Eden Falls (39 page)

Tobias, sitting in the drawing room with his mother, spoke of none of these things, concentrating only on guiding her back into a reasonable humour. However, he was deeply troubled, and, worse than that, he had no idea what to do.

Amos Sykes was back in London and he was looking for his wife. Her place was in Ardington. She was needed there, by Eliza, by Ellen, by Daniel and – God knew – by himself. He felt the present situation amounted to an emergency, but he disliked the limitations of telegrams and their impersonal nature; he had never sent one in his life. Instead he had journeyed to London, a man on a mission, to explain to her fully that nothing was right and that the longer her absence continued, the worse everything would become.

She was out, though. He had let himself in and stood in the entrance hall, and had known at once that the house was empty. It had that essential stillness of a home without its family. He had made himself a cup of tea, rifled through the post, which had clearly been sorted by Anna earlier in the day, then put on his coat again and walked to Tottenham Court Road to buy a newspaper. He bought the
Daily Mirror,
rolled it up like a baton, tucked it under his arm and set off back again, and this is when he saw her, outside their house in earnest conversation with the Earl of Netherwood. There was a motorcar idling in the road, a cream Rolls-Royce with tan leather upholstery, and a chauffeur so motionless he might have been stuffed. Tobias Hoyland wore a mid-tan lounge suit, a cream silk scarf and two-tone shoes; Amos thought him ridiculous. Anna, however, was taking him extremely seriously; she listened, nodded vigorously, responded, listened again, and Amos’s heart filled with resentment. She had no idea that her husband was approaching until he was almost upon them. Then, when she saw him, she gave a little bark of surprise and flung her arms around him in evident delight, and he instantly felt like an undeserving curmudgeon.

‘Well I never!’ said Anna.

‘Speak of the devil, as they say,’ said Tobias. He held out a hand, which Amos was obliged to shake.

‘’ow do,’ he said, just as he would have done if it had been Sam Bamford in the pit yard. ‘Talking about me, were you?’

‘Indirectly,’ Tobias said. He barely knew Amos Sykes, except by reputation. In his father’s day, Sykes had been an agitator, a glowering malcontent whose name sometimes came up over the kippers when the late earl and Henrietta were talking shop at the breakfast table. Now that he’d taken his rabble-rousing tendencies to Ardington their paths no longer crossed. He still looked a crotchety devil though, thought Tobias. A shame for the wife, who was pretty as the day and all smiles.

‘We were talking about Lady Henrietta, in fact,’ Anna said, with a brightness that she hoped would detract from Amos’s scowl. Silently she willed him not to fly off the handle, here in the street.

‘Poor girl’s got herself in a pickle,’ Tobias chipped in. ‘Being force-fed eggs and milk, by all accounts.’

‘She’s starving herself, in Holloway Prison,’ Anna said. ‘So now they’ve decided to forcibly feed her. It’s quite brutal.’

Amos, silent thus far, said, ‘Right,’ very flatly, acknowledging the information without betraying the least interest in it. Tobias, acutely aware of the new awkwardness that had arrived with Amos, smiled tightly at him and warmly at Anna and said, to her, ‘Righto, I’ll leave it with you. Any influence you can bring to bear would be simply marvellous.’ He was holding a Homburg – again tan, lighter than the suit but exactly the same shade as the shoes – and now he placed it on his head and climbed into rear seat of the motorcar. Through the window he said, ‘Cheerio then,’ and the vehicle moved smoothly away.

Amos looked at Anna. ‘Does ’e always dress to match ’is car?’ he said.

She smiled thinly. ‘Let’s go inside.’

