The Sleeping Sword (51 page)

And for an hour I indulged myself with champagne and great bursts of laughter, as fallen women do, while he regaled me with the up-and-down fortunes of the
Star
and his own literary and amorous endeavours; the widow who had almost succeeded in marrying him; his exposure of bad housing in the neighbourhood of Gower Street, which had caused some irate landlord or other to put a brick through his windows again; his old landlady's daughter, who had taken it into her head to get into bed with him, which had necessitated yet another change of address; his concern at the rate of infant mortality in Cullingford's workhouse; the damnable little brats who raised havoc all day in Gower Street so that he was undecided whether to advocate shooting them or sending them to school; his new landlady who went to chapel three times every Sunday and looked like a martyred missionary, but who had started giving him some very odd glances lately from her eye-corners.

‘Come and see us at the
Star
, Grace, and meet my new assistant. I can't think why you haven't been before.'

His new assistant, since the old one had been Robin Ashby, was the nearest he came to mentioning Venetia, my appearance at the
Star
, as he well knew, having been put off because I had not wished to be reminded of the happier days when she and I had gone there together. But his visit had warmed me, offered me a reason to get out my new victoria, to put on my new hat and gloves for something other than a visit to Fieldhead or an excursion among the stony stares of Millergate. I went, my mind on Venetia every inch of the way, my eyes misting over as Gower Street came into view, the unwashed, underfed urchins scuffling in the gutter, the stench of dung and garbage, those boarded-up windows. But it was not my intention to forget Venetia and I got down resolutely and quite calmly from my carriage, walked briskly upstairs, past the aged printing-presses, into the cluttered upper room, to be enclosed at once in a hearty, just faintly alcoholic embrace.

‘So you've come to look us over? I thought you would.'

‘Nothing seems changed.'

‘I don't know about that. I'm older—you're bonnier. There's my new assistant—at any rate,
that's
a change for the better. I've been wanting to see the two of you together. Grace, this is Mrs. Inman—Camille, this is Grace Barforth, my stepmother's granddaughter, that we've spoken of.'

‘Mrs. Inman.' And through my amazement that she should be female at all—any kind of female—I realized I was holding out my hand to one of the loveliest women I had ever seen.

She was, as I learned later, in her early thirties, a perfect oval face, glossy black hair and a great deal of it in a huge coil high on her head, eyes which should have been dark, too, but which were an astonishing amethyst, long-lashed and altogether entrancing. She was tall and very slender, plainly dressed but extremely neat, a bunch of violets pinned on the lapel of a pale blue bodice, a fall of white lace at the throat, a warm smile and a firm handshake, a friendliness of manner which was one of her greatest charms.

I sat down in the chair by her desk, fascinated, and we began a conversation which lasted in fact for several days, my curiosity about this woman who had once shared her life with a man who sounded very much like Robin Ashby and who had not only survived to tell the tale but could tell it with affection and humour, proving insatiable. She was a missionary's daughter who had spent her girlhood in the wild places of the world where propriety—although her mother had made the effort—did not seem to matter. Her parents had been killed, she did not say how, and she had lived ‘here and there'for a while, finally settling with a spinster aunt who, among other things, had founded a shelter for wayward girls in the East End of London. No one had ever really protected Camille as Venetia and I had been protected. Her father had been too busy caring for his heathen flock to concern himself with his daughter. Her mother had trusted in God and hoped for the best. The spinster aunt had put her to work, at an age when Venetia and I had been ignorant of life's basic facts, among child prostitutes and the victims of household rape. She had married at eighteen and gone adventuring with her husband, a journalist ten years her senior who, like her father and Robin Ashby, had been more deeply touched by the sufferings of the masses than of the individual. But she was used to that. When her husband fell ill, she wrote his pieces for him. When he recovered, they continued to work together. When he died five years ago, she had gone on supporting herself as, for the six months of his final malady, she had supported them both.

