The Orphans of Bell Lane

by Ruthie Lewis

  Grace watched them go. She remembered what Rosa had said about the gang, the Angels, and wondered if these girls were part of it. The knives in particular frightened her. Repressing another shudder, she walked on.

  *

  The moment I saw her watching us, I thought, we have to run. I didn’t know who she was, or why she was watching, but I thought she meant danger. She might tell someone she had seen us, and then we’d all get put back in the workhouse. I’d been there once, and I wasn’t never going back, not me nor my little brother, neither. We ran out into the marshes where no one would follow us and waited all day, hiding.

  I kept wondering who she was. I didn’t recognise her from round these parts. And why was she staring at us like that? I didn’t like it, not at all. I touched my knife. If she comes near us again, I thought, I’ll stick her. That’ll teach her.

  *

  The offices of Mr Jevons the undertaker were in Jamaica Road. Mr Jevons himself did not look much like an undertaker. He was short and jolly, and wore a flowered waistcoat with bright brass buttons that strained over his rotund belly. ‘Hot today, isn’t it, miss?’ he said, wiping his forehead with a blue handkerchief. ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll have everything arranged. I’ll send Mrs Pegler around now to lay out the body, and I will bring the coffin later. I can let you have our best hearse today, but I’m afraid there’s only the one horse. Do you want the black ostrich feathers? It’s three shillings extra for the hire.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Grace. She would pay for these out of her own pocket too. There must be no pauper’s funeral for Rosa. She would have the same dignity in death that she had in life. ‘Where might I find the gravedigger?’

  ‘Harry and his mates are probably in the White Swan right now. You don’t want to go in there, miss, it’s no place for a lady. I’ll find Harry for you. His fee is two shillings. Leave it with me, and I’ll pass it on.’

  A few hours later, everything was done. The physician from the workhouse, the nearest doctor, had come to the house and examined the deceased and written out a death certificate. A black ribbon hung from the door knocker, and she had purchased black armbands for herself and George. The hearse stood waiting in the lane, the horse shuffling in its black-plumed harness. Rosa had been dressed in her best gown and laid out in the coffin, pale wood with brass mounts, and was resting now in the parlour. In daylight, her face looked less sunken and haggard than it had last night. She was at peace.

  People came and went, neighbours and friends coming in to view the body and speak softly to George. He barely noticed them, but he looked up when Grace fastened the black band around his arm. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Are you all right, George?’

  Mute with grief, he shook his head. ‘Where are the children?’ Grace asked.

  ‘In the kitchen. I thought it best to keep them out of the way.’

  Exhausted and sleepless, Grace went into the kitchen and found the children sitting at the table, looking frightened. She kissed them all. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘No,’ said Albert. His lower lip was trembling, and he was doing his best not to cry.

  There was bread and cheese in the larder. The bread was a little stale and she had to pare mould off the cheese, but she managed to lay out some food for the children. Unable to contemplate the thought of eating herself, she made a cup of tea.

  ‘Why is Mummy sleeping?’ asked Daisy. Her little face was anxious, her blue eyes clouded with puzzlement.

  Her heart aching, Grace kissed the child again. ‘She’s not sleeping, my sweet. She has gone away.’

  ‘But she is here,’ said Harry, equally puzzled. ‘She’s in the other room, with Daddy.’

  Oh, lord, Grace thought in despair, how do you explain death to a five-year-old? She wondered what George had told them. ‘Her spirit has gone away,’ she said gently. ‘In a little while, they will take the rest of her away too. They will lay her in the churchyard.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Harry.

  ‘So she can be near to God,’ Grace said. ‘That is where her spirit has gone. To be with God.’

  ‘But why does God want to take Mummy?’ Harry asked.

  To that, she could make no answer.

  She was just finishing her tea when the clock in the parlour struck noon. In the distance she could hear the tolling of church bells. Someone knocked on the front door, hard and peremptory. George opened it, and she heard the vicar’s voice.

