Victorian Maiden (17 page)

“Oh, thank t' stars, she's a-come ‘round,” said another voice. 

It was Old Rachel.

“Lizzie… Lizzie… it's us. It's Mary and Rachel. You fainted and now you're in the infirmary.” 

Mary's face appeared above hers and she felt warm fingers entwining her own.

“Mary, they've taken Sarah away. I don't know where she is!”

“Hush, Lizzie, I know, I know. Mr Price arranged it all. He said that she'd been adopted into a good, local family. Don't fret; I've checked with Mr Petty at Sessrum and no one has seen a little girl that young come through the house – recently anyway. I don't suppose Mr Price would have taken her to his own house to hurt her there either because of his wife. She adores children although she can't have any of her own. Anyway, Sarah Beatrice is too little – even for him.”

“Find her, Mary. Please find her and bring her back to me!” 

Little pricks of light were beginning to fill her vision, and she felt as if she was beginning to float; almost as if she'd just been given some of her uncle's medicine for wicked girls.

“I will find her, Lizzie, I promise.”

Mary's voice was distant now. 

“I'll find her. I'll find her if it takes me a lifetime.”

“Please find her, Mary.”

The four of them: Atticus, Lucie, Mary and Dr Roberts, stared in disbelief at the old woman now singing ‘Hush-a-bye, baby' softly to herself, as she rocked to-and-fro.

“Good Lord,” Roberts exclaimed, his teacup frozen in mid-air, “She spoke to us. That was as plain as the nose on my face. She understood everything we just said.”

“It's no wonder the police wouldn't entertain the McNaughton rules,” Atticus added.

Mary shook her head.

“I don't think so. Sometimes she seems to understand a little of what's being said to her. Occasionally, on a good day, she even makes odd remarks like that which seem perfectly sensible. Most of the time though, in fact, almost all of the time, she might as well be on the moon.”

She took Elizabeth's hand and held her fingers.

“Lizzie, do you know where Sarah might be?”

Elizabeth stared down at their hands and rocked.

“One and eight and eight and one is Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One,” she sang.

“Do you know where her daughter might have gone, Miss Lovell?” Lucie asked, after a respectable amount of time had passed.

“Surely the workhouse records would show the name of the adopting family?”

Mary shook her head once more.

“When the parishes combined into the union and the big new union workhouse was built at Knaresborough, a lot of the old records disappeared. I'm not even certain there was ever a record kept in the first place. I've searched and searched over the years, but I've never found anything. I suppose no-one saw a need to keep an adoption record of a dozen years previous.”

“Damned sloppy,” interjected Roberts, and Atticus grunted in agreement.

“All I can recall,” Mary continued, “Is that one of the overseers at Starbeck arranged for Sarah to be adopted just after her second birthday. It was by coincidence, Mr Price, the ringleader of my rape in the Annexe. You can see him on the photograph there: He's the one standing next to Mr Alfred.”

As one, they glanced up at the photograph and picked out his image. There he was; a broad, powerfully built man, with one massive arm crooked over Alfred Roberts' shoulder.

“Is he still alive, do you know?” Atticus asked.

Mary said: “No,” and Roberts added: “Thankfully not. He died a few years ago of a heart attack. Not that I would have believed for one minute that he actually had a heart, but I remember reading it in his obituary so it must be true. He was another great Harrogate philanthropist, so it said.”

“That's a pity; he might have been able to remember where Miss Sarah was adopted. Does he have any close relatives, do you know?”

This time Roberts nodded.

“He has a wife, Anne Price. She's still alive, although she's very old and frail now. I believe she lives over in Low Harrogate, to be near the Pump Rooms.”

“Anne Price was a lovely, kind-hearted lady,” Mary added, the warmth of the memory forcing her to smile.

“She used to bring all kinds of sweets and toys for the workhouse children when she visited with her abomination of a husband. She couldn't have any children of her own, so she would come over and spend hours and hours with the pauper children instead. We quite missed seeing her when we moved to Knaresborough and we had the new parish guardians instead of the old overseers.”

“I can't see how it's likely she'll remember what her husband did with one little girl though, Fox,” Roberts said, voicing all their thoughts.

“He must have moved dozens of girls on, most of them into misery, and it was over forty years ago.”

They all had the same, terrible thought, and inevitably, it was Atticus who voiced it.

“Was she brought here, do you think – to the Friday Club?”

Mary winced and glanced at Elizabeth. Thankfully, she seemed unaware of the conversation going on around her.

