Shadow Baby (37 page)

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before her inner vision, a shadow engulfed her happiness. She struggled to be sensible but failed. She told herself that time would restore her normal buoyancy, as time had done before. Perhaps she was unwell without knowing it, she was not after all far off forty and things happened to women at forty. She forced herself to eat properly and to carry out all her daily tasks, and when she did not sleep at night she recited hymns in her head and did not allow her thoughts to meander down dangerous routes.

But when Henry came home, with his face tight and anxious, she knew. He tried to speak to her and she would not let him - she put a hand lightly over his mouth when he began to say he had discovered something incredible which he must tell her, and she told him she did not wish to know. He frowned and pushed her hand away and said, ‘But I must tell you, Leah.’

‘You must not.’

He stared at her and shook his head and said, ‘I have no choice, it is too important, I must tell you that …”

‘No! You do have a choice. You will make me ill. I cannot bear it, Henry, you must not tell me.’

He sighed, walked about the room, poked the fire, and then suddenly wheeled round and said, ‘There are other people to consider, there is what is due to them, to her …’

She gave a little scream and tried to run from the room, but he stopped her. He put his arms round her struggling body and asked her what she was afraid of. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of,’ he assured her, ‘she is only a girl, and a good girl.’

‘No!’ Leah shouted. ‘No! No!’

‘She is a good girl who will make no trouble, she will understand and …’

‘No!’

‘Leah, I have to do something. She has asked for my help …’

‘I am asking for your help, I am begging for it, and I am your wife.’

‘I have given it to you, all these years I have given it to you, have I not? I have kept silent when I should have spoken out, and I have given no thought to the help she needs and now she has come and asked me for it, knowing nothing, and I cannot refuse.’

‘You can!’

‘Listen. You have not even heard the circumstances, you have jumped to conclusions. Evie Messenger …’

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‘No! Do not speak her name, for God’s sake, I never, never want to hear it.’

‘… came to me with her birth certificate which she has only lately been given, following the death of a cousin, and she asked me to help her use it to trace her mother …’

‘Henry! Please, Henry!’

‘… whom she has never known, and I looked at this document and I saw well enough who she was, and I had never recognised her nor even known her name was Messenger, and I felt such shame ..,’

”You felt shame?’ Leah laughed in the middle of weeping and became hysterical, rocking backwards and forwards, repeating the word ‘shame’ over and over until Henry became angry.

‘Is this what it is about?’ he asked, releasing her so suddenly she stumbled as he moved to stand in front of her with his back to the door. ‘Shame? You are too ashamed to recognise her as your daughter? Then that is as it should be, yes, as it should be. I wanted to take her …’

‘Oh, you are so good.”

‘… and you would not hear of it and when I wanted to go in search of the child you would not help me, you said her name was not Messenger, you lied to me …’

‘Yes, I lied, and I am glad I lied, and I would lie again.’

‘You thought only of yourself and this strange, unnatural aversion to your own child …’

‘Yes, I did, I had to.’

‘And now, now when you have the chance to redeem yourself…’

‘I do not wish to redeem myself.’

‘You said you were ashamed.’

‘No! You said I must be ashamed. I am not ashamed, not then, not now. I did what I thought right and best …’

‘For whom? Best for whom? And right? How right?7

‘Best for us.’

‘Oh now, Leah, I was not party to this, I was not, you know I was not …’

‘We were to be married, then later when Mary died we were already married and our marriage could not have survived with her as part of it.’

‘Such nonsense, wicked nonsense, how you can say these things

>

‘I say them because you force me and they are true. I am wicked.

