The new year progressed from a very chill winter into the ease of spring and Jane began to make preparations for her baby’s arrival. At the end of May she wrote to Audrey Palmer asking her if she would consider leaving her job as a dairy maid and coming to live in Shelton House with her to be the baby’s nursemaid. ‘You were so good to me when my Milly was born,’ she wrote, ‘I can’t think of anyone I would rather have to help me when this child arrives.’
Audrey needed no urging. ‘I could not think of nothing better,’ she wrote back, adding ‘I could be there by Friday, that being the carter’s day for York.’ And Friday it was. By the time June and the baby arrived, everything was ready and orderly. Audrey had moved into the house and her new job, delighted to have a bed of her own in the nursery corner, and Mrs Hardcastle was making daily visits, not because there was anything amiss with either her patient or the baby but because Mr Cartwright had insisted on it.
He needn’t have worried. His baby arrived with so little fuss that he was born, fed, washed and dressed within five quiet hours. Nathaniel would have named him only for some unaccountable reason Jane seemed to have taken against the name he’d chosen, which, naturally enough, given how much he admired the man, was George. She said it wouldn’t do at all and her voice and her face were so fierce he gave in to her at once and tried to think of another name that would suit her better. In the end, for want of any other inspiration, he suggested Nathaniel, since that was his own name and his father’s and she said that was much better and to show how well she approved of it shortened it at once and lovingly to ‘my little Nat’.
He was an affable baby, and made no complaint even when he was passed from hand to hand like a sleeping parcel. Milly was very taken with him and spent more than an hour nursing him on that first afternoon, saying she’d forgotten how small newborn babies were. ‘He makes Matthew look enormous.’ And Audrey was totally enamoured, calling him her ‘dear little duck’ and waiting on him as if he were royalty. It was the happiest, easiest time.
Lizzie came to visit a fortnight later when Jane had finished lying in. She was so sorry to have taken so long to come and see them, she said, and tried to explain, getting steadily more and more flustered. ‘Mr Hudson is so … What I mean to say is, he has such a lot of work to do and he does need me to be there although why that should be I can’t imagine. ’Tis not as if …’ But then Audrey carried the baby into the parlour and rescued her. ‘Oh, what a dear pretty baby! Such big eyes! How happy you must be my dear, dear friend.’
Jane took the baby on her lap and motioned to Lizzie to sit beside her, which she did, leaning forward to slip a practised finger into the infant’s small curled fist. ‘They’re so pretty at this age,’ she said. Then she paused to take a kerchief from her reticule and held it in front of her mouth for several seconds.
‘Are you not well?’ Jane asked.
‘A little sickness,’ Lizzie said. ‘Nowt to speak of. ’Twill pass.’
‘You are carrying again,’ Jane said.
‘Aye,’ Lizzie admitted. ‘How quick you are, my dear. ’Tis due in January, so Mrs Hardcastle says, but I’ve been uncommon sickly from the word go, not that I’m complaining. I mean to say, that could be a good sign, couldn’t it? I mean to say I were never sick wi’ t’others an’ if I’m sick this time happen ’tis a girl. I would so like a girl. Not that I don’t like my boys. They’re darlings all of ’em, especially my poor little James, but a girl would be so …’
‘Would tea be helpful?’ Jane offered.
‘And then there’s this dress,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what to wear for the best and ’tis such a worry. ’Tis such a grand occasion, you see, and up in London, what is worse, and I wouldn’t want to let him down. The seamstress says blue and white are all the rage but I favour red and orange myself. Such pretty colours. What do ’ee think?’
Jane had to admit she knew nothing about the sort of gowns that would be worn at society dinners. ‘But the seamstress should know,’ she said. ‘Happen you should be advised by her.’
Unfortunately Lizzie went her own way and chose a dress that was wildly unsuitable, being a concoction in yellow, amber and red. The next day the society gossips were busy in their parlours and salons tearing her to shreds for her lack of class. And two days later Milly had a letter telling her all about it. She read it through twice and on her afternoon off she took it to Shelton House to show to her mother.
It had come from the Lady Sarah Livingston, who was, as she invariably signed herself, ‘your old friend from our nursery days at Foster Manor’, and had been writing to her at frequent intervals ever since she started work with the Hudsons. Their letters were usually full of the latest news of their families but this one was rather different. It was bubbling with amusement at the terrible gaffs Mrs Hudson had made at a society dinner and the dreadful figure she’d cut. ‘I know you work for her, my dear, but really she is quite, quite impossible. She is so fat and has absolutely no taste at all. Fat women should never wear yellow. Everybody knows that. I can’t think what she was thinking of. Howsomever, poor taste one can forgive but lack of wit is something else entirely and she has no wit at all. When they asked if she would like sherry or port, she said she would have a bit of both. Can you imagine that? She was an absolute laughing stock. Emma and I have been in stitches ever since.’
Jane read it in silence, occasionally shaking her head.
‘What do ’ee think of that?’ Milly asked.
