The Ivory Rose (10 page)

Georgiana sighed, straightening her skirts with the palm of her hand. ‘The evening went by so quickly.’

Connie stood up and started plumping the cushions on the sofa.

‘Well, fair lasses, I must be gone, so I bid ye farewell with a lovely old Irish blessing.’

Ned struck a theatrical pose by the doorway, one arm held over his eyes as though searching the distant horizon. In a deep, dramatic voice he recited:

Connie snorted. ‘Until we meet again, over breakfast!’

‘Thank ye, fair Jemma, for a most delicious French feast.’ Ned took Jemma’s hand in his own and bowed over it with a flourish, as though she was a high-born lady and he an aristocratic lord.

Jemma responded with her best ballet curtsey, her hand curled upwards over her heart and one leg tucked behind the other.

‘It was my pleasure, Ned.’

Ned laughed, waved and disappeared out the door, whistling.

Once Ned had left, the light and excitement and joy disappeared with him. Connie and Jemma had to return, with a sigh, to the task of tidying up all evidence of their illicit, fun-filled night.

The days rolled by that week, each one following the same pattern as the one before, working from dawn until late at night – scrubbing floors, making beds, dusting, ironing, sweeping and polishing lamps. Jemma was not called to take Georgiana out walking, and in fact had little time to spend more than a few minutes with her each day.

Jemma sighed, faced by a huge pile of dirty pots and pans soaking in hot, soapy water. She had her sleeves rolled up, suds to her elbows and dribbles of sweat running down her face.

‘What, still going with those pots?’ scolded Agnes. ‘You must be the slowest maidservant I’ve ever come across. Leave those for the moment. The mistress wishes you to go up to the haberdashery to see if her embroidery silks have come in yet. She also has a package she wants collected from the apothecary.’

Jemma’s heart leapt at the thought of escaping the house and walking in the spring sunshine.

‘Do you know where the haberdashery is, in Booth Street?’ Agnes asked.

Jemma nodded. Her heart skipped in excitement.
Booth Street – I wonder how it looks in 1895?

‘Well, at last you seem to remember
something
!’ exclaimed Agnes. ‘Go and tidy yourself up, take a basket and, for goodness sake, don’t forget your bonnet.’

Agnes gave her clear instructions on how to find the necessary shops and what to do once she found them, all in her scolding, nagging voice, as though speaking to an exceedingly stupid foreigner.

Jemma raced upstairs, washed her face and hands, unrolled her sleeves and took off her sopping apron. She tied her bonnet, collected the basket and was soon walking out through the back garden. Clean, white laundry flapped on the clothes line, scenting the air with the smell of lye and soap.

On the left was the kitchen garden – a neatly fenced plot of vegetables and herbs growing in neat furrows, carefully hoed and weeded by Ned. Tomatoes, peas and beans grew on tripod stakes against the wall. Rows of lettuce, cabbage, carrots, turnips, parsnips, beets, cucumbers and capsicums thrived in the sunshine. Bees buzzed amongst the sprawling mounds of thyme, sage, oregano and lemon balm.

Jemma felt like singing as she gazed up into the deep blue sky. A flock of white-and-yellow cockatoos swooped, calling raucously. Jemma had never seen so many cockatoos together before.

‘Hello, cockies,’ she called softly, smiling at the brilliant colours. She pushed the irksome bonnet off her head so that it fell down her back, hanging by the ribbons.

‘Ye’r sounding very happy this grand morning,’ called a familiar Irish voice.

Jemma glanced quickly to the stable in the corner of the garden, leading onto the back laneway.

Ned was sitting in the sunshine outside the stables, polishing a huge mound of leather harnesses. He had a rag in one hand, a bottle of linseed oil in the other and a mischievous glint in his green eyes. Merlin sat beside him, licking his paws and cleaning behind his ears. Jemma could hear the snuffle and stamping of Sugar and Butterscotch inside in their stalls.

‘Oh, hello, Ned,’ replied Jemma, a flush racing up her neck.
Why, oh why, do I blush every time Ned speaks to me? He must think I’m an idiot.

Jemma leant down to stroke Merlin’s back to hide her confusion. Merlin miaowed and arched his back under her palm.

‘Where are ye off to so happy, I wonder?’ Ned asked, rubbing the reins with the oily rag between his brown, calloused hands.

‘Miss Rutherford wants me to run some errands in Booth Street, and it is such a beautiful morning. I couldn’t wait to escape from the piles of filthy pots and endless dishes!’

‘Skiving off? Grand. Old Agnes is a fire-breathing she-dragon, isn’t she?’

Jemma giggled at the image of Agnes breathing fire, smoke coming out her ears, with huge, scaley, green paws, sharp claws and crimson eyes.

‘She’s terrifying all right,’ agreed Jemma. ‘She thinks I’m completely useless.’