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Say it if you will, say it again, and I will agree, I am wicked and evil, an unnatural woman, a woman who did not and cannot love her own child and hated the sight of her and still does …’

The rest was lost in sobbing so wild and loud Henry expected the girls to come running from their beds to see what terror had seized their mother, but they stayed mercifully asleep upstairs. Leah was on her knees, her face buried in her arms, which rested prettily on the seat of the yellow velvet-covered armchair. He did not want to touch her. Always, deeply hidden inside himself, he had known there was a part of Leah of which he was afraid and over which he had no control. He doubted if she had any control herself. This hatred, her terrifying rejection of what had been a frail vulnerable child and was now a poor, gentle good young woman, was uncontrollable. But it was time to control and tame it. His duty this time was clear. He must tell Evie Messenger who her mother was even if at the same time he had to tell her her mother did not want ever to see her and could not bear the mere mention of her name. He would have to attempt explaining the inexplicable as best he could and trust to Evie’s goodness to understand and accept the unacceptable.

‘You can cry, Leah,’ he said after a while, when the ugly noise of violent sobs had quietened down, ‘but it makes no difference. I must tell Evie Messenger the truth.’

Leah pulled away from the chair and lifted her blotched face up and said, ‘If you do, I will leave you. I cannot stay here to be found and haunted by her. I will leave.’

‘Don’t say such things,’ Henry said angrily. ‘You are not yourself, talking like that, in that way.’

‘I will leave,’ Leah repeated. ‘I will take the girls and leave.’

‘You will not take my girls,’ Henry said, as firmly as his alarm could allow him. ‘I will not allow it and I will not allow this kind of talk. You are upset, I know that, of course you are, it is understandable, but this is mad talk and you are doing yourself no good. Stop. Stop it. Let us be sensible and reasonable for heaven’s sake, Leah.’

But the crying began again and all he could think of to say was that he would send for the doctor if Leah did not control herself. It proved an effective threat. She slumped on the chair once more, her hands threaded through the mass of her hair which had come unpinned and cascaded over her shoulders, but she was quiet at last.

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‘Come, Leah,’ he said, daring to touch her now, going down on his knees beside her and embracing her awkwardly, ‘come to bed. Things will look different in the morning.’ He had to half carry her upstairs and undress her and tuck her up like a child in their bed, where to his surprise and relief she slept immediately. But he himself did not. He lay awake most of the night, worrying. She couldn’t leave him, of course. She had no money of her own and no family, no mother to run to, and nowhere to go, and she cared far too much about Rose and Polly to risk exposing them to the life of some kind of wandering exile. No, she could not and would not leave, but there were other dangers all too real. She could make herself ill. She could cry herself into a state day after day until she collapsed. She could make scenes, shout and scream and wear him down. She could decide not to speak to him, could decide to turn away from him in every sense, and such was her strength of will there was no guarantee that she could not keep it up. All these things Leah could do and make their life miserable; but he was resolved and that was that.

Leah, in the morning, sensed this. She woke to find a cup of tea steaming on the little table beside her, and Henry, fully dressed for work, standing looking down at her. ‘You slept,’ he said. She raised herself on her elbow and sipped the tea gratefully. Her head felt sore and her face ached. She felt her eyes had disappeared altogether and the skin seemed stretched too tight across her cheeks. ‘The girls have gone to school,1 Henry said. ‘I would not let them disturb you.’ She nodded. Henry was such a good husband and father, there was none better. It made her feel tearful to acknowledge this to herself, but there were no tears left, she had cried herself out. ‘Stay in bed and rest,’ Henry urged, ‘I will come back later, in an hour or so.’ She shook her head to indicate he did not need to but said nothing, afraid to speak for fear of what might come out. He kissed her lightly on her hot cheek and left. She lay back, listening to young Clara, their maid, who had just arrived and was clattering about downstairs, doing the fires. She had slept but she felt so tired, so weary. It was an effort to finish her tea and when she had done so she closed her eyes and lay back on her pillow. Tonight, when Henry came home, it would all have to be gone through again. She would have to force Henry somehow into weakening and holding his peace. It exhausted her to think of the arguments ahead, the hours of quarelling there would have to be. Then there was the threat she had

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made. It ought to have been saved as the ultimate threat and she had made it already. She had to prepare herself to make it again and show this time that she would carry it out.