In a windowless room of the infirmary, Henrietta was half-pushed, half-lifted onto a hard, narrow bed, which stood at about waist height and was not, she immediately realised, meant for sleeping on. There were eight warders, waiting in a grim line, and they stepped forwards to surround Henrietta. One of them began to pound at an unseen pedal, which tilted the head end of the bed upwards, so that Henrietta, who was now being held in place by the warders, was lying not flat, but at a slight angle. Two doctors entered the room, one of them carrying a glass flask of thick, milky fluid and the other bearing a length of rubber tube, which was coiled over his arm like a snake on a branch. They were laughing as they entered, at something one of them had said, but then they fell silent and neither of them uttered another sound. Henrietta, quite helpless, closed her eyes in despair, though she didn’t speak and she didn’t cry. Exactly this had happened to her yesterday, and the very worst part was about to come. Her head was gripped and held rigid in the iron vice of a warder’s hands, and her limbs were pinned by the others, then the pipe-bearing doctor – greying, bewhiskered, severe – began the tortuous process of pushing the tube not into her mouth but up her nose and along the nasal passages then down into the gullet. Her eyes opened wide at the assault; the pain was indescribable, a suffocating invasion, an attack on those tender, delicate, secret places of the human body that should never feel the harsh edges of man-made implements brutally deployed. She bucked and gagged, and the warder who held her head slid her hands further down so that, with her fingers, she could clamp Henrietta’s mouth shut. She was expert at this; it was her speciality. Henrietta looked into her face and saw gritted teeth, clenched jaws, eyes of steel. Her own body was limp now, unresisting, but the eight warders still pinned her down with fierce dedication as the doctors went silently about their business.

The milk came next, roughly a pint and fortified with beaten eggs, pumped from the flask, along the tube and down into Henrietta’s gut. This part, the feeding, was accomplished quickly, and when the flask was almost empty the doctor called a halt and whipped out the tubing, swiftly, without care or compassion. Immediately, Henrietta vomited, a great upsurge of fluid that caught one warder in the face and splattered on the doctor’s polished black boots. Someone – she didn’t know who – slapped her hard, across the cheek. Then everyone exited the room and she was left alone on the bed, where she lay as still as death, imagining herself elsewhere, imagining herself free. She knew, because Mary Dixon had written to tell her, that in the world outside, she was a cause célèbre
.
Her heroic martyrdom, Mary said, was the movement’s single most effective weapon against the government. Every woman fighting for the vote owed Henrietta a debt of gratitude. She was marvellous, inspirational, a symbol of valour in the face of contemptible cruelty.

Henrietta closed her eyes. She didn’t want the vote. She only wanted to go home.

Tobias had gone to Anna at his wife’s suggestion. ‘She can do anything,’ Thea had said. ‘Try her.’ It was true, Tobias had thought, that Anna Sykes seemed capable and caring, and the fact that she was married to an MP couldn’t hurt, even though he was from the wrong benches. It was all about access and influence, after all. So Charlson had driven him to Bedford Square and he had knocked on her door and persuaded her to have tea with him at the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street – Thea’s suggestion again; he had no idea why she knew the place, but it fitted the purpose. Anna had listened to the tale of woe, and had been horrified at what he told her.

‘Bad enough,’ he had said, ‘that darling Henry is kept away from us. But to be tormented in this manner, and for us to discover it through an article in the newspaper…’

He was very upset: shaken, almost tearful. Anna’s heart filled with pity, and she promised – perhaps unwisely, she later thought – to do all she could to help Lady Henrietta. Then Charlson had driven her home and that’s when Amos had arrived, out of the blue and with a face like thunder. He looked no happier now, sitting in his wing chair in the drawing room, listening to her account of the story.

‘Well, anyway,’ Anna said, tailing off, discouraged. They looked at each other and Amos said, ‘Aye, “well, anyway” sounds about right.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, well, anyway, that’s their problem. You ’aven’t asked me why I’ve come.’

This was true. She had been over-anxious to tell her tale, madly hoping to deflect his anger, and so now she said, ‘Oh, yes, I suppose I just assumed that it was Labour business.’

‘It isn’t,’ he said brusquely. ‘I came after you. You’re needed back ’ome.’ The north – Yorkshire – would always be home for Amos; here in London he felt like a visitor. ‘Eve’s badly,’ he added. ‘Daniel’s out o’ kilter and them girls need you.’

‘But I had a letter from Eve, full of high spirits,’ Anna said.

‘There’s a lot can change before a letter sent from Jamaica arrives in London. They got a telegram from ’er brother. Seems to think she’s at death’s door. Daniel ’as ’er dead and buried.’

She blanched, and stood up. Amos thought she was going at once for her hat and coat, but she held her ground and her eyes were filled with hot anger. ‘You pig!’ she said.

‘Ey? Don’t shoot t’messenger,’ he said indignantly, but he knew he’d been unkind. There were ways and ways of delivering bad news.

