The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  When he had finished, Sam propped the broom up against the tack room wall and began to work the pump handle, water splashing into the bucket below. I thought he would wash his neck but he did not, just washed his hands very carefully with a well-worn bar of carbolic soap.

  In the barn, a horse whinnied, a flash of white among the darkness and the thud of a hoof.

  ‘Isn’t that Edelweiss?’ I said as the white flank turned back into shadow.

  Sam stopped washing at last and dried his hands on a kitchen towel. ‘The Caldwells’ horse – yes.’

  ‘What is she doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that horse always seems to make it back here one way or another,’ he said, turning to me. ‘Now I’m teasing her with Sultan. He’s a bit long in the tooth but the only stallion I have at the moment.’

  ‘They want Edelweiss to foal?’ I said. ‘I thought Sir Howard barely knew about horses and would not want to suffer another.’

  He pulled up a bale so that he could sit next me. ‘Well, that daft old git insisted on the mare. I warned him that she was headstrong and he would be better off with a gelding but little princess Caldwell would have the white mare – it was something to do with a horse that her mother once had.’

  I thought of the painting in the study of Haughten Hall, the one of the girl and the white horse. Iris’s mother had owned a white horse, so of course, Iris would have one too, but now there was nothing left that would surprise me about this girl who lived in the shadow of her dead mother.

  ‘Right from the off, Sir Howard has been saying that the horse is trouble,’ Sam continued. ‘He wants his money back, but the horse has a little spirit, only that. She is a sweet thing with the right rider. Now Sir Howard is forbidding his daughter to ride at all so he thinks the only way he will make his money back is by having her covered. It’s all down to something that happened on the common the other day when the horse got spooked.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said looking down at my boots. I did not want to admit that I had been there that day on the common and failed to calm the excitable dog. I thought of what Sam had said about the sweet nature of the horse but the memory of when she had reared – the sight of her muscular chest rising above me, her eyes wide and nostrils flaring – made me think otherwise.

  Then I realised that Sam had said nothing more and was looking at me, his eyes fixed on mine.

  ‘So, miss,’ he said. ‘It is not often we meet alone without your mother.’

  ‘No,’ I said, but did not know what else to say for his voice seemed deeper and firmer and his stare had become so hard that I felt I could no longer look at him.

  ‘Come.’ He stood up and held out his hand and I took it and followed him past the loose boxes and through a split stable door into the old tack room where he lodged. He sat down on an old straw mattress in the corner and took his boots off.

  The room was spotlessly clean and bright with whitewash. A ladder was propped against the wall on which clothes were drying, the tang of the same carbolic soap rising in the warm air. A blanket was neatly folded on top of a straw mattress and an old Tilley lamp sat on the floor by the wall. When I saw that Sam had put his boots at the end of the bed, I removed mine and put them next to his. He patted the space on the mattress next to him as if I were a dog, but I said nothing about it and got down on to the mattress.

  ‘Your hair!’ he said, putting his hand on the back of my head. ‘I thought it one of those old ladies’ buns but…’ He smiled and ran his fingers through the short strands, but he said nothing more about it and I was glad that kind of thing had never mattered to him.

  We kissed. I am not sure who started it but it would have been embarrassing not to. The conversation had stopped and I had not given him any other reason for my visit. He opened his mouth a little and moved his tongue against mine, his breathing slow and deep as if he were in some kind of trance. His mouth had a wetness I had not expected and I tasted the grassiness of his tobacco.

  I felt his fingers fumbling with the buttons on my blouse and then he slid his cold hand under my vest and I opened my eyes to see the curl of his eyelashes on his cheek and the bulge of his knuckles moving under the fabric. Then I felt his hand cup my breast, and the tenderness of my nipple as he squeezed it between his fingertips.

  He drew back and I realised that I must have flinched. ‘Are you alright, Nell?’

  ‘Mmm.’ I nodded, and then thought that I should say something more, the kind of thing that people say in romantic novels – ‘oh darling!’ or something like that – but what he had just done to me was nothing like any of the passionate kisses or romantic embraces that I had read about in those books.

