The Dressmaker's War

by Mary Chamberlain

  They rose as the judge came in, the same one as at the arraignment three months ago. He was old, had a face like a skull, sunken eyes and jagged cheeks. Half-glasses toppled on the end of his nose, craggy hands hovered beneath his gown. He looked like a cadaver. Ada wondered if he was ill. She curled her hands round the wooden rail of the dock, fingers on the top, thumbs underneath. It was rough, splintered by other people’s thumbnails, clawing for their lives. She was going to be sick.

  “Please give the court your full name.”

  “Ada,” she said. “Ada Margaret Vaughan.” Margaret, after her mother.

  The clerk read out the charge: “…in the Central Criminal Court, Rex versus Ada Vaughan…on the charge of unlawfully killing Stanley John Lovekin, on the night of the fourteenth June 1947…”

  The ceiling pressed down and the paneled walls closed in. Ada felt frail and small, the judge high on his bench and the jury on theirs, Mr. Wallis in the pit. Mr. Harris-Jones, the prosecutor, was swaggering as if he’d already won the case. Harris-Jones was older than Wallis, experienced, you could tell, the way he rocked on his heels and his grown-up hands collared the edges of his gown.

  She began to quiver, her legs acting like she needed calipers to keep them strong and straight. She wasn’t sure she could stay standing, didn’t see a single friendly face. She understood what that phrase meant now, weight of the law. Not the copper’s heavy hand on your shoulder—You’d better come along, miss—but the gravity of justice crushing down on her, grinding her to dust. She looked up at the windows in search of earth and sky and the horizon in between, but the windows were set high in the wall and all she saw was the thick green phlegm that blew in smelly squats through the lanes and round the towers of the City.

  “How do you plead?” the judge said.

  She could say guilty, have it over and done with, go back to her cell. But she’d hang if she did, and Stanley Lovekin wasn’t going to have that over her. She was going to survive. She was a survivor. Lucky.

  “Not guilty,” she said quietly.

  “Speak up,” the judge said. The room was hollow, she’d have to project. From the diaphragm. She could hear Miss Skinner’s voice in her head all those years ago. You may look like a swan, but if you talk like a sparrow, who will take you seriously?

  “Not guilty.” E-nun-ci-ate.

  The judge leant towards Mr. Wallis.

  “Not guilty of murder. Guilty of manslaughter through provocation,” Mr. Wallis said.

  “Thank you.” The judge wrote something on the pad in front of him. His pen was gold. Must be worth a bob or two.

  “This is a most unusual defense,” the judge said, turning towards Harris-Jones. “I trust you have acquainted the prosecution with the law on provocation, as it stands?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Wallis said.

  The judge turned to address the jury. “The jury must decide whether the person charged has been so provoked as to lose self-control, that is, provoked beyond reason. Normally”—the judge paused, eyed the jurors one by one, eyed Ada, head bowed, trying not to pick at the skin on the side of her nail—“the provocation would fall under the following expectations.” He held up his hand, fingers splayed wide. “First, by witnessing the sodomy of his son.” He took a deep breath, pulled down his index finger. “Second, by witnessing the adultery of his wife.” He bent his middle finger over. “Or, third, the unlawful arrest of an Englishman, and, fourth, the mistreatment of a relative.” He said the last bit all in one breath, his voice higher and higher, pulling down his third and fourth fingers simultaneously, turning as he did so to Mr. Wallis again.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Mr. Wallis said.

  “And there is only one possible line of defense left? A most unusual line?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Of a grossly insulting assault?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Very well.” The judge grunted.

  She felt the jury looking at her. Judging already. Appearances matter, Ada knew that, better than them all. I thought you were one of the customers, looking so smart. What they saw was her in prison togs, looking guilty. They’d condemn her before the trial began. The jury foreman had a mustache and a row of ribbons across his top pocket. War hero. Ada didn’t trust men with mustaches, not after Stanislaus. She put her hand to her hair, made sure that it was in place, watched as Mr. Harris-Jones stood up, stacked his folders on the desk before him, and turned to face the jury.

