The Seaside Angel

by Evie Grace

  I trust you are well, I remain your humble servant etc.,

  J. H. Piper

  There was another envelope containing money for tickets on the hoy – not enough for passage on a steam-packet, she noted, which would mean their journey would depend on the weather and tide.

  She looked up on hearing the porter clear his throat.

  ‘On learnin’ that you were leavin’ us, I took the liberty of askin’ Cook to make up a basket of provisions for you. There’s a letter with it too – it arrived in the second post yesterday.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Featherstone. That’s very kind.’ Hannah touched the corner of her eye, suddenly close to tears, as he picked up a basket covered with a gingham cloth from the side table in the hall and carried it over to her.

  ‘You’ve always treated me with the greatest of respect, and you cheer me up with your ready smile.’ He and his wife had had a bad time, losing their first child to the palsy soon after Hannah had started her training. ‘I’m going to miss you.’

  ‘I’ll carry it for yer, missus,’ the shorter of the two boys offered.

  ‘It’s Nurse Bentley to you, young fella,’ Mr Featherstone said. ‘You’d better act like a gentleman when you’re with ’er, or you’ll ’ave me to answer to.’

  The boy’s eyes opened a little wider as she let him take hold of the basket.

  ‘There’s a lot o’ wittles in there,’ he marvelled.

  Hannah could only flinch as she caught sight of his grubby hands.

  ‘Good day, and give my regards to Mrs Featherstone,’ she said, before shooing the boys out of the hospital on to Great Ormond Street. ‘I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced,’ she went on as they began to make their way slowly along the pavement which was glistening in the hazy sunshine after a brief shower. ‘Which one of you is Master Herring?’

  ‘I’m Charlie, missus. I mean, Nurse.’

  ‘Then you must be Peter,’ she said to the other.

  ‘No, ’e’s Charlie,’ the first boy said. ‘I’m Peter, same as my ma’s always called me.’ His mouth curved into a small smile. His brown sandy hair was crawling with nits and his legs were bowed. ‘That’s right, ain’t it, Peter?’

  The other boy nodded. His hair was darker, almost black, and he had a smattering of freckles across his upturned nose. She could see the scrofula around his neck, the swollen glands, one suppurating and half covered with a dirty bandage.

  ‘You’re beginning to try my patience,’ Hannah said lightly. ‘At this rate, we’ll miss the boat.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Nurse,’ they said in unison.

  ‘I’m Charlie,’ the bigger one said – she already knew that the size of a child didn’t necessarily correlate with their age. ‘And so is ’e.’ He chuckled, but she remembered the details in the letter.

  ‘Oh, you two are incorrigible,’ she sighed, playing along because Peter – the boy with the scrofulous glands in the neck – didn’t look as if he’d ever had any fun in his life. ‘Come with me – I shall call you both Charlie.’

  They were smiling as they made their way along Gray’s Inn Road towards the Old Bailey. Their minds were lively enough, but they struggled to walk. Charlie winced with every stride he took, and Peter dragged his feet with each step, as swarms of people hurried past them, their heads down, barely looking at where they were going.

  ‘Mind your backs!’ Hannah stepped aside as a carriage pulled by a pair of bays flew past, followed by a rider on a grey cob, then a horse and cart loaded with barrels of ale.

  ‘Why is everyone in such a tearing hurry?’ she muttered. ‘Boys, you must stay close. Don’t touch that, please,’ she went on as Charlie stopped to pick up a small stick from the pavement and began digging around in a heap of dirt.

  ‘You never know what you might find that you can sell for a farthin’ or two.’ He slipped the stick into his pocket. ‘I’ve found bones and rags, even an ’a’penny once.’

  Hannah thought of her younger half-brothers at Charlie’s age – they would never have thought of grubbing around in the gutter looking for treasure. They hadn’t needed to.

