A Dark Dividing (31 page)

Harry switched on the electric fire in his flat and threw himself down in his favourite armchair in the sitting-room.

So Sonia, that elusive twin, was dead, and there was no story. Even though he had not wanted to write the story he felt a sense of loss. Markovitch had implied there was a mystery—people died and people disappeared—and Harry had been intrigued, but the answer had simply been that the twins had been taken abroad to escape the media, and Sonia had died. And presumably Melissa had remained abroad and was still there. No mystery about any of it.

He was glad that Rosie had been able to solve things for him, even though the more he thought about her, the more he thought she was an uncomfortable person. Even the name felt wrong. Rosie. The rather attractive, newly-fashionable diminutive sat oddly on her, almost as if a 1940s forces’ sweetheart had donned a mini-skirt. She had definitely made a move on him, although he thought he had got out of it with reasonable tact. Oh hell, in addition to everything else from now on call me Heartbreaker as well. Last of the great lovers. Oh sure, said his mind cynically.

Philip Fleury had probably been a bit of a heartbreaker. Harry could easily imagine the passion that had driven Floy’s writing spilling over into other areas of his life at times. This could have been a lot of fun for the females in his life, or on the other hand it could not. It would have depended on the particular females.

Harry was about a third of the way through Floy’s book by this time, and a conviction was growing on him that Floy might not after all have written this story from his own imagination and his study of the social evils of the day, but out of actual experience. Was it possible that Fleury had known this child, this Tansy, and that what he was really doing was telling her story to the world?

He could not analyse why this idea was taking such a strong hold of him, unless it stemmed from the conviction of Floy’s writing. He writes as if he cares very deeply about all this, thought Harry. Yes, but that might simply be because he did care. It might be that Floy had known—or had found out—about the conditions of workhouses and orphanages, and about child prostitution. Tansy’s story could simply be a hybrid of all that.

And what about the dedication on the fly-leaf? said his mind. ‘C’ and ‘Viola and Sorrel’? Who were they? ‘C’ might have been a man, of course; a colleague or a son or a father. And Viola and Sorrel were most likely Floy’s wife and daughter or sisters. Simple as that. But I do wonder who he based Tansy on.

Tansy had grown up hating the world, which, considering the world she had lived in, was not surprising. But she thought she might have deserved all the things that had happened to her in her short life.

The children had to go to church on Sundays, and to a Bible class on Sunday afternoons, and they had all learned, by rote, that the way of sinners was made plain with stones and that those who sinned were enemies unto their own lives. Tansy had learned this along with the others but she was not sure if she entirely understood it, except that it meant if you did something bad you were punished for it. She thought she had been quite bad a few times. She thought she might have taken the wrong path once or twice as well—what the Bible class teacher said was the ivory gate. You should never go through the ivory gate, the teacher said; it looked very nice and very pleasing and pretty, but once through it you were on the sure path to the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity, and now please to turn to their New Testaments to learn how Jesus had healed the sick.

But if Tansy had not understood about the sinners being their own enemies, or the gall of bitterness, by this time she understood very well about the stews; she understood that they were not things you ate, but houses in towns where men came to lie in bed with little girls and do to the little girls the thing that made babies. She thought the pig-men might lie in wait for children who went through the ivory gate, in fact; you could very easily imagine them hiding just on the other side, ready to pounce on everyone who came through.

But one day she found a hiding place, a secret corner where she could hide when the pig-men came, and she learned the trick of vanishing, silently and swiftly, and of cheating the whip-fingered overseers and fat ratty-eyed Mrs Beadle. It was necessary to do this because Mrs Beadle and the Beadle himself knew all about the pig-men, and they did not mind them at all because they gave money in exchange for the children.

So on the nights when the moon was still a thin paring of cold light, Tansy folded her pillow down beneath the blankets on her bed so that it looked like a sleeping person, and then slipped out before the dormitories were locked for the night. It was easy to wait in the shadows until everyone was asleep, and then to go stealthily through the dark passageways and down the old stone steps to the long grim room below the ground.

Tansy hated this room which smelt of people crying and struggling to escape. She hated the sick smothering darkness of the passages as well. The long room had iron bars at one end, formed into cages, and the other children said this was where you were brought if you were mad or if you did something very bad. You were put inside the man-cages and left there for hours, or even days. Tansy knew this was true, because she could feel the pain and the unhappiness of all the people who had been shut inside the man-cages. There was a story that someone had starved to death down here, and that her ghost walked about when everywhere was dark and quiet. So Tansy was very frightened indeed on the nights when she came down here to hide.

But it was better to brave the darkness and the dreadful swirling unhappiness, and to sleep down here with the ghost and the pain, than to risk being caught by the pig-men.

