She cannot find the words.
‘You know I will persist.’ I drew the small footstool up in front of Sobriety and arranged myself upon it.
‘I know you will.’ She slid the needle into her work for safekeeping. She smoothed the cloth with long strokes.
And still there was nothing but wordless emptiness, through which travelled a distant rattle on the road outside, perhaps of some rickety vehicle come lurching back from a long trip to market. Sobriety sat with a frown, her fingertips to her lips, then looked again at me, with a slight wave of her hand.
‘I’m sorry. I cannot think where to start.’
I took her hand between mine.
‘Is it that you like Mr Broadford?’
‘To tell the truth, I do not know.’ She considered a moment. ‘Although he is presentable. And intelligent. And passably amusing.’
She drew a deep breath and her mouth pinched together.
‘And for all that,’ she said, ‘he is a simple man, and straightforward, and that is a good thing.’
See, she has been considering him.
‘No, it would be difficult…delicate enough if it were only that. But it is not…’
I waited.
‘You know I am not quite well yet, after…after. And it is so hard, so very hard for me to have a man pay his attentions—’ She glanced quickly into my eyes, and then away. ‘For he is paying attention to me.’
‘It is very evident, Sobriety.’
She flushed.
She is annoyed with me, I thought, a little guilty. That was out of place. ‘I am sorry. This is not a time for levity, I know that. Please tell me what troubles you.’
Sobriety closed her eyes a moment, then with the smallest of movements nodded her head, before speaking again in a quiet rush, as if to get the words out before her own confusion refused to let them see light.
‘I do not know my own feelings in this, but I have been thinking that it does not matter what they might be—it is immaterial what they might be—because I am not worthy in any case. I am sullied. I am lost. My body testifies to this…’ She halted, and let her breath out in a long sigh that left her still once more, as if only that breath had animated her.
‘Your body is wounded, my dear, and will rally —’
‘My body is wounded because I…because…’
What can I say?
Sobriety’s face was by now wet with tears, washing down her face in sheets. She wiped at them with her handkerchief, roughly, as if her weeping had come only to distract, to try her while she found the will to speak. I remembered my own handkerchief and searched in my sleeve for it, and without speaking exchanged it for hers, which was bunched into a wet ball.
‘I cannot see what option you had, Sobriety.’
‘And yet, I must carry the sin, all of the sin; for what I show to the world, to God, represents what I am…’ Her voice had lost its own cadence; she intoned, nearly chanted as if from a remembered text.
‘Blood may expiate, or it may condemn…’
This is her father speaking. I cast my imagination to the small man, hard with labour, taut and brown, his face massed with sharp pleats thin as razor cuts from decades of squinting into God’s weather as it slashed or shone; who gathered together his sternest powers to preach by night, driven by belief. By candlelight wavering in the shadowed hall, he would address the gathered folk of their small hamlet, his eyes black and fathoms deep. His voice would rise to a shriek that could pierce the ears and conscience, until some soul was overwhelmed and fell down in agonies of guilt, delivered thus on the floor of the sin of self-will, of independence of being, of pride. Wailing, sweating and quivering with it, curled in fear like a child.
I recalled this story, which Sobriety had told to me as one of many. This had been before Hope was victim to the cholera and also after she had died, so that Sobriety’s tales grew darker and the chill of moaning winter nights and desolation could be felt in them. In the telling, she had whispered an admission, as if her father might be lurking near to hear it. She may, she said, privately have been repulsed by the self-abasement of her father’s self-confessed sinners. This was not something she had ever thought to herself at the time, but now she fancied there had always dwelt in her mind some germ of this repulsion, and this was in itself a thing that haunted. For here was betrayal, was it not, of the respect which one ought to pay one’s father? Of the commandment—was there not a commandment?—not to doubt the preacher, for this itself was pride.
‘The Lord sees what I am and it must be this…’ The tears trickled more slowly now and she sat with my handkerchief gripped in both hands, her eyes nearly closed. ‘And it must be that it was always evident, that I had perhaps the sin of pride, of self-sufficiency, and it was for this reason that Mr—’ She halted, as if she could not say the name.
