The Sleeping Sword (32 page)

There was no conversation at table that night, Venetia staring listlessly at the white brocade wall, Gideon's mind on facts and figures, Gervase leaning back in his chair, eating little, saying not a word. And when their silence oppressed me I began to tell them whatever came into my mind, Aunt Faith's return from Paris, a dinner at Mrs. Rawnsley's the night before, when her parlourmaid had spilled a decanter of wine on a brand-new carpet.

‘What rotten luck!' said Gideon whose training as a gentleman always enabled him to produce some sort of reply.

‘Mmmmmm,' said Venetia.

‘Yes, terrible luck, for the carpet is pale green and the wine, as you might imagine, was red. I am not at all sure the stain can be removed.'

Gervase leaned towards me, his face very pale in the twilight, his eyes carefully narrowed, his mouth touched by a smile that deceived me, since he was not much given to smiling these days.

‘Grace,' he said very distinctly, ‘what a bore you are.'

To which I coolly and to no one in particular replied, ‘Do you know, I believe this sauce is much improved by that dash of tarragon. I must remember to tell cook.'

One night the following autumn, my maid, Sally Grimshaw, who had been given permission to attend a wedding, did not return, her absence being only grudgingly explained to me by Mrs. Winch, my housekeeper, who did not seem to think it my concern. The girl, while walking back to Tarn Edge alone at what could not be called a respectable hour of the night, had been ‘set upon'by some unknown male, and as a result of her injuries had been taken by a constable to the Infirmary. The constable had then been kind enough to inform Mrs. Winch, who for her part saw no reason to trouble me. Sally would be missed, of course, but either Mary-Ann or Martha-Jane would be able to do my hair and mend my linen and should they not give satisfaction Mrs. Winch knew an agency which could be trusted to supply a proper lady's maid at short notice.

What injuries? Not serious. Shock, mainly, thought Mrs. Winch, and the cuts and bruises one would expect after such an affray. But I must remember that she had been ‘set upon', after all, by a man she said she had not recognized, although there was no way to be sure of that.

‘You mean she has been raped?'

‘Yes, madam, I do.'

And she was very angry with me, I could tell, for using the word, even angrier when I ordered my carriage and went off to see for myself.

Cullingford's Infirmary, at the top of steep, cobbled Sheepgate, was an old and inconvenient building, clean enough since Miss Florence Nightingale had taught us that, if hospitals could not always cure the sick, they should not by their filth and squalor actually do them harm. But it was equipped as sparsely as a workhouse, black iron bedsteads pushed close together against a stark white wall, cheerless, not intended for the affluent who would be nursed at home, but for the poor, the vagrant, the disgraced, who for one reason or another were homeless. And what disturbed me most about Sally was not the evidence of a brutal beating but her fear.

I was interviewed with barely adequate courtesy by the physician in charge, an elderly, ill-tempered, possibly overworked man who, like Mrs. Winch, did not really know what I was doing here and had no time and certainly no patience with my indignation. There was in his view no need to make a fuss. After all, these things occurred with enormous, in fact with tedious regularity and he had seen worse—far worse—than Sally, who had broken no bones and lost no teeth.

‘My dear lady,' he said finally, his tolerance at an end, ‘one must take a rational view. Your sympathy does you credit, but the young woman
was
alone in a questionable area of the city at an advanced hour of the night. In such circumstances any woman must expect to be molested. Her assailant no doubt mistook her for a prostitute.'

‘I see. It is permissible, then, to rape a prostitute?'

He raised a dry, somewhat disgusted eyebrow.

‘Madam—I would consider it to be something of an impossibility.'

‘I cannot agree.'

‘Indeed? It astonishes me, Mrs. Barforth, that you—as a gentlewoman—should have any views on the matter at all. And I will give you a further piece of advice. You would do well not to trouble our constabulary with a sorry episode such as this, for if that young woman's assailant was really unknown to her, she cannot name him; and if he was not the stranger she claims, then she
will
not name him. These incidents are best left to settle themselves. Good-day to you, Mrs. Barforth.

I took Sally back to Tarn Edge in the victoria, Mrs. Winch greeting me with tight-lipped disapproval. Did I realize, she wondered, the extra work involved, the trays to be carried upstairs, the hot water, the bed linen? And when I reminded her that we had had sick maids before who had not been turned outdoors like stray kittens, she folded her hands, drew a deep breath and compressed her lips even further.

