The Sleeping Sword

by Brenda Jagger

  ‘They wear their scars like medals,’ said Liam, who would have done the same at their age. But this constant raiding of the newly cleared site was a serious nuisance to the building contractors, who needed to take advantage of the good weather to complete their schedule. If the walls were not up and the roof not on by October, then Mr. Chard would be out of temper and everybody else out of pocket. The tenement lads decreed that the roof would not be on by October. The building workers, with their bonuses at stake, decided otherwise. Threats were made and ugly scenes ensued, one of them in the street directly below my office window when a gang of navvies, strapping Irishmen for the most part, encountered an equal number of our local breed, smaller and perhaps not quite so fierce but wiry and cooler, more reasoned, so that the battle was evenly matched and most unsightly.

  ‘Appalling,’ thundered the Courier & Review. ‘Unfortunate,’ said the Star, without adding for whom, and I suppose it was not to be wondered at when some days later our office was not so much entered as invaded by a man, well-dressed yet somehow not a ‘gentleman’, huge not only in girth and muscle but in the anger that was mottling his heavy cheeks and his thick, bull-neck, who, even before a word was spoken, had curved his big-knuckled hands into fists.

  ‘Tom Mulvaney,’ he said, considering this sufficient explanation, since we would be sure to know that the firm of Charlesworth and Mulvaney had won the much-coveted contract for the building of the new houses at Black Abbey Meadow and the new mill at Low Cross. And, after making his announcement, Mr. Mulvaney remaining at his vantage point in the doorway, glanced swiftly around the room, assessing the fighting strength against him and seeing just old Mr. Martin, sorting through the morning telegrams, the boy, Davey, the printers on the floor below, who were as elderly as their presses, myself, and Liam.

  ‘Good morning,’ Liam said without getting up, very sensibly keeping his desk between himself and this very obviously superior adversary. ‘And what can I do for Mr. Mulvaney?’

  ‘Call off your rat-pack, Adair.’

  ‘Which particular rat-pack did you have in mind?’

  The desk was reached in two long strides, an iron fist smashed down upon it, oversetting the inkstand and the water jug Liam always kept there, the pool of ink and water doing a small violence of its own among his papers.

  ‘Mr. Mulvaney,’ he said, and leaning back in his chair clicked his tongue reproachfully, an act of provocation which brought me to my feet, my presence as a woman, which might appeal to Mr. Mulvaney’s sense of decency, the only support I could offer.

  I was not sure just how old Liam was. There was no grey in his hair, no apparent lessening of vitality, certainly no sign of the sobriety men are assumed to acquire with age. But he was older than Gervase and Gideon, had seemed a man to me when I had still been at school, and could not, I thought, be much short of forty, while this murderous, mountainous Tom Mulvaney might at a guess be twenty-nine. I doubted if Liam could withstand him. I saw that Liam doubted it too, and I did not wish to see him try.

  ‘Call off your bloody rat-pack, Adair.’

  ‘I have no rat-pack, Mulvaney.’

  ‘This is the last warning you’ll get.’

  ‘You’re threatening me, then? Would you care to be more explicit? And would you watch your language, old fellow, in front of a lady?’

  ‘I see no lady,’ snarled Tom Mulvaney, darting me a glance as vicious as any he had bestowed on Liam, and, having been drawn to his attention, I came forward to the side of the desk, unable to stand between them but positioning myself so that he would have to push me aside to get at Liam.

  ‘Then I must bring one to your notice,’ I said, my voice emerging very cool although in fact I was quite terrified. But Liam, for all his possible forty years, could not consent to shelter behind a woman, and as he got to his feet, exposing himself to attack for his pride’s sake in a manner I found most exasperating, there was an ugly moment when I felt myself to be physically holding them apart as once—in another world it seemed—I had stood between Gideon and Gervase.

