Tattycoram

by Audrey Thomas

  “One heart,” I said, “is all I need.”

  There was silence for a while after that, and then he said, “May I go and fetch you a warmer covering? I think it would be nice if we sat here a while longer and enjoyed this still moment together.”

  We gave ourselves a holiday the next day and took a walk on the Downs. Away in an orchard women and children on ladders were picking the last apples, and, even farther away, we heard the horn and the barking hounds, long before we saw the distant pink-coated hunters galloping madly over the landscape.

  “‘This is the way the gentlemen ride,’” Sam said, remembering the old game on Grandfather’s knee, “only every farmer wants to be a gentleman now, and his wife must be a lady. They care nothing for their workers. Times have changed and are changing still. And now the railway cuts through the valley, the city comes to the country. We are fortunate to have skills that will be in demand for a long time to come.”

  “And land,” I said. “No one can turn us away.”

  “Not for ninety-nine years, at any rate.”

  The banns were read and we were married quietly a few weeks later, with the Misses Bray, very old now but as generous as ever, standing up for us, along with Old Albert, whom we had brought out specially from London.

  I was thirty-six years old and Sam was forty-five.

  And now we went up the stairs at night together.

  To our delight, the following year a little girl was born to us. As I lay in the upstairs room, panting, clutching the bedposts, I remembered the long ago day in the kitchen at Doughty Street and asking, “Is she going to die?”

  Yet out of such pain, such joy. We named her Anne, after Mother, but for some reason she was called Rosie, almost from the first. She had my springy curls but Sam’s colouring, hair the colour of new pennies and, in time, lots of freckles. Digger became her special protector as though to show Angus he too could round up little lambs when called upon to do so. He placed himself between her and the fender and always accompanied her on her toddling explorations of the outside world.

  After Rosie there was a little boy who lived long enough to open his eyes, look blankly at his mother and father and then close them again. We named him John. He was a tiny baby and could easily have fitted in one of Sam’s big shoes. His father made him a lovely coffin out of oak, and we buried him next to the rest of the family. Mother told me how people said to her, after each dead baby, “Well, it isn’t as though you really knew him,” and how she wanted to scream at them that if you carry a child beneath your heart for nine months, you do know it, that it has its own particular movements, its own uniqueness, right from the start. How each time she buried this child she already knew, she buried a piece of her heart.

  There were no more babies after that, but we were more than content with Rosie. Down came the little chair I had sat in all those years ago; down came poor old Baby (I made her a new dress from a checked handkerchief); out came the wooden hen with her revolving egg.

  “I had forgotten about that hen,” Sam said, and he began making copies to sell at the annual Guildford Fair, where they were a great success. We all loved the fair, but coming home I always said, “Well, that’s enough bustle for this year.”

  And so the years went on, the seasons came and went, and suddenly Rosie was nearly ten years old, one of the best scholars at the village school and, when at home, a great help to me, teasing and carding the wool from Sam’s sheep, learning to use a spindle. And of course I taught her the pleasures of tatting and embroidery. She was a chatterbox and asked the drollest questions: “Mam, what do the cows think about when they stand there staring?”; “Mam, why does Digger only bark? Why can’t he talk, like me?”

  Sam said one night, after Rosie had gone up, “Ah, Hattie, isn’t it grand to think that child will never have a number hung round her neck, like you, or printed across her back, like me?”

  “Are we going to tell her, Sam — our history?”

  “Oh yes, all of it. Nothing must be hidden. We should tell her soon, before the old gossips do.”

  And yet I kept putting it off; could not the past simply remain the past? I think the truth was that I did not know how to tell her about my first mother giving me up. Rosie would ask so many questions, might demand that we set off “at once” (one of her favourite phrases) to find her, whereas I had long ago given up any desire to do so. My real mother was the mother who had loved me and cared for me in Shere. As for Sam, boys and men still poached, although they were no longer transported. That Rosie would more readily understand.

