Tamed By The Marquess (Steamy Historical Regency)

by Scarlett Osborne

  More often, Joanna was the object of the fear and derision of respectable people. It seemed that once one fell beyond a certain level, one was not even considered human anymore.

  Joanna frequently found herself called foul names and pelted with garbage. Ladies who passed her on the streets drew their skirts back so as not to touch her. They grabbed their children by the hand and yanked them away if they spoke to dirty little Hannah.

  Joanna was much more sorry for Missus Vi and Hannah than she was for herself. Missus Vi had lost the will to live—she drifted around after Joanna, day after day, like a malnourished ghost. And after years of being treated as her mother’s princess, Hannah was suddenly learning just how little other people liked or cared for her.

  In truth, though, the presence of Missus Vi and Hannah saved Joanna. A young, helpless woman, she could have been the helpless prey of every scoundrel who encountered her—except that the presence of the sick old lady and the pretty little girl, so obviously dependent on her, shamed even the worst of men.

  As the days grew cooler and the nights grew longer, Joanna increasingly worried how the three would survive the winter ahead. Already Hannah coughed and wheezed—she had lost her robust good health. They had no warm outer garments, and even their regular clothes were torn and ragged by now. Where could they sleep on cold nights ahead?

  At the first frost, the London constables began rounding up all the homeless beggars for commitment to the workhouses. Every poor person—and many a person teetering on the brink of poverty—feared these loathsome places.

  Here, the poor were housed by the hundreds in what was little better than prison. Families were separated and sent to different areas or even to different workhouses, typically never to see each other again. The men, women, and children were assigned grinding daily labor so they could work off their debt to society.

  Conditions were grim. Food was of the plainest sort, and was tightly rationed. Dormitories of fifty or more occupants provided sleeping quarters on sacks filled with straw and infested with vermin.

  Serious and even terminal illnesses were rampant. Typhoid, cholera, consumption, and tuberculosis preyed on tightly packed inmates with little opportunity to keep themselves clean.

  It was to such a place, a London workhouse called Clerkenwell, that Joanna, Hannah, and Missus Vi were taken.

  As part of the intake process, a group of stern matrons stripped the three to the skin and doused them with a harsh disinfectant. To fight lice, their hair was cut off, leaving only tufts of hair here and there on their scalps.

  Missus Vi did not care much about her hair by now. But Joanna cried when her own waist-length raven locks were mercilessly shorn, and cried even harder when she saw her daughter’s glossy mahogany curls meet the same fate.

  Then the three were separated, Joanna to the queue of able-bodied women, Missus Vi to the infirm elderly, and Hannah to the little children. When Joanna realized her daughter was to be taken from her, she screamed hysterically. She had to be subdued forcefully by three of the matrons, who gagged her until she stopped hollering.

  Because of such bad behavior, Joanna was put into a small solitary cell for five days. She was given stale bread and murky water twice a day. By the time they let her out, no one could tell her where Hannah had been taken.

  The weeks ran together. Joanna spent her days scrubbing floors, stitching sacks together, and other meaningless tasks, often for twelve hours a day. Grieving for her daughter, she was numb to any other pain.

  The only thing that gave Joanna any comfort were her thoughts of Christy. She longed for the few hours she was permitted to sleep on her straw pallet. There, she could escape from her grief by retreating into her memories.

  Every night, she fell asleep lost in the reverie that Christy’s arms were tightly around her, and that his hands were stroking her hair. For in her imaginings, her hair was still long and lustrous.

  Each night, she imagined he was making love to her, his gentle hands ranging over her plump breasts, her tiny waist, and her generous hips. For in her thoughts, she was still young and voluptuous, not a haggard, malnourished skeleton of a woman.

  Every night, she thought of different ways she could please him—not just by letting him ride astride her, but by using her hands, her mouth, her tongue to give his manhood pleasure.

  How she would make him moan and scream out her name, if ever she lay with him again! How he would look at her, and swear no other woman could ever give him such pleasure! These were ideas she had never had before—everything she and Christy had done in the past had been spontaneous and in the moment—but now she was a woman, ready to seduce her man in every way she could think of.

  These memories of the past were the only good thing Joanna had to hold on to. The present was hopeless. She would keep on fighting, for the sake of her daughter, whom she had to find. But she felt it all was hopeless.

  Joanna heard through the workhouse grapevine that Missus Vi had died. Unused to harsh treatment, already weakened by life on the streets, she succumbed within two weeks of entering Clerkenwell.

  Joanna felt that this was perhaps a blessing—to the extent that Joanna could feel anything at all.

  Missus Vi, you were good to us, and I’m sorry to lose you. But you died because you were weak—because you let people treat you as your son treated you. I am not going to be weak. For Hannah’s sake, wherever she is, I am not going to be weak.

  * * *

  The workhouses were assigned Visitors, usually vicars, who would periodically make the rounds among the inhabitants and report back to the institution’s Board of Governors.

  On days when a Visitor was scheduled, the matrons made a special effort to polish up their charges, for the sake of the workhouse’s reputation. A few of the more presentable children might be called upon to recite a simple prayer. Several of the more comely and decent young women might be required to assist in serving tea to the Visitor.

