I found myself of a sudden tired of all this—more theatre, more theatre—and impatience flooded throughout my body unto my very fingers and toes. I began, almost without noticing what I did, to arrange my shawl and straighten my gloves. I looked at the faces about me, and at Gwendolyn whose forehead creased as if she had headache. In the end, your claims upon me are a chimera. And these faces swam and blurred in my mind; they and their loosening grip upon me were fading, losing their importance. For somewhere in the world the murderer Spillane ran and ran around a dirty broken brick wall into night, into day, with his thin jacket pulled tight against the whistling cold and his own guilt. What was all this, compared with that?
It was as if all present held their breath; even Bella seemed spellbound, swinging the huge eyes in that famished face from her aunt to her mother and back.
‘We will not agree this day, I think.’ I stood. ‘I intend no hurt, I hope you believe, or at least will come to believe. I know this is a disruption to you, and I am sorry. Will you ring?’
Gwendolyn face wore the heat and the cold of a dozen emotions crying out to be named. She was silent in her confusion, and instead of speaking picked up the silver bell to ring for the maid to see me to the door.
‘Thank you. And Gwendolyn—’ My sister looked up, the bewilderment on her face evident as she could not bear, apparently, to bring her eyes to me. ‘Gwendolyn, this need not make you ill.’
Gwendolyn spoke at last, in a whisper that made an old woman of her. ‘Adelaide, Adelaide. We must not question—‘
‘Ah. It is there we disagree, you see.’
I stood at the portico and awaited Mr Brent and his horses, the cold air of the world blowing at my face, a small trembling running through my limbs in this aftermath of battle. I snap my fingers, and they are gone. I closed my eyes and breathed in the filaments of odours that spoke of a thousand lives, joys and anguishes. The trembling eased.
Of a sudden, that new emotion rage ripped through me, rage at the murderers of that innocent, or at the murderers of my own innocence, or at my very helplessness to do aught about it or at my failure to stay, to stand against evil in that benighted alleyway, and that weeks ago I had robbed that child of her baby, without a question.
Without a question.
Chapter Forty-three
The clock on George’s mantel tinkled, and was answered more darkly from below by the grandfather clock in the drawing room. The doctor would be here soon.
Mr Rossetti’s painted woman looked down from the wall, but she was now no more than painted pouting, for this old and dying man was beyond the vanities of sensuality, and I had larger things to fear than fur and perfume. It may even be this woman is not happy, I thought, despite the clarion of colour and the bold assertion of her body, though Mr Rossetti and George both did think so. As they would, for the idea of this woman was created by them, painter and buyer both.
My eyes were drawn to the letter open on my husband’s counterpane. It had come from Miss West some days ago and invited me to an evening at the Wests’ residence, a Christmas gathering, apparently, and I carried it with me from time to time because it seemed so odd somehow, slipped into this…this netherworld of mine, as it was for the time being. This waiting life, this waiting until life. Slipped like bright satin ribbon tossed among a jumble of widow’s weeds. Its very oddity made me smile a little. Sobriety had looked as if she may make comment, but did not.
This on my own account? Think on it!
Was I of any special interest to the Wests, and why, or was I part of a crowd only, made up of acquaintances put together for their wit, or because they had occupation, taste, wealth or association, or some other such thing in common?
I have no wit! I have nothing in common with anyone! Nor wit, nor taste, nor wealth! I felt ill with self-consciousness and a leap of panic. I may as well be asked to stand and account for myself before a crowd of frock-coated arbiters, I thought. I realised immediately that there may in fact be few frock coats present at the Wests’ gathering.
I had mentioned this, that the Wests’ gathering would include folk I would find unfamiliar personally and perhaps by their manner, and Sobriety had answered, ‘Worldly people, I fear,’ and I had flushed hot.
Well, but now I am begun to visit the world! I thought this, but said nothing aloud, and indeed felt foolish for it and not a little ill-at-ease at my own innocence and, yes, the Wests’ worldliness; and this although, or perhaps because, the Wests drew me so. Something like the Tree of Knowledge, I thought, and blinked at myself.
Sobriety had been bent over all last evening stitching the bodice of the new evening dress for the Wests’ occasion; it was of rose pink silk taffeta and had a narrow black, woven stripe, and black lace was to trim the neck and puffed sleeves, and goring at the bottom of the skirt to increase its fullness. This lovely thing would be worn once, and then be put away for the duration of my black widowhood.
Indeed, I essayed a play with Sobriety, about how I would doff my butterfly colours and enter a black cocoon, but Sobriety forced me to laugh at my own expense. ‘That would be to do the thing in reverse, surely, for you would emerge a caterpillar!’ she said, and shook out the skirt draped over her lap.
In my imagination I contemplated the Wests’ front door—
beneath a wide porch no doubt, beyond the sinking of light snowflakes, and heavy, probably, with an elegant knocker just below a wreath of ivy—from behind which would float the thin notes of a violin being tuned, and beneath that would hum the deeper notes of viola and bass.
