The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “As I said,” she retorts, “it was a reputable and highly respected establishment. I heard nothing but good reports of it, the entire time I worked at Camberwell. I can assure you, Mrs Nicholls’s was a model of its kind.”

  Charles does not press her, but he’s not fooled either. The practise of baby farming is not yet as prevalent as it will become later in the century, and won’t become a public scandal for at least another twenty years, but his time in the police force has taught Charles what can really happen to children in such places. All too often the so-called respectable women advertising so innocuously in the newspapers for ‘children to adopt or nurse’ were little better than child-murderers, prepared to take an unwanted baby off its mother’s hands for an appropriate fee. No questions asked, and never to trouble them again. No surprise, either, that Miss Chadwick’s newborn child should end in such a place—the younger and sicklier their charges were, the better the baby farmers liked it; several pounds for a few weeks’ work was a handsome return, and the death of such an infant was so common as to raise not the slightest concern, official or unofficial.

  There is a silence. After a moment or two Miss Jellicoe shifts in her chair, and bends to the table to collect the cups. There is a closed look on her face, and Charles knows he has his cue to leave.

  They return to the tiny hallway and he turns to thank her. He expects her reply to be as perfunctory as possible, but she surprises him by asking where he plans to go next.

  “Back to town, but my destination is unconnected with the present case. I head for Curzon Street, Mayfair.”

  And now it is her turn to look surprised. “How curious. My last nursing engagement was in that very street. Number 46.”

  Charles strives, not very successfully, to conceal his astonishment. “You worked for Sir Julius Cremorne?”

  “Strictly speaking, no. Sir Julius was my employer, of course, but my patient was his wife. Poor lady. That such a thing should have happened.”

  She sees his uncomprehending face. “You obviously do not know the story. Lady Cremorne suffered a bad fall some four or five years ago. She was found one morning at the bottom of the stairs. Her back was not broken, but she was lamed in the hip and has been in great pain from that day to this. I never heard her complain, all the time I nursed her, but she will not walk again.”

  Charles frowns. “I find it hard to understand how such an accident could have taken place in such a well-attended house.” He looks at her downcast eyes. “Were there rumours about it at the time?”

  But he has pressed her too much; she answers sharply. “It’s neither my place to comment, nor yours to pry.”

  The next moment the door has shut behind him and he’s standing on the rough unmade road, quite alone.

  THIRTEEN

  Hester’s Narrative

  I DEBATED VERY much whether I ought to inform Mr Jarvis about what Clara had told me. She had not enjoined me to secrecy, but neither had she given me leave to talk of the matter to anyone but her. In consequence I was very doubtful whether I had a right to speak of it, and sat up half the night thinking and pondering. At last I came to the conclusion that I might do so, because I knew in my own heart I had only her good in mind, and only her and Rick’s joint happiness in view. I hope this may not seem trivial. I was very much in earnest.

  Accordingly when the morrow came, I went to Mr Jarvis after breakfast, and said that I had something delightful to tell him. He was in his own room overlooking the garden, as he always was at that time of the day.

  “Then you must tell me what it is, little old woman,” said he jovially, putting down his pen.

  “Mr Jarvis,” said I, gaining confidence from his smile, “do you recall that night soon after Rick first came to live with us? When Clara was playing the piano, and Rick was with her, and they looked so fine and well-matched sitting there together?”

  I wanted him to remember the moment when our eyes met, and now there was an expression on his face that told me that he did.

  “Yes, my dear?” said he, with perhaps just a very little impatience now.

  “What I foresaw that night has come to pass,” said I. “Clara and Rick have fallen in love. She has told me so.”

  He sat considering for a minute, and then asked me a question or two, concerning what Clara had said, and how I had replied.

  “You are not angry with them, are you, Mr Jarvis?” I asked, at length. “They are, it is true, very young, and many years must pass before they can think of marrying. But I am convinced their love is true and will stand the test. Even if any dearer tie must be very far off.”

