The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘If she is treated as something between a leper and a Jezebel, then most likely she will not.’

  But Mrs. Winch, armoured by her self-righteousness, did not lack courage and, quite calmly, had something more to say.

  ‘Mrs. Barforth, that girl should be discharged at once for the sake of your own peace of mind. She may well be pregnant, Mrs. Barforth, and since you would have to discharge her then, it is better to do it now, when no one can be sure. That way she will have time to make her arrangements and your conscience will be clear. I was forced to dismiss a pregnant thirteen-year-old in my last place, madam, and it was most distressing. Sally Grimshaw is older, has more sense, and she will be far better off now with her mother.’

  I had never thought of Sally in terms of a mother, family, or in any terms whatsoever that did not involve the dressing of my hair, the laying out of my clothes, the cleaning of my brushes. She had been present, the plump, pink and white face glimpsed behind me in the mirror, the quick, capable hands wielding a button-hook, her cheerful gossip of disaster on the night I had lost a child of my own. I was neither fond of her nor otherwise. I was simply used to her. But I was appalled, now, by the callousness her plight had aroused in the normally well-meaning Mrs. Winch, and made it my concern that very afternoon to go and see her mother.

  I had come with sad tidings and expected them to cause distress, an honest show of indignation, a desire for revenge, and I was badly shaken by the indifference with which the gaunt, grey woman who was Sally’s mother lifted her shoulders, displaying a body which I at first thought to be misshapen by accident or disease but which was in fact pregnant.

  The house was as small and dark as I had expected, one room downstairs and one above, a bare floor and a kitchen chair or two, mattresses rolled up and stacked in corners, a flat stone sink, a steep, littered staircase leading to the upper floor, stone steps leading down to a dank, open cellar. All this I had expected to see, but even Liam Adair’s fluent denunciations in the pages of the Star had not prepared me for the smell of damp and poor drainage, of the overflowing privy a yard or two from the door, the sweat and the urine soaked into those splintering floorboards, a smell which, at this our first encounter, stung my eyelids and took my breath away.

  ‘It happens. She’ll get over it. She’ll have to,’ said Mrs. Grimshaw, one hand on her swollen belly, another child no more than two years old straddling her hip. ‘And she knows not to expect anything from me.’

  Mrs. Grimshaw, I discovered, was the mother of seventeen children, a large family she was ready to admit but not unusually so in a district where the men were mostly unemployed and, as she put it, ‘had nothing else to do’. She herself worked in the weaving-sheds—anybody’s weaving-sheds—when her health permitted, and when it didn’t she took in washing for anybody who could afford to pay her a penny or two, since her husband was not, she said, ‘reliable’. She had married at sixteen, when she had already given birth to her first child, and had been recovering from one pregnancy or starting another very nearly ever since. And she had alleviated the squalor of nineteen persons in two dingy rooms by the simple procedure of pushing each child out of the nest as soon as, or even a shade before, they had started to fly. The boys were welcome to stay as long as they were earning and could bring something in, although two had gone to sea, another into the Army, and unless trade picked up she supposed the rest would follow. But her one prize possession was a sister who had done well in the service of a clerical gentleman at Elderleigh, and, as each of her daughters approached the age of eleven or twelve, this sister had never yet failed to place them as kitchenmaids, maids of all work, skivvies; after which Mrs. Grimshaw rarely saw them again. They moved on, or, if they succeeded and became parlourmaids or lady’s maids like Sally, they grew proud. Her eldest girl had taken employment so far away that Mrs. Grimshaw had been unable to attend her death-bed and, far from complaining, had simply been relieved that the girl’s employer had agreed to bury her.

  ‘I’d stopped her funeral club payments, you see,’ she told me in her flat, monotonous voice. ‘And it would have been awkward having to borrow. Because they won’t put a nail in the coffin unless you can pay cash down.’ And as for Sally, she had given her the best start in life she could and had not received so much as a shilling from her ever since. Nothing, on either side, was owing. And there was nothing to spare.