  ‘Come along, my sweets,’ she said. She ushered the children upstairs to their room, then took a deep breath and walked back downstairs.

  The funeral took place in the parlour, a dozen people crowded into the little room around the coffin with more in the lane outside listening through the window, while the vicar read the service in a deep, sonorous voice. Afterwards Mr Jevons and his assistants carried the coffin to the hearse and loaded it aboard, and then the procession set off towards the church, the hearse leading the way, the vicar and George and Grace walking behind with a few of the neighbours following. In the street, people turned and bowed or curtseyed as the hearse passed, the men removing their hats, and then stood and watched as the procession moved down the street.

  At the graveside in All Saints churchyard there was a short service of committal. Grace did not really hear what the vicar said. She stood, gripping George’s hand tightly and watching as the coffin was lowered into the newly-dug grave. Moving forward, she knelt and picked up a handful of soft earth and sprinkled it gently onto the coffin. A fresh wave of grief and shock washed over her, and she rose and turned away. She felt George’s arm around her shoulders, comforting her, but nothing could hold back the tears. Standing in the hazy sunlight she wept for the end of joy, for the end of a love she had thought would never end.

  *

  Grace remained at Bell Lane for another two days. She wrote to Mela, telling her what had happened, and received a letter in reply so full of love and sympathy that Grace started to weep again. Mela asked if she could come and help, but Grace wrote back to say no, she could manage.

  She packed away Rosa’s clothes, and then cleaned and aired the house thoroughly to get rid of any last lingering trace of illness. Leaving the twins with Mrs Berton, one of the neighbours, she took Albert with her to the market and bought bread and potatoes, salt fish and beans and cheese, good nourishing food that would keep even in the heat. Back at Bell Lane she cleaned the kitchen and polished the pots and pans until they shone.

  Apart from the visit to the market, all three children stayed close by her. Daisy and Harry were always playing around her feet, and several times she nearly tripped over them, but she had no heart to scold them. Albert offered to help her when he could, but otherwise sat quietly and watched her work, saying very little. The twins, she saw, were already beginning to forget, but poor little Albert was suffering.

  ‘He is taking the loss very ill,’ she said to George on the second evening, when he returned home from work. He had gone back to his job the day after the funeral, his employers having allowed him only a single day off. Now they were in the kitchen, she preparing supper and he washing the dust from his face and hands. ‘You must be careful of him. Comfort him, and give him plenty of love. He needs it.’

  ‘I know.’ George was still hollow-eyed with grief himself, struggling to come to terms with his loss. Grace watched him sit down at the table, a mug of tea in his hand. ‘I can stay a few more days,’ she said. ‘No one will mind.’

  George looked up at her and smiled his kind smile. ‘We can manage,’ he said. ‘You must go, love. You have work to do. Rosa told me about your new job.’

  ‘I have made lists of what needs to be done,’ Grace said. ‘Mrs Berton and the other neighbours will keep an eye out for the children, and help them if they get into distress, but you must take care of them and make sure they are safe and well fed. You will need to feed them in the morning before you go to work, and again at midday as well as their evening meal. I have left some recipes for you to
follow.’

  She handed George a sheaf of papers. He peered at them doubtfully, and Grace felt a twinge of misgiving.

  ‘Rebecca will come in once a week to do laundry,’ she said. Rebecca was Mrs Berton’s daughter, an industrious girl of about twelve. Grace was paying her a couple of shillings a week from her own purse. ‘I will come again as soon as I can.’

  The school holidays were about to begin, and the Clares were going as they did every year to the seaside in East Anglia. Grace had volunteered to run a nursery at the Clare School so she could stay in London to spend time with the children. Her job in Sevenoaks would not start until September.

  ‘Thank you.’ George looked down at his tea for a moment, embarrassed by his poverty, and then looked up again. ‘You must not worry for us,’ he said quietly. ‘We will get by.’

  Grace watched him for a while longer. Her misgivings grew stronger. ‘The landlord’s agent called today,’ she said. ‘The rent was in arrears. Did you know?’

