Tattycoram

by Audrey Thomas

  “Mr. Dickens goes, but he is a grown man. Nevertheless, I even fret about him sometimes, although I know he must because of his work.”

  The freedom to move about, the freedom not to be one drab child in a host of drab children. On washdays, when I helped the washerwoman with the family wash and my hands became rough and raw from the soda and scalding water; on days when Charley had been fractious and I had to sit up half the night with him and still be up before dawn to light the fires and heat water; on days when nothing seemed to go right — then I grumbled a little to myself, but really, I felt so free compared to my prison life at the hospital that my grumbling did not last long.

  One person, however, could always rub me the wrong way and reduce me to smouldering fury.

  My single extravagance was stationery, for every fortnight I wrote a letter home to Father and Mother in Shere, describing my life on Doughty Street and the wonderful sights that I saw on my walks through London. I told them how well I was treated and how I prayed for them both every night and for Sam and Jonnie as well.

  Until the penny post came in, I had to save enough to pay for the delivery of the letter, for I knew they would go without to pay the postage if I didn’t.

  I told them how noisy London was, once you got out into the crowded streets, and how often I thought of the music of the Tillingbourne as it rushed along and the song of the lark in the clear air. Sometimes my tears smeared the letters by the end, for I did sorely miss them and always would.

  Mrs. Dickens had a young sister named Georgina. She was just a little girl, no more than ten or eleven when I first went into service in Doughty Street, but she had a sharp tongue and made pronouncements as though she were much older.

  “Who is that girl?” I heard her say, shortly after I arrived. “Surely that is not the new housemaid?”

  Mrs. Dickens said yes, that was indeed who I was.

  “She looks like a gypsy, she looks like a girl not to be trusted.”

  She liked to call me Coram, unlike the rest of the household. Early on Mr. Dickens had suggested that I might prefer not to be called by the name of the Foundling’s father and that I might prefer to be addressed as Harriet or Hattie.

  Georgina was in and out of every room, always criticizing her older sister, digging at her in little ways, almost mocking her now that she was heavy and slow with her pregnancy. When I brought Charley down, she would grab him and say, “Thank you, Coram, you may go,” as though she were the lady of the house.

  And when Mr. Dickens was around, it was plain that she worshipped him. Of course he liked that and never really saw her other side. I had known one or two girls like her at the hospital, girls who took pleasure in criticizing others in subtle ways, goading them into bad behaviour or tears; girls with a mean streak, telltales as well, but who could be all sweetness and light when it suited them. They were usually favourites with the more gullible adults.

  Twice Georgina nearly cost me my place. Mrs. Dickens could be slow and forgetful, whereas Miss Georgy was swift and clever and as keen on order as her brother-in-law. Once, when she came upon her sister crying (Mrs. Dickens had forgotten to do something important — decline or accept a dinner invitation — and this had led to some awkwardness), she said, “For heaven’s sake, stop that crying. You know how Charles hates it when you cry. What’s done is done, and crying won’t make it any better.”

  A proper little madam, she could be. Very unchildlike.

  One afternoon, she called me back just as I was leaving the parlour.

  “Oh Coram, would you stop a moment please? I wish to ask your advice about something.”

  Sensing a trap, I returned reluctantly and stood in front of her. Mrs. Dickens smiled encouragement as she peeled an orange and fed slices of fruit to her son. He struggled to get down when he saw me come back; Charley and I got on very well. I shook my head at him and told him I would be back for him later. Miss Georgy watched this exchange with a little smirk. She removed a length of brown material from a large paper parcel by her chair.

  “I have been invited to a fancy-dress party at the end of the month, and I decided it would be great fun to go as a Foundling Girl. Mama has bought the material but we have no pattern. I wonder, do you still have your old uniform by you?”

  “No, Miss Georgy. I left it at the hospital.”

  “What a pity, but never mind, you can describe it for me instead. I could ask Charles when he comes in, I know he goes to the chapel every Sunday, and he is so observant, but I do not like to trouble him with so trivial a matter.”