  “Very far off,” echoed he, with a suitable gravity. “Very far off indeed, I fear.”

  “I hope I have not done wrong, sir,” I said then, “in encouraging their attachment?”

  “How could our Dame Durden ever do wrong?” said he, laying his hand a little heavily on my head, and looking into my eyes. “But we must take care she does not overburden herself in the concern she shows for her fellow boarders. For there are others here who deserve her attention, and a Guardian who has first claim on her love.”

  We spoke no more on the subject, either then or at any other time. I admit that I did expect him to raise it again, but I am—no doubt!—making too much of my own importance. I do know—or at least I believe—that he spoke to Clara, and I am sure, to Rick too. What I am now about to say has long been a cause of regret to me, and I have blamed myself many times, but I must steel myself to it and be as truthful as I hope I have always been in these pages. I am sure Mr Jarvis spoke to Rick, because I observed with pain that Rick and he were never quite as frank and genial with each other thereafter. Rick was civil—more civil, if anything, than hitherto—but all the same, a coolness arose between them that worsened as the months progressed. I feared from the first that this was all my fault, and that a corresponding coolness might develop between me and my darling, but it was not so. It is true that Clara became somewhat distracted and listless as the weeks passed, and seemed more often indisposed. Her appetite, likewise, was a little affected and no doubt for this reason, she took ill of a low fever.

  I remember everything about that day—the weather, the circumstances, exactly where I was, and what I was doing. I even remember the little paisley shawl I had gone to fetch for Clara from my own room. We had been sitting together working, and I observed that her fingers were blue, even though the fire was lit and burning brightly. I was returning with the shawl and had my hand on the door, when I heard the key turn in the lock on the other side. I was concerned at once, for never, in all our time together, had either of us ever fastened our doors against each other. I called to Clara at once to let me in. My apprehension was only augmented when I received a reply not from my darling, but from Miss Darby.

  “Not now, Hester,” she called. “There’s nothing the matter; I will come to you presently. You will be with Miss Clara soon.”

  But it was long, very long before my darling pet and I were to see each other again.

  Within a few short hours Clara had become very ill. Miss Darby moved her to a chamber upstairs, on the other side of the house, and though I begged on my knees to be allowed to nurse her, my Guardian would not even permit me to enter her room, saying I might catch the contagion of her disease. So I wrote her a letter telling her that I loved her, and Rick loved her, and she had to get well for both our sakes. But despite all this, my poor darling grew worse and worse, and for many days we almost despaired that she would ever recover. How much I reproached myself then for not taking more care of my darling! How much I would have given to have taken her place, and restored her to the sunlight, and the sweet dreams of happy love!

  My only comfort was my Guardian’s tenderness and affection, which never failed, all that terrible time. Never had he been more protective of me or more assiduous of my comfort; never had I needed his care and kindness more. He would sit with me, and hold my hand, and I would cling to him as he kissed and consoled me. N
or was this the only instance of my Guardian’s love, at this time, and I should not let it pass without gratitude and recognition. One evening, while Clara was still very ill, there came a gentle knock at my door. I said, “Come in!” and there on the threshold was a pretty girl, dressed in a starched white cap and grey dress.

  “If you please, Miss Hester,” said the girl, “I am Carley.”

  “And what brings you here so late, Carley?” said I, in some surprise.

  “If you please, miss,” she replied, “I’m to attend you, at your Guardian’s request.”

  I put my hand to my heart, it beat so fast, so overcome was I by this new instance of his solicitude for me.

  “There’s no need to cry, miss,” said Carley, helping me to my chair.

  “I can’t help it, Carley.”

  “All will be well now,” she said with a smile, and patting my hand. “You will soon recover your strength, and before you know it, you will be able to join Miss Clara once again.”

  She smoothed my hair, then set about her functions, going about the room putting things to rights, and finally she folded my camisole and took it away.

