Abigail (49 page)

“She has brought you tea in your drawing rooms. She has scrubbed your scullery floors. She has served you ribbons at your haberdashers. When you bought your last dress, you did not see her, but hers were the deft fingers that made it so inexpensive. And, in all honesty I must tell you, you have looked briefly into her shame-filled eyes (and looked long away) when you have seen her in all her tawdry finery on the pavements of Piccadilly.”

Here there was a sharp, indrawn gasp. But the earlier half of her speech, combined with her blazing sincerity now, gave her enough authority to hold up a hand and say, “In her later years you failed to recognize her, for she was not the human wreck you expected, but a respectable small shopkeeper, happily married, a devoted wife, a fond mother, and a pillar of her local church.

“I asked men to see the humanity in us, and you applauded me. Now I ask you to see the humanity in this person, and I shall applaud you. I said that the vote, and other measures of equality, will not come until men have acquired a truer and more honest picture of womankind. You agreed with that notion. When you have heard this woman’s story, ask yourselves if men will
ever
form that honest picture while some women—not you, not me, but some women, some tens of thousands of women—can undergo the sort of life you are about to hear unfolded? Can we achieve recognition of our humanity and still withhold it from such as these? If we can, then what sort of humanity
is
ours—and is it worth the achievement?”

The applause was greater than she had expected. Clearly it did much to ease Mrs. Elkington-Laud’s mind, too. Now surely Annie had arrived—she’d had over half an hour of grace. She turned to Frances. But Frances was not there.

What on earth to do now?

As an afterthought—and as a last, desperate play for time—she turned back to the audience and added, “For your peace of mind I should tell you that you will hear nothing tonight that you could not repeat in mixed company to an unmarried grown-up daughter.” She looked to one side of the hall. “I’m sorry if that disappoints the gentlemen of the press.” She hoped Annie would make it true.

The little joke did much to ease their mood.

“Where is she?” Mrs. Elkington-Laud hissed.

“She must be there by now,” Abigail said. “I’ll run and see.”

She walked off the stage and dashed toward the street door. Frances was there, looking wildly up and down. “Not a sign of her,” she said bitterly. “Oh, to let you down like this, Abbie. It’s too bad.”

“I’m afraid it’s rather like her, though,” Abigail said. “She has the greatest heart in the world, but…”

“What’ll you do?”

“Go back and apologize, I suppose.”

“Couldn’t you at least tell them what she would have said?”

Abigail stared at the girl, openmouthed. “Genius!” she cried. Then, wringing her hands and beginning to pace up and down, she said, “But dare I? Dare I?!”

“What?”

Her heart beating like a flail, Abigail said, “Find a cloak. I haven’t time to change everything but I’ll put on the boots, the skirt, and the veil. I’ll put on your navy-blue cloak.”

“No!” Frances said, half-fearful, half-delighted. “You’d never be able to do it.”

“Just watch!” Abigail said. And she ran back to the stage. An expectant hush fell. “I’m sorry, everyone,” she called out. “Your next speaker feels no relish for the story she has to tell. You will understand that she tells it with no sense of pride. Indeed, she is, it seems, terrified—not of telling it to you, but of telling it to you in my presence. So—by your leave.” She bowed her head.

While the applause rained down, Abigail said to Mrs. Elkington-Laud, “Have you any news or administrative matters to announce?”

“Always!”

“Now would be a convenient moment for them.”

She walked off stage again and then dashed to the cloakroom.

“Please don’t,” Frances said, though she had everything ready. “If you fail, if they find out, it’ll be such a humiliation for you.”

“I can’t draw back now, Frances. I’m on fire, I tell you. I shan’t fail. Have no fear. Oops! Me beads!” She slipped into character as swiftly as she slipped into her black skirt and boots. “Blimey, gel,” she said to Frances, “what’s that long face for then? Let’s have a bit of a laugh, eh! How do I look?”

Frances inspected her minutely. “Well—
I
don’t recognize you.”

“I can’t hardly see through this veil.”

Frances put her hand to her mouth. “I must go outside,” she said, shivering with fear, “or I’ll be sick.”

“Suit yourself, me old love. Just point me the right way.”

She felt not the least bit afraid. Not the veil, not her disguise, but Annie’s accent and personality made the perfect mask; she understood how an actress who might be terrified of addressing a crowd as herself could go on stage as a character and feel only the faintest stirrings of the butterflies in her stomach. She was a little drunk with the power of her concealment.

She edged onto the stage and stood irresolute. A deathly hush fell. Then a sibilant whispering. Mrs. Elkington-Laud, all brave smiles, beckoned her to the table with encouraging dips of her head. Abigail stood beside her and forced her own hands to tremble. Silence returned.

“I’m not proud of what I’m going to tell you,” she began. “I’m not proud of what I had to do. But if any lady here can tell me what I might of done different, then—like Lady Bouvier says, there’s ten thousand girls and more want telling.”

The veil was a perfect ambush. Through it she could look
at
people. She realized that when she had spoken earlier, as herself, she had not actually looked at any single member of the audience but rather had let her eyes flit over them as over a sea of small waves. Now she looked to see if recognition lighted any eye. None did.

“It’s hard to believe I had a happy childhood, but I did. There was ten of us shared one room. Me dad was a billposter, which pays about a farthing above portering—and portering often don’t pay nothing at all.”

Someone giggled and corrected her English. A small, uncomfortable laugh spread among them.

“Yeah,” she answered. “Another thing was me governess. She was often away drinking when she should’ve been teaching me grammar.” The laugh that followed this was much more wholehearted.

A movement, about the fifth or sixth row back, caught her eye. It was the sort of movement she was on the lookout for—an excited dart of the body and a whisper in a neighbour’s ear as the discovery was made and communicated.

But a moment later it was not fear that moved her. It was terror—stark, numbing terror. The woman who had moved was her sister Winifred. Beside her sat Steamer. And beside him sat their mother.

Abigail’s knees jellified. Her innards fell into the perpetual vacuum of her midriff. Her throat went as dry as a ship’s biscuit. A violent ague of shivering paralyzed her.

“Have a drink, my dear,” Mrs. Elkington-Laud advised.

She raised the tumbler like an alcoholic at his breakfast; water slopped and spilled over the table and all down her cape.

“Take it off, there’s a good woman,” Mrs. Elkington-Laud advised, standing to assist. “I’m sure it’s too cumbersome anyway.”

“No!” Abigail said, still in Annie’s precise tones. She clutched the cape to her. This real threat to her imposture did more to calm her than the psychic terrors induced by the presence of her family.

“Yeah. Ten in a room,” she said. “And often we’d have to take in a lodger to help with the rent.”

And she told them Annie’s tale, in Annie’s bright words, with Annie’s surprise in her voice that it should have happened to her and that she should have survived it. She told it just as she had heard it in those whispered, giggling memories as they had lain in bed in the dark, in Buckingham Street, at the Villa Corot, and in Italy.

She told them of the workhouse and orphanage, of the joy when their father got into work. She made them understand that hers had, indeed, been a happy childhood.

In a curious way she found she soon ceased to be Abigail; that is, she began to think of “Abigail” as another person. She did not become Annie, though, but hovered some undetermined way between the two. Or perhaps she became an amalgam of them—a nameless person inhabited by both. Her story was no longer being assembled in her mind and then passed down to her throat; it welled up from unsuspected sources within. The talk was no longer an intellectual and dramatic exercise; it had become a compulsion.

She told them of her training for domestic service and of her first jobs, of the marvel of eating every day and always having boots on her feet, of the ambition that led her from scullery to upstairs maid in five hard but satisfying years.

And they’re still listening,
she thought. It was amazing and exhilarating. An audience of rich ladies listening in respectful silence, some visibly moved—and she nothing but an orphanage scullery maid! Of course, it was because of what that Baroness had said first.

She described the many kindnesses she’d been shown, and then—the beginning of her shame. How, in the last great house, she had repaid her employers’ generosity. How the young daughter of the house had asked her to tell secrets that no decent young girl should be told. And she had told those secrets.

