Whispers in the Dark

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  He was there as I had prayed, in the line of boys walking ahead of us to the church. I knew him at once, and every now and then I caught him looking back, searching me out among the girls. They wouldn’t let us sit together, that would have been an unthinkable transgression against the Christian spirit, but with Annie’s help I managed to seat myself right alongside him when we finally got inside the church. He looked so thin, his eyes stared so, his hair was cropped short, but he was my Arthur all the same, I could not take my eyes off him. And while the others sang “0 Little Town of Bethlehem,” I managed to whisper to him, across the aisle, a few words. They beat me for that, the worst beating of my life, so I could neither stand nor sit for days afterward; but it was worth a dozen beatings just for those few words.

  I told him I was well, that I thought of him every day, that we would soon be together again, he must not lose faith. And I asked him the hardest of questions, if he had been told that our mother was dead. And he said no, he did not know, no one had said.

  My mother’s destruction had been written on her from the moment she entered the workhouse. That look on her face had said it all. Life held nothing for her now, she was beaten and lost, she had made up her mind to die. And die she did, six months later, at the end of May, on a morning full of sunshine, a morning just like this, with her eyes open and her face turned to the wall. They told me that night, after supper, just after prayers, before we were sent to bed. But they forgot to tell Arthur, or thought it did not matter.

  They buried her in a pauper’s grave, without a shroud, in a cheap coffin with broken boards. Years later, when I was at last able to have her reinterred in our family plot at Gosforth, it proved impossible to identify her remains among so many unmarked graves, such a mass of nameless coffins, so many broken bones. I still think of her often. Sometimes, when the nights are very dark, my hand still reaches out for her.

  CHAPTER 5

  When I was fourteen, they reckoned I had had enough education and put me in the servants’ class, the plan being to train me for work as a maid. I could still remember the wretched lives of the undermaids in our house. But after so long in the workhouse, the prospect held no fears for me. Indeed, it seemed the most desirable of things to be out of that place, however hard I might have to slave. In the servants’ class, I would work ten hours each day, laboring in the kitchens or the laundry, or cleaning the floors.

  I would start in the early morning, right after breakfast, scrubbing the casual ward, where they used to put the vagrants. There were nine cells on a side, and I and another girl would be put to do one side each, as well as the bathrooms and lavatories. All I had for the job were cloths, a bucket, and some soda. I made my own kneeling pad, for that work was murder without one. The job would take all morning, and by the end of it I felt wrung out. But after dinner we would set off again.

  There were wooden floors to scrub and long tables to scour, and woe betide the girl who left so much as a spot, whether above or underneath. I had had little enough to do with Mrs. Moss until then, but the work of cleaning and scrubbing and lighting fires was her domain and she spared no pains to make us know it. She was, I suppose, what the doctors now would call a sadist. A lot of them had employment in the workhouses.

  By the time I was fourteen, my hair had grown and I was thought ready to enter employment. They let us girls grow our hair out like that, in the year or so before we were due to go into the world. I think it was the only charitable act they ever performed, though it was done less for our comfort than to spare our future employers the sight of our cropped heads. When I see young women nowadays with their heads closely shaved and wearing shapeless bags of clothes, I am reminded of the days I spent with my own hair so ruthlessly cut back and a workhouse dress on my back, and I feel sorry for them. Poor things, no doubt they think me a little soft in the head when they see me looking at them with such a pitying expression.

  Mrs. Moss came to me one day early in 1902 with a dour look on her face. It was morning, and I was busy polishing some brass in the room where the guardians took their lunch on their monthly visit to the workhouse. I thought someone had died—that was not uncommon, but I could not think why she should want to notify me personally. Unless . . . A shiver of perfect fear went through me at that moment as Arthur came to my mind.

  “You’re to pack your things.” she said. “There’s a place for you outside. They expect you there this dinnertime. It’s a doctor’s house in Birtley. You’re to be the scullery girl. You needn’t expect any pay, but they’ll feed you and find a place for you to sleep of nights. It’s better than you deserve, but no doubt you’ll be complaining before you’re there a week. Well, then, get going. What are you waiting for?”

  My heart had come into my mouth and seemed like to stay there. I could remember almost nothing of the world outside. My mother had been with me all the time before, and now I was to be thrust back out onto the streets alone and expected to fend for myself. The fear I had felt a moment before had not quite passed, and now it changed into a dull sense of dread for myself.

  “But I. . .” I stammered, “I don’t know the way. How am I to get there?”

  “That’s none of my concern. You’ve got two feet, you can walk like other folk. You’d better be there by two o’clock, mind, or you’ll find yourself on the street. Mrs. Venables won’t put up with that, you’ll find that out. She’ll have no truck with idle girls.”

  I stammered again. I could have fallen, my legs were trembling so.

  “How do I get there? I’ve never been anywhere on my own before.”

  “Didn’t they teach you anything in that school? I’ll give you the address, you’ll find someone outside to show you the way. It’s not my business to be coddling those that are too lazy or too stupid to get from A to B by themselves.”