  14

  One May day, when Sam was away to Albury, taking measurements for a grand banister to go in a new house under construction there and Rosie was at school, two strangers appeared at my open door: a tall thin woman in black shawl and bonnet and a little man, not much taller than a dwarf, also dressed in black, very rusty black. Digger and Angus had both gone off on some adventure or other, so I had no barked warning at the visitors’ approach. I had been up to the shop for some lump sugar (Sam liked his tea heavily sugared) and had just put the kettle on when these two odd creatures appeared.

  “Hello,” I said, “are you looking for me?” The woman gave me a bold stare, then looked me up and down in an offensive way.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “you are exactly who I’m looking for.” She gave a harsh laugh. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s not surprising, I suppose, given what I’ve been through.”

  All of a sudden I knew, and I wanted to back away, even shut the door in her face. Elisabeth Avis. The tone of voice identified her.

  “Ah,” she said, “it’s coming back, is it? Well, Miss Harriet, are you going to invite us in?”

  “Come in,” I said, wishing with all my heart that Sam were there. The air seemed to crackle with anger.

  Sam had made me an outdoor oven in which I could bake our bread, once the weather turned mild, without overheating our little house. If he was inordinately fond of sugared tea, he was equally fond of fresh bread, and having no cow, he traded labour for butter at Manor House Farm. I had left the loaves to cool while I went to the shop, and now I felt I had to offer my visitors some bread and butter.

  “I would prefer a mug of cold water, if you please. We have walked from the station at Gomshall.”

  I could see the little man eyeing the bread in a wistful fashion, and so, after bringing the water for Elisabeth, I made the tea, sliced some bread and brought out a crock of preserves. The man was a strange creature. The fingers of his left hand drew inward towards the palm, making his hand resemble a chicken’s foot, although his right hand, which clutched a pair of threadbare gloves, looked perfectly normal. I wondered how and where these two had met.

  Elisabeth, who had so far refused my invitation to sit, withdrew a book from her carryall and thrust it at me.

  “I can only assume you have seen this, seeing as you and he were as thick as thieves.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” The little man, who had not yet been introduced — I could not help but think of witches and their familiars, although weren’t cats the usual companions? — could not keep his eyes away from the table, but he was too cowed or too polite to help himself until the invitation was given.

  “This book!” She was practically shrieking. “This dreadful volume, where both of us have been libelled!”

  “Please sit down. I confess I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “I find that hard to believe.” She appeared to be coming to a boil, but I had no idea what was upsetting her so. I really wished she would just go away.

  “I thought you were in Australia,” I said.

  “Of course you did, everybody did. Certainly he did, or he would never have dared do what he has done.”

  “He?” I poured out the tea and offered cream and sugar, but she waved me away impatiently. The little man, however, accepted gratefully, poured his tea into his
saucer and blew on it to cool it.

  “He is Charles Dickens of course. Don’t play the innocent with me.” She held up the book again and shook it as if she would like to shake it to pieces.

  “I am not trying to deceive you,” I said. “I honestly don’t know what you are going on about. I haven’t seen Mr. Dickens for many years.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “No, not since I moved back here.”

  “But you must have read his books? Even in this backwater people must read his books. Why, he has a following of millions.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not one of those millions. He used to send me a small parcel of books at Christmastime, but that stopped over ten years ago. I must confess I have not kept up. It’s mostly children’s stories these days, or stories from the Bible.”

  “Ha,” she said with a smile of satisfaction. “Then you really don’t know.” (The little man was on his third slice of bread and jam.) “That makes it even better. I thought perhaps you didn’t mind, you were such a hero-worshipper in the old days. I thought perhaps you had said, ‘Use me as you will.’ For used you certainly have been, and I, too. Cruelly used.”

  I began to suspect what had happened.

  “He has written about you?”

  “Us! About us. He has caricatured us, myself most cruelly. At least you get to reform in the end.”