‘I wonder, madam, if you have considered the effect of this on—well—the others?'

‘Why should there be any effect at all, Mrs. Winch?'

‘Because she is not suffering from influenza, madam, or a sprained ankle. In fact we cannot be sure what she
is
suffering from.'

‘Mrs. Winch, what do you mean by that?'

‘I will tell you, madam. I keep these girls well under control. I think you will agree with that, and it is essential they should be controlled. But most of them are naturally flighty, and a thing like this can only arouse their curiosity. They will be around her bed, mark my words, like bees round honey, asking their silly questions, letting it all go to their heads and neglecting their work. And we have men-servants too, Mrs. Barforth, please do not forget that. It is difficult enough, at the best of times, to preserve the decencies in these large households, and one cannot expect these young footmen to treat a girl who has—well, they will not treat her as they treat the others, you may take my word for it. I cannot think it right to take her back and I believe you will find the girl herself does not wish to stay.'

‘If she is treated as something between a leper and a Jezebel, then most likely she will not.'

But Mrs. Winch, armoured by her self-righteousness, did not lack courage and, quite calmly, had something more to say.

‘Mrs. Barforth, that girl should be discharged at once for the sake of your own peace of mind. She may well be pregnant, Mrs. Barforth, and since you would
have
to discharge her then, it is better to do it now, when no one can be sure. That way she will have time to make her arrangements and your conscience will be clear. I was forced to dismiss a pregnant thirteen-year-old in my last place, madam, and it was most distressing. Sally Grimshaw is older, has more sense, and she will be far better off now with her mother.'

I had never thought of Sally in terms of a mother, family, or in any terms whatsoever that did not involve the dressing of my hair, the laying out of my clothes, the cleaning of my brushes. She had been present, the plump, pink and white face glimpsed behind me in the mirror, the quick, capable hands wielding a button-hook, her cheerful gossip of disaster on the night I had lost a child of my own. I was neither fond of her nor otherwise. I was simply used to her. But I was appalled, now, by the callousness her plight had aroused in the normally well-meaning Mrs. Winch, and made it my concern that very afternoon to go and see her mother.

I had come with sad tidings and expected them to cause distress, an honest show of indignation, a desire for revenge, and I was badly shaken by the indifference with which the gaunt, grey woman who was Sally's mother lifted her shoulders, displaying a body which I at first thought to be misshapen by accident or disease but which was in fact pregnant.

The house was as small and dark as I had expected, one room downstairs and one above, a bare floor and a kitchen chair or two, mattresses rolled up and stacked in corners, a flat stone sink, a steep, littered staircase leading to the upper floor, stone steps leading down to a dank, open cellar. All this I had expected to see, but even Liam Adair's fluent denunciations in the pages of the
Star
had not prepared me for the smell of damp and poor drainage, of the overflowing privy a yard or two from the door, the sweat and the urine soaked into those splintering floorboards, a smell which, at this our first encounter, stung my eyelids and took my breath away.

‘It happens. She'll get over it. She'll have to,' said Mrs. Grimshaw, one hand on her swollen belly, another child no more than two years old straddling her hip. ‘And she knows not to expect anything from me.'

Mrs. Grimshaw, I discovered, was the mother of seventeen children, a large family she was ready to admit but not unusually so in a district where the men were mostly unemployed and, as she put it, ‘had nothing else to do'. She herself worked in the weaving-sheds—anybody's weaving-sheds—when her health permitted, and when it didn't she took in washing for anybody who could afford to pay her a penny or two, since her husband was not, she said, ‘reliable'. She had married at sixteen, when she had already given birth to her first child, and had been recovering from one pregnancy or starting another very nearly ever since. And she had alleviated the squalor of nineteen persons in two dingy rooms by the simple procedure of pushing each child out of the nest as soon as, or even a shade before, they had started to fly. The boys were welcome to stay as long as they were earning and could bring something in, although two had gone to sea, another into the Army, and unless trade picked up she supposed the rest would follow. But her one prize possession was a sister who had done well in the service of a clerical gentleman at Elderleigh, and, as each of her daughters approached the age of eleven or twelve, this sister had never yet failed to place them as kitchenmaids, maids of all work, skivvies; after which Mrs. Grimshaw rarely saw them again. They moved on, or, if they succeeded and became parlourmaids or lady's maids like Sally, they grew proud. Her eldest girl had taken employment so far away that Mrs. Grimshaw had been unable to attend her death-bed and, far from complaining, had simply been relieved that the girl's employer had agreed to bury her.

