The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I turned gratefully to work as one turns, in great thirst, to water, and found it in plenty, for the circulation of the Star was growing, our advertising revenue with it, enabling us quite soon to put out two weekly editions instead of one, to take on more staff, more enthusiasm, and eventually perhaps to replace those ailing presses which had seen service in my Grandfather Aycliffe’s day. But, in that far off time when Aunt Faith and my mother had been young, the stamp duty on newspapers which had made them too expensive for the working man to buy had been less of a hardship than it seemed, very few of those working men being able to read. Now, in these enlightened times of Mechanics Institutes and public libraries, when the Act of 1870 had decreed there should be a school within walking distance of every child and the Act of 1880 had just, with the heartfelt approval of the Star, made school attendance compulsory, a few hours a week, for all children between the ages of five and ten, literacy was spreading, the craftsmen, the artisans, the workmen at whom the Star was aimed being able to purchase it now with the same nonchalance as Gideon Chard purchased his Times, his Yorkshire Post, his Cullingford Courier & Review.

  I worked, all day and every day, not only at the amassing of sordid or sensational facts, the uncovering of human dramas and injustices, but the small doings of a small community which enjoyed hearing about itself. I sat in draughty church halls on hard wooden benches and listened to interminable lectures on ‘improving’, artistic, or scientific subjects. I drank weak tea in those same halls when some fund-raising activity was in progress, admiring both the examples of fine needlework which were for sale and the charity for which their proceeds were destined. I watched amateur theatricals, operas, dancing displays, remembering to note the name of every single player and the number of flounces on the organizers’ dresses. I attended weddings, not of Blenheim Lane or Elderleigh, but of skilled workmen, weaving-overlookers, shopkeepers, schoolmasters, clerks, publicans; and their funerals, finding an appropriate mention for each one. And on the evenings when the Star could not detain me I went to the Stones and talked to women whose basic need for food and shelter should have made my own needs seem irrelevant—or, for an hour or two, more bearable.

  I left my house by half-past seven every morning and was rarely home before midnight to a supper of cold meat, bread and cheese, some kind of cold pudding on a tray. I lost weight and colour and a great deal of sleep, and suffered for a short while after my letter to Gideon from a strange imbalance of mind, a feeling half dread and half desire that I had conceived his child. Three painful weeks convinced me otherwise and even then, my reactions remaining considerably off-key, I wept first for sheer, blessed relief of it, and then wept again at my own continued sterility.

  I acquired a professional manner, pleasant yet cool, a woman not easily pleased and who did not care to please everyone. I wore plain but stylish cut gowns in good quality fabrics and dark colours which made me taller and thinner, did my hair in a low chignon since I had no time now for ringlets, although I did not abandon a certain musky perfume which had its uses in Silsbridge Street. I was acutely miserable for some part of every day, then less so, for the decision to part from Gideon had been mine and, having taken it, it would have been senseless to waste my cherished independence grieving for him. He lingered in a raw place at the back of my mind, a guarded area quick to bleed when one prodded it but bearable if left alone. I know now that his feeling for me went deeper than convenience and that had I married him before making my dangerous acquaintance with freedom we would now be living happily together. But I had married Gervase. Gideon had married wonderful, maddening, enchanting Venetia and had not been enchanted. It was too late. I knew it and the fact that he had neither answered my letter nor thrown it in my face proved that he knew it too. I began to busy myself with the affairs of the workhouse, falling foul once again of Miss Tighe, for whom I was now a competent adversary.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with the administration of the Poor Law,’ she told me.

  ‘Not for those who administer it,’ I replied, ‘although one has yet to learn the opinion of those it is supposed to benefit.’ And I concentrated throughout the next few months on gathering those opinions together and repeating them, with my own reactions to them, in the pages of the Star.

  I had never—as Miss Tighe reminded me—seen the inside of Cullingford’s workhouse and while she remained on the Board of Guardians would be unlikely to do so. But it took little imagination to picture the bare, whitewashed wards, the narrow wooden beds like coffins all in a row, the conviction that in this bleak place Charity was not only cold but cruel. And I found many who had been obliged to suffer that Charity to agree with me.