  He grinned at me, his eyes now large and strange as he pushed up my skirt and petticoat, the palm of his hand flat against my thigh. He put his mouth on mine again and I wondered if he really did want to kiss me so badly or if he just did not want me to speak.

  Then he eased his hand inside my drawers, his knuckles pressing firmly against my body and I felt the hardness of his fingertip push inside me. I felt the grate of his beard on my cheek and the wetness of his mouth over my chin, the coldness of the air on my breast and then a strange feeling where he had pushed inside me – a dull ache as his touch made my flesh warm and swell. It was a feeling that was strange and new, one that I did not understand and I pushed his hand away quickly and crossed my legs, trying to pull my skirts back down.

  He drew back a little, so I leant forward and kissed him again, taking his hand and putting it back on my breast because I wanted him to know that I liked him – but the truth was that I could not bear him touching me again, not in that place. The ache I’d felt had now faded to a gentle warmth and my gusset felt damp but the shock of what he had done remained and I feared how his touch had controlled my body in a way I could not.

  The kissing had become awkward, for it could not lead anywhere now but I fancied that to stop would be somehow impolite. I felt his hand on my thigh again, his fingers slipping inside the leg of my drawers and I felt myself begin to shrink away, my hand on his wrist.

  Then he jerked his head back, the roughness of his fingers pressing into my skin but he no longer moved. His face turned towards the door. It was then that I heard the distant bark of a dog. He jumped up quickly and I saw his trousers were no longer fastened, the fabric hanging loose around his knees.

  I heard the scamper of feet outside and then the little brown dog shot through the door, its tail whisking the air behind it, jaws gaping excitedly.

  ‘Charlie!’ I jumped up quickly, grabbing the dog’s paws as he bounced on to his hind legs, and I laughed as his tongue lapped at my arms for I felt that somehow he had saved me. ‘This dog knows me—’

  ‘Nell, get out!’ Sam hissed, jumping up. ‘Mrs Elliot-Palmer is never far behind that dog!’

  I rammed my feet into my boots as the dog circled my skirts. I peeped round the door, but I could not see past the wall of the stable yard.

  I looked back to Sam but he was still fumbling with the button on his trousers and I glimpsed a flash of hard purplish flesh in the gape of the linen. ‘Go!’ he hissed.

  And then another voice, the distant shout of Mrs Elliot-Palmer: ‘Charlie! Come boy!’ and the dog ran back towards the sound of its mistress.

  I ran as hard as I could, across the yard and out of the gate into the lane, ducking behind the wall to catch my breath and lace my boots. I sat in the dust, panting hard as I listened to the voices in the stable yard and the excited bark of the dog, but there were no more shouts. I did up my blouse, my fingers trembling over the buttons, and pulled my drawers back into place, pulling down my petticoat and skirt. But as the voices quietened, I heard a slow clicking sound and looked up.

  A man stood in the lane in front of me, a large black box raised up to his face on long splayed stilts. He wound a handle at the side of the box, a rhythmic click rising from the mechanism. The box was angled towards me, a large hole in the front, which seemed to st
are, deep and glassy like an eye.

  I jumped up and ran down the lane without looking back.

  I had seen Francis Elliot-Palmer again. He was a man who was the master of Waldley Court and had once been Iris Caldwell’s intended. He was a man who was a scholar and a religious zealot, and a man who had known my name without being told it. He was a man who I had seen staring up to the windows of Haughten Hall, and a man whose eyes always seemed to linger just a moment too long. He was a man who said that his camera filmed only the truth.

  13

  ‘Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord…’

  We sat in the study of Haughten Hall, my mother’s Bible open on her lap. I watched her finger trace the words on the page and the movement of her lips but the words themselves seemed no louder than the chatter of the birds outside the long window or the scrape of Dora’s broom far down the corridor.

