by Katie Hutton
She obeyed, slipping the linen blouse from her shoulders. Behind her, Sam bent forward and kissed her neck. She heard his frustrated intake of breath as he began to work his way down the clips that held the flattening corset in place and shivered in anticipation.
‘God gives you this abundance and you strap it all flat and pretend it’s not there. ’Tisn’t nat’rel, Ellen.’
Eventually the hated garment was peeled away and Ellen’s pale breasts breathed in the dappling sunlight.
‘Oh you are lovely, lovely,’ he murmured, cupping them in his hands and kissing her shoulders. ‘Now take off them drawers, pretty rakli.’
As she did so, Sam untied the string that held up his trousers, pushed them down and pulled his old collarless shirt over his head. She turned towards him, putting her arms round him and resting her forehead on his chest.
‘In the water first,’ whispered Sam. ‘I want to wash those horrible togs away. I want to see that lovely skin all aglow.’
‘That was my best underwear,’ she said sadly. ‘Worn specially for you.’
She’d put aside something from her wages for some weeks to buy them: ‘dainty things for modest means’ the accompanying advertising had said, and she’d asked Mrs Colton to keep her size by until she could pay for them in full, without knowing then what occasion she might have to wear them.
‘I like them,’ said Sam, conciliatory. ‘I liked best taking ’em off. It’s the dull blouse and skirt I don’t like. A pretty girl deserves better.’ He stepped back from her, holding her shoulders. She shut her eyes, to not see his arousal.
‘Water after,’ he said. ‘I can’t wait longer for you.’
*
‘I don’t want to, but I have to wash you off, Ellen.’
She murmured in her sleep.
‘Ellen,’ he said, kissing her awake.
She sat up suddenly.
‘Oh Sam, what time is it? I’ve been asleep forever. I’ll get such a hiding!’
‘Not for sleeping, you won’t. It’s all right, rawnie13 mine. It’s not been long. I’ve been watching you. Now come in the water with me.’
Sitting up, her knees folded primly sideways, she watched him go before her. She would have to pay for such beauty, surely!
‘If you ain’t bathed here for years and years,’ he said, ‘how do you get clean, then? At the pump?’
‘I could hardly do that, could I? Saturday night is wash night for me,’ Ellen said. ‘Heat the water in the copper and then the hip bath in the outhouse. How else?’
‘What, sitting in your own dirty water? No one ever got clean that way! Come here, girl, till I bathe you myself.’
Ellen stood up and, sheltering breasts and sex with her hands, hobbled awkwardly with bent shoulders towards the stream, feeling Sam’s warm sap damp on her thighs.
‘’Tis too late for that,’ laughed Sam. ‘I know all of you, pretty white birks and that dear minge of yours – see, all wet from me!’ He eased her hands away. ‘Put your shoulders back, look proud!’ And before she could stop him, he had pulled out her hairpins and tousled her soft brown hair about her shoulders.
‘Now, into the water – no, t’other side. You mun go downstream of me.’
‘Why, Sam?’
‘How it should be. You can wash in my water but I mayn’t wash in yours.’ He thought for a moment. ‘’Tis all along of the liquids a chi makes, I suppose – I never stopped to think on it before now, it’s just how it is. Now you stand there and I shall wash you, and you shall wash me.’
‘It’s so cold!’
‘You see when you get out, that you’ll be glowing so warm that I could bake bread on you, though I’d rather do something else, but then I’d need to get in here again.’
‘Oh Sam, what’ll happen to us?’
‘Don’t fret. Haven’t I told you I’ll always be yours, no matter what? I know you’re mine.’
‘And Lucretia?’
His face clouded. ‘I’ve told you before, don’t you worry on account of her. Since I bin with you I ain’t bin with her, nor will I be. ’Tisn’t her should trouble you. My old mother, though . . .’
‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Not yet. One or other of them Bucklands are always there, ears pinned back. The only one of ’em I trust is young Vanlo, but he’s mortal afraid of the others.’
Then his face brightened as though the sun had come out. ‘Nay, Ellen, I’d do anything for you! I’d even wash in a dirty old hip bath if you wanted me to! Come here, girl, and let me stop your shivering! Ah, you’re as slippery as an eel . . .’
