be an idea not to mention this medical college for a while. No sense in pushing things, is there?’
‘Maybe not,’ Harriet admitted. ‘I shan’t forget about it, though.’
‘I’m sure you won’t,’ I said, smiling as I went back to the grate.
So that was Miss Harriet settled, and one problem off my mind. The days passed, November arrived and one morning a new smell floated through the Hall from the kitchen: dark brown, sweet and spicy. Mrs Bragg was making mincemeat and plum pudding. Before we knew where we were, Christmas would be here. I found myself thinking about Iris a great deal of the time; she had probably had her baby by now, and I prayed for them both every night. And then one morning, almost as though I had willed it by wishing so hard, I opened my mother’s weekly letter to find a note folded inside, and knew instantly that it had come from Iris. She must have known her handwriting might have been recognized and the letter opened, had she sent it directly to the Hall.
‘I have been in two minds for some time as to whether to pass this on,’ my mother wrote, ‘but seeing how anxious you were about your friend, I thought you should like to have word from her. Of course you cannot visit the workhouse (how could she ever suggest such a thing!) but at least you know she is alive and has been safely delivered.’
This is what Iris had written to me:
20 November 1890
My dearest Polly
I hope this letter reaches you, and that your mother will forgive me for sending it to her in the first instance. How are you, my dear friend? I think of you often and wonder what is happening at Swallowcliffe. It seems a very long way from here, although in fact I am less than fifteen miles away. Please do not be too shocked when I tell you that I was admitted to the workhouse in Hardingbridge a little while ago. My parents did not want to take me back at home on account of the shame I have brought upon the family, which was much as I expected. But the workhouse is not such a bad place, and last week my baby was born here - a beautiful boy - which may shock you too, although I think you must have known he was on the way. Do you think too badly of me? I hope not, because I have something very important to ask you.
Would you come and see me? We are not allowed visitors as a rule but I have said that you are my sister and so they have permitted me one visit. I know this may be difficult for you to arrange, but can you come in three weeks’ time, on the morning of Sunday December 14th? That is when they will allow me to see you. You can take the train to Hardingbridge, it is only a few stops further down the line from Little Rising. The workhouse is in Union Street - everyone knows where it is.
You may feel uncomfortable about being seen in such an establishment, which I quite understand, but there is really nothing to fear. Please come if you can, Polly, dear - I must talk to you about an urgent matter. You may well not want to see me again but could you find it in your heart to grant this request, for old times’ sake? I have no one else to ask, and there is no other soul in the world I would rather see than you.
Do not desert me, I beg you,
Your loving friend
Iris Baker
The workhouse! As soon as I read that word, the rest of the letter seemed to dissolve in front of my eyes. To think of my lovely, sweet Iris ending up in such a place! I had to read her note several times to take in the rest of it, and then another set of worries came thick and fast. My mother had shilly-shallied so long in sending on the letter that Sunday December 14th was a matter of days away. It would be near on impossible to arrange for time off to visit Iris at such short notice - and pay for the train fare, besides. We would not get our last quarter’s wages until after Christmas, and I only had two shillings to my name.
I laid the letter aside with Iris’s final words sounding in my head: ‘Do not desert me, I beg you.’
How could I let her down?
Twelve
The Workhouse should be a place of hardship, of coarse fare, of degradation and humility; it should be administered with strictness, with severity; it should be as repulsive as is consistent with humanity.
Reverend H H Milman, 1832
It was a long walk up Union Street to the workhouse, and not made any shorter by the crowd of noisy children who left off playing in the road to follow behind me, laughing and shouting. When I came to a stop outside the porter’s lodge, the jeers rose to a crescendo and a stone came whizzing through the air very close to my head. By the time I turned around, they had already taken to their heels, so I vented my feelings on the door knocker instead and gave it a good hammering.
The door flew open and I found myself looking into the watery eyes of an elderly gentleman with flushed cheeks, a bulbous red-veined nose and two of the bushiest grey sideburns I had ever seen.
‘All right, all right!’ he said irritably. ‘Why should you be in such a hurry to enter this place, young lady?’
‘Sorry, sir,’ I replied, ‘my nerves are all in a jangle this morning.’ There was no point in getting on the wrong side of him - you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, as my mother likes to say.
‘Aye, as well they might be,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Most folks who come this way finds themselves all jangled up in one way or another. And they look a darn sight worse than yourself, in the main.’
‘But I have only come on a visit, not to stay.’ I hurried to put him right. ‘My fr - my sister is here, and I am to see her today.’