  Over a week had passed since our last visit to Haughten Hall and we now sat waiting for Sir Howard and Iris once more. It had been a week that I thought had changed me, and I found my mind wandering back to the stable at Waldley Court and what had happened there. It was not so much Sam that I thought of, but what he had done to me – the thing that kept repeating in my head: the curl of the eyelashes on his cheek, the smell of carbolic soap, the grassy taste of the tobacco in his mouth, and then the act that had followed, one that had left me altered.

  ‘Repent,’ my mother said again. ‘Nell, do you even know what we mean by repentance?’

  I nodded.

  She stared at me for some time, her eyes blinking behind her thick spectacles as if she wanted more from me, but then she just sighed and started reading again, a passage that I fancied she did not know so well as she seemed to stumble over the words.

  I did not listen but her interruption had been enough to make me uneasy and I remembered the women who my mother would receive in the parsonage sitting room when I was a child. They were women who would raise their heads from the quilt that they worked on and nod to me politely, although their eyes were swollen and their smiles were weak. They were women who my mother said needed to repent, but for what sin, I was never told. I knew only that some of them seemed just a little older than I was now, and that some of them were unmarried, and I fancied that I was at last beginning to understand a little of why my mother wanted them to repent. My thoughts now turned to Francis Elliot-Palmer and the cine camera he had use to film me adjusting my skirts in the lane. The machine had recorded the truth, just as God saw it, and I wondered if I should repent somehow, but telling my mother what I had done was not something I was prepared to do.

  ‘Here…’ My mother put down the Bible at last and held the frilled bonnet out to me. ‘Put it on,’ she said. ‘You remember how Sir Howard liked it.’ There was a kind of desperation in her voice and I wondered if pleasing Sir Howard was just an excuse and that really she could not bear to look upon the horror of my hair, even though it could now be tied and pinned to suggest that it had some length to it.

  I looked at the bonnet dangling from her fingers but she snatched it back when she heard the rattle of the door. It was not Sir Howard who entered and, as my mother rose from her seat, she let out a little gasp.

  ‘Dear child!’ she cried, the bonnet falling to the floor. ‘Are you quite well? You should surely be in bed!’

  Iris leant on the doorframe. Her skin was pale but for a little spot of blood where she had bitten down on her lip. She wore a short chequered pinafore but her undergarments billowed underneath it as if the whole outfit had been thrown on in haste. She smiled weakly, and then made some sort of excuse for her father’s work on the motorcar, which neither my mother nor I really heard.

  My mother walked a few steps towards her and took her hand, stroking it gently as if she dared not get any closer.

  ‘It’s alright, Mrs Ryland,’ said Iris shakily as she perched on the edge of the chaise longue. ‘I am just a little out of sorts. Maybe it is to do with the mutton I ate last night.’

  ‘Well, we won’t keep you,’ I said standing up and smoothing my skirts, ‘just in case it is the same bug that has been going round the Sunday school—’

  But my mother looked at me sharply and I sat down again when Sir Howard entered, still in his driving gloves.

  ‘Oh, Sir Howard!’ said my mother. ‘We can come back another time if—’

  ‘No, no. I am sure that this will pass,’ he said as if commanding the illness away. ‘If Iris took the pills that have been recommended, I am sure that it would have already gone by now.’

  My mother turned back to Iris but Sir Howard had not finished. ‘Agnes, if you are ready you can show me the hymn book that you found in the library.’

  My mother jumped up as if she were a dog commanded by its master and followed him out of the room, with a motherly glance back at Iris.

  I turned to Iris. ‘You look a fright. Do you want me to help get you presentable? I can at least run a comb through your hair.’

  To my surprise, she nodded. ‘You are kind, Nell, I know you do not think it but you are.’ She rose shakily and I followed her down the corridor to her bedroom.