  She recalled the day the twins had been born. She and Ruby had been upstairs in the nursery, playing with a doll and a fine china tea service in miniature, when they’d heard the first cry which meant that their lives had changed for ever: the arrival of not one, but two much-wanted sons. There had been visitors, celebrations and two strapping young wet nurses – women from the slums of Canterbury whom Pa would never normally have allowed anywhere near the house, let alone inside it. The twins had been reared in the nursery under controlled conditions like pineapples in a pinery, and Hannah and her sister had been put aside. No longer interested in the minutiae of their lives, no longer asking them to show him their drawings, or recite poetry in front of his guests, Pa had virtually ignored them.

  A fire had burned in the grate all that summer, keeping the babies snug while the laundry was sent out daily and the windows left open to allow fresh air into their bellowing lungs. Within six months, the wet nurses had been dispensed with. After that, there had been a grand christening for the two chubby cherubs.

  Plans had been made for their golden futures and they were given everything they could have possibly wished for, while these two poor boys she was with now had nothing, except for an apparent acceptance of their lot. They had no hesitation about walking through puddles and they didn’t care that their nostrils dripped snot almost constantly.

  Hannah directed them along Newgate Street where they were distracted by the costermongers, hawking their wares.

  ‘Penny pies, all hot, hot, hot,’ sang the pieman.

  ‘Milk below, milk belooow,’ came the sweet voices of the milkmaids.

  ‘Pots and kettles to mend!’ called the tinker’s boy.

  ‘Come along,’ Hannah urged as they loitered on the pavement, and eventually, having passed St Paul’s and made their way along Cheapside, they reached London Bridge where a bell chimed the quarter-hour.

  ‘Look at all ’em boats.’ Charlie pointed to the hundreds of masts and funnels of the vessels moored at the wharves along the river. ‘’Ow do we know which of ’em’s ours?’

  ‘There are signs, look,’ Hannah said, before realising that they were of no use to him. ‘I’ve been told that the Margate hoy leaves from Blackwell Pier, which is this way.’

  ‘It’s an adventure, ain’t it?’ Charlie went on, and, caught up in his anticipation of the journey as they found the hoy and embarked, her heart began to beat faster.

  ‘When are we going to get there?’ Peter muttered as the hoy moved into the river and floated down towards the estuary, joining the fleet of steam packets spewing smoke, the cutters and broad-bottomed barges with their rust-red sails and cargo of London dirt destined for the brickfields of Faversham.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, suspecting it would take longer than they would wish.

  ‘Excuse me.’ One of their fellow passengers, an elderly woman in a bonnet adorned with frayed feathers, stopped sucking on her brandy bottle for a moment. ‘Those boys shouldn’t be on deck – they are an offence to my eyes.’

  ‘Look at ’em,’ said another, a maid off to spend the season working in one of the guest-houses along the coast, Hannah guessed. ‘Look at the girt lumps on that one’s neck.’

  Peter tugged at his bandages to try to cover them.

  ‘The other couldn’t stop a pig in a passage with legs like that,’ the elderly woman jibed.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d leave them alone,’ Hannah said crossly. ‘They can’t help what they look like, no more than you can with your beak and your fleshworms.’ The woman touched her nose, and the maid was blushing at the reference to her pimples when she turned away.

  ‘That’s ’er been told,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Well said,’ commented a large gentleman who was perched on a trunk nearby. He looked like an invalid too, red-faced and perspiring in a greatcoat on a warm, sunny day.


  ‘I don’t like the way people stare at me, like I’m a freak,’ Charlie observed mournfully. ‘I’m missing my ma – she’d give ’em what for.’

  ‘You’re being very brave,’ Hannah reassured him. ‘Your time in Margate will pass in the blink of an eye.’

  ‘Peter’s an orphan – at least, ’e don’t know for certain what ’appened to ’is parents. They left ’im at the poor’ouse, so he says. Ain’t that true, Peter?’ Charlie gave him a nudge.

  ‘Me ma’s dead,’ he said, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

  They had that in common, Hannah mused, thinking of her own mother who had died soon after Ruby was born. Hannah had been three at the time – her memories existed in fragments: Ma’s long, dark hair; soft hazel eyes; the faint scent of roses and lavender; the lilt of her voice as she sang. The pain of loss, of not having a mother’s love, lessened, but her anger over what her father had done to her remained.

  A few days after she moved in with her grandmother, Hannah plucked up the courage to ask her exactly what had happened to her mother.

