Victorian Maiden (23 page)

As Detective Inspector Douglas had pointed out so vehemently, re-uniting long lost relatives was a task to which privately commissioned investigators were particularly suited. Even so, it took Atticus and Lucie Fox several long and mentally shattering days of searching the parochial registers to find that Miss Sarah Beatrice Price, spinster, had indeed been married to a Samuel Elswick esquire, a man ten years her junior. What had caused them so much time and effort in their search was the fact that she hadn't actually been married until the Eighth of July of the year Eighteen Eighty-Five, by which time she was fully in her thirty-ninth year. It was also, by coincidence, the day the police were finally called to the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette in London in order to control the morally-outraged crowds baying for copies of Mr William T. Stead's next article in his series: ‘
The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.'

Mr Samuel Elswick, the society report in the
Harrogate Advertiser
had noted, was the son of a wealthy industrialist of the City of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

 

A tiny voice in her dream was nagging. It was nagging at her to wake up. She dearly wished it would stop, because she was still so very tired. But it persisted; it wouldn't heed the anguished, anguished pleas of her brain begging for it to be silent, to be still, so that she could sleep forever in peace. Again and again, it urged her to wake, goaded her to open her eyes. She tried. Light flooded in – light so very bright that it hurt. 

The voice nagged again. She needed to ignore it. It really was just too much effort to keep trying to obey. She drifted back to the womblike safety of sleep. But the voice was still there and it was getting louder and louder and more insistent. Now that she thought about it, she did vaguely recognise it. She thought it might have been the voice of a friend she had had when she was alive. Or it might have been her dear mama!

She forced her eyes to open and the light burned again. This time she could just about make out what might have been a face peering down at her. Was it – could it really be her mama? She blinked, awkwardly and painfully, and the shapes and shadows merged into human form. But it wasn't the face of her mama gazing fondly down at her; it was the face of Mary – dear Mary Lovell. She could hear snippets of her voice as if in the far distance. 

“Lizzie – Lizzie, it's me – it's Mary. Please wake up.” 

She retched and the face dissolved into shapes and shadows once more. 

“Lizzie, you're back at Starbeck – in the infirmary; you're back at the workhouse.”

So she wasn't dead at all, and Tom had lied to her. The bridge hadn't been high enough to kill her, and she was still here, still bound and imprisoned in her body. In her broken, mortal body.

“They found you on Monday morning, soaking wet and lying inside the bridge works,” Mary continