Hettie of Hope Street

by Groves, Annie

  But the landing remained silent, and the minutes became hours, and Eddie’s breathing had become such a frail movement of his chest that several times Hettie had to rub her tired eyes to see it.

  The afternoon was fading into evening when suddenly Eddie opened his eyes and called out wonderingly in the voice of a young child, ‘Mama!’ whilst he gripped Hettie’s hand.

  And then, shockingly, his breathing changed and became a raw gasp that turned to a hideous rattle followed by complete silence.

  Hettie could hear men’s voices outside the door. Numbly she sat staring into Eddie’s still face, willing him to breathe even though she knew that he would not.

  Someone was knocking on the door. Very gently she released Eddie’s hold on her hand and stood up, leaning over him to gently kiss his forehead before going to open the door.

  Two men she didn’t recognise were standing there, both of them so femininely handsome that she knew at once what they were.

  ‘I think Eddie is dead,’ she told them, and then burst into tears.

  It was gone ten o’clock and the streets were dark, but Hettie had refused to accept an escort back to her own lodgings. The doctor who had been sent for had confirmed Eddie’s death and then asked her so many questions that her head began to ache. She had been careful, though, not to say anything to him of Eddie’s admission to her that he had taken his own life. It was against both the law of the land and the law of the church for anyone to commit suicide, and so Hettie had been as circumspect as she could be, saying only that she had called to see Eddie because he was a friend and she knew he had been poorly.

  Now as she stumbled into Piccadilly Circus she realised that she was trembling from head to foot. Suddenly she longed for Jay and the comfort of his presence. The comfort of his arms. On impulse, she found a hackney carriage and instructed the driver to take her to the Ritz, vaguely aware of the look he gave her and the fact that she was not dressed either for the evening or such an elegant venue.

  Guessing that Jay would be in his suite, since he had told her the previous evening that he had some work to catch up on, she used the side entrance, hurrying passed the doorman on duty and summoning the lift.

  The corridor leading to Jay’s suite was empty, but as Hettie hurried towards the suite door, another door suddenly opened and Harvey stepped out into the corridor in front of her. Immediately Hettie froze.

  ‘Well, well, if it isn’t Jay’s little song bird. And where might you be going, my pretty? he asked mock jovially as he stood in front of her, deliberately blocking her way.

  ‘I’m going to see Jay,’ Hettie told him, making to step past him, but as she did so, to her shock he took hold of her, laughing down into her shocked face as she demanded to be set free.

  ‘What for? Jay isn’t here. He’s gone off to see one of his other love birds, so why don’t you and me enjoy ourselves instead, eh?’

  As he spoke he was pushing her into the hallway to his suite and back up against the wall, pinning her there with the weight of his body whilst he groped her breasts with his free hand, pinching at her nipples and grinning coarsely as he watched her impotent struggles to break free of him.

  ‘Let me go, let me go.’ Hettie wept as she struggled against his constraining hand.

  A familiar suffocating sense of fear and loathing was spreading weakeningly through her as she remembered Mr Buchanan.

  She could smell the acrid, sickeningly musky odour of Harvey’s sweat, his breath a heavy rasp in her ear and the grip of his hand on her breast painful as well as terrifying.

  ‘You can protest all you want, my little dove, but soon you will be singing a different song, and I promise you I shall make you sing it every bit as sweetly as Dalhousie.’ Harvey was breathing thickly in her ear. ‘Come on, stop pretending you aren’t eager for me. Women like you are always eager, and I promise you I won’t be ungenerous. These pretty ears of yours will look even prettier wearing a pair of diamond earrings.’

  His hand was tearing at her bodice and suddenly the fabric gave way and his hard biting fingers were grabbing painfully at her breast, squeezing and kneading her tender flesh, his mouth a wet red gash of lust in the bloated flesh of his face.

  ‘No…’ Hettie moaned. ‘No…’

  ‘What the devil?’

  ‘Jay!’

  Hettie sobbed weakly in relief as she was suddenly released, her trembling fingers pulling at the torn fabric of her bodice as she ran to Jay’s side.