  “The case for the prosecution,” he said, looking at the jurors, “is straightforward. There is no issue that the deceased was unlawfully killed by the administration of gas when he was unconscious. There is a confession, corroborated by the evidence. The only issue is whether a grossly insulting assault caused the defendant to lose control in circumstances where a reasonable person in her position and with her background would have done so.”

  Fear. She remembered how it tasted, how it charged through her body like an engine and left her quivering in its tracks. There was a policeman who stood behind her in the dock. She turned, wanted to catch his eye, snatch a crumb of sympathy, but he was staring straight ahead, expressionless.

  “The case for this grossly insulting assault, members of the jury”—the prosecutor spoke the words slowly, carefully, like it was a foreign language that no one understood—“goes back to the start of the war.”

  He laid it out: Stanislaus von Lieben. Seducer. A cad and a coward, undoubtedly. But did he abuse her? Assault or insult her? He twisted his hand in a so-so manner. “Did he abandon her? Or were they separated in the anarchy of war, through no one’s fault?”

  He laid out her life like a corpse, dissecting it. Here’s the head, here’s the feet, large intestine, small intestine. But there was nothing about love or guts or heartache or fear, nothing about what war did to her, the inside of her, Ada Vaughan, her dreams and hopes and ambitions.

  Internment by the Nazis. Secret pregnancy and a birth. Herr Weiss. Years locked up in that room. Perhaps scared, hungry. A little boy, Thomas, Thomas, in German. German, members of the jury. The loss of this child.

  “Was she so haunted by his memory? Driven to murder by it?” His voice was sarcastic.

  He was looking at her, directing the jury to follow his eyes, to see her dressed as a common-or-garden villain, incapable of knowing right from wrong.

  Lovekin. Stanley Lovekin. Stanislaus von Lieben. Had he been the architect of her decline, her torments for the last eight years, the cause of her suffering? Her fall from grace, into a life of sin and despair? Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Or was he simply a man like any other?

  “What was the nature of the assault? That he had reappeared?” He paused and looked at the jury, man to man, eyeing each one, before he stared back at Ada. She stood in the dock barely above the railing, a caged animal, a lunatic. “If, indeed, it was him.”

  “It was,” Ada shouted out.

  “You must be silent,” the judge said.

  He had no heart, this man, Ada could see.

  —

  THE JURY HAD her confession. I, Ada Margaret Vaughan…She had signed it. A policeman said how he’d found the body on the bed, wearing only a shirt and vest, no trousers. Reeked of whiskey. A detective said that the sole fingerprints on the gas tap were Ada’s, and on the window frame, where she’d closed the gaps in the curtains, and on the bottom of the door, where she had wedged the draft excluder. Those were the facts of the case. Incontestable. Guilty of murder. But manslaughter? Provocation? Grossly. Insulting. Assault?

  —

  SISTER BRIGITTE HAD plumped up since the war. She stood in the witness box with a clean, starched wimple and dark gray scapular over her black tunic, her brass crucifix glinting under the electric lights. It was odd, seeing her here in London. It seemed as if she belonged somewhere else, on the Continent, in war.

  Yes, Ada had sought refuge in the motherhouse in Namur. They understood she had been separated from her husband, Stanislaus von Lieben
. After the Nazi occupation of Belgium, the British nuns had been interned, taken to Munich, forced to nurse the Germans, the elderly.

  Sister Brigitte. Hearing her words breathed life into Ada’s memories, reanimated the corpse of a life that Mr. Harris-Jones had laid out. Ada knew she was trembling. She could hear the bombs and the shouting, smell the cordite and the burning and the fear that had surrounded her that day in Namur.

  “If you had refused to nurse these Germans,” Mr. Harris-Jones said, putting the emphasis on Germans, “would you have been shot?”

  “Possibly,” Sister Brigitte said. “We did not put it to the test.”

  “You made no attempt to resist?”