‘Do not let her worry ye,’ advised Ned, smiling. ‘She is a bully all roight, so if ye stand up to her, she’ll back down.’

‘I can’t imagine standing up to Agnes.’ Jemma shivered at the thought. ‘I think she’d tear me limb from limb. I’d better get going or she’ll be chasing me all the way down Johnston Street breathing fire!’

‘Well, enjoy ye’r walk then,’ offered Ned, sloshing more oil on his rag. ‘Do not lose ye’r groceries on the way home or Agnes will really have something to say.’

‘I won’t,’ replied Jemma, smiling back.

Jemma continued out the back gate into Piper Lane – a narrow service laneway that ran behind all the Johnston Street mansions. To walk to the shops she should turn left. Jemma stood at the gateway, staring to the left, then the right. To the right was the route she would normally go home, to Breillat Street. Jemma glanced quickly back at Rosethorne, then made up her mind. Hoisting her basket into the crook of her elbow, she hurried out the gate and turned right.

On the corner, she passed the imposing sandstone towers and crenellations of the Abbey – the largest and grandest of the Witches’ Houses. So familiar, yet subtly different. Across the road, the view was a complete shock. Instead of the row of tiny Federation terraces and semis she usually walked past, there was a wrought-iron fence then vast, landscaped gardens and a glimpse of a large house, partially hidden by trees.

Jemma hurried up the hill, away from the Abbey, beside the timber-paved roadway. A woman in shabby long skirts,
with a tattered shawl covering her head, nodded to Jemma as she walked the other way. A group of small, barefooted boys, wearing caps, shirts and long shorts, were crouched in the gutter playing marbles. A messenger boy scooted past on a bicycle.

In a few minutes Jemma was in her own street – Breillat Street. She could recognise very little. The dirt street was potholed and littered with mounds of horse manure. Some of the blocks were vacant and weed-infested, heaped with rubbish and broken implements, chickens scratching around in the dirt. The houses were shabby with peeling paint, the verandahs boarded up with scrap timber, the shutters broken.

Jemma walked along tentatively, her basket over the crook of her arm, trying to recognise her house.

Small, grimy children in ragged clothes were playing barefoot in the dusty road, skipping ropes and bowling wooden hoops along with a stick. They called out, shrieking with laughter as a hoop escaped and bounded over to Jemma, crashing into her leg.

Jemma picked up the fallen hoop and held it out to one of the little girls who was wearing a patched dress, her sunken face filthy. Jemma noticed the girl was very thin, with stick-like limbs.

‘Here you go,’ Jemma offered, smiling.

The child snatched the hoop, poking her tongue out and escaping back to her friends.

An older girl watched from the steps of the house that would one day be Jemma’s. The girl had a dirt-coloured shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders; a drab, stained skirt; frayed petticoats and old elastic-sided boots that
looked a couple of sizes too big for her. She was sewing buttons onto a snow-white shirt, its brightness glaring among all the grime.

‘What’re you staring at?’ the girl asked rudely. ‘You’ll catch flies in your mouth if you leave it hangin’ open like that.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ offered Jemma. ‘I was just looking at the house. I … I used to live here.’

‘Poor you,’ sniffed the girl. ‘It’s a dump all right. Funny. I don’t remember you, and I’ve lived here for a few years now.’

‘I wouldn’t call it a dump.’ Jemma smiled at the girl, trying to win her over. ‘I loved living here – I had a lovely view of the sunset from my window.’

The girl paused in her sewing and nodded.

‘Oh, you lived upstairs at the back then. We used to have the whole of the downstairs, with the Watsons living above us, but then Pa lost his job at the soap factory and we couldn’t afford the rent no more. We just have the front room – there’re four families living here now.’

Jemma’s eyes widened in surprise.
Four families living in the little house I share with Mum and Dad?

The girl snipped the cotton with her scissors and started on a new button.

‘The house is a bit different from when I lived here,’ offered Jemma.

‘It must’ve been a long time ago then,’ agreed the girl. ‘The landlord hasn’t spent a penny on the bloomin’ place since he moved out. The toffs used to live here, but they moved out to a snootier suburb a few years ago. They decided the place was getting below them with all the
riffraff moving in – so they rented it to us. Now we’re the toffs of Breillat Street.’

The girl laughed at her little joke, ruefully examining her own drab skirt.

Jemma’s eyes scanned the sandstone house. It did look neglected. One of the window panes was broken and patched with the side of a timber packing case. The paint on the door was dirty and peeling. The front garden was filled with weeds, and a scrawny chicken scratched for grubs.

On the left-hand side was a single-storey cottage, which Jemma realised was the original part of Ruby’s house. On the right-hand side was a number of timber slab huts, which looked like they had been built from offcuts and packing cases. Through the open door of one of these makeshift huts, Jemma could see a woman stirring a large iron pot over a wood fire.

