Victorian Maiden (21 page)

Atticus Fox was a firm believer in the medicinal benefits of the Harrogate spa waters. In particular, he took care to drink several glasses of the iron-rich chalybeate water each and every day. By so doing, he was able to maintain his brain in first-rate order, and his brain, after all, was the principal tool of his profession.

This particular morning however, Lucie was with him as he stood outside the sumptuous spa Pump Rooms, and they were both peering anxiously into the crowds that were gathering to have their own prescribed waters dispensed into large glass tumblers.

“I see her here every morning, and she's usually quite early,” Atticus said over the rousing music that had suddenly erupted from the bandstand up the way.

Lucie shouted over the music, “I just hope she hasn't already left for her daughter's house.”

Atticus nodded gravely and they turned to peer through the crowds once more.

“There she is!” Atticus exclaimed, and several people turned to frown at them, understandably indignant at the shock he had caused to their delicate constitutions. But he was right. There, wrapped snugly into her wicker bath chair, with both hands firmly gripping the tiller handle, was Mrs Price. A hired bath chair man was pushing from behind, or rather he was pulling heavily on the handle, to prevent the chair rolling away from him down the sharp slope of the pavement. Mrs Price caught sight of them almost as soon as they had seen her, and she swung the tiller wide. The bath chair turned sharply towards them.

“Good morning, Mrs Price,” said Atticus, a little stiffly.

The old lady raised her gloved hand and the man heaved the heavy chair to a halt.

“Good morning, Mr and Mrs Fox,” she replied in a voice that sounded exhausted.

She stared resolutely at her hands still gripping the tiller-handle for several long seconds before she spoke.

“The girl's mother – the one we spoke about yesterday – is she the Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson in the papers, the one who murdered her uncle?”

“She is,” Lucie replied.

Mrs Price nodded in acknowledgement and looked up at them at last. Her eyes were as red as the tartan rug tucked neatly around her legs and they had deep, dark circles beneath.

“I hadn't immediately connected the two, you see. The Lizzie I knew at Starbeck was only a slip of a girl. I never knew her as Elizabeth, or as an old lady.”

She examined her gloves once more.

“If what you say is true, then God forgive me, but I can understand her wanting to murder Alfred. I wanted you to know that. But as I said yesterday, how can I tell you where her daughter is now?”

She lowered her voice to a whisper.

“How can I risk Sarah finding out that she is the bastard offspring of a rape – maybe of an incestuous rape at that? It would kill her as surely as her mother sticking her knife into Alfie Roberts' chest. I'm sorry, Mr and Mrs Fox, I truly wish I could, but I cannot possibly help you.”

“There's a fortune too, Mrs Price,” Lucie murmured, and the bath chair man glanced across.

“There is a fortune of several thousands of pounds that's of no use now to Elizabeth. All she has ever wanted since we first met was to see her daughter once more. And after the life she's had, I think that's the very least that she deserves.”

“Money is of no consequence,” Mrs Price answered quickly. “Her new family is very well-off, very well-off indeed. They are industrialists. She has no need for any outside inheritance.”

“But Elizabeth's lawyers will still want to know what to do with it after she's gone. They will have to advertise the fact in the newspapers.”

Mrs Price raised her hand once more and the bath chair man leaned obediently against the handle.

“I don't want to miss my train,” she said. “My answer is unchanged. Do your worst, Mrs Fox, and may you and your husband and your infernal lawyers be damned for it.”

They watched the wretched, old figure in the little, wicker bath-chair trundle along the pavement until the crowds swallowed her up. Then Atticus shrugged and said: “What now?”

Lucie stared at him.

“Mrs Price is very well off,” she said.

“I know,” Atticus replied.

He gestured along the line of elegantly dressed people waiting patiently to take their waters.

“But then so is most of Harrogate.”

“I know, Atticus, but think back. Didn't Mary Lovell say that Mrs Price liked to spend time with the workhouse children because she couldn't have any of her own?”

Lucie's eyes were dancing with tiny explosions of revelation.

