by Jo Baker
“There’s no need for this.” I said. “My Sunday dress will do quite well enough for the dance.”
“Nonsense,” Mam said. “What are you thinking? With this beautiful bit of cloth Thomas has so kindly got for you—”
She fingered a fold, and lifted a corner so that the bundle tumbled undone, and she lifted the fabric up to the light, so that tiny squares of sunlight shone through it, and it glowed. She and Thomas exchanged a glance, a little smile, and I was conscious of a fierce and sudden flush across my face and through my whole body. They were not conspirators, I remember thinking; the need for conspiracy was over. They were victors.
—
I didn’t ask Mrs. Wolfenden; not for weeks. I couldn’t. Not the way things were at the vicarage. Every day when I got home after polishing the hall floor twice, or being scolded for invisible dust, or having fresh linen returned to me for re-laundering, my mam would look me over, seeking out the neat little parcel of patterns that she daily expected, and seeing nothing, would frown and start to scold. I was leaving myself scant time to get the work done, all the pinning and cutting and sewing. I’d end up having to go in my Sunday dress after all, and what would Thomas think of that. Perhaps he’d take the hint, I wanted to say, but instead I’d begin some half-hearted excuse; that just when I was going to ask, Mrs. Wolfenden had gone out on a morning call; my work had kept me from the house and out of the family’s company; the lady had been out of sorts and it hadn’t seemed right to trouble her; I’d speak to her tomorrow.
“If I were your age, and in your position,” Mam said, “I’d have asked her pretty smartish. I’d have the dress nearly finished by now. I’d have thought of little else.”
It was September already. There was only one meeting that month, when the moon was full, since it was too dark otherwise for people to find their way home afterwards without ending in a ditch. It was a noisy meeting: voices were raised behind the closed door, and three of the men left before it was ended. Mr. Gorst didn’t come, though his eldest boy did; and there were others who had often come before but didn’t now. There were newcomers too; Methodists and other non-conformists, people we never met from one season’s end to another, walking in miles from the hill-farms and the hamlets above Docker, walking back by moonlight. They arrived with furrowed brows and left in huddles, muttering.
There was a book waiting for me, every evening, squeezed between the Progress and the Bible on the dresser shelf. Some books were left for several days, giving me time to become so deeply engrossed in them that I moved in a haze, a dream of them. Some books were there overnight, and disappeared like mist in the daytime, while I was at work. I’d go to the shelf when I got home, and there would be an unknown book waiting. It became almost a joke: Mr. Moore would sit, cool as the September day, and he’d glance up at me with his brown eyes, his gaze level and uncharged, as if he were innocent of everything, and I would take the book, and return his gaze coolly, and sit down to read. All the unfinished stories: they wrapped themselves around me like vapours, trailed after me like mist.
—
“Not much more than a week now,” Mam said, jolting me out of my reading. “Till the dance. Sall’s coming home for her holiday, and can help with the trimming of the dress, if it’s ready for trimming.” She was folding linen, her face lined with vexation and bother. “Have you even spoken to Mrs. Wolfenden?”
“It’s not easy,” I said, my eyes pulled back down to the book.
“It’s perfectly easy. You just ask her. You’re a good girl. You deserve a treat once in a while.”
“It’s not my place. Alice is her maid. I’m just a housemaid; it’d be too much of a presumption. I’ll do fine in my Sunday dress.”
“If you don’t ask her tomorrow,” Mam said, “I’ll march down there and ask her myself.”
—
The ewer was warm and heavy in my hands. I walked carefully with it, conscious of each step of the stairs, looking at the pretty flower pattern and the shiny glaze; I tapped on the door, pushed quietly through and put the ewer down on the washstand. Mrs. Wolfenden sat up from her pillows, all creamy cotton and frills, her hair in braids, and blinked around her.
I spoke softly. “Madam?”
She was startled to see me, and tried to conceal it. “I expected Alice.” She held to the sheets as if she were resisting the urge to pull them up over her head and hide, as if I were a penny-dreadful villain come to ravish her, as if I were the big bad wolf. That she could be so nervous of me made me nervous too.
