Rack & Ruin

by Carol Hedges

  It doesn’t seem beautiful to him any longer, as it did briefly when he arrived. The smog washes over it, darkening its brick and ashlar stone. A city of fog and darkness. A bricken wilderness, barren and wild. Pagan and savage. Babylondon.

  ****

  Meanwhile Letitia Simpkins makes her way back to the rented house in Islington where the family currently resides. In her sixteen years the family has occupied various properties in various locales.

  Some have been quite grand houses, some rather less so, as the quality of the Simpkins living quarters is dependent upon Mr Simpkins securing employment, which is dependent upon his temper. Which is unpredictable.

  But currently her father has secured a well-paid job and here they are in a newly built terraced house with tessellated tiles on the path leading to the front door, which has smart modern acid-etched upper glass panels.

  Letitia pulls the house key from her pocket and opens the green painted door, which is the same colour as all the other doors in the street. She wrinkles her nose at the familiar smell of unappetising meals which seems to follow them wherever they go.

  From upstairs, a frail voice calls out, “Is that you, Letty?”

  “Yes, Mama,” she responds, hanging up her bonnet and placing her bag on one of the hall chairs.

  She climbs the stairs and enters her mother’s bedroom. The air is close. Her Mama, white faced and reduced, lies helplessly crooked amidst a heap of pillows and untucked sheets.

  “My pillows ... please,” she whispers.

  Letitia crosses to the bed and slips an arm under Mama’s shoulders, raising her in the bed. Then she rearranges the crooked pillows. She refills the glass of barley water from the jug.

  Mama has been like this for as long as she can remember. Letitia has never been told specifically what it is she suffers from, but she gathers that it started with her twin brothers’ births and has been getting worse with each subsequent pregnancy, all of which have ended in miscarriage.

  Now her mother has given up on life. She languishes, confined to bed or on better days, to the downstairs sofa. Letitia gathers her father is not sympathetic to his wife’s condition. Sometimes, if she wakes in the night, she hears arguments through the thin walls. Her father’s voice hard and insistent, her mother’s feeble protests. Her small wretched cries of pain.

  “Would you like me to open the window a little, Mama? The tree in the garden is in blossom and the air is so mild and warm.”

  Her mother sighs and shakes her head.

  “No thank you dear. It would fly straight to my chest and I have barely recovered from my winter cold. Can you go down to the kitchen and find out what the cook is preparing for dinner? Your father has not been happy with her efforts over the past few evenings. I fear we may have to apply to the agency for a new one.”

  “I shall see to it at once,” Letitia says.

  “And ask her to make a cherry cake. William and Arthur do like a slice of cherry cake when they come in from school.”

  Letitia goes downstairs. She would have enjoyed a slice of cake after her long day at school, she thinks grimly. But such luxuries were never offered to her. Other boarders got parcels from home containing fruit and cake. She never did.

  But, she reminds herself as she prepares to do battle with the latest incarnation of truculent kitchen staff, Daisy always shared her good things generously, so at the end of the day she did not go short.

  Letitia reaches the ground floor and heads for the basement. Much as she loves her brothers it is hard not to feel some resentment at the way the house revolves around them.

  She has only been back for a couple of months, but already she has noticed how Mama’s eyes light up when the boys are around - however noisy and rough they are. Mama always tries to make an effort, questioning them about their day in the way she never does her daughter.

  And there is something else preying on Letitia’s mind. No mention has been made of her future. It seems that she is just supposed to stay at home, acting as Mama’s amanuensis, nurse and general household manager for the rest of her life.

  Nobody has asked her whether this is actually what she wants to do; whether it is the kind of life she envisages for herself. It has been taken for granted that it is. But it is not. And as each day passes, Letitia is feeling increasingly incarcerated, like an eagle in a cage.

  Having dealt firmly but diplomatically with the cook, she climbs the stairs back to the ground floor. Her satchel lies where she left it, propped against the coat rack. She picks it up and takes it into the small cramped parlour, also known as her father’s study.

  It is the only room to contain a desk. It is her father’s desk. But her father is at work, so Letitia rolls up the lid and seats herself in front of it. She opens the satchel and takes out a notebook, a pencil and a book. The book is by Mary Wollstonecraft and it is titled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

  It is not her book. She has been lent it by one of the new friends she has made. Friends she has kept secret from her family. Even from Daisy. Now, with the house quiet and nobody to disturb her until the twins return from school, she opens the book, and begins to read.

  ****

  To understand why Letitia Simpkins, newly released from the stifling confines of a Girls’ Boarding School and now facing a future of drudgery and servitude, is avidly devouring a text so revolutionary and scandalous in its day that if her parents knew what she was reading, her father would throw it upon the nearest fire, we must go back to a rainy Saturday in early March.

  Driven out of the house by the squabbling of her two brothers, the ire of Mr Simpkins and Mama’s querulous demands, Letitia was walking along Regent Street. It was raining, a slow persistent rain that was falling as if it had all day. Rain dripped off the rim of her bonnet and ran down her face.

