The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  I thought of the meeting on the common again – Mrs Elliot-Palmer with her curses and Sir Howard with his raised hand. I had thought their hostility was due to an excitable dog and a mis-sold horse, but now I imagined a feud that had lasted much longer – years of disputes and broken engagements, of cold shoulders and distrust.

  ‘I won’t go,’ I said. ‘How could I go to the house of someone who won’t give women the vote, someone like Sir Howard?’

  My mother shook her head wearily. ‘You will come with me, Nell—’ she held the leaflet in front of me, tearing it down the middle, the halves fluttering on to my plate ‘—or we don’t eat!’

  * * *

  My words of protest were lost on my mother, for later that morning we returned to Haughten Hall. I had hoped to find Iris waiting in the entrance hall in her riding britches, but when Dora showed us upstairs I guessed that the meeting with Mrs Elliot-Palmer on the common had put an end to any excitement and I felt a strange kind of disappointment.

  My mother was called in to Sir Howard’s study and Iris beckoned to me from another door, the expression on her face telling me that my guess was right.

  I followed her through the door into the small dark room and she pirouetted slowly on the rug, her arm spinning past shelf upon shelf of leather-bound journals.

  ‘He says we should each find something to read,’ she said wearily, ‘but we are to take what we find back to the study because a library is no place for young girls.’

  I went to a shelf but all the books were bound in the same kind of leather. There was nothing to tell them apart but a couple of meaningless words embossed in gold on each spine followed by roman numerals in such high numbers that they looked like toppled dominos.

  I started to panic and turned back to see what Iris was choosing but she stood in the centre of the room, her hands on her hips, watching me.

  ‘Your face!’ She laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry, those are my father’s books about politics.’ She waved her hand towards a little table with several stacks of books on it. ‘These are the ones he expects us to read.’

  There were books of all colours on the table with golden titles, pictures and patterns. It was as big as the selection that they had on the stand at Partridge’s, but the titles were newer and there were several first editions that I could not usually afford.

  ‘Oh, you take Strand magazine!’ I cried. ‘And you have the novels of Marie Corelli! I have to hide those from my mother – she says they are sentimental smut and quite ungodly!’ I twisted my voice on the last word so that I sounded like my mother. After all, ‘ungodly’ was a word that my mother used often, especially when she spoke of me.

  Iris laughed. ‘We take a lot of things,’ she said. ‘My father has some kind of subscription and I don’t think he even knows what arrives. The company supplies what they think a girl of my age would want to read, but I really only look at them now and then.’

  I took a book from the table. It was a novel by one of my favourite authors, although I had never heard of the title before as my mother did her best to keep me away from such things. The cover had golden sand dunes and pyramids embossed on the front, which I thought beautiful.

  We left the library and carried our books back to the portrait-lined study, sitting on opposite ends of the window seat, the ruffles of Iris’s short skirt rising to her shins as she sat. I opened the beautiful cover of the book I had chosen and read the first few pages but found that I could not settle into the story. I held it up to Iris to ask if she had read it but the words stopped in my throat when I saw that she had not taken a novel from the little table but something plain-looking with a French title. Suddenly my story, which seemed to be some silly romance about Egyptian princesses, felt childish. I had always thought of myself as a reader, but now I felt that the kind of thing I read did not matter.

  I watched Iris as her eyes moved over the text, a slight crease in her brow and a twist on her lips. I studied her features – her round cheeks and small childlike nose – but I still could not think what it was about her face that kept drawing my eyes back to it. I fancied that it could be the way that she wore her hair long, with only the front pinned away from her forehead, framing her face like a schoolgirl’s, or the way she raised her eyebrows slightly when she smiled, but there was more to Iris than her face. There was something not right about her – something not right about the Caldwells and my thoughts kept turning to the way she had shrunk from Sir Howard’s raised hand, the childlike way she dressed, the oil paintings that stared down at us from every wall and the family feud that had broken her engagement.

  ‘I have met Francis Elliot-Palmer,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, looking up, although her voice was quite disinterested.

  ‘Properly,’ I added. ‘I saw him in the village and he remembered me from the common. I even saw the end of one of his photoplays.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’ she said, putting down her book slowly. ‘Do you think I will miss out by not marrying him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, embarrassed, for I did not want to explain that I had not actually spoken with him save for a few awkward words outside the church hall when he had called me ‘Nell’ – a name I had not told him.

  She stared at me silently and I realised she wanted more from me.

  ‘Well, I suppose I could not really see the two of you together,’ I said quietly.

  ‘That is what I think too,’ she said, nodding as if to convince herself as well as me. ‘Maybe it is for the best. After all, I think the religious mania would be too much for me.’

  ‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘You should try living with my mother.’

  She laughed. ‘Your mother is just like any vicar’s wife,’ she said. ‘She is just dogmatic. Francis truly believes that he will discover the meaning of life and God. Many think the new cine cameras are a sin against God, but Francis says they just capture a simple truth and that they see everything.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said and nothing more, for I knew little of such things. I looked back to the page of my book, the lines of text now making little sense.