  Clerkenwell’s Visitor sipped his tea. A good-hearted clergyman of late middle years, he hoped to bring redemption to some of these sorry souls, but with the passing years, that hope grew ever more faint.

  The adults here were pathetic, sunk in ignorance, apathy, and vice. The children were little better, their innocence quickly lost as they became just as hardened as their parents.

  I wonder, sometimes, why I even bother.

  The Visitor was lost in these thoughts when he noticed the young woman serving him tea. Like the others, her hair was cropped, and she was gaunt with malnutrition.

  But unlike the others, there was something different about her. For all her obvious poverty, she was not downtrodden. She moved with poise and grace.

  Unlike the others, she appeared not to have given up.

  In fact, she was quite lovely.

  “Young woman,” the Visitor said, “come over here, please.”

  Joanna approached him, warily, yet still possessing some of her usual confidence.

  “What is your name, young woman?”

  “Joanna Bagley, sir.” Her voice was surprisingly pleasant on the ear. It lacked the ignorant accent of the London Cockney, as well as the harsh burr of the country folk. It was low-pitched and subtly musical.

  “Miss Bagley, then. Pray tell me how a well-favored young person like yourself comes to be in such dire straits. Is it possible there is no employment whatsoever that you can find?”

  Joanna hesitated, but the Visitor sensed she seemed inclined to trust him.

  “Come, sit down. It is my job to come here and listen to stories like yours. Perhaps one time in a thousand, it turns out I can actually do something to improve an inmate’s situation.”

  So Joanna sat down, and the words poured from her. The Visitor sensed that she was naturally reserved, but that the relief of sharing her burden was overwhelming to her.

  The Visitor’s experience told him that she might not be telling the truth in every particular.

  Joanna’s grief over her missing da
ughter was obviously sincere. Her story of how, as a young mother, she had come to join her husband in London—only to find he had died in a carting accident before ever seeing their little daughter—might be a fairy tale.

  But the Visitor was used to such things, and he did not judge. Sometimes, in his opinion, life was too hard to be faced in all its particulars. Who could say whether, under similar circumstances, he would behave any better?

  The existence of the missing child, Hannah, could be verified. So could the recent death at the workhouse of the old lady named Violet, who Joanna said had taken her and Hannah in and given them honest work in her tea shop, before the woman’s own son had evicted all three of them.

  It was not an uncommon story. But the Visitor sensed the young woman telling the story, this Joanna Bagley, was herself quite uncommon.

  “My dear young lady,” said the Visitor, when Joanna appeared to have run out of words. “Let me take a few weeks to look into this matter. I will be back here on the first of December. I will try to have some suggestions for you by then. Meanwhile, do not despair. Always remember there is a good God who loves you and your child.”

  Laying his hand briefly on her head in blessing, the vicar left Clerkenwell for the next charitable obligation of his day.

  * * *

  Joanna did not place much faith in the Visitor’s promises. But her heart was lightened just a little, merely by telling her lonely story to another human being.

  However, the vicar was true to his word. When he next made his rounds at Clerkenwell on the first of December, he asked for Miss Bagley to be brought to speak with him.

  “Miss Bagley, I noticed when last we spoke that your voice did not carry the London accent. And you said you and your baby had traveled to the city from elsewhere. Where were you born, my dear? At what parish did your good parents have you christened?”

  Joanna was suspicious of such questions. The last thing she wished to do was to identify herself to the Visitor as one of the Travelling folk. No doubt, like most churchmen, he viewed them as godless, thieving pagans.

  So she responded with some care. “Why do you ask, sir?”

  “Because, my dear young lady, if you are indigent and without employment, the Poor Act requires by law that you and your dependents must be held in a workhouse, for your own good. But it is expensive to house and feed so many poor people in any one city. Did you know that in London alone, one person out of every hundred lives in a workhouse? That makes for hundreds of thousands of people who are a charge on the public purse. Forgive me, I’m digressing,” he said, as Joanna’s attention seemed to wander. “I get very upset when I think of these things. My wife says it’s an obsession with me.”

  He smiled. “The reason I ask this, in your case, is that the Poor Act only requires a municipality to provide space in its workhouses for people born in that city or town. If the indigent’s birthplace can be traced to another place, it is preferable to transport them home to their own place of birth. There, the local workhouses or charitable facilities must take charge of them—if they have no family left in that area to take them in.”

  Joanna’s sharp intellect caught his reasoning at once.

  To find a way to get out of London, back to my own people! Where would the Travellers be stopping this time of year? December—that’s leading up to the winter solstice. Stonehenge, then. I could rejoin them, if I only had the means to travel to Stonehenge.

  But not without Hannah. I will not leave without Hannah.

  “Sir,” she lied fluently, “I was born just outside a town near Salisbury named Domesday St. Osmund. St. Osmund’s Church, that’s where I was baptized. And my little girl, too. She was born and christened there, too.”

  I don’t even know if I was ever baptized. Maybe Maggie Mae or my mother did it?

