Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

by Jackie French

  Has he ever done a forceps delivery? wondered Sophie, but Sister Martens added, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell him what to do.’

  Sophie sat by Alison’s side. ‘It’ll be over soon. Soon.’

  ‘Sophie … don’t tell Philip I screamed, will you?’

  Philip is dead, thought Sophie, just as Alison shook her head, said, ‘I forgot’, then screamed again.

  The doctor arrived smelling of port. He washed his hands briefly in the water bowl, then pulled the forceps from his bag.

  ‘Try to time pulling with a contraction …’ began Sister Martens.

  He silenced her with a look. ‘Now, then,’ he said, in a gust of false cheer and port fumes. ‘Let’s be doing with this, shall we?’

  It took another hour. An hour of screams, of blood running into the sheets, and down Alison’s chin when she bit her lips. At times Sophie wondered if the duchess was going to faint. But she stayed where she was, a rock no one dared try to move.

  At last, the baby cried.

  Sister Martens took it, gazed without comment at the bruised head, then quickly and efficiently wiped it with warmed wet cloth she’d had waiting, swaddled it, and placed it in Alison’s arms then, as the doctor left, bent down again to deal with the afterbirth.

  Sophie held Alison’s hands more firmly around the baby. Alison had no strength, but wasn’t going to let it go. The duchess sat, her face unmoving, tears streaming down the leathered skin.

  ‘A girl,’ said Sophie softly. ‘Clever Mouse.’ She exchanged a look with the duchess. A girl couldn’t be swallowed up by war. And she’s going to have all her mother never had, thought Sophie fiercely. Money enough to do what she likes. We will tell her she is beautiful and intelligent and hug her every day.

  ‘I’m going to call her Sophie,’ Alison whispered through white lips. ‘Philip agreed.’

  ‘But not Sophronia. Please.’

  A shadow of a smile. ‘Not Sophronia.’ Her eyes closed.

  Sophie took the duchess’s hand to help her up. ‘Happiness is a baby,’ the old woman whispered. ‘Even in these days. So very happy.’ Her eyes closed, as if to stop the tears she would not acknowledge.

  By evening Alison was drinking broth made from a rooster the housekeeper had been saving specially, the baby with her now-swollen head nuzzling at her mother’s breast. ‘I know nursing spoils the figure. But it doesn’t matter in my case, does it?’ She gazed down at the baby. The bruises were purple, but the child sucked strongly and waved her tiny fists. ‘It’s funny; I woke earlier and thought, The war will end now my baby has been born. There has to be a safe world for my baby.’

  ‘She will be safe,’ said Sophie. ‘Always.’

  Alison nodded. ‘Mine,’ she whispered. ‘Somebody of my very own, at last.’

  Sleep came like a blow from an axe that night; it had been impossible to do more than doze every now and then in a chair by Alison’s bed the last two nights.

  Sophie was woken by urgent knocking. She sat up, dazed. A servant would enter without knocking, otherwise only Alison ever came to her room.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  Sister Martens appeared at the door. ‘Miss Higgs, I think you should come. It’s Lady Alison.’

  ‘Is something wrong? She was doing so splendidly.’ Sophie grabbed her dressing gown and slippers, and followed Sister Martens and her candle down the corridor.

  The dowager duchess was already there. Alison sat up from her pillows as they came in, red-faced and sweating, shadows almost green about her eyes.

  ‘Lie back,’ instructed Sister Martens, and then to Sophie, ‘Sponge her face. Keep her cool, if you can.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Sophie urgently.

  ‘Puerperal fever,’ said Sister Martens. ‘Childbirth fever, if you like.’

  ‘Have you called the doctor?’

  ‘He’s already seen her. He’s given her something for the pain.’

  ‘There must be something else he can do!’

  Sister Martens frowned, then drew her out into the corridor again. ‘Miss Higgs, I’m sorry.’

  ‘What is it, Sister?’

  ‘Puerperal fever is an infection, Miss Higgs.’

  ‘Infections can be cured.’

  ‘Not this one. Miss Higgs, no mother survives puerperal fever.’

