Victorian Maiden

by Gary Dolman

  “Lizzie Wilson was no harlot, Mrs Price.”

  The old woman’s defiance boiled up into anger. Under the heavy rug on her lap, she stamped her foot.

  “How dare you contradict me in my own home? She was most certainly a harlot. You will leave – now – before I summon the gardener and have you thrown out.”

  Lucie ignored the tantrum, and the threat. She cast the die.

  “I believe your husband was a member of a gentlemen’s club, Mrs Price; a gentlemen’s club called the, ‘Friday Club’?”

  Mrs Price froze.

  “My husband was a philanthropist, Mrs Fox. He was a celebrated philanthropist. It was a philanthropist’s club.”

  Lucie shook her head.

  “It was from various, shall we say, philanthropists, of the Friday Club that Lizzie Wilson fled. The father of her baby was one of those very gentlemen, who had raped her.”

  “No, Mrs Fox, you’re quite wrong; everyone knows that they were great and good men.”

  The fury had gone and the old lady’s tone was imploring.

  Lucie sounded calmer now too, reasonable and persuasive.

  “Mrs Price, I have spoken with another person in the last few days who was also ill-used in the Friday Club. She too was a young girl at the time, barely older than Elizabeth.”

  “No. No, you lie. They were philanthropists. They did many good works.”

  Once again, Lucie ignored her pleas.

  “Alfred Roberts had a wife, Mrs Price – Agnes Roberts – who by all accounts spent her later life entirely in her bed. She coped with her husband’s, shall we call them, proclivities, only by living in a permanent stupor enabled by the drinking of absinthe. If I may say so, your denial is your own absinthe.”

  “You may not say so. You are a vile and a wicked woman and you may not.”

  She stamped her foot once more.

  “What I naturally need to be sure of, and what our client needs to be sure of, is that little Sarah Wilson didn’t fall prey to those very same proclivities as her poor mother.”

  “Get out of my house, both of you. Get out!”

  Mrs Price’s face was a twisted mask of hatred and of fear.

  “Get out, get out, get out!”

  Chapter 28

  A thick shroud of mist had settled at the foot of the deep gorge of the River Nidd, where it skirted the ancient town of Knaresborough. The throngs of people bustling about their daily business along the riverside seemed to Elizabeth almost like angels walking on clouds.

  “Old Mother Shipton’s cave is ower yonder,” she heard Tom tell them, and he waved his arm towards the riverbank. “She was a prophetess who was born in the cave hundreds o’ years ago and she foretell’d the future. This bridge ower t’ river ’ere,” he pointed to a broad, stone bridge just ahead of them, starkly black against the pure white of the mists. “The High Bridge it’s called. Owd Mother Shipton said that if it was ever to fall down three times, it’d mean t’ end o’ the world was upon us. Now I’ll tell thee both truly; it’s fallen twice afore already.”

  The boy looked thunderstruck.

  “Aye it’s true,” Tom continued, looking solemn, “An’ she said when it would happen too. She said: ‘The world to an end shall come, in Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One.’

  Now there’s some that believes it, and then there’s some, like Mr Walton, the owner of t’ mill that don’t, but she said that the world would end in Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One and every one o’ her other prophesies has come true.”

  Elizabeth felt a tiny surge of hope. Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One! Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One was thirty-four years away. So even if her mama didn’t come for her before then, even if the Lord Jesus said she couldn’t be like Grace Darling and be allowed to die young, then she would still see her dear mama again, and Baby Sarah, and Baby Albert, before she was fifty-two years old. But fifty-two was so old, and so far away. She would be old then, old and wizened and not worth a tramp’s farthing, never mind two hundred pounds. How good, how wonderful that would be. And then, then she could die at last, because everyone would die at the End of the World. Even Uncle Alfie and Mr James and Mr Price would die at the End of the World, along with Mr Otter and all of their gentlemen friends.

  Suddenly, she realised that Knaresborough, with its river of mist, its narrow, twisting streets and its rows of ancient cottages, was surely the most beautiful place on earth.