T
HE CHILD-TRADERS had come for Tansy in the end, of course; there had always been a dreadful inevitability about that. And this time they had come on a night when no one had been expecting them—when the moon was full and bright, and Tansy had not thought it was necessary to creep out to her hiding-place. One of the other girls had heard them arrive and had woken everyone up, and Tansy had known, with a bump of terror, that soon she would be crammed smotheringly into one of the sacks and the top tied up so that she could not call out for help, and then carried out to the waiting cart.

The only thing she could think of was to creep under the bed and huddle in the darkness, making herself as tiny as she possibly could and hope they would not see her. But they did see her. They came stomping and clattering into the room, the smell of them everywhere like greasy meat, and they walked up and down, looking at the children one by one. Saying, ‘Two little girls wanted tonight—who are they to be?’ And, ‘A nice plump little boy as well—which one shall we take?’

And then they reached Tansy’s bed, and crouched down and peered under it, and saw her. They nodded and smiled so that you could see the stumpy teeth they had, and you could see how their mean little eyes glittered. And then their hands—dreadful thick-fingered hands with huge knuckly bones—were reaching into the cramped space under the bed, and even though Tansy held on to the frame of the bed, they dragged her out, and held her up as if she was a rabbit they had just caught, and chuckled to one another, saying, My word, this is a nice little one tonight. My word, we’ve done well with this one.

There was the smell of the sack as they bundled her inside—like bad meat, like fish gone off—and Tansy had to fight not to breathe it in. And then they were carrying her, struggling and fighting, out into the night, and there was the feeling of the hard wooden floor of the cart, and then the sound of a horse’s hooves clip-clopping on a road.

Somewhere nearby she could hear the sound of a church clock chiming. It would be the church where they all went every Sunday morning, and where they had Bible-reading classes on Sunday afternoons. The chimes grew fainter as the cart clopped farther away from it, and the clopping hooves and the chiming clock formed into a horrid little voice inside her mind. Clop-clop, you’re-an-evil-child… You’re-going-to-be-punished… Chime-chime, bitterness-and-gall… Clop-clop, punishment…

No matter how evil she had been it was still terrible hearing the chimes of the church clock fading away, because it was the very last link with the place she had known all her life and the friends she had grown up with.

So she listened to the clock chiming for as long as she could, and counted the chimes carefully. All the children had been taught how to count and to read their letters, because the beadle said it was part of his duty to see they were given some schooling, as well as making sure they grew up in the fear of the Lord.

So Tansy was able to count twelve chimes as the pig-men’s cart took her away, and she knew that meant midnight. And when the chiming stopped she knew she had gone beyond the reach of her friends for ever.

Harry’s mantel clock did not chime the hours, but with eerie coincidence it was showing just on midnight when he closed
The Ivory Gate
at this page.

He went to bed with his mind full of Floy’s waif-heroine who had crept into that dreadful hiding-place when the child-traders came, but who had been caught by them despite it. When he dreamed, his dreams were of dark houses and iron man-cages that might have come straight out of
Hansel and Gretel
, and of thin cold moons that stared soullessly down on all manner of atrocities…

And of Viola and Sorrel whose names conjured up the woodbine flowers of Shakespeare’s romances, and the scent of autumn rain and woodsmoke… And of ‘C’, who might be a man or a woman, but who might, in some unfathomable way, be connected with the ill-starred Tansy…

And of Tansy herself who might never have lived outside of Floy’s imagination.

Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
8th February 1900

Perhaps one day all this will become dim and faded, and I shall wonder whether any of it really happened, or whether it was all simply a trick of my imagination.

But Maisie’s future is reasonably well arranged at last, and when I return to London she will stay in Weston Fferna, as housemaid in one of the neighbouring houses. They are people who own several farms and have what Mamma calls a rather slapdash attitude to house management—‘But
kind
, Charlotte, they are extremely kind.’ The great thing about them is they do not mind about the coming child.

Making all the arrangements has helped me to stop thinking about Floy, and about Viola and Sorrel, the daughters he never knew. Telling Mamma a little about Mortmain—just a very little—has helped even more. Mamma horrified and shocked at description of privations and the Paupers’ Room, although pointing out at same time that it cannot be made too easy for such people, Charlotte, or they will not want to work for their living at all, and then where should we be? Know that Mamma is a product of her generation and cannot, therefore, be blamed for some of her views, but ground teeth in silent fury at this outlook all the same.

Still, have managed to get her to say she will endeavour to find out about Robyn and try to do something for her. ‘And who knows but what we may be able to get the girl into good service, Charlotte.’