  It took another day. By midday Alison knew no one, though in between her mutterings she called for Sophie, unaware that Sophie sat there, holding her hand, sponging the flushed face, trying to hope it was something else. Measles, or influenza …

  Some time that afternoon Doris was there too, sitting side by side with the dowager duchess, neither seeming to think the conjunction strange.

  At ten past three in the morning Alison died.

  It was a small funeral. They always were these days. Grief must be compressed by war too: not the depth of sadness, but the moments spared to show it. No horses to pull the hearse; no hands to tend the flowers to make the wreaths — just small bunches from the gardens of the estate, daffodils and bluebells from the woods. The mourners were all women. Doris carried the baby, had tended her since Alison’s death, had somehow found a farmwoman to wet-nurse little Sophie that first night when Alison grew ill.

  ‘It’s all I can do for Lady Alison now,’ she said to Sophie. ‘Please, Miss Higgs, can I be her nurse? Then her maid maybe, as she grows older?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sophie. The dowager would have no objection; she would be glad someone suitable had offered. Someone who had known Alison, and who would love her child.

  Sophie walked back to Wooten behind the dog-cart that had carried the duchess. The old woman had borne it all without tears; she had simply stood there, leaning on her stick, watching as the earth was scattered on the coffin, watching as though to gather the last second of her granddaughter’s existence.

  Alison, gone forever. Hannelore vanished among the enemy, and Miss Lily. Sophie wondered what Emily was doing. Still creating an empire of jumble sales and collections for refugees? She didn’t care.

  She had never truly hated the war till now. She had seen what it had done to men, to the women and children left behind. But this was the first loss that had struck at her personally. For the war had killed Alison too — she knew enough of nursing and infection to realise that.

  She should have insisted on that London clinic; overruled physicians and Alison’s wishes. Alison should have been kept from a place where infected wounds were commonplace; where a tired doctor simply rinsed his hands before attending her.

  I failed you, Mouse, she thought. My first true friend, who needed me, who trusted me. And I let you die.

  Chapter 47

  If I had one wish, today, it would be to be able to say the things that cannot be said.

  Miss Lily, 1915

  Wooten Abbey

  20 November 1915

  Dear Dad and Miss Thwaites,

  It was so good to get your letter. I miss home dreadfully. The days here at Wooten all seem to run together. Every morning I expect to see Alison at breakfast, and yet it seems decades since she died. So many deaths since then that sometimes I feel guilty for mourning one so much, but the men have mourners too. It is hard to remember that they have homes as well, as so few families are given permission to visit.

  Sometimes I dream that I’m going to open my eyes and I’ll be at Thuringa, and the lyrebird will be singing out the window, imitating the sheepdogs. Do you remember when I was small and tried to find the dog up in a tree, but it was a lyrebird?

  I could almost have booked my passage home but I can’t abandon Her Grace now, nor Alison’s baby. She is the dearest little thing, sitting up already and eating mashed carrots, the same colour as her hair — at least by the time she has finished with them. Since the Germans sank the Lusitania no passenger ship is safe anyway, even if it has a neutral flag. Truly, I am better to stay here.

  I was sorry to hear the horses have gone from Thuringa. It is hard to think of Moonbeam Joe without h
is charges, but I realise the Australian army must need mounts. All of the riding and most of the carriage and farm horses have been taken here, but somehow I never thought of Australian ones going to war too.

  We have different burns cases here now. A nurse came down from London to show us how to care for them. They are from the chlorine gas the Germans are using at Ypres. It floats in a green cloud, the men say, then attacks their eyes and lungs when they breathe it in. At first men ran when they saw the cloud coming but now the orders are to stay in place, as more of it is breathed in when you run, and to stand up on the parapet and not lie down in the trench, as the gas sinks to the ground. The men soak their handkerchiefs in water and put them over their mouths and noses, but gas pads are more effective, as they hold more water, which stops the gas. They are just rolled linen with straps on each end so they can be tied around the head. They are easy to make. I usually make two or three while I have my cup of tea after dinner — and am very glad not to have to knit instead.

  Your loving,

  Sophie

  The war, which had seemed to eat time in the first months of transforming Wooten into a hospital, now stretched it so every minute was a struggle to complete, weariness competing with boredom.

