Authors: Janette Jenkins
Agnes shuddered, saying she could not imagine a life of muddy fields, empty sky and cattle.
‘Thing is,’ said Ivy, swallowing a belch, ‘there’s only a place for a wife.’
Leaving the pigskin bag (they couldn’t say she wasn’t generous), Ivy started wrapping her own things into the bed-sheet, saying she was departing that night for the sticks, London had never been good to her, she’d heard country people were warm-hearted, jolly, and there was always plenty of ale. ‘Oh, you’ll be all
right
here. Why, when I was your age I was very nearly married.’
‘More fool you,’ said Agnes.
‘Can we visit?’ asked Jane. ‘I’ve never seen the country. What’s it like?’
Ivy grunted. She pushed a creased, sweaty blouse into the bed-sheet. ‘Well, it’s very wide and green.’
‘I’ve heard it stinks,’ said Agnes.
‘London stinks worse.’
Jane, now pacing up and down, asked for an address. She would like to write. To ask if they had arrived safely and to share all their news. Ivy, now knotting the ends of the sheet, told them she wasn’t sure of the address, only that it was somewhere in Kent, which might, or might not, be a very small place.
‘Smaller than London?’ asked Jane.
‘Everywhere is smaller than London,’ said Ivy.
‘So if we go to Kent, we’ll find you?’
‘Probably,’ said Ivy. ‘Just look out for some cows and we’ll be amongst them.’
Agnes laughed. ‘Doing what?’
‘Whatever the farmer tells us,’ she said, pushing her hand into her pocket and leaving a small pile of coins on the shelf. ‘Now, let’s say our goodbyes, or your pa will be going without me.’
‘Don’t leave us,’ said Jane.
Ivy paused. ‘Look at you both,’ she said. ‘All grown up. You’ll be better off without me. Without us.’
‘No we won’t.’
‘You will,’ said Ivy, picking up the bed-sheet and throwing it over her shoulder.
The girls watched their mother as she weaved
around
the lamp-posts to where their father stood swaying with a broken cardboard suitcase and a filthy-looking sack. A few minutes later, a man appeared with a limping horse and cart, and after several attempts to winch their gin-hazed mother onto the back of it, the two men eventually managed to heave her onto the sorry-looking vehicle that would take them out of London and into the wide open space that was Kent. Jane waved. Agnes closed her eyes. ‘Why bother waving, when it might be the end of us?’ she said.
For the next few days, the sisters crept in and out of the house, living off crackers, raisins and cheap bowls of soup. The girl called Edie was nowhere to be seen, though they could sometimes hear her whistling. It was easy to avoid Mrs Swift, a woman who spent most of her time in the parlour, and when they did collide on the landing, Jane beamed her best winning smile, saying,
A very good morning to you, ma’am
, which seemed to please their breathless landlady no end, and with the briefest nod of the head she would say,
And the same to you too
.
Lying on the lumpy mattress, they talked about the future. Agnes would find a good position in a dressmaker’s or florist’s, or she would soon be taken on as a lady’s maid due to her dainty appearance, sewing skills and general fine nature. ‘Perhaps near a park,’ she mused, pulling a strand of hair and wrapping it over her finger. ‘Parks are very useful. I’ve heard Hyde Park in particular is full of opportunity.’
‘What kind of opportunity?’
‘The young man kind of opportunity; everyone
knows
a great London park is a respectable place to meet them.’
Jane looked at her older sister, who seemed to know everything about young men, and was it any wonder? Agnes had shiny chestnut hair, deep dark eyes, a snub nose, a generous mouth, and straight-as-you-like bones, which Jane could only marvel at.
‘And what shall I do?’
Yawning, Agnes picked at the last few cracker crumbs while staring at the ceiling and advised her sister that as the market was right on their doorstep, perhaps she should take herself over there and offer to sell potatoes or sweep flower cuttings, or do anything that might earn herself a living.
‘We could both do that. Couldn’t we?’
Agnes frowned. ‘I don’t know, I’m just not suited to markets – the noise, those big carthorses, you know they have always unnerved me.’
Three days later, on a damp grey morning, Jane opened her eyes to find her sister had gone, leaving a short scribbled note, a bent hairpin and their mother’s pigskin bag.
Dear Jane, Please forgive me. I have to leave, to make my own way in this world. It won’t be easy, but for now we are better off alone. It will make us stronger. I won’t forget you. Until we meet again. Your loving sister, Agnes
. Jane read the note seventeen times, before crushing it into her hand, where it sat for half an hour, like a stone.
