A Sovereign for a Song

by Annie Wilkinson

  ‘I have to go to Annsdale on business to do with the mine, little hinny. I shall be back as soon as I can, then there’ll be plenty of time to arrange a wedding. Try to eat well, and go out every day for a little fresh air. I’ll give instructions to the servants about your diet. Go to bed early and have a long rest in the afternoons. I really will be back as soon as I can.’

  What business to do with the mine needed his presence, she wondered. He did nothing for the mine other than to take his profits from it, but she knew better than to tax him with leaving her at such a time, and her concern was about her child, not about Charlie.

  ‘Is everything all right with the baby, Charlie?’

  ‘Take very good care of yourself whilst I’m away, and all will be well.’

  Three weeks later, after a long and difficult labour, her baby girl was stillborn. The capable housekeeper wrapped the yellow, bloated little corpse with its already-peeling skin and put it in her arms. ‘It’s a hydrops foetalis – a golden baby. I’ve seen them before. They never live. None of your children by Mr Parkinson will ever live. You’ll be well advised to accept my help in future.’

  Ginny held her lifeless child whilst the housekeeper went to prepare her a sleeping draught. She drank it and drifted into a drugged sleep thinking it not at all odd that she’d had a golden baby to golden Charlie. Naturally the child had died. She had died to oblige her father, so that everything would be as he wanted. Charlie was so lucky. When he wanted a thing, it became so. When Ginny awoke, her baby was gone.

  A few days later, whilst the housekeeper was removing a tray of food Ginny had been unable to eat, Charlie entered.

  ‘She had the child a week ago, you say. I hope you’ve taken very good care of her.’

  ‘I have indeed, sir. She’s had every care, and cook has tried every delicacy to tempt her appetite, but she’s not quite herself yet.’

  ‘Poor little hinny.’ He crossed over to Ginny and lifted her chin. ‘I must take you out and about, blow the cobwebs away and put some roses into your cheeks.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know whether we lost a son or a daughter?’

  ‘It makes very little difference now, surely. The important thing is to have you quite well again. Pas de rapports pendant trois semaines, as the French say.’ He smiled and ruffled her hair fondly. ‘So much more realistic than stretching the thing out to six weeks. There’s no satisfactory substitute for you, little hinny.’

  He threw himself into the task of restoring her to health. He lavished attention on her, took her out, had the cook prepare delicacies for her but did not mention the subject of marriage. That was well. Far from being her aim, the thought of marriage to Charlie had become her aversion. After a couple of weeks he joined her in bed.

  ‘Please, Charlie, I’m not ready yet,’ she whispered.

  He sighed. ‘Very well. I won’t trouble you for a while yet. But in another three weeks, I expect you to be quite well again. You ought to understand something though, Ginny. I’m a very healthy man, and I must find release somewhere.’

  He made no bookings for her and left her to sleep alone. She was left to her own devices, to convalesce and to mourn her child.

  ‘Don’t worry on my account, I’ve no interest in babies,’ he told her one morning, in a consoling mood. ‘Small wonder many men seek a mistress for the first time after their wives are with child. No, Ginny, babies are more than an inconvenience and we’ll do much better without them. I really think everything has happened for the best.’

  Chapter 17

  Ginny was dead inside, as dead and frayed as her baby. At night she dreamed of it silently reproaching her, seeming to ask, ‘What choice had I but to die? How could I have lived?’ She passed her days brooding, playing patience, or wandering alone for hours in the park. It was her second November in London, the trees were stark and rustling dead leaves covered the grass. She thought of Maria in the world of the dead and whispered to her, ‘Love my child.’

  ‘You don’t look very well. All Charlie’s whores look like that, sooner or later.’

  She turned and recognized Charlotte sitting next to her on the park bench. A little girl of about three years old stood at her knee.

  ‘I’m not one of his whores.’

  Charlotte gave her a withering look and said no more.

  ‘Charlie was my first. I’ve never known any other man.’

  ‘No, neither had any of us before we met him. Charlie doesn’t take up with whores, he makes whores of the jays he takes up with.’

