The Redeemed

by Tim Pears

  In 1923, female students were admitted to the Royal Veterinary College in Camden, London, for the first time. Two women, Lottie Prideaux and Muriel Furst, took six-month courses. Both had previously worked as assistants to veterinary surgeons, Muriel to her father in Birmingham. Since assisting Patrick Jago during the war, Lottie had worked on her own, attending to animals on the estate. Digs were found for them to share close to the college.

  ‘Well, my dear, you’re off to live in the great metropolis,’ Arthur Prideaux said to his daughter at breakfast on the morning she left. ‘A day I never thought would come. Perhaps you might even find time to enjoy some of the delights of our capital.’

  ‘I shall not,’ Lottie told him. ‘As you well know, Papa, I intend to work hard, learn all I can, and return as soon as possible.’

  Her stepmother’s teacup was returned to its saucer with a loud chink. ‘I cannot believe you,’ she said. Alice could not hide her envy. She wished to bring her children up in London. She allowed that bucolic isolation might be acceptable for their infancy, but maintained that the stimulation of city life was an absolute necessity once they acquired the use of reason, which she believed to be at the age of seven. Arthur pointed out that from that age the boys would be away at school most of the year, and whatever other arrangements prevailed, they’d surely spend summer in the country. Their eldest child, James, was not yet quite seven, and Alice’s parents had made their town house available for as many visits as she might wish.

  ‘I don’t care how hard you study, Lottie,’ her stepmother said. ‘I’m going to come and sweep you off to Liberty’s. They’ve new premises and I can’t wait to visit.’

  Lottie raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Thank you, Alice,’ she said. ‘You are far too generous. But I warn you, you’d have to drag me into town.’

  The main doors set in the façade of the college were opened at 8 a.m. Most mornings the two female students stood there waiting. The doors gave access to a vaulted archway that led to the main quadrangle, laid to lawns and flowerbeds. The only evidence of its veterinary function were the gravel setts or walkways, and the quadrangle resounding to the clatter of shoes and cracking of whips as horses were trotted, being studied for lameness. The buildings surrounding the quadrangle housed a bone room, botanical classroom, dissecting room, pathological laboratory, and the offices of the professors.

  On the ground floor of one side of the quadrangle were stables, generally occupied by horses awaiting assessment for soundness, and a loose box for use while examining horses’ eyes.

  ‘I don’t think I ever really believed such a place as this existed,’ Lottie told Muriel during their first week. ‘Devoted to the study of such animals. I might have dreamed it.’

  The middle quadrangle had a massive glass roof supported on iron columns. At the northern end was a table at which small animals were attended to in the Poor People’s outpatient clinic, which took place each morning between 9 a.m. and noon. Owners came with their moggies and mutts, and sat waiting their turn on a bench along the wall. Muriel spent every morning here, for virtually all her work in Birmingham had been with domestic pets. Students had to work in pairs. She and Lottie interviewed owners, examined the patients, made a diagnosis and proposed treatment. If an operation such as castration or spaying was required, they led the patient to the small-animal operating theatre off the archway between the quads. Under a professor’s guidance the women performed the operations, taking it in turns to act as surgeon or anaesthetist.

  The veterinary work that occupied Lottie at home was chiefly with large animals on the estate, and it was to these she turned her principal attention while at the college. She attended lectures on hygiene, surgery and the pathology of farm animals. There were always cattle, sheep and pigs awaiting examination in a yard behind the lecture theatre. An area of the middle quadrangle was covered in straw and in this bed horses were cast and operated on in the afternoons. This was the domain of final, fourth-year students, but Lottie observed whenever she could. Not that she reckoned she’d be able to manage the arduous and awkward work while dressed in a long skirt. Back home on the estate Lottie wore what she liked.

  At first, Muriel beseeched her friend to stay with her so that they could work on the small animals as a pair, but as male students queued up to offer themselves as colleagues she let Lottie go. Muriel was a plain, stoutly built young woman, a couple of years younger than Lottie, yet there was something that drew men to her. Lottie could not quite see what it was. A teasing lilt in the way she spoke with them, perhaps. A sense of self-awareness when she moved, how she moved, that attracted them.