  “Indeed,” said the Visitor. “Funny, many of those old towns have such odd names! Domesday St. Osmund, now.”

  “My father told me all about that, sir.” And silently blessing her father for his love of obscure history, she told the vicar about the holy Osmund and his work in promoting the Domesday Book to the Saxon king.

  “St. Osmund’s bones are buried in the church there,” she said.

  In spite of himself, the Visitor was impressed. Admittedly, this business of saints’ bones smacked of Papism, which the vicar did not tolerate. But still, it was a rare young person these days—inside or outside a workhouse—who could so readily quote Church history.

  “Do you have people in the Salisbury area, now?”

  “Oh, yes, sir, they are living there right now.” That’s probably quite true, given the time of year. “My mother has passed away. But my father, and the great-aunt who raised me, are near Domesday St. Osmund still.”

  “You never thought of returning to them?”

  “If only I could! But all these years, the coach fare for my daughter and me was more than I could ever save up on my small wages. And now, with Hannah missing, how could I go, even if I had the means?”

  “Well, then, my dear, I have good news to give you on multiple fronts. I have raised a little subscription among my parishioners to aid you—oh, not much, just enough for coach fare and a few meals. And I’ve located your daughter. I’ve obtained authorization that when you leave this place, little Hannah will go with you.”

  Courtesy restrained Joanna from throwing her arms about the older man’s neck to thank him. Instead, she buried her face in her hands and wept unashamedly.

  The vicar smiled. There were tears in his own eyes. “You and your daughter will leave on the morrow, my dear. And for once I can feel I’ve done some good in this terrible place.”

  Chapter 27

  Homecoming

  So Joanna once again found herself on the London-Salisbury coach, her child on her lap. They were wrapped against the December cold with whatever castoff clothing the workhouse could lay hands on.

  Joanna and Hannah had reunited that morning. Each had spent weeks wondering if the other was even still alive. When brought together, they clung to each other as if nothing would ever be allowed to part them again. Even a few of the less hardened matrons had tears in their eyes, to see the pair embrace.

  Now, she was on the coach, headed home to her clan. “Hannah, you will love them!” she promised the little girl.

  “And how they will love you! You’ll meet your Grandda—I know he’ll tell you you look just like your Mama did at your age. And your Auntie Maggie Mae—she makes the best food you can imagine. And all Mama’s friends from when she was a girl.”

  Well, all of them but one. Christy can never meet her.

  The emaciated child was silent. She rarely spoke now, seeming to try and spare her voice, her ragged breath.

  Then Hannah erupted into a fit of coughing, and other passengers drew away from her as far as they could. Her illness looked like the contagious sort, and no one there wanted to succumb to it.

  At last, after stopping at many small towns and hamlets, they reached Domesday St. Osmund. The coachman jumped off, calling for stableboys at The Holy Scrivener to rest and water the horses.

  The coachman gestured at Joanna and Hannah to get out of the coach. Joanna heard him mumble to The Holy Scrivener’s ostler, “I’m not sorry to see that pair go. The child’s been hacking and coughing all the way from London Town. I wager she won’t live long, whoever she is.”

  With these words ringing in her ears, and carrying an exhausted, white-faced Hannah, Joanna began the long walk to Salisbury Plain to see her people again. It had been eight years since she had left them.

  * * *

  By nighttime, a cold, hard rain was falling, drenching everything it touched.

  Like the other Travellers, Maggie Mae had taken refuge from the rain in her caravan. She lived alone there, now that Domnall had died.

  She heard a scratching at the caravan. She opened the door, thinking it was a dog caught in the rain.

  Instead of a dog, Maggie Mae saw two other drowne
d creatures. They seemed barely human. Yet the larger creature spoke her name.

  “Maggie Mae,” the creature croaked. It was a woman, and by her voice, despite its hoarseness, she knew it was Joanna.

  “Joanna? Joanna, girl, is it really yerself? My God, my God, I thought ye dead. Please, come in out of the storm and let me get ye warm.”

  Joanna thrust the smaller creature into Maggie Mae’s arms. It was a little girl, and it was coughing and retching pitifully.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Joanna said. “Look after Hannah, please. She’s so sick. I’m afraid I might lose her.”

  It was only when Hannah was sleeping in Maggie Mae’s arms, dosed with medicinal herbs and syrups and wrapped in warm, homespun blankets, that Joanna looked around the caravan.

  “Maggie Mae? Where’s Da?”

  * * *

  The loss of her father was by far the hardest sorrow Joanna had ever borne.

  Oh, Da. If I could just have been here in your final hours, so we could have said goodbye to each other. If I could have made you realize how much I loved you. If I could have told you I knew that no one else in my life will ever again love me as you did.

  But Joanna knew that her father had realized these things—had known them to be true every day of their lives together.

  In her mind, she often found herself talking to her father. She took comfort in the belief that, although dead, he was still near her, still looking out for her.

  Maggie Mae tried to get at the truth of what had happened to Joanna these past eight years. When she first arrived back among the Travellers, Joanna had been unrecognizable.