“We can only pray not, Mr Fox. Sarah was only two. I checked at the time with one of the servants here, and he told me that no-one had seen a girl that young come into the Annexe.”

“So then why adopt her out?” Lucie asked, “Why take her from her mother, when her mother could quite easily ruin him in an instant? Did he sell her abroad do you think?”

Mary shrugged.

“Who knows for sure? But the Matron told me that Sarah was still in the West Riding and she had no reason to lie. Lizzie told me that Price believed he was the girl's father. Around the time Sarah would have been conceived, Price had taken Lizzie with him up to Alfred's hunting lodge in Northumberland. He raped her there many times, so it's quite possible, I suppose, that he was. I wouldn't have thought he'd have wanted to ship his own daughter abroad, but then at the same time, I could very well understand a monster like him wanting something as incriminating as an illegitimate daughter well out of the way.”

Elizabeth had stopped singing her lullaby. She had stopped rocking.

Mary reached over and wrapped her skinny fingers around a teacup. Elizabeth looked down at it, and her mouth gaped like a nestling's.

Mary said: “Mr Price took you to Budle Tower didn't he, Lizzie? Mr Price took you to Northumberland.”

Elizabeth nodded, and the teacup quietly dropped and vomited its contents across the carpet.

 

The shrill whistle shrieked along the length of the express train and dissolved into the chill of the afternoon; dissolved everywhere, that is, except within her soul. There it compounded with the silent screams of her anguish; with Sarah's; with John's; with little Peter Lovegood's… And grew louder and louder and louder.

She concentrated her whole being on the rhythmic clicks of the carriage wheels as they glided over the joints in the tracks. She closed her thoughts to everything except her urgings of the train to slow, to stop, to falter somehow, so that she need never set foot again in Northumberland, in that accursed county where forever a little boy floated face down in the rank black waters of her mind.

Mr Price was taking her to Budle, Uncle Alfie's hunting lodge, far to the north. It wasn't far from the Holy Island, John had said. They were supposed to have stayed there after the game of Viking Marauders that had gone so horribly wrong, when little Peter Lovegood had drowned and Sarah had screamed her scream of terror. But, after the cleansed sands of the causeway had reappeared once more, Uncle Alfie had ordered that the coach take them straight back to Newcastle and the fast train to Yorkshire. So she had only ever seen the big, square tower at Budle as a charcoal sketch. 

John had said it was a peel tower; a fortified house built hundreds of years previously, by the wild Reiver clans. He said it was full of the brutal pikes and swords and maces that Uncle Alfie was so fond of collecting, and that if you went to the very top and gazed out over the battlements, you could see for miles and miles and miles across the sea, far beyond even the Holy Island. He swore that he had once seen Denmark.

But that was before the game of Viking Marauders, and that was before Mr James had taken him alone up to Budle. Now, he wouldn't talk about it at all.

Her first glimpse of Budle Tower rather surprised her. It surprised her not because it looked in any way dissimilar to the charcoal sketch that hung between the windows in the library at Sessrum House; it surprised her in that it looked so exactly like it. 

Budle Tower was built of grey-black whinstone, and founded solidly on a grey-black, featureless drift of the same hard rock. Behind it, the cold, slate-grey Northumbrian sky was reflected perfectly in the cold, slate-grey waters of the North Sea.

Uncle Alfie kept only two servants at his hunting lodge, neither of whom she had met; a gamekeeper and a housekeeper. On the day that Mr Price first took her up to Budle Tower, the gamekeeper had gone off for the day to Berwick to fetch his new apprentice boy. Mr James was bringing a hunting party up for the following week and he would certainly be needed for that.

Miss Pearce was the housekeeper, and at the sound of the horses' hooves clopping and sliding on the smooth, hard rock of the lane leading up to the tower, she had slipped through the great front door and stood as attentively and as patiently as a spider in its web to welcome her special guests.

When Lizzie saw her standing by the door, with her hands clasped respectfully in front of her pure white apron, she again found herself not a little surprised. The servants at Sessrum always seemed to be sharing smirks or conspiratorial winks whenever Miss Pearce's name was mentioned, and Lizzie had always assumed that there must be something quite peculiar about her. But that certainly seemed not to be the case. She seemed perfectly normal, quite pretty even, if in a rather mannish way with long auburn hair and a ready, careful smile. 