  In the room they shared back at their digs Lottie asked Muriel if she knew what she was doing.

  ‘I do now,’ Muriel said, ‘though I didn’t used to. I don’t ask them to push themselves forward. It makes no sense, does it? You’re twice as pretty as I am.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Lottie said. She did not tell Muriel that she herself did not intend ever to trust a man again. She was simply curious.

  ‘Ten times prettier. And they’re mostly sons of vets, just like I’m the daughter of one. They know you’re from nobility.’

  Most of the students were younger than Lottie. She was approached, but she told one prospective suitor that she was engaged to be married to a peer of the realm, another that she was a divorcee, and the invitations ceased.

  *

  The Professor of Surgery was a pioneer of equine abdominal surgery, and Lottie attended all his lectures. She spent as much time as she could in the dissecting room, and volunteered to assist at post-mortem examinations. She was permitted to attend the London, Scottish and Midland Railway stable to the east of the college on Saturdays, when lame horses were examined. Most Sundays she came back into the college to help the laboratory assistants. When Alice sent a telegram saying she would pick her up from her digs the following Saturday morning, Lottie replied with the words: REGRET TOO BUSY. SEE YOU BACK HOME. She made no trips to the West End, or Oxford Street. The six months were gone before she knew it, and she returned with renewed confidence to the West Country.

  2

  Lottie Prideaux beheld the vicar’s pair of cocker spaniels. The younger one scurried around her, rose on its hind legs, demanding food or attention or simply out of uncontainable excitement. The other lay on a rug in the drawing room, glancing up at her with a defeated expression.

  ‘She’s been poisoned,’ Reverend Doddridge said.

  ‘Who on earth would do such a thing?’ Lottie asked him.

  ‘A thief.’

  ‘You’ve been robbed?’

  ‘No,’ the vicar said. ‘He got poor Mabel but Edna chased him off. I dreamed I heard her barking in the night, but did not wake.’

  Lottie did not believe the excitable young spaniel at her feet would chase away any intruder, but rather welcome them.

  ‘Or possibly some other blackguard,’ the vicar said.

  ‘Do you have enemies?’ Lottie asked. She knelt and examined the stricken bitch.

  ‘The call to righteousness has many enemies,’ the vicar replied. ‘Myself, personally, none that I know of. Unless some member of the Chapel believes cruelty to animals a legitimate expression of schismatic dissent.’

  Lottie wondered if this was the vicar’s attempt at humour. She suspected not. His devotion to his dogs was well known, and he took their well-being more seriously than that of members of his flock. He had been the incumbent for over forty years, and always kept two female spaniels. As one neared her end he bought a puppy, always unrelated. He did not breed but had the puppies spayed as soon as they had had their first season, during which he protected them from male canine attention under lock and key. Mabel was a little over six years old. Lottie herself had lethalled the previous ailing spaniel, Reverend Doddridge hovering over them like some grim guardian angel as she applied first chloroform, then when the dog was unconscious a concentrated vapour. Reverend Doddridge had the gardener dig a grave in a spinney
in the vicarage garden, where the old girl could rest with her predecessors.

  ‘Or perhaps it is distemper,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Mrs Dagworthy has some castor oil. And syrup of buckthorn. Is that what she needs?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lottie told him.

  ‘Can’t you see the poor girl is fading before our eyes? She’s paralysed … that’s what distemper leads to, is it not? Or clots in the blood vessels, they’re deadly too, aren’t they?’

  Lottie massaged the quiet spaniel. The younger one tried to lick her fingers as she did so. She asked the vicar if he wouldn’t mind removing Edna to another room, as the youngster’s antics were distracting. He said he could not leave Mabel in her distress and instead lifted a small bell that was on a reading table and rang it vigorously. They heard footsteps approaching along the stone-flagged passage from the kitchen, and the housekeeper Mrs Dagworthy appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Please take away this unquiet dog,’ the vicar said. He gently picked Edna up and, cradling her in his two large hands, passed her to his housekeeper, who turned and carried away the yapping puppy.