  Saying which, she grabbed my arm and pulled me to the room where the belongings of inmates were kept. We had an altercation straightaway, as to whether or not I was entitled to take with me the bits and pieces my mother had brought to the workhouse with her. There had been no will, Mrs. Moss said, so my mother’s things belonged to the guardians—by which, indeed, she meant herself. And I think she would have kept them, were it not for the fact that she had already stolen the ring and the locket. Such treasures rarely fell to her lot. Sooner than have me make a fuss in a year or two years’ time, she let me take all that was in the chest, in the hope I would have forgotten that the stolen items had ever been there. It was pitifully little, but it seemed like untold wealth to me at the time.

  “May I see my brother before I go?” I asked, for it was more important to me than anything to have a chance to speak with Arthur again. I would leave him the address for which I was bound, and he would make his way there to fetch me as soon as he was sent outside himself.

  “Brother? What brother? Your brother’s gone long ago,” she said.

  Her words hit me like one of the blows she liked to deal out. The blood rushed from my face. I do not know why I did not faint, for the fear I had felt that first moment of her arrival had returned with redoubled force. I was certain for a moment that she meant he was dead.

  “Gone?” It was all I could do to force the question out.

  “Yes, of course. Did you think he’d stay on here forever, maybe just to wait for his big sister? This isn’t a hotel, you know. Our inmates don’t pay for their keep like decent folks. Your brother was found a place and sent to it like any other lad his age.”

  “When? When did he go? How long has he been gone?”

  She bent down over me, bringing her ugly face close to mine, her little red eyes gleaming. I could smell gin on her breath, and vinegar. I could smell the sweat of her body, a dark, humid odor. I wanted to be sick.

  “I have better things to do, miss,” she snarled, “than to stand here all day answering your questions. If you've got any illusions about going back to your old station in life, with maids to wait on you and nurses to wipe your behind, you’d do well
to shake them out of your dull head this very moment. If you think it’s been hard on you in here, lass, it’s been nothing to what you’ve got waiting for you on the outside.”

  She straightened up, still leering at me.

  “But I have to know. Arthur—”

  She struck me hard across the face with the back of her hand. I had suffered her pointless violence often enough in the past, but the particular cruelty of that blow has never left me. Wherever she may be now, I hope she is suffering for that blow. God forgive me, but that is what I truly feel, even now, after all these years, as though my cheek were still stinging from the force of it. For if she had told me then what I wanted to know, if she had made it possible for me to follow Arthur, ail that followed might never have happened and he and I, dead or alive, might today be at peace.

  I had a long, cold walk to Dr. Lincott’s house. Mrs. Moss had sent me in my mother’s dress and my mother’s shoes, for my own had grown too small. The shoes were too large for me, but I stuffed some scraps of old paper into them and made do like that for a spell. After less than a mile, my feet began to hurt terribly, and in a short while I was limping. I even started to wish for my old hobnailed boots as though they had been the most stylish footwear imaginable. My clothes and other belongings I carried in the little cloth bag in which mother had brought them to Chester-le-Street. An old woman showed me the way.

  Dr. Lincott’s house was not half so grand as the one in which I had been brought up. But that did not stop me from shaking like a leaf as I came within sight of it. I had seen from a clock that it was very nearly two o’clock, and I was quite certain I would receive a hard welcome, or perhaps even be turned away in spite of everything and forced to make my way back to the workhouse. And all the way I thought of Arthur and that I might never see him again.

  I presented myself at the back door, as I had been told to do. Mrs. Venables, the housekeeper, grandly called it the “servants’ entrance,” but it was no more than a plain back door at the foot of a short flight of steps. I had to knock hard and long before anyone answered. When the door finally opened, I found myself face-to-face with bedlam. A flagged passage ran down to a kitchen, from which came a frightening clatter of dishes and the hubbub of raised voices. The Lincotts kept a small enough establishment—a housekeeper, a cook, an undercook, two maids, and a boy—but between them, they managed to create as much noise as a roomful of costermongers. I was unused to such boisterousness, for it had been all hushed voices and scraping feet in the workhouse.

  The boy opened the door wide to discover me on the step shivering and sobbing. For all my fears, it was now my dearest wish to set foot in that house, for I thought I might at least find a little warmth and a bite to eat. Yet I was now mortally sure the door would be slammed in my face. The boy—whose name I later learned was George—called out to someone in the room behind, and moments later Mrs. Venables appeared (though I had not the slightest notion then of who or what she was).

  “You’ll be the new girl from the workhouse,” she snapped, taking a large watch from her dress pocket, opening it, and clicking it shut again. “You’re not far off being late. What kept you?”

  “Please, ma’am, I—”

  “No matter. There’s work to do, and it won’t get done if you stand there gawping and sniveling. George, see this girl in and tell Lottie to set her about her tasks at once. I’ll speak with her later, when I’ve a minute. Come on, come on, don’t dawdle.”

  She then grabbed me by the neck of my dress and hauled me bodily into the passage. A moment later, she had disappeared.

