The Love Knot

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘You have all of them off your hands at last, Aisleen dear,’ she stated.

  ‘Leonie will be the last to go,’ Aisleen agreed, and she gave the particularly comfortable sort of sigh of a woman who knows she has fully discharged her duties as a mother and can now look forward to a future where she will be taken care of by at least a handful of the children whom she has struggled so hard to bring up. ‘She’ll be down in a jiffy,’ she added, and sighed again, but this time in pleasant anticipation, because she knew that Leonie had been upstairs ironing and goffering her best navy costume, not to mention her underclothes and petticoats and matching hair ribbons, and that by now she would be sitting waiting with some impatience for her foster mother to call up the narrow, bare, wooden stairs to her to come down.

  Of course Mrs Dodd, as one of the child’s godparents, had taken a preliminary interest in Leonie as she was growing from babyhood into childhood, but, as is the way of things, in these last few years prosperity and a burgeoning business had prevented her from visiting Eastgate Street, and so it was with some interest, verging on the nervously expectant, that she turned as Leonie entered the living room.

  No sooner had she seen Leonie Lynch, tall, blonde and wearing a costume of navy blue with a sailor collar in perfect taste, than her feelings of nervousness were replaced by a strong desire to laugh delightedly. Indeed Mrs Dodd found herself putting her hand to her mouth to stop herself saying something too extravagantly praising (so bad for young girls) of her goddaughter’s beauty.

  She had, of course, given the progress of time, quite forgotten the beauty of the mother, quite forgotten her arrival at the discreet private house where young ladies were delivered of their illegitimate babies by expert medical men who, very often, if they were friends of the girl’s family, or had some other connection, would give their services for free.

  But now she was shaking the hand of Leonie Lynch, and the tall young girl was curtsying, and there was so much about her that was natural and beautiful that Mary Dodd found she did actually remember Leonie’s poor young mother from seventeen years before, and her beauty, and her delicate ways. She imagined that the mother must have had turquoise eyes as this girl had, and even that she was as happy-looking as her daughter, but she knew, given the awfulness of the situation, that the latter at least must be impossible, and her memory must be deceiving her.

  She turned to Aisleen.

  ‘Upon my word, she is a credit to you, dear, really she is. I cannot have seen her since she was – well, hardly more than twelve, I am all too ashamed to say, but being so very busy at business as what I have been these last years, it has been more than hard for me to get out to you here.’

  ‘She is a credit to the nuns, dear, not me.’ Aisleen gave a shrewd nod towards the window as if she could, at that very moment, see a troupe of the good sisters passing by the glass. ‘Nuns are ever so much better at education, I always think, than what normal folk are.’

  ‘And they knew quality when they saw it,’ Mrs Dodd stated, with an approving nod of her own towards the window as if she too could see a group of hurrying sisters in their purple habits and white veils.

  ‘I love Sister Agnes and Sister Therese,’ Leonie agreed, but shyly, because she knew just how much depended on this meeting with her godmother. But since there had been a considerable pause during which both the older women had sipped their tea she had felt emboldened to make some comment.

  Both women now turned to her and nodded slowly. ‘You can’t do no better than a convent,’ Mrs Dodd opined. ‘And all that sewing and that – so good for girls. Never mind that most of them are French or Irishy, they’re still the best.’

  Having been advised to say as little as possible, and leave everything to her foster mother, Leonie only smiled, and instead Aisleen spoke for her foster daughter.

  ‘We was thinking of nursing as an occupation for Leonie, but the uniform, you know, and so much to pay for in the first three years if she is to go to a decent training establishment.’

  Despite the canary cage, the new tablecloth and the shawl with the lace insets, Mrs Dodd could well appreciate that to pay for nursing training and a uniform would be too much for the Lynches. Any help for their youngest foster daughter would have to come from outside. She herself had no children, and now that she saw how grand and beautiful her goddaughter had become she suddenly no longer felt the lack of them. Now was the time, she could see, for Leonie Lynch’s godmother to come to the forefront and help guide the girl’s future into a safe harbour.