‘Who lives there now?’ Jemma asked, pointing to Ruby’s house.

‘Ma Murphy,’ replied the girl, tossing her head with some disdain. ‘The baby farmer.’

‘The baby what?’ asked Jemma in some confusion.

The girl rethreaded her needle, biting off the cotton between her chipped teeth. She shoved the needle through the material forcefully.

‘The baby farmer,’ the girl repeated with some irritation. Jemma obviously still looked confused.

‘Don’t you know anything? Poor women and unwed mothers pay her to look after their babies,’ explained the girl. ‘Well, she takes their hard-earned money, but there’s not much looking after that goes on. If they’re lucky, the
poor wee mites die in a few weeks. Most of them die before they’re more than a few months old.’

Jemma felt sick.
Baby farming! Babies dying in a few weeks.

‘No!’ Jemma exclaimed. ‘You can’t be serious!’

‘Oh, yes I am,’ retorted the girl. ‘Why’d I lie about something like that. You was the one who asked me!’

‘How many babies does she look after?’

The girl shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘Eleven, maybe twelve at a time?’

Jemma glanced over at the quiet, neighbouring cottage – shabby, neglected and poverty stricken like all the others.

‘It doesn’t sound like there are twelve babies next door?’ Jemma asked doubtfully.

The girl nodded her head firmly, shaking out the shirt in her hands.

‘Luckily, she gives them laudanum or gin to keep them quiet. You should hear the racket when she goes out and forgets to come back and dope them. It gives you a fair headache. Ma said she’d complain to the constable if she left them screaming for hours. And the smell!’

Jemma shook herself mentally. She had trouble absorbing the information. She remembered that laudanum was an old-fashioned drug made of opium and alcohol, which had been very common in the nineteenth century. Her English teacher had told her that many famous poets, such as Coleridge, had become addicted to it. It was inconceivable that anyone would give that to tiny babies!

‘She goes out and leaves twelve babies by themselves?’ demanded Jemma. ‘She drugs babies to keep them quiet?
She gives them gin? No wonder so many die! That’s disgraceful.’

The girl on the step shrugged, her needle steadily plying in and out of the soft fabric.

‘What’s it to you?’ she asked. ‘Babies die all the time. Ma’s lost two, and it weren’t from lack of love. They just took sick with the whooping cough and faded away. No-one wants those little mites. There’s no-one at all who cares whether they live or die, except Ma Murphy – she mostly makes more money if they die.’

‘No,’ retorted Jemma in disbelief. ‘How could that be?’

‘The mothers pay a one-off fee for her to take the babies. Ma Murphy says she’ll find rich families to adopt them, but if no-one does then it’s expensive to feed them until they grow up. So it’s better for Ma Murphy if they don’t survive.’

Tears stung Jemma’s eyes. ‘Babies shouldn’t die all the time,’ Jemma cried, her lip trembling. ‘Not if they’re looked after and fed properly. It’s outrageous!’

The girl on the step flashed her a warm smile.

‘Ain’t you a funny one? Well, I’d best be off,’ the girl said. ‘Ma’ll be back soon, and I’ve a whole basket of shirts I’ve to sew buttons on today. Ma’ll tan my hide if I don’t get them done in time.’

Jemma suddenly remembered the empty basket at her feet and the errands that Agnes had set for her.

‘Yes, I’d better go too,’ Jemma agreed hurriedly. ‘Nice to meet you. My name’s Jemma, by the way.’

‘I’m Molly. Molly Bryant.’

Jemma waved goodbye and set off up Breillat Street, heading south, her head swivelling from side to side as she took in the scenery.

Coming towards her was a group of older teenage boys with a couple of girls. They were dressed differently to the other men Jemma had seen, with short jackets, tight-fitting trousers with flared bell-bottoms and pointed high-heeled boots. Their girlfriends were gaudily dressed – one in violent orange and the other in bloody crimson, with feather boas draped around their necks. Their skirts were scandalously short, revealing high-topped, lace-up boots.

‘Gorblimey – who ’ave we ’ere then?’ sneered one of the boys, spying Jemma, his hair greased back under his jaunty hat. ‘Isn’t that the little simpleton who was nearly run over by the Rutherfords’ carriage in her underclothes? She looks all prim and proper now, doesn’t she! Goin’ somewhere, missie?’

The gang spread out to block the roadway, jostling each other and catcalling.

Jemma’s heart began to pound. There was a definite sense of menace in his tone and words. She suspected they had been drinking and were looking for trouble. Jemma’s eyes glanced to the left and right, searching for an escape.

‘Come ’ere, little simpleton, and show us yer underwear again,’ called the youth, smacking his lips as he mimed lifting up skirts and dancing.