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Jay. It was her idea.’ Harvey was gabbling wildly. ‘She told me she knew you weren’t here and…’

  Without a word Jay took hold of Hettie and put her to one side and then with a speed that made her blink he grabbed hold of Harvey by the fabric of his shirt and slammed him back against the wall in much the same way as Harvey had done her. Then, whilst Harvey was still standing there, Jay hit him with his bunched fist so hard that Harvey dropped to the floor.

  Horrified, Hettie looked at him. There was a thin trickle of blood oozing out of his mouth.

  ‘Jay, you’ve killed him,’ she whispered.

  ‘No I haven’t. Are you all right?’

  Hettie nodded. ‘Yes, but I wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t saved me…’ She was shivering and tears were rolling slowly down her face.

  ‘Come on,’ Jay encouraged her, guiding her towards his own suite. ‘What exactly are you doing here, Hettie? You knew that I was going to be busy. You weren’t trying to check up on me by any chance, were you?’ he asked her dryly.

  As he opened the suite door for her and guided her inside, Hettie shook her head and told him emotionally, ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Jay, I had to see you. The most dreadful thing has happened…’

  ‘What dreadful thing?’ He was frowning now.

  ‘Eddie is dead.’

  ‘What?’ As he closed the door Hettie saw how Jay’s expression had changed and hardened. ‘How do you know about this, Hettie? Who told you?’

  He was guiding her into the salon. Hettie stopped him and turned to him, telling him, ‘No one told me, Jay. I was there with him. I’d heard about…about what had happened at the theatre with…with the scenery, and how you’d dismissed him, and I…I decided to go and see him. I knew where he was staying because, well, anyway, when I got there he let me in and then he told me…’ She stopped and gulped. ‘He told me that he was going to die and that he taken something…opium. Oh Jay.’

  Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks as she relived those terrible moments. ‘He thought I was Ivan. He wanted me to be and he really believed that Ivan would come to him.’

  She started to sob, but instead of comforting her Jay ordered her sharply, ‘Stop that, Hettie. Damnation, what the hell were you thinking of, going round there in the first place? A scandal like this could destroy everything I’m working for and us with it. Who else have you spoken to about this?’

  ‘No one,’ Hettie told him. ‘Some of Eddie’s friends came and they got a doctor.’

  ‘And he saw you, this doctor?’

  ‘I said that I was a friend of Eddie’s.’

  ‘Did you tell him anything about what had happened at the theatre?’ Jay demanded sharply.

  ‘No. But everyone knows what happened there, Jay. All the girls were talking about it.’

  ‘They might have been then, but my guess is they’ll keep their mouths closed now they know he’s dead. It won’t pay any of us to have a scandal on our hands. It’s a pity the damned fool didn’t wait until we’d left for New York,’ Jay remarked with a brutal lack of compassion that jarred Hettie.

  She had come to Jay expecting to find comfort and reassurance. Instead she had almost been raped by Harvey and now here was Jay himself talking about Eddie so callously that Hettie could hardly believe this was the same man who had whispered such tender words of love to her.

  ‘Has he any family, do you know?’ Jay asked Hettie curtly.

&
nbsp; ‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘But he told me that they had disowned him.’

  ‘They’re not likely to want any awkward questions being asked, then. Thank the Lord for that. If I had my way, he and all his kind would be…’

  ‘Jay, please don’t,’ Hettie begged him.

  But Jay didn’t seem to have heard her as he paced the floor and then announced, ‘You’d better go back to your lodgings. No doubt the authorities will be informing me of his death and it wouldn’t look good if they found you here. Especially since you were with him when he died.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  John unfolded the letter he had only just refolded and smoothed out the single sheet of paper, re-reading it although he had only just finished reading it, and indeed had read it a hundred and more times since he had first received it earlier in the week.

  It was from Hettie, the writing shaky, and the words smudged from what he knew must have been her tears.