  They crossed over the High Bridge and turned into the narrow riverside lane that footed the immense crags reaching up out of the gorge to an old, ruined castle.

  “What are they a-building there, Tom?” the boy asked pointing ahead of them.

  Lizzie looked. Four great, flat columns of stone, laced all about with scaffolding and swarming with men, seemed to be racing each other to get to the sky.

  “That,” announced Tom, “Is a new viaduct that they’re building.”

  “What’s a viaduct, Tom?” the boy asked.

  Tom laughed his deep, slow laugh.

  “It’s a bridge, Peter; a special bridge for t‘ railway to go ower.”

  Lizzie started; the boy was called Peter too.

  “Knaresborough,” Tom continued, “Is going to get a railway line.”

  They approached the nearest of the columns and a whistle seared a shrill, burning path through her mind. The noise of the men working; the chiselling, the hammering, the rattle of the blocks-and-tackle, all abruptly stopped, and the whole world seemed to be holding its breath and looking at her. Lizzie dropped her head and stared at the broken rocks that littered the crag bottom, wishing and wishing that more would fall and bury her from sight.

  ‘Please Lord Jesus, please don’t let them look at me; please don’t let them look at me and see me for what I am.’

  But she knew that they would look, and she knew they would know, just as they always looked, and they always knew; and she waited for the shouts and the jeers that would surely follow.

  A shout – a mocking, jeering shout stopped her heart. Her ears didn’t need to make sense of the words because the laughter that followed told her exactly what they would be. She cringed yet deeper and turned her head in shame.

  There was a flash of movement. Tom had picked a workman from the pulley-chain he was holding and pitched him bodily into the river. The mists parted and swallowed him, and it seemed an age of raucous shouting and laughter later that he emerged coughing and gasping from the unseen waters. Tom stabbed an enormous finger at him.

  “Don’t ye ever insult a lady again,” he bellowed.

  And then, as they walked, the sounds of laughter and of ridicule slowly faded. They faded everywhere, that is, except inside her head. There they compounded with the silent screams of her anguish and grew louder and louder and louder.

  But there was a new sound too; a distant sound of gushing water, a sound that also grew louder and louder until it became a muffled roar. It was a weir, she heard Tom explain to Peter, who made her remember the Holy Island and a game that had gone terribly wrong; a double-weir with a mill-race that powered the machines which made the flax into fine linen. The waterwheel it fed already had the power of twenty-five horses, but Mr John Walton, the new owner of the mill, had a grand plan to install a steam engine. He had already built an engine house in readiness for it with a short, square stack. Only a modern steam engine, Tom told them, could provide enough power to drive the rows of looms that would soon fill bay after bay of the celebrated Castle Mill.

  And then the muffled roar became deafening, and she saw at last where she’d been sold into apprenticeship. It was a huge, square, grit-stone building, with rows and rows of small-paned windows, just like those of the workhouse. But unlike the workhouse, Castle Mill had no pretence of ornamentation or finery. It rose, plain and austere, like the old, ruined castle in whose shelter it worked.

  Chapter 29

  Atticus Fox was a firm believer in the medicinal benefits of the Harrogate spa waters. In particular, he took care
to drink several glasses of the iron-rich chalybeate water each and every day. By so doing, he was able to maintain his brain in first-rate order, and his brain, after all, was the principal tool of his profession.

  This particular morning however, Lucie was with him as he stood outside the sumptuous spa Pump Rooms, and they were both peering anxiously into the crowds that were gathering to have their own prescribed waters dispensed into large glass tumblers.

  “I see her here every morning, and she’s usually quite early,” Atticus said over the rousing music that had suddenly erupted from the bandstand up the way.

  Lucie shouted over the music, “I just hope she hasn’t already left for her daughter’s house.”

  Atticus nodded gravely and they turned to peer through the crowds once more.