Jane wept. She kicked the end of the bed until her ankle throbbed. Why had Agnes left her?
Why?
she asked the painted bulldog and the walls. She cursed. Prayed.
She
pummelled Agnes’s pillow. For days Jane stared out of the window looking for her sister, thinking she’d return, just like those times she’d run away as a child, only to appear sheepishly at suppertime. Her eyes stung as they followed all the girls with the same coloured hair, or the same felt coat, and scanned every face in the crowd until they blurred into one grey wash. She smoothed out the note. Surely it was all a mistake. Her sister would soon change her mind. Agnes wouldn’t leave her to the wrath of Mrs Swift! She would be back before the end of the week. On Friday. On rent day.
The room was cold and the fumes from the spirit stove made Jane’s head throb. She found the bent hairclip and straightened it, jabbing it into the frozen palm of her hand as yet another girl with chestnut hair pushed her way between the lamp-posts, turning her head, and looking so much like Agnes that Jane wondered if it really was her older sister, only changed.
She played games in her head. If she could think of a girl’s Christian name for every letter of the alphabet, Agnes would be back before morning. Agnes, Beatrice, Caroline, Daisy. She almost did it. She managed to X. If she could count to fifty without blinking, Agnes would be back. Her eyes were tired, she made a slow fifteen. If she could hum the national anthem before another cab appeared …
When she finally slept, Jane’s dreams were full of panic. She was supposed to meet Agnes, she was late. Her legs wouldn’t move. She had to send her sister a letter but she hadn’t any paper. Then her stamps had blown away and she’d forgotten the address.
Friday came and went. There was no sign of Agnes. Steeling herself, Jane walked to the market, asking for work at every stall and barrow, where the faces, usually grim, grunted ‘no’. A nearby confectioner, feeling high-spirited on account of his daughter’s wedding, gave her a chunk of coconut ice; a woman in a pawnshop said Jane looked the very spit of her little cousin Hetty, and could she stand there a minute while she shouted for her ma to come and have a look, which she did, humming and nodding, saying her poor niece died not long since, and did her bones come in useful with the telling of the weather?
As day dragged into evening, Jane spoke to the gypsy selling sprigs of white heather; Miss Lucille Edgar: Face Ablutionist & Beautifier; a knife-grinder; a chestnut man; a flower-seller, her fingertips swollen with pollen. She offered to sweep the barber’s shop floor, to polish all his glass, but, snapping open his cut-throat, that foppish coiffeur growled like a grizzly, and Jane turned on her heels and ran.
In a plush top hat and waistcoat, Jeremiah Beam strode up and down the pavement, his working girls in rented rooms, sleeping, drinking watered gin and reading penny dreadfuls. From a nearby doorway Jane watched the men, some with silver-topped canes, others in thick tweed overcoats or soiled market aprons, as they asked for these girls by name – Violet, Lily, Iris, Rose. ‘Every one a flower,’ said Jeremiah. ‘We have a blonde, who’s amply proportioned both fore and aft, we have a charming brunette, and we have a new little redhead, still smelling of the schoolroom. That one, sir? That’s my Iris, be gentle.’
Shivering, Jane watched these murky faces leaning from their windows, with their painted eyes and sullen carmine lips, and she wondered if Agnes had found a new life away from all this sordid gloom. Was she really a lady’s maid? A seamstress? Or had she left London altogether?
Despite the bitter cold, Jane kept moving through the bustle, past the woman selling pig’s feet, the man with the sheet music spilling from his pockets, the boy with P
REPARE TO
M
EET THY
G
OD
written on boards and tied across his shoulders.
‘Why?’ asked Jane, suddenly finding her voice.
Puzzled, the boy scratched his head, because he wasn’t used to questions, unless it was some gin-riddled sot asking the way to Drury Lane. ‘Why what?’ he said.
‘Why should I prepare?’
‘No idea,’ he told her. ‘This sign could say “Sing for the Devil” and I’d wear it all day for the shilling.’
‘Who gives you the shilling?’
‘Some idle preacher who would rather sit in the Cock than carry it himself.’
‘Does he keep any more?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘not one, and these signs are heavy – if you weren’t crippled already, you would be soon enough.’