  ‘Course, dear. I understand, it’s out of the question…’ Her voice tailed off, as her thoughts raced ahead.

  Mary Dodd was now very wealthy. Not wealthy in the way of Lady Angela Bentick, of course, not privileged and wealthy, but she was very well cushioned, and nicely set up too. She still had her own nursing home, despite her husband’s unfortunate demise. But although the nursing home was most respectable, it was not at all suitable for Leonie Lynch. The type of girls that were taken into the home would not be at all desirable company for a young innocent girl fresh from a convent.

  Oh, they were upper class all right, those girls, but they had all but been abandoned by their patrician parents to grow up half stable lad and half hoyden, with the inevitable result that her nursing home was rarely if ever, alas, empty.

  Lady Angela on the other hand had her own hospital, very proper, where military officers of all ages came for operations and recuperation from every sort of wound or illness. Lady Angela had accompanied Leonie to Aisleen Lynch’s house. Lady Angela was therefore the person to whom, Mary Dodd determined, she would now turn for advice and help.

  ‘Leave everything to me,’ she told Aisleen. Not wishing to raise hopes, she said no more, neither mentioning any names nor making any promises.

  After she had left, with all the usual injunctions, and departed in a hansom cab back to the West End and her nursing home, Leonie turned to Aisleen.

  ‘How was I?’

  ‘Every inch what she could have hoped or expected, I should have thought.’

  Of a sudden Leonie threw her arms around her foster mother’s neck.

  ‘Oh, if only something could come of this, Ma. If only!’

  ‘There is so much to think about, is there not, when a young person is involved?’

  Lady Angela Bentick looked across at Mary Dodd. That she had spared the time to see her visitor alone in her office they both knew was an unusual concession, but behind this mutual appreciation of the moment there was another deeper appreciation. There was no doubt at all, in either of their minds, that Mrs Dodd was an equal rather than an inferior of Lady Angela. They understood each other really very well, not by virtue of their social class, but through their work, both of them having to deal with human suffering daily, sometimes hourly. They were alike too in temperament, since neither was conventional, and both had been forced to become businesswomen.

  In fact, they understood each other so thoroughly that when Lady Angela’s blue eyes stared across the top of her desk at Mary Dodd they stared not down at her but into her, searching, as always, to do not what was easiest, but what would, in both their opinions, be right.

  Following a long silence, which Mary Dodd had no intention of curtailing, Lady Angela spoke again.

  ‘How has she grown, my dear friend’s child?’

  ‘Tall.’

  ‘Yes, well, she would be, all the––’ She filled in what would have been the moment when she mentioned Leonie’s true surname with a little cough. ‘All her mother’s family are tall. And dark – very dark, usually.’

  ‘No, blonde, with turquoise eyes.’

  ‘Turquoise? Surely you mean blue?’

  ‘No. Turquoise, Lady Angela, pure turquoise, like the sea in Italy, now I come to think of it. Really lovely.’

  Lady Angela hesitated again. Leonie’s mother had always refused to reveal the father of her child, but the idea of ‘turquoise eyes’ rang a bell in her head. She frowned and thoug
ht about it while a good minute went by, a minute during which Mary Dodd’s own thoughts ran back to the past, to the days shortly after they had travelled together to Eastgate Street in Lady Angela’s carriage to deliver little Leonie to her foster mother. For both of them it had been a time when their lives were at a crossroads, before they had each, in their own way, taken firm steps towards independence, towards gathering the reins of their lives into their own hands.

  Lady Angela could not have been more than eighteen when she had thrown over the traces. After a dutiful London Season and presentation at court to please her mother and grandmother, she had displeased them by remaining stubbornly unengaged. Not so very long after delivering her friend’s baby into the hands of the good Aisleen Lynch, she had announced to her father that she wanted nothing more than to enter Florence Nightingale’s profession and to spend her considerable inheritance on a nursing home, and this at a time when, in the highest circles, nurses were considered only marginally better than prostitutes.