  You will wonder how I occupied my days, all the time that poor Clara was away from me. I had my duties, of course, and all the little tasks I took on to make myself useful about the house; indeed I re-doubled my efforts, in an attempt to distract my thoughts and alleviate—in my own small way—the burden Clara’s illness placed on the maids. Likewise I would often see Miss Flint in the garden. Soon after Clara fell ill Mr Jarvis encouraged me to seek her out and talk to her. He knew I had always done my best to humour her poor distracted mind, and I think he hoped that in doing so now I might be brought to think less of my own sorrows, and gain a juster appreciation of all the blessings I still possessed. The first time Miss Flint saw me walking alone, without my pet, she came running towards me, her bonnet and shawl all awry, crying aloud in the utmost distress, “Oh my dear Miss Hester, what sad news!”

  I do not know if she wept more or if I did, but I do know that she soon had to put her hand in her little reticule and search among the paper matches and dry lavender for a pocket-handkerchief, and I had to take out my own. I led her to a little bench, where she sat holding the cloth to her eyes with both hands, shedding tears.

  “Be so good as to let me have my cry out, my dear,” she said. “I am a little rambling today, I fear, but if you will forgive me and not mind my tears, then I will be quite recovered presently.”

  So I let Miss Flint cry, and I let myself cry, and it did us both good.

  In a little while I composed myself and attempted to lead Miss Flint to talk a little about her own history, and how she came to be with us, which would, I thought, quiet her mind and draw her from sad thoughts. But I was much mistaken. She immediately became quite distressed, and looked about her in the most pitiful way.

  “Oh I must not talk of that! Do not press me, my dear!”

  I seized her agitated hands and held them fast in my own, doing my best to soothe her, saying I would never have raised the subject had I known the effect it would have. But she became ever more fretful, and I began to wonder whether my darling was not right when she pronounced Miss Flint to be a little mad. It happened to be at that moment that I perceived Miss Darby wheeling Augusta towards us down the gravel path, at which sight poor Miss Flint became quite irrationally distraught, and seizing her little reticule, quite ran away. I worried very much about this for some hours and spoke to Mr Jarvis about it that very evening, but he assured me that the poor thing was often given to such sudden and absurd flights of fancy, and would be quite her old self when next I saw her, and would probably have no recollection of the incident at all. And so, to my immense relief, it proved.

  I also, of course, found myself spending rather more time than I usually did with the other girls during my darling’s illness. My pretty room had become a source of pain to me; I could not bear to sit there on my own in the evenings, thinking of what Clara and I would have been doing together at that moment if she were there. So when my Guardian was not with me, I would sit in the drawing-room with Caroline and Augusta and the others, with good Miss Darby in attendance. Caroline was not nearly as reserved as she had been when I first arrived; indeed Miss Darby told me she had made considerable progress, and could nowadays often be permitted to sew by herself and cut out her own work. Miss Darby was good enough to ascribe much of this encouraging improvement to my own influence, but I am sure that very little of it was due to anything I had done. At first Amy was not supposed to know (and indeed did not know) why Clara was not among us, but as the days lengthened to weeks she was eventually told what the matter was. She was always such a sprightly child, and I suppose it was unreasonable of me to expect such news to dampen her girlish chatter, or quiet her constant skipping about. It is as well that we hardly saw Rick during all that dreadful time—I imagine he was as anxious about Clara as I was—I am sure of that!—but Mr Jarvis told us he had a great deal of study to do and had no time to devote to anything else. Little time, as I said, for conversing with us and I cannot say I am sorry. Not for my own sake—oh no!—but because one might almost have thought Amy saw Clara’s illness as an opportunity to ingratiate herself with him. I know there was nothing in it—that it was only Amy’s way—but she became rather insistently vivacious; one might almost have said flirtatious, if that were not such an incongruous, not to say unpleasant, idea.

