The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘She knew,’ I said. ‘Nell knew. She did not tell me at the time, but now I see that she did.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ she said, her cake poised in mid-air.

  ‘Back then I always thought that I did not know my daughter,’ I said, ‘but I know her now.’

  She nodded and put down her cake quickly, hunting about for her coat, and I wondered what I had said wrong. ‘I should probably go, Mrs Ryland,’ she said. ‘I fear that I have upset you further – my intention was to offer you solace with what I knew but I fear that I’ve brought back memories that are not welcome.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ I said, but she had already stood up, her coat over her arm.

  ‘That is Nell’s shawl, isn’t it?’ she said, pointing to the chair by the window. ‘I remember it because it was the same colour as her eyes, although the parts left in the sunlight have faded. I noticed you looking towards it as we spoke. Is this chair where Nell would sit?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is her chair.’

  She took a few steps to the door but then looked back to me once more. ‘Won’t you come again to Haughten Hall, Mrs Ryland? I am sure Sir Howard would like to see you as a friend.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I will.’

  ‘Not even for the library? The books for your religious studies?’

  ‘No,’ I repeated. ‘There was a time when Howard was some comfort to me, but Nell was never happy when we went to visit, and I might never know what happened over that way. I have to do what I think Nell would have wanted – I think it is about time.’

  She nodded.

  ‘But I wish you and your family well,’ I said, standing up so that I could see her to the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘but it is just me now.’ She took another little step towards the door but then drew back again. ‘My husband suffered from TB for many years,’ she said, as if she felt she should explain. ‘I finally lost him over twenty years ago. Not long after that, I had to give up my newborn son to the orphanage. I needed to support myself but could not keep a baby as well as my position.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, but the words did nothing to ease my guilt. I did not remember my meeting with Dora in the parsonage all those years ago, but somehow I felt that I had failed her, and that my advice had resulted in a baby that was born only to be grieved.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It was all a long time ago now,’ she said, although we both knew that this was something often said by those who grieved to stifle floods of sympathy.

  I followed her to the door, muttering a last farewell as she walked down the garden path. As I shut the door behind her, I looked back to the window seat and saw that Nell was back, but it was not the Nell that I was used to seeing – this Nell was strange and altered.

  17

  She sat in the chair by the window, her head tilted to watch Dora as she disappeared down the garden path. Then she turned to me and I felt a stab of ice deep inside me as her eyes met mine.

  The girl who sat in the chair was Nell, my daughter, but she was now changed. This Nell was not my silent companion of the last twenty-five years – the memory who had given me comfort by filling the space that my daughter had left. This Nell was my recollection of a less happy time, an echo from a day in March 1912 when I had returned home from church to find the girl in the window seat was someone I did not know.

  She sat with her head resting on the back of the chair, her cheek nestled into her emerald shawl. She wore the striped cotton dress that she had set out in that morning and the boots that she complained rubbed her ankles. But she did not wear her bonnet.

  Her hair was hacked roughly about her scalp, patches of bare skin milky white against the short clumps. It was not like before – there was no thought for fashion, music hall stars or rebellion this time. There were swollen areas on her scalp where the hair had been torn from the roots and seeping scratches in her skin.

  I looked away, watching the raindrops on the window, waiting for the image to fade, but it did not. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine Nell as I wanted her to appear, with a smile on her lips and curls about her shoulders, but when I opened my eyes again the room about me seemed to have darkened and it was not only Nell that I could see but the little silver sewing scissors in her quivering hand, their blades choked with mats of chestnut hair, and the dark crescents of fallen curls in her lap.

  But it was her eyes that told me the daughter I knew was gone. This Nell would glance to me and then away again as if she neither recognised me nor anything around her, and she stared into empty space as if something else was playing out in front of her, something that I could neither see nor understand.

  Dora’s visit had changed things. She had told me what I should have seen all those years ago. I should have recognised the loss of her first love in my daughter’s face. Sam was never a reliable sort, so I should have guessed that the day would come. I should have pieced it all together, but I could not have guessed that it would happen in that way, and that Nell’s hopes would be lost in the arms of another. I could never have foreseen Iris Caldwell.

  I had not scolded Nell on that day in 1912, but I remember the shrillness in my voice when I saw her: ‘What have you done, Nell? Oh, what have you done?’ But the words were spoken in haste and I had not waited for an answer. I had not said anything more about what she had done to herself. I had just drawn the curtains and lit a lamp, then I had gone to the kitchen for a basin and the meat scissors.

  Her hair had barely been long enough to scrape back into a bun, yet only a few of these straggled strands remained that day. I’d feared she would look like an invalid if I left them, so I’d steadied her head with one hand and cut them short, for I was sure that it would make her hair look thicker – after all it is what we woman are always taught, and I remembered my own mother had told me that cut hair will always look thicker. So I had done my best to cut the strands to an approximation of a style that was planned and wanted. I could do no more for her back then.