  This system of Poor Relief had come into being in my grandparents’day, based on the assumption that, except in the case of the old, the infirm or the juvenile, poverty was invariably the result of laziness, lustfulness or strong drink. And consequently a committee of frock-coated, silk-hatted gentlemen had decreed that outdoor assistance on the old parochial system be abolished and that those who could not maintain themselves must be maintained in workhouses—‘Bastilles’ their inmates called them—where the conditions were so harsh that the able-bodied would do anything—presumably even go to work—in order to avoid them.

  The diet was of the most meagre, little more, it seemed, than water-porridge, dumplings and thin gruel, the paupers being obliged to eat all their meals in total silence and to pay for them with their labour, the men being set to stone-breaking, bone-grinding, the picking of oakum, the women to housework and coarse, monotonous sewing. There was, in all workhouses, the strictest segregation of the sexes, husbands and wives being separated on entry and allowed no contact with each other, a precaution thought necessary by the Poor Law Commissioners to prevent the breeding of infants who would be a further drain on the rates, although this same rule was applied to old couples, long past child-bearing age, who had lived together for fifty or sixty years and were often much distressed at being so roughly torn apart.

  In fact old couples thus separated quite often died soon after. Infants removed from their mothers and placed in the children’s ward as soon as they were weaned tended to do the same. And since no account had been taken by those original Commissioners of the fluctuating state of trade, the fact that a man thrown out of work by bad weather and bad conditions could, if given a little something to tide him over, soon find employment again when things picked up, many were forced into the Bastilles who need never have been there at all.

  One heard of mothers who were not told of a child’s death until after the funeral, of men in their seventies forced to hard labour; of unruly children punished by being locked in the mortuary for a night or two, with corpses for company. One heard of overseers who sexually abused young girls and young boys, of strange outbreaks of disease, and other deaths which, being unexplained, were presumably suicide. One did not, I must add, hear of these things in Cullingford where our Board of Guardians, at the direction of Miss Tighe, was most vigilant, making regular inspections of the wards, employing a qualified teacher for the children who, in their natural habitat, would have received little or no education at all; ensuring medical attention for men and women who had never in their lives possessed the wherewithal to pay a doctor’s fee.

  But there were abuses of a more subtle nature and it had come to Liam’s attention that the superintendent was a very sleek little man, rather better dressed than he should have been when one considered his wages; that the matron had a cool air of competence which had pleased Miss Tighe but a greedy mouth and crafty eyes, quite capable, Liam thought, of further watering down that eternal porridge, of reducing the five ounces of meat allowed each adult pauper four times a week to four ounces, the twelve daily ounces of bread to ten, and thus, with the dreadful patience of a spider, building a profit.

  The workhouses, of course—as Miss Tighe was quick to point out—were not prisons, only infirmity, extreme old age or extreme yout
h obliging anyone to stay there. But since entry to the Bastille meant the breaking up of homes and families, the sale of furniture and pots and pans, of anything one had that would fetch a copper or two, the meagre treasures of a lifetime all gone to purchase that wooden bed, that bowl of gruel, it was not easy, once incarcerated, to get out again. We all knew that in the area around St. Mark’s Fold there were old husbands and wives who preferred to starve or to freeze together, rather than apply for the workhouse test; young women who would go to the brothel before the Bastille; we knew of the desperate young man, quite recently, in Simon Street, who, crippled in some accident for which no one felt the need to pay him compensation, had watched his furniture sold, his wife and small children led away, and then hanged himself. I had, to my shame and distress, heard an old woman pleading with her daughter: ‘Just hold a pillow to my face, Lizzie, when I’m asleep, so I’ll not wake again. It’s kinder.’ But Lizzie had eight or nine children of her own, a husband who was violent in drink, pains in her chest and dizziness in her head, the fretful cough and wasted cheeks of the consumptive.

  ‘They’ll look after you, ma. I can hardly look after myself. And I’ll get you out when I can.’

  ‘It’s a pernicious system,’ Liam decreed. ‘I think I’ll make a little mischief again.’