  The embarrassment deepened. ‘Rosa looked after that side of things,’ George said. ‘How much do we owe?’

  ‘Nothing, now. I paid him. But George, you must learn to keep accounts, and make budgets and stick to them. There is the rent, and food, and the coal merchant to be paid, and of course there is the burial fund to be kept up. You must not allow yourself to fall into debt.’

  ‘I will try,’ said George. ‘The truth is, I’m not very good with numbers.’ She started to speak and he held up a hand. ‘But I will do my best. I will care for the children and make sure they have a good home. I’ll do it for them, and I’ll do it for Rosa, too. I won’t let her down.’

  She wanted to believe him. She was deeply fond of George; there was no kinder or gentler man in the world. But it was no secret that Rosa had been the strong one in the family, and without her as his prop and mainstay, George might well begin to crumble.

  In the morning she departed. George had already gone to work. The twins clung to her, one to each leg, and Albert’s lower lip trembled once more. She kissed them all, holding them close while her heart ached for them. ‘Be good, little ones,’ she said, caressing their hair. ‘Do as your daddy tells you, and be kind to him, and each other.’

  ‘We shall,’ said Albert.

  ‘I will see you soon,’ she said. She kissed them again and turned away to the door. Outside, she walked towards the railway station, surrounded by the clopping of horses’ hooves and the rumble of wagon wheels, the shouts of workmen and the clack of machinery from nearby factories, the air full of coal smoke and steam with the sun shining through a dull orange haze, and she felt the tears on her face once more.

  She knew what she was going towards. But she also knew, painfully, what she was leaving behind.

  Chapter 3

  In August the Clares departed for the seaside as planned, and Grace remained behind in Hackney, alone in the house with a single servant for company. She spent as much time as possible with her niece and nephews, travelling each day by train to Rotherhithe, going against the tide of workers less fortunate than her who flooded in from the newly burgeoning suburbs to the south-east to work in the hot, quickly expanding city. Sometimes on fine days she and the children went further on the train, up to Greenwich Park where the air was cleaner and clearer and occasional breezes blew through the trees.

  In the park, the children ran about like young lambs in fresh pasture. Their usual playground was a muddy street or a tiny yard at the back of their Rotherhithe house, and the green grass was a novelty for them. Here they could really be children and Grace took great delight in throwing balls and playing hide and seek with them. Together on such days they could, for a short time, forget the tragedy that was the loss of their mother.

  ‘Look, look, Auntie Grace, I can come down this big hill so fast,’ cried Albert as he rolled over and over down the steep incline from the top of the park, up near the observatory. Grace watched in some alarm at first, thinking that the younger twins would want to follow where their older brother led, but they both clung to her as they watched Albert whizz down the hill and then race back up again until he got tired halfway to the top.

  ‘I think Albert is very brave, Auntie Grace,’ said Daisy. ‘This hill is so very high. I would be scared to go down it so fast.’

  Harry said, ‘I’m not scared to go down it, but I don’t want to climb back up.’

  ‘That is a sign that you are still too young to try rolling down,’ said Grace. ‘I should wait until you don’t think it is such a great climb back up.’

  ‘I think they should have a train to bring you back up,’ said Harry.

  ‘I think even a big steam engine would have trouble climbing that hill,’ responded his aunt, ‘but engines are doing such magic new things all the time that maybe one day they will make an engine that can. Would you like to make such an engine, Harry?’

  ‘I want to make an engine that can fly,’ replied Harry, and they all laughed as they imagined what a flying steam engine would look like.

  ‘I think that being up on this hill is a bit like flying in the air,’ said Daisy.

  Grace smiled at the little girl. ‘I think you are right, sweetheart. If you go to the brow of the hill and look out over the city, you can see it as if from the air.’

  They walked slowly up to the summit of the hill. ‘Hold on to your hats, children, it is rather windy,’ she told them. ‘But at least the wind has cleared the dust and smoke from the air, and that means we can see a long way. See how many church towers you can count?’ Rosa, when she was well, had been teaching the children to count and read, Grace knew, but she was not certain how much they remembered.

