Loretta Proctor

by The Crimson Bed

  ‘But who then is Jessaline?’

  ‘Who indeed? Have you any details of this other child?’

  ‘She’s called Jessaline Putterill.’

  Griffin looked through the files again.

  ‘There is no Jessaline Putterill here.’

  He paused and looked thoughtful, ‘The name Jessaline though… it is familiar to me, an unusual one, is it not? Hardly the sort of thing a common servant girl would think of, would you have said?’

  Fred had thought this himself. Bessie had not struck him as romantic or imaginative enough to dream up such a musical name for her child. Yet some mother had done so, it seemed.

  A thought suddenly flashed through his mind.

  ‘Try Jessaline Witherspoon,’ he said.

  Chapter 31

  So that was the truth of it. Jessaline was Sue Witherspoon’s daughter and had been brought by her mother to the Foundling Institute just a year after Bessie had brought poor little Beatrice Mary. His suspicion that the father was Thomas Oldham was, however, unfounded. Mr. Griffin assured him that was not the father’s name while naturally refusing to disclose it.

  It mattered not how Sue had managed to get herself with child. Knowing her to be a liar, he supposed that she had probably cooked up some story in order to leave the child at the Foundling Institute. She had left the Thorpe household shortly after Bessie was ejected and taken a post as housemaid elsewhere. There it appeared that she had fallen prey to some young man’s eager ministrations and become pregnant. Apparently, the young man had promised her marriage. She had foolishly believed him, perhaps hoping the child might force the issue but his parents had turned her out in the street to fend for herself and he had insisted she was lying. This was her story at least.

  The child had been brought here just under one year old and taken away by Sue when she was seven. Sue had been able to prove that she was now quite comfortably off and able to provide for her. Fred thought cynically that Sue might have felt that she had a use for her daughter by this time. Jessaline, young and pretty, would be a further source of income.

  Fred left the Institute with his head reeling and yet his heart considerably lightened. So, poor Bessie and her little one had died of the cholera. His heart constricted again at this thought, the thought of his child dying of that horrible disease in some squalid common-lodging house in Bermondsey. Why had he brought a child into the world so carelessly to suffer such a fate? Perhaps it was for the best that they had both gone. He had to confess to a certain feeling of relief that these awful reminders of his youthful stupidity were no longer there.

  However, Cheating Sue and her paramour, Oldham, were not to be let off so lightly. He took a cab to Sue’s lodgings and told the man to wait for him outside.

  The landlady was often too drunk to trouble with opening the door and he had to bang furiously at the knocker for some time. At last the disordered creature who called herself the maid arrived and admitted him, staring at him in alarm as he pushed his way past her and went upstairs to Sue’s rooms.

  Again he banged at the door but there was no reply.

  ‘She’s gorn out,’ the girl called from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Then let me in at once.’

  ‘Ooh, I dunno’s I should do that!’

  ‘If you don’t then I’ll get a constable and he’ll open it!’ said Fred savagely.

  Terrified the girl ran upstairs, opened the door with her bunch of keys, and followed him into the room.

  He proceeded to remove the pictures from the wall. The Turner was nowhere to be seen. Damn, she must have already disposed of that through that rogue Oldham! He would never leave a good picture like that around. He felt sure now that it had been his suggestion to her to ask for it and for many other worthwhile paintings that Fred had acquired of late. Sue would not have thought of it by herself. Her knowledge of art was not particularly astute even though her low cunning was.

  He felt that losing Jessaline’s pictures would be a real punishment for her for he knew that she did love the child. Did Jessaline know that Sue was her mother? Who could say? They were all such a devious bunch. He began to take the pictures downstairs to the waiting cabbie followed by the maid protesting vigorously. Her cries and shouts woke up the landlady from her drunken stupor and she appeared from her domain now, adding her own noise and protest. Fred, unperturbed, brought down the rest. As he went upstairs for the last one, Sue arrived at the front door and demanded to know what all the noise was about. Being told that a ‘dreadful, fierce, angry man’ was stealing her goods, she ran upstairs.