I pictured the people themselves, then, and fought with a humming doubt that set itself against a certain light-headedness. For if all the ladies were as Miss West and stood about in Aesthetic dress, and if all the gentlemen were as Mr West, leaning and lounging in loose dark velvet and scarves, then I would stand conspicuous, over-trimmed and bright and, it suddenly occurred, the very epitome of vulgar display as complained of by Mr Ruskin in his social comment. The display, indeed, that Mr Hadley always insisted upon, because it demonstrated his wealth, his position, and his young wife.
They will be kind. Surely, they will be kind. I several times felt my hot cheeks with cool fingers, and was angry for a considerable time when Sobriety said, ‘This will be entertaining, and a little strange, and I know you will not entrap yourself by supposing you are returning to the girl’s life that Mr Hadley took from you.’
Yet I knew myself to be irritated only because it was true. These people brought back the dizzy brightness of those few moments when my eligible maidenhood had been on display, years ago. All those young women, bedecked and over-sweet as marzipan, and those young men, alight, handsome as they would never be again. Yes, again—as I had done at Mr Farquharson’s party—my heart yearned for what could not, I knew, be regained.
The Wests were beautiful, as things and people had seemed beautiful when I was young. But whatever was on offer then is not now. These are strangers; I visit them, as with everything recently, I sighed, as I would visit a foreign land.
I admitted, at last, that the languid Mr West, the artist, did bring to mind those days of faerytale balls when I boasted to my giddy friends that I would kiss that boy with dark curls, he whose mouth was suggestive as fruit. The idea did, of course, bring that Broomish heat to my cheeks, while I confessed privately that I was no longer that girl and he may not be so harmless as that boy…and that now I must encounter him and put such a picture from my mind. Such a thought was not real. Real life was here before me.
And yet, I could not help but think, it is as if I am to begin my second coming out. I am a debutante once more, of sorts.
Mr George Hadley. I now looked at the man who was once king—nay, emperor—in this place, and had sought to raise himself to power in other places, and now was diminishing by the hour, at last approaching nothingness. Power such as yours is based on corruption, George. And then
, as if he argued—No, ’tis true. I cannot even say you are so far removed from Mr Farquharson, since you have kept me in ignorance about all that you did. Corruption flourishes in the dark, George Hadley, and tyranny is furthered through ignorance. You were tyrannous, and corrupt.
He, frail, continued unknowing on his bed, but Sobriety came to my mind, and this man’s use of her and the bloody consequences of that, and Sobriety’s own fear, her struggle with the mantle of guilt. I sat forward with sudden fury, and spoke so that the words hung about the silent room: ‘Oh, God, George! Perhaps it is that you wither from the shame!’
I was passing judgement on this man, I knew it, while he was so reduced now, was so nearly insubstantial, was ready to pass into dust. I paused, surprising myself with this thought, that I had so stepped away from him, he who had considered himself master. I took a deep breath, and then another.
I would do much better, George, to recognise both tyranny and nonsense for what they are. We would all do better for that. What nonsense we fashion to conceal our fears! I put one hand on top of the other and was aware of the life within my own flesh and the bones that moved within it. It was myself, and I recognised it.
The story of the past weeks, husband, is about what I have learned. Taken with this thought, I smiled a little. I carpet my way ahead with knowledge.
And George, I will walk along that path on my own account. There was a small thrill of fear at this, which passed along my skin like the velvet stroke of a finger.
I thought of Mrs Charles. She had come to farewell the still-living man and would no doubt come to see his body to the ground. And then that will all be done, George, I thought, and marvelled at my own hardness.
Toby would be home soon, poor child. I closed my eyes, but my memory held the image of a small, lolling head with the new, perfect skin of the young beneath freckles and smears of dirt, and it caused me to open my eyes with a start. Will Toby come to me this time? What can be said to a boy who does not know he is loved? How to protect what runs away? Is there a way back from such disdain? What have you taught your child, husband? I wiped at the tear that had started, while the thought encroached that gifts must be got for Christmas, even though the celebration would no doubt by then be muted by mourning.
‘A toy theatre,’ Sobriety had suggested. ‘Or a magic lantern.’ These represented pastimes that could be spent both alone and with, say, his mother, she pointed out, and snipped at a loose thread. I smiled a little.
Sobriety smoothed the material where she had mended. ‘He would find the goings-on at the séance amusing, I fancy, particularly the thought of Madame Drew on the chair.’
O Lord. When did my boy ever laugh with me?
But thoughts of the séance were apt, of course, to lead back to death. And that child’s passing, alone in the filth of the street, must always—like the turning of a great wheel, over and over returning to the same point—draw up a comparison with Toby. Toby the child, Toby the innocent, Toby the imperious.