  “Watch out for Venables,” George whispered, leaning close. “Cross her, and you’ll find yourself back on the street.”

  He took my bag and tossed it carelessly into a corner. I made to rescue it, but he seized my arm and hauled me down the passage, limping and tripping, into the kitchen. The passage had been freezing cold, but the heat in the kitchen was enough to make me gasp for breath.

  A large woman in a floury apron, whom I took— rightly—to be the cook, descended on me like a barge.

  "New girl? Got a name?”

  “I . . . .”

  “Not good enough, girl. Use your tongue. God gave it you for no other purpose. Name?”

  “Char-Charlotte.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Same as myself. But don’t go thinking you can be familiar on account of it. You’re here to work. And you can start by cleaning those pots and pans. If you’d got here earlier, you’d be halfway through them by now.”

  And so my day began. No one asked me if I was hungry. I just had to roll up my sleeves and set to work, scrubbing and scouring, with none of the detergents we have nowadays. Because it was a doctor’s house, there was an insistence on high standards of cleanliness, which meant that every utensil had to be scrubbed until it shone. After breakfast, after lunch, after tea, and after dinner. Of course, pots and pans and dishes were only a fraction of my work. There were five fires to light every morning before anyone else was out of bed. There were wooden floors to scrub, toilets to clean, bathrooms to wash out twice a week. Laundry and ironing, carpets, brasses, windows, the backs of cupboards, the rear yard—they were all my responsibility.

  In return, Mrs. Venables told me I could bed down in the kitchen at night and help myself to whatever scraps were left after the other servants had eaten their share of leftovers from the family table. Some days, I ate little more than a slice of bread and drippings. I never tasted hot tea or butter or jam. George warned me that the last girl had been caught picking morsels of meat from a hambone left on a plate, thrashed, and dismissed on the spot. Mrs. Venables ran her household with a will of steel and a rod of iron.

  I was up in the mornings by five o’clock, creeping about in the darkness for fear of waking the others, laying and lighting fires in the kitchen, the drawing room, the doctor’s consulting room, the morning room, and the master bathroom. And I would be hard at work from then until late at night, ten or eleven o’clock sometimes. If there was a special dinner that went on late, we would all be hard at it in the kitchen until midnight or one. Mrs. Venables would let none of us creep off to bed until every last pan had been cleaned and put away. As for me, I had no choice in the matter, for the kitchen was my bedroom anyway. I still had to be up before dawn to light the fires.

  One incident from those days stands out in my mind. Ellen, the maid who normally did the dusting, had been taken ill, and I was sent to the drawing room to dust the furniture before Mrs. Lincott came in for morning tea with her friends from the ladies’ committee of the local hospital.

  As I was dusting, my heart all the time in my mouth for fear that I would drop and break something delicate, I came to a photograph on the wall near the fireplace. It showed a group of men in evening dress, very formal and starched. It seemed like something from another world, and yet gnawingly familiar. And then I realized that my father had had a photograph very like this one. I glanced at the caption written in copperplate on the mount at the foot of the picture: Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society Committee, 1884.

  My heart beating, I looked at the photograph again. My father was standing in the back row, just as I remembered him from his own copy of the photograph, which he had kept in the study, where I had seen it every time I went to visit him there. For it had been his habit to invite me to sit with him for about half an hour every evening and to read to me. I remember Kitty’s Secret Wish and Little by Little, and his soft voice, and the security I felt sitting on his lap while the lamplight fell all round us.

  Now, looking at that familiar photograph, I felt my defenses give way and I burst into the most bitter tears. There had scarcely been time to grieve at his death before financial disaster had brought other, equally devastating blows on my head. In the workhouse, my mother’s death and Arthur’s absence had been all the sorrow I could handle. But now I felt more alone than ever, and nothing could hold back the misery or the tears.

  I did not
hear the door open or footsteps cross the room toward me.

  “What is it, girl? What on earth’s the matter?”

  I was on my knees, crouching, my head in my hands.

  “Come on, child, speak up. What are you crying for?”

  When I looked up, I saw a woman standing over me. Not Mrs. Venables, but someone else, a rather younger woman and much better dressed. With a sinking feeling, I realized that this must be Mrs. Lincott, my employer, whom I had not so much as set eyes on before that moment.

  It took a long time, but in the end I managed to blurt out something about my father.

  “Father? Father? I don’t understand. What about your father?”

  “He’s. . .” I gulped and looked up at her. “He’s dead, ma’am.”

  She looked at me quite softly, with sympathy, I thought.

  “I'm sorry to hear that,” she said. “Have you just heard?”

  I shook my head and tried to explain.

  “But if he’s been dead all these years, why all this crying now? I don’t understand, really I don’t.”

  I pointed to the photograph, to my father, a man in side-whiskers and evening dress.

  “He . . . That’s my father,” I said.

  “Your . . . ? Nonsense, girl.” Her manner changed, now she could see how I was bamboozling her. “That’s one of my husband’s friends. Surely you can see that, you stupid girl. Does that look like a common laborer to you?”

  I had started to come around a little. I shook my head.