  ‘You can see everything from up here, Auntie Grace,’ said Harry. ‘You can see the whole world from up here, can’t you?’

  ‘Well, maybe not the whole world, Harry, but you can see all of London. Look, there is the tower of All Saints church near your house. And you can see all the docks, too. there is the new dock that your father is working so hard on.’

  ‘Fa comes home late and very tired from work,’ said Albert, running over to join them. ‘Mrs Berton says he works too hard because he misses Mum. Do you think that is true, Auntie Grace?’

  ‘I think he works so hard to make a good life for you all,’ said Grace, ‘but I know that he misses your mother very much, as do we all.’

  The little group stood for a few minutes looking out over London, each wrapped in their own memories of Rosa. The twins moved closer to Grace and Albert reached out and took her hand.

  ‘Is Mummy really never coming back?’ asked Daisy. ‘Some mothers go away, and then come back. Maybe our mummy will come back too.’

  Grace hated to spoil her young niece’s hopes, but knew what she had to say. ‘Your mummy has had to go to be with God and he needs her to stay with him, so she won’t be coming back to us. She was so very sad to leave you all, but she will be waiting with God in heaven for you and she is looking down on you from heaven too.’

  ‘I think God is mean to keep Mummy,’ said Harry. ‘I said so to Mrs Rev’rend at Sunday school and she was very angry with me and said I was wicked to say such things.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t say such things in Sunday school, Harry,’ said Grace seriously, ‘Mrs Reverend will think you have been brought up a heathen.’

  ‘What is a heathen?’ asked Albert.

  ‘Someone who does not believe in God, Albert, and you know that your mother would want you to love God. She believed he was a kind and gentle God and would want you to think so too.’

  ‘Mrs Rev’rend makes God sound scary rather than kind,’ said Harry. ‘She is always talking about how he will punish us if we don’t behave.’

  Grace hugged the youngsters close to her. ‘Well, I prefer your mother’s kind of God to Mrs Reverend’s, don’t you? But don’t tell Mrs Reverend I said so, if you please.’

  *

  In later years, Grace would remember those three weeks she spent with the children
as a gift. The four of them explored the Tower of London, and St Paul’s cathedral and climbed the many steps of the Monument to get a different view of London. Grace regaled them with stories of Old London that she had learned from history books, and they tried to imagine the city below them as it would have been after the Great Fire two hundred years before. ‘How could fire have destroyed such a huge area?’ Harry had asked, and Grace explained how the fire had started. Albert said it was a lesson to be very careful with the kitchen fire at home.

  On Sundays, after church and Sunday school, George joined them on their rambles. On those days he dropped his worries and his sense of fun was partly restored by his children. Grace saw once more the gentle, kind and often funny man that her sister had fallen in love with and married. She wondered if she would ever find a man to love, as Rosa had loved George. She hoped so. Unlike Mela, she wanted one day to fall in love and be married, and she had high expectations of what married life would bring her.

  These Sunday outings with George and the family were happy, but they were also tinged with an inevitable sadness as they all felt the absence of Rosa. Often, though, they sensed that Rosa’s spirit was with them, especially when Grace and George spent hours talking about her. Grace told some simple stories of the happy days before she and Rosa were in the workhouse. She also talked to them about their aunt Edith and how she had plucked them from the workhouse and made a happy home for them. She wanted the children to know about their grandparents and their aunt, not only for the children’s sake but so that she could keep their memories alive in her own life. Telling Albert, Daisy and Harry about them meant she had others to help keep their spirits alive now that Rosa and Edith were gone.

  She and George also told the children about Rosa and her work as a seamstress working in a garment factory making uniforms. Rosa, as she had wished, had become able to earn her own living and was trusted by her employers with ‘specials’, making one-off uniforms for senior army and navy officers and sometimes even for Queen Victoria and her daughters when they wanted to dress for military occasions.