  The child drifted off and started to play in the dirt. Charlotte’s features twisted into an expression of anger and she called a few sharp words to her. The little girl turned her face towards them, lips stretched in a smile that couldn’t reach her joyless, watchful eyes. Her face was the image of Charlie’s, and the apprehension in it chilled Ginny’s soul.

  ‘Charlie said you’d easily get a husband, and a rich one, too.’

  ‘Yes, Charlie would say that, but Charlie should have been my husband. I was a respectable governess when I met him. You might find it hard to believe, but I’m a clergyman’s daughter. I had a good place when I met him, and I let him gull me into his house with promises of marriage. He told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. Who do you think her father is?’

  ‘Charlie,’ said Ginny, with absolute certainty.

  ‘I hoped he’d marry me when she was born, but she made things worse, not better. Now I haven’t got him, I’ve got her to remember him by and ruin my chances of getting anybody else. How do you think I’m going to get a husband with her in tow?’

  ‘I hoped he’d marry me before my baby was born. But my baby died.’ Ginny’s voice sounded hollow.

  Charlotte gave a sardonic smile. ‘You really do have all the luck.’

  ‘It’s not luck. I wanted her to live, like yours,’ said Ginny, a tear stealing down her cheek. ‘It’s not the child’s fault. She’s not to blame for anything anybody’s done. What’s your name, pet?’

  The child did not answer but smiled on, wary, watching her mother intently. ‘Her name’s Jubilee,’ said Charlotte. ‘You’re more gullible than I am. He’s got you earning good money on the halls, I know. I needn’t ask who’s holding the purse strings. How much money of yours has he spent? You’re even more stupid than I am.’

  Ginny should have been shocked but was curiously flat and calm. ‘I’m going to leave him.’

  ‘No woman ever left Charlie yet, that I do know. He’s too good in bed. He decides when they’ll leave and then they leave to walk the streets for him. We left when he knew you were coming. He put me in a carriage with a friend of his, and when he’d finished with me I started to work the Empire. That dress you wore when I first saw you was one of mine once.’

  ‘He told me it had belonged to his sister.’ Ginny thought for a moment. ‘That means you must have been living together when she came down to stay with him. Wasn’t she shocked?’

  Charlotte smiled the strangest smile Ginny had ever seen. ‘Oh, no. She was brought up to know the world too well to be shocked, although I daresay it suits her to pretend otherwise these days. Their mother was half French, you know, with very French talents that got her admirers among our aristocracy. A certain Irish gallant did very well by her. Her daughter naturally followed in her footsteps. Mrs Vine was one of the sisterhood, and Charlie should have a brass plate on his door – Procurer to the Gentry.’

  Ginny hesitated, then gave way to morbid curiosity and hinted, ‘He said something to me that day we saw you. He said it was much the same with other men as with him. He made it sound an easy way of life.’

  ‘Yes, very easy for women who like insolence and violence and disgusting lust and putting themselves at risk of filthy disease, and having brats sired on them by men they loathe. For those who enjoy every form of degradation, the life is one long round of pleasure, and there are women like that. Unfortunately for me, I am not one of them. I detest the life. No, it’s not
the same with others as it is with Charlie.’

  ‘You must hate him for what he’s done to you.’

  Charlotte was silent for so long that Ginny doubted she’d heard her, then, ‘I have a weakness where he’s concerned. If I had a thousand men to choose from, I’d still only want Charlie. No, I don’t hate him. I hate you for taking him from me,’ she said.

  The sins of the fathers are visited on the children, Ginny thought, passing the lamplighter as she walked through darkening streets back to Charlie’s house. Jubilee’s apprehensive, wizened little face with its parody of a smile would not leave her mind, and she wondered despairingly if she could have been any better a mother to such a faithful copy of her flame-haired betrayer. ‘Don’t you bring any carroty-haired chips off that block to my door,’ her father had said. Jubilee’s face was replaced by Charlotte’s, mouth turned down, eyes dead, expression as bitter as gall. Then came Maria’s sweet face, and the face of her own baby.

  ‘Love my bairn,’ Ginny whispered.