  ‘I’m sorry that it’s painful for you, Grandma, but I won’t have any peace of mind until I know,’ she said.

  ‘Sit down, dear,’ Grandma said. ‘Elsie, fetch the brandy.’

  ‘Are you sure we should have any more?’ Hannah said. ‘We must have had half a bottle between us the other night.’

  ‘It’s for medicinal purposes, no other reason.’

  ‘I don’t need any medicine.’

  ‘It’s a restorative – it maintains one’s strength when one is receiving unsettling news. The story of your mother’s passing is most disturbing, and one which should have been told before.’ Grandma’s voice wavered. ‘You were inconsolable when we lost her – I couldn’t bring myself to upset you further. And your father wouldn’t say anything that would incriminate him and cause his daughters to hate his very bones. You will take a little brandy?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ She heard the chink of the decanter clipping the glasses as the maid poured two generous measures, then left the room.

  ‘Your father treated your mother very badly and I will never forgive him for what he did and the way he took up with your stepmother in such indecent haste afterwards. When he met Mercy – my daughter – he was besotted. He would have her and nothing would stand in his way.’

  ‘Did she love him back?’ Hannah enquired.

  ‘Oh yes. She did – very much. All should have been well, but your mother was a fragile young woman, far too delicate for a boor like him. I’m sorry – I forget he’s your flesh and blood.’

  ‘He’s nothing to me,’ Hannah said quietly.

  ‘He made her life a misery when she gave birth to girls, not the sons he wanted. Feeling trapped and helpless, your mother began to suffer from long spells of sadness when she wasn’t herself. Your father blamed me for duping him, inducing him to marry my daughter without warning him of her changeable moods.

  ‘He banned me from the house, claiming that my presence made her worse, but after Ruby was born, I insisted on seeing her. I hardly recognised Mercy —’ Grandma bit her lip before continuing. ‘She just stared out of the window, completely uninterested in her darling infant who was squalling to be fed. I wanted to take them home – Mercy, Ruby and you – but there was no way he’d let me. Instead, he had your mother put away in the asylum – for a rest, he said.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’ Hannah exclaimed. ‘Poor Ma. She must have been so frightened.’

  ‘It isn’t uncommon for mothers to suffer from melancholia after they’ve birthed a child, but I’d never heard of anyone being put away for it.’ Grandma took a gulp of brandy before going on, ‘You must have wondered why you’ve never been taken to your mother’s grave.’

  ‘I assumed that it was too upsetting … for you, Pa, everyone …’

  ‘There is no grave, nowhere we can go to pay our respects, lay flowers in her memory or just sit quietly with her.’ Grandma started to cry. They were both crying. ‘Hannah, this is painful to say, but your mother died at the asylum. She was working in the laundry …’

  ‘Go on,’ Hannah said, her heart in her mouth.

  ‘She took some sheets … she hanged herself.’

  Dumbstruck, Hannah pictured her dark-haired mother, racked with grief at having been torn away from her daughters, knotting freshly laundered sheets together to make a noose for her neck.

  ‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why did she abandon us like that?’

  ‘That’s a question I’ve asked myself many times over, but I’ve never come up with a satisfactory answer. There is no answer, Hannah. As far as I’m concerned, she didn’t deserve to die – your father’s cruelty drove her to it and I shall never forgive him.

  ‘It’s a sin in the eyes of God to die by one’s own hand – that’s why there’s no grave. I’m sorry. She was a loving mother who did her best to be a good wife.’

  They sat for a while, watching the embers in the grate gradually flicker and die.

  ‘If you’re sure about pursuing your choice of vocation, I can help you,’ Grandma said. ‘I’ll do it to honour your mother’s memory, and I confess, it will give me great pleasure to spite your father. I have some money put by and I’d like to use it to put towards your training.’

  Hannah’s spirits lifted a little after the shock of her grandmother’s revelations. ‘I’m very grateful, but how will I repay you?’

  ‘I will find satisfaction in your achievements. That will be reward enough.’

  Determined not to let her grandmother down, Hannah had taken up her offer – which was how she’d ended up on the hoy now with Charlie and Peter, all this time later.