“But now she tells us that she is off to see her daughter.”

Atticus gasped.

“You're right. So you think that it was the Prices themselves who adopted Sarah?”

“Yes,” Lucie said, “I'm very much afraid that I do.”

It had been agreed with the Master of the workhouse that Elizabeth would be paid the sum of tuppence each week as a pauper apprentice. Tom, in his capacity as mill foreman, reminded her of this as he caught her alone on the great stone stairwell of the mill that reminded her so much, both of the Annexe, and of Budle Tower. She stood trembling as he spoke, waiting for him to drag her off to Hell. She barely heard him say that he had now agreed with Mr John Walton, the owner of the Mill, that as well as her lodgings in the apprentice house over the way, she would now be paid no less than sixpence each and every week. She had, he explained in his capacity as the mill foreman, impressed everyone. She had impressed them with her diligence and quick learning, with her sheer industriousness, and with the fact that she often worked, unbidden and unpaid, far beyond the twelve hours a day that a girl of her age was allowed to be employed tending the looms. 

Tom smiled and reached out towards her. His hands were massive and overpowering; they were utterly, utterly unstoppable. She wanted to beg him for mercy, to plead with him to leave her to her work, but the words gagged unspoken in her throat. She tried to turn, tried to flee back down the dark, winding stairwell, but her leaden limbs refused to heed the shrieking, shrieking screams of her brain. 

His hand found her shoulder, and her soul cringed as he gently squeezed it and smiled, saying “Well done, Lizzie,” before he turned away.

Sixpence – what did she care for sixpence? Would any number of sixpences bring back little Baby Albert, or Baby Sarah, or her poor, dead mama? She worked, not for all the sixpences in Threadneedle Street, but to keep those awful, awful memories locked away, shut off in the foul, festering depths of her mind.

When her mind was full of looms and yarns, of shuttles and spinning, it had no space for anything else. It was only at the end of the day, when the sun had kissed the side of the gorge and when she was too exhausted to work any longer, that the memories would slip their bonds, and would come to hurt her. Night was when she always remembered the bad things that had happened. 

But she had also remembered the hurt in her nipple, when Mr Wright had first examined her at Starbeck, and she remembered how it had so eased the hurt in her soul. Now she had a knife. It was a sharp knife, with an edge that shone with all the colours of the rainbow, if you held it up to the sun. Tom had given it to her to shave off the stray threads from the linen cloth. She kept it as sharp as a razor. Stroking the edge over and over and over again with the whetstone somehow seemed to sooth her mind; somehow make her feel a little calmer. But at night, when she remembered the bad things that happened, she could slide the blade under her nightdress and think only about the long, stinging lines on her breasts.

She sometimes wondered if there would be enough skin on her breasts to last until the End of the World – until Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One, when she could at last be with her babies and her mama once again. 

Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One; it was such a special number. When she wrote it down, and she wrote it down very often, it always looked the same – it always was the same – whichever way she held her paper. And when she counted up the numbers – one and eight and eight and one – they added up to eighteen. She was eighteen now – eighteen years old. And then she had wondered: Was it possible; dare she hope that she didn't need to wait until Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One before she could die at all? Perhaps the End of the World would come in Eighteen Hundred and Forty-Eight instead, because Eighteen Hundred and Forty Eight was when she was eighteen and one and eight and eight and one was eighteen too. Could she, like the brave Grace Darling before her, be granted an early relief from her life? One and eight and eight and one was such a special number, and whichever way you reckoned it, it always, always added up to eighteen.

Mr John Walton of Walton And Company knew that it would have been commercial folly to bring in workers for his mill from the great industrial conurbations of the West Riding. To do so would have involved building every single worker his own tiny cottage to live in: an expense of over one hundred pounds per head. So instead, Mr Walton had built a single large apprentice house over the way from his mill. It had cost a good three hundred pounds to build – a not inconsiderable sum – but for that, he could house no less than eighty child apprentices. And Mr Walton knew that if he then filled his new apprentice house with pauper children, not only would the workhouses pay him to apprentice them in the first instance, but he could also employ them at a wage of just tuppence each week. 