  Iris’s dressing table was at the far side of the room in front of a long window that overlooked the little lawn and the slope up to the common. There was a large mirror in the middle, which framed her face like a portrait when she sat down on the little stool in front of it. On the mahogany surface was a silver hairbrush and another framed photograph – a copy of the one I had seen on the desk in the study, the portrait of the serene woman gazing down at a bouquet of flowers. Now I recognised it as, not of Iris, but her mother. I had thought that the artist who had painted all the portraits of Lady Caldwell must have softened his brushstrokes to flatter her, but this was a photograph that could not be altered, and her face almost filled the frame. I thought of what Francis had said about the camera only capturing the truth – Lady Caldwell really had been as beautiful as her paintings.

  Iris winced when she saw her reflection in the mirror. Slowly she reached to her shoulders and undid the buttons on her pinafore, the fabric dropping to her waist, a gape of white lace revealing her delicate collarbones and the loose ribbons that fastened the material at the back.

  ‘You are still in your nightgown,’ I said, standing behind her, ‘although I did not notice it when we were in the study for it is grander than my own best day dress. My mother would never approve of lace on a nightgown. She would think it quite ungodly!’ I mimicked my mother’s voice as I said the last word. It was something that had cheered her up before but she did not laugh this time.

  She smiled weakly. ‘It is of no use to me if there is no one to see me in it!’ I wondered if she did feel sad about Francis Elliot-Palmer, the husband who would never be.

  I took the brush from the dressing table and started to pull it through her hair, the bristles catching a little in the bed-tangled strands. I drew the brush slowly through the mats, but as my strokes started to reach down the length of her back, the bristles snagged on the hard boning of a corset.

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I see that you have let Dora dress you a little – you really should not have gone to such trouble just for my mother and me. I only own one little bodice and I just wear it when my mother wants me to be smart.’

  ‘I had started to dress but the sickness came on quickly,’ she said. ‘In fact, it comes and goes.’ Then she added, ‘But I’m sure it is not contagious. It is just something I ate.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said and started to brush her hair once more. My eyes fell on the photograph again, and I remembered one of the beautiful pictures from the poetry book I had read in school – ‘The Lady of Shalott’, about a woman trapped in a castle looking into a mirror and then drifting away on a boat. I had never paid attention to such things in class, but I imagined Iris as this fine woman suffering from some sort of sensibility that only her class suff
ered from and I would never know the like of.

  Then she held out her hand to me. ‘I can do the ends,’ she said.

  ‘There is no need,’ I said, ‘because your hair is so straight and fine.’

  ‘That is what everyone tells me,’ she said as if she had grown weary of compliments, then her eyes flicked to my reflection. ‘Your hair is already growing longer, Nell. I can see that it would usually be curly.’ She spoke the words as if she had spotted a stain on my dress or was pointing out where a bird had messed on my shoulder. It was the kind of comment I had suffered at school, when my classmates would pull my hair and ask me when it would grow past my shoulders, and I tucked the curl Iris had seen back behind my ear so that she could not taunt me any longer.

  I passed the brush back to her and she bunched her hair and pulled it over her shoulder and started to rake the ends with her fingers. The movement of her arm caused the neck of her nightgown to gape wider and I could not help notice that the pale skin under her shoulder blades was rubbed raw at the edge of the corset, the reddish imprint of the wounds staining the fabric of her slip.

  Corseted women were the wives of merchants and officials. They would parade in the high street with their maids and parasols or take tea in hotels, but they would never lift a bag of groceries or run to catch the omnibus. Their bodies were trussed, laced and pulled in all directions from their high arched shoes to the powder on their faces and the pins in their hair. Iris was not one of these women – she was a girl who read political journals and had calmed a rearing horse. She was a girl who had worn riding britches and jumped on to the saddle behind me. She was a girl who had squeezed her thighs around me and pressed her breasts into my back, and I knew that there had been no corset then.

  ‘I can fetch those pills for you, if you like,’ I said, suddenly feeling awkward at the memory of her body so close to mine. ‘Those ones that your father spoke of.’

  ‘No!’ she said firmly, but then her voice seemed to falter. ‘It is just that I do not want to take them while you are here, for I fear that they shall make me worse.’