‘She was always hoity-toity,’ Jane said, ‘but I’d never have thought she was spiteful. Poor Mrs Hudson.’
‘Should I say summat when I write back?’
‘No,’ Jane said, ‘you should not. There are plenty of other things to write about. Tell her about our little Nat. And ask after Felix.’
‘Should I say summat to Mrs Hudson then?’ Milly asked. ‘To warn her.’
‘No,’ Jane said again.
‘Will you?’
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘’Tis not for us to criticise our betters. Leave it to Mr Hudson. He was the one what took her there and exposed her to being a laughing stock and he ought to have known better. Let him deal with it.’
So they left it to George.
It was four weeks before Lizzie came visiting again and Jane half expected her to be cast down but, on the contrary, she was triumphantly happy.
‘Oh, ’twere a great success,’ she said when Jane asked her about the dinner. ‘I can’t think why I were so worried about it. I were foolish, that’s the size of it. Mr Hudson were that pleased, you’d never believe. He said I were the best dressed woman there. A credit to him, he said.’
So Jane changed the subject and asked after her health instead. But later that afternoon, as she sat comfortably in her bedroom suckling her baby, she turned the conversation over in her mind and decided that she couldn’t make any sense of it. If George had really told poor Lizzie that she was the best dressed woman there, when it was plain from what Sarah had said that everybody else had a very different opinion, he was either blind to what people were saying or he was deliberately telling her lies. Either way it didn’t show him in a very good light. But she must be charitable. Happen he was so busy climbing the social ladder, he didn’t notice things.
That summer was what Mrs Cadwallader called ‘a mixed bag what we could well do without’, with days of blue skies and strong sunshine followed by days when the sky was heavy with sodden grey clouds and the showers were sudden and drenching. Jane was glad to stay at home with her little Nat when the weather was bad and saw to it that there were always warm towels ready for his father when he came home from a day on one of Mr Hudson’s railway sites because on far too many occasions he was drenched to the skin.
‘We can’t have ’ee catching cold,’ she said, when he thanked her. ‘That wouldn’t do at all.’
But in the event it wasn’t Nathaniel who took harm from the rain, it was Lizzie’s baby, Matthew.
Jane was in her parlou
r, sewing a new gown for Nat, who was rapidly growing out of his old ones, when the parlour maid arrived with a message from Mrs Hudson. It was a roughly written note, short and to the point. ‘Please come dear friend. Matthew has taken a fever. I am at my wits’ end.’
What followed was painful in the extreme for both women. The fever was sharp and virulent. Within three days the little boy was so ill he couldn’t keep anything down and he was losing weight visibly, lying motionless in his sour-smelling cot with his eyes tightly shut, as if he’d given up on life. Jane visited every day as soon as she’d settled Nat and she and Lizzie kept vigil and did what they could to ease his suffering. They tried coaxing him to take sips of water but that only exhausted him; they cleaned his soiled clothes but that exhausted him so much he was gasping for breath; and from time to time Lizzie eased him gently out of his cot and took him on her lap to nurse him and croon to him and tell him how much she loved him but he was too far gone to hear her. He died in the small hours of the tenth day without opening his eyes. She was inconsolable.
‘I can’t keep my babies alive,’ she wept to Jane. ‘First my poor little James and I did try. I tried so hard. No one will ever know how hard I tried. And now my poor Matthew. I knew he wouldn’t live. I said so at the time. I did, didn’t I? You remember. Oh, what’s to become of me?’
Jane did her best to comfort her, pointing out that most women lost at least one baby in the course of their lives, ‘that seems to be the way of it’, that she still had Dickie and another child on the way and that there would be others, ‘bound to be’ – but nothing she said made any difference. Lizzie didn’t want ‘others’. She wanted James and Matthew and she wept for them both uncontrollably. It took more than two months before she could take any comfort from anything at all. And as far as Jane could see, George wasn’t being any help to her at all, for he was always out at one meeting or another and seemed to be leaving her to get on with it on her own. But he was certainly climbing. By the time Christmas arrived he had become the treasurer of the York Tory Party and had befriended the Tory MP for Sunderland, who was also a London alderman and a former Lord Mayor of London, no less.
‘This Christmas, we’ll throw the biggest party this city’s ever seen,’ he told his long-suffering Lizzie. ‘Make ’em all sit up, eh?’
Lizzie may have learnt to cope with her grief but she was now so heavily pregnant it was all she could do to sit still, leave alone up, as she complained to Jane when she visited her in the new year.
‘Not that I can tell Mr Hudson,’ she said, shifting her bulk uncomfortably on Jane’s padded settee. ‘That wouldn’t do at all, would it, being he’s so particular to have everything just so, and of course he’s right to have everything just so, when so much depends on it, but, I tell ’ee, there are times when my back aches summat cruel, specially when they go on, and they do go on, some of ’em. I shall be glad when this one’s born. Oh, I do so hope ’twill be a girl.’