  But Lady Angela was not to be deterred. She wanted to minister to the sick. She wanted to improve conditions, not just for the patients, not just to alleviate their suffering, but to better conditions for the nurses themselves, so that the reputation of nursing in general would improve, would become what it should be – respectable.

  It had become a passion with her, this desire to help the sick and the injured, to restore people’s bodies, and with them, their minds – so much so that her family feared that from being too independent of spirit she had now become quite unhinged.

  After much controversy, and a considerable length of time during which her father held her a virtual prisoner in the country, he had, at long last, relented, and Lady Angela, against all advice from her truly shocked family, had been allowed to leave home and do as she wished.

  As it turned out she had spent her inheritance wisely, buying a large, elegant house near Buckingham Palace, and setting about converting it into a nursing home with all the usual facilities, so that it became in effect a hospital which also had that particular kind of comforting country house ambience so reassuring to the sick and wounded coming in from abroad, or nearer to home. Here the wounded officer could be made better in surroundings that would be familiar to him.

  Still thinking about turquoise eyes, Lady Angela was called away by one of her senior sisters, leaving Mary Dodd to look around her and appreciate the kind of environment that made a stay in ‘Sister Angela’s Nursing Home’ a most particular experience, and one it seemed to Mary Dodd which could only make the lame walk, the sick heal.

  Here the kind of bright decoration made fashionable for some time now by the influx of young American heiresses marrying into aristocratic circles had long ago made its entrance, so that there were no gloomy pot plants or dire stags’ heads, only bright and comfortable chintz curtains and covers, and flowers in great blue and white vases.

  So homely was the atmosphere that a newly arrived patient would have the sensation of staying in the home of a relative rather than booking into a hospital. Indeed there was nothing institutional about any of the surroundings, and even a visitors’ book laid out on the table, a page from which, Mary Dodd knew, if she was so indiscreet as to read it, would more than likely read like an index from a book devoted to the scions of great houses who had been nursed by Lady Angela.

  ‘Very well,’ said Lady Angela on her return, ‘now we must resume our thoughts together. What is it that you have in mind for Miss Lynch, Mrs Dodd?’

  ‘As her godmother I would like to be Miss Lynch’s patroness, so that she may enter your nursing home as a junior nurse.’

  They both knew what this meant. Mrs Dodd was prepared to pay for Leonie’s considerable uniform and for her keep during her training, and to hold herself responsible for her in every way. If Leonie disgraced herself, if she let down her training, or was in any way found wanting, Mrs Dodd would be called upon to take her back. If she behaved herself she would stay under Lady Angela’s patronage and be privileged to do so.

  ‘That is very generous of you, Mrs Dodd. And you are quite sure – despite everything – that this could be rewarding?’

  ‘Despite everything’ meant that Leonie Lynch, ‘despite’ being brought up in Eastgate Street, could pass as a young lady from a rather more sophisticated sort of background.

  ‘I think that when you meet Leonie, Lady Angela, you will be, let us say, pleasantly surprised, really I do.’

  ‘Gracious, Mrs Dodd.’ Lady Angela sighed and suddenly put one long-fingered, white hand to her forehead. ‘Do you know, I can remember that awful week so well, even now – despite its being seventeen years ago. And I remember Mrs Lynch being the only ray of hope at that moment. I remember thinking, the moment I met her, that she was a very good woman, and that we could trust her to bring up my poor friend’s child. We did what we could, did we not, and there was nothing more we could do, was there?’

  To Mrs Dodd it seemed that, of a sudden, Lady Angela was once again the worried young woman from years ago, her eyes reflecting all the old agonies she had suffered during that terrible week of indecision and grief.

  ‘Lady Angela, I have to tell you that my friend, Mrs Lynch, poor though she may be, is not the same as her neighbours, not by any means. Indeed, had it not been for her husband being tricked out of his business by unscrupulous loan sharks in the City, who added clauses and forged signatures and goodness knows what else, her own marriage would have been set against quite a different background. She would have had servants, and a silver tea set, not to mention her own carriage, but he was tricked, Mr Lynch was, and Mrs Lynch stood by him, as a good woman should. I would always have stood by my late husband, even had he lost his business, or I know not what.’