Beyond the finish of her shift each night, when Lizzie finally became so exhausted that she could work no longer, she would hurry across the way to the apprentice house. There she would go straight to the girls' dormitory, and the sanctuary of her cot. 

She was lucky with her cot, because Tom had arranged with the mill manager that she could have one all to herself. The other girls had to sleep in pairs in the little wooden boxes they jokingly called ‘coffins.' That was much warmer, but Mr John Walton had known that it would have been commercial folly to have had the cots made any bigger than the little children really needed. But Lizzie was tall, almost too tall to be a little girl at all. So she had been allowed a cot entirely to herself. It was cold to be sure, but she really didn't mind being cold at all. In fact she preferred it, because lying there, cold as death in the little wooden box, she felt somehow closer to her mama. 

The cots were built in stacks four high in the dormitories to save Mr Walton valuable floor space, and she was lucky because hers was a topmost cot and that meant that there was only the thin slates of the roof between her and the Heavens above.

Because hers was a topmost cot, she didn't suffer from the apprentice boys creeping in from their own dormitory next door and gawping and probing at her whilst she slept. There were no boys and there were no demons to peer into her coffin or to carry her away. The little wooden cots had needed no bell; no bell that would ring and ring and ring as the demons slipped inside and dragged her down to the Eighth Circle of Hell.

She didn't mind the cold either, because it helped to keep her from sleeping. It was whilst she was sleeping that the memories would come. They knew somehow when she was too exhausted for busy or for her knife. They would come and they would spill into her dreams and turn them into nightmares. But if she succumbed, if she could hold off sleep no longer, Lizzie would often – mercifully – be awoken, and not only by the cold. She would be woken too by the little girls as they whimpered and cried from being hurt in the mill, or by the stench of their greasy, unwashed bodies, or, as was more usually the case, she would be woken by her own nightmares.

One Sunday, when she couldn't be busy in the mill because God had said that no-one could be busy on that day, whilst she was soothing her mind with her whetstone and her knife, a memory spilled into her daydream. And because that day was a day of rest, when even God couldn't be busy, the memory was of a demon. On that day a demon did peer into the coffins of the apprentice house.

It had come with a gentle knock on the door of the dormitory. The blade of her knife had trembled against the whetstone even though she knew it must be Tom who had knocked, because her Uncle Alfie never knocked.

“Girls,” he had said in his deep, slow, tick-tock voice, “And Lizzie,” (just as if she was a proper grown woman and not a little girl at all), “I would like all o' ye to pay attention. I have a nurse here who has come from t' other side o' Harrogate to tend to thy injuries.”

Lizzie peered over the edge of her topmost cot and saw a thin, black shadow standing next to Tom; a thin, dark shadow blocking the light of the doorway.

She shuddered.

“Mr Walton 'as agreed it. A lot o' ye 'ave been getting hurt in t' machines an' this lady has come 'ere as a philanthropist to help ye. She's been visiting all o' t' ‘prentice houses round Knaresborough and doing it all from t' goodness o' her heart. She won't be charging thee or Mr Walton or anyone else a farthing. 

She'll be a-coming round your beds to inspect all o' ye for injuries so ye must speak nicely and respectfully and take care to do exactly as she says.”

Lizzie fell back flat against her mattress, her heart pounding like the big steam engine that churned and throbbed in the shed by the river. 

‘She mustn't know I'm here. She mustn't see my cuts. She mustn't ever stop me from cutting myself.'

Instinctively she pulled her shift tight against the stinging lines on her breasts, shielding them with her hands and lay, as still as a corpse, horrified at the thought of a life where there could be no more pain.

The sound of the woman came closer, growing louder and louder and louder. She was moving from cot to cot and the poor little girls were calling for her, begging for her to go to them, begging for the nurse – for the angel of mercy.

Little girls who beg for mercy seldom deserve it.

