A Dark Dividing (28 page)

Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
1st February 1900

After I had promised the child, Robyn, that we would never tell whatever secrets we were about to see inside Mortmain House (she made us promise thrice over, because she said that to say a thing three times made it a solemn vow), she led us through the dark corridors.

Have to say that this was one of the eeriest parts of the whole thing. Mortmain is a terrible place, filled up with human despair and human hopelessness and a dreadful feeling of
acceptance
by the people who have to live here. As we went along I thought that if ever a place should be burned to the ground and then the ground sown with salt, this was that place.

(If Edward read that last sentence he would smile sadly, and shake his head in that superior way—can’t
stand
it when Edward is superior!—and say, Oh dear, my poor misguided Charlotte, one of your flights of fancy again, but Floy would understand at once, because Floy always understood about the darknesses in the world.)

As Maisie and I walked behind Robyn I suddenly wanted Floy so much that it was a physical ache, and then I wanted my lost babies, Viola and Sorrel, even more than I wanted Floy. This time last year I was still secretly meeting Floy in the thin tall house in Bloomsbury, and I remembered that this time last year Viola and Sorrel were not even specks of life struggling to form.

I had absolutely no idea what we were about to see, or how Robyn and her friends were planning to ‘deal’ with the men who came here to get children for brothels. At that stage I think I was still expecting to witness a childish prank; a small rebellion by a handful of children, and I am not even sure I believed in the story of the men either. Patronizing of me to think like that. Devoutly hope that Edward’s smugness (also his
mother’s
!) has not rubbed off on to me without my noticing it.

As Robyn led us down the dingy passages I kept expecting to encounter someone in authority who would ask our business, but there was no one, and when I asked where the inhabitants were she gave a shrug, and said no one was allowed to walk around, except at recreation times.

‘When are recreation times?’

‘I don’t know times. Recreation’s near to bedtime.’

‘Where is everyone now?’

‘In the Rooms.’ The proper noun was impossible to miss.

‘The Rooms?’

‘Working, of course. This is a workhouse.’ It was said with impatience, and I was so angry with myself for asking such a stupid question that I lapsed into silence. Surprisingly, it was Maisie who timidly asked what kind of work people did here.

‘All kinds. Whatever’s brought. The women have to clean things or sew. Mailbags and such. That’s one of the easy jobs.’

‘What about the children?’

‘We get lessons so’s they can say we’ve been taught to read and write and count. But we have to work in the Paupers’ Room afternoons and some of the time we have to help with the babies. That’s just the girls. Boys don’t look after babies.’

‘Babies? You do have babies here, then?’

‘Some. They’re in a different part from this because they yowl a lot.’

‘Are they born here? Or brought here to be found homes?’

‘Don’t know about born here. Don’t know about finding them homes, neither. Usually they’re here ’cos nobody wants them.’

I caught Maisie’s quickly smothered sob, but before I could speak Robyn was saying, ‘Mostly what we have to do is clean things. Sculleries and the wash-house. Then you can sneak away sometimes and not always be noticed. Like now.’

‘Yes, I see. And the men? What kind of work do they have to do?’

‘Don’t know. Don’t know much about the men. Somebody said they get taken to break rocks in the quarries.’

We were approaching a partly-open door and Robyn motioned to us to stop. She went forward stealthily, and peered inside, then, apparently satisfied, she beckoned to us to walk past. Maisie scuttled past it but I looked directly in.

I wish I had not. I suspect that I shall remember for the rest of my life the sight I saw inside that room. It was like a glimpse into hell, but it was a cold, despairing hell and it was truly and utterly dreadful. Rows of women—of all ages—but all stamped with the same helpless, hopeless submission. All with their hair shorn, wearing roughspun gowns and shapeless shoes; all bent over their tasks with a terrible patient humility, and something that might even have been gratitude.

They worked ceaselessly at thick twists of matted, tar-blackened ropes, unplaiting them into loose thin fibres. Even from where I stood I could see how the constant picking at the stained, sticky lumps of hemp had chafed their skin: their hands were scabbed over with old sores, and some were bleeding and raw.

It is almost impossible to imagine that any gathering of women, no matter what task they are engaged on, could be completely silent while they worked. I thought of the charity sewing mornings that Edward’s mother sometimes arranges to provide warm clothes for the men in the Transvaal, and all the church and hospital work parties I have attended on my own account, and I thought how the chattering of the women there was sometimes like a group of starlings. But these poor beaten creatures spoke not a word to one another. And then a figure moved into my line of vision—a dreadful ogress-like female wearing a grim grey uniform, and the women nearest her seemed to cringe and then redouble their efforts.