  I thought of the plainly dressed man with the lingering stare, and then of the torn leaflet in my pocket. It was the leaflet that Francis had forced upon me, the one I was supposed to give to Iris, but my mother had ripped it up in front of me, leaving me to rescue the severed halves from the breakfast crumbs.

  ‘Why do you not read the political books?’ I asked.

  She looked up again, as if I had disturbed her.

  ‘The political books,’ I said, ‘the ones in the library that are bound in leather – you said that you do not read them.’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘That kind of thing is not to my taste.’

  ‘Don’t you think that women as a class must be the best judges of their own interests?’ I said, pleased that I had remembered the bold sentences from the leaflet.

  Iris wrinkled her brow. ‘I did not mean that politics itself is not to my taste,’ she said, ‘just those particular books. I did read them once but I don’t read them now. You see, those books are written by men like my father. They are authored by men my father admires, Lord Salisbury and Lord Curzon and the like, men just like him. There are things in those books that I do not agree with, so I would not read them again.’

  I felt my face warm and my eyes dropped back to my novel.

  Then she added, ‘Although I do admire Grace Elliot-Palmer’s work and all that she is striving for.’

  ‘Who?’ I said but then felt foolish as I realised she spoke of the woman I had met in the church hall. Iris must have realised that I had just memorised one of Mrs Elliot-Palmer’s leaflets as she was already familiar with her struggle. I had hoped to impress her with my knowledge but instead I felt like an idiot.

  ‘Nell,’ Iris said folding the book shut on her lap. ‘I know you are probably part of Mrs Elliot-Palmer’s army, but I really think we can be friends.’ I remembered that she had sugges
ted friendship when we had last sat in the library together and how I had felt a strange little jump deep inside me when she had spoken. Yet now I felt that she was talking down to me and the words fell flat.

  I stood up and went over to the silver-framed photographs on the desk, taking up the romantic portrait with the bouquet. On my first visit to Haughten Hall I had thought that it reminded me of another picture that I had seen before, although I could not think where, but now I thought that it must be similar to the colourful picture plates I had seen in the poetry books at school, where all the women had pure white complexions and loose hair, and gazed at flowers.

  ‘Your father clearly adores you,’ I said, copying Francis’s words, ‘or he would not think of you in this way. If you feel so strongly about what Mrs Elliot-Palmer is striving for, surely you could—’

  ‘Oh, that is not me,’ she said, pointing to the photograph in my hands.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The photograph you are looking at is not of me,’ she said. ‘It is my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’ I echoed. I looked back to the photograph and then to Iris again. There was little to tell her apart from the woman in the photograph. The fair hair fell in the same way about the face, with little curls at the temples, but on the photograph it seemed lighter and wispier as if caught in a breeze. The face was certainly the same shape but the eyes in the photograph were cast downwards at the bouquet and I could not guess at their shape and colour.

  I put the photograph down quickly.

  ‘These too,’ Iris said, waving her hand around the oil paintings that hung on every wall. ‘They are all of my mother – all the paintings and photographs.’

  I looked to the paintings again, squinting up at the girl with long, golden hair and loose, romantic gowns – the one who led the white horse, peered at her reflection in the stream and posed with doves, mirrors and blossoms. Until now, the girl in the paintings had been the one that I expected to see, but there was something about the whimsical mood of the paintings that made them feel almost timeless and now I realised that they could have been painted in the last century. The girl in the paintings wore her hair in the same way as Iris and must have been close to her age. As I looked from frame to frame, I saw the same face looking down from each, but it was not the face of Iris Caldwell. During my last visit I had noticed differences between the oil-painted girl and the one who sat in front of me but I had put this down to the clumsiness of the artist, and how he had not been able to capture what I saw in Iris – the strange familiarity I could not put my finger on.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said for I did not know what else to say and knew only that her mother was dead.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said, looking amused. ‘I never knew my mother. She died giving birth to me. People do say that I look so much like her.’

  ‘You do,’ I said, quietly looking to the paintings of the girl by the stream in front of Haughten Hall with the dappled reflections of the irises, and the girl with the white horse. ‘So much about you is the same.’

  ‘Iris was my mother’s name too,’ she said.

  ‘Oh!’ I said quietly but no more words would come.

  ‘You seem shocked, Nell,’ she said, laughing. ‘You must know it was quite common in Victorian times for a child to take the name of a mourned relative.’

  ‘Only the name of a dead sibling,’ I said, ‘not the mother.’

  ‘Well, my father says that the name ties us both to Haughten Hall. You see the stream in the foreground of that painting?’ she said stretching out her hand. ‘My mother was named after the yellow flag irises that grow around the ford. This was her family’s home – she was named after the irises, and me after her.’