  ‘What in bleedin’ hell are you doing!’ she screamed and ran up to Fred, trying to wrestle the picture away from him. ‘Why are you stealing my pictures?’

  ‘These, madam, happen to be my pictures, if you recall,’ said Fred, his voice hard and cold, ‘purely on loan to you. And now I am asking for them back.’

  ‘They’re my pictures of Jessie,’ said Sue, almost distraught. ‘I’ll call a constable, you wretch!’

  ‘Kindly do so. Perhaps he will be interested in your little blackmailing effort at pretending your own daughter was mine. Isn’t that the case, Mrs Witherspoon? Jessaline is your own daughter. My daughter died at the age of six.’

  Sue let the picture go and stood looking at him with a wary defiance in her eye.

  ‘Oh, so you’ve woken up at last,’ she said, ‘the game’s up, as they say.’

  She almost laughed and Fred felt a begrudging admiration for her as he always did.

  Sue turned and waved away the maid and the landlady who were peering round the door, their mouths wide open.

  ‘Go away, you silly stupid fools, this gentleman and I have to talk.’

  The landlady went off muttering about lodgers who caused trouble like this and disturbed a decent woman etcetera, etcetera…

  ‘There’s nothing to discuss,’ said Fred, ‘I am sorry to have to include Jessie in all this. I feel she’s an innocent victim but she can no longer sit for my friends. She’ll have to find her own clientele if she hasn’t already done so. As for yourself, you can do what you like, you and that blackguard Oldham. For it is he, rather than myself, who will be discredited. You can both be sure that I shall pass the word around discreetly and he will find himself shunned by all decent fellows. I know, you see, about his little racket in erotic pictures and I think the police would be very interested in his trips to Holywell Street via Paris. He can take you and Jessie to Paris, if he fancies. He has plenty of amazing artists there to do his bidding. You two will make very nice models for them. They like to deal in sluts.’

  Sue stood arms akimbo and glared at him.

  ‘Oh, sluts are we now? Wasn’t your opinion those days you used to sneak round here to have your pleasuring, now was it? Yes, I shall indeed go to the Continent with my Thomas and Jess will come with us. He means to marry me and we shall live in fine style, never you fear. There’s nothing you can do to bother him. He’s a proper man and no coward either. He will always get on while your sort will not. ‘

  ‘If you call him a proper man then good luck to you, madam. I suspect you will end badly with a fellow like Oldham. He is using you as much as you used me,’ Fred said and turned to go.

  ‘Let me have that picture of my Jessie, at least,’ said Sue mournfully, ‘I did give you a good time and I deserve that much.’

  He hesitated and then turned and set the last picture against the wall.

  ‘Take this picture then. I want to neither see nor hear any more of you or Oldham. He should be grateful I haven’t called him out.’

  ‘You’d be dead if you had,’ was her response.

  As he walked down the stairs, she slammed the door after him. Hopefully that was the last he was ever to see of Sue and Jessie and Thomas Oldham.

  Ellie sat in her bedroom one night, preparing to dress for a dinner to which they had been invited. She was feeling a trifle off colour that evening but knew Fred wanted her to be with him. He always wan
ted her to be with him wherever he went these days, which was most annoying. She felt she had no choice but to comply, especially if it was important and to do with business. He liked to show her off and delighted in her sound business sense.

  They were meeting a rather influential gentleman, a Mr John Woolveridge, who had asked Fred to set up a small gallery with him. The idea appealed greatly to Fred. Ellie, on the other hand, was not sure about it at all. Fred did not always exhibit good business sense. He had a very good eye for buying and selling but tended to trust some very odd people. Woolveridge was a man well known in the City and, though there was nothing disreputable about him, the rumour was that he had suffered some very bad financial crashes in his time. He had always recovered and set himself afloat again but Ellie felt the man to be unstable in some way.

  Fred was becoming more and more difficult these days as if he couldn’t bear to let her out of his sight, as if he was suspicious of her in some way. Why? She gave him no cause for suspicion at all. Yet he wanted to know where she went, what she did and tried to dictate to her what she must do. Ellie had never liked being controlled, even as a child, unless by love. She resented Fred’s constant interference and was more than glad whenever he went away.