‘If I tell him a little—’ I thought of all that that tale implied. ‘—a very little of that child’s tale, perhaps—’
Sobriety had placed the needle into its little box by now, and packed it away in the sewing case. ‘He cannot be as Mr Hadley forever, not altogether.’
I sighed. ‘Not altogether.’
We will jog on, my son and I.
I had a notion, for a smiling moment, that my boy might smile and laugh as I had at Mrs Gaskell’s story, that little ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’ that my own mother had read to me, the boys, and to Papa so many year ago, at Christmas. I will read it to Toby, I thought, if he will permit it. Perhaps there will come some group of chorister children to the door and sing, as in the story:
As Joseph was a-walking he heard an angel sing,
‘This night shall be born our heavenly King.
He neither shall be born in house nor in hall,
Nor in the place of Paradise, but in an ox’s stall.
He neither shall be clothed in purple nor in pall,
But all in fair linen, as were babies all:
He neither shall be rocked in silver nor in gold,
But in a wooden cradle that rocks on the mould.’
I would invite Edith to dine, of course, on Christmas Eve, and coax her, if this were possible or even advisable, from her new enthusiasm for mesmerism.
And then in the silence of thought there was a small pinprick, again, to my conscience and, again, I felt the anxious, steamy clinging at my arm of little Mrs Farquharson.
‘I will seek out where Mrs Farquharson now lives, and leave my card for her, I believe,’ I said, and Sobriety glanced up with her brows a little raised.
Cissy passed by the closed door, causing a stair to creak, for she always stamped too hard.
She goes to clean grates, I suppose.
Mrs Staynes and Cook were out still, as they had been since soon after breakfast, filling the carriage with a very long list of items—I had insisted they take the carriage for this endeavour—and Mr Brent with all his silent forbearance along as well, and the bill afterward to be sent to Mr Gordon.
I wonder if we can keep Mr Brent after all? It did not seem likely.
Albert sat below in the kitchen, no doubt, with a cup of hot tea and perhaps spelling his way through an old journal, overly robust, even as he sat there, with that breath of surliness that always made a lurking of his presence. He had been absent more frequently lately, had been careless about seeking permission for his outings, though none had commented, not even I, for it was presumed he went in enquiry about future employment.
The fire snapped; the clock tapped its way through the seconds and minutes. The wind had ceased and now a rain fell, heavy and monotonous. George’s breath continued a mere suggestion from his bed, and I thought a moment how its absence would soon change the nature of the silence in this room. I thought how altered the house itself had become, with all of its functions, all movements to and fro, the relation of one person to another, and how on George’s passing it was to absorb this chamber into itself, its use and its very meaning. The house, so upturned, had settled differently around me, and me within it.
See, George Hadley, how the order of things changes—even the domestic—when you are no longer at our head?
The heavy curtain did not hang straight; its hem had buckled back on itself. I stood to shake it out and then stood for a moment to regard the material, a tapestry in elegant chandelier-like design, in blues and pale yellow against a green background, from France. It was fine work, without a doubt, and I realised I had not before spent any time in examining it. Somebody wielded a needle for hours in its creation, and perhaps did damage to eyes and health in earning a pittance thereby. There is so little we notice of who or what is around us.
Opening my eyes, I sat up, lifting the lid of my writing desk and taking out a clean sheet of paper. I cleaned the nib of my pen with a rag, for I had one more task to undertake, since the masons awaited direction and a tombstone must be inscribed. I gazed a long time at the paper and finally dipped the nib into ink. I wrote:
This child who lies here
Was gone too soon
To tell her name.
Wild and a stranger, yet we loved her
For what could have been,
And in love address her thus:
Grace.
I looked a long time at what I had written. Do I take or do I give, with this? For whose sake do I name this girl? I thought on this but could not find the answer; or perhaps I knew the answer but did not wish to dwell upon it. Do I think of thriving from her calamity? I wondered at this world to which I had fought so hard to belong, and at myself for having no wish to leave it alone.
Acknowledgments
My thanks not just to my sons Tom and Alan Bell and to Alan’s partner, the artistic Emerald Buller,
but also to my best fan Max Costello; the deeply talented and nurturing members of my writers’ group (Alison Goodman, Jane Routley, Chris Bell, Janette Dalgliesh, Steven Amsterdam, Christine Darcas and Mat Davies); painstaking mentor and excellent author Kim Kelly; my sisterly friends Louise Craig and Jo Giles; my cousin Michael Crozier (who knows everyone in London!); Clare Allan-Kamill, author and assessor who saw something worthwhile in my earlier Victorians; and the lovely Christopher Ayling…all of whom have very patiently loved me and my ever-
developing novel over the years. Deep appreciation too to Jaynie Royal and Michelle Rosquillo for steering this book so ably, and to the team at Regal House for their work and always-cheerful encouragement.
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