  I had lost my head that night. I must not do so now. ‘Mr. Mulvaney,’ I told him, ‘you may not see a lady but I am sure I see a gentleman. And certainly you have a grievance—’

  ‘A grievance? Is that what you call it? As fast as we put the windows in at Black Abbey those louts of his have them out again. And who pays? Not Chard, who can afford it. I pay. And if it goes on then I’m telling you—’

  He was right, entirely right, and I told him so, repeating at such length and with such conviction how right he was that at last his killing rage turned sullen, smouldered a while and then hardened to a point where he would be more likely to sue for damages than extract blood for them.

  ‘You think you’re a clever woman, don’t you, Mrs. Barforth? I’ve heard about you.’

  ‘She is a clever woman,’ said Liam.

  ‘Aye. Maybe so. But I’m not much taken by cleverness in women. And I warn you, Adair, if this goes on, then the next time we meet she’ll not talk me out of a thing.’

  ‘There’s no need to wait, Mulvaney. I’ll meet you any time you like.’

  But Tom Mulvaney, in his full green prime, could recognize an older man’s bravado when he heard it, and making a gesture of contempt I had seen often enough by now in Gower Street, he turned and went down the stairs, a victor who condescends—until it suits him to do otherwise—to leave the field.

  ‘My goodness, gracious me!’ said Mr. Martin returning to his telegrams.

  ‘You can’t do anything about it now, can you, Liam?’ I said, feeling suddenly very weak about the knees.

  ‘Of course I can’t. But I reckon that bog-trotter in his Sunday suit could do something about me any time he had a mind. So it looks as though you’ll have to guard me, Grace, day and night, my darling—I can see no help for it.’

  Was he afraid?

  ‘Of course,’ said Anna Stone later that evening, adding with her habitual gravity: ‘There can be no courage without fear.’

  ‘Which means,’ said the Doctor, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘that if one measures on that scale then Liam is probably a very courageous man indeed.’

  But the Stones themselves had come increasingly under attack, a campaign of hostility being waged against them which, although admittedly genteel, was nevertheless as virulent in its way as anything likely to be devised by Tom Mulvaney. It was no new thing in their experience. In Liverpool, people had risen against them as once they might have risen against a coven of witches and warlocks, and made it physically unwise for them to remain in the city. Cullingford’s hostility, taking its character, I thought, from Miss Tighe, was a more silent matter, no vicious stoning of the culprits to the town gates, but an ostracism, a withdrawal of all those who considered themselves decent, which was designed to smother them out. Mrs. Stone found herself ignored in the better shops of Millergate, all of them patronized by Miss Tighe, who had far more money to spend. Dr. Stone found the more lucrative side of his practice dwindling away, no respectable woman liking to openly consult a man who was known to advocate contraception in case there might be talk that he was advocating it for her, few gentlemen caring—with Miss Tighe’s drawing-room windows directly across the way—to risk their reputations at a house where such dubious characters were known to frequent the back garden.

  The Stones reacted in their separate fashions, Anna Stone becoming more preoccupied, more intense than ever, the Doctor whistling a great deal as he went about his business, continuing to prescribe as he thought fit and to bring home with him such waifs and strays as he believed might best profit from his attention, arriving one September night with a young woman who had a child of two or three years old fastened to her side by a shawl.

  There had been heavy rain, an early autumn cloudburst so violent that within moments the gutters had been overflowing, the streets transformed to muddy, narrow streams, everyone, rich and poor alike, soaked instantly to the skin. And running for shelter, Dr. Stone
had found the woman half-collapsed in a doorway, willing—despite her obviously weak condition and the child strapped to her hip—to go anywhere with him, for any purpose, and for as much or as little as he might care to pay.

  She was very thin and dirty when he brought her into the garden shelter, the child knotted so tightly in the sodden shawl that we were eventually obliged to cut him loose, this bondage being necessary, we understood, to prevent him from crawling away, down some squalid alley or through the mire of some cheap lodging-house while his mother slept. And occupied with hot water and hot broth, soap and towels, milk and bread for the whimpering child, I did not immediately recognize this gaunt, suspicious, flint-eyed woman as cheerful Sally Grimshaw who had once been my personal maid.