  He always seemed to be worse after a visit to his mother. Beatrice seemed to Ellie to be the one who kept whispering gossip and nonsense in her son’s ear and Ellie hated her more than anyone else she knew. If she had known just how menacing was the gossip spread by her mother-in-law she might well have torn the old lady’s hair out. On one occasion when the old lady had made the effort to visit them at home, Ellie had returned from an errand in kitchen to find her mother-in-law poking around amongst the private papers on her desk and had made it very clear to the old lady that she resented such an intrusion.

  Once Fred would have brushed his mother’s nonsense aside, but now he listened and wondered. Beatrice kept on insinuating… oh, just a hint here and there, a comment or two… that there might be something going on between Dillinger and Ellie. It fed into Fred’s deepest anxieties but he had the sense to suppose his mother was simply venting the spite she always seemed to harbour towards his wife. Beatrice could hardly bring herself even to enjoy her grandchildren. Little ones running around, demanding, showing off, made her feel ill, she declared.

  ‘In my day, children were always kept out of sight and not allowed to impinge on adult conversation and habits,’ she would say frostily on her son’s infrequent visits with the little ones, ‘ain’t that so, Mr Thorpe?’

  Fred’s father however, adored the little ones and was regretful that Beatrice’s attitude kept the little family away.

  ‘My dear Beatrice,’ he would say as he was about to sally forth into the gardens of Belgrave Square, a grandchild hanging on each hand, ‘that may be so when one is a parent but how often do we see our grandchildren? Are they not a delight? They are very well behaved. You have no cause to complain whatsoever and we must enjoy our brief encounter with childhood. We see little enough of it.’

  ‘Childhood ain’t a time of life I care for,’ said Beatrice, ‘it is so tiresome, so undignified and so… so… unpredictable.’

  Thus James Thorpe took to visiting them alone when he wanted to enjoy his grandchildren, and Fred visited his mother on his own.

  On one occasion, Beatrice was in an especially viperish mood and enjoyed injecting her slow drip of poison into her son’s mind.

  ‘I assure you, he was considered quite a rake in his youth,’ she said with a laugh, referring to Dillinger, ‘quite a rake. He has always liked the ladies and got himself into trouble at Oxford, I do believe. Oh, yes.’

  ‘My dear mother, he is not a young rake anymore but a respected politician.’

  ‘Goodness, as if that had anything to do with it!’ said Beatrice. ‘What politician is to be trusted, may one ask? They all have their mistresses. Oh, believe me, I hear rumours of how Dillinger entertains now his wife is dead. And I don’t speak of formal dinner parties, though he seems to have enough of those. I speak of other entertaining… hmm.’

  Fred looked at her in disgust.

  He did not like Lord Dillinger but he had never heard anything derogatory about that gentleman’s character and despite his own particular aversion, Fred was a fair man.

  The silly suspicions I harbour, he thought, are just my own jealous nature. Othello was an angel compared to me. I know myself to be wrong. I will not allow myself to be suspicious of my beloved Ellie.

  ‘Mother, why are you telling me this? It’s all so much nonsense. I don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘It’s common knowledge, my dear, common knowledge,’ his mother replied equably. ‘They say that he keeps a special house somewhere in St John’s Wood or so I have heard. And maintains an interesting establishment there, I do believe.’

  ‘I’d like to know just where you heard all that. I wish you wouldn’t repeat gossip, Ma, I really do. You have no proof and it’s probably all rubbish!’

  However, the seed of doubt was sown and Fred felt it confirmed all the disquiet he tended to feel whenever he was around Dillinger. He knew perfectly well that many gentlemen took a lady under their ‘protection’ and established them in separate houses. Why should Dillinger not do the same? He was a widower and had no need to find a wife now that his children were all adults. Perhaps he preferred to satisfy his needs in other ways. All quite acceptable amongst gentlemen. But suppose that he was also satisfying himself with Ellie? She doted on him so much and there was such a bond of affection between them. It may well have slipped over the borders of convention into something else. Why not? He was still a handsome man, influential, rich. He spoilt Ellie all the time.