  “There she is!” Atticus exclaimed, and several people turned to frown at them, understandably indignant at the shock he had caused to their delicate constitutions. But he was right. There, wrapped snugly into her wicker bath chair, with both hands firmly gripping the tiller handle, was Mrs Price. A hired bath chair man was pushing from behind, or rather he was pulling heavily on the handle, to prevent the chair rolling away from him down the sharp slope of the pavement. Mrs Price caught sight of them almost as soon as they had seen her, and she swung the tiller wide. The bath chair turned sharply towards them.

  “Good morning, Mrs Price,” said Atticus, a little stiffly.

  The old lady raised her gloved hand and the man heaved the heavy chair to a halt.

  “Good morning, Mr and Mrs Fox,” she replied in a voice that sounded exhausted.

  She stared resolutely at her hands still gripping the tiller-handle for several long seconds before she spoke.

  “The girl’s mother – the one we spoke about yesterday – is she the Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson in the papers, the one who murdered her uncle?”

  “She is,” Lucie replied.

  Mrs Price nodded in acknowledgement and looked up at them at last. Her eyes were as red as the tartan rug tucked neatly around her legs and they had deep, dark circles beneath.

  “I hadn’t immediately connected the two, you see. The Lizzie I knew at Starbeck was only a slip of a girl. I never knew her as Elizabeth, or as an old lady.”

  She examined her gloves once more.

  “If what you say is true, then God forgive me, but I can understand her wanting to murder Alfred. I wanted you to know that. But as I said yesterday, how can I tell you where her daughter is now?”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper.

  “How can I risk Sarah finding out that she is the bastard offspring of a rape – maybe of an incestuous rape at that? It would kill her as surely as her mother sticking her knife into Alfie Roberts’ chest. I’m sorry, Mr and Mrs Fox, I truly wish I could, but I cannot possibly help you.”

  “There’s a fortune too, Mrs Price,” Lucie murmured, and the bath chair man glanced across.

  “There is a fortune of several thousands of pounds that’s of no use now to Elizabeth. All she has ever wanted since we first met was to see her daughter once more. And after the life she’s had, I think that’s the very least that she deserves.”

  “Money is of no consequence,” Mrs Price answered quickly. “Her new family is very well-off, very well-off indeed. They are industrialists. She has no need for any outside inheritance.”

  “But Elizabeth’s lawyers will still want to know what to do with it after she’s gone. They will have to advertise the fact in the newspapers.”

  Mrs Price raised her hand once more and the bath chair man leaned obediently against the handle.

  “I don’t want to miss my train,” she said. “My answer is unchanged. Do your worst, Mrs Fox, and may you and your husband and your infernal lawyers be damned for it.”

  They watched the wretched, old figure in the little, wicker bath-chair trundle along the pavement until the crowds swallowed her up. Then Atticus shrugged and said: “What now?”

  Lucie stared at him.

  “Mrs Price is very well off,” she said.

  “I know,” Atticus replied.

  He gestured along the line of elegantly dressed people waiting patiently to take their waters.

  “But then so is most of Harrogate.”

  “I know, Atticus, but think back. Didn’t Mary Lovell say that Mrs Price liked to spend time with the workhouse children because she couldn’t have any of her own?”

  Lucie’s eyes were dancing with tiny explosions of revelation.

  “But now she tells us that she is off to see her daughter.”

  Atticus gasped.

  “You’re right. So you think that it was the Prices themselves who adopted Sarah?”

  “Yes,” Lucie said, “I’m very much afraid that I do.”

  Chapter 30

  It had been agreed with the Master of the workhouse that Elizabeth would be paid the sum of tuppence each week as a pauper apprentice. Tom, in his capacity as mill foreman, reminded her of this as he caught her alone on the great stone stairwell of the mill that reminded her so much, both of the Annexe, and of Budle Tower. She stood trembling as he spoke, waiting for him to drag her off to Hell. She barely heard him say that he had now agreed with Mr John Walton, the owner of the Mill, that as well as her lodgings in the apprentice house over the way, she would now be paid no less than sixpence each and every week. She had, he explained in his capacity as the mill foreman, impressed everyone. She had impressed them with her diligence and quick learning, with her sheer industriousness, and with the fact that she often worked, unbidden and unpaid, far beyond the twelve hours a day that a girl of her age was allowed to be employed tending the looms.

