by Sandra Byrd
I heard a door open into the room. “Miss Sheffield?”
That was Mr. Clarkson now! I was certain he did not know, in full, our dire circumstances, and I could not afford to lose him.
“Yes, Mr. Clarkson?”
“May I be of some assistance?” He looked out the window at the backs of the solicitors and constable.
“No thank you. Those were our landlord’s representatives; that’s all,” I said.
He nodded uncomfortably. He knew there would be no reason for the landlord’s solicitors to show up at our home—with a constable, who would only be required when significant debts were owed. “Well, then. Do you know what day we’ll be leaving for Watchfield? I’ll need to visit Bristol soon. My sisters will be home, and my father is unwell.”
I’d learned little about Mr. Clarkson in the previous year. His father owned a large shop in Bristol—he’d let it slip once that it was a curiosity shop, though he represented it to others as more akin to the higher status of something like Sheffield Brothers—and he was fond of his younger sisters, each of whom depended upon his income to keep them from the poorhouse.
“I had thought, perhaps, the twelfth of October,” I responded, gathering what calm and confidence remained.
He stared at my face, which must have blanched during my interactions with the solicitor and police. “Do you need help?”
I shook my head. “No thank you.” I softened my voice. “I’ve sent out enquiries over Mr. Herberts’s pieces of silver. I would very much appreciate your opinion when they arrive. I appreciate the many commissions you bring to Sheffield Brothers.”
“Consider it done . . . and you’re welcome. You will find, Miss Sheffield, that I am most loyal to the firm. And—” he smiled at me—“all within it.”
As soon as he returned to the workshop, I went to the kitchen, where Orchie was crying, her head buried in her apron once more.
“What is it, dear Orchie?” I put my arm around her.
“The water. I was so hoping and praying you wouldn’t be offering tea to anyone, and you didn’t, thanks be.”
“The water?”
“The water’s been shut too,” she said.
CHAPTER
Seven
Uncle Lewis had not, apparently, paid the water, either.
“How can I cook and clean with no water?” Orchie asked. “’Tis difficult enough keeping up on the laundry when there is water, and now?” She hiccuped a small sob before getting ahold of herself. She looked so very tired. And it was true: my laundry had become dull and wrinkled, sometimes spotted. Her hands were too old and arthritic to keep up. Dull clothing would not allow me to make my best presentations before our well-to-do clientele.
“Do you know where Uncle Lewis keeps his correspondence?”
She nodded and did not seem surprised by either the visit or my question. Was this another matter about which everyone but I knew?
“In his study.” She wiped her hands as if she was going to show me there.
I put my hand up to stop her. “I should hate to take you from your duties. I shall find them.” I was no longer the girl who must obey her; I must take charge of my own household now.
I made my way up two flights of stairs to the level where Uncle Lewis’s rooms were—his bedroom, a small study, and a dressing room. I opened the door to the study, which was unlocked. The room was in mostly good order; he had become a little less tidy of late. All the woodwork from floorboards to ceiling was painted dark green, as was his preference. I scanned the shelves first; it appeared something was missing or amiss, though in my distress, I could not put my finger on it.
I opened drawer after drawer until I found many unopened envelopes. The landlord, a few suppliers, the gas company. Quite overcome by it all, I swallowed the sourness rising in my throat. I opened the ledger book; notations as to receivables and payables stopped about a year earlier, though clearly payments had not. I could not know how much was taken in or paid out. Which had truly been paid or not, I did not know. If things were as they appeared after some quick sorting, our current situation would allow me, but just, to catch up by the end of the year. I would visit the bank first thing to ascertain what actually remained.
I took the ledger book with me and knocked on my uncle’s bedroom door. “Uncle Lewis? May I come in?”
“Yes, m’dear.”
I opened the door; he sat, in his dressing gown, in a chair by the window, looking out. “How are you?” I asked.
“Better,” he answered. He glanced at the papers in my hand. “What is that?”
“Invoices,” I replied. “All of them unpaid. Many of them unopened.”
He waved his hand through the air as if swatting an insect. “Bah. All are paid. You may be certain of that. I paid them myself in crisp notes. These must be duplicates.”
I did not argue with him. But I’d seen the dates on each and read the shrill tones in those I’d opened. They had not been paid.
“Perhaps it’s your eyesight,” I suggested, offering him a way out and thinking how to put the next question delicately. “Can you still see to appraise?”
He grinned. “Oh yes. I just squint a little like this.” He half closed his eyes. “Or I blink. On better days, I don’t need to do either. It all comes back. Don’t worry. I shan’t let you down.”
“Perhaps I should take care of the ledgers,” I said softly. “Till your sight is restored. Things are bound to get better soon.” I patted his shoulder, and just like that, our roles as protector and protected had switched completely around. I don’t like feeling there is no one to protect me, I thought as I left the room.
Next, I visited the water company, which took my cheque and agreed to allow me till the end of the year to catch up the account but said it would be a day or two before the water would flow once more.
I returned home and asked Orchie for two large, stoppered jugs. “I have to visit the fountain,” I said. “Just for a day or two.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“No,” I said. “You need not.”