When Mr Price had been talking to her on the long coach journey from Newcastle, Lizzie had begun to hear the catch in his voice; that awful, breathless catch gentlemen get when they are thinking of punishing some poor little girl, and it had become more and more pronounced the closer to Budle they came. 

She had hoped it was just the pure, clean air of Northumberland catching in his lungs, but then his enormous hands with their short, stubby fingers had begun to move. They had slipped inexorably towards her every time the only other passenger in the coach, an ancient gentleman with long, white whiskers, had drifted off into one of his frequent, fitful dozes. She was very glad indeed that there was another woman at Budle.

When she thought about it, she was especially glad that it was Miss Pearce at Budle. She knew that Miss Pearce must be some kind of entertainer – a turn. Perhaps Miss Pearce might somehow entertain Mr Price through the long, lonely nights, so that the shadows behind her door might stay mercifully still, and he might not come and slip into her bed. 

She was sure Miss Pearce must be a very accomplished performer. Several times each year, Uncle Alfie would arrange for her to be brought down to Harrogate – a not inconsiderable distance – to do a turn with Mrs Eire in the smoking room of the Friday Club. All of the gentlemen members would be sure to attend their performance. Sometimes they would bring other gentlemen as guests too and on those nights, Mr Otter the steward would quite have his work cut out.

She wasn't altogether sure what form Miss Pearce and Mrs Eire's performances took. No one seemed particularly inclined to talk about it. But in spite of the thick walls and deep carpets of the clubroom, there was always a constant sound of rumbustious merriment. In fact, as her cousin John once remarked, they seemed to be raising Merry Hell itself in there.

There always seemed to be more than the usual number of waifs and strays in the Annexe on the nights when Miss Pearce and Mrs Eire were performing for the gentlemen. And when they had finished and the guests had gone home, the waifs and strays would be roused. They would be dragged up the iron stairs, one after another, and taken away by the gentlemen to be punished. Mr Otter certainly did have his work cut out then. The gentlemen always seemed to be having their work cut out too. And the girls would scream and scream and scream.

Night was when the bad things happened. But here, in the utter solitude of Budle, where the days were as quiet and as lonely as the nights, she worried whether perhaps the bad things might happen by day too. And so she had climbed to the very top of the spiral stairway that wound its way up one corner of the tower. It was horribly like the great stairwell of the Annexe at Sessrum House, but with the added terrors of the silent, unmoving suits of armour watching her from the shadows of every corner. 

Each and every one of the stone steps had been worn down by the centuries of feet that had trodden the very same route that she now took. She wondered how many of them had pounded them in fear and mortal dread. What horrors had these ancient stones witnessed since they were first laid down by their Reiver founders? 

She was jerked from her thoughts by the sound of Mr Price's harsh laughter echoing up the stairwell. She could feel it echoing inside her head. Perhaps Miss Pearce was entertaining him already? Yes, that would be it. Miss Pearce would be performing and making him laugh. But another part of her mind, an insistent, disquieting part told her Mr Price wasn't here for laughter, or the pure, fresh air. He was here for her.

At the very top of the stairs, just as at Sessrum House, there was a door. But unlike at Sessrum House, when she timidly pushed it open and peered through into the world beyond, there was no overpowering stench of tobacco, no ravenous leers and no raucous, mocking laughter. Here there was only silence, and the glorious scent of the sea. Instead of the terrible, terrible screams of the girls, there was only the far distant screech of gulls.

She crossed to the parapet and looked out over the broad whinstone drift. She gazed across the broad, flat sands of the bay to the black, black waters of the North Sea beyond. Except that the waters weren't black at all. The clouds had parted now, and they were a deep, sparkling blue. They reflected perfectly the glorious blue of the sky above them, and Lizzie realised all at once that they were there simply to do the bidding of the Heavens. They would mimic the Heavens in their colour, and they would follow it in their tides. It was the tide that had drowned little Peter Lovegood, but it was the Heavens that had seen his wretched terror and had taken pity on him. It was the Heavens over Lindisfarne – the Holy Island. They must have known that he was really a good little boy. They must have known that it was better to be drowned in the black, black waters of the North Sea than to be drowned in the suffering and cruelty that Mr James and her uncle meted out.

She watched as the waves became myriad points of light, reflecting the sun as it slowly arced over her, and gradually, she began to fill with dread. She felt a sickening fear of the time when the orb and the far-distant Cheviot Hills would finally kiss, knowing that night would surely follow, that bad things would happen and that Mr Price would surely come.