  Her thoughts were dark and bitter. Like the water that was seeping through the thin soles of her boots, the realisation that she was of very little significance to her family was slowly and uncomfortably seeping into her soul.

  Unlike Daisy, there had been no party to celebrate her return, no newly decorated bedroom awaiting her arrival. Instead, it had been made clear to her that the end of her education marked the beginning of her life as unpaid house staff.

  On her first evening back, she had been handed a basket of her brothers’ socks, and told to darn them, as Mama was too frail to ply the needle. It was also suggested that she listened to them repeat their lessons, and should help them with their homework.

  Other domestic duties pressed in thick and fast: supervising the servants, running errands for Mama, writing her letters, fetching her many medicines and pills from the chemist. Now here she was, stalking the rain-soaked streets, and trying to hold back the tears that came unbidden to her eyes.

  Letitia paused under a shop awning to wipe her face but as she stepped out, the awning suddenly buckled under the weight of water, spilling its contents all over her. She was soaked to the skin. It was the last straw. She buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.

  A light touch on her shoulder made her look up. A young woman had drawn alongside and was regarding her solicitously from a pair of very blue eyes.

  “You poor, poor girl,” she said. “What a thing to happen!”

  Letitia stared at her in dumb tear-streaked misery.

  The young woman took her gently by the arm.

  “If you’d like to come with me, I can supply you with some fresh clothes, and a cup of hot coffee to warm you up.”

  She led the unprotesting Letitia towards the top of Regent Street, pausing in front of a big white painted house fronted by black railings.

  “Here we are,” she said, guiding her up the steps. “Come in and get dry.”

  Letitia pauses in her studies, recalling that first meeting with Sarah Lunt, the sweet-faced librarian of the Regent Street Ladies’ Literary & Philosophical Society. How kind she was. How kind they had all been.

  Clad in dry clothes, and provi
ded with a steaming hot drink and a saffron bun, all the hoarded woe and misery of the past months had spilled out and she had found herself confiding in her rescuer in a way she had not done with anybody since dormitory days.

  But miracle of miracles, instead of chiding her for being undutiful and selfish, or reminding her of the debt she owed to her parents for feeding and clothing her and giving her a roof to shelter under, the young woman had sympathised.

  She had even gone further, intimating that in her opinion, bright young women ought to be able to access higher education and receive training for some profession where they could fulfil their innate potential and earn a living, rather than being expected to fritter away their valuable time and their precious health in household pursuits.

  The visit had been an eye-opener. Letitia had not realised there were other women who loved learning as she did; who thought that she and they deserved a future of their own. Women who believed that there was more to life than just waiting around for some man to turn up.

  From thereon in, whenever she could get away, Letitia had sneaked out, making up various excuses for her absences, and had returned to the Regent Street house. There she got to know some of the other ladies who ran the group. And as the weeks passed, she absorbed more and more of their thoughts and ideas, finding in them an answering echo to her own.

  So now here she is reading this book in preparation for a public lecture by one of the group’s founders, Miss Sophie Jacques. The topic, How Higher Education Could Change Women’s Lives is most pertinent to her situation, though she is not sure how she will ever get any more education herself, much as she longs desperately to research and explore and study.

  For her, the door to more learning seems to have slammed shut, leaving her on the outside looking in, like a hungry child pressing its nose to a sweetshop window. As if to mock her thwarted ambitions, Letitia is currently supervising her brothers, who are about to sit the entrance exam to a minor public school.

  They are struggling to master the Euclid theorems, the Latin, the Greek and Religious Study needed to pass. She, on the other hand, is soaking up all the new knowledge, painfully aware that were she a boy, she could probably sit the same exams and pass with flying colours.

  She reads on, pausing occasionally to note down her thoughts or copy a quotation. But Time, that normally moves so slowly, is fleeting by on airy wings. All too soon the front door crashes open and the loud imperious voices of her brothers fracture the tranquillity of the afternoon.

  Letitia sighs, closing the book and her notebook. For now, scholarly pursuits must cease and household chores begin.

  ****

  Almost as soon as Inspector Greig and his men leave Hind Street, a draggle of onlookers, gawpers and people with nothing better to do with their time start to arrive, word having got out that Something Nasty Has Happened.

  Thus, by the time the two male lodgers at number 18 Hind Street return, the street is almost impassable, such is the press of people, dogs, carts, and itinerant street sellers of ham sandwiches, fruit and ginger beer, who have spotted an opportunity to make a few pence on the basis that a non-ambulant crowd always requires feeding at some point.

  Edwin Persiflage and Danton Waxwing elbow their way through the throng until they reach their front door. They are both bank clerks in the same private bank. They are earnest young men with well-oiled hair, cheap gaudy waistcoats and big ideas.

  They have been discussing them (the ideas) over a lunchtime chop and a glass of porter at the Lamb and Flagon, a quiet backstreet pub where food can be consumed and ideas discussed without the rest of the world wanting to know your business.

  Mr Sprowle, landlord of number 18 Hind Street, views their arrival in his hallway with an air of pursed-mouthed disapproval. He doesn’t like clerks. He likes their rent, but regards them as cheeky young upstarts. Especially these two. Mr Sprowle was educated in the School of Hard Knocks, leading to a Degree in Resentment.