  But when the Star printed a sketch of an unnamed but easily identifiable Bastille, portraying the superintendent as a fat tabby cat, the matron as a weasel, the inmates as tiny skeletons of mice, Miss Tighe, who would not visit the Star and could not set foot in the lodgings of so notorious a bachelor as Liam Adair, brought her complaints to me.

  ‘Good-morning, Mrs. Barforth,’ she icily greeted me, a martial light in her eye. ‘I have one thing to say to you. I have here Miss Mandelbaum’s copy of the Star, since I do not take it myself. It will have to stop.’

  ‘The Star, Miss Tighe?’

  ‘Preferably. But I am referring to these attacks not only on the workhouse, which I believe to be the most efficiently managed in this union or any other, but on its employees, Mr. Cross and Mrs. Tyrell—for that is what they are, Mrs. Barforth, just employees. I would have thought such attacks to have been beneath even so dubious a publication as your own.’

  ‘I will convey your opinions to my editor, Miss Tighe.’

  ‘I daresay. And while you are about it you would do well to note my further opinion that while your editor, as you call him, is moralizing about the Poor Law and hinting that my superintendent is somehow making his fortune out of it, he turns an entirely blind eye to the scandalous conduct of his friends, Dr. and Mrs. Stone.’

  I was for a moment, astonished.

  ‘I know of no scandal concerning the Stones.’

  ‘Do you not? Then regretfully, Mrs. Barforth, I must tell you that you cannot be speaking the truth. Come now, my house is directly opposite theirs in Blenheim Lane, Miss Mandelbaum’s a few doors above, and we have seen, Mrs. Barforth, the use to which they put their garden shelter—it is the talk of the neighbourhood. Can you deny that Dr. Stone, if indeed he is a doctor at all, goes on the prowl at night and brings home—well, I shall not say the word—persons of the lowest character, diseased minds and diseased bodies too, I shouldn’t wonder—’

  ‘Miss Tighe, you must know as well as I do that Dr. Stone’s purposes are the very opposite of immoral.’

  ‘I know no such thing. What I do know is the evidence of my own eyes. I have seen that man set off alone and return accompanied by some creature who quickly disappears with him into that shed. I have heard cries and screams on many occasions, and the unmistakable sounds of drunkenness. I have seen girls who had no business to be in Blenheim Lane and would never have come there had he not brought them, running out of his gate and past my windows in a state of terror. And I have asked myself what it is that could terrify them. What is going on in that garden, Mrs. Barforth? Is it a shelter for vagrant women, as he declares, or is it a bordello to accommodate the perversities of his friends?’

  ‘How dare you, Miss Tighe—especially when you know it to be entirely untrue?’

  ‘Are you accusing me of lying, Mrs. Barforth. How dare you?’

  ‘This is all nonsense, Miss Tighe.’

  ‘Really? Then the whole of Blenheim Lane is nonsensical, for I am not the only one to watch and complain—not the only one by a long way.’

  ‘Dried up old stick,’ Liam said, grinning broadly when I reported the interview. ‘She enjoys it. There’s nothing she can do.’

  Yet I was uneasy and mentioned the matter that evening hesitantly, to Anna Stone.

  ‘Poor Patrick!’ she said calmly smiling. ‘They broke our windows in Liverpool and threw stones at his horse. He is quite accustomed to it. But the really sad thing, you know, is that if Martha Tighe would only broaden her views a little she could be most useful. She really believes that her workhouse is humane and orderly—certainly it is clean. And if it is ever proved to her that Liam’s suspicions are true, then that superintendent and that gimlet-eyed matron will have a very angry Miss Tighe to deal with. There was a girl here last week who lost her baby in Miss Tighe’s Bastille. There is an allowance of two pints of beer a day given to nursing mothers until their infants are weaned, not only for the extra liquid to make the milk but because the hops and malt are strengthening. It was never given, although one assumes it was charged for. The girl lost her milk, other forms of feeding did not succeed, and the child died. Well, perhaps it would have died anyway, for the mother was very undernourished, somewhat beyond the remedy of two pints of beer, nor was she too badly grieved by her loss, for a baby would have been an encumbrance to her and would have obliged her to stay longer in the Bastille. She went off quite cheerfully, knowing just how to get another baby whenever she wanted one. But Miss Tighe, had she known the truth, would have been very grieved indeed.’