‘Mr Hadley,’ I whispered.
My Sobriety closed her eyes a moment and took a breath.
‘It is for that reason—because what I am was evident—that he…that he took…and he retains…because I am spoiled for all else, and God can see this, and that then, though I tried to put it away from sight, He could see my sin, which was great, it is great…’
She hugged herself close, rocking back and forth, while her voice sank lower and lower, her eyes closed, and her mouth barely moved. She was murmuring fast, as if at prayer.
‘ …Mr Hadley was the instrument and has taken and he keeps… I am fit for no man, and no man would accept me, for how could he when I am thus used and thus spoiled by another…’
I was moved to grip Sobriety by the shoulders, to hold her still.
‘Stop!’
‘If I were good, if I knew I had grace, I would yearn to die, to be joined to the Lord. But I cannot, for I do not deserve it…’
‘Stop!’
She stopped, panting, her eyes swollen as if she had fever, her face blotched and wet with water that had run to the end of her chin and dripped to her chest. I tweaked my handkerchief from Sobriety’s clenched fingers and wiped my friend’s face.
‘You speak as your father would have spoken. And yet you have not always—you have told me this—been so absolutely convinced by his preaching.’
She will make herself ill, or mad, with this. What can I say? Sobriety’s face was white with a trance of exhaustion.
‘Are you listening to me?’
There was a pause, before she nodded slowly. I took a breath and spoke. ‘Mr Hadley owns the sin, my dear. All of the sin. You must know this. I know what he did to you, for after all it was like what he did to me. But what he did to you was worse, far worse, for he knew all that could befall you as a result of…what he did. And…’ I paused for more breath. ‘And how can he possess any part of you when that would make him a bigamist?’
I am inspired! Though he has done his best—his worst—she must not be permitted to believe in her own ruination.
Sobriety looked up at this, her eyes wide, for the moment. I looked into them—the red rims and the eyelashes wet and clumped into spikes, the puffiness that gathered now in the soft flesh around the eyes—and myself also felt shock at the word, the notion itself, the linking of ourselves in this iniquity, that I had pronounced it in some headlong giddiness that propelled all along with it. My mouth moved a moment before sound would issue.
‘Like the abominable Mr Farquharson.’
There was another moment’s pause, until we both laughed, high-pitched, Sobriety’s giggle harsh and desperate, and in the end only an avenue for more tears.
‘And yet, I cannot ignore my own sin and ruin—’
‘This is your father again, Sobriety. You have no end of quarrelsome relatives with argument to counter his, you have told me their stories.’ This is such hard work. ‘And I have always thought it made you weigh evidence with a great objectivity.’
; ‘But—’
Look at her. I must not fail to make her doubt her own damnation.
‘Remember your Uncle James.’ Oh yes, James! ‘He would argue with your father on anything, but most about sin, you told me. And what did he quote that you recalled to me from your childhood, that Mr Thomas Spence the Jacobin had written at the very beginning of this century?’
Sobriety closed her eyes. I could barely hear her speak. ‘I do not recall.’
‘Oh yes, you do. It began, “What is the significance of great reforms…” No, that is not quite it…’
Sobriety sighed. Depleted though she was by the tyranny of her wringing emotion, her glance said that she recognised my ploy to make her recite these words.
‘It was: “What signifies Reform of Government or Redress of Public Grievances, if people cannot have their domestic grievances redressed?”’
‘Lord, Sobriety! The stuff of revolution! Mr Hadley would have fetched the army!’
Look, she smiles a little, at least. As she ought, for I have apparently turned politician in order to save her!
‘And yet—’
‘Do not judge yourself more harshly than you would others,
Sobriety.’
Sobriety shook her head slowly side to side, and opened her mouth to answer. Still, she persists!
‘Sobriety, did you ever think that I deserved Mr Hadley?’
The maid’s eyes opened wide at that. ‘No, no, of course I did not!’
