Workhouse Child

by Maggie Hope

  ‘Where are your brothers?’

  ‘Long gone. Noah went to Australia, Freddie emigrated to Canada. I went to Australia but I came back. I couldn’t help but think of Betty here with me da. Poor lass,’ he said again. ‘He was a sod, you know, Lottie. He didn’t marry her neither, not when the first bairn died.’

  ‘It died?’

  ‘Stillborn. Then when she fell wrong again … Why did you not come to see us, Lottie?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘She talked about you a lot, you know. I came looking for you again. It was when you had a story in the Post. I spoke to someone in the office but he said you didn’t work there any more and anyway it wasn’t policy to give out the addresses of their employees. An older man it was, talked like he had a mouthful of marbles.’

  ‘By, Mattie, I’m sorry. I am, that sorry.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mattie and lit his pipe for the fourth time. His hand holding the taper, which he lit from the flames in the grate, shook.

  ‘I was always going to.’

  It sounded lame even to her own ears. Why hadn’t she? Because she was so caught up in the excitement of her new life? Because the time went by so fast until it felt as though it was too late? Shame washed over her once more.

  ‘Lottie Lonsdale?’

  The question came from a police sergeant, who stepped over the threshold of the open back door, removing his helmet at the same time.

  ‘Charlotte Mitchell-Howe, actually,’ Lottie replied. ‘I’m sorry, I was just married a week ago. Sorry.’ She had to force herself not to go on apologizing.

  The sergeant, whose head almost reached the low ceiling of the kitchen, wrote something in his notebook. ‘I would like to ask you some questions about your time here,’ he said, before looking at Mattie. ‘We will go into the front room if that’s all right by you.’

  Mattie nodded. ‘Go on, Lottie,’ he said.

  Lottie rose meekly to her feet and followed the policeman into the front room; the room where, as a little maid straight from the workhouse, she had looked after Laura Green through her last illness. Her heart beat wildly as she walked down the short, narrow passage and went in.

  Twenty

  ‘Where were you?’ Thomas demanded.

  She had seen him waiting for her as she turned the corner into the street. It was almost dark; the lamplighter had already been around to light the streetlights.

  ‘I had to go to Sherburn after what happened,’ Lottie replied. She was out of breath, for she had run almost all the way from the bus stop. She looked up at him as he stood in the doorway of her house in North End, hands on hips, legs astride, frowning and angry-looking.

  ‘After what happened? What could happen that could be so important, more important than being here to meet me?’

  ‘Let’s go inside, Thomas, there’s no need to talk out here on the street. It’s cutting in cool now, there’s a mist rising off the river.’ Lottie shivered, as much from his anger as from the cold.

  Thomas turned and stalked into the house and she followed. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lottie replied. She looked at the cold grate, for of course the fire had been dead for hours. She could have done with a warm drink of tea, she thought, before turning back to Thomas.

  ‘It was Betty, Betty Bates,’ she said. ‘I had to go to see Mattie.’ She handed him the paper with the news item in it. ‘Betty was my friend,’ she went on and told him the full story. She was tired and sat down on a chair, propping her elbow on the table and resting her head on her hand. She found it a great effort to go over the story for him but she was sure he would understand. He did not.

  ‘So, you went traipsing about even though you are with child,’ said Thomas, and it was the only comment he made on the sad story.

  ‘But Betty was my friend!’ she protested. ‘And Mattie too …’

  ‘How were you helping Betty? Or Mattie either? The only man you should be thinking of is your husband! Or had you forgotten I was coming this afternoon?’

  Lottie was stung into a hot reply. ‘Of course not, I just couldn’t get home any earlier! The police wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘The police? What could you possibly know about what happened?’ Thomas was standing over her, still very angry.