  It seemed many sad weeks before they finally told me that all my desperate prayers had been answered, and God had spared my darling. She was still very ill, still very weak, but she would live, and she would—at last—be restored to my side.

  Then it was several long slow days more before they finally let my pet come and stand behind the window-curtain and talk to me where I stood in the garden, looking up towards her blinded casement, and loving her beautiful voice even more than when I used to hear it every day, and there was not a minute of the hour when we were not together.

  And then at last there was that longed-for afternoon when I was finally allowed to go upstairs and see my dear girl, sitting up in bed for the first time, and propped by soft pillows. She looked well, my Clara, but not, perhaps, as lovely as she once was. There were hollows now beneath her pretty eyes, and a thinness to her pale cheeks. I had hoped that we would return to our old ways and our usual confidential manner, but as her strength slowly returned, I began to notice a change in my darling. I cannot say what it was that first made me think of this, and even now I find it hard to lay my finger on this word, or that gesture, but sure I was all the same, that what Clara had suffered had altered her in some way I could not define. She loved me as much as she ever did, I knew that, but there was a secret sorrow about her now, which she did not speak of. And one day, when I stole to her room and found her sleeping, it seemed to me as I watched her that even her always beautiful face—that face I knew and loved so well—was different now in some strange new way, and not the same as once it was.

  FOURTEEN

  Springing a Mine

  Drawing a chair before one of the coffee-room fires to think about him at my leisure, I gradually fell from the consideration of his happiness to tracing prospects in the live-coals, and to thinking, as they broke and changed, of the principal vicissitudes and separations that had marked my life. I had not seen a coal fire, since I had left England three years ago: though many a wood fire had I watched, as it crumbled into hoary ashes, and mingled with the feathery heap upon the hearth, which not inaptly figured to me, in my despondency, my own dead hopes. I could think of the past now, gravely, but not bitterly; and could contemplate the future in a brave spirit. Home, in its best sense, was for me no more. She in whom I might have inspired a dearer love, I had taught to be my sister. She would marry, and would have new claimants on her tenderness; and in doing it, would never know the love for her that had grown up in my heart. It was right that I should pay the forfeit of my headlong passion. What I reaped, I had sown.r />
  “FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, let me hear no more of this sentimental claptrap! Can you not find something decent to read in that great stock of books of yours?”

  Maddox aims a swipe of his walking-stick at his great-nephew’s ankle, which very nearly meets its mark. He is lucid today, if a trifle cantankerous; Charles’s idea of reading David Copperfield to him started auspiciously enough but as time has gone by Maddox has become increasingly restless, first muttering occasionally under his breath, and now breaking out in open rebellion.

  “Don’t you like Dickens, Uncle?” says Charles. “They were queuing at the bookseller’s for this last instalment—I very nearly didn’t get one. Everybody wants to know if there’s going to be a happy ending.”

  Maddox snorts and looks at him with undisguised contempt. “Life rarely provides what you so tritely term a ‘happy ending’, and certainly not in the mawkish fashion to which this fellow seems so attached.”

  “What would you prefer? I think I have a Miss Austen somewhere.”

  Maddox sniffs. “At least that woman could write decent prose, which is more than I can say for this hack of yours.”

  Another swing of the stick, which this time succeeds in knocking the pages out of Charles’s hands.

  “Though even she seemed to consider a wedding an ending, rather than a beginning. It is usually quite the opposite way around, in my opinion. And in my experience.”

  Charles frowns. “I didn’t think you ever—”

  “No, no, of course not,” Maddox snaps, “I was not talking about myself—I was referring to the observations I have made of other people. Marriage is at best a hazard, my boy; at worst, a snare from which there is no relief, and no escaping. So you mind my words, next time you find yourself following a well-cut spencer down the Strand.”

  It’s doubtful any woman has worn such an out-moded article these last twenty years, but Charles knows what he means. The next moment Maddox is wiping his hand clumsily across his eyes, and banging his cane heavily on the wooden floor.