by Maggie Ford
He got up from his chair and rang for Mrs Jenkins again. Ellie hadn’t come to do the study this morning – Chambers had instead; now he knew why.
‘First, would you have someone inform my wife that I will be late down for breakfast,’ he told Mrs Jenkins the moment she appeared. ‘Then tell Jay to come here. I wish to speak to her. I do apologize, Mrs Jenkins, for asking you to play messenger, but I assume you understand?’
‘I do, sir,’ came the sober reply.
Alone in his study Bertram Lowe waited. He did not have to wait long. It could not have been more than two or three minutes before Ellie was bustled into the study with Mrs Jenkins holding her firmly by the arm.
‘There you go, child,’ she said and withdrew immediately, the door closing softly behind her.
Ellie stood in the centre of the room. The face gazing at him had a drawn look. It made her look years older than she was and his heart went out to her.
‘Come, my dear, sit down.’ He gave her a smile and added, ‘I’m not going to eat you.’ The trite remark made him cringe inwardly. Fool! But his face did not change from the smile he had put on it and he was grateful to have her do as he had asked.
As she sat, perching herself on the edge of the chair opposite his, he leaned towards her. This wasn’t the way he wanted it. What he really wanted was to go and put an arm about her, draw her to him, cuddle away that haunted expression; but he continued to stay where he was. How would he have behaved if this had been his daughter? But such a situation would never have arisen.
He gathered himself together. What he was about to put to this girl would have to be in the utmost secrecy. He dreaded to think what would happen were his wife ever to find out. He was already being torn three ways – between thought for his own safety, perhaps even the safety of his marriage if she were to remain here; a natural instinct to help any child in distress; and this overriding need to have her stay here, balm for his empty soul in seeing her every day in his home.
He was beginning to realize that there was a growing genuine fondness for her – not of any sordid kind, as she had come to know, but a fatherly affection while he pretended to himself that it was his own daughter whom he saw.
He took a deep breath, leaning forward on the desk, fingers interlaced before him. Ellie had been watching him closely and, as their gaze met, he said as soothingly as he could, ‘Do you know why I want to speak to you, Ellie?’
She didn’t move, didn’t even shake or nod her head, putting him at a slight disadvantage.
‘It concerns something you told Cook this morning – in confidence,’ he added, hoping to coax her into speaking.
The hazel eyes had become wary and accusing. She frowned, but that was the only movement she made. It was disconcerting, and Bertram tried not to nibble at his lips or allow his face to give away the indecisiveness that was gripping him.
‘Cook felt you needed help and so she came to me, in confidence, and I assure you, my dear, that what she told me will not go outside the four walls of this study.’
‘But you want to get rid of me,’ she said suddenly.
‘No!’ The word shot from his lips before he could stop it. ‘No, my dear; I want to help you – do all I can for you. But I need your co-operation. I can help you, but in turn you must put your trust in me.’
He paused, but she didn’t respond – didn’t ask why she was being asked to trust him or what he intended to do to help her. She just sat rigid as a wooden doll.
‘First, would you like to tell me exactly what you told Mrs Jenkins? It will help me to help you.’
‘I don’t know now what I told her,’ she returned in a flat tone, almost as if she didn’t care.
‘You do realize your condition, don’t you?’ he went on.
She nodded and shrugged offhandedly.
‘You told Mrs Jenkins whom you suspected.’ Again she nodded, this time without the shrug. ‘And is that the truth?’
Her gaze fell away and she lowered her head, but there came a faint nod, so brief as to be hardly discernible. There seemed to be no lie in the movement. A liar would surely have stared him out, but this gave the appearance of genuine shame. It was cruel. This girl had no cause to feel shame – a child at the mercy of a brutish, selfish father: what could she have done to defend herself. She had been wronged.
He leaned back, the movement making her glance up. What he saw in her eyes took the breath out of him: an arid gleam of utter loathing. It lasted for only a second and he knew it wasn’t there for him but for another.
His mind conjured up the face, pugnacious, flushed – with drink maybe – its owner heavily built. What hope had this girl before such a man? The impression might be wrong, but even if he were a mere weasel of a man, his power over a girl like this was just as vile. But, having seen her hulking brother, his first impression struck him as probably more correct.
On an impulse, he stood up and came round the desk towards her. Seeing her lean away ever so slightly from his approach, he stopped himself just in time from catching her up in his arms and holding her close. Instead, he moved past her to pace the room, the only thing he could think to do.
Feeling a little more composed, he turned back to her. ‘Listen to me, my dear. I need to explain certain things to you.’ He spoke as kindly as he could, but serious matters needed to be dealt with.
‘You are aware now that you are carrying a child inside you?’
Ellie nodded.
‘And that it is… I am sorry to be saying this… that it is the child of your own father.’
This time she did not nod but, as before, stared at him with that arid, almost blank gaze. Again it was unnerving, but he forced himself to continue, clinically, with no trace of emotion – a doctor advising a patient.
‘I need to explain to you the possible implications attaching to such a situation. Certain things could affect the child’s chance of a normal life. At the best it would abort… You could lose it quite suddenly, early on in this pregnancy. On the other hand, it could go to full term; but what its condition might be is the problem. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Ellie?’