  Lottie sighed. She didn’t want to talk about it any more, especially when he was so unsympathetic. She had had a long day and she was still very emotional when she thought of poor Betty. The last time she had seen her, Betty had been so hopeful for the future even though Lottie had tried to persuade her that Alf Green was no good, that he would let her down. She should have tried harder, she knew that. The guilt rose again in her as she remembered how she had let Betty down, had not even visited her because of her contempt for and dislike of Alf.

  She had relived her own time in the house in Sherburn to the police, telling all of it. Now she was older she could do that when she never could have before.

  ‘Why did you not report the man at the time?’ the sergeant had asked. ‘It was against the law. You were underage and no doubt Betty Bates was too.’

  The question was not really serious, though, how could it have been? Everyone, even the police, would think the girl had led the man on.

  ‘I did not think I would be believed. I’m sure Betty would think the same at first. Then when she was expecting her first baby, he promised to marry her. She believed him.’

  ‘The baby she was carrying was not the first?’

  ‘No. The first baby died.’

  The policeman pursed his lips and wrote something down in his notebook. He had a look of distaste on his face, which he didn’t bother to hide.

  What did he know of the wretched lives of workhouse foundlings, she thought, girls like Betty?

  ‘It’s Alf Green you should be questioning. Have you found him? He’s a murderer,’ she said bitterly. ‘What can a young girl do if she is sent to work in the house of a monster like him?’

  The policeman gave her a level stare. ‘You got out,’ he said. He closed his notebook and put it in his breast pocket, then stood up. ‘That’s all, missus,’ he went on and walked to the door, before turning back to her. ‘We’ll find him, Alf Green, and he’ll be tried for murder at the assizes.’

  ‘Lottie? Are you listening to me?’

  She started, for of course she had not been listening at all; her mind had been going over the events of the afternoon.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m just tired.’

  She was too, she realized; she was bone weary. ‘What were you saying? Oh yes, the police. Well, I did work there for a while. They were asking me about Alf Green, how he treated me then.’

  Thomas was horrified. ‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘I certainly hope your involvement is not reported in the press. After all, in my position …’

  ‘Your position! How can you think of that when there is a poor lass murdered?’

  Thomas stared at her. ‘My position is what is important to me,’ he said coldly. ‘I think the sooner we are away from here the better. We will return to Newcastle tonight. I am your husband and you will do as I say. Do you hear me, Lottie?’

  Lottie paused for a moment before replying. This was not the boy she had used to know, she thought. Oh, his education had changed him all right. No doubt she was lucky he had condescended to marry her and she should be grateful for it.

  Only she was beginning to realize what it meant to lose her independence.

  ‘I hear you, I’m not deaf,’ she replied. ‘I’m ready to go.’

  Thomas picked up her bags and followed her out of the door and waited as she gave the key to her neighbour. The house clearance man who was also the landlord was coming tomorrow and then the little house where she had been happy would be no longer hers. She did not look back; she couldn’t bear to.

  The first few weeks of her new life were busy and she had little time for her writing. Sometimes she found herself going over a plotline and working it out in her head, but she did little
actual writing apart from her short articles for the Durham Post.

  Thomas did not approve anyway.

  ‘There is something here for you,’ he said one morning as they sat over breakfast.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s from that editor chap, the one you used to work for.’

  ‘Jeremiah,’ said Lottie. She felt a bit queasy as she watched Thomas load his fork with bacon and dip it into his egg yolk. The yolk was slightly underdone, as he liked it that way, and drops of brilliant yellow fell from the fork to the plate. She couldn’t look away from it until he at last put it into his mouth. The room seemed to be dipping and swelling, dipping and swelling. She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them her vision was restored to normal but her nausea was rising.

  ‘Shall I open it?’

  ‘Em …’ Lottie got to her feet and rushed out of the room to be sick in the newfangled water closet down the hall. She flushed it and wiped her mouth with the flannel.

  Back at the dining table, Thomas had taken her permission for granted and opened the letter and taken out a cheque for one guinea. He was frowning.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ he said, then belatedly asked if she was all right.