*
Though the days dragged, after the incident with Mrs Larden, Ellen’s instinct for survival began to take over. But subterfuge was hard work. Several times her mother had complained: ‘I have to repeat myself every time to get a simple answer from you. Anyone’d think you was in love!’
‘Mother!’ cried Ellen in distress.
Judy, of course, had to be told something, if only to enlist her help.
‘I’m not telling you any more than that I’ve met someone, Judy, in case . . .’
‘In case it comes to nothing? Don’t look like nothing, with your face like that. Who is he?’
‘I daren’t say!’
‘All right, then, you’ve said he’s handsome – at least tell me has he any brothers? You know I won’t split – and if you told me just a tiny bit more I’d know how I could cover up for you, you goose!’
‘Not yet.’
*
Mrs Larden and her nasty smile seemed to be everywhere. Leaving the shop one afternoon Ellen encountered her standing a few yards further down the pavement with her friend Nellie Ansell. To avoid them, Ellen would have had to cross the road, and that would have looked even worse. Mrs Larden nudged her companion’s arm as the bell of the shop jangled on Ellen’s exit, and they stopped talking – and stared instead. Her face heating up, Ellen approached, murmuring, ‘Good afternoon.’ Neither woman acknowledged this. Ellen was forced to step off the pavement, and felt their eyes on her back until, sweating, she turned the corner and let out a tiny animal cry of distress. It was a trembling and tearful Ellen who went to the stream with Sam that evening.
*
‘What is it, Ellen?’
‘I’ve told them all lies, Sam, as I never have in my life before! I told them I like to walk and pray, for that is a thing Grandfer often does – he says it’s a way for a man to get closer to his creator without any flummery and pride in the way. But I don’t pray, Sam, do I? I mean, I know the words but they don’t go deep – I don’t let them, because any moment I have to myself, and those I don’t, I think about you. Then I come here and find you and we do these things and afterwards I fear what will happen to us both!’
‘What’ll happen is that you’ll come away with me, Ellen! I mean that I find a place where they’ll give me reg’lar work, and you come along of me as my wife. No one will be any the wiser. I can turn my hand to anything – be it in the cattle line, or smithing, or hedging, or ditching. If there is land to be tilled and animals to be cared for, I can do it – most of all if it’s horses. I can’t stay on in this life and love you, Ellen, and if you love me you can’t stay on in yours.’
‘If I love you? Oh Sam!’
‘I want you to take this, Ellen,’ he said, unknotting the red silk scarf he wore round his neck. ‘If you and I were to be wed in the reg’lar way of my people, I’d be giving you this and if you accepted me you’d tie it round your head so everyone would know that you were going to be mine. If you want a ring of me you shall have one, Ellen, even if I don’t have no right to give you one.’
‘But I can’t wear either.’
‘No more you could now, but I would know that you were mine. And when you come away with me I’ll walk proudly with you on my arm in the busiest streets in the land if you’d let me. Will you tie my diklo round your hair for me now?’
‘Tie it on for me, Sam.’
&nb
sp; His hands were busy round her head.
‘Oh, what a picture you are, my Ellen.’
‘But won’t they notice it’s gone?’ she said.
‘They’ll notice all right. But they’ll notice when I’m gone too.’
*
Lucretia crouched in the bender like a wounded animal.
‘We’ll sort ’en, my Lukey,’ said Liberty, sitting on a pile of blankets. ‘He’ll pay. He’ll not want to do it again after.’
‘P’raps he’s been ’dulteratin’ me for years and years,’ she cried, her face averted.
‘No, we’d’ve known. You’d have known.’ He tentatively put a hand on her shoulder, but she twitched it away.
‘I’d do anything for you, Lukey.’
‘An’ I’d thought it was only them holy boys,’ she sobbed.
He shifted his position. ‘We’ll do it quick, then. And move off after. There’s other farms.’
‘But leave Vanlo out of it.’
‘All right. But he’ll see it. And that’ll learn ’im too.’