  She looked hard at Mr. Harris-Jones, as if she could see through him to his soul.

  “Our vocation,” she said, “is to nurse the elderly, wherever and whenever it is needed. Our vocation knows neither politics nor war. Nor does old age.”

  “High principles,” Mr. Harris-Jones said. “Convenient, in the face of the most evil regime in history, would you not say?”

  “Only those without principles resort to cynicism,” Sister Brigitte said, eyes level with his. She stared until he looked away to his notes. Sister Brigitte had faced the Nazis down. She wasn’t fazed by a smarmy barrister, even if he was a King’s Counsel.

  “I understand you stayed on in Munich for several months after the war was over,” Mr. Harris-Jones said. “Can you tell me why?”

  “We couldn’t abandon our old people. Not until we were sure that their welfare would be taken care of.”

  “The defendant, Ada Vaughan—” Mr. Harris-Jones said.

  “Sister Clara.”

  “Sister Clara. That was how she was known?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she work with you?”

  “Yes. She wasn’t a trained nurse, but she could carry out the menial tasks. She worked hard.”

  “And she behaved as a nun?”

  “Yes,” Sister Brigitte said.

  “And the Nazis never guessed she was not whom she claimed to be? Even though she was pregnant?”

  “She wore a borrowed habit, from a nun much larger than herself. It did not show.”

  “And when she gave birth?”

  “Fortunately, there were no complications. The baby came in the night. Our dormitory cell was out of earshot of the guards.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “No, good fortune.” Sister Brigitte smiled. “We had prayed.” Ada knew that smile. “The Virgin Mary was looking after us.”

  “And the baby? What happened?”

  Sister Brigitte swallowed, looked over to Ada. Who did she see in the dock? What was she thinking?

  “The baby was born dead.”

  —

  No!

  —

  HIS DELICATE SKIN, marbled purple and blue, like the inside cover of a prayer book. She’d pulled the edge of the towel from his face, so she would remember it. His eyes were closed and puffy, deep folds round the sockets. His hands were clutched in little fists, pressed to either side of his cheeks. He was bald, his head slicked with blood and mucus. He lay there with naked shoulders and creases in his neck. He was sleeping.

  He was alive.

  Ada remembered the black stole fluttering in Father Friedel’s bag from Thomas’s breath, his little nostrils flaring as the air filled his lungs, as his chest moved, in out, in out. It was his breath, not the breeze from the bag as it was clicked shut.

  Sister Brigitte had baptized him, so he didn’t go to Limbo, had held Ada’s hand as Father Friedel left. “May his little soul rest in peace. Say it with me, Sister Clara.”

  “No,” Ada had said. “He’s not dead.”

  “Say it with me, Sister Clara, May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.”

  No. Thomas was alive. She would not say those words.

  —

  “HE WAS ALIVE,” Ada screamed out. “Sister Brigitte, he was alive.”

  “Miss Vaughan,” the judge said, “silence, please.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The priest helped us. He smuggled the baby’s body away.”

  “Where?”

  Sister Brigitte shrugged. “We don’t know.”

  “How did he dispose of the baby?”

  “We don’t know. But there were funerals almost every day. He could slip the baby’s body into one of the old people’s coffins. No one would know.”

  “And what about Sister Clara?”

  Sister Brigitte looked towards Ada. Tenderness was there, contrition, too. “She found it difficult to accept.”

  “That he was dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Postpartum depression is a terrible condition as is,” Sister Brigitte said. “We couldn’t have it get any worse. It was prudent all round to humor her.”

  “Lie to her, you mean? Let her believe the baby was alive?”

  “Yes. Sometimes a white lie is for the best, and for the greater good. God forgives those little venial sins. And it was war.”

  No, Ada thought, no. This wasn’t what happened. Thomas was alive. Sister Brigitte knew this. Why was she saying this?

  “And when she returned at the end of the war, did you continue with the white lie?”

  “We had to,” Sister Brigitte said. “She was in a dreadful state. She was half dead, out of her mind. What the Germans did…” She looked up. “She couldn’t take that news.”