  ‘I’m fine. I don’t need to do what?’

  ‘Be a newspaper hack any more. You are my wife. In any case, I think that man is altogether too familiar when he writes to you.’

  ‘Familiar?’ Lottie echoed.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ snapped Thomas, becoming angry. ‘And I don’t think it reflects well on me that people know you are doing this work. I can afford to keep my wife.’

  ‘I like to do it.’

  ‘Well, you will write and tell him you won’t be doing it any more,’ said Thomas with an air of finality. He blotted his lips with his napkin and got to his feet. ‘I expect you to do that today,’ he said. ‘Now I have to go. I’m in court this morning.’

  Rebellion seethed in Lottie’s breast but she knew she had no choice. She called Janey, the girl Thomas had insisted on employing in the house, through to clear the breakfast things, then went upstairs and sat down at her dressing table. She opened a drawer and took out her writing case and began to write a letter to Jeremiah, telling him that owing to circumstances she would not be sending him any more articles. She read it through, and biting her lip, added ‘for the time being’ and signed her name.

  Well, she would get on with her novel. Though it was a little cramped sitting at the dressing table working, but Thomas would not allow her near his desk or to have one of her own. Regretfully, she thought of her desk in Durham. She pictured it in her mind as it stood before the window overlooking the old city: the woods and the distant gleam of the river and the castle and cathedral seeming to be almost in the sky rather than on the ground.

  Suddenly Lottie picked up her notebook and pencil and jumped to her feet. She ran down the stairs and into Thomas’s study. His desk was a grand affair and stood before the window looking out on to the garden. The summer flowers were dead now but there were a few October daisies still showing purple against the hedge. It was not the view of Durham she loved but it was better than looking at herself in the looking glass on her dressing table. What Thomas didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

  It was almost eleven when Janey knocked on the door and entered the room. Lottie was scribbling away in her notebook, developing a plotline she had thought of a couple of weeks before. She was completely lost in her story and Janey had to speak twice before she heard.

  ‘Ma’am? Mrs Mitchell-Howe?’

  It penetrated Lottie’s thoughts at last. ‘Yes? What is it, Janey?’

  ‘There is a caller, ma’am, Mrs Snape. Will I show her into the sitting room, missus?’ Janey had been told the correct forms of address when speaking to her employers by Thomas, but had regular lapses. Lottie thought of the time when she was a maid of all work in his mother’s house. They had been friends, they still were.

  What would Eliza make of Thomas’s pretensions now? Lottie had a sudden wish to see her friend and talk things over with her.

  ‘Do that please, Janey,’ she said. ‘And bring in a tea tray and a plate of those ginger biscuits I made yesterday.’

  ‘Aye, I will,’ said the girl, then corrected herself. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Lottie smoothed her hair with her hands, then gave them a rueful look. It would take too long to get the ink stains off her fingers or to change her dress. Well, she would have to do. Leaving her work on Thomas’s desk, she went through to her sitting room.

  ‘Mrs Snape, how nice of you to call,’ she said, as she held out her hand to her visitor. Mrs Snape was a large woman held in by a formidable corset. The resulting bulge over the top of the corset strained at the black silk bombazine of her dress. The hat sitting at an improbable angle on her glossy, black ringlets had a small bird perched on the brim as though preparing to fly the nest. Lottie tried not to stare at it but it drew her eyes.

  ‘Please, do sit down,’ she said and they sat on the plumply cushioned chairs. Janey brought in the tea and Lottie poured it out, all the time conscious that Mrs Snape was looking at her hands with their black ink stains and from them to a lock of her hair that had fallen down over her forehead and over her spectacles. She felt awkward and then as she handed the tea to her guest the cup rattled in the saucer, spilling a drop or two.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you another cup.’ She felt all fingers and thumbs. This was almost a repeat performance of the day that Mrs Brownlow junior. came to call. Suddenly she giggled.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Mrs Snape. ‘This is fine, I have a napkin.’