  I remained silent; I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Well?” She had taken out a writing tablet and a pencil.

  “I don’t remember, Miss Georgy.”

  “You wore that outfit every day for ten years and you don’t remember?”

  “Yes, Miss Georgy.”

  She looked me full in the face. How she was enjoying this! My cheeks burned.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I stared straight at her — insolent servant! — and said nothing. I may even have shrugged.

  “Georgy,” Mrs. Dickens said, “leave it, dear. You can ask Charles. He’ll be down soon.”

  “I will not ask Charles. I will ask Coram, who for some strange reason refuses to reply. The material is already bought, as you can see, and I am determined to use it.”

  At that moment Charley reached for his mother’s teacup, which she was just raising to her lips, grabbed it and would have tipped it over her frock if I hadn’t darted forward and taken it from him.

  “Kate,” Miss Georgy said, “pay attention to what you are doing.”

  That was too much — this high and mighty little baggage with her superior airs. In my anger and frustration, and barely conscious of what I was doing, I threw the cup at the wall. Then I ran out of the room and up the stairs to the very top, to my room.

  How dare she! To pose as a Foundling Girl at a party; to wear once, and as a kind of joke, what I had had thrust upon me for ten years. And now I would be dismissed, I knew it, sent back to the hospital without a character, fit only to be a scullery maid or worse. And Matron and Mr. Brownlow, my family as well — disgracing myself before all those who had believed in me. I sobbed and sobbed.

  It was Fred who tapped on my door an hour later.

  “Hattie, Mr. Dickens wants to see you in his study.”

  I had never been in Mr. Dickens’s study before; no one was allowed in unless invited and I assume he did the dusting himself. I was too upset to take in much, but I saw him look up from a table covered with slips of blue paper.

  “Ah, Harriet. Come here, please. I understand you, ah, you broke a teacup.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I had not thought of you as clumsy.”

  “No sir, I am not, as a general rule.”

  “Then how came the teacup to be broken? Did you really throw it against the wall?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would you care to tell me why? I understand you rescued it from Charley. Why rescue it if you were going to destroy it a moment later?”

  I did not wish to answer; it would be Miss Georgy’s word against mine, a servant against a sister-in-law.

  He moved a little china monkey from one end of the table to the other, back and forth. “Look at me, Harriet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have nothing more to say on this matter? You are not going to try and defend yourself. Whine or cry?”

  I shook my head.

  “You know, I must write to Mr. Brownlow soon, for I gave my word I would keep him informed. What am I to say to him?”

  I could feel the traitor tears beginning, but I dug my nails into my palm and forced them down.

  “Very well. You may go.”

  A tear slid down my cheek, but he pretended not to notice.

  “Go where, sir?”

  “Why, back to work. What on earth did you think I meant?”

  At this the tears pour
ed down; I could not stop them. I searched blindly for the door, but he got up and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Listen to me, Hattie. Never be ashamed of where you came from, never. But mind your temper. If something provokes you — and I suspect Miss Georgy did not mean to provoke you — count to two and twenty before you begin smashing the china. Will you promise me that?”

  I couldn’t speak; I could only nod.

  “Two and twenty, remember?”

  I nodded again.

  “Say it.”

  “Yes, sir. Two and twenty.”

  “Good girl.”

  Cook told me later that she had eavesdropped behind the parlour door and that I had caused a great uproar. Miss Georgy wanted me dismissed and “sent back to where she came from,” but Mrs. Dickens defended me and said how good I was with Charley, how much she had come to depend on me. She said Miss Georgy must have touched a nerve when she brought up the subject of the Foundling uniform, that perhaps I had taken the whole thing too much to heart. She and Mrs. Dickens had quite a set-to about it, but then Mr. Dickens came in and agreed with his wife, that I might have felt mocked or made fun of. He was quite severe with Miss Georgy, much to Cook’s surprise.

  “But you minds how you goes, my girl, you’ve made an henimy of that one. And I don’t think as Master will be so forgiving a second time.”