On Catherine Street, a man played a mournful-sounding squeezebox, and was it any wonder people hurried by, ignoring his upturned hat, because he was worse than all the pipers, not half as good as the Italian street musicians, and who’d want to hear that kind of noise when life was miserable enough without it?
And then the rain came down, slowly at first, fat
splattering
drops, then quickening, pounding, sending the boy with the sign back into the Cock and even Jeremiah went inside, where his bleary-eyed girls quickly sprang into life.
Jane was sodden. Beneath an advertisement for Quaker’s Rolled White Oats, she stood shaking like a dog, the cheap blue dye from her shawl dripping down her back and bruising the length of her skirt.
Next morning, Mrs Swift was propped in an armchair with so many cushions it was hard to see where she began and ended. Her face was a circle, her eyes almost lost inside the deep puffy sockets. She was pouting, and her pigeon-grey dress, tight everywhere but especially around the bust and upper arms, seemed to add to the dreary parlour’s atmosphere.
‘Where is your mother?’ asked Mrs Swift.
‘Kent, ma’am.’
‘And your sister?’
‘Vanished.’
‘So they’ve left their little cripple high and dry?’
Jane could feel her hair moving in the room’s stuffy heat. Her left knee was aching so she shifted her weight to the right. ‘I have threepence, ma’am,’ she managed.
‘Threepence? What threepence? You owe me more than threepence! Have you heard of debtor’s gaol? The asylum? Have you seen the workhouse with its great big iron gates?’
Jane nodded. Everyone knew the gaol and she was familiar with the workhouse, though would hedge a little bet on the asylum being worse, having witnessed more than one bony hand reaching through the bars,
inmates
crying out like foxes in the wind, and all of them mad as March hares.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake sit down, you are giving me a neck-ache.’
Perched on the end of the sofa, Jane had the appearance of a small starving owl. Her dress had dried, but the blue dye remained, like the sea in a mildewed atlas. Her fine feathery hair was tied in a small fraying bundle, her nose raw around the nostrils, her thin pink mouth trembling at the edges. She clasped her hands. Her left foot was tapping.
‘Your age?’ asked Mrs Swift.
‘Fifteen, ma’am.’
‘Are you useful?’
‘Oh yes, ma’am, I’m useful.’
‘And honest?’
‘Very.’
For obvious reasons, Mrs Swift pulled a dubious face. ‘And are you clean in your habits?’ she asked.
‘I am usually very particular,’ said Jane, looking at the creases in her skirt and the dirt that had dried on her fingers.
Mrs Swift nodded curtly, then it seemed she might be thinking some very deep and interesting thoughts, like a person listening to a minister barking on about heaven, or a scholar perplexed, or a servant weighing up a fatty side of brisket. The room was quiet, a few pale flames rising from the ashes, as Mrs Swift glanced towards the clock. It was getting close to dinnertime.
‘I am going to help you,’ she said at last. ‘You will work for my husband, live in the attic, and have something of a home.’
‘Oh thank you, ma’am!’ Jane almost fell from the sofa in gratitude. ‘I will not let you down.’
But it seemed Mrs Swift wasn’t listening, pushing herself from her seat, muttering something about Tuesday, chicken soup, and beef and oyster pudding.
Later, stepping between chamber pots, broken stools and cracker tins, Jane chose the only attic room with a bed in it. She moved the junk until her arms ached. A fireguard. Oil canister. A brown leather trunk that could not be budged and would do very well for a table. Arms throbbing, she remembered the other rooms she had slept in, usually small, always shared. She pictured the old house by the river where they had lived happily enough until her father, in and out of their lives like an Irish fiddler’s elbow, had insisted on moving to smaller, cheaper places, easily abandoned.
Her new room was comfortable enough, and she liked being closest to the sky. There was a small rag rug in pleasant shades of blue by the bed, and a few brass hooks for her clothes. Pacing the room, doing giddy little twirls, Jane suddenly managed to laugh because not only had she landed on her feet, but also if Agnes did return, chances were, she would find her. Yet as the light began to fade, Jane began to worry. She was not a new kitchen maid or a scullery girl. She would not be sweeping hearths, or mopping greasy floor tiles. She was a doctor’s assistant, and what did she know about medical matters?
Sitting on her bed, she thought about the box her mother had kept for emergencies. Oil of cloves. Smelling salts. Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne,
‘
Rapidly
cuts short all attacks of epilepsy, colic, palpitations, hysteria
’.