It was a private and much-wept disappointment to her when the child turned out to be yet another boy, healthy enough and really quite pretty, but a boy. His father called him George – ‘What better name, eh?’ – but otherwise paid no attention to him. He was too busy pushing for a post with the newly formed York Union Bank. And the push, as Lizzie discovered a few weeks later, meant that she was expected to join him at another grand party in London.
‘Although,’ as she confided to Jane, ‘how I shall mek out wi’ my poor Georgie to feed I do not know. I suppose I shall have to tek him with me and what a to-do that will be, I dread to think.’
‘Then tell Mr Hudson it can’t be done,’ Jane said practically.
But Lizzie was shocked. ‘I can’t do that, Jane. Not when so much depends on it. No, no, I must mek shift somehow or other.’
So she went to London with her baby and his nursemaid and so much luggage that they were hard put to get it all in the coach.
Milly didn’t think much of it. ‘She should stand up to him,’ she said to her mother. ‘Dragging all that way with a new baby. ’Tis the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. What if he takes a fever? What will she do then?’
‘I daresay they have surgeons in London,’ Jane said. But she had to admit that she agreed with her daughter and didn’t think her poor friend was being wise. ‘Howsomever, there’s nowt we can say to change her mind. That’s plain and obvious. He’s her husband and if he wants his own way he’ll get it, on account of she’ll do whatever he tells her. He’s got her under his thumb.’
But the months passed and Lizzie obeyed her husband and only complained about him very occasionally and Jane enjoyed hers and rejoiced in him every single day and their children thrived, despite Lizzie’s trip to London. At the end of the year, they discovered that they were both carrying again and that their babies would be born within weeks of each other, which pleased them both. This time Lizzie didn’t say anything about how much she wanted a daughter, accepting that she was doomed to produce boys and only boys. Even when July came and Jane gave birth to her third child and her second daughter, she kept quiet and tried not to show how envious she was. So it was a surprise and a reward to her when her own fifth baby turned out to be a girl too. The two babies were christened in the Church of the Holy Trinity together, Mary Cartwright and Ann Hudson, and it would have been hard to say which of the two mothers was the happiest. And ten months later, when Lizzie had yet another boy, they made a celebration of that too and took young Dickie and all four of their babies to the church to see him christened John.
And so they continued until the cholera came to York.
13
IT BEGAN SLOWLY on a bright April morning with an unobtrusive report in the York Courant. Two patients, both resident in Skeldergate and both ‘men in poor circumstances’ had been taken to the hospital suffering from Cholera Morbus. Two days later one of them was dead, there were thirteen new cases in the town and the new Board of Health had been called to a meeting to decide what should be done.
George Hudson had no doubt about what action should be taken and demanded it forcefully. The cholera was spread by effluvia. Very well then. The first thing they should do was strip the patients of their clothes, the minute they arrived in the hospital, and take every single garment away to be burnt. If they died, their bedding should be burnt too.
‘’Twill cost,’ his fellow members told him.
‘Aye,’ he said, grimly. ‘’Twill. But think on’t. If we allow it to spread into an epidemic, that’ll cost a darn sight more. We need to fight this and fight it now.’
‘It’s all very well saying burn their clothes,’ another board member objected. ‘Some of ’em might not have other clothes to wear. Have ’ee thought of that?’
He hadn’t but he was quite capable of thinking on his feet. ‘Then we must collect old clothes from folk as can spare ’em,’ he said, ‘and provide replacements. We could use t’Guildhall as a collection point. If t’committee are agreeable, I will organize it.’
He was full of energy and determination, driving them as he used to drive the horses when he was a lad, allowing them to snort and balk and pull at the traces but knowing they’d give in and do what he wanted, come the finish. After all, they had no option for he was George Hudson, the man who got things done. It was a disagreeable surprise to him when he finally returned to Monkgate, a great deal later than he expected but glowingly pleased with himself, to be met with a furious attack in his own dining room.
Lizzie was standing by the window where she been watching out for him for the last hour and she was incandescent with fear and fury, her face so twisted by it that for a few seconds he didn’t recognize her and thought he’d come into the wrong house.
‘What are you going to do about this cholera?’ she said, attacking him before he could open his mouth to tell her how successful the meeting had been. ‘Tell me, why don’t you. Don’t just stand there. There’s people dropping like flies. ’Tis no earthly good you pulling a face. I know and don’t ’ee
think I don’t. Like flies. ’Twas in the paper. You must do summat. Oh, what are we to do? I’ll not lose another baby. Not to the cholera. I’ve lost two and that’s enough, I’ll not lose another. I couldn’t stand it. You must tek us out of here this minute. This very minute as ever is. Afore we all tek ill and die.’
He tried to bluff her into a more amiable mood. ‘You’ll not tek ill,’ he said. ‘You’re safe here.’ And he ventured a joke to clinch it. ‘Safe as houses, you might say.’ It was a waste of effort. She was scowling worse than ever. So he changed tack again. ‘See sense, woman. Nobody’s dropping like flies. That’s all silly talk.’
‘Silly talk!’ she screamed at him. ‘Silly talk! ’Twas in the paper. Dropping like flies.’
Off the Rails Page 15