Robyn, seeing that I was still staring into the room, grabbed my hand and pulled me past the door. ‘Mrs Beadle,’ she said in a vicious hiss. ‘If she sees us, she’ll have me whipped, certain sure.’

So we went swiftly along the passageways, and I was strongly aware of the small hard hand in mine. It was only when we were out of hearing, I said, ‘Robyn—those women. What was the work they were doing?’

‘Picking oakum.’ Again, there was the scoffing, Don’t-you-know-anything? tone. And Maisie, for once in her small life possessed of knowledge I did not have, said, ‘It’s old lengths of rope, mum. Least, that’s what you start with. You have to unpick it and scrape out the tow and the tar, and then it’s used on ships and the like. Stopping leaks and seams. Caulking, our dad used to call it.’

I thought: in those women’s place I should rebel and demand at the very least decent lighting to work by, and a bit of heat, and the right to talk to my companions if I wished. And then I thought: but would I? What do I know about being homeless and penniless and in danger of starving?

Robyn took us through a long room with a bare wooden floor and windows too high up to admit much light. Narrow beds were ranged down the sides and an iron-barred wall rather sketchily divided the room, with a door at the centre.

‘This is where the grown-ups sleep,’ said Robyn indifferently. ‘Women here, men over there.’ Again there was the sideways look from eyes far too old for her years. ‘That’s so they can’t get together and make babies.’

But even without the cage-like wall nothing so joyous as babies could possibly have been made in this room anyway. There was nothing in either section, save the narrow beds. There were no rugs on the floor or pictures on the walls; no ornaments or bedside tables that might contain a few cherished possessions or photographs of loved ones. Nothing. This ruthless obliterating of the inhabitants’ identities and the dousing of their private histories was so shocking that I said quite fiercely, ‘Maisie, no matter what it costs I shan’t let your baby end up here!’ And then to Robyn, ‘If I can find a way to get you and the other children out I shall do so!’

She regarded me with amusement. ‘We don’t need you to get us out,’ she said. ‘We can look after ourselves. Like we’re doing now. You’ll see. This way.’

‘Through here?’ I said, for unless I had lost all sense of direction the door she had indicated would surely take us outside.

‘Yes.’ She stood back to let me step through.

I had been right about it leading outside. Beyond it was a large flagged courtyard—not well tended; there were weeds thrusting up between the flags and a dank, bad-water stench hung on the air. The walls of Mortmain rose up on all four sides, closing the courtyard in so that it had a suffocating feeling despite being open to the sky. For a brief, illogical moment I felt sad for the courtyard which could have been such a pleasant place (Floy once took me to his old college at Oxford, with the sun-drenched quadrangles and the beautiful oriel windows and old, mellowed bricks, and I thought it one of the loveliest places in the world), but then I saw the little cluster of children standing in the deep shadow cast by one of the frowning walls, and I forgot about the surroundings. There were perhaps eight or ten of them, and each one was almost an exact replica of Robyn, with their raggedly short hair and no-colour clothes and wary, defiant eyes. The forgotten ones. Nobody’s children.

They were standing close to what looked to be an old well; I could see the low brick parapet and the square outline of the frame rising over it, with the winch for lowering the bucket into the well-shaft.

I looked at all of this, and then I saw that lying on the ground, in an untidy huddle against the black brickwork of the parapet, was the bulky shape of a man.

I said, ‘Who is that?’ and Robyn looked up at me.

‘One of the child-traders,’ she said.

Charlotte Quinton’s diaries, continued
The children had tied his hands and feet and knotted a dirty-looking rag around his mouth so that he could not speak or call for help, but even from where I was standing I could see the small, mean eyes that glared with angry malevolence, and the thick coarse skin. I remembered how Robyn had called the child-traders ‘pigs’, and saw how apt was the word.

The part I find difficult to explain here (even now, writing this account in the comfortable privacy and safety of my old bedroom in the house where I grew up) is the extraordinary atmosphere of cold, implacable menace that came from the children. There were ten of them altogether—I had counted by this time—and although it was difficult to differentiate the sexes because of the short hair and shapeless clothes, I was fairly sure there were four boys and six girls, including Robyn. Most of them looked no more than eight or nine, but on reflection several of them must have been older. Workhouse food does not make for robust health or strong stature. (‘Eat your greens, Charlotte, and eat the crusts on your bread-and-butter or you’ll never grow up to be strong and healthy…’ Remarkable when nursery precepts turn out to be true.)