“We’ll need at least four jugs,” she said. I could not carry four jugs on my own, so I reluctantly agreed.
We made our way, heads down, to the public fountain. Perhaps five or six years earlier, a kindhearted banker and barrister of good faith had established the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association so the poor might not thirst; each year, more fountains were established throughout London. I had never expected to have to avail myself of one and I felt shamed.
It was quite a walk, and I tried to pleasantly pass the time with light chatter. “I’ve visited the water company, and it shall all be sorted within a few days. The gas company and the landlord have also agreed to my plan, and so we shall be as cozy as we always have been,” I said. “I’ve taken over the accounts from Uncle Lewis, though I didn’t quite put it that way.”
“I’m happy to hear of it.” Orchie laughed sharply. “I was worried it would be off to the workhouse for me, though they’d like as not sell me for glue!” Her eyes looked so shadowed I knew she’d thought it was a real possibility.
“Never,” I promised her.
We arrived at the fountain and waited our turns among the long lines of the toothless and those whose clothes smelled of the latrines or the public house. And then there were some who looked very much like me. I did not feel the others in line were my inferiors, but I also did not want to find myself or Orchie in such a place again.
“Look!” Orchie said, pointing to someone about half a block away. “It’s Lord Lydney.” She elbowed me. “He’ll come carry these home for us.”
I looked up, horrified to find that she was right! I’d forgotten that Harry’s gentlemen’s club was nearby. I used my hand to gently push her arm down and then turned so my back was to Harry.
“We don’t need his help,” I said.
“You mightn’t, but I’d just as soon have a man help carry these jugs back,” she said. “And he’s
such a nice man, after all. Or I thought he was until . . . Is that why you don’t want his help, then? ’Cause he did not come back for so long?”
“I would prefer he not know we are here,” I softly pleaded. She nodded and we both turned our backs and pulled tight our bonnets.
“I have always admired your strength and self-sufficiency,” Harry had said to me. I had gone hat in hand to so many in the past few days. I did not want to humble myself before Harry, too. I wanted him to continue admiring my strength and self-sufficiency—it was perhaps all I had left. I wanted him to see me as an equal, not a pauper. I straightened up.
I had three months to clear our debts, and I would.
Normally I took a hired carriage for my monthly visit to the prison, which was both a house of detention—where the accused waited until sentencing—and a house of correction—where punishment and reform were administered afterward. This day, I walked. The mist drenched my face, and I hoped the damp would not be heavy enough to weigh down my cloak before I reached my destination. Dark clouds fell in behind me, chasing me from home and toward the prison. I clutched my reticule and hoped that the small package I’d had Orchie assemble with the portion of bread and bacon I had refused during mealtime would remain dry and somewhat warm. Eventually I approached the prison neighborhood and saw the street children huddling in the corners where boulevards spilled into alleys. In other months, I saw them from carriage height. Now we were nearly face-to-face.
I looked for the younger ones, both for my own safety and for their well-being. As I approached a pair of children huddling together, shivering, I reached into my bag and pulled out the package of food. “Are you hungry?” I asked.
The girl nodded. She looked up at me and smiled, and my heart clenched. Her sweet face was marred by the gloom of rubbed-away coal soot, the deep shadows of black sleeplessness which cupped her eyes, and mourning. I handed the bag to her, and she thanked me quickly before turning her back to me so she and what was likely her brother could share the food before others fell in to steal it from them.
Rounding the corner to the prison, I saw the rows of fine carriages waiting for other, more wealthy members of the committee. Perhaps someday they will be coming here to visit me, jailed as a debtor. Perhaps Charlotte would lend me five shillings.
I laughed the sharp, stuttered, slightly feverish laugh found where truth met absurdity and then took hold of myself.
Hysteria would not help.
The ladies’ Visiting Committees, first started by Mrs. Elizabeth Fry some fifty years earlier, afforded ladies the occasion to bring comfort, cheer, some minor physical assistance, and the hope of the gospel to those incarcerated. I did not volunteer my hours and charitable gifts only to help them improve their moral standards and outlook on life. As a woman who had been lonely for many years, I understood the crushing sorrow that loneliness brought. Self-sufficiency eased that for me; they had no ability to be similarly eased. I simply wanted to be a friend to them as they had grown to be to me. After my mother left, all my friends did too. Even Marguerite’s parents had forbidden her from seeing me; they’d said it might lead to my encouraging her into harmful amusements. After she was married, we could be friends once more.
I entered the prison and showed my credentials to the warden. He then showed me into the open area next to the chapel where the prisoners could congregate, meet those ministering to them, and speak for just a few minutes each week. Prisons were often known as the cold hell—slate floors to better clear the refuse; cheerless, cold stone walls; and peeling, black, cold iron bars on whatever windows were present. The iron released the scent of blood into the air whenever it sweated, which was near constantly. The bars burned like branding irons in the summer. The windows were never cleaned; it was impossible to judge the time of day or celebrate sunshine, even on a pleasant day. The dusk of despair smothered the cells.