  She paused at this point, accepted a cup of tea and looked around her. I tried to see my little home the way she must see it, the simple but beautiful furniture Sam had made, the geraniums on the windowsill, the bunches of herbs hanging from the rafters, the braided rug before the fender. Everything neat and tidy, but not much more grand, except for the furniture, than an ordinary tenant-farmer’s cottage.

  “Somehow I thought you had more ambition than this.”

  “I am quite content with this, as you call it, quite content. Can you tell me what it is you want of me, exactly?”

  “I want you to join me in a suit against him — against the great man himself. He mustn’t get away with this. And we shall be joined by others. I have already found a woman, very small, smaller than Hopkins here, a dwarf, really, who was bought off with a pittance years ago. There must be dozens of us scattered about, and I intend to find them all. Hopkins, show her the advertisement.”

  Out of a rusty pocket Hopkins produced a folded paper and handed it to me. He had neglected to wipe his fingers, and so he left grease stains and a purple thumb print at the corner. I unfolded it carefully.

  “This is to go in all the London newspapers next week,” Elisabeth said. “And then the innocent victims will come forth to be counted, and we shall launch such a suit against him, he’ll wish he’d never been born. His reputation has already been tarnished, you know. He separated from his wife some years ago, as good as shoved her out the door. He tried to hush it all up, but I’ve discovered there were plenty of rumours. He’s a whited sepulchre, he is, and we shall bring him down.”

  The advertisement said that anyone who felt they had been held up to ridicule in any of the novels or stories of the noted author Mr. C _____________ D ____________ should please contact the offices of Messrs. Grundig and Beckstein immediately, with the view of initiating a suit for malicious libel against the said C ______________ D _____________ and his publishers.

  I folded up the paper and handed it back to Hopkins.

  “What will you gain by this?”

  “Money, of course, but that is not the main thing. All my life I have been subjected to insults and backbiting. All my life I have turned the other cheek, as the Bible instructs us. Well, I am tired of turning the other cheek. I want revenge. He cannot use me like this — it’s shameful. I wish I had never seen Urania Cottage!”

  “Surely he has not caricatured Urania Cottage?”

  “Of course not, he’s too clever for that. He wouldn’t want to get in trouble with his rich friend. And Urania Cottage is no more, I hear, but that is by the way. No, what I meant is that if I hadn’t been persuaded to go there, I would never have met Mr. Dickens and,” she added in a low voice, “would never have set foot in Australia.”

  She stood up, the book on her lap falling to the floor, came over to me and pushed up her sleeves.

  “Mark this, Harriet, mark this.” There were deep and dreadful scars across both wrists.

  “Australia did that,” she said, “Australia did that to me. All their fine talk about a new life and a second chance. Well, I can tell you it was far worse than the old life, far worse.”

  “But the Bishop of Adelaide . . . ?”

  She pushed down her sleeves, picked up the book off the floor and resumed her seat.

  “The Bishop of Adelaide was another whited sepulchre — he and his wife both. At first it was all smiles and commissions to do altar cloths and stoles and the like, but they had a daughter for whom they had plans. And when the curate of a nearby church began to take a lively interest in me — I did nothing to encourage it — they soon told him of my background, that I had been in prison, and he turned away from me towards their rabbit-toothed daughter. He proposed, was of course accepted, and they had the nerve to ask me to make the wedding kneelers, ‘since your work is so very fine, my dear.’ Well, of course I refused, and I asked to be transferred somewhere else. I said that I keenly felt their dislike of me and it was making me ill.

  “Out of spite or perhaps real cruelty, they sent me away to a horrible rough settlement, where I was supposed to be a housekeeper but was really nothing but a slave to a drunken vicar in a rundown vicarage, nothing but a slave. And I, a clergyman’s daughter! The way he ran that parish was a disgrace. There was no one of any culture within a hundred miles, the women — great red-faced, rough things — were as bad as the men, and the children ran wild, like animals. I wrote to the bishop, I begged him to find me another situation, but his wife replied that they were sorry, they had done all they could, then quoted second Thessalonians to me: ‘Be not weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.’