“I was given some cloth, madam,” I said, clumsy and reluctant. “To make a dress, but there isn’t a pattern to be had that’s not been twice around the parish already, and we thought that I might ask you, since you would have something newer, and less seen, that would suit the fabric well.” She eyed me uneasily. “Not anything new,” I added; “last year’s, perhaps, or whatever you have that you wouldn’t mind me using.”
Her voice was dry with nerves. “What cloth have you got?”
“Tea-dyed,” I said.
Her eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The fabric was clearly too fashionable, too much of her world, to be thought appropriate for someone like me.
“Of course, yes.” She seemed to shake herself. “I have something that would do you well.”
She slipped out of bed, her feet soft in cotton bedsocks. She went over to the far side of her bed, to her workbox. She came back with three fat envelopes, each illustrated with a drawing of an elegant young woman in fashionable dress.
“They are cut to my size,” she said, and looked me over as if noticing for the first time that I had a shape, a figure, dimensions. “But then we are not so different after all.”
I watched the uneasy flicker of her eyes as she shuffled the parcels around in her hands. She selected one, and offered it to me. “Take this one. It will just suit the fabric, and your figure.”
I took hold of the nearest edge of the envelope. She did not let go. I glanced at her face, but her eyes were downcast.
“You’ll remember I was good to you?” she said.
“Madam?”
She glanced up. Her cheeks were pale. “Whatever happens, you’ll remember I was good to you?”
“Yes,” I said, puzzled. “Of course.”
She let go of the package. I fumbled it, then clutched it to my chest.
“The Reverend has told me,” Mrs. Wolfenden said, “he has told me he will protect me, but, Lizzy, I do not see how I can be protected, or anyone at all can be protected, not while men like Mr. Moore move freely in the world.”
I was caught between sympathy and laughter. We were as harvest mice in a corner of a field, I thought, wearing a summer’s worth of tracks through the wheat and thinking it a whole world, an eternity. She was afraid. She was afraid of change. I understood that; change is frightening.
—
Mam helped me with laying out the pattern on the kitchen table; Sally arrived as we were pinning the paper to the cloth. My heart skipped to see her; I went to hug her, but she was busy with taking off her smart bonnet, so I helped her off with it, and she took it from me and glanced about for somewhere to lay it. She set it on the dresser, and teased at the feather trim to smooth it, and when she was satisfied with that, she took off her gloves and cloak, and came to kiss us both; and the kiss was not a kiss but the light brush of her cheek against mine. I put my arms around her, but she backed off, cautioning me against crushing her poplin, and I found myself standing there, slightly shy, and not knowing what to say, and glancing to Mam, to see if she were faring any better. She stood back, glowing with admiration at her handsome daughter.
“Don’t you look fine, my love? Don’t you look fine!”
Sally brushed down her skirts, said “Thank you.” She nodded to the cloth and pattern on the table. “Who’s that for?”
“Our Lizzy.”
A flicker of surprise crossed Sally’s countenance. “I thought you were
taking in sewing. Mrs. Millard had a tea-dyed dress this summer.”
Mam exclaimed warmly at this, then asked, “Who’s Mrs. Millard?”
Sally took up a fold of cloth and rubbed it between her finger and thumb, pouting. My cheeks burned. She glanced up at me.
“You can borrow my second set of stays, if you need them.”
“Is your box left up at the public house?” Mam asked. “Shall I send the lads for it?”
Sally shook her head. “The Forsters had their man collect my valise. Mrs. Forster has been kind enough to ask me to stay with her.”
The glow sank from Mam’s face. She smiled, said, “Oh.”
“Well, I can hardly sleep on the floor here, can I?”
Sally took herself over to the fireside chairs, arranged her skirts carefully and sat down. “I am parched for a cup of tea.”
