So, to return after more than two months’ absence and find the company as vigorous and healthy as if he had been there every day was a striking indorsement of his skill at picking men. But what would members of Parliament feel like when society was perfected and the last useful law was on the statute book? What would doctors do when the practice of their art had banished disease forever? Or painters when every character, gesture, twig, petal, and dewdrop had been depicted to photographic perfection, somewhere, by someone? What would everyone do when there were no more working goals? What was paradise like?
If his mood as he walked alone through Regent’s Park that afternoon, after the luncheon, was any gauge, paradise was a very purgatory. He would now have to take seriously his own threats of many years’ standing to enter public life, locally or nationally. And if he were honoured with this peerage, that transition would be even more expected of him.
These thoughts led him at once to Nora. He realized—had long ago realized—that his main reason for not playing a larger public role had nothing to do with the demands of his business but rather with the unconventional behaviour of his wife. No man could take any large part in the affairs of the nation—or even of the parish—if his wife refused to play a corresponding part in Society. Why could she not see that? Why could he not bring her to understand it? Nowadays whenever he came near the topic, she would sense it a mile away and put up her hackles like a hedgehog. It was something they simply could not discuss sensibly.
And she could so easily do it, too. All her friendships in the hunting field—if she played on those a bit, she could, in a season or two, find herself at the very heart of London Society. And no one could keep Nora down for long. Very soon she’d be one of the leaders; if she put her mind and heart in it, she could do anything. And then she could indulge these strange tastes of hers for the company of painters and writers and people she called “interesting”; she could even make it a sort of fashion, as long as she kept it within sensible bounds. Why, when he could argue it all to himself in such a reasonable way, could he never explain it to her? Something about her always made him angry first and led him to say wounding things. And then, naturally, she would retaliate.
Like last night. Except that she had now gone much farther than ever before; she had strayed right into the truth! He had to be honest about that. But she’d done it only because she knew the truth would hurt so much; there was a great deal in the past, in his past, that would not stand examination now. But any man who could honestly say otherwise about himself was rare and fortunate.
And Nora had touched on only the half of it. For she did not know that once, long ago, when he was a lad of twenty, he had married (or what passed for married in his circle) a girl named Alice. And for one happy year—the happiest of his life, he now thought—he and she had lived in a little timber cottage at the end of a lane in Irlam’s-o-th’Ights, just west of Manchester.
Then, one dreadful day, he had been forced to run for it. Even to have delayed while he explained things to her could have cost him his life; as far as she knew, then, he had simply ditched her. Very common. It happened all the time.
But he had not ditched her. He had come back as soon as the immediate hue and cry was over, though he still was not exactly safe—at least, not safe enough to be making the sort of open and widespread inquiry he longed to be making for her. So, in the end, it was she who had vanished without trace—she and the baby she had been carrying. Where? To the workhouse? Not to another man—he could not believe that of her. To the grave? The house stood rotting, untenanted, bereft of clues.
Despite all the happiness he had once known with Nora, he had never ceased to mourn the loss of his Alice. Nora was a marvellous person; objectively he could see that. But Alice! She had been an angel, a unique girl, the only girl he would ever truly love. If he knew she was alive, he would give up everything—family, money, business, friends…everything—simply to be with her. Or so he now told himself.
Her absence, however, left many unanswered questions. What of his marriage to her? True, it was only “over the anvil” as navvies said, but did that make Alice his wife in common law? And did the possession of a common-law wife make bigamy of his regular church marriage to Nora? Anyway, was Alice still alive? And what of the child? He realized that these were questions he had not been eager to pursue these last sixteen years; but they became very pertinent now, with the peerage in the offing. And Nora had, unwittingly, put her finger right on the wart when she had taunted him in that way last night.
He had even been unwilling to face the possibility of official inquiries. Now she had forced him to consider that, too. Damn her!
Memories of Alice—beautiful, gentle, sweet girl—now contrasted very harshly with these much more urgent memories of Nora. Awkward, obstinate, clever, full of self, empty of duty, unfeminine…unfeminine? No, you couldn’t say that; but too determined to express herself, too angular in character to be properly womanly. He should have tried to find Alice again instead of taking up with Nora.
***
Charity Bedfordshire (as the workhouse master had named her) could not have chosen a more apposite moment to come back into John’s life. He had first met her one evening the summer of 1850, down on the quays in Bristol, plying the only trade she knew. She was then, at seventeen, such a living image of the Alice he had known eighteen and more years earlier that for a while he had been convinced she was the child Alice had been carrying. His child! Even that possibility had made it unthinkable to leave her there on the streets; he had waited for Walter to finish his horizontal refreshments (which was why John had been on the quays at all) and together they had taken Charity back to Arabella as her first Fallen Woman. Arabella had procured a hysterical conversion of which Wesley himself would have been proud, and ever since then Charity had been Arabella’s prize exhibit, chief adviser, and—as Arabella always said—“ever present help in time of affliction.”