  Their faces stayed with her all the way back to Charlie’s house, their voices one after the other whispering through her mind. The sins of the fathers are visited on the children. Charlotte was venting all her anger against Charlie on their innocent child. Jubilee’s taut little face haunted her, smiling its ghastly smile, and Ginny felt pain at the recollection of Charlotte’s sharp words to her and the question: ‘How do you think I’m going to get a husband with her in tow?’

  ‘You see? How could I live?’ her own child seemed to ask, and Ginny felt too heartsick to cry.

  Charlie was out when she got back. She sat in the drawing room until dinner time, when the housekeeper served a meal she could not eat. ‘Mr Parkinson instructed me to tell you he won’t be back. He has some business to attend to. He may be quite late.’ The curt message was delivered with the faintest sneer.

  ‘Have you anything for a headache?’ Ginny asked.

  ‘I’ll bring you something directly.’

  She took the medicine and went upstairs to lie down. The same faces and melancholy thoughts chased each other through her head and gave her no rest. She tried to think how to act, then came real fear as she rehearsed what she must say to him. Her headache grew worse. At two o’clock she tapped on the housekeeper’s door to beg for a sleeping draught and later fell into a drugged slumber disturbed by bad, sad dreams. She woke late, jaw clenched and shoulders stiff, when the housemaid came in to tell her that Mr Parkinson wanted her to join him for breakfast.

  She found him in very good spirits. ‘How’s my sweet little hinny today?’

  She gave him a wan smile, dark circles evident under her eyes. ‘I can’t say I’m very well, thank you, Charlie. I waited up until two o’clock for you last night.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, but my lateness was owing to consideration for you. Your being indisposed as you are prevents my disturbing you, and the girl I was with took more than the usual amount of coaxing. Never mind, she liked it in the end,’ he smiled, ‘but there will never be anyone to match my little hinny. I shall be truly glad when you’re quite yourself again.’

  Ginny imagined another young, green, helpless girl with no friend to protect her being coaxed by Charlie. Had she dared she might have taxed him with rape but she knew it would make no impression except to anger him, and that she did not want. She had long understood that the worse Charlie’s conduct, the more elevated was the language he chose to describe it. Charlie was a gentleman. He did not abduct and rape girls who were scarcely more than children, he indulged women who really wanted his attentions with a little coaxing to help them overcome their feigned shyness and false modesty. Her head began to ache again.

  ‘Is she going to live here?’

  ‘Certainly not. Whatever gave you that idea? I’m very happy with you most of the time.’

  ‘But you won’t marry me.’

  He shrugged. ‘There’s no urgency about that now, little hinny.’

  ‘No, there isn’t,’ she said evenly, ‘but there’s an urgency for you to marry Charlotte.’

  ‘There you have me quite mystified. Why ever should I marry Charlotte?’

  ‘Because you’ve got a little girl between you.’

  ‘I have no little girl.’

  ‘I’ve seen her with my own eyes, Charlie. I saw her in the park yesterday, with Charlotte. Her name’s Jubilee.’

  ‘Very well. I have no little girl that I recognize.’

  ‘She’s the spit of you, Charlie. You can’t deny her.’

  ‘You do have some amusing colliery-village notions, Ginny. Charlotte was well paid. That account’s cleared. Charlotte can live very well on the profits of her embraces. That is the path she has chosen.’

  ‘I always thought you were heartless, Charlie, but I can’t believe how heartless. It’s not only that you don’t love Jubilee yourself, you make her own mother hate her because of the way you treat her. Your own child. Doesn’t it grieve you to think your own child’s mother ill-treats her because of you? Couldn’t you weep to think of it? Doesn’t it make you want to run and find her, and bring her home? And Charlotte still loves you, you must know that.’

  He spoke quietly and deliberately. ‘Listen, Ginny. Your Methodist teachers must have told you that if a woman consents to accommodate a fellow before he’s married to her, the consequences of her choice are her own. More so, if she refuses to allow him to help her out of her little difficulty. Charlotte refused the services of my excellent housekeeper. Charlotte hoped to blackmail me into marriage. She gambled and she lost. That’s the end of it.’