  But so much time had passed since that day and now I knew what had caused Nell her sorrow and I was sure I could be more of a comfort.

  ‘Everyone suffers a loss like this,’ I whispered. ‘The first time is the hardest. Time will heal.’ But the words seemed empty because I knew that the girl I saw in front of me was just a memory. She could not hear me or touch me – even her sobs were muted. It was a silence that still separated us even after all these years.

  I reached out to her but the arms that stretched out before me wore the long sleeves of an old-fashioned day dress. The hands were smooth and the fingernails short but not yet yellowed, and I realised that I saw my hands as they had been on that day in 1912, as I had offered them to her. It was an embrace that she had not returned and I remembered the feeling of her hard shoulder against my bosom, as if I had done nothing more than crush her arms to her chest. I do not remember her warmth, because there had been none.

  ‘I am here for you, Nell. You are home now.’ They were my words but it was not me who spoke them. I heard my voice as it had been over two decades ago when it was softer and still had some depth. It was a voice that I had used to sing Nell to sleep when she was a baby, to read her fairy tales when she was a child, and to scold her when she was a young woman – a voice that had scolded her too often, I thought. It was a voice that was no longer mine.

  And then Nell lifted her head and I felt that maybe she saw me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’ But now the age had returned to my voice once more and the grate of the words sounded hollow as I spoke them to a memory I could see but not touch.

  ‘Why, Nell, why?’ But my lips were only tracing a memory because twenty-five years later I finally knew the answer. It had been given to me by another – the words had slipped out so carelessly, but now I could link what Dora had said to the girl I had found that day in 1912 when I had walked in through the front door with my Bible still un
der my arm, and found her with my little sewing scissors in her hand.

  If I had been a better mother to her, she might have told me what had happened to her that day, but I was not and she stayed silent. I had spent sleepless nights worrying about the day that she had set out for Haughten Hall with a bag of liver salts for Iris Caldwell. It was something that I had wondered about even when she was long gone.

  ‘Why, my love?’ I pleaded. ‘Why did you not tell me?’

  But Nell did not answer me because she was just a memory and never made a sound.

  * * *

  It took some time for Nell to fade completely. She lingered for a while, her striped dress blurring to grey, as really I could not remember the colour of it, and the boots that had rubbed her ankles fading back into the fog of my mind.

  It was her head that remained the longest – the non-seeing eyes and the stark outline of her naked scalp. They were things that had robbed her of her gentle softness and made her seem more creature than girl. It was a memory that I had tried to forget for so long, but now that it had returned I did not move from my chair because Nell was my daughter and I could not leave her alone at a time like this. I stayed with Nell until she was gone and only her essence remained.

  I thought of my meeting with Dora and the knowledge it had brought me. I had always suspected that Nell had been in love with Sam but now I was sure. I was certain that, on the day I remembered, Nell had found out about his attachment to another – to Iris Caldwell, the girl I had always so openly praised when I never had a kind word for my own daughter.

  But it had not just been words that I had used against Nell. It had been every act, every command, every betrayal: I had stood by while Nell led Iris’s horse just as a servant would; I had forced her to deliver liver salts to a house that had both a housekeeper and a motorcar; I had belittled a cause she believed in, ripping apart the suffragettes’ leaflet in front of her so that it would not offend the Caldwells.

  Then Iris Caldwell, the girl who I had favoured over my own daughter, had stolen Nell’s sweetheart, the only true friend she had. Together Iris and I had driven Nell to disfigure herself. Maybe we had driven her to do whatever she did on May Day – the crime that Sam Denman had always been blamed for.

  I blinked my eyes in the faded light but neither Nell’s shadow nor outline remained and I could feel her no longer. Then I got up slowly, my knees painful and clicking. I went upstairs to my bedroom, crouched down by the bed and took the bloodied nightgown out from the chest once more.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said into the darkness, for what I was about to do would betray her at last. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and carried the nightdress downstairs, stopping at the bottom for a few minutes while I wiped away more tears. Then I straightened my skirts, smoothed my hair and held my head high. Without stopping, I went to the front door.

  I crossed the village green, towards the distant blue lamp, and I opened the front door of the police station and walked right up to the constable on the front desk.

  I held the nightgown out in front of me, the bloodied cotton bunched in my hands.

  ‘I would like to report a murder,’ I said.

  18

  ‘She went mad,’ I said.

  Roy leant back in his chair and put his pen back on the desk. ‘Are you sure about this, Agnes?’ he said. ‘Because this is not something you have mentioned before and, from what everyone else says, there is very little to suggest—’

  ‘Mrs Ryland,’ I said firmly. ‘My name is Mrs Ryland to you now because I am here to report a murder and I will be taken seriously.’ I heard my voice echo in the little room and realised that I must have shouted. It was a tiny space with whitewashed walls, a high arched ceiling and an iron-barred window, and I thought that it must once have been the cell in the days when the town had been much smaller. I could not help but think of the rattle of the iron door and the rants of the prisoners over the years.