  I returned home preoccupied as always by the extent of Anna Stone’s tolerance, to find two notes awaiting me, one from Mrs. Barforth, the other from Aunt Faith, both telling me that Gervase had returned to Galton.

  ‘Will you be dining, ma’am?’ the maid asked, and for an instant I could barely understand the sense of her question, much less answer it. Would I be dining? I had not the faintest notion. But there was something I must do, although exactly what it was eluded me. I must hurry. But where? And why? I must make arrangements. But for what purpose?

  ‘Yes, Jenny. I will be dining.’

  But even then, seated at my plainly set table, eating the kind of food servants choose when left to themselves by a mistress who does not care—the kind of food which would have revolted Gideon—I could not lose the feeling that there was something I had neglected or forgotten, something to which I absolutely must attend.

  ‘He is looking well,’ Aunt Faith told me the following Sunday. ‘Very well indeed. I was at Galton on Wednesday and he had walked in quite unannounced, half an hour before me. Georgiana was in ecstasies of course, for she had feared never to get him back again. Well, he is here, very bronzed and healthy, and I believe on Friday he went over to Scarborough to see his father. My dear, if he means to stay you must be prepared to meet him.’

  A letter from Camille reached me on the Monday morning.

  ‘Grace, I was terrified, for if he had come to accuse me of blighting his mother’s life what could I have answered? What he actually said was: “I believe you have become, more or less, my wicked stepmamma?” We laughed and I could have wept with relief. “I suppose you have come a-begging?” Nicholas said to him, which sounds ungracious except that it was said with a twinkle in his eye and that unwilling little smile, as if he didn’t really mean to smile at all. We dined very pleasantly, Gervase telling us his traveller’s tales, which made me laugh until I ached and even made Nicholas grunt once or twice in the way he has when he is actually very amused but doesn’t want to show it. He says he wishes to settle at Galton and farm the land and I suppose there is some suggestion that if he sticks to his plan Nicholas will buy him more land
in compensation for the fortune he could have been making in the business. I certainly hope so. He is much quieter than I supposed. And of course we talked a great deal of you.’

  I waited, still prone to that sudden need for haste when nothing required it, until another letter was delivered to me, and holding it in a carefully steady hand it seemed incredible that I had never seen Gervase’s handwriting before. It was pointed and slanting, rather fine, suggesting that, since we certainly would meet, it might be easier for both to meet by arrangement rather than chance, and in the privacy of Galton, without danger of observation by any Mrs. Rawnsley, any Miss Tighe. Did I agree? I did. He wrote again appointing a day and an hour he hoped would suit me. It suited me. I informed my coachman, begged a day off from Liam, and found that my mind had wandered rather foolishly to the subject of hats, a certain blue velvet confection veiled with spotted net and topped with a pile of blue satin roses which I had glimpsed in Millergate only a day ago.

  I bought it that evening on my way home from the Star, knowing as it went into its box that it would not do, that it was a hat for high days and holidays, for garden-parties and fashionable churches, fashionable promenades; a hat for the life that used to be mine.

  In the end I put on a smart but not extravagant cream straw with a black velvet ribbon, a cream silk dress draped up to show an underskirt patterned in cream and black and hemmed by a black fringe, a cream parasol with a black handle, cream silk gloves and cream kid shoes. And as we drove away from town, up Blenheim Lane, past Lawcroft Fold and Tarn Edge, past Aunt Faith’s suburban Elderleigh to the narrow crossroads which led one way to Listonby, the other to Galton, I was pestered by a fly-swarm of senseless anxieties, the probable muddiness of the Abbey grounds that would spoil my shoes, the specks of soot which could ruin my silk gloves, a conviction that I was too smart—or not smart enough—which occupied my mind and helped me not to admit that what really ailed me was cowardice.