  “And then this, this beast, this disgrace to the cloth had the nerve to ask me to marry him. I couldn’t stand it. I stole his razor and slit my wrists.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, “you poor woman.”

  “I wanted to die, but he found me and took me to a hospital, where they locked me up and said I was mad. I was there for a long time until they finally let me go.

  “And then I made my way to Sydney and threw myself on the mercy of the nuns there. I told them I wanted to return to England and would work for them, do anything, not just needlework, if they would let me earn passage money. They were good women, but frugal. There was a story you read to us once, about a girl who is assigned some monumental task which seems as though it can never be completed. That’s how I felt. And always hungry, always practising ‘self-denial.’ Except for the Mother Superior and her pets, of course, you could smell the wine on their breath, see the cake crumbs at the corners of their mouths. But I said nothing, just worked away, all for the love of God and the sake of a few shillings a month. Finally, this year, I had enough for the cheapest passage. How happy I was to see the shores of that dreadful country shrink into nothing.

  “I kept to myself on the ship. The passengers in my class were mostly ticket-of-leave men and a scattering of missionary wives and children. Few women ever return from that fatal shore. As soon as I arrived in London, I went straight to Urania Cottage to find Mr. Dickens or Miss Burdett-Coutts or someone and demand that they help me. Only Urania Cottage was to let, Miss Burdett-Coutts was out of the country — or so her servants said — and Mr. Dickens was at his new home outside Rochester. I wrote to him at once, but he did not favour me with an answer. However, I have a bit of money left over from my work at the convent, and I have temporarily put up in a respectable lodging house. It was in the landlady’s parlour that I found a set of Mr. Dickens’s novels, and as I could barely afford a newspaper and my evenings were long and lonely — the landlady, a widow
, has a group of friends and invited me to join them in the evenings, but I could tell this was only out of politeness — I began reading.

  “He is nothing if not prolific, but I am a quick reader. Last month I finally got to this one” — she banged her fist on the book in her lap — “saw what he had done and became determined to show him up, to reveal him to the world as the fiend he really is. Frankly, if he knows what’s good for him he’ll offer to settle out of court. We will agree to that, but once we have the money, which will be distributed fairly, according to the degree of insult — remember his old marks system — once we have the money, then we’ll publish it to the world and ruin him.”

  “Can you do that? I know nothing about the law, but surely if you agree to a settlement, you agree to keep quiet. You probably sign something to that effect, perhaps a bond.”

  “I care nothing for bonds or silences.”

  I stared at her. (Hopkins had fallen asleep during Elisabeth’s tirade; I wondered what was his role in all this.)

  “Mr. Dickens is a wealthy man. He will be able to hire the very best lawyers. Do you really think you have a chance?”

  “Listen,” she said — she was practically spitting — “in the case of this dwarf, Mrs. Hill her name is, she was a neighbour of Mr. Dickens and he caricatured her in Great Expectations. Have you read it?

  “Yes. I’ve read up to and including Bleak House, which, if you’ve read it, should put you off lawsuits, I would think.”

  She ignored this.

  “Well, he made Mrs. Hill into Miss Mowcher, do you remember her?”

  “Yes, she’s a dwarf. But wasn’t she ultimately seen as wise and kind?”

  “What difference does that make? Suppose you called attention in public to Hopkins’s deformity, ridiculed it, but then went on to say, ‘but his left hand is quite beautiful, with long, slender fingers,’ do you think you would make Hopkins feel any better? And in my case, he mentions no redeeming features, none. In any event, Mrs. Hill wrote to the man, and then her solicitor wrote and threatened a suit, and Mr. Dickens agreed to change the character when the one-volume edition was published. That’s what you must have read.”