She was looking confused. A child of sixteen – what could she know?
‘There are certain unions between man and woman nature abhors. Between brother and sister, between uncle and niece, between mother and son and between father and daughter. It is in the Bible. Any such union can cause irrevocable damage to the issue that may come of it.’
Still she stared as if uncomprehending what he was saying. He began again, in simpler terms for her. ‘If the child ever goes to full term, it is almost a certainty it will be either stillborn or will come into the world an imbecile, or deformed, or both. I dread to think to what degree. Do you understand now?’
At last realization of what he’d been trying to say had stolen over her. Her eyes had grown wide, filled with fear. He hurried to assuage that fear.
‘Listen to me, Ellie; I can help you there. I can stop it if you wish.’
‘Oh, yes please!’
‘But you have to put yourself in my hands, and not a word can be breathed to anyone. And I mean anyone! – not even your sister. I will explain. And if you are in agreement at the end of it, you will abide by your word.’
‘I promise.’
‘Now, why you must never breathe a word of this is because what I shall do for you is illegal. If discovered, I’d be struck off the medical register, banned from the medical profession, never allowed to practise medicine.’
He had tried to say it in the simplest terms for her benefit, but there was no response. She merely sat listening to him.
‘I shall need to perform a small operation on you, child – very simple and quick – and will relieve you of that which you are carrying inside you.’
It had been the only way to explain without becoming technical; being used to dealing with dull, uneducated patients, he had thought her brighter and quicker to grasp what he had been saying. Then he reali
zed that she had been in shock; she had understood what he had been saying but hadn’t been able to respond. He felt almost relief. But he needed confirmation.
‘You know what I’m saying, child?’ he said slowly.
‘You’re going to do something inside me and that will make me all right again, won’t it?’
Good God! She had known all along. In her world she would have heard of back-street abortions. But if she knew all that, with the dregs of society all about her, why hadn’t she realized her own condition?
He knew the answer to that. Even in such a world as she came from, mothers were too embarrassed to explain to their daughters the facts of life, many of which they themselves didn’t know. Though even they knew how to prevent pregnancy, breast feeding for as long as possible – things like that.
The facts of life were usually learned from friends and then mostly from conjecture – babies could come about from open-mouth kissing; they came out through the belly button; you only got babies when you married; even the lingering children’s ideas a mother had fobbed them off with, that the stork brought them or they’d be found under a gooseberry bush.
Many a girl of thirteen or fourteen was told that and believed it until later she went with a boy probably as ignorant as her about such things except that the sexual urge was probably one of the strongest instincts of nature, to end up horribly surprised a few months later. But one thing girls were aware of was the one thing they ought not to know about: that unwanted pregnancies could be got rid of by going to some woman or other for a few shillings. It was rife, it was dangerous and many a woman and girl had died from infection and shock.
‘You will be in safe hands,’ he reassured her.
She’d begun to look doubtful, probably from fear of the unknown, maybe having heard dire stories about fatal results.
‘What if it ain’t done?’ she queried in a small voice. He wondered whether she was asking whether, if left in her condition, there’d be no place for her here, or whether something could go drastically wrong, ending her life?
She had no need to fear the latter. What she had to fear was that, left to go to full term, the child might be born in a condition not to bear thinking about. He had no qualms about his own skills, but she must be told what could come about were she to refuse his aid.
‘I will answer your question,’ he said sternly, ‘and give you the truth in plain terms, but it may upset you.’
She listened quietly to all he said on the possible results of forbidden union. She listened with eyes closed and lips tight together. Only when he had finished speaking did she open her eyes to look at him.
‘I put all me trust in you, Doctor Lowe,’ was all she said, very quietly.
It was only after she had left that he allowed his own emotions to rise to the surface. He’d always been impeccable in medical matters. He had never practised what he was now contemplating doing. Assisted abortion – if he was discovered, he’d be struck off the medical register, or, worse, would face imprisonment.
More than that, this wasn’t just any patient. This was a young person whom he’d become fond of. He was not alarmed by the operation itself but that their relationship might never be the same again. Would she always look on him as another violator of her person?
‘I put all me trust in you,’ she had said in her poor English. With those words ringing in his head Doctor Lowe felt his muscles momentarily weaken, so that he almost decided he couldn’t go through with it.
He pulled himself up sharply. She had put her trust in him and he must make himself worthy of that trust. Going slowly from his study, he closed and locked the door and made his way downstairs to the dining room where Mary would most likely be waiting to have breakfast with him.
Ten
Physically Ellie felt she’d got over it better than she’d feared. Mentally it was hard: the memory, the pain, the humiliation, the one who had performed it, medical man though he was, being someone she must face every day. To have had to go through all that because of her own father’s incest made her even more determined to make him pay, grievously, when she did finally trace him.
She could hardly look at Doctor Lowe – more than between doctor and patient, theirs was a secret between master and servant – she felt only embarrassment. Yet his own attitude towards her seemed to have become almost paternal, that of a father trying to do all he could to comfort her; he couldn’t have been more considerate.