  She had begun by offering him her sympathy on the death of ‘your dear friend Lady Polly’, but then she had gone on to tell him that she too had ‘lost a very dear friend in the most unhappy of circumstances’. The words ‘unhappy’ and ‘circumstances’ were wobbly and very badly smudged, and John smoothed his thumb over them now, desperately trying to visualise Hettie writing them, although he had no idea of where her lodgings were or what they looked like and instead had to picture her seated at the small desk in his sister Ellie’s sitting room.

  ‘I cannot say any more, John, and have already said too much. I don’t want to burden you when you have your own grief to carry. Eddie is to be buried tomorrow but we are none of us from the theatre to go to the funeral. His family have come and taken him and he is to be buried with his mother.

  ‘I did say my prayers for him on Sunday when I went to church, though, and for Lady Polly as well.

  ‘I hope and pray that you may find some comfort and peace in your own grief, John, and that God will keep you safe. Jay, Mr Dalhousie, says that I will feel better once we leave England for New York, where I am to spend six weeks singing the part of Princess Mimi as well as learning the songs for Jay’s new musical. Jay says that I am to put what has happened behind me, but I confess that I am not finding it easy to do so.’

  John folded the letter again. From the first moment he had read it he had had the strongest of urges to go to London to see Hettie. But for what purpose? Ellie had already mentioned in her letters to him that she suspected that a romance was developing between Hettie and the American she mentioned so frequently in her letters home. The same American who was taking Hettie away from them to New York. And besides…he had nothing he could offer Hettie. Or at least nothing she would want. They lived in different worlds now.

  Eddie’s death had cast a sombre shadow over the whole theatre and everyone who worked in it, or so it seemed to Hettie. And the director, whose temper had always been short, was now savagely unmerciful with anyone who made any kind of mistake.

  ‘Anyone would think that I was responsible for his death,’ Jay had complained angrily to Hettie about the sullen silence that greeted him whenever he left his office to come down to the stage.

  Hettie had not been able to make any response. Although people had sometimes mocked Eddie behind his back, they had nevertheless been fond of him. As Aggie had put it, ‘He may have been one of them but he were one of us as well.’ And they felt that Jay had not treated Eddie either kindly or fairly.

  ‘But surely if anyone should be blamed it should be Ivan and not Jay?’ Hettie had tried to defend Jay, but Aggie had shaken her head uncompromisingly.

  ‘It were Jay as give ’im the sack,’ she said.

  Hettie had repeated this comment to Jay, without telling him from whom it had originated, her voice faltering as she saw the anger in his eyes.

  ‘Goddammit,’ he had cursed. ‘What was I supposed to do?’

  But as everyone said, in true theatre tradition, the show still had to go on, and Jay had elevated Eddie’s assistant Bryn Davies to take his place. Bryn was a small, sturdy Welshman with twinkling eyes who claimed that he was the ‘only Welshman on earth who could not sing’.

  ‘Mary’s in bed this morning,’ Aggie announced as the girls clattered downstairs to the dingy back parlour where their landlady grudgingly provided them with their breakfast.

  As soon as they hurried into the room, the grubby tweeny maid appeared and plonked a heavy tea urn down on the stained sideboard announcing, ‘Toast’s off this morning on account of cook forgettin’ to send out for bread, but she said I wuz to say she’s mekkin’ porridge instead.’

  Jenny and Jess both groaned, and pulled a face.

  ‘Aggie, what’s wrong with Mary?’ Hettie asked worriedly as she poured herself a mug of tea.

  Mary hadn’t said another word to Hettie about her unwanted pregnancy or about her plans to have it terminated, but Hettie had already seen that Mary wasn’t wearing her diamond ring and wondered if she’d already visited the doctor.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Aggie told her. ‘She’s just very bad with her monthlies. Kept me awake all night almost she did wot with ’er wailing and moaning.’

  If Mary was having her monthlies then that must mean that everything was all right, Hettie decided with naive relief. ‘I’m not going for my singing lesson until later on this morning, so I could pop up later and take her a cup of tea,’ she told Aggie.

  ‘Aye, you do that. I told her last night that she ought ter get herself down to the kitchen and mek herself up a hot water bottle. Works a treat on belly cramps, it does.’