Bless her, my only friend!
‘Well, there! Mr Hadley has committed his own sins, and we are left to survive them.’
We women were still. A dog barked outside in the street and a child shouted at it. Sobriety took a breath that wavered, stopped and took another before she whispered: ‘Did you ever hate me for it?’
‘Hate you? Why?’
Yet, for an instant I recalled a resentment that had indeed swept over me and left its trace, come from knowing that my husband took his needs to my maid. He had chosen to enter Sobriety, forcibly, while I listened and was thus shamed, humiliated, reproved, I supposed, for my inadequacies. And set aside in this way, with this demonstration of my inconsequence, even while he would nevertheless continue to visit me without notice. Yet then I would think of Sobriety’s little body pressed in this way, and know that his thrusting at me crashed my own bedhead against the wall so that Sobriety, in turn, would know…
The very memory turned me cold. I took breath, and with that knew for certain that Mr Hadley had intended in his brutality thus not merely to take possession of both, and humiliate both, but also to tear us one from another as beings who lived a life in friendship when he was not in the house.
I kissed Sobriety’s hand.
‘My love, no. I could not hate you. This was his sin, and he sinned against both of us.’ We looked away from each other, until Sobriety sighed and I relaxed at last.
I sat back on my stool, my head swimming with the concentration I had brought to this conversation; I felt myself powerful with it, triumphant somehow, as if I had been doing battle against such demons, in armour and with sword and shield, on behalf of both of us. And then there was a sense of revelation, to know that I had spoken nothing but the truth, that somehow the truth had declared itself in all of this discussion with Sobriety.
I do absolutely believe all that I have said. I do.
Sobriety’s breathing had calmed; she sat thoughtful, the salt crusting around her eyes and on her cheeks. But I felt Sobriety’s thoughts, perhaps, turn with mine to the farm kitchen, dark with stone and smoke. I pictured the too-hot fire in the hearth and the cold needling from cracks in windows and door, the press of bodies around the great, thick table grooved from a century of scrubbing. There were the silent children with their elbows upon the table listening again to the two men raising voices in a perpetual battle of credos which contradicted yet were nonetheless born alike in opposition to the corruption of power, of State, and of Church.
And I felt Sobriety’s knowledge, an awareness leached by sadness, that a Sobriety violated and changed by Mr Hadley, and driven thereby to seek a miscarriage, could find no welcome or comfort at that hearth if her secret were ever honestly divulged, though that violation itself was enacted out of the very corruption that had fed the wrath and guided the oratory of Farmer Mullins.
Her secret separates her from her family. It is the secret itself that is the change in her, and it is unbearable.
Winding between us there was, too, that knowledge of Mr Hadley in his bedroom above, his own power evaporated, his body ebbing toward death.
If we are both his wives, then we will soon be widows.
I closed my eyes. Perfidious woman! It is my own self-will that speaks, as if it were a separate thing! Wrong, wrong, to wish for his death!
I had another thought. And Mrs Charles. Do I count her in our widowed band? No, no. She is of a different case. I shrugged a little, and shook my head clear of thoughts of Mrs Charles.
I opened my eyes. Sobriety had been staring at the window where a small bird was an agitated shadow beyond the lace. We women now looked at each other. In a long moment, looking thus into Sobriety’s face, I came to know that this woman would never dress the facts of a case in anything but its own plain clothing. Her task was first to confront what Mr Hadley had left her, and then to accept that it was a story that could not be told without disaster to herself, to family or indeed to spouse—should Mr Broadford press his suit—no matter what affection lay there.
‘If Mr Hadley had thought to make us both friendless, he has failed,’ I said at last.
Sobriety reached to touch my hand, and took breath.
‘While I fear God’s grace may have gone, yet all I can do is find what is best to do for duty on my path,’ she said. ‘And, besides, I must find this path so that Mr Broadford can know my mind, for otherwise there would be sin also in allowing an understanding that may not exist.’