  Tom smiled and reached out towards her. His hands were massive and overpowering; they were utterly, utterly unstoppable. She wanted to beg him for mercy, to plead with him to leave her to her work, but the words gagged unspoken in her throat. She tried to turn, tried to flee back down the dark, winding stairwell, but her leaden limbs refused to heed the shrieking, shrieking screams of her brain.

  His hand found her shoulder, and her soul cringed as he gently squeezed it and smiled, saying “Well done, Lizzie,” before he turned away.

  Sixpence – what did she care for sixpence? Would any number of sixpences bring back little Baby Albert, or Baby Sarah, or her poor, dead mama? She worked, not for all the sixpences in Threadneedle Street, but to keep those awful, awful memories locked away, shut off in the foul, festering depths of her mind.

  When her mind was full of looms and yarns, of shuttles and spinning, it had no space for anything else. It was only at the end of the day, when the sun had kissed the side of the gorge and when she was too exhausted to work any longer, that the memories would slip their bonds, and would come to hurt her. Night was when she always remembered the bad things that had happened.

  But she had also remembered the hurt in her nipple, when Mr Wright had first examined her at Starbeck, and she remembered how it had so eased the hurt in her soul. Now she had a knife. It was a sharp knife, with an edge that shone with all the colours of the rainbow, if you held it up to the sun. Tom had given it to her to shave off the stray threads from the linen cloth. She kept it as sharp as a razor. Stroking the edge over and over and over again with the whetstone somehow seemed to sooth her mind; somehow make her feel a little calmer. But at night, when she remembered the bad things that happened, she could slide the blade under her nightdress and think only about the long, stinging lines on her breasts.

  She sometimes wondered if there would be enough skin on her breasts to last until the End of the World – until Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One, when she could at last be with her babies and her mama once again.

  Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One; it was such a special number. When she wrote it down, and she wrote it down very often, it always looked the same – it always was the same – whichever way she held her paper. And when she counted up the numbers – one and eight and eight and one – they added up to eighteen. She was eigh
teen now – eighteen years old. And then she had wondered: Was it possible; dare she hope that she didn’t need to wait until Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One before she could die at all? Perhaps the End of the World would come in Eighteen Hundred and Forty-Eight instead, because Eighteen Hundred and Forty Eight was when she was eighteen and one and eight and eight and one was eighteen too. Could she, like the brave Grace Darling before her, be granted an early relief from her life? One and eight and eight and one was such a special number, and whichever way you reckoned it, it always, always added up to eighteen.

  Mr John Walton of Walton And Company knew that it would have been commercial folly to bring in workers for his mill from the great industrial conurbations of the West Riding. To do so would have involved building every single worker his own tiny cottage to live in: an expense of over one hundred pounds per head. So instead, Mr Walton had built a single large apprentice house over the way from his mill. It had cost a good three hundred pounds to build – a not inconsiderable sum – but for that, he could house no less than eighty child apprentices. And Mr Walton knew that if he then filled his new apprentice house with pauper children, not only would the workhouses pay him to apprentice them in the first instance, but he could also employ them at a wage of just tuppence each week.

  Beyond the finish of her shift each night, when Lizzie finally became so exhausted that she could work no longer, she would hurry across the way to the apprentice house. There she would go straight to the girls’ dormitory, and the sanctuary of her cot.

  She was lucky with her cot, because Tom had arranged with the mill manager that she could have one all to herself. The other girls had to sleep in pairs in the little wooden boxes they jokingly called ‘coffins.’ That was much warmer, but Mr John Walton had known that it would have been commercial folly to have had the cots made any bigger than the little children really needed. But Lizzie was tall, almost too tall to be a little girl at all. So she had been allowed a cot entirely to herself. It was cold to be sure, but she really didn’t mind being cold at all. In fact she preferred it, because lying there, cold as death in the little wooden box, she felt somehow closer to her mama.