She was lying there, trying and failing to think out a plan of action, when Henry returned within the hour as promised. He brought her tea again and she assumed he had come to check she was well and about to get up. ‘Thank you, Henry dear,’ she murmured, ‘but there is no need to disrupt your work. I am not ill. You do not need to treat me like an invalid. Go back and we will talk again after supper, and I will try to stay calm, though it is very hard.’ Here a little sob escaped her but she stifled it with a cough and reached for a handkerchief. This was pressed to her mouth when Henry said, ‘I have told her. It is done and over.’ The scrap of lace in her hand, pressed still to her mouth, was all that prevented her from screaming. He had no need to explain She understood at once. Her eyes widened as Henry walked over to the window and peered through the net curtains saying, ‘She took it well. No tears or hysterics. I told her to sit down, but she would not. She was solemn when I told her you did not wish to have anything to do with her and that you could not help your feelings.’ He turned and came to their bed and sat upon it and looked at her, his eyes meeting hers, but his gaze far from steady. ‘So, Leah, it is done. She knows and that is that. I am going to provide for her. It is the least we can do. I am going to bank a sum of money for her and in return she has agreed that what has been a secret for so long will remain one. She will tell no one. She has been very good, Leah, very good.’

‘And I have been very bad,’ Leah whispered, ‘and now I must suffer and pay for my badness.’

‘There is no suffering except hers,’ Henry said. ‘She suffers.’ He said this sternly enough to astonish himself, but was glad at the tone he had managed even if it would bring forth the full violence of his wife’s anger and grief. But she gave vent to neither. She stayed perfectly still and quiet, shocked, he judged, into calm. ‘I should have acted years ago,’ he said, getting up again. ‘Years ago, when she was little, when we married. Everything would have been different, it would not have been too late.’

‘I can never come to Arnesen’s again,’ Leah said. ‘I can never walk the streets of this city and feel secure again.’

‘Secure?’

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‘I might come face to face with her now I have seen her and I would die.’

‘This is fanciful talk, Leah. You exaggerate foolishly. She is a poor, sweet …’

‘Sweet?’

‘She has worked for me for over a year and everyone is fond of her.’

‘They will hate me.’

‘No one will know. She has no desire to tell a soul.’

‘You believe her?’

‘Certainly I believe her. Why should I not? She has shown herself truthful in every way. She is to be trusted.’

‘And I am not.’

‘What are you saying now?’

‘You do not trust me.’

‘Of course I trust you. You are my wife. I do not understand why on earth

‘You do not understand.’

‘No. I said I do not. How can you think I do not trust you, my own wife? It is absurd.’

‘You do not understand, so you do not trust me.’

‘Oh Leah\ Talking in riddles helps no one.’

‘It is no riddle to me. You do not understand my feelings and therefore you do not trust my instincts. You do not know what this

- this telling you have done does to me, how afraid I am …’

‘There is nothing to be afraid of, it is all over …’

‘… of myself, of what I have done, of what she knows I have done. She will come and claim me.’

‘No, no, I have told you, she will not. I am settling a sum of money …’

‘Money? It has nothing to do with money, neither for her nor for me. She will not be able to resist coming now that she knows.’

‘She will not come, though if she did it might prove the best thing that could happen. You would see for yourself what a …’

‘You forget. You sent her with the pink silk. I have already seen her.’

‘There, then. What did I tell you? She is harmless, just a poor young working girl, an apprentice seamstress …’

‘In your employment. Sack her, Henry, give her money to leave Carlisle, find her a place elsewhere, please?

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Later, when he had at last returned to work, Leah felt some new hope. She had seen that Henry was at least turning over her suggestion in his mind and had not dismissed it out of hand. He would puzzle over the fairness of it all day, maybe even longer, and then it would be time to use more persuasion. Honour, his honour, was after all satisfied. He had owned up and told Evie Messenger the truth and now, to help further ease his conscience, he was going to tell her he would give her money. There was no moral problem about suggesting she should move to another establishment in another city. If he could find her a good situation, perhaps a better one - Henry had excellent contacts throughout the north of England