  Suppressing the fit of giggles that threatened to overwhelm her, Lottie looked up and saw that beneath the perched bird there was the merriest pair of brown eyes. She relaxed.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t call earlier; I desperately wanted to talk to you about your work,’ said Mrs Snape. ‘Only I took the children to Lindisfarne for the summer. I like to get them away from the city, and Sidney came up at weekends.’ She paused and smiled at Lottie. ‘I do so envy you. It must be grand to have such a talent. I get bored writing a letter, never mind a whole book.’

  Lottie had found a friend. In no time she was confiding that her novel, The Clouds Stood Still, was coming out the following week and how excited she was about it.

  ‘Thomas must be very proud of you,’ said Alice, for that was her name.

  Lottie shook her head. ‘I thought he was. But that was before we were wed. Now he disapproves of my “scribbling”, as he calls it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Alice, pulling a face. ‘Well, when you’re famous he will most likely change his mind.’

  She stayed much longer than the usual calling time of half an hour, talking about her children and asking about Lottie’s life in Durham. ‘You lived alone? In a house on your own?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, how daring of you! And going to work for a newspaper too. It’s so exciting. I think women should be independent, don’t you?’ She took off her hat and placed it on the seat beside her. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  Lottie shook her head. ‘No, of course …’

  ‘I don’t know why we have to wear such concoctions,’ Alice went on. ‘But still, I’m fond of birds, aren’t you?’

  ‘I …’

  It seemed that Alice wasn’t really expecting an answer. She talked on and on and no doubt got on some people’s nerves but not Lottie’s. Lottie liked her. In fact, she was already imagining her as a character in her novel. She would fit in beautifully.

  By the time Alice at last took her leave, after inviting Lottie to her ‘At Home’ the following Tuesday week, Lottie had cheered up immensely. She could make a friend of at least one of the partners’ wives.

  ‘Alice Snape?’ said Thomas when he came in to dinner. ‘I bet she talked you to death, that one.’

  ‘I like her,’ said Lottie as she served out the lamb chops and passed him the vegetable dish. She felt the need to
defend her new friend.

  Thomas shrugged. ‘I would rather you made friends with the Brownlows,’ he said, but did not pursue the subject. He tucked into his chops and afterwards made for his study. It was only then that Lottie remembered she had left her notebooks on his desk.

  ‘Lottie! You’ve been in my study!’

  He came striding back to the dining room with a face like thunder. He had the notebooks in his hand and he flung them down on the table so that they skidded over the polished surface and fell on to the floor. Lottie scrambled to pick them up. When she stood up again she was raging.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I? There’s nowhere else I can work. It’s not as though you were using the desk anyway.’

  ‘You can give up your scribbling. It’s not as though you are going to get anywhere with it, not really!’

  He did not look at all like her Thomas, she thought, with his disdainful look and cruel tongue he was more like a stranger. She flushed. ‘You think not, do you? Well it’s just as well my publisher thinks otherwise, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t want my wife to write tuppence-ha’penny novels and gossipy pieces for the local newspaper. I told you to tell the editor you were finished with all that. You’ll do as you are told, my lady!’

  ‘Will I?’ Lottie was as furious as he was. ‘I’ll leave you first!’

  She pushed past him as he stood open-mouthed at her threat. Leave him? How could she leave him? Of course she couldn’t leave him. He started to go after her; he had to show her who was the master in this house. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, watching as she went up them. About halfway up she stopped and turned.

  ‘Any road, you knew I was a writer when you married me! You didn’t have to marry me! You didn’t say I would have to give it up, either!’ She bent forward and took her hand from the banister to shake it at him and make her point but as she did so she tripped over the hem of her skirt and fell. Thomas started forward but he was too late to catch her before she came down heavily on a stair and slid further. He was just in time to catch her before she finally fell to the floor.