In a half-dream that night, I felt that I floated in the eddies of the night air, wrapped in my quilt and sheet which made a tail behind me as I travelled, and my hair flew behind me too, loose as I had worn it as a girl. I slid close to rooftops and chimneypots, gliding as fish glide, for the air had a thick feel to it, like water, and gently glided as watery currents do. I passed Sobriety’s bedroom window, but all was dark within and I could not tell how Sobriety slept. The shadow that was my maid moved once, but there was nothing to tell if Sobriety’s dreams were good or bad.
I glided on.
Elsewhere, sometimes there were lights in the mounded darkness of buildings, and lamps left circles of dim gold, but beyond these were doorways of ink or black shelter behind carts where breathed huddled bodies—of children, perhaps, or young girls—murmuring in sleep.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I had on my mind a great crowd of womenfolk, ones that I knew well and others that I did not. There were those of my household, those whose very character—I came to feel it in a rush—gave shape to both myself and this house. There was Sobriety; there was clinging, fearful and now lost little Mrs Farquharson; there was that girl, that shadow of the street. That nameless soul.
To this crowd I chose not to add Mrs Charles nor, indeed, the sensual woman who even now hung her fur-clad flesh on Mr
Hadley’s wall.
I drew out my writing, that entitled ‘Ladies, what of the world between us all?’ and dipped my pen:
. . . those who have not our good fortune, who have none to care for them, and for whom misfortune, indeed, has led to despair and perhaps madness.
Think on it, ladies, how the fairer, gentler sex can be exalted or cast down, by others or merely by fate! And then understand how, at your own hearth, without a word you are yet bound in a deep companionship with those women who are about you, whatever their station.
I read the addition, with the whole, a
nd could not help but raise my eyebrows at myself. There! ’Tis true, I am cousin to the Italian revolutionary! Or some such. I sighed—or subsided— and put the paper away. This ladies’ revolution of mine will be a private one, I fancy.
‘Sobriety and I will take luncheon in the kitchen, Mrs Staynes.’
This was sudden, said just at the close of arrangements between me and my housekeeper to do with the sewing machine (with the man coming from the emporium that afternoon to demonstrate its use) and the time that might be taken by each of us to practice. That is, today perhaps Albert might spend additional time with Mr Hadley, so as to enable the women to receive their tuition with the machine, while, later, time for further practice must be set aside, despite household duties. Further, arrangements must also be made for the next day, when Cissy may yet have to testify in committal proceedings against Mr Farquharson, who was also Mr Forster, the Mancunian grocer. Poor Cissy—to whom we all were now speaking especially kindly, while keeping an eye open for danger to vases approached by the affrighted girl.
It had seemed a complicated thing to Mrs Staynes. In addition to disliking change in the way things were done, she quite evidently disliked the indignity of seeming to struggle with newness itself. Any disturbance to the everyday, ever-repeating tasks of the house, to its deep and reassuring patterns, was a disturbance to Mrs Staynes, and disturbance was by its very nature unsettling and apt to play upon the nerves. Earthquake and pestilence would, I felt, have had less effect on Mrs Staynes than this disturbance to domestic organisation.
I had written the plan down so that Mrs Staynes could be satisfied that all had been taken into account in an orderly way, and she was about to leave the room. Yet there was a rigidity now clamped upon her figure and her features that indicated she had yet to accept the changes. While she knew these were inevitable—Mr Hadley’s study turned into a ladies’ sewing room (at last, my morning room would be rid of that machine!); a strange man coming to teach us the uses of this contraption; the cessation of work while he was here; Cissy’s upsetting of all our rituals while she (possibly) spoke in a public place about terrible things—there was certainly something about her eyes that spoke of someone lost and afraid, despite all assurances. One knew, after all, how to nurse a sick person—this was simple duty—but the tumbling down of one’s ordered world about one’s ears was a very different thing altogether. Mrs Staynes clung to wordless and frozen dignity as her only option, given the circumstances, and turned to face the unknown armoured thus. Her hand was upon the door handle when my announcement tumbled out at her feet.
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