  ‘You may have been right the first time,’ Lottie said.

  ‘Mabel’s been poisoned?’

  ‘It looks to me like dropsy. It feels like there is an obstruction of the portal circulation.’

  Reverend Doddridge said nothing, and when Lottie glanced up at him she saw the puzzlement on his face.

  ‘The liver,’ Lottie said. ‘She might perhaps have consumed something with lead in it. We all know how greedy spaniels can be. They’ll wolf down all sorts of muck, indiscriminately.’

  The vicar looked pained, as if he could hardly bear for one of his dogs to exhibit a human vice. Lottie reassured him that Mabel was young enough to recover, if given calomel, and also a decoction of broom, which could be got from the chemist in Wiveliscombe.

  ‘But most important,’ she said, ‘is to rub her right side, from the last rib to the hip, with embrocation.’

  ‘Every day?’ Reverend Doddridge asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ Lottie told him. ‘The influence you produce on the nerves of her skin will be carried to her liver, it’ll be just what she needs.’

  ‘I shall do it, without fail,’ the vicar said.

  ‘And if Edna exhibits signs of jealousy,’ Lottie added, ‘you may give her a massage too.’

  Reverend Doddridge smiled. This produced a somewhat sinister effect upon his face. ‘That is a fine idea, Miss Charlotte,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Lottie said. ‘Mabel’s greed is not life-threatening. Unlike some incidences. A fortnight ago, cows got through a fence into Mrs Tucker’s garden, over at Manor Farm.’

  ‘I suppose they gorged themselves on her vegetables?’ the vicar asked. He rose to his feet. Mabel already looked perkier. ‘Or her flowers, perhaps?’

  ‘A reasonable assumption,’ Lottie said. ‘But false, I’m afraid. They went for her washing on the line. Most of the beasts were little affected. They passed the various socks and vests through their four stomachs. But one greedy Ruby Red tried to eat an entire bedsheet, and choked on it. She was dead when I arrived.’

  Lottie rode her motorcycle back to the estate. Villagers and farmworkers watched her pass. A plume of snuff-coloured dust rose from her wheels. Her home was a cottage once inhabited by the Wombwell family. Mr Wombwell had died young, neither of his sons had returned from the Great European War, and when crippled Florence Wombwell died a fortnight after Lottie came back from the veterinary college in London, in 1924, she’d asked her father if she could live there. Arthur assured her there was no need to move out of the big house, there was plenty of room for everyone. Alice said she should have a larger house, they could build a new one in the grounds for her, it was unbecoming for Lord and Lady Prideaux’s daughter or stepdaughter to inhabit a labourer’s tied cottage. But Lottie insisted it would suit her perfectly. She had it emptied and stripped. Floorboards were freshly oiled, rotting window frames replaced. Plumbing was installed. An extension was added onto the back of the cottage with one room for her surgery, another for storage and preparation of medicines.

  On Saturdays Lottie saw domestic animals in her surgery. The queue of patients and their owners often stretched into the afternoon, attending from an ever-wider radius around the estate. On weekdays she visited the farms.

  3

  Each day dawned hotter than the one before in the summer of 1926. Without rain, many crops struggled. In his study Arthur Prideaux watched the needle on the slowly turning drum of his barograph, hoping for a sign of change in the atmospheric pressure, but the line on the graph only scrawled upwards. By the middle of July the mercury in the thermometer on the wall in the hall rarely dropped below eighty degrees even after nightfall.

  On Sunday 11 July Arthur and Alice and the three boys were joined for lunch by Lottie and also Alice’s mother, Maud, Lady Grenvil. They began with a chicken broth. Alice asked Lottie how she managed in this heatwave, riding her noisome motorcycle in those heavy clothes, and manhandling large animals.

  ‘I must confess, I wouldn’t mind a little rain,’ Lottie said. ‘A light breeze.’

  ‘It’s ghastly,’ Maud Grenvil said. ‘I was brought up in India, where one went up into the hills when the heat in the plains grew unbearable. Here, what can one do? Climb Dunkery Hill? One would simply expire in the attempt and that would be that.’