She gave herself all the excuses: the girl had made her take drink…she was commanded to tell…it flattered her to think she knew more than the young lady with all her Latin and Greek…she was showing off. And then it came to her—the real reason, the one she had forgotten and buried all these years.

“No,” she said in a hushed voice that compelled attention. “No excuses. I’ll tell you—I wanted to spoil her innocence, like what mine had been spoiled. I loved her. I loved my mistress. There’s nothing I wouldn’t of done for her. But I hated her innocence. I wanted her to know of life what I had always known.

“It was wrong. But I paid for it. Oh, I paid as I believe no woman should be asked to pay for so brief a slip.”

Her eyes found the Countess and a hatred inflamed her. Others did wrong too, but they had not been asked to pay.

She told of her dismissal without a character and the impossibility of finding honest and honourable work, of the rotten food she begged in the markets, of sleeping rough and feeling herself hourly slipping from the respectability she had known as an upstairs maid down to the lowest depths. She described her spell as a shirt seamstress and remembered for them the dingy garret, the numb fingers, the smarting eyes, the body that would never leave off aching—and the few shillings a week it brought in. The starvation. The sickness that followed.

Again and again her eyes returned to the Countess;
that woman should pay,
she thought.

“Then they said me dad had died. They said he was buried in the pauper cemetery out in Highgate. It could of been—well, it could of been halfway to Leeds to a starving, sick gel. But somehow I got there. Somehow I gave his grave a last tending before the cross rotted. But it was my undoing, that cemetery. Or was it? That’s what I want to ask you. That’s what I want to know.

“The only honest work I could get was killing me. In two more months I’d of been dead of honest work. Then here was this gentleman. A kindly, youngish gentleman—a railway engineer, he said he was, soon to be married. He told me what he’d like, and he showed me four and six-pence. I said no, but he said gels like me always say no and we never mean it. That was the first time in me life when I realized I was a ‘gel like me’. Afterwards, when he found out I’d never been ‘a gel like me’ before, he took me back to his rooms in London, and when I left next day I had food inside me and a sovereign in my pocket. A month’s earnings for a shirt seamstress.”

The Countess was weeping. Other women were dabbing their eyes, too, but the only one who mattered was the Countess; her tears discharged a debt. The woman on the stage was satisfied.

“You may imagine I gave up sewing shirts at once, but I didn’t. I was brought back to sickness and starvation again before I took, once more, to being ‘a gel like me.’ And then it was only the once—until I was starving again. And so I went on, four or five times, only taking to my shame when I could bear the hunger no further.

“But there was no future in it. I could see that. The day would come when I’d be too old to escape starvation in that way. I nearly said ‘in that easy way,’ but it’s not easy. I won’t dwell on it, but I’ll say this: Walk along any street and pick any dozen gentlemen who look as if they might have a loose guinea about them and then imagine how ‘easy’ it might be for a woman brought up respectable and religious to come between that man and his gold.

“But I won’t pretend it was all disgust, neither, though after four years I was glad to hang up all me finery and buy a decent, honest little shop and settle to a respectable life. In those four years I knew the first companionship with refined people. You’d scarce credit the number of gentlemen who paid me—paid me five or ten pounds…to do nothing more than listen to them talk. They’d kick off their boots, lay on the bed, and
talk.
Talk about their work, their wives, their homes, their families. All their fears and disappointments. All their lost hopes. All their dreams. That’s all they wanted me for—to listen. And to say I understood.

“The funny thing was, I
did.
I did understand. I used to cry for them at times it was so sad. Sad they couldn’t be laying by their own wives, telling them. Confessing where they failed instead of hiding it and then coming and telling the likes of me. But many and many’s the man who’s said to me, ‘You’re the only person in the world I can really talk to.’ If you ask me, being a man—
having
to be a man—is a terrible burden at times.

“Times was I’d feel guilty at all the affection they gave me when they should of given it their wives. And I didn’t want it—what could I do with it? Other times I’d be angry. Why couldn’t they get that understanding back home!

“If you want to know, I quit after four years because I’d saved two thousand pounds.”

There was a concerted gasp.