  Lady Angela cleared her throat as a churchgoer might when the vicar’s sermon had gone on a mite too long.

  ‘Bring Miss Lynch to see me next week, and we will discuss this matter further. But say nothing, if you please, of our connection. She must not know I knew her mother. That would not be right.’

  Although she was possessed of a calm temperament Lady Angela now found that she felt oddly excited at the idea of seeing her dead friend’s grown offspring, and yet at the same time part of her, although admittedly only a very small part, was in dread that the young girl might turn out to be not quite the thing, and prove to be a social embarrassment.

  Mary Dodd curtsied to Lady Angela and hurried off, her smart street clothes in their excellently cut dull cloth and her feathered hat disappearing into her opulent carriage watched by Lady Angela from the window of her downstairs room.

  ‘What a curious world it is,’ she remarked to her secretary later.

  She stopped precisely there, for to go any further would be to be indiscreet, and if there was one quality which even Lady Angela was aware that she possessed in full, it was discretion. Without it ‘Sister Angela’s Nursing Home’ would not be the undoubted success that it was.

  Only a few days later Leonie Lynch was delivered to her godmother’s house, where Mary Dodd was waiting for her in some excitement. Having no children of her own (and since she had assisted in the birth and placing of so many unfortunate mistakes her reluctance to become a mother was surely understandable) Mrs Dodd was looking forward to the pleasure of transforming her goddaughter into precisely the kind of daughter that she, in an admittedly fairly wild flight of fancy, would have liked to have had. Under interrogation she would have had to admit that she had ambitions for Leonie Lynch, and that those ambitions did include marriage to someone prosperous.

  It was for this reason that she watched Leonie step out of the Dodd carriage with some fascination. Leonie had always been a pretty child, but now, seen from above, it was apparent that she was quite, quite beautiful, and what was more she stepped like a lady, she walked like a lady, she stopped and looked around the street like a lady. And, too, the manner with which she wore her velvet-collared coat and simple hat made them look a hundred times better than they we
re.

  ‘My dear, how marvellous that you are here. Step this way.’

  Mrs Dodd led her protégée up the stairs towards her bedroom, a light and airy room whose windows gave on to the chic-er aspects of London’s West End, where she could watch carriages arriving and decanting other young ladies more richly dressed than herself.

  ‘One step at a time,’ Mrs Dodd told Leonie, as she saw the young girl gazing down, obviously already mesmerized by some of the sights below them. Beautiful women stepping up into coaches, while dowagers stepped down from them, their gloved hands held by their coachmen. Gentlemen in their immaculate cutaway tail coats, grey and black striped trousers, grey top coats, spats, boots, gloves and – despite the warm spring weather – black furled umbrellas. ‘One step at a time,’ Mrs Dodd repeated.

  They both knew what Mary Dodd was trying to say, and a sudden look from Leonie’s turquoise eyes told Mrs Dodd that the girl might be well brought up but she was not stupid, and the warning not to try to take too big a step would be not just heard but heeded.

  This was most reassuring to her godmother, and yet at the same time Mrs Dodd could not help hoping that Leonie would not turn out to be too intelligent, or that if she was she would be wise enough to hide this particular attribute, for while a nurse at Sister Angela’s would be expected to be good, and ladylike, to be patient and gentle, clever she must not be.

  If she turned out to be sufficiently stupid to show that she was clever, she would have no prospects at all. Any chance of success in English Society depended entirely on a girl acquiring an aura of gentle innocence and gracious stupidity.

  ‘Now, dear, elegant though you undoubtedly are, we must dress you to fit your new role, for although you are to be trained as a nurse you must look, at all times, like a lady, or you will have no prospects. Our first visit will be to my good friend Madame Chloe, the costumier.’

  The ‘costumier’ was an old acquaintance of Mrs Dodd who went under the fashionably Frenchified name of ‘Madame Chloe’. She too had grown stouter than she would have probably wished, but, perhaps in compensation, more prosperous than she could have ever dreamed of either.