Mam rushed to set the kettle on. I returned to the work. My mam had had a notion that if we could squeeze the pattern into small enough a space, she could make herself a new bonnet-liner out of the remainder. I unpinned the front panel of the bodice, teased it down a little less than a hand-span, slid the yoke in and stabbed it into place with a pin.
Mam was asking Sally about the milliner’s shop as she made the tea, and about Mrs. Millard who was, it turned out, one of the better sort of customers. Sally told Mam about her extraordinary progress, how she had been given silk to work with, how she had feathers such as you wouldn’t dream, that came off great big birds from half a world away, and cost more than the silk; and weight for weight cost more, almost certainly, than gold. I took up the scissors and snipped into the cloth. She got up, and smoothed herself down again, and came over to watch me, distractingly. I glanced up at her.
“You’re going wrong there,” she said.
I looked back down. I had. I retreated with the scissors, then set them down. “Only a snip.”
“So, you and Thomas are finally courting.”
“We’re not courting.” There was a faint darkness under her eyes, I noticed, as if she were fatigued, or somehow troubled, but her manner gave nothing away.
“He’s been pining after you long enough,” she said.
“We are not courting.”
“What do you think this is, then?” She nodded at the fabric. The pattern was laid and pinned out, and I had already begun to cut the cloth that he had given me. There was, after all, no disputing what she said.
—
The Reverend leaned on the pulpit’s edge, his hands gripped around the rim, his knuckles white. He was speaking, his voice level, setting out the argument of his sermon as if he were laying paving stones. I was watching the whiteness of his knuckles, the way the veins stood out on the back of his hands.
I sat between Thomas and my mam. My dad was sat on the far side of her, at the end of the tight-packed pew. All the free-seats were full, the air heavy with the press of warm bodies, the smell of clothes, goose fat and lavender water and bad teeth; a whiff of drink here and there, including off my dad. Michaelmas daisies and marigolds were brilliant on the windowsills; their faint scent was the scent of funerals and did little to sweeten the air. I kept my eyes on the pulpit.
The Reverend’s surplice was spotless as the Lamb; spotless as all the linen that we laundered for him. It hung in folds, as if carved out of wood and whitewashed. I watched as his face filled with blood; noticed that his voice was getting shrill, and there was spittle at the corner of his mouth. The words were coming from his lips like ash-flakes lifting from the fire. It was as though I didn’t so much hear them, as watch them rise.
To presume too much, seeking to rise above the station allotted, tempted by Satan to presumption, it is folly, folly, folly of the most abject kind, to look to the things of this life, and so lose the Life to come.
I could hear Thomas breathing, too close. I felt my mam’s shoulder press against my own, too close. I could smell the breakfast egg on her breath.
The wise man seeks rather an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, that fadeth not away. A Crown of Glory, Life Everlasting, garments that shine like the sun. The Righteous Man will heed the word of God, and not the word of Man, or the word of the Devil from man’s lips. The Righteous Man knows that to do otherwise is to fall into sin and folly; he knows that there is no wisdom greater than that of the Pure Heart and the Innocent Mind, that there is no worldly consolation for the troubled soul.
I could see the back of Sally’s head, the bare nape of her neck underneath her fancy feathered bonnet. She was sitting between Mr. and Mrs. Forster in their pew. And as Reverend Wolfenden said A Crown of Glory she reached up, and touched the curl that had escaped on the nape of her neck, and I loved her for it. Dad said something. I didn’t quite hear it; he spoke under his breath, and was at the far end of the pew. I saw Mam shushing him; he shook his head, and fell silent.
For the Lord has ordered our estate, and set every man in his situation, from the highest in the land, to the most wretched pauper at his door—
Dad rose from his seat, making me gasp, sending off rustles of movement across the church as people turned to stare. He was standing now, one hand clutching the back of the pew in front, the other clenched in a fist at his side.
“Damn fine luck for some,” he said.
Silence filled the whole of the chancel; it was as if the nave, from flags to roof-beams, had been turned into one solid block of ice. Mam scrabbled at his arm, but he pushed her hand away. He stepped out into the aisle, and I lunged across Mam, trying to grab his coat-tails.