The angel passed along the coffins, peering in. It was checking the girls, examining them, sorting them. It was like an angel on the Day of Judgement, like an angel in black – an Angel of Death.

It was down there now – examining the girl in the cot just below her. She closed her eyes and stopped her breath and waited.

“You're a pretty little thing,” the angel whispered to the girl in the cot below her. “Do you like working here? Answer me truly, my dear.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the girl in the cot below dutifully answered.

“The mill only pays you tuppence a week I believe. How would you like to earn pounds and pounds?”

Like an abscess bursting, the worst memory of all, the very worst memory and all of the other memories, every one of the foul and loathsome horde, poured from the secret black places of her mind. A great billow of dread rolled over her as she lay in her coffin and her brain shrieked and shrieked and screamed the name of the angel, of the Angel of Death: 

‘Mrs Eire.'

Old Rachel had told her of her other name as together they had slashed the whin bushes on the Stray. Old Rachel had said that Mrs Eire was nothing more than a common procuress.

Her brain shrieked and shrieked and Lizzie whispered the word: “Procuress.”

“I know some nice gentlemen with big houses in Harrogate who would love to have a pretty little thing like you…”

“PROCURESS!” 

Her brain shrieked and screamed and now Lizzie screamed. She screamed the name, the other name that Rachel had taught her as they pretended that the dense, spiny stands of whin bush were Mrs Eire and they slashed and slashed and slashed. 

“SHE'S A PROCURESS, A COMMON PROCURESS!”

Over the edge of her topmost coffin, Lizzie could see Mrs Eire, the common procuress staring up at her as the girls around them jumped up and screamed too. Her eyes were like Uncle Alfie's eyes when he had stood in front of the empty black waters of the North Sea, slipping silently past the shore of the Holy Island. They were the very eyes of the Devil.

“You!” she hissed like a serpent. “It's you, Alfred Roberts' two hundred pound whore. So this is where Barty Price had you sent, is it? To spend your days weaving linen? That's good. The Friday Club needs lots of fresh, clean linen for their beds, Lizzie, so they can…”

“HELP,” she screamed, “Tom, please help us. She's taking the girls away for the gentlemen's beds.”

And Tom had come. He hadn't knocked, but neither had he crept in like a shadow, as Uncle Alfie or Mr Otter might have done. He had burst through the door as a saviour, into the shrieking, shrieking screams of the girls. And Mrs Eire, the common procuress, had fled. The demon had paid visit, and now, mercifully, it had gone.

Afterwards, when the girls had stopped screaming and her mind had stopped shrieking, Lizzie had begun to feel like a heroine. As she lay in her topmost cot in the apprentice house and watched the rainbow colours slide up and down the edge of her blade, she remembered Grace Darling. Grace Darling had been a heroine too; she had saved thirteen lives that surely would otherwise have been lost. Lizzie might not have saved the lives of the little girls sleeping, safe and quiet now in the cots all around her, but she had certainly, certainly saved their souls.

Just a few nights after she had begun to feel like a heroine, she had awoken in her little cot in the apprentice house to find a dead moth lying beside her on her mattress. Someone had told her that it was a mother shipton moth, named for the witch who had been born in the cave just over the river. They had pointed out the curious pattern on the wings, like two hags' heads facing each other, and Lizzie had been thrilled. But now, the more she thought about it all as she lay awake in her topmost cot and watched the rainbows slide along her blade, the more she was convinced that it must have been Old Mother Shipton herself who had sent it. 

For the moth was surely a messenger, bringing the word that everything would be fine, that the End of the World was coming, just as she had said it would, and that she, Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson, a heroine just like Grace Darling, could die at last.

She had asked more about the witch – no, surely not a witch – the prophetess. Tom had called her a prophetess and not a witch, and Tom seemed to know everything. 

Old Mother Shipton – Ursula Shipton, she was told – had made many other startling prophesies during her lifetime. And every single one of them, she was promised, just as Tom who knew everything had promised, had come true.