They sat facing each other in the gloom of the carriage while the cold January twilight deepened around them. John stifled a yawn and apologized.
"You must have had a hard month of it," she said.
"It's the irregularity, not the hardness."
"But it must be a great comfort to know that Nora is looking after her end of things. It's a perfect arrangement."
John agreed.
"Even now. When she knows you are in York, after nearly four weeks away. Even so—she is busy at your interests."
He chuckled and tapped the window lightly, three knocks. "What's in thy mind, lass?"
She leaned forward into the fading light and looked at him intently. "I shall never understand people, John."
"Well, which of us ever does? Given a long life, we may come to understand one or two well enough. And learn a trick or ten for coping with t'others—or keeping out their way. What's the particular puzzle?"
She shook her head and retired again into the dark. "Do you think I should accept Sir George Beador's proposal?"
"You needn't worry about Beador," he said. "We're not throwing him out. He can stay on as a sort of pensioner up at Framwell."
"I feel so sorry for him though."
"That's no substitute for love. In your letter you made it quite clear it would be no love match."
"Love!" she said, almost with mockery. "I came to it so strangely with Tom. Now I think it an accident—intended for some other."
When she added no more he asked: "What do you mean? Came to it so strangely?"
He could not see her face now. She became a voice speaking out from the shadows. "My mother and father were like two cordial strangers sharing an abode for convenience, I believe he overcame his aversion for…for anything… stronger…long enough to beget me. And after that—never again. You understand what I'm speaking about?"
He nodded.
She continued. "I wonder now how my mother felt about that. Though she seemed content enough always. And then when he died and she followed him so soon, you see, I was at once cut off from all example of domestic life between the sexes. All I had ever known was that very dull…at least, now I call it dull, then it seemed secure and eternal…but life at the vicarage was dull."
"And you went straight from that to the Church Commissioners girls' orphanage? That was even less preparation."
"Well…" she said doubtfully.
He waited.
"I did not tell you all," she said. Her voice was trembling; he could hear the fear in her pushing it from her control.
"Nor do you need to," he said.
"I do. I do." She was past stopping. But as she spoke, the fear seemed to lift from her. The effort had been to start. "May I tell you something, John? I never thought I would tell anyone. I never told Tom. But since he is dead the thought of it keeps coming back."
"If you are sure of never regretting it."
"I'm sure of that. With you it will be safe."
"I don't mean that. I mean it might be better to talk with a complete outsider." Her exasperation cut him short. "Or a woman—Nora? Have you told her?"
She thought hard before she answered. "It's a man's view I need. That's what I don't know."
"Very well. I hope I'm the right person."
She breathed in, steeling herself again. "You and Nora sometimes mention a Reverend Doctor Prendergast, now bishop in Manchester I think."
John sat upright suddenly, startled out of his role of passive sympathizer. "Go on."
She hesitated again. "You will remember that although I was born a vicar's daughter, I have seen quite a different level of life since then. You will not be shocked if I speak of…things that a vicar's daughter…"
"That is not the fear," he warned again. "The fear is that, however I respond, you will regret speaking of it at all. What of Prendergast?"
"When I first heard you mention him to Nora, last autumn"—she laughed—"I was so startled! I thought—now you will be ashamed of me—I thought, I suspected…" She faltered.
"You suspected that from the little you told me that morning at Coutances I had made investigations and found out something."
She was astounded. "How do you know that! I'm ashamed to have suspected you."
"But why? It would be very human. Tell me about Prendergast. Is it the same man?"
"It must be. He knew my father, I think. Or so he claimed. He came to the orphanage just after I went in there, and they let him take me out to tea. Of course, they would." There was quite a silence before she continued. "He offered to take me away from there. I thought he meant to adopt me, because that's what it sounded like." She giggled nervously. "I was only sixteen then."
"Oh, dear," John said. "You really want to go on?"
"If you'd rather not…"
"I can imagine the rest, knowing Prendergast."
She laughed then, harshly. "Oh, you cannot! I mean he told me. He made it very clear. He told me
exactly.
Every detail, every step, every move. Everything. And he spoke so-ooh! So drily. Like a—geometry book. No—a dancing master. Oh I don't know what he was like."
"How terrible for you."
"But it wasn't. Because, you see, I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about. I thought he was—strange, of course. But you know how children accept almost anything that grownups tell them? And especially a dignified old clergyman like that. It seemed no more silly than—deportment classes or—physical exercises."
A flesh-curdling thought began to seize John. "And—did you…did he…" He could not voice it.
She laughed. "I would have. Truly, I was so ignorant, I would have. But he told me to think upon it and he would come back for an answer." She sighed the relief he felt. "He never came. I never saw him again. Do you know," she said in a brisker tone, "I believe now—knowing the ways of the world a great deal better—I believe he never
intended
to come back. I think his pleasure was merely to talk about it in that calm way to a completely ignorant young girl. I even think I was not the first. Nor the last."
He thought that was very perceptive of her. "Poor old gentleman," he said.
"Yes. That's all I feel about him now. But when I ran away from the orphanage, I was so nearly trapped again. In London that was. And in a place that would have made Prendergast's…
arrangement
seem almost pure."
He stifled the urge to tell her again that he could imagine it—though, of course, he could. She was too intent upon confession.
"The first man they—let into the room—well, I have often wondered about him. I cannot remember him at all, whether he was young or old or fat or thin or short or tall or anything. I must have been partly stupefied by something they gave me. I remember the madam though—a hard, pretty woman, still quite young. I'll tell you who she was like—Madame Corneille. Just like her."
"I picture her exactly!"