He had told Mrs Jenkins to inform his wife that Ellie had been taken ill and must remain in bed until she was able to resume her duties.
‘Chambers will get suspicious, them sharing,’ Mrs Jenkins reminded him. She wasn’t worried about Mrs Lowe. The master could deal with her.
He frowned. ‘Of course. She must sleep elsewhere temporarily. Tell her Jay has influenza and that we don’t want the whole staff down with it.’
‘Where should I put her?’
‘We’ll clear out the old box room.’ The box room was in the attic along from the two maids’ room. Six feet by seven, it was a graveyard of discarded bits and pieces as well as housing a noisy water tank.
‘With all this stuff out of the way,’ he said, looking about him, ‘we’d easily get a single bed in here. I notice there is already a commode in here and an old chest of drawers and there are door hooks to hang her clothes on. Yes, this will do admirably,’ he concluded, ignoring the gurgling and rattling from the tank. ‘After all, it’s only temporarily, isn’t it?’
‘Why couldn’t Jay sleep there till she was better?’ Florrie grumbled in Mrs Jenkins’s hearing, while avoiding making it a direct complaint; otherwise she would have got her ear bitten off.
For all that, Mrs Jenkins’s tone was sharp. ‘I don’t suppose it crossed the master’s mind and who am I to put him right? Anyway, it’s done. You’ll have to put up with it.’
Just the same, to Nora’s mind the master’s behaviour towards young Jay was looking glaringly odd, and she was worried. The only other one aware of the deed he’d performed on the girl, she was glad it had been successful and Ellie had suffered no lasting ill effects, the thing having been quickly disposed of. But should this business ever come out, she might be implicated, and that didn’t bear thinking about.
As to his attachment to the girl, Doctor Lowe should be treading very warily. Yet as the days went on it seemed more and more that he was casting caution to the winds, not about the illegal operation – that was over – but in other ways and not so subtle other ways either.
No sooner had the girl got up from her ‘sickbed’ than he spoke of her needing to take things easy for a while longer.
‘It would help her recovery if she had some time off work on one or two evenings a week,’ he said to Mrs Jenkins, threatening to implicate her even more into whatever he had in mind for Jay. As she saw it, he was behaving almost like a father to her, and that was dangerous.
Chambers still slept in the box room with the water tank and was becoming frustrated and morose in her work, with no foreseeable prospect of returning to the room she and Jay had shared. In fact, young Rose was now sharing with her, leaving Jay with a room all to herself.
‘We can’t have Rose continuing to sleep in the kitchen,’ he said by way of excuse. ‘I know the lowest order of servants are little considered in some households, but that is not my way. We can squeeze a truckle bed in there for her – which will be an improvement for her, don’t you think, Mrs Jenkins?’
Young Rose had relieved Ellie in doing all the more menial jobs: laundry, ironing, beating carpets, sweeping the outside area, sluicing the drain, cleaning the servants’ outside lavatory and the like.
‘And she’ll be out of your way, Mrs Jenkins,’ he went on. ‘It can’t be easy entering your kitchen first thing in the morning to see her getting up.’
It might have seemed a more proper arrangement had she not known different. It was only a matter of time before the mistress got to know about these strange changes and fell to wondering wh
at was behind them. Lately she had hardly left her room, except for dinner and when entertaining, keeping to herself, speaking only to her as ‘Cook’ when she came to her room to discuss meals and purchasing provisions. Poor young Dora, closeted with her, must have been miserable. Mrs Jenkins felt sorry for her sometimes.
Then, a few weeks later, there appeared a new face in the house. Nora Jenkins wondered if the mistress was as in the dark about that as about Chambers’ altered sleeping arrangements. But the young man was as much a mystery to her, except that she was told his name. Around seven thirty each Tuesday evening he’d arrive – by the front door, if you please – to be shown straight up to the master’s study, giving her no time to quiz him. She felt a little irked that Doctor Lowe hadn’t confided in her what the young man was doing here. She suspected it had something to do with Ellie, but what she couldn’t think, even though she racked her brains.
It was Chambers’ task to answer the tug on the door bell and conduct him up to Doctor Lowe’s study, her complaining over sleeping arrangements pacified a little by this apparently important role.
‘It’s all very mysterious though, ain’t it?’ she said on the occasion of his second visit. ‘He don’t look like a doctor or lawyer or any professional sort.’
‘Whatever he is is nothing to do with you,’ she was reminded by Mrs Jenkins, by the third visit having been taken into the master’s confidence.
‘I’ve discovered young Jay is quite a talented little artist and I feel it might benefit her to be encouraged,’ he’d confided after she had voiced her disapproval of being kept in the dark about the visitor. The ordinary staff had no need to know, but she had been with this family long enough to feel part of it, and not to be confided in struck her as grossly underhanded.
‘I have asked the young man, the son of a colleague of mine and quite a talented painter himself, to come and give her a few lessons. But – and this is between you and me, Mrs Jenkins – I would rather my wife didn’t know for the time being, and I know you will not allow this to go any further.’