  ‘What about you, Charlie?’ Hannah asked. ‘You mentioned your ma. What about your pa?’

  ‘I don’t know who ’e is and I don’t think Ma knows either. It weren’t ’er fault – she’s a dignified and respectable woman who got taken advantage of.’

  ‘I don’t think you should be talking of your mother like that,’ Hannah said gently.

  ‘I have three sisters an’ they don’t know ’ow many fathers they ’ave between ’em.’

  ‘I see.’ There was a time when she would have been outraged, but she’d learned a lot about human nature since she’d started nursing.

  It wasn’t long before they were past Canvey Island and into open water where the wind grew stronger and whipped up a swell. Poor Charlie was seasick and Peter rigid with fear. Their travelling companions turned morose and green around the gills, but Hannah was hungry. She took the letter, addressed to her in Ruby’s copperplate hand, from the top of the basket, and tucked it inside her bodice before eating some bread and cheese washed down with a little small beer. She would read her correspondence later when she was no longer obliged to keep watch over the boys.

  ‘I’ve never seen the sea before’ – Charlie held his hand up to shade his eyes – ‘and I wouldn’t be sorry if I never saw it again. You must ’ave a cast-iron belly.’ He fell silent, but it wasn’t long before he started talking again.

  ‘Nurse, am I goin’ to die?’ he asked in a small voice.

  An icy finger traced a path down her spine as she wondered how to reply.

  Her half-brother had told her he was dying, and out of fear, she had denied it.

  It had been the fourth of January, and everyone in the Bentley household except for Hannah seemed to have forgotten that it was her sixteenth birthday. Nine days before, the twins had been sent home from the cathedral school in Canterbury where they were choristers, and Doctor Crossley had been called for.

  Not only that, Stepmother had cancelled a soiree to which she’d invited a phrenology expert to impress her guests, and she’d sent the butler to call Pa home urgently from the agency.

  ‘It’s scarlet fever,’ Doctor Crossley opined, having run through the symptoms. Ten-year-old Christopher had been irritable and keen to eat, but Theo had a high fever and couldn’t stop shivering. The doctor advised Stepmother
to put them to bed and offer them whey or broth with Epsom salts to fight the poison that came with the fever. He told Pa that he should employ a barber to shave the blonde curls from the twins’ heads, but Pa had insisted on doing it himself, then wrapping their bald pates in cool rags, before leaving Hannah to watch over them until the private nurse arrived.

  Gradually, Christopher had begun to get better – his rash faded and the skin on his tongue peeled away. Theo was slower to improve, but when they reached the eighth day of their illness, the doctor pronounced that they would both make a full recovery. The very next day, Theo had gone, carried up to Heaven by the angels.

  Hannah cuddled up to her sister that night, afraid to fall asleep in case Ruby stopped breathing and she lost her too.

  ‘I will always be a twin,’ Christopher said, ‘and when I sing again, I will sing for my brother.’

  Stepmother hadn’t been able to stop crying. She said that she wished it had been Hannah or Ruby who had died, and Pa didn’t stand up and tell her to take it back. He was colder than he’d ever been, any warmth he’d had buried beneath the smooth, white marble memorial he’d had erected in memory of their son.

  He had sent her and Ruby to stay with their grandmother for a few weeks where they’d worn their lilac and white mourning clothes, played hopscotch and gone out for walks every day. Hannah hadn’t wanted to go home, but eventually, they’d had to return to the house in Dane John where they’d lived quietly, cocooned indoors by their father’s and stepmother’s grief and resentment, while Christopher went back to St Edmund’s and continued to sing until his voice broke.

  Hannah looked at Charlie and forced a smile.

  ‘I think you have as good a chance of living to a ripe old age as anyone else, having enjoyed the benefit of a few weeks of fresh air and saltwater baths.’

  ‘Baths? Oh no!’ he exclaimed. ‘I never go near water – it’s cold and wet, and you can die from it.’

  She wished she hadn’t mentioned it – his expression of alarm had woken Peter, who had fallen asleep against her skirts.

  ‘Where am I?’ he said, looking befuddled.