‘Leave me, brother. I need to think a bit.’
Oh Sam, I thought you was a soft mush sometimes. But I never took you for a cruel one!
*
‘Ellen?’
She looked round from where she stood at the sink scraping potatoes.
‘Mother?’
‘One of ’em Gypsies came asking for you today!’
‘What did he want?’ she stammered.
‘Never said it was no he, did I? A bold-looking young woman, it was, along with another one that never spoke a word.’
Ellen’s heart hammered. She held onto the edge of the sink for support.
‘I don’t know any Gypsy woman, Mother! What did she look like?’
‘Pretty enough in a hard, dirty sort of way. Black curly hair tied back and a man’s old hat on her head. A man’s jacket and boots too, atop an old skirt all long and draggled, the way they wore ’em before the War; I couldn’t say what colour it was meant to be anymore. And a yellow scarf knotted round her neck. But as proud and staring a look as though she was the Queen of England.’
‘I’ve never seen such a person. I don’t know how she should know me, I’m sure.’
‘She don’t know you by name. She came here with them pegs they make – and I took some of ’em for I’ll always use them and I don’t want trouble – and some of them pretty elder-wood flowers. Then she asked could she see the young woman of the house so as to read your palm and say what your fortin was. She said she would do it for free just for the pleasure of your company. But she wasn’t kind with it, nor wheedling the way her sort often are. She said it like it was a threat. I told her thank you for the pegs and the flowers but to get packing for we’d have no truck with sorcery and that your fortin was in God’s hands alone. Then she laughed, but nasty-like, and the pair of ’em took off. Well, if you say you don’t know her then I’m sure you don’t. Perhaps she spied the place, or saw your linen out to dry. I oughter go and see is it all still there. I’ll be glad, though, when they’ve upped sticks and gone on their way. I did see one of ’em today out in Farmer Horwood’s trap with poor Reggie up alongside him, talking away as if they’d known each other years. Reggie looked happier than he has in a while, I will say that.’
Ellen put down her knife and stared at the wooden flowers that Lukey had brought. Had she made them? Had he? She tapped them gently.
‘They’re very pretty, aren’t they,?’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘If you didn’t touch them you’d think they were the real thing, real chrysanthemums.’
‘We had a neighbour in Clerkenwell couldn’t abide chrysanths. An Italian lady. Said they were the flower of death. I’ve always liked ’em, myself.’
9 I’d choose as pillows for my head, those snow-white breasts of thine;
I’d use as lamps to light my bed, those eyes of silver shine:
O lovely maid, disdain me not, nor leave me in my pain:
Perhaps ‘twill never be my lot, to see thy face again.
10 Oh dear!
11 Blood
12 Unclean
13 Lady
CHAPTER 10
Had a Romany chal kair’d tute cambri,
Then I had penn’d ke tute chie,
But tu shan a vassavie lubbeny . . .14
‘Song of the Broken Chastity’, George Borrow,
The Romany Rye
Account Rendered
‘This water isn’t right, mother!’
‘What do you mean, Ellen?’
‘Was it in a tin can before you put it in the jug?’
‘No, indeed. It’s fresh from the bucket, fresh from the well, and that not half an hour since.’
‘So why does it taste all metallic, then?’
Her mother’s hands stilled at the copper. ‘Oh Ellen,’ she muttered. ‘I wasn’t mistaken then.’
‘Mother?’
‘You do right to sound fearful.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Flora Quainton said nothing, but started to cry into the washing.
‘Mother!’
‘I dunt know what your grandfather is going to say, but it’ll be none of it good. My poor little girl!’
Mrs Quainton turned round to face her daughter. Cold fear gripped Ellen’s insides. Her mother’s face was pouchy, defeated.
‘Your undies are tight on you today, ain’t they, child?’ Mrs Quainton crossed to the table and traced her daughter’s jawline with her index finger.
‘’Tis a first sign, the face going softlike round the edge.’ With three fingers she swiftly prodded Ellen’s breast.
‘Ow!’
‘Tender, is it there?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I’m a mother – your mother. Who was he, child?’
‘He? ’
‘Telling me is the least of it. ’Tis your grandfather you have to think of!’