  “Did she try to find her son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you not tell her then?”

  “No. We thought it best that she try to find him, and learn for herself that he couldn’t be traced, rather than have us tell her he was dead. We thought if she still had hope, it would help her to recover from everything she had been through.”

  “You knew she was lying, didn’t you?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “About being married.”

  “I didn’t take a judgment on that. It was the war.”

  “You were told by Sister Monica that Ada Vaughan was not married to Stanislaus von Lieben. Her passport was in the name of Vaughan. Vaughan was her maiden name. We have an affidavit from Sister Monica to attest to that. Jury”—he turned to the men sitting in rows, hands on their files—“item one in your bundle. Ada Vaughan wore a curtain ring as a wedding band. You must have known that she was a liar. A fantasist.”

  “It was war,” Sister Brigitte said. “It was terrible. We were treated without any respect. In war, people do anything to survive. I don’t condemn anyone for that.”

  “You said that you were above war.”

  “You’re twisting my words. That is not what I said. I said old age does not know war.”

  That’s what they did, these lawyers. Take the facts out of context, so they sat skewed, like a picture hanging crooked on a wall, or one of those mirrors in a fairground that show you squat or stretched. Ada wanted to shout out to the jury, Can’t you see what he’s doing? And if they did, would it make a difference, would it matter?

  “Did Ada Vaughan visit you after your return to England?”

  “Sadly not.” Sister Brigitte shook her head. “She would have been welcome.”

  “Let me ask one more time. You are certain that her baby died?”

  “There was no pulse, no heartbeat, no breath. The baby was born dead. Without doubt.”

  “Ada Vaughan would be lying when she said he was alive.”

  “She thought he was. She was deluded. There is a difference. She couldn’t accept he was dead, and we didn’t tell her, as I have said.”

  Sister Brigitte stepped down from the witness box, kissed her crucifix, left the room, did not look back. Ada should have gone to visit, she should have. But what would they have talked about? Do you remember when…? There was no joy there, no happiness to look back on. Just war and emptiness and sadness.

  —

&nbs
p; ADA WAS BACK in her cell at the end of the first day. Mr. Wallis came with a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of ginger beer, face like a wounded weasel’s.

  “The baby was dead,” he said. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t know it,” Ada said. “That’s what Sister Brigitte said.” Sister Brigitte’s words clanged in her head. She wanted to crash her skull against the wall, drive out the demons that had settled there.

  “I can’t defend you if you don’t tell me what happened. Or if you just denied it to yourself.”

  “Why would I do that?” Ada said. Her voice quivered. “I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t?” Mr. Wallis bit into his sandwich, and Ada watched as his tiny mouth chewed. She couldn’t eat, not now. All she could think about were the empty pits and the mottled skin of the cadavers buried underground. Little Thomas lay stretched out in a coffin with a stranger, an old man who’d emptied his life and flushed away his love.

  “Death.” She sat with her hands clasped round her waist, rocked herself, forward and back, forward and back, as if her mind was splitting in two, the memories of hopelessness driving a wedge between the parts. “Death and darkness.”

  “Talk to me, Ada,” Mr. Wallis said. “Tell me what happened.”

  Ada sat, rocking, rocking, unable to talk, trying to making sense of it all.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING the gallery was full again. Ada twisted in the dock, tried to see who was there. Maybe her mother had come today.

  Mr. Wallis had warned her that the prosecution would jump round in time, like a jack-in-the-box, calling witnesses so that the jury saw her in a certain way, to prove that there was no provocation. He’d said that Scarlett would be called, though Ada didn’t see why. Scarlett had nothing to do with the war, or Stanislaus; she didn’t even know about Thomas, hadn’t seen a thing that evening when Stanley Lovekin died. Ada stood in the dock, nervous and on edge.

  Scarlett entered the courtroom. Low-heeled shoes, shabby checked coat, head scarf knotted at the front, not a trace of face paint. She could be anybody, a plain, anonymous woman.