  Holding the cup of tea she had just persuaded ‘cook’ to let her make for Mary in one hand and the hot water bottle she had filled for her in the other, Hettie climbed the stairs carefully, not wanting to spill any of the tea.

  The door to the room Mary shared with Aggie was already open, and the curtains were still pulled across the window, blocking out the summer light. Mary was lying in bed with her back to Hettie, but it was obvious from the way she was moaning that she was not asleep.

  ‘Mary, I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ Hettie called out as she walked into the room. ‘And I’ve made you up a hot water bottle. Aggie said that it would help your cramps.’

  ‘Wot?’

  Reluctantly Mary turned over and struggled to sit up. Her face was puffy and pale and Hettie could see how she was shivering as she pulled the thin bed covers round her body.

  ‘Aggie said this morning that you were bad with your monthlies,’ Hettie told her sympathetically as she sat down on Aggie’s bed and put the cup of tea on the small table between the two beds before holding out the hot water bottle to Mary. ‘I’ve got some aspirin if you want some?’

  As Mary moved she winced and shuddered, and then told Hettie, ‘Oh gawd, ’Ettie, it feels like I’m bloody well bleedin’ to death. And if’n he knew he’d want me to an all. Tek my advice, Hettie, don’t you ever believe it if’n some posh fella tells you ’e loves you, because he’ll be lyin’.’

  She reached out to pick up the mug of tea and then cried out sharply.

  ‘Mary, what is it?’ Hettie asked in alarm.

  ‘It’s me insides, ’Ettie. Gawd knows what that bloody doctor’s done to them. ’E told me that I’d bleed a little bit, but ’e never said as how it were going to be like this. You should ’ave seen what he done to me.’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘’Ad ter hold me down they did whilst he put this thing right up inside me, the pain were that bad. Eee, ’Ettie, I thought it were never going to be over, and then…’ Her whole body heaved with her sobs.

  ‘And it’s today as His bleedin’ Lordship gets married to ’er,’ Mary added, still crying. ‘Lady Arabella…Oh gawd, ’Ettie, but I ’ate him so much now. And I wish as I’d never met him never mind let him get me in the family way.’ She started to shiver. ‘I’m that cold ’Ettie.’

  ‘I’ll go and get you one of the blankets off my bed,’ Hettie told her. ‘Here’s the hot water bottle. Aggie said you were to put it
on your belly.’ Without thinking Hettie stood up and lifted back the bedclothes intending to place the hot water bottle beneath them, but when she saw the bright red stain on the bed, and smelled the hot salty scent of Mary’s blood, she couldn’t move.

  Some deep-seated instinct she hadn’t previously known she possessed warned her that something was seriously wrong. It couldn’t be right, surely, that Mary should be bleeding like this? Quickly she let the bedclothes drop back over Mary, who looked at her and said fiercely, ‘Don’t you go saying nothing about this to anyone, ’Ettie. Do you ’ear me? If Ma Jenkins knew I was like this she’d have me out of here and on the street.’

  ‘Mary, shouldn’t we get a doctor?’

  Mary started to laugh bitterly. ‘A doctor. No thanks. That were how I got in this state in the first place. It’ll be all right, ’Ettie, I just need to get some sleep that’s all.’

  ‘How’s Mary?’ Hettie asked anxiously. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on her singing lesson because she was so worried about her and now, instead of meeting Jay as she was supposed to be doing, she had come hurrying back to the boarding house.

  But as she looked into Aggie’s set face her stomach lurched and a sick premonition gripped her. ‘Aggie…’

  ‘She’s in hospital,’ Aggie told her grimly. ‘And bloody lucky to be alive to go there an’ all, by all accounts. If’n I hadn’t come back on account of forgetting me purse this morning, she’d more than likely have bin a gonner. Found her in the lavvy, I did, bleeding like she was…’ Aggie’s mouth compressed. ‘She tried to tell me as how it were her monthlies, but I could see straight off what was up. Me Mam used to do a bit of midwifing, aye and a bit of the other stuff as well, and I knows what it means when a woman bleeds like that.