“Dad,” I said, “please, Dad, don’t—” But it was too late, I couldn’t catch hold of him, and I doubt it would have done much good if I had.
“Isaiah,” he said, far too loud, his voice ringing around the chancel roof like the Reverend’s. “The prophet Isaiah. He said you were damned if you took more land than you needed to feed yourself and your family, that you were damned if you added property to property and left nowhere for ordinary men to live. Isaiah said that was devilry, and you’d be damned for it. What would be your thoughts on that, Reverend? On Isaiah’s teachings?”
The silence was melting, people began to mutter. Dad raised his voice over the noise.
“And then there’s the rulers who make unrighteous decrees and turn aside the needy from justice, and take away the rights from the poor; they were damned too, according to Isaiah. There was a time we had rights. A bit of land to farm. Cattle and fowl on the common. Hogs in the woods. Them rights were taken away, and property was added to property.”
“Shut up,” someone said, low and urgent.
“God’s sake man, sit down,” someone else called out. “We’ll be here all day.”
Dad was moving up the aisle towards the pulpit. His words rang out through all the church, strange and heavy-sounding.
“You’re very ready to tell us how it’s all God’s will, that this is God’s will, and that is God’s will, but what I really want to know is if it really is God’s will, his own Holy Decree, that you eat meat every day, that you have a house big enough to be home to a hundred men, that your wife wears those pretty frocks of hers, all those silks and satins and what have you. And if it is,” he said, “I want to know how you got to be such a great favourite with Our Lord, and what I ever did to annoy him, so that I have to get by on a crust and a paring, and what the poor souls must have done so that He’d arrange a wage-cut just to watch them starve. Maybe you could share the secret of it, Reverend? Maybe you could tell us how you managed to persuade the Lord that you deserve better than the rest of us?”
My father’s voice had grown, was strong and harsh and demanding. The Reverend opened his mouth. There was a moment’s pause; he gathered breath. His face was greyish-white. A line of spittle joined his upper lip with the lower one.
My dad said, “And while we’re at it, d’y’happen to know the Lord’s opinion on the fashions, Mrs. Wolfenden? Is He fond of lace?”
Mrs. Wolfenden shrank in her pew.
“See, I only want to know what the Lord is up to, I can only ask them as’d know, them He’s set above us to govern and guide us ignorant folk. If I’m assured my tithes are being spent as He would have it, if He’s keen on you getting your satin and sirloin and coals, if He’s all for luxury and sloth for some and famine and drudgery for others, then good for you, I say. Good for you. Well done. You must be very holy folks indeed.”
My father moved up to the chancel step, and stepped up onto it, and then he turned to the congregation.
“Time we did summat, don’t y’think?”
Looking at him standing there, scruffy even in his Sunday best, his face shining with a passion that I had not seen before, I felt the whole frail structure of my happiness crack and splinter; the mist of half-read stories burn and shrink away. This was the end; I knew it was the end. This was exactly what the Reverend had been anticipating. Dad would be locked up; Mr. Moore would have to leave. He would take his books and go.
The Reverend’s expression had narrowed. “Mr. Aitken,” he said, “would you be so kind as to support my wife, and see her safely home?”
Mr. Aitken stood up and left his pew, and went to the vicarage pew, and offered Mrs. Wolfenden his arm, and she reached up and took it, and it looked as if she were being hoisted out of a hole, and Mrs. Aitken joined them both, and took her husband’s other arm, and he supported them down the aisle and out of the church, and Mrs. Wolfenden’s plump and pretty face looked pale as death; I thought she might be about to faint, and part of me thought I should go after her, assist her, but I knew my attentions would not be welcome. I watched as Mr. Forster stood and gave his wife his arm, and offered Sally the other, and, crushed close together, they made their way down the aisle. Sally passed us, and kept her eyes fixed on the floor, but I could see that she was blushing like a beet, and there was, I thought, a hint of satisfaction in her face, to find herself treated as a lady, as something fragile and prone to harm.