  She shrugged her shoulders again, her hollow eyes asking me, ‘What can I do? I feed them, and clothe them after a fashion, until they’re big enough to see to themselves. And after that I have to think of the babies—the babies—until this wretched body of mine is too old for babies.’

  I knew from that first meeting—although indeed I never met her again, merely hundreds like her—that I could not judge her, and leaving behind the few coins I had on me, ashamed at this easy gift of money and her lethargic acceptance, I went home with the smell of her so deep in my memory that my bath-tub of scented water, carried upstairs by girls who could have been her daughters, gave me no comfort. And even when I had explained to Sally that she need not be afraid, that in any eventuality she would be looked after, I saw that neither her fear nor my discomfort had subsided.

  She was a victim, but I seemed the only one able to believe it. She had been forced to the ground and held there as dogs hold bitches, her whole life possibly ruined to satisfy a drunken caprice, a fit of madness, a ‘poor fellow’s mistake’. A woman alone after dark must expect to be molested, they had told me, and I could not accept it. He mistook her for a prostitute, the doctor had said, considering this sufficient justification. I could not accept that either.

  ‘My dear, the girl probably knew him and led him on,’ murmured Mrs. Rawnsley, who had been something of a ‘tease’in her younger days.

  ‘If it should come to the worst,’ Mrs. Sheldon told me in her sweet and serious manner, ‘I may be able to arrange for the adoption of the child.’

  ‘She will not feel the disgrace as we should,’ Miss Tighe insisted stoutly. ‘They have their own morality, these girls, you know, and a mishap of this nature can make little difference. She will find somebody ready to marry her, I expect—especially if you should feel called upon to make her a decent wedding present—and all will be forgiven.’

  ‘Lord! What does it matter?’ said Venetia. ‘She’s only a woman, and what’s a woman for, after all?’

  But Sally had done nothing wrong. A crime had been committed against her by a man for whom these ladies, with their talk of ‘leading on’, the eternal, discreetly whispered ‘My dear, men are made that way’, seemed ready to supply with excuses. ‘It is always the woman who suffers’, they said, finding this state of affairs if not precisely desirable then at least quite natural. And of all my acquaintance only Liam Adair seemed able to comprehend my indignation.

  ‘Aye, these women are the very devil,’ he told me cheerfully, ‘especially when it comes to tearing another woman to pieces. Fear, I reckon, in this case, because some of them dread it happening to them and some of them are plain terrified they might like it. So if they can blame the girl it makes them feel safer and better. Grace—I know there are men who do these things, but we’re not all the same. Come now, you don’t really think I’d force my attentions on some poor helpless soul, do you?’

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t have to, Liam. With your famous charm how could it ever be necessary? Quite the other way round, sometimes, I’d say.’

  But, just the same, the spectre of male violence clung to me, giving me a wariness of the men I knew, an unwillingness to take my coachman’s muscular arm when he came to assist me at the carriage-step, a positive discomfort in the presence of Gideon Chard, for although he was a gentleman to his fingertips, fastidious in his tastes and his manners, I knew that in the most private areas of his life he did not need the refinement of affection. And from there it was an easy step to ask myself what remained of affection in the few early morning encounters that had become my own marriage? Why did I submit to it
? To what degree of compulsion was I myself subjected? Or was I in fact playing the prostitute to secure my way of life, to keep the peace, in simple obedience to the way society—but not my nature—had fashioned me? I was not certain, but the next time Gervase touched me my body could not endure the insult and turned rigid with disgust.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said coldly, and although I had probably given him the excuse he needed, I had salvaged some minute part of my self-esteem.

  It was not merely Sally but her mother who haunted me, and I was grateful to Liam Adair for including in his paper an article on the brutalizing effects of poverty and constant childbearing, describing as if it had happened to himself, my interview with that apathetic and defeated mother of seventeen.

  ‘You did well by me there, Grace,’ he told me, ‘for she’d never have talked so freely to a man. Why don’t you pay the Star a visit one of these days and see how it’s done?’