  Garnished ham and galantine of veal were brought from the kitchen, served with a hard-boiled egg salad, another of beetroot and potato, a third of tomato and watercress, which Alice’s mother proclaimed was efficacious not only for women in their confinement or recovery from childbirth, but also for those heavily outnumbered by male members of their household.

  Alice laughed and said, ‘Thank goodness you are here, Mama. But don’t worry. The odds will be shortened at the end of the holidays, when Edward joins James at Tyttenhanger Lodge.’

  George heard this and demanded to be allowed to join his older brothers at preparatory school. ‘There won’t be anyone left for me to play with,’ he protested.

  Arthur Prideaux turned to his eldest son, James. ‘Could you ask your younger brother,’ he said, ‘not to be in quite such a hurry to dash off and leave me at the mercy of these women?’

  James smiled, but George frowned and said, ‘Couldn’t you call in reinforcements, Papa?’

  Alice repeated ‘reinforcements’, and said it was an impressive word coming from a five year old. Edward explained that it had occurred in the book Aunt Lottie was reading to them. George denied this. He knew the word anyway, he hadn’t got it from anyone.

  ‘Do you know, I read an article the other day,’ his father said. ‘It claimed that, far from coining new words all the time, increasing our potential to express all we experience, in fact the English language is losing more words than it gains. More slip out of use, are forgotten, become archaic, than are invented. The language is impoverished, and so are we.’ He looked around the table at his sons. ‘Rather sad, don’t you think? You chaps, it’s up to your generation to reverse this sorry trend.’

  The boys had milk jelly for pudding while the adults took coffee and chocolates in the drawing room. Afterwards, a wicket was set up on the lawn, stumps hammered into the hard earth, ruining one bat, and bails laid on top. Arthur and Lottie joined in the game. James said it was a belter of a wicket, and his father warned him not to bowl any bumpers. Lottie bowled underarm. She said it was as cumbersome to play cricket in a skirt as it was to do most other things. She regretted that she didn’t wear breeches on a Sunday as on weekdays.

  George swung wildly and missed. Edward possessed a pair of pads but would not let anyone else use them, and wore them himself even when fielding in the slips. They used a tennis ball, though James could easily send it for a six into the jungle. The Labradors nosed round after it while a replacement was tossed down from the terrace, where Alice and her mother watched from beneath parasols.

  Play was interr
upted by the housekeeper Gladys Whittle, who informed her ladyship that his lordship had a message from the stables. It has arrived. Alice passed this on. Arthur called out, ‘Draw stumps. Play over,’ and marched off towards the side of the house leading to the stables. Edward said it was unfair, it was his turn to bat next, Gladys should be twelfth man and bring some drinks out to the pitch and they could resume after. But the others were already following their father.

  4

  The horse was unlike any that had ever been seen on the estate. He stood some seventeen hands high. His glossy hide was grey. He had deep shoulders and a strong chest, a short back and powerful hindquarters. His withers were well defined, the neck long and his head refined, handsome. Altogether he was an incredible combination of muscularity and elegance. Lottie looked at his eyes. They were bright and shining, commanding. She had witnessed such creatures before, in the enclosure at Epsom, and they were striking then, led round by their dwarfish riders. But to see a pure thoroughbred here in the stable yard of their home in a hidden corner of the West Country was quite different. He stood there like some magical creature, a visitor from a higher realm.

  Even her father and Herb Shattock, inspecting the stallion, seemed diminished beside him.

  ‘I thought you should wish to have a look, master,’ the groom said. ‘Before he goes over to the stud farm.’

  ‘I should indeed,’ Lord Prideaux said. ‘Let the poor chap have a day or two to recover from the journey.’

  As they spoke, the two men ran their hands over the animal’s skin. Perhaps they were aware of doing so but Lottie thought not. They could not help themselves in their appreciation of his conformation, his beauty. He had a certain nervousness, rising off his hooves on the cobblestones of the stable yard. Yet he gave no indication of a desire to escape. He possessed a regal bearing, a poise, that suggested his awareness of the impression he made on these human beings and enjoyment of their attention. His restlessness was the expression of the energy latent within him, ready to explode into action when required.