  Something was not right there, by God. Maybe his mother was right and trying to warn him.

  He felt angry after leaving Beatrice that day. Her poison wormed its way into him and though he knew his mother was a notorious gossip, the poison worked well. Despite the good sense of his rational mind, he could not help but watch his wife closely from then on. He took to slipping into her bedroom occasionally when she was out somewhere and looking through her little desk and chest of drawers. Maybe she was hiding something, some billet doux that had been sent to her. He searched often yet found nothing but the compulsion to keep looking was upon him.

  Fred came home one afternoon to find Ellie putting on her gloves and hat, a hired cab at the door ready to take her out.

  ‘Who are you visiting, Ellie?’

  Ellie turned and looked at him. She had not expected him home quite so early and had hoped to set forth on her visit without his constant enquiry as to where she was going and what she was doing all the time.

  ‘I’m going to Kensington.’

  ‘To visit Dillinger, I suppose?’ An unpleasant change came over Fred’s face as he said this.

  ‘As it happens I shall call briefly on Dillie but I do have my friend Martha Simmonds living close by, have I not? I shall call on her too. She has just had another child recently and I’d like to see the baby.’

  ‘Why do you need to see Dillinger? You were there only a few days ago.’

  ‘Fred, why are you questioning me? What is this nonsense? You know full well that I like to visit my godfather. I like his company and dear Lottie will also be there with her children. These are my oldest friends and I love them.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you love them more than us.’

  Ellie sighed. ‘You do talk nonsense, dearest. You know full well that is not true. Am I to be kept chained to a chair so that you might feel more comfortable? Am I to be a prisoner?’

  Fred forced a smile. ‘No, no, Ellie. It’s just that… it’s just Lord Dillinger. You know how much I dislike the man.’

  ‘You are irrational, Fred. Do you dislike poor Lottie too?’

  ‘Not at all, she is a very pleasant girl.’

  ‘Then forget Dillinger. Assume that I am going to see Lottie and her children. Surely you can have no objection to that?’
/>   ‘No, of course I haven’t.’

  ‘It saddens me, Fred, it saddens me that you harbour this dislike for someone I truly love and care for. And now that dear Papa has gone, I feel this love even more deeply.’

  ‘Yes, Ellie, you are right. I am sorry.’

  She gave a light little laugh and patted his cheek with her gloved hand.

  ‘Men are so nonsensical,’ she said, ‘like rams lowering their horns at one another.’

  When she had left in the cab, Fred stood irresolutely at the window watching her off and then pulled the bell.

  ‘Send up some coffee to my study,’ he said to the housemaid who curtsied and went off to the kitchen to do his bidding.

  On the way to his study, which was on the first floor of the house, he paused outside Ellie’s bedroom door. He felt a peculiar compulsion to enter the room. Standing in the doorway, he looked around him, sniffing with a dog-like intensity the sweet perfume of lavender and rose that always seemed to linger in the air here.

  How strange that bed was, the old bed of her ancestral mothers! It almost seemed alive at times if one stared at it long enough. The tendrils and leaves quivered with unseen vibrations, centuries of use and polishing and the energies of its female owners. It was almost like a sacred space and he knew, as he had always known, that he was unwelcome there. It was a feminine place and his maleness seemed to violate it in some way. Perhaps that was why he still felt so uncomfortable when making love to her in it. How natural and easy it had seemed with Sue! Sordid perhaps when judged by other people’s standards, yet at the same time natural, and easy and at the time rewarding. For once, he understood why Henry had always preferred such women. If only the two women could somehow be put together. Nevertheless, he knew that he would not want Ellie to be as carnal and degenerate as Sue. He loved his wife for her beauty, her ladylike ways, her honour and faithfulness; he wanted desperately to believe that she was still his fair lady without taint or dishonour upon her soul. But was she?