And now here she was, distraught almost to tears, riding around the southern end of Regent’s Park in a cab whose fare she could not pay, looking for a street she half remembered from a visit with Arabella Thornton almost a year ago. Mrs. Thornton had gone into the Stevenson office while she had remained in the cab outside. All she could remember was that it was near Regent’s Park and was named after some place in England.
So the cab driver had taken her to Nottingham Terrace, York Place, York Mews, Cornwall Terrace, Ulster Terrace…and now here they were in Brunswick Terrace with the driver swearing Brunswick was somewhere in England and Charity wondering how to explain she couldn’t pay him until she found the right street and Mr. Stevenson. What she would do if Mr. Stevenson wasn’t in his office she had no idea; the things she had to say were for no other ears but his. And then, suddenly, the whole pall lifted and there was Mr. Stevenson walking along York Terrace, not two dozen yards away.
“Sir! Oh, sir!” she called out. “Driver, that’s the man I’m looking for.”
“Oh, yus?” He glanced warily down through the trap she had opened. “I thought you was a decent gel,” he said. “You’re rigged out decent enough. I don’t touch this class o’ trade, young ’un.”
“How dare you!” She tried to say the words as Mrs. Cornelius would say them, but she knew she merely sounded like a servant aping her mistress. Nevertheless, desperation must have lent her outrage some urgency, for, although Mr. Stevenson had not responded to her cry, the driver flicked his whip and in next to no time they were alongside John.
She opened the door. “Mr. S.!” she called. And when he hesitated, thinking no doubt that this was some kind of ambush, she added, “’Tis Miss Charity, from Bristol.”
Still cautious he came toward the open door.
“I told ’er—I don’t touch this class o’ trade, sir,” the cabby said in preparatory apology.
John recognized Charity and saw that she was the cab’s sole occupant as the man
spoke. “Hold your filthy tongue,” he said, getting in at once. “Drive on!”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere. Round the park.”
The man made no move. “I told yer—I don’t touch that trade.”
John, at the limit of his patience, leaped out and grabbed the fellow by the arm. It was a grip that had once broken a man’s hand. “You’ll drive off the end of Vauxhall ferry stage if I tell you,” he said quietly.
The man gave one yelp of pain and agreed he would at least take them around the park.
Back inside the cab John saw the mingled relief, gratitude, and admiration in Charity’s face. “Was he giving you trouble?” he asked.
“Just starting,” she said.
He settled back in the cushions, facing her. She wore a sober green dress and plain collar, like a Quaker girl. Her hair was pulled severely back into a plain, tight bun. She looked the very image of piety. And pious women had always exerted the strongest fascination on him. Add to that her resemblance to Alice—less marked now that she was five years older, but still strong—and she began to have the most disturbing effect on him. He had to look away.
“Why are you here?” he asked, trying to lose his gaze in the network of bare branches of the trees outside. “Where is Mrs. Thornton—or Mrs. Cornelius?”
It was grotesque, but Sarah Cornelius, as soon as she had thrown over Walter Thornton and ceased to be his mistress, had become the closest of friends with Arabella Thornton, had provided most of the money for the Home for Fallen Women and had done most of the hard day-to-day work there while Arabella was away campaigning. Charity was, nominally at least, Sarah’s lady’s maid.
As soon as he asked the question she became flustered, half beginning a dozen sentences but making no sense. “I dunno who to talk to,” she said at last.
“Me?” he suggested. “Did you come up here to see me?”
And then she told him how she’d come up from Bristol that day and all the trouble she’d had finding his offices and how she’d been at her wit’s end when she had seen him walking by.
“It was Nottingham Place,” he said. “The other side of the New Road!”
Their laughter, and this recapitulation of her relief, made it easier then for her to begin her tale.
“Mrs. Cornelius now, was there ever anything between her and Mr. Thornton, sir?” she asked.
“You mustn’t concern yourself with things like that.”
She looked gloomily out of the window. “My God, and I wish I never had to! I wish I never seen. Nor heard.”
In the silence John thought of a dozen ways he might explain away a seeming infidelity of Walter’s—a stolen kiss or something like that. But he knew it would be impossible to deceive Charity; she was no young innocent.
“Oh dear!” was all he said.
“Was there anything?” she repeated. “’Tis important to you, too, sir.”
“I don’t know for certain,” he said truthfully. “I…suspected it.”
“When she was staying at your place? Not after she came down to Bristol?”
“If there ever was anything, I’m sure it stopped before that.”
“’Cos he come this morning, after he went to work like, he come back, not to his own house but up to us, up the Refuge. Now he never do come there, never. So I thought well, that’s a strange one, right off.”
“Were…ah…the women there?”
She grinned. God, but she had a lovely little grin! Fit to knock the feet from under you. “That’s why he stays away—too many old friends of his up with us being rescued!”
John frowned. “You shouldn’t talk like that, Charity. He’s your master.”