She had a slender income of her own, barely enough to keep a roof over her head, and when Liam Adair, who had been a good friend for years both to herself and her husband, had offered her employment she had been glad of it. She did not live well, she was ready to admit, but she found life interesting. Sometimes very interesting indeed. No, she saw nothing alarming in walking about the city streets alone. She took a cab when she could afford it, which was seldom, but mostly she came and went as she pleased without too much hindrance. No one had ever told her she was frail and in need of care, and she had seen no advantages, therefore, in fragility. Her husband would have been irritated by it, her father would not even have noticed. Women, she had found, were very rarely frail in any case. As for herself she was always busy. At the moment she was investigating housing conditions in a nearby street, selected at random, and Liam would publish her survey in weekly instalments in the
Star
.

‘Why don't you lend a hand?' Liam said, leaning an arm along the back of my chair. ‘It's a job worth doing and, unlike Camille here, who costs me a fortune, I know you wouldn't expect any pay.'

‘Liam, you are still exploiting women.'

‘Yes—yes, I know. But these printing-presses of mine won't last forever, my darling, and neither will Grandmamma Elinor. Think it over. Camille could do with the help, and she'll tell you what a jewel I am to work with.'

Camille Inman came to tea with me the following Sunday, stayed, at my urgent request, to dinner and told me, among a great many other things, that although Liam was assuredly no ‘jewel'she was not ashamed to be in his employ. The
Star
in his hands would make no one rich, but its readership was extending now from the few radical hot-heads who had previously purchased it to the more thoughtful members of all classes. There was no denying that, because of the
Star
, it was somewhat safer to eat Cullingford's bread than it used to be and she had great hopes for her survey of overcrowding in St. Mark's Fold.

She was no missionary like her father. She simply wished to investigate and inform and would be content to leave the moralizing to others. Could she not tempt me to lend a hand? I would need a strong stomach, of course, for she had known many a well-intentioned and truly compassionate soul who had been quite unable to cope with the
smell
of human poverty and distress.

I drove to the
Star
the following morning dressed plainly, without jewellery of any kind, as she had instructed, and together we took the ten-minute walk from Gower Street to St. Mark's Fold, Camille once again with a bunch of violets pinned to her lapel, her startling amethyst eyes expressing no shock, no disgust, no anger, but remaining in all circumstances perfectly serene and friendly.

A pleasant enough sounding place, St. Mark's Fold, reminiscent of some cloistered cathedral city, a green lawn and tapering ecclesiastical spires. I had never heard the name before, although I was Cullingford born, and discovered it to be a dank alleyway among a hundred others just like it, a filthy cobweb of streets built by Grandmamma Elinor's first husband, my Aycliffe grandfather, around the Barforth mill at Low Cross. It consisted of ten squat two-roomed houses on the right hand side of a narrow, muddy street, with ten more built behind them, a further twenty houses on the left-hand side constructed in the same back-to-back fashion, the houses at the rear being reached by passages that seemed no larger than arrow-slits cut into the walls.

And in these forty houses, with their total of eighty rooms, Camille expected to find between three and four hundred people living, her calculations being difficult to make not from any unwillingness on the part of the inhabitants to be counted but because of their habit of taking in lodgers and throwing out wayward daughters; and because only one in two of all infants born here would be likely to reach the age of five. She had done these surveys before, she told me, her composure unruffled. She knew.

I was not to suppose that the whole of Cullingford's working classes lived in such squalor. Far from it, for the Law Valley produced a most enduring breed of men and women who, by hard work and good management, and a kind of shrewd, down-to-earth humour Camille found most appealing, organized their affairs in a much better fashion. She knew many houses where there was not much money but where the women were scrupulously decent and the men hard-working and philosophical. She had encountered in other houses a kind of realistic, almost sardonic nobility, a grudging respect between husband and wife, and a gruff-spoken affection, a family united against all comers, facing the insurmountable and somehow—without making too much of a fuss—surmounting it. But these were the ones who paid their rent on time and put something aside for a rainy day, who sent their children to school and who had the resilience, the nerve, the stamina, to pick
themselves
up whenever Life or Fate or the state of the textile trade knocked them down. I would meet very few of them in St. Mark's Fold.