As we entered the courtyard the children turned to look questioningly at us and some looked truculent (Maisie was still cowering in the doorway—she has a knack of shrinking almost to invisibility when frightened), but Robyn said, ‘It’s all right. This is a friend and she wants to help. I trust her.’ So you’d better do the same, was the implication. ‘And she’s taken the vow never to tell what she sees.’

(Think a couple of the boys still looked suspicious, so clearly the thrice-times vow not accepted as a guarantee of good faith by everyone, but Robyn said it with a defiant authority and nobody made objection. For which I was
profoundly
grateful.)

The boy who looked to be the oldest, and who had a shock of tow-coloured hair, said, ‘Everything’s ready,’ and I heard that he had a slightly foreign voice. Eastern European, perhaps. He appeared to be the leader, or at the very least the spokesman, and in sharp contrast to his light hair he had dark, angry eyes. I visualized him forcing the other children to fight against the harsh regime, and even whipping them into small rebellions at times.

‘Is
he
ready?’ said Robyn, and the tow-haired boy aimed an angry kick at the prisoner’s ribs. The man flinched and tried to roll out of range. ‘He’s ready,’ said the boy contemptuously.

I said, ‘What are you going to do to him?’

‘He’s going to be punished,’ said the boy, staring at me. ‘And when the rest of them see what we’ve done they won’t come here any more.’ He glanced back at Robyn. ‘Are you sure she’s to be trusted?’ he demanded truculently.

‘Yes, I told you.’

I felt absurdly pleased at Robyn’s off-hand air of trust, so I stayed where I was and tried not to interfere with whatever they were doing.

Robyn had joined the other children, and she was looking at the man on the ground very intently. ‘You’re one of the pigs,’ she said. ‘I know that ’cos I’ve seen you in here. You’re one of Mr Dancy’s people. Matt Dancy.’

With the pronouncing of the name the children seemed to cringe and the smallest girl glanced uneasily over her shoulder as if fearful of being spied on from the shadows. That was the first time I heard the name of Matt Dancy, and I hated it at once.

‘We’ve all seen you with him,’ said Robyn. ‘Most of all, Anthony’s seen you. You were the one who took his little sister away.’

I saw that Anthony was the dark-eyed, tow-haired boy. He said to the man, ‘She hid from you that night. She hid under her bed and made herself as small as she could, and prayed that you wouldn’t find her.’

‘I heard her praying,’ said the little girl who had looked so frightened. ‘She whispered the prayers, but I heard her saying, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look on me, a little child.”’ She had a light, polite little voice, and I imagined her being the much-loved daughter of some nice people, who had taught her to say her prayers and always be polite to grown-ups.

‘She was eight years old, my sister,’ said Anthony, his eyes still fixed on the helpless man. ‘And you dragged her out, and slung her over your shoulder, and carried her away. She screamed all the time and she tried to cling on to the frame of the bed, but you prised her fingers free and then you took her away.’ His voice held no emotion other than cold hatred, and I wanted to cry again. I wanted to cry for the little girl who had hidden under her bed and said her prayers, and I wanted to cry for all the children gathered around the old well. But mixed up with the wanting-to-cry feeling was also the longing to run out from my place of half-concealment and kick the imprisoned man until he screamed for mercy.

Looking back, I can see that it was curious that it never occurred to me to disbelieve these children. But even in retrospect it does not occur to me to disbelieve them. They were certainly all very skilled at lying or cheating in order to dodge the worst of Mortmain’s vicious rules, but they had no knowledge of falseness or pretence or sophistry. They knew what they had seen this man—and others like him—do, and they were going to punish him.

Then Robyn suddenly said, ‘Let’s do it now,’ and as if a spell had been set working, the children moved in on their captive.

There was absolutely nothing I could do to help him even if I had wanted to. And in the face of some of the things I had seen inside Mortmain, and in view of what had been said by Robyn and Anthony, I did not want to. The rebellious, angry part of me (the part that Edward does not like to think exists and his mother deplores, but that Floy loved and encouraged) said: let them go ahead and punish this evil creature.

But even the rebellious part was not prepared for what they did.