"Anyway, this man. I imagine he had dreamed of doing what he came to do for years before he tightened up his courage."
"You knew by this time? You understood?"
"Half. I had seen things in that place and heard the girls talking. But this man, when the moment arrived, I think it must all have—evaporated for him. And he saw himself left with a ridiculous, dead feeling, and a half-drugged, frightened, tearful, disgusted young girl. That's what I imagine. D'you know what he did to me? He combed my hair! For almost an hour that's all he did. Until I could talk sensibly. Then he asked me if I wanted to go from that place. And I thought he meant with him. I thought it was Prendergast again—the same offer. But, anyway, I said yes, because I thought I could escape from him easier than from madam. So he made me pretend I was in a dead faint. I had to chew soap to froth and so on. Then he ran out in a panic and said he was a doctor and thought I was dying. And she was so terrified she let him take me to—he said—the women's hospital. Or perhaps she thought she could always pretend to be a relative and come and claim me from the hospital. Anyway, the miracle worked."
"It was a miracle."
"It's like a moral ballad, isn't it! The man took me straight to the Tabard. I don't
know what tale he told Tom—certainly not the true one. But there I stayed. First as scullery maid, then—when he found I was a vicar's daughter—Tom put me upstairs. Why can't I remember that man's face?"
"Did he never come to the Tabard again?"
"He may have. And I wouldn't have recognized him, you see. For a long time I thought of him as 'my saviour' and even—though it was blasphemy—as my
Saviour.
You know?"
"That wouldn't be blasphemy, Sarah. To rescue girls in that situation would be His work." Struck by a thought he looked over the street, where the gaslights were being lighted. He moved to the seat by the window on that side. "Look there," he said, pointing to where the "gay" girls of Station Road shivered, stamped their feet, and walked morosely up and down beneath the flaring gas.
She moved across and looked out too. He felt the sudden warmth of her nearness in the dark and withdrew. "How many of them lacked only the good fortune that saved you?"
She shuddered and returned to her former seat. "I often think it."
"Still. A tavern in Southwark is, many would say, only one step up from the place you were spirited from."
"But a very important step, John. A girl couldn't close her eyes and ears to it, but she could keep herself pure. And then I fell in love with Tom, years before he even looked at me. And that made it easy. Oh, but wasn't he a marvellous man?"
"He was. He was lucky too, in you. You were both lucky. I ought to light the carriage lamp."
"Leave it a bit. Nora's a long time."
He wondered why she had told him all this. "A long way from George Beador," he said.
She sighed. In the light that shone feebly from over the street he saw her hands grip and rub one another. "Does it still happen to you, John, that you look back at yourself as you were six months ago and you think what an ignorant, innocent goose you were? How little of life you knew then and how wise you are now?"
And he had to confess that it was years since he had had such notions.
"It's like that all the time with me. All those years at the Tabard when I was so prudish. And then when I went to France with Tom last year I was still like that at first, until…He was so patient and gentle. And so I learned it is not always shameful and wicked. Does that sound brazen?"
"Of course not." He sat tensely, guarding himself for one false word or gesture that might dry her up.
"Remember, we were not married. Yet even in the depths of my soul, even when I faced God in church and took His Body and Blood at communion, I could feel no shame."
He almost told her that he had once lived for a year with a girl he had married navvy-style, over the anvil, and had got her with child before she ran away from him. But caution checked him before he began to speak.
"You still aren't shocked?" she asked.
"Not at all. That kind of shock is really a sort of timidity."
"I remember how it was to lie with Tom. And I still feel no shame. Those uxorial memories are very strong. Are they equally strong in everyone? We can never gauge that, can we?"
"Do you really think marrying Beador would help?"
"I would have no other reason for marrying him."
"But do you really want to marry him?"
A man was walking past the girls across the street, looking at and talking to them in turn; then he went off with one of them. Sarah drew an enormous breath, let it out, and said: "If you really ask me, I want it to be as easy for me as for that man over there. I will never fall in love again. So what am I to do with—those feelings? We call them 'uxorial,' but we both know what they are. Now I'm sure you are shocked."
He knew exactly what she was offering him then; and he was fairly certain that she knew too. The moment was exciting and he wanted to prolong it—to think of himself as capable of taking up such an offer—though he knew that in the end he would have to decline it. The conventional response: If only there was some way I could help…rose to his throat and was half uttered before he realized its implication. He changed it to: "If only there was some way I could…illustrate it for you. What you say is not unnatural, not shocking, not even uncommon. The same longings overtake me when I am away from Nora for weeks. So how could I be shocked or surprised? And a few nights ago, in London, I did what that man over there just did."
"Oh, John! I didn't mean you to…"
"Wait! Listen to the whole story. I actually went with this girl to a little hotel. But just before we got there I realized how—tawdry it was going to be. Unlovely and tawdry." He laughed. "My one thought then was how not to hurt
her
feelings."
The lamplighter came back and put on the lamps along their side as John spoke.
"How like you," she said. "What did you do?"
"I had some filberts in my pocket. I bit the shell of one and gave the kernel to her, and then bit another and pretended it had broken one of my teeth and I was in too much pain."
The incident had actually happened two years ago but to say so would have diluted the force of the tale. "Suppose you suddenly had that feeling—tawdry— while you were walking up the aisle with George Beador. Or, even worse, afterward. Toothache would offer no escape then."
She nodded glumly. It was cold comfort, all right. To change the mood he returned to the seat opposite her and, daringly, reached a hand across and squeezed her knee. And daringly he grinned a wicked grin as he said: "Find a discreet lover. You'd not be the first young widow to do such a thing."