  Horror could be boring. A corporal, dying of gangrene, had told Sophie that the boredom was the worst illness of the trenches, how at the end even a severed hand could not elicit shock.

  The work she did now was necessary. It also confined body and mind. At night she dreamed she was the eagle at Thuringa, playing with the wind. Free.

  The patients changed; lived, died, recovered. Supplies arrived, were delayed, had to be pleaded for. But real change happened only in the world beyond Wooten.

  The papers they got at Wooten were a day late now, with fewer trains running.

  The war had yet another battlefront now: Gallipoli. It had been strange to see the Australians’ fighting so prominently mentioned, after more than a year when the word Australia was only in the shipping news and sometimes the cricket. The whole world was ringing with the Australians’ heroism, it seemed. Australian soldiers had a new name now: Anzacs, sharing it with the New Zealanders, who were at Gallipoli too.

  Gallipoli was in Turkey, an ally of Germany, so Sophie supposed they were trying to capture Constantinople — wasn’t that what Miss Lily had said it would be good for the first time she had read about the place?

  Meanwhile she visited baby Sophie and Doris in the nursery, where sunlight and the smell of baby hair almost banished Wooten’s scent of disinfectant. In these few moments of poignant joy each day, holding Mouse’s baby, Sophie wondered if the war would eat her entire life. By the time it left her free she might be old. Perhaps she was already old, in spirit if not in body.

  The dressings were an endless job now that even she had to make time for: the burns from the chlorine gas festered, requiring constant cleaning and fresh coverings. Often the dressings had to be soaked off, which meant returning, hours later, more prodding, poking and tearing of newly granulated skin.

  She had just finished the last of her wards that day when Blaise appeared, grey-haired, grey-faced. ‘Miss Higgs? Telephone for you: Mr Slithersole.’

  For a moment she panicked, imagining bad news from Australia — her father with a heart attack, or news of Malcolm … But no, Miss Thwaites would have sent a wire to the dowager duchess if there had been any hard news to break, not delivered it via Mr Slithersole.

  ‘Miss Higgs speaking.’

  ‘Miss Higgs, I have some good news. Higgs’s Corned Beef has been able to do, shall we say, a favour for the Medical Corps.’ Which meant cheaper corned beef, she supposed, or supplies of the new line of dried beef tea: just add hot water for a nourishing beverage in the trenches — assuming hot water, or even clean water, could be found.

  ‘That’s wonderful, Mr Slithersole. Er, what is the good news?’

  ‘VADs, Miss Higgs!’ She could almost see his smile. ‘Twenty of them will be down at Wooten on the eight-ten train tomorrow.’

  ‘Twenty! Mr Slithersole, that’s not just good, it’s miraculous! Twenty!’

  No more dressings, she thought. Trained hands to pull off the bloody linen, not hers …

  Where should she put these new VADs? Four in her old room. Four in Alison’s? No, she couldn’t ask the dowager for that. Move the officers from the far end of the east wing and make that a sort of VAD headquarters, with the red room as a sitting room — they could make toast and cocoa at the fireplace …

  I shouldn’t feel so glad, she thought. But for the first time since Alison’s death she felt a smile — a real smile, not a ‘duty’ smile — spread across her face. ‘Mr Slithersole, you are an angel and a joy to the heart. Please tell Mrs Slithersole I told you so. She is well? And Albert?’

  ‘Both in the pink, thank you, Miss Higgs. I reckon my boy is as safe as anywhere in the Catering Corps.’

  ‘I’ll warrant he does sterling service there too, Mr Slithersole. An army marches on its stomach.’

  ‘A remarkable observation, Miss Higgs.’

  Except Napoleon observed it first, she thought, and Miss Thwaites observed it to me. She ended the call with more profuse thanks and good wishes, then went to tell the dowager duchess the news.

  It was warm in Her Grace and Nanny’s sitting room. Gloriously warm, the wood fire glowing in the hearth. Nanny Hawkins sat in her chintz-covered chair, knitting. It had been years since she had been able to conduct a conversation, but she could still spoon her food for herself, still knitted sock after sock, still smiled when any young person came in. The room was furnished now with the grander furniture from upstairs, but still small enough to heat through and through so even your bones felt warm.