“Don’t put me in there!” a woman wailed as I made my way down the corridor. Her screams and pleading were met with pitiless silence. She caught my eye. “Help me, miss, please!”
What could I do? Smile? Hardly appropriate. Help? There was no way I could assist her. I nodded and hoped my eyes reflected my concern for her. She was young—perhaps just eighteen—and her hair had been chopped with blunt scissors. It still reached her chin, though unevenly. She was beautiful, fragile as an iris and just as likely to be trampled underfoot. The warden, grown deaf to such pleading, shoved her into her cell and slammed the door shut behind her. It muffled but did not silence her cries.
I kept my head down and continued walking through the fetid, stagnant prison air. I had befriended a prisoner named Jeanette, and her eyes lit as she saw me enter the room. I smiled too, trying to banish the younger woman’s misery from my mind, and hurried toward her.
“Miss Sheffield,” she said. “I’m so glad ta see ya. I thought perhaps you’d be too busy to visit us.” She was, at thirty, five years older than me. In some manner, she seemed much older, perhaps due to the difficulty of the life she’d been forced to live. Perhaps it was her missing teeth.
“Never too busy.” Three or four of the other ladies who had been given into my care by the committee came near, and we talked together of the chapel message they had heard very recently, which had brought both tears and hope.
Jeanette held out her hands to me, red and raw. Her fingers were pricked and sliced, torn by the oakum. As part of their work duties, they must pick apart the tight, old, tarred rope used on ships, like the miller’s daughter in the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, thereby turning it into something valuable: a mound of loose fiber. The fiber would be collected and sent back to the ships for use in caulking or patching holes. Each woman was assigned a certain weight she must produce each day; if she did not, severe punishment would follow.
I knew Jeanette and other younger women often worked as quickly as possible to help meet the quotas of older women whose hands were crippled by cold and age.
“I am gladdened to see you,” I said. I made a note to myself: if in any way possible, buy soothing gloves for the ladies at Christmas, when I would be allowed to bring a small gift to them.
I spoke of news of the world outside and the foods they craved and the books I’d been reading and recited a psalm or two, for comfort. I discussed articles of interest in the ladies’ magazines, which they seemed most enthusiastic about, and listened to them tell of their days.
They told me of their hopes and dreams upon release and news of their children, who were allowed an occasional visit, and promised to pray for me.
No one else, not even Marguerite, promised me that.
As I left the House of Correction, I did not want to walk past the row of carriages the other visitors would use to leave. I turned down a nearby street, instead, and then another, and then a third, trying to make my way back to the thoroughfare.
I soon found myself in the center of an unfamiliar tangle of thin streets and alleys. The soot and rain bore down on the day, making it impossible to see clearly. I pulled my bonnet low; still, I could hear two deep male voices just behind me.
I quickened my step as they closed in. My hem dragged through the mud, and the smell of both horse and human muck filled the air. I gagged.
“Hey! Heya, Madge. I’m over here.” I looked up to find a woman of about nineteen or twenty years old waving at me. “Come on now. Da is expecting us and he’s probably on his way to find us right now.” She looked at the men presumably behind me. “I don’t think he’ll be very happy with those what kept ya?”
I shook my head, not wanting to speak and give away my station in life. My dress, now muddied, had hidden that well.
The young men melted away as the woman pushed a large wheelbarrow across the street toward me; it was filled with towering sacks of what appeared to be laundry.
“Thank you very kindly.” I held my hand out to her. “Miss Eleanor Sheffield.”
She took my hand in her own, ungloved one. “Alice.”
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�Miss . . . Alice. I’m indebted to you.”
“You don’t belong here,” she said.
“No,” I admitted. “I’d been visiting the women in prison.”
She nodded.
“Then I got lost on my way home.”
“You’ll never find your way out on your own. If you don’t mind my saying so. I’m a person who never minds asking for help, meself. Come along. I’ll show you the way.”
We began to walk. “This is my father’s wheelbarrow. That’s probably how the lie about our father came so quickly to my lips, God forgive me.”
“It’s kind of your father to lend his wheelbarrow to you.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
She shook her head. “Oh, he’s dead, Miss Sheffield. He used to wheel plants back and forth at Covent Garden. When he passed on, he left my mother with six children and a wheelbarrow.”
“I’m sorry about your father.”
“He drank himself to death with gin.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, honest, and unflinching.
I stopped in my tracks and reached out to the brick wall to steady myself. “Gin!”
“I’m sorry to shock you with that, miss,” she said. “No way around the truth. We do laundry now. I collect it and deliver it in the wheelbarrow, round here, anyway. My sisters work too, sewing or mending or cutting up bits of wool for shoddy cloth. We could take in more laundry, but the whole street has to share the laundry stew pot.” She looked at my collar and my dress. “No disrespect, miss, but your collar is a bit dull and wrinkled.” She appraised me anew. “I have one here, for sale.” She fished in one of her bags and came up with a lovely, fresh white collar. “Four pence.”
I looked at her dress and collar, peeking from beneath an old cloak. Although she was poor, and the fabric was thin, it was clean.