  ‘Well, your father must have adored her,’ I said, trying to recover my train of thought, ‘as he does you.’ It was the sentence I had begun only minutes before, but now I could not remember how I had intended to finish it or what I was going to ask of her because what she had said about the photographs and paintings had shocked me. ‘Your father adores you…’ I said again, ‘and—’

  ‘Oh, is that for me?’ she said. I realised that I was holding the torn leaflet with the angel on the front, the halves slipping over each other where my mother had torn it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and then, ‘No – I mean it is not from me. It is for you from Francis Elliot-Palmer, but it was my mother who tore it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, taking the leaflet, ‘but Francis must know that I have seen this before, for I spoke with him at the last ball at Chaverly House.’

  ‘He thought that your father might listen to you,’ I said. ‘If only you would speak to him. You could ask him…’ But the speech I had imagined myself giving stuck in my throat and my voice sounded weak.

  I thought of Iris’s life – of the horse she could not ride without being led, of the hair that she wore loose like a child and the dresses that still showed her ankles. I thought too of Francis Elliot-Palmer, the man she seemed in awe of but was forbidden from marrying, and of her father, the man who gave her everything she wanted but whose raised hand she shrank from. I thought of her mother, a woman she had never known, and of Iris herself, the daughter who lived in her shadow.

  I had let Francis believe that I could persuade Iris to show the leaflet to her father, but it was only now that I realised why she could not.

  12

  Sam Denman took a jack-knife from his pocket, inspecting the blade and wiping it clean on his trousers. I drew back quietly and watched him from behind the gatepost, intrigued by his every move as if he was an animal I had spotted in the wild. He glanced at the stack of small hay bales propped against the wall of the stable yard and then ran the knife through the rope that bound them, the loose end snapping free. He wiped the knife again and reached high to release the old tarpaulin, which had covered the bales. Then he stabbed his knife into a bale, raising the weight on his knee and carried it through to the barn where the dark shapes of horses mingled in the dim light. I watched Sam for a good few minutes. I could have watched him all day.

  Some thought Sam strange, but I thought him misunderstood, and a little exciting. On my fifteenth birthday he had given me a lucky rabbit’s foot. It had not been tied where the joint had been severed, the bone hard and white at the cut and the blood still sticky on the clumped fur. I had felt fortunate to have the affections of a boy such as Sam, although I did not think the rabbit so lucky. Sam said his childhood in the farms of Evesbridge had been hard. He would think of nothing of stringing crows to the fences to protect the feeds or of stabbing his knife into the neck of a lame horse to drain the blood. Sam was different from the other boys in Missensham but I did not see this as a warning of what was to come.

  My mother only tolerated Sam because he was some sort of relative on my father’s side of the family. He was the kind of person that she would have usually crossed the street to avoid, but there had been a time that my parents had welcomed Sam into our home and he had lodged with us in the parsonage so that he could attend the school in Missensham during the months when there were no crops to sow or harvests to gather. I think my mother must have seen it as a duty to her husband, or at least some kind of Christian charity, for when my father died and Sam came of age, she wanted little to do with him.

  Sam was a working man now and when I looked at him I no longer saw anything of the boy who had lodged with us. He was strong but his build was slight, and his clothes seemed to hang off him. At almost nineteen years old, I did not know if he would grow any more. His skin was already speckled by the sun and winds, but his beard was scant and still had a hint of boyish gingeriness. He was a man, I thought, if only just.

  When Sam bent to pick up the next bale, I took up a stone and aimed it at his back. The shot missed but the crack of the stone on the hard ground made him stop and look up, resting the bale on his knee.

  ‘I’m working, Nell,’ he said, as if he had been expecting me. ‘You know that some fo
lk do.’

  ‘But it’s been a long time, Sammy,’ I said, ‘and I am bored at home – you know that.’

  He set down the bale and came over to the gatepost, rubbing the sweat from the back of his neck. ‘I hear you are not at home so much anymore,’ he said. ‘You’ve got finer company now. Are you sure you should be calling here and not taking tea at Haughten Hall?’

  I walked past him into the yard. ‘I don’t care for tea,’ I said, ‘but I know you’ve usually got some bottles of cider about the place.’

  ‘Is that all I’m good for?’ he joked, following me back into the yard. ‘I thought you wanted more of me than my cider.’ But when I did not answer he added firmly, ‘No, Nell, I’ve got no cider.’

  ‘There’s no need to be like that!’ I said. ‘I only meant so as you could have a break. Sit and have a drink with me, Sammy. Water will do just as well.’ I pointed to the pump by the side of the tack room.

  Sam squinted up at the sun, as was the way out in the farms, for there was no clock in the stable yard and the church bell could only be heard in the right wind. ‘Alright,’ he said shortly. ‘Go and sit down. I will need to finish up here.’

  I sat on the bench by the pump, making sure the wall that hid the yard from the main house shielded me.

  Sam took up a broom and started to sweep the loose strands of hay under a low fence and on to a little vegetable patch, which already had the early leaves of leeks and spinach pushing from the soil. The yard was tidy, the winter’s mud and mildew cleaned from the brickwork and not so much as a bucket out of place. A couple of horses hung their heads from the loose boxes and I could see the shadows of several more mingling under the low roof of the barn.