Ellen’s glance darted round the cramped kitchen, looking for escape. The humble deal furniture she had known all her life seemed to rise up against her, leering, the mocking plates jostling on the dresser, the ladle in the jar poised to strike at her, the fly whisk against the wall readying itself to beat against her calves. She stood up, felt again that dizziness and nausea, and rushed out of the cottage door into the misty rain to throw up.
If Mother knows, it must be so!
Flora followed her, and put her arm across Ellen’s back as she retched uselessly on an already emptied stomach.
‘It med be all right, Ellen. We dunt need to say anything yet. Sometimes they dunt keep, babies.’
‘I can’t be having a baby, Mother . . . He can’t . . .’
‘That’s what he tole you, is it? Offer to marry you too, did he?’
‘No . . . no.’ The full realisation of her situation hit her at last, but within it quivered a little flame of hope. She remembered his words, that first time: ‘If I got a baby with you there’d be no man more pleased than me,’ and saw herself and Sam walking along the road, waiting for the carrier, going into their future.
‘Go in and lie down, Ellen. I’ll get Doris’s boy to run to Mrs Colton’s and say you ain’t coming in today.’
*
‘Ellen sick?’ Oliver leaned his stick slowly against the wall. ‘Can’t be – Ellen’s never sick. Has she a fever, Flora?’
‘No, just the vomiting – and tired. A face like paper.’
Oliver was silent for a moment. ‘The little maid started that way,’ he said.
‘No,’ Flora said quickly. ‘It’s not that.’
‘You’re a doctor now, are you?’ said Oliver.
‘Maybe she ate something not right,’ tried Flora.
‘What do you mean, woman? She ate same as you and me and we’re hale enough. I’ll go for the doctor and stop your foolishness.’
‘Couldn’t we wait a little . . . ? Mayhap it’s nothing serious.’
Oliver stared at her. ‘My gran
ddaughter – she’ll have the doctor, whatever it costs.’
Flora’s shoulders sagged. There was no escape, then. The doctor would come, a judge in a black cap, condemning Ellen to a kind of death, the death of respectability, of name, of hopes.
*
Oliver and Flora sat wordlessly either side of the fireplace, listening to the murmurs from above – the doctor’s rumble and Ellen’s short, muffled replies. At last they heard the man’s slow tread down the creaking staircase, and saw him pause as he ducked his head under the doorframe at the foot. He closed the staircase door.
‘Bad news, is it, Doctor? Something my girl shouldn’t hear?’ asked Oliver, getting to his feet. For the first time Flora sensed Oliver’s agitation.
The doctor’s face was inutterably sad – disappointed, Flora thought.
‘There is some good news, Quainton. Ellen is in perfect health. Please, sit down.’
Oliver obeyed. The doctor spoke to him as though Flora wasn’t there. He blames me, she thought. It’s me ’as let her go astray.
‘Ellen is going to have a child.’
The silence seemed endless. The blood drained from Oliver’s face. He stared at the doctor, his mouth moving soundlessly. He shrunk in his chair; those few words had turned him into a frail man of ninety. The doctor leaned towards him, fearing a stroke, but Oliver at last spoke, though in a cracked whisper.
‘No – not my poor maidy.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Flora started to cry. Ignoring her, Oliver creaked to his feet. ‘I’ll get you your fee, Doctor,’ he said, leaning on the mantelpiece with one hand whilst rustling the notes in a tin tea caddy.
‘No, not this time, Quainton. I’ll need to come back anyway.’
*
‘Who is the man as did this, daughter?’ asked Oliver.
Her face in her handkerchief, Flora shook her head.
‘You knew about this?’
‘No – only hours before you did,’ wept Flora. ‘I guessed – but I have no idea who the man is. She won’t say. She hardly believes it herself. It’s my opinion she don’t know what she was doing. He mun have taken advantage of her – of her innocence.’
Oliver sat down again and covered his face with his hands.
‘She mun go away,’ he said. ‘She mun go away and come back without ’en – without the baby. I’ll enquire – maybe Birmingham, friends in the connexion who can help.’