  She had recognized me at once, of course, but had not particularly cared to make herself known to me. If she had fallen on hard times, so had thousands of others, and she could see no point in discussing it, since talk, although cheap, made things no better. But, with a plateful of beef broth inside her and her child washed and wrapped in clean, warm blankets, she shrugged her shoulders and, in the spirit of one who is paying for her supper, allowed me to question her.

  She had left my house because she had been uncomfortable there, with people who knew her circumstances. She had been raped, true enough, but she had lost her virtue just the same, or so everyone had told her, and there were plenty of others who had said, behind her back but loud enough for her to hear, that rape was impossible and all it meant was that she had not fought hard enough. At any rate, she knew more than she ought to know, whether one called it rape or seduction, sin or folly, and the others knew she knew. The maids kept on asking her questions, the menservants—or some of them—tried to take advantage, because what was done was done, and what more had she to lose by doing it again? She had moved on to get away from her reputation, but it had followed her on the below-stairs grapevine and eventually—well—if you give a dog a bad name, sooner or later it will probably earn it. There had been a baker’s boy who had coaxed her into folly for a week or two, succeeding mainly because she had been very lonely. And then, in her last place, she had fallen in love with the butler, a man of dignity and authority, older than herself, who had first taught her to enjoy her body and had then impregnated it.

  The mistress had dismissed her the moment her condition was discovered—very early, since speed was to her lover’s advantage—and he had stood nearby, impassive and slightly disdainful, while she was turned off without a reference. She had worshipped him and even then had seen no sense in implicating him so that he would have lost his job too. He had told her from the start that he could not marry her, but she had not really believed him, had thought he was testing the strength of her feelings, which had been—she admitted it—powerfully strong. And she knew he had been considerably annoyed with her, had called her a little fool, a damned nuisance, when she had turned down his offer to pay for an abortion, refusing to be mutilated for his convenience by some old woman with a knitting needle. No, she had made no appeal to the law, for no court in the land would award her more than two shillings and sixpence a week for the support of a bastard child, and in any case her lover needed only to bring other men before the judge—the menservants directly in his employ—to swear they had had her too and the case would be dismissed.

  He had made only one other approach to her. He had found a woman who specialized in these things who was ready to adopt the child, no questions asked, as soon as it was born, for a cash payment of ten pounds, which he—to be rid of the obligation once and for all—was prepared to supply. But knowing what this meant, that these baby-farmers would keep a child in misery for a year or two and then let it die, handsomely insured, or, failing that, would sell a girl to a brothel-keeper, a boy to a gang of thieves, she had again refused. She would manage, one way or another, on her own and had expected it to be hard. Domestic service being no longer possible, she had gone to work, first as a trouser-hand at a sweatshop in Leeds, stitching all day and into the night, until her fingers were raw and her eyes smarted with strain, for as little—when she had paid for her thread and her share of the lighting—as three shillings and sixpence a week. And since it was impossible to live on those wages, much less put something by for the few days after her confinement when she would earn nothing at all, she had taken the only course that had seemed available.

  It was not unusual, she said, in the sweated trades for girls who had neither parents nor a man to support them, to supplement their incomes by some part-time street-walking. And Sally was not unusual. She had gone out for the first time with a friend, another trouser-hand, and thereafter alone, transacting her business in dark corners and back alleys since she could not take men back to her lodgings. But she had earned just enough, before her pregnancy became too cumbersome, to enable her to stay in those lodgings—such as they were—while her baby was born.

  Had she felt disgust or shame at her new trade? She could not afford disgust, and whose was the shame? She had stood many a time with her back to a wall and marvelled at the filth men were ready to pay for. And if they despised her for supplying it, then she had nothing but the most complete contempt for them. And as for the moralizers, the churches, the police, the law, if they really wanted to sweep the streets clean, they should discourage the demand, surely, not the merchandise? And as for the respectable ladies who drew aside their skirts and averted their eyes when she passed, she would be interested to know how many of them had ever been hungry or unable to find an honest penny to buy milk for a child?