  And perhaps my own need for diversion and my even more pressing need to divert Venetia inclined me to accept.

  ‘What does it matter?’ she still sometimes enquired, but increasingly her phrase would be ‘I don’t care whether it matters or not’, or even more positively than that, ‘I don’t give a damn. Yes—I mean a damn’. And no doubt it was to provoke Gideon, to see how far she could go, that, on her way back from Galton with Gervase a week or so later, she stopped on the outskirts of town to attend—of all things—a cock-fight.

  It had been very nearly criminal of Gervase to take her there. I knew it and could not defend him, for, impropriety apart, she had been in real danger among such rough company. I was shocked and furious, yet just the same profoundly grateful that he was not in the house the following evening when Gideon strode into the drawing-room and spat out the one word ‘Why?’

  I had never seen him so angry, had never felt such a boiling of wrath in any man, but Venetia, instead of shrivelling in the heat of it, jumped to her feet and flew at once to the attack.

  ‘To see how men pass their time—to see what pleases them.’

  ‘Have you any idea who saw you there?’

  ‘Oh I don’t care about that, although I know you care. And whoever saw me must have been there himself, so what does it signify? If he could be there, why shouldn’t I? Have you never been there yourself, Gideon?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, I’ve been cock-fighting many a time, Venetia, with the whores and the thieves—the rabble—yes.’

  ‘And did you enjoy it, Gideon?’

  ‘I may have done—once. What’s more to the point is did you enjoy it, Venetia?’

  ‘I hated it,’ she shrieked at him, her control snapping. ‘It was cruel and degrading and disgusting. I loathed it and I loathed them for enjoying it—even Gervase. It was foul. But don’t take that to mean I won’t go again—or that I won’t do something else men do, just to find out why they do it, and why they tell me I must not. That is—if I feel inclined. You follow your inclinations, don’t you, Gideon, so why should I not follow mine?’

  If she had planned to take his breath away I think she had succeeded, for he seemed momentarily unable to speak, an incoherence which, had he not quickly mastered it, would probably have led him to strike her. And watching as she swayed a little towards him, her pointed face trying hard to be insolent, I saw that she wanted him to strike her and thought—perhaps—that it might be a good thing if he did. But what he gave her was not the hot flaring of anger which must have contained some spice of emotion, but his silence, his back turned towards her in a gesture of cool and fastidious dismissal. A bitter thing for them both.

  We visited Liam Adair the morning after, Venetia and I, my coachman showing serious displeasure when I gave him the address of the Star, not, I imagine, out of any consideration for me but because it was not a neighbourhood in which he cared to venture his horses. And so from the start it was an adventure, the broad paved thoroughfares we knew giving way first to warehouses and old, half-used mills sagging listlessly by the canal bank, and then to the dingy row of lodging-houses, ale houses and cheap shops that was Gower Street.

  The lower windows of the Star were still boarded over following Liam’s dispute with the baking trade, there being no sense, he thought, in replacing the glass when he would surely offend somebody else ere long, and had we not glimpsed his printing presses on our way upstairs I suppose we could have been in the office of some small and slightly shady lawyer, a vast quantity of papers, documents, odds and ends, covering the surface of two battered desks, spilling from half-open drawers and spread in haphazard piles all over the floor; an air of comfortable confusion, a smell of cigar smoke, beer from the pot-house next door, dung from the street, and gas.

  ‘How very thrilling!’ said Venetia, meaning it, needing quite badly to be thrilled, so that I glanced sharply at Liam, who had once been in love with her and who would surely not be unmoved today by her straight, fine-boned little body in its sheath of amber silk, her upturned face vivid with curiosity. Liam would have married her in place of Gideon. I wished he had. But her father had chosen otherwise, and catching my eye—reading my thought—Liam nodded to me as if in agreement, then shrugged and smiled.

  ‘Aye, so thrilling in fact that when the landlord comes knocking at the door I’m obliged to pass the hat round to pay the rent.’