  That evening I went to apologize to Mrs. Dickens.

  “We will say no more about it, Hattie, but remember that Mr. Dickens likes a smooth-running household. He doesn’t take kindly to disorder or disruption.”

  That night I prayed hard that God would help me to be a better person, and I vowed I would count to four and forty, eight and eighty, even, before I would ever be tempted to do such a thing again. I had had a very narrow escape.

  No one ever mentioned the incident afterwards, but one day, when Miss Georgina was putting on her bonnet in the hall and I had just come in from my half-day off, she stopped me.

  “Tell me, Coram, do you understand whom you are working for? Mr. Dickens is a very unusual man, a genius. The whole world will soon be talking of him. He can’t stand uproars; he must have peace and quiet. Sometimes I don’t think my sister understands that as well as I do. And now with another baby imminent.”

  She gave a dramatic sigh.

  “He’s a genius, Coram, and don’t you ever forget it. Your feelings don’t count, your little moods.”

  “Yes, Miss Georgina.”

  I wanted to ask her if she had enjoyed the fancy-dress party, but I counted to two and twenty and carried on up the stairs.

  Mary was born on the sixth of March, 1838. I hadn’t known about the screaming; I thought my mistress was going to die. Mr. Dickens’s mother, who was staying with us for the confinement, came down to the kitchen, where I was sitting with Cook and Charley and warming soft cloths by the stove. I had carried up can after can of water, hot and cold, with Mrs. Dickens lying in the big bed, all the colour bleached out of her face. Even her lips were white.

  “Is Charley all right?” she whispered.

  “Charley is fine, ma’am. He’s down in the kitchen with Cook and me, in the warm.”

  “But not too near the stove! He could burn himself on the stove!”

  “It’s all right. We tied him to the table leg with a bit of clothesline. He can move about, but he can’t get near the stove.”

  “Hattie, thank you . . . bless you . . . you are such a help to me.”

  And then her face twisted with pain and she cried out.

  Her torment went on for hours and hours. We could hear her screams all the way down to the bottom of the house. Mrs. Dickens Senior had sent for the doctor; the baby was stuck.

  “Is she going to die?”

  “Of course not, you silly goose. We all ’ave to bring forth in sorry, the Bible tells us so.”

  “But you heard her, the baby is stuck!”

  “Doctor will turn it.”

  Mr. Dickens, once the pain began, had called for his horse and ridden off to Richmond with his friend Mr. Forster.

  Charley had had his supper by now and had fallen asleep on my lap. I didn’t dare move him, so I carefully brought out my tatting shuttle and thread and began some new edging. I had made some lovely nightgowns for the new baby, but now I was working on a collar and cuffs for my mother. Cook had served us both with some cold meat, bread and pickle, and now she helped herself to a tot of port.

  The screams stopped.

  “She’s dead,” I said, “I knew it.”

  “Nonsense. Wait and see.”

  After a while Mr. Dickens’s mother came smiling into the kitchen with a bundle of bloody sheets. She saw her sleeping grandson and whispered, “It’s a wee girl. Now they have a pigeon pair.” She asked Cook to warm some beef tea.

  “It was a hard one, that?”

  “Very hard. She tore. But she’s all smiles now.”

  “Yes, we soon forgets the pain, that’s Nature’s way. Otherwise nobody’d ever ’ave a second one.” They smiled at one another and nodded.

  Cook said she knew a cousin whose baby was stuck so bad and they pulled so hard that its little leg came off in the midwife’s hands.

  Mrs. Dickens put the bloody sheets to soak in cold water, then asked me to carry Charley upstairs and sit by him until called. I was dripping with sweat and feeling faint. So that was what it was like to bear a child — “The baby was stuck”; “She tore”; “Its little leg came off in the midwife’s ’ands.” Screams and bloody sheets. I would never let that happen to me.

  The front door slammed and Mr. Dickens went pounding up the stairs; he had met the doctor on his way home. I heard his mother come out of the bedroom. “Hush, hush, they are both asleep.”