Two of the girls brought out a thick length of rope—I thought it must be taken from the dreadful room where we had seen the women picking oakum—and Anthony climbed precariously on to the parapet while two of the other boys held on to his ankles. The frame with the winch-and-bucket mechanism was quite large: there were two thick vertical posts supporting a horizontal crossbar above them, and this crossbar was a good three feet higher than the brick surround, so that Anthony had to stand on tiptoe and lean up to reach it. He was thin and probably under-nourished, but by dint of holding on to one of the vertical posts he managed to first unhook the wooden bucket and then knot the rope’s end on to the big iron hook.

The three boys pulled hard on the rope to make sure it was securely anchored, and then they fashioned a loop out of the rope’s free end. No. Not a loop. A
noose
. And then I became aware that the two smallest girls were chanting something very quietly, almost whispering it, but doing so with a fierce concentration. After a moment I made out what they were chanting, and a deep horror began to close round my heart.

The gallows. The gallows that used to clank by the four cross ways… I had heard those lines once before, in Floy’s house when a professor who also wrote poetry had read them to a roomful of people. The lines were part of a cyclical poem, on the surface pastoral, on the surface written about this part of England by an uprooted Shropshire boy. But if you looked below the surface (and by then Floy had taught me how to do that), there was nothing pastoral about them at all. Hearing them inside Mortmain House I saw that the professor—his name was Housman—might very well have known about the pockets of darkness in the world, and might very well have been writing about one of them. I had thought the verses chilling when I heard them for the first time, but hearing them chanted by this group of resolute children, they were much more than chilling: they were fearsome and grotesque.

Dear God, I thought, I know what they’re going to do to him, and no matter what he is, that brute-faced creature, or what he’s done I’ve got to stop this—Or have I?

Anthony and the other boys dragged the man to his feet. He was squirming and struggling to get free, trying to kick out at his captors, but his ankles were bound too firmly. The boy who had helped Anthony to tie the rope over the well-shaft slipped the noose over the man’s head and tightened it, and I had the irrelevant thought that whatever these children knew or did not know, this one understood about knots, and perhaps his father had been a sailor or a chandler—

And then thought was cut off abruptly, as the children pushed the man over the brick wall and down into the well-shaft.

He went down feet-first but he did not fall very far. The rope around his neck jerked his body to a grotesque upright position, spinning him around with the momentum of his fall. He hung there, half in, half out of the well’s mouth, his waist level with the top of the brick surround, the crossbar of the winch creaking ominously from his weight.

A hundred emotions poured through my mind, but mixed up with them was a tiny voice beating against my consciousness like a hammering pulse. Nothing-you-can-do…They’ve-hanged-him… They’ve-hanged-him-and-he’s-dead…Serve-him-right, said the softest and strongest voice of all the voices, and an image of an eight-year-old girl clinging to the under-side of her bed, praying to Gentle Jesus that she would not be taken away, rose up in front of my eyes. Serve him right.

The children had joined hands around the well, and they were moving in a circle, not quite dancing, but not exactly walking either. The only word I can find to describe their movements is
prowl
. They prowled in their half-dance, and the eerie thing was that if the well and its dreadful figure had not been visible, they might have been any group of children playing an ordinary childish game.

They all joined in with the chanting of the two girls.

The man’s body was still spiralling around, and I thought: if I were to run across the courtyard now, could I reach him? Could I cut him down? But into what? said my mind at once. Straight down into the depths of the well?

The children were still singing, their hands linked, circling the well ceaselessly, and now there was something tribal and even primeval about them.

I began to feel slightly sick and dizzy, so I leaned back against the wall behind me, grateful for its solid strength, grateful for Maisie’s presence as well, even though she was sheet-white and plainly more frightened than I was. And surely in another minute it would all stop and Robyn and the others would scuttle back to whatever dark corner of Mortmain they were supposed to be in, and Maisie and I could go quietly home. Leaving the children here? Leaving the man hanging? Standing on air…?

Their voices were so unchildlike that I remembered the old superstition about possession, and thought that if the old witchfinders could be here now they would swoop on this ragged little group.

(Note: This thought about possession was one I later thought better of, although only slightly.)

It was as they sang this line about the heels that had once trodden the land that the worst thing of all happened. The rope was spiralling more slowly now, but as the hanged man swung round to face my part of the courtyard again, life flickered in his eyes and he began to struggle.