  ‘Oh Liam, I fear you’ll never get rich.’

  ‘Why should he wish to?’ enquired a voice from the corner of the room, a head which had been bent—decidedly ‘at work’—since the moment of our arrival looking up now to reveal a dark, by no means handsome face, thin and intense, and at first acquaintance without humour.

  ‘Why not?’ Venetia said, startled, having taken the man for a clerk, a menial, and being clearly taken off guard to hear an accent as pure and privileged as Gideon’s.

  ‘Because we are not in the business of getting rich, Mrs. Chard. We are in the business of giving information or education or such assistance as we can—of giving. Naturally there is no money in that.’

  ‘Lord!’ she said, rippling—as I had not seen her do for a long time—with laughter. ‘And just who are you? A saint?

  ‘He’s Robin Ashby,’ Liam said easily. ‘My assistant—my conscience. He doesn’t believe in money.’

  He stood up, revealing an angular, slightly awkward body, and we shook hands, telling each other we were ‘delighted’although he was clearly not pleased at this interruption to his work.

  ‘I was at school with your husband, Mrs. Chard,’ he said coldly. ‘No, he will not remember me, although I believe he is acquainted with my cousin, Lord Macclesworth.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Venetia, as we drove home, having spent the rest of our visit dutifully examining Liam’s presses. ‘Lord Macclesworth’s cousin, and did you see his threadbare coat and the state of his shirt collar? And his bones all sticking through as if he had not eaten for a week? He may not believe in money, but Liam should still pay him.’

  ‘He is probably the kind who gives it all away.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, still laughing. ‘And he is as ugly as a monkey too, poor thing.’

  Gideon, when applied to at dinner that evening, did not at first recall the name. ‘Ashby? Don’t ask me—Yes, just a minute, there was an Ashby—the Wiltshire Ashbys. Good family, but if he’s the one I’m thinking of, I can’t recommend him. He was expelled from school, and it strikes me they locked him up later on for debt or libel or breach of the peace, or some damned political thing. No, I’m not keen to renew acquaintance. Nor, I imagine, is he.’

  We of course returned to the Star, my own interest claimed by the greater reality I found there than in Miss Mandelbaum’s genteel petitions for the voting rights of middle-class spinsters; Venetia because she had discovered a new game in the baiting of Robin Ashby, a game she did not always play with kindness and did not always win.

  Dressed in her elaborate and costly best, a diamond on her hand, emeralds swinging in her ears, a feathered and beribboned ha
t perching among her curls, she amused herself by flaunting a deliberate and quite false extravagance.

  ‘Come now, Robin Ashby, since you don’t believe in money, what else is there to believe in?’

  ‘Freedom, Mrs. Chard.’

  ‘Nonsense. No one is free. You are not free.’

  ‘As free as possible. I own nothing. I have a coat and a change of linen, a few other necessaries which will easily fit into a small bag. Nothing detains me—anywhere.’

  ‘Yes, and that sounds very grand, but you are one of the Wiltshire Ashbys—Mr. Ashby—my husband has told me so. It is easy to preach poverty when you have all that prestige and wealth behind you.’

  ‘I have no expectations from the Ashbys, Mrs. Chard. I long since cut myself adrift from all that.’

  ‘You can’t be sure. Supposing they called your bluff and left you a fortune?’

  ‘Then I should make the best possible use of it.’

  ‘You mean you’d give it away?’

  He nodded and, suddenly disgusted with him, she rapped her parasol smartly against his desk.

  ‘What nonsense! What you really mean is that you don’t want the responsibility. Is it true you were in prison once?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said as calmly as if she had asked him the time of day.

  ‘And I suppose you are proud of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, I expect you enjoyed it—because you thought it made a martyr of you.’

  ‘There was nothing about it to enjoy.’

  It had, of course, been a political matter, an inflammatory speech which had caused a riot in a cathedral town, six months of acute discomfort for Robin Ashby, who had suffered not only from degradation but from attacks of bronchitis and a severe fever which had nearly killed him.