‘I'd stopped her funeral club payments, you see,' she told me in her flat, monotonous voice. ‘And it would have been awkward having to borrow. Because they won't put a nail in the coffin unless you can pay cash down.' And as for Sally, she had given her the best start in life she could and had not received so much as a shilling from her ever since. Nothing, on either side, was owing. And there was nothing to spare.

She shrugged her shoulders again, her hollow eyes asking me, ‘What can I do? I feed them, and clothe them after a fashion, until they're big enough to see to themselves. And after that I have to think of the babies—the babies—until this wretched body of mine is too old for babies.'

I knew from that first meeting—although indeed I never met her again, merely hundreds like her—that I could not judge her, and leaving behind the few coins I had on me, ashamed at this easy gift of money and her lethargic acceptance, I went home with the smell of her so deep in my memory that my bath-tub of scented water, carried upstairs by girls who could have been her daughters, gave me no comfort. And even when I had explained to Sally that she need not be afraid, that in any eventuality she would be looked after, I saw that neither her fear nor my discomfort had subsided.

She was a victim, but I seemed the only one able to believe it. She had been forced to the ground and held there as dogs hold bitches, her whole life possibly ruined to satisfy a drunken caprice, a fit of madness, a ‘poor fellow's mistake'. A woman alone after dark must expect to be molested, they had told me, and I could not accept it. He mistook her for a prostitute, the doctor had said, considering this sufficient justification. I could not accept that either.

‘My dear, the girl probably knew him and led him on,' murmured Mrs. Rawnsley, who had been something of a ‘tease'in her younger days.

‘If it should come to the worst,' Mrs. Sheldon told me in her sweet and serious manner, ‘I may be able to arrange for the adoption of the child.'

‘She will not feel the disgrace as we should,' Miss Tighe insisted stoutly. ‘They have their own morality, these girls, you know, and a mishap of this nature can make little difference. She will find somebody ready to marry her, I expect—especially if you should feel called upon to make her a decent wedding present—and all will be forgiven.'

‘Lord! What does it matter?' said Venetia. ‘She's only a woman, and what's a woman for, after all?'

But Sally had done nothing wrong. A crime had been committed against her by a man for whom these ladies, with their talk of ‘leading on', the eternal, discreetly whispered ‘My dear, men are made that way', seemed ready to supply with excuses. ‘It is always the woman who suffers', they said, finding this state of affairs if not precisely desirable then at least quite natural. And of all my acquaintance only Liam Adair seemed able to comprehend my indignation.

‘Aye, these women are the very devil,' he told me cheerfully, ‘especially when it comes to tearing another woman to pieces. Fear, I reckon, in this case, because some of them dread it happening to them and some of them are plain terrified they might like it. So if they can blame the girl it makes them feel safer and better. Grace—I know there are men who do these things, but we're not all the same. Come now, you don't really think I'd force my attentions on some poor helpless soul, do you?'

‘Oh, you wouldn't have to, Liam. With your famous charm how could it ever be necessary? Quite the other way round, sometimes, I'd say.'

But, just the same, the spectre of male violence clung to me, giving me a wariness of the men I knew, an unwillingness to take my coachman's muscular arm when he came to assist me at the carriage-step, a positive discomfort in the presence of Gideon Chard, for although he was a gentleman to his fingertips, fastidious in his tastes and his manners, I knew that in the most private areas of his life he did not need the refinement of affection. And from there it was an easy step to ask myself what remained of affection in the few early morning encounters that had become my own marriage? Why did I submit to it? To what degree of compulsion was I myself subjected? Or was I in fact playing the prostitute to secure my way of life, to keep the peace, in simple obedience to the way society—but not my nature—had fashioned me? I was not certain, but the next time Gervase touched me my body could not endure the insult and turned rigid with disgust.