  ‘Good afternoon, Nanny.’

  A smile. The old woman held up the sock, and then her cheek to be kissed. Her eyes went down to her knitting again. Sophie wondered who Nanny mistook her for — which of the many children Nanny had loved and cared for. She let her body fall into a chair, the twin of Nanny’s.

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘Your Grace? I have the most wonderful news.’ Sophie stood up again as the dowager shuffled in from her bedroom, leaning on her stick. She looked a decade older than she had last year, her body bent by grief as much as the arthritis. But she greeted every new arrival, farewelled every man who left, attended the funerals of strangers who now lay in the family plot in the churchyard. ‘Twenty VADs arrive tomorrow!’

  Suddenly she realised she should have asked the old lady’s permission. This was still her house, or at least her nephew’s. She of all people was due the courtesy, even if the VADs were officially a gift of the War Office, not Sophie Higgs.

  But the dowager simply smiled. ‘So you can rest a little at last, my dear. Can you spare the time to sit with me now?’

  Guilt struck her. It had never occurred to her that, despite the invasion of so many, the dowager might be lonely. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought you and Nanny might want to be alone.’

  The duchess picked up her knitting: another balaclava. ‘Why does one need to be alone at my age? One will have plenty of that soon enough. Or reunion with all whom I have loved and lost, perhaps, but you will not be among them for a long time.’ The leathered eyes crinkled. ‘So I treasure our conversation now. And Nanny likes company too, don’t you, Nanny?’ Nanny beamed vaguely at the sound of her name. ‘Sit down again, my dear.’

  Sophie waited till the old lady had made herself comfortable first, then sat as well, leaning back into the softness of the chair. She closed her eyes; opened them perhaps ten minutes later to find the duchess watching her.

  ‘You’re exhausted. It must be hard for you, away from your family.’

  As you have lost most of yours, she thought. ‘I miss them. I miss Australia too. Well, my small corner of it.’

  ‘Do James Lorrimer and that young Australian still write to you?’ Now Sophie was officially ‘out’, Her Grace no longer felt it her duty to read Sophie’s cor
respondence. In this new world of war, such things hardly mattered.

  ‘Yes. James is back in the United States. I never know if I will get one letter from him, or three at once. Malcolm just had a week’s leave in Paris. But my heart doesn’t go all a-flutter when I get their letters.’

  ‘All a-flutter?’

  ‘That’s what Cook says Elsie feels when her young man writes to her. Her heart goes all of a flutter.’

  ‘Elsie?’

  ‘One of the kitchen maids.’

  ‘I think you know my staff better than I do.’

  ‘Maybe I just like kitchens, like my father.’ She tried to smile. ‘It’s in the blood.’

  ‘Not yours alone, my dear. I spent a good part of my youth in the kitchen. I don’t know if Alison told you my father was a vicar?’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’ It hurt to hear Alison’s name. It helped too.

  ‘We had a maid-of-all-work, of course — Mattie, a darling woman. I don’t think I ever saw her hands at rest. Even when she sat down she’d be stirring, or darning a sock.’ The old woman smiled again. ‘Maybe that is why at the end of my life I find I am happy in somewhat more intimate circumstances than alone in the rooms upstairs.’

  ‘You’re not at the end of your life at all, Your Grace.’

  The wrinkled eyes were shrewd. ‘I have another decade left, perhaps. Which may seem a long time to you, but is all too short to me. It is good to have my own hands occupied with real work again. I never did enjoy petit point or embroidery, and as for tapestry … This house is full of the handiwork of ten generations of bored women, and a nice job it is protecting it from the mice and moths too. The Abbey doesn’t need my contributions.’

  ‘I wish my knitting were as good as yours.’

  ‘I had three younger brothers. There were many socks to knit when I was young.’

  ‘What are they doing now, Your Grace?’

  She expected to hear that they were vicars too, or in some form of public service. But the neat grey head bent down to the sock growing between her fingers. ‘Thomas and Henry died of the diphtheria when I was ten years old, Clarence of typhoid a little later. It was typhoid that took my parents too. Bad drains, my dear — the privy was only two yards from the well, but one never thought of those things back then.’