  “Home early, ain'tcha?”

  “Half-holiday,” Waxwing says airily.

  “Ho. Nice. Wery nice. For some. I never had a half-holiday when I was your age. Nor a whole holiday neither. Had to work fifteen hours a day and -”

  “What’s afoot?” Persiflage asks, gesturing over his shoulder at the crowd.

  “Twelve inches, last time I checked. Hur, hur, hur,” says Sprowle, who is to comedy what bricks are to opera.

  The two clerks roll their eyes.

  Luckily Sprowle cannot resist imparting information to which he owns the exclusive rights, especially to people who need reminding that in this life there are those that rent and those that rent to them.

  “They found bodies in the cellar of number 9,’ he says. “Dead bodies,” he adds with lugubrious if tautological relish.

  “Bodies - plural?” Waxwing asks, raising his eyebrows.

  “’S what I heard. Babbies too. Pore li’l mites. What’s the world coming to?”

  Sprowle takes off his cap, revealing a bald crown patchily covered by greasy strands of thin grey hair.

  “Of course, them what has been living here for some time, like myself, will be aiding the police in their enquiries,” he says self-importantly.

  The two clerks exchange a quick look.

  “Will the police be visiting the house?” Persiflage asks with feigned nonchalance.

  “Nah - I has to go down to Bow Street in the next few days to talk to ...” Sprowle fishes around in his tattered coat pocket, finally producing a small card. He squints at it: “In-spector L Greig. Yeah. That’s the cove.”

  For some reason, both clerks look relieved.

  “Well - we must get on,” Persiflage says. “Ledgers to write and so on.”

  “So on,” Waxwing echoes, nodding.

  They mount the uncarpeted stairs to their small room on the first floor, but do not speak until they are inside with the door closed.

  “Rum,” Persiflage remarks.

  “Very rum.”

  “Could have been worse,” Persiflage says. “At least the police aren’t coming to the house.”

  “Not that they’d search it,” Waxwing says, removing his jacket and hanging it on a bentwood chair. “And even if they did, what would they find?”

  “What indeed.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Even so ...” Persiflage says thoughtfully.

  “Quite. Exactly what I was thinking.”

  “We don’t want anything to go amiss at this early stage.”

  “No indeed. That would be ... most unfortunate.”

  “Most.”

  Persiflage goes to the window and looks down.

  “So you’ll ...” he says, not turning round.

  “I will. I’ll do it now.”

  Waxwing kneels by the bed. Slowly and very carefully he brings out a small wooden box. He puts on his jacket and quits the room, taking the box with him. There is the sound of footsteps descending on the stairs. Then the front door slams.

  Persiflage continues to stare out of the window, his eyes following his fellow clerk until he is lost amidst the crowd. Some time later Waxwing will return to the lodging house. Still carefully carrying the small wooden box.

  ****

  Daisy Lawton, having sounded the opinion of her dear friend Tishy, (which was her own opinion to begin with) returns to the department store and spends some time trying on the pale pink spotted tulle day dress, with puffings and a heart shaped berthe.

  Being fussed over by sales assistants is very soothing to the spirit. As is being told how pretty she is. And twirling in front of the big gilt mirror admiring her neat waist and pretty white shoulders.

  Having pins stuck into her side by one of the store’s dressmakers is less so, but if she wants to wear the dress to the next tea party in a few days’ time, she must suffer. In silence - though with a few little squeaks.

  Finally satisfied that the dress will fit her to perfection, she chooses matching ribbons for her hair and the dearest pair
of satin slippers. She arranges for the whole outfit to be sent to the house the following day, along with the bill which Papa will settle, though she may have to prepare him in advance. There have been many such purchases since she returned home.

  Daisy checks the time on her little silver and pearl watch, a present from Mama and Papa on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday. Oh dear - she is late. She is supposed to be meeting Mama outside Daleys.

  Mama is going to instruct her how to select the best linen and china. It is important to know this for her future home. Nothing marks out a lady more than the pattern of her china and the thread count of her sheets. They will then go home in a cab and she will practice the piano for an hour so that she can perform her waltzes at the next supper party.

  Playing the piano gives one the opportunity to show off pretty wrists and dainty fingers. Last time Daisy entertained, the young men were positively elbowing each other out of the way to turn the pages of her music.

  She smiles to herself, remembering how a certain handsome Dragoon Guard won, and as a result stood all afternoon at her side, turning the pages. It was a pity he couldn’t read music and occasionally turned too late or too many pages, but a girl can’t expect everything in a beau. Fine dark eyes and silky moustaches win over musical accuracy any day.

  Daisy hurries along the pavement, aware that she is the cynosure of many male eyes, but schooled to keep her own eyes demurely lowered. She is only too aware of the whores in the doorways. Even at this hour she passes brightly dressed women in low cut dresses, smelling strongly of cheap perfume and perspiration.

  Mama has dinned it into her ever since she was old enough to understand, that a young girl’s reputation is the most precious thing she owns and once lost, it cannot be retrieved.