“And she’s his mistress, Mrs. Cornelius,” she said, unrepentant. “Come on, sir. ’Tisn’t no secret, how he is.”
“Except from Mrs. Thornton.”
Her face went hard. “He isn’t worth to touch her,” she said vehemently.
“So it would be dangerous—apart from being treachery—to talk in that disloyal way about him.”
This reminder halted her. She puzzled something to herself and then turned helplessly to him. “I got to tell you. And I can’t tell you without speaking of him that way.”
He shrugged and resigned, smiling to show her she could go on.
“I were in the women’s work room. Know where I mean?”
He shook his head.
“Anyway, ’tis like a long room between the study room and the wash, and you can’t help but hear through the walls. Like paper they are. Then she come in. And him behind her. And he were going on—about you. That’s why I listened, see. And he said some old geezer had come to see him, about you. Some bloke asking a lot of old questions. From the government, he said.”
“Who said? The ‘geezer’ or Mr. Thornton?” John was on the edge of his seat now.
“Dunno. This bloke, I suppose. Anyway, it were all under your hat and don’t breathe. He said he asked all questions about you. Then Mrs. Cornelius and he, they both fell to talking about you, and mister he said he thought as how it was about making you a lord. And missus she said as how you deserved it. And mister said about how they were looking back into your past life, like, looking for skellingtons or something, I dunno. Anyway…looking to see if they could make you a lord.” Suddenly the idea caught hold of her imagination anew and she flashed the sweetest, most radiant, smile. “Eh?” she said. “What about that, then, eh?”
He could not hold her gaze. He hated the effect she was having on him. It was so—shallow, so obvious. A man of any intelligence, a man with the slightest bit of moral fibre, should be able to resist these primitive urges.
She was disappointed at his lack of response. “Anyway,” she went on, “then he mentioned me. He said as how he always did think there was more between me and—and you, sir, begging pardon, sir—this is what Mr. Thornton said. He said there was more to it than ever come out. And she said rubbish. And mister he said just wait, and you’d been very strange that night we met and you brung me home to Mrs. Thornton. And missus she went on saying it were rubbish. And then they went on talking about this and that and I wasn’t really listening, like, ’cos I was trying to remember that night and how you come to rescue me. And I thought, begging pardon, sir, you was a bit…strange, like. I mean you did think but what you knew me.”
“I did,” John said with lowered eyes, wanting to stop this particular reminiscence. “I did, but it was all a mistake.”
“No, but the way you were going on, like, made me think that you…like, you know, in books and that where people find long-lost children?”
John pretended to laugh, pretended it was ridiculous.
“No, but anyway, that’s what made me think, and that’s why I never heard all what they two said. Anyway, soon I thought, hello, they’re talking a bit funny, ’cos I come back to them from what I had been thinking on about. So I had a peek, what with the door being open and all, and I seen they had some of their clothes off and he was taking more off and promising her better than what they’d ever had before! So I thought oh yes! My my! And she was just standing, shaking her head and saying no with everything—except not with words. Shivering, she was, and crying.”
Charity laughed at the memory but the sound in that small carriage was so loud that she instantly thought how unfeeling it made her seem. So she stopped laughing suddenly and then didn’t know what to say next. Nor did John.
Charity had understood why Mrs. Cornelius was behaving in that way, for it was exactly the way in which she would have been responding to what Mr. Thornton was doing. But that was as far as her understanding went; she was not given to self-analysis. If she were, she would not now have found herself sitting in a cab in Regent’s Park beside John Stevenson. The steps that had brought her there would not (had she paused on each for thought) have carried the weight.
The moment she had seen Mr. Thornton and Mrs. Cornelius doing that thing, she had known, in the way that does not call for words, exactly what her life had been missing since she had become one of Mrs. Thornton’s converts. And that was strange, because she hadn’t enjoyed it much during those few weeks when it had been her trade—only the power it gave her over men who were much stronger than she. Aside from that, she had taken their money and done what they wanted, but she had spent most of the time thinking about clothes and dancing and walks in the country.
But five years of continence—or perhaps just of growing older—had changed all that. Unknown to her the pressures had been building until this morning when she had seen them at it and had caught that fierce, predatory look of delight in Mr. Thornton’s eyes. That had hit her.
She disliked the man for exactly the reason she had given to John—Thornton wasn’t fit to touch Mrs. Thornton. But those glittering eyes! They were something outside all ideas of liking or disliking. They stripped you where you stood; she had often felt that. They gloated. And that loose-lipped smile that lurked in his beard—it could make you shiver at times. And then having to stay there and watch them go at each other! She almost ran into the room to join them—or, better still, to make Mrs. C. run out in shame and then take her place with him. But all she could do was stand there, spellbound, living it all through Mrs. Cornelius and thinking that the woman’s earlier crying and parade of unwillingness had been very hypocritical when you considered this exhibition of abandonment.
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