‘You just want to make me feel as bad as possible, don’t you – about being away, about sometimes living life separate to you? You want me to be someone else! This is truth of it.’ Her voice rose to a full-blown shout and he shrank from it, appalled. ‘Well,’ she raged, ‘I am who I am, and you should not have married me, perhaps.’ Her heart thumped in her chest, and she felt lightheaded with fury and distress. Amos seemed stupid with shock; lost for words, staring and staring but saying nothing at all. He was thinking hard, however, because he knew that in many ways she was right; he had come to London in a spirit of self-righteous indignation at her absence; he expected her unstinting support at home and in his work; he resented her chosen profession. But, emphatically and categorically, he didn’t think he should have married anyone other than Anna Rabinovich.

He didn’t say any of this, though; he was stumped, and he was stubborn. Unhappiness was plainly written across his face, but Anna, just at this moment, didn’t much care. She sat down again and took a moment, collecting herself before she spoke again.

‘Tell me about Eve,’ she said, calmly enough, and he told her in a surly, mechanical voice what little he knew. Anna closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, absorbing the information. It was a body blow, but she was sustained by the certain knowledge that she would know in her heart if Eve were gone. This she believed fervently.

‘Poor Daniel,’ she said. ‘Poor girls. How they must be suffering.’ Amos’s spirits lifted with love for his extraordinary, compassionate, generous wife, who could seethe with anger one moment and forgive the next; but then she said that her plan was to remain in London for the time being, because she had given Lord Netherwood her word that she would petition the government on Lady Henrietta’s behalf. In an instant Amos’s world turned dark again.

‘You put that lot before Eve?’ he said, incredulous.

For a moment she looked down at her hands, which were clasped in her lap. Then she looked up and fixed him with a look of such disdain that he felt a jolt of actual physical pain. ‘No,’ she said, ‘of course not. That’s not what I’m doing. I am, however, putting them before you and your demands, in this instance.’

She paused now, and drew breath, and Amos could see that she was shaking. If he could have moved he would have stood and wrapped her in his arms and apologised again and again, but he seemed compelled by an inner destructive force to merely sit and stare. So Anna went on, in a measured, rational way that felt worse, to Amos, than the shouting. ‘If Eve were in England you know that I would be by her side. But she’s thousands of miles away, while Henrietta Hoyland is imprisoned here in London. I shall see if I can help, and then I shall come back to Yorkshire and do what I can there.’

Her expression was unreadable, but he knew she was angrier with him than she had ever been. He had used the crisis of Eve’s illness for his own ends. He wanted her by his side; whatever the needs and wants of Daniel, Eliza and Ellen, his own came first; his own were paramount. She had understood this at once, and now it had dawned on him too.

He said, ‘Anna,’ in a faltering, questioning voice, as if he couldn’t see her, but she didn’t answer. She only stood once more and left the room.

I
t did Isabella Beeton no credit that there was not a single mention of goat in her book of household management. Ruby had looked in the index months ago, not because she needed to know how to cook goat but because she wondered what the English did with it. There had been plenty of recipes for lamb, even more for mutton, but for goat nothing at all. It was as if the creature’s four tasty feet had never walked the earth. Ruby pitied Mrs Beeton in particular, and the English in general. Speaking for herself, there was no animal flesh that she held in higher esteem.

This morning, Scotty had carried in two whole carcasses, intact from their heads to their hooves, one over each shoulder. On a butcher’s block in the kitchen annexe, which was reserved for the grislier aspects of meat preparation, Batista – a maestro with a cleaver – had set about them with swift expertise. Heads, feet, shins, necks and all variety of offal went in a tin bucket for safe keeping, while the prime cuts came through to the kitchen for currying. Ruby cut the meat into chunks and seasoned it with a mix of chopped scallion, garlic and curry spices. It needed, now, to be massaged into the flesh, but this, she thought, could be accomplished by someone else, and she looked across the kitchen to where Angus sat on the floor with Scotty, playing four-five-six with a trio of dice.

‘Angus,’ Ruby said. ‘Come and rub the goat meat.’

This sounded interesting so the little boy stood up immediately, and Scotty said, ‘An-goose, you kyaan just walk away from de game,’ although that’s exactly what he did and Scotty held out his hands in mock despair.

‘Sorry Scotty,’ Angus said importantly. ‘Ruby wants me.’