  Sensing his anger, Ginny felt a flutter of anxiety but went on with the arguments she had prepared throughout most of the night. ‘What about Jubilee? What’s she done to deserve being cast off by her father and hated by her mother? Charlotte punishes her because of you. She’s yours and she looks like you, Charlie. All she needs is to be loved.’

  ‘What Charlotte does with her own child is her own concern. You know, Ginny, I realize from time to time why I am still unmarried. To borrow the words of the wedding service, I’m a “for better, for richer” sort of man. Others may take “for worse” if they wish. You’re being exceedingly tedious, and I beg you to stop it now.’

  ‘You should marry Charlotte, Charlie, and look after your child.’

  He sighed heavily, tossed his napkin on the table, leaned back in his chair and looked at her for several moments.

  ‘Marry her, you say? I wouldn’t even be seen with her. I wouldn’t fuck her now with somebody else’s prick. She’s a filthy malicious whore who’s obviously doing everything she can to spite me. I regret the necessity for such language, Ginny. I use it to make the matter clear enough for you.’

  She blushed and hung her head, very afraid that her meddling had made things worse and not better for Charlotte and Jubilee. ‘Charlotte hasn’t said anything against you. But her little girl looks so miserable, it was my idea to ask you, not Charlotte’s. Don’t blame Charlotte. I’m sorry, Charlie.’

  ‘Very well, but you must never mention either of them to me again.’ He leaned towards her and lifted her chin. ‘You do look unwell. You must drive all these matters from your mind, Ginny; they’re not your concern. Concentrate on getting well. I’ve arranged bookings for the week after next. All this moping is doing you no good. You’ll be much better working.’ He drew her face towards his and kissed her lips. ‘And you’ll soon have your other duties to attend to, the ones we both enjoy so much.’

  She nodded in submission, and suddenly looked up. ‘Can I have some pocket money, Charlie?’

  He gave her a quizzical look. ‘May I have some pocket money, I suppose you mean. What for? I hope you’re not thinking of buying drink.’

  ‘I just want to have some money. In case I walk a long way and want to get a cab back, or I might want to call at Lyons for tea and cakes while I’m out. May I, Charlie?’

  He tossed a couple of sovereigns on the table with an air of patient generosity.
‘You may, little hinny. I take your renewed interest in money as a sign of improving health.’

  The housemaid brought in the morning post. Unexpectedly, there was a letter for Ginny, postmarked Annsdale Colliery. It contained a postal order for the sum of every penny she had ever sent home, with a short note from her mother saying that everyone in Annsdale village and Annsdale Colliery knew she was living in sin with Charlie Parkinson. Her father had disowned her and insisted that all the money she had sent them should be returned. She was to send no more. The letter fell from her hand.

  ‘Well, that’s the end of it for me. I’ve got no mother and no father. I’ll never dare go back home again after this. He’d kill me. I don’t think I’d visit your sister for a long time if I were you.’

  Charlie snatched up the letter and read it. ‘How in God’s name did they find out? I told you not to give them this address.’

  ‘I didn’t, and I don’t know how they found out.’ A thought suddenly struck her. ‘If your engagement to Clarice Farr wasn’t off before, it’ll be off now, I should think.’

  The expression on his face told it all. He was livid, and despite her own deep misery and discomfiture, she felt a small glow of satisfaction and a tiny measure of compensation in his.

  ‘I told you no good would come of any dealings with the people in Annsdale. I’m very annoyed with you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlie.’ She thought that had he been like her father, he would have struck her then, but other than breaking her occasional resistance to his lovemaking, Charlie managed to control her without violence.

  She took her morning bath, hating him for his treachery in maintaining his engagement with Clarice Farr, hating him for his treatment of Jubilee and Charlotte, and for everything that had happened to her since she left Annsdale Colliery. She wallowed for an hour in the comfort of hot, scented water and thought of home. It was not her father or her mother who came to mind, but an image of Martin in the tin bath before Mam Smith’s fire. She soaped herself slowly and pictured herself washing the coal dust from his hair, scrubbing his back, wrapping him in a towel when he got to his feet with the water running in rivulets off him, skin as white and muscles as hard as marble, then taking his wet, clean face in her hands and pressing her lips against his.