It was slower work than I had expected, for we visited only five houses that day, Camille sitting herself down on whatever chair or packing-case or heap of shoddy seemed available, taking whatever stray urchin or stray dog or cat on to her lap that wished to go there, with no particular demonstration of affection, no grimace of pity, but as a matter of course, something quite natural. She had no money to give, no cast-off clothing, no basket of goodies, she made that clear from the beginning. There was no use asking her to pay a doctor's bill or find shoes for the children. She was hard pressed, often enough, to get her own shoes mended and could show the worn leather to prove it. But what she could do was tell other people, who might have something spare or who, better still, might tell the landlord it was high time he did something about those roof-tiles and those ugly damp patches. ‘Now then, Mrs. Ryan—Mrs. Backhouse—Mrs. O'Flynn—how many beds did you say you have?—and how many sleep in them?'

Mrs. Ryan had one sagging double bed in her upper room where she slept with her husband and her three younger children, two girls and a boy. Her four elder children, ‘two of each', slept downstairs on the kind of mattresses I had seen at the home of Sally Grimshaw's mother. There was another daughter who ‘came and went'but had not been seen for six months and more now. Mrs. Ryan and her elder daughters worked sometimes at Low Cross Mill, sometimes elsewhere, for the girls, she said, were ‘flighty', prone to ‘answering back'the overlookers and spending their wages on themselves every Thursday night before she could get at them, while her boys could get no work and her husband was unfit for it, suffering so badly, as so many ageing mill-hands did, from bronchitis—the disease of smoke and damp and raw northern mornings—that he seemed unlikely to get through another winter. He had been a good man once, earning good wages as a wool-sorter at Low Cross which he had put straight into his wife's pocket, not across the bar counter. They had even managed to save a little, had got together some decent furniture, had been in a ‘fair way of carrying on'. But the bad winter six years ago had finished him. He had lost his job at Low Cross for ‘breaking time'on those icy mornings when he had scarcely been able to breathe, and that had been the end of it. No job, no wages, and the doctor's bills had soon taken care of their savings. He could hardly drag himself to the end of the street now, her man, and had no interest any more in trying. Her boys and one of her girls were turning out troublesome—because, after all, they needed a man's hard hand sometimes and
he
wouldn't stir himself these days—the lads hanging about the streets all day, the girl loitering on her way home from the mill. No, the children never went to school. It was too far and in any case she had to be in her loom-gate at Low Cross by half-past five every morning and was not at home to get them out of bed and see them off. So far she had managed to pay her rent every week, although often enough it meant taking her decent shawl and her husband's boots to the pawn shop on a Tuesday morning and redeeming them on a Friday, as best she could. But if there should be any more doctor's bills this winter, then she might not do so well.

‘Thank you,' said Camille and as we went outside she sniffed the violets at her lapel and translated for me. ‘The eldest daughter, the one who “comes and goes” is a prostitute, of course, and the other one who “loiters” is serving her apprenticeship to the same trade. The boys she calls troublesome are starting to steal, there can be no doubt about that. They will go to prison sooner or later, I suppose, and their little brothers will be awfully proud of them. Oh yes—for in St. Mark's Fold, you see, it is thought quite bold and dashing to be in a House of Correction, and when they are released they will strut about like peacocks and take their pick of the girls—a fine old time until they are sent back again. Poor Mrs. Ryan, for it is poverty that does it, you know, and she can't help that—just as her husband can't help his bad chest. I wonder if she knows she will be better off when he is dead?'

Mrs. Backhouse did not get out of bed to greet us, having recently given birth to a child, a wailing little scrap wrapped in a corner of her blanket who looked no more likely to survive than the mother. She had no interest in us nor in herself, nor in the baby whose persistent crying she seemed not to notice. She had no man of her own and pregnancy had stopped her earnings. She was in arrears with her rent and when the landlord threw her out she would have no choice but the workhouse, where they would take her baby away from her in any case. So far as she was concerned it couldn't happen soon enough.