  Later, Cook and I were invited to see the new baby. My mistress was still pale, but she had a glow on her and looked very young and happy. The baby was in a cradle by the bed. I had seen hundreds of little babies at the Foundling, for I was one of the trusted big girls who stood with babies in their arms while the chaplain sprinkled them with water and gave them new names. “In the name of the Father . . .”

  This was different. Mr. Dickens was sitting close up to the bed, holding his wife’s hand, beaming.

  “She is to be called Mary,” he said, “after the dearest, sweetest girl who ever lived.” I thought this remark a bit peculiar, given the hell my mistress had just been through, but she smiled and nodded.

  “Yes, after Mary, but I think we shall call her Mamie amongst ourselves.”

  The baby was just another baby, red-faced and wrinkled. What brought tears to my eyes was the sight of the happy family: father, mother, newborn wanted child.

  We offered our congratulations and stole away.

  By the new year she was pregnant again.

  5

  “Writing to your sweetheart, Coram?”

  Miss Georgina often appeared in the kitchen without warning, hoping to catch us stuffing our faces with forbidden foods or entertaining riffraff. It drove Cook wild.

  “I am writing to my mother,” I said, without looking up.

  “Your mother?”

  “My foster mother, then.”

  “What a good girl you are, the very model of a foster daughter.”

  Miss Georgina had come down to ask Cook, as a special request from Mrs. Dickens, if she could make a Madeira cake and some flapjack because the family were coming to tea. Cook scowled, but of course she would do it.

  At the door Miss Georgy turned and addressed me once more.

  “Oh, Coram, can your foster mother read?”

  “Of course she can,” I lied. “Why?” (Count to two and twenty, count to two and twenty, one, two, three, four . . .)

  “I’m rather surprised, that’s all. How long has it been since you saw her?”

  “Over a year, but I shall see her soon.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m to go home for a few days around Easter.”

  “My goodness! Kate — your
mistress — can let you go when there is so much to do here?”

  Cook stopped on her way to the larder.

  “Mrs. Hogarth — your mother — will be coming to visit for a few days. It’s all arranged, Miss Georgina.”

  “Is it now? I have not heard of it. And Mrs. Hogarth is not a nursemaid. How typical of soft-hearted, soft-headed Kate!”

  Cook spoke up for me.

  “It’s in the contract, Miss Georgy. The girl gets three days off each year to go and see her mother.”

  “Well, you are a lucky girl. I shouldn’t think many servant girls have such agreements with their employers.”

  Smirk, smirk and she was gone.

  “I’ll flapjack ’er,” Cook said. “The sooner she’s growed up and married off and ’as a ’ousehold of ’er own to manage, the better for everybody.”

  “She’s never going to marry. I heard her say that to Madam.”

  “That’s unnatcherl. She’ll change ’er mind when she’s a little older.”

  “Why does she dislike me so?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s because of your curly hair. I thinks it’s because Master likes you. I thinks it’s because she’d like to be living ’ere.”

  I folded my letter and prepared to go back upstairs to the nursery. Charley was with his mother, being specially dressed up for his relatives in a new little sailor suit. The baby was asleep.

  “Mrs. Rogers,” I said (I never called her Cook to her face), “when the time comes, would you teach me how to make a simnel cake? I’ve been saving for the spices and such. Mrs. Dickens suggested I should take one to my mother when I go.”

  Cook looked up from where she was cracking eggs one-handed into a big bowl.

  “Of course, love. I’ll ’elp yer make the best cake you’ve never seen.”

  In the end, Mrs. Dickens said she wanted to help as well. And oh, what fun we had, with Cook’s big aprons tied around our middles, our arms dusty with flour. Carefully we measured out the cloves, the cinnamon, the currants and sultanas. Carefully we whisked together the eggs, sugar and butter. Oh so carefully we poured half the mixture into the tin, laid a circle of marzipan on the top, added the remaining batter.