‘Oh, are you indeed? And have you brought your calling card? We likes things done proper here! I shall have to announce you in the droring room!’ And he collapsed into a paroxysm of the most dreadful wheezing which I eventually realized was what passed for laughter. This soon turned into a proper coughing fit, so I patted the old fellow on the back and waited until he could speak again.
‘I shall unlock the gate, Your Ladyship,’ he gasped. ‘Stay there.’ And the door slammed shut again.
The porter’s lodge
was set at one side of a gated arch, through which I could see the grey bulk of the workhouse itself. It was a forbidding stone building, with row upon row of narrow windows frowning down on to a bleak courtyard below. I shivered, and not merely because it was a cold, damp day that seemed to have frozen the very marrow in my bones.
‘The Archway of Tears, that’s what folks calls it around here,’ the porter said, shutting the gate behind me with a clang and locking it up again. ‘You’ll be glad enough to pass through the other way, I’ll be bound, but spare a thought for the poor souls who never will. Now come this way.’
He took me into his lodge through a door on the other side of the arch, then out by another door at the back into a passage which led along to a large bare room. It was empty except for a table, the chair behind it and a bench opposite. ‘Wait here for the matron,’ he said. ‘I’ve rung for her to collect you.’ I took a seat on the bench and tried to think of cheerful things so as not to lose heart completely.
Matron appeared a short while later, and any cheerful thoughts vanished right away. She matched the building very well, having a face that might have been carved from the same stone. ‘Unbutton your coat,’ she said, by way of a greeting. ‘If you’ve brought in any drink, it’ll be the worse for you.’ And she glared at me most severely while she searched for it, as though she could read on my face all the naughty intentions that were no doubt in my mind.
‘Right, follow me,’ she said when this unpleasant process was over, and marched briskly the other way down the corridor, which skirted the open courtyard. It was a little after mid-day, and we went past the open doorway of a dining hall filled with row upon row of women, all seated facing the same way and dressed in the same blue-and-white striped dresses, some with grubby calico shifts over them. The next room contained rows of men in striped cotton shirts. I wondered where the children were: they must have been in another part of the workhouse. Nobody spoke a word; the only sound to be heard was the scraping of spoons upon plates and an occasional shifting of benches. A thin, sour smell that might once have had something to do with boiled beef and turnips hung on the air.
We went on down the passage past a large laundry room, round a corner and then up two flights of stairs. At last the matron stopped at a door halfway along the upper landing. ‘This is where the unchaste women are. You can have half an hour with your sister and no more,’ she rapped out to me. ‘I will come back for you when the time is up.’ She opened the door, and in I went.
Iris was sitting in a chair facing the door, wearing one of those same striped dresses. Her face lit up when she saw me. ‘Polly! You came!’ She made as if to get up, though it was too much for her and she sank back in the chair. Although she was clearly overjoyed to see me, I could tell she was also ashamed that I should have had to find her in such a place.
‘Well, of course I did! Now don’t you go disturbing yourself on my account. You stay there and I shall sit beside you.’
Settling her back in the chair gave me a moment to gather my wits, because I should not have liked Iris to see how shocked I was at the sight of her. Her beautiful golden hair had been hacked short - the way Mother cuts our Tom’s when he’s been especially naughty - and the pink and white softness of her skin had faded to a dirty grey. She looked exhausted and ill, and every so often her body shook with a hollow, racking cough. What worried me most, however, was the desperate look in her eye: as though she had already endured more than a body ever should, and knew her troubles were not over yet.
‘You’ll have to sit on the floor, then,’ said a gravelly voice. ‘Not exactly set up for visitors, are we?’
A heavy, blowsy-looking woman was staring at us both with great interest from her seat on a low bed in a corner of the room. Her dark bedraggled hair stood out in all directions like a moulting feather duster, and when she drew back her narrow lips to smile at me in welcome, I could see that most of her teeth had rotted away to blackened stumps. She might have been forty or even fifty, yet there was a wooden crate on the dusty floor beside the bed with a swaddled shape laid in it that must have been a baby.
‘This is Miss Harker,’ Iris told me, and I knew from her face that she could tell what I was thinking.
‘Pleased to make your acquaintance,’ the lady said. ‘But call me Lily. We don’t stand on ceremony here, do we, Iris?’ She smiled again. ‘Iris and Lily, two flowers in a field.’ And she laughed, which was not a pleasant sound.
Then I noticed another wooden box on the floor, not far from where I was kneeling beside Iris’s chair. She nodded proudly. ‘There is my Ralph. Take a peek at him, Polly, if you’d like.’