  She had gone out again after her baby was born, too soon, and had suffered an illness which had nearly killed them both. But she had made up her mind not to die, had not died and had taken up with a man soon after, a former, very minor champion of the illegal bare-knuckle prize-ring, an unstable character—even Sally admitted it—but the kind of companion her trade required. They had looked after each other, the woman contributing her earnings, the man the protection of his muscle, but he had been caught at a race-meeting relieving a gentleman of his wallet and had been given twelve months’hard labour.

  It had not been an easy year for Sally. The very week of his sentence she had been badly beaten by a customer, an occupational hazard to which the loss of her man exposed her, and had recovered slowly. She had lost her regulars, then her lodgings, and had been reduced once again to doing business in back passages, coal-sheds, a man’s jacket on the hard ground, and to living where she could, in constant danger of being picked up as a vagrant. She had taken refuge for a while in a navvy camp, a law unto itself, and had been travelling recently with a tinker who after a quarrel had dumped her in Leicestershire. She had been on the tramp since then, making her way north again since her man was soon to be released and she had agreed to meet him in Leeds. He would not have a penny piece in his pocket and neither had she, and she did not expect his stint at the treadmill, on prison rations, to have sweetened his temper; but two, she found, were better than one. He had lost an eye, she’d heard, in a prison brawl, which in a way could be counted a blessing since it meant that his thieving days were over. What future did she see for herself and her son? Future? She lifted her head from her mug of hot, sweet tea and gave me a look of frank contempt. Future? She had not thought me so simple-minded as that.

  ‘You could come and work for me again, Sally?’

  ‘I doubt it, ma’am. Your other servants would walk out of the door in a body the moment I came in.’

  ‘I daresay. But I have a very small house these days and do no entertaining. You could manage it yourself, Sally, with a girl to do the rough.’

  ‘And my boy?’

  ‘I am seldom at home and there is no reason why he should inconvenience me. It’s a future.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, no more; but when I returned the next day intending to take her with me, she had gone, had left very early that morning, her child knotted to her side, refusing to take anything but a packet of bread and cheese to sustai
n her until she got to Leeds, some time that night.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, and Anna Stone sighed and shook her head, her husband clicked his tongue, irritable with pity.

  ‘It has gone too far with her, I suppose,’ he said. ‘When a woman suffers some gross physical deformity from an accident which was no fault of her own, she will usually hide her face, partly to spare decent people the pain or the embarrassment of looking at it, and partly because she does not wish to be seen. Perhaps your Sally feels much the same. And after all, with this man of hers—she has no need for any kind of embarrassment. He is vicious and inadequate and has lost an eye. She had no reason to feel inferior to him. Poor woman! It could happen to anyone.’

  It could have happened to Venetia. I went home, haunted afresh by the memory of her slight figure in that dingy, rented room, unable to face the hopelessness of her situation and so retreating from it, gathering just enough of herself together to do what was necessary for the child. And I had done nothing for that child, could do nothing now but send expensive, impersonal trinkets to Listonby at Christmastime and make occasional, rather guilty enquiries of Blanche. But what I could do, for what it was worth—and I was uncertain as to its exact value—was to write a thinly disguised account of Sally Grimshaw which Liam included, with my signature, in the following Friday’s Star.

  I made no judgements. I did not even question the wisdom of the law which, considering a bastard child to be a fitting punishment for the sin of sexual depravity, regarded that punishment to be an entirely female matter, according maintenance settlements that would have been insufficient to feed a sparrow. I did not ask why one partner in a crime should go unscathed while the other paid the penalty for two. I merely stated that it was so. I did not ask who was responsible for this woman’s downfall, whether it was her attacker or her seducer, the mistress who had coolly dismissed her, knowing full well the misery that awaited her; whether it was the owner of the sweatshop who had not paid her a living wage, or the narrowness of a society which allowed only half its members—the male half—to possess realistic emotions and desires which in the other, female half were condemned as vice and lust. I did not ask, but the answers came thick and fast, letters of abuse some of them, others of mild reproach, suggesting to me that such things should not really be spoken of and certainly not by a lady. But there were other letters bristling with honest indignation, a few with compassion, a few more declaring stoutly that Sally Grimshaw was a victim of circumstances beyond her control but not beyond ours, and asking what could be done.