  ‘Mrs Ryland,’ he echoed but there was still no respect in his tone.

  ‘In answer to your question – yes, I am sure about this,’ I said flatly. ‘I have not mentioned it before because for all these years I have been trying to be respectable and save my little family from the so-near disgrace that Nell brought upon us so many times. From the moment she went missing I have tried to preserve a good name for her but now I know that there are more important things that I need to say about Nell, things that I need to face up to. That is why I am coming to you now, Sergeant Astley.’

  He folded his arms across his chest and waited for me to continue.

  ‘Look!’ I held up the bloodied nightgown. ‘Iris was murdered, and Nell was involved somehow.’ But I realised then that he could see nothing more than the cotton bunched in my hands, and a faded brown stain stretched across the top.

  He had been keeping his eyes away from it, as if he did not want to look; did not want to know. When I had held it out to him he had not taken it, so now I stood up from my chair and held it aloft, letting it unravel all the way to the floor.

  His eyes widened.

  ‘You always said that you could not convict without a body,’ I said. ‘Is this not good enough for you?’ I put a hand on each shoulder of the nightgown and shook it, opening it up as if the wearer was still inside, revealing the stain of browned blood stretching from the embroidered chest to the hem. It was only the long sleeves that still bore patches of white among the speckles of mildew. Here was his body – the body of Iris Caldwell.

  Roy drew a sharp breath, then rang a little bell on the desk. ‘Will you take this into the office, Constable?’ he said to the uniformed man who appeared. He waited for the man to leave and then put his elbows on the desk, slowly rubbing his temples with his fingertips.

  ‘I found it under Nell’s bed the day after May Day,’ I said as I sat back down. ‘Not long before you came to search her room.’

  ‘You did not tell me,’ he said wearily. ‘After all these years you did not tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. I knew the words were not enough but I did not know what else I could say.

  He looked at me sternly. ‘Agnes… Mrs Ryland, do you have anything else to add to what you have said today? Any other evidence that you have not shown me?’

  ‘No,’ I said after a while. ‘There is nothing more.’

  ‘That is not what you implied when you came in here,’ he countered. ‘You spoke of madness, of Iris’s murder and of Nell and Sam.’

  I put my head in my hands. I could not remember exactly what I had said when Roy led me from the front desk into this little cell, his arm around me as if to hurry me out of sight, but I remembered speaking so fast that I could barely draw breath. Now I worried that he thought me hysterical. ‘I know I might have implied things,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘I don’t really know what happened on that morning, but I have started to see things differently over the past few weeks.’

  ‘How so?’ he said, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘Well, before the film was shown there was never enough evidence to charge Sam, but when you tried to arrest him after the film, well, I suppose then I felt I should come forward,’ I said. ‘To clear his name.’

  ‘To clear his name,’ he repeated. ‘After twenty-five years!’

  I had planned to say more but the words caught in the back of my throat. It was a speech I had prepared – arguments I had thought reasonable – but now as I tried to piece the words together again, I realised that they did not make sense after all.

  ‘I have always spoken up for Sam,’ I said quietly. ‘Haven’t I?’

  Roy took a deep breath and opened his mouth, but I feared what he would say.

  ‘I always wanted to do more than that, of course,’ I said quickly. ‘From the day I found Iris’s nightgown, I wanted to bring it to you to show you that Sam was not guilty…’ But then I found that I could not continue because whatever I had wanted to do did not matter. I had let Sam live with the blame for what had hap
pened, I had hindered the police investigation, and I had broken promises to those I had loved. I had let down both the living and the dead.

  ‘What would Thomas have thought of this, Agnes?’ Roy said as if reading my thoughts.

  ‘Thomas?’ I began. ‘Well…’ I thought of how Thomas had welcomed Sam into our home. He had done it out of duty to his family, but mainly because of his kind nature. When his health had started to fail, he had asked me to look out for Sam when he was gone. It was the final thing that he had asked of me, and I had failed him. ‘Do not speak of him!’ I said, my voice trembling. ‘I had little choice. Sam is related to me by marriage, but Nell is my blood. Nell had to come first. I had to protect my daughter.’ My eyes started to sting and I fumbled for my handkerchief.

  But Roy’s voice did not soften. ‘Protect your daughter from what?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I whispered. ‘I was protecting her from the noose! If she is still alive somewhere I could not see her hang. I could not lose her a second time.’

  ‘There has never been anything to suggest that Nell is still alive,’ he said sternly. ‘You must have come to accept this by now.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘then I had to protect her memory – her reputation.’

  He said nothing. He did not have to. I saw in his face what he was thinking, for his view of things was far simpler than my own – I was a woman who had hidden important evidence for twenty-five years. I had hindered his investigation and let the public blame a man who might be innocent, and I had done it all to save the reputation of a girl who had not been seen for well over two decades – a girl that he believed dead. But Roy did not share my guilt or my grief. He would not return home that evening to a house that was empty but for a memory so clear that it seemed real – a visitor that would stare but never speak.