Of course I would. I have always loved babies - their soft downy heads and the sweet milky smell of them - and I could not wait to see Iris’s. Such a wise round face looked back at me from the depths of the blanket! He was wide awake but not making a sound, just gazing up at that cracked, cobwebby ceiling as though it was the bluest, most heavenly sky in the world.
‘Oh, there’s a dear,’ I whispered, stroking his peachy cheek with my little finger. ‘Iris, he’s perfect!’
‘You can pick him up if he’s awake,’ she said. ‘He seems to like being cuddled.’
Lily tutted in exasperation. ‘Why can’t you leave him alone for five minutes? I’ve told your sister a hundred times, she’ll spoil the bairn, always petting and fussing over him.’
I ignored her and lifted up the little bundle to settle him against my shoulder. If only Iris and I could have been alone together! There was so much to say but we could hardly talk with that dreadful Lily there.
Iris watched me hungrily as I held her baby. ‘Here, you have a turn,’ I said, offering him over, but she shook her head.
‘No, you keep him.’ I could see she was close to tears. Then she raised herself up a little in the chair, cleared her throat and said, ‘Mrs Henderson gave you the day off? That’s a wonder.’
I didn’t go into the full story behind my coming to the workhouse, not wanting to worry her. I had had to tell Mrs Henderson that my mother had suddenly been taken ill (which I hated to do, being superstitious about lying over such things) and plead with her to be allowed home for the day. She hummed and hahed about it, but at last she said yes, so then all I had to do was persuade someone to lend me the train fare - not an easy task with Christmas coming up. Luckily Megan came to my rescue, having some money put aside for a rainy day.
So Iris and I wasted time talking about this and that, while the minutes of my visit ticked by and Ralph nuzzled into my shoulder. Now it seemed as though she could hardly bear to look at the baby, which was strange.
‘Don’t think I’m going to be carrying him around all day,’ Lily said, watching me walking to and fro with obvious disapproval.
‘Lily is to leave the workhouse next week and she’s offered to keep Ralph for a while, until I can come for him,’ Iris explained. ‘I am sure it won’t be for long, but I need to get a little stronger before leaving myself.’
I looked at her for a moment without speaking, trying to understand what she was trying to tell me with her eyes. Something important, it had to be. Luckily, Lily’s poor child set to wailing just at that moment - a thin reedy cry that did not seem to hold out much hope of an answer. The noise went on, and Lily went on ignoring it. I laid Ralph back on the rough, straw-stuffed mattress in his cot and took out my purse.
‘Your baby must need feeding,’ I told Lily, ‘and I’m sure you won’t want a stranger looking on. Perhaps you could take the mite downstairs for a moment? Here’s a shilling for your trouble.’ It was all the money I had left.
The sight of my purse made Lily a good deal more considerate, and she took herself off the bed in quite a hurry to test the coin with one of her few remaining teeth. ‘Just for a few minutes, then,’ she said, and yanked the baby up out of its box - which gave the poor thing such a shock that it stopped crying immediately.
As soon as they had gone, Iris started talking more freely. ‘I don’t
want Lily to take Ralph, Polly. She’s no fit person to look after a baby, anyone can see that. I’ve a little bit of money put aside, you see, for after he was born. I had to give it to the matron for safekeeping when I came in here, and now Lily knows about it too – she and the matron are thick as thieves. She says she’ll take care of Ralph if I pay her five shillings a week, and I can come for him when I’m feeling better.’ Her words ended in a fit of coughing which she tried to stifle with a grubby handkerchief. ‘They mean to take him away from me, I know they do, and what will become of him then? I’m not strong enough to stand up to them.’
‘Hush, hush,’ I said, wiping the hair off her damp brow. ‘Don’t upset yourself.’ Poor thing, she was burning up! Then I saw to my horror that the handkerchief at her mouth was spotted red with blood, and had to look away so she wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.
‘Ralph is all that matters. Give him to me, Polly.’
I put the baby gently into her arms and she laid her hollow cheek against his soft round one. ‘I cannot help loving him,’ she whispered. ‘They say all my wickedness has been passed on to him, but how can that be? He is an innocent child, sent from God.’
‘And what of his father?’ It was an awkward question, but I had to ask.
She smiled sadly. ‘His father gave me the money to get rid of him. Not such a fine gentleman after all, as it turned out.’ For a second she clutched the little scrap to herself as though she would never let him go, then tenderly she kissed the top of his head and passed him back to me. ‘You take him,’ she said. ‘Please, Polly! This is no place for a baby, and I’m too sick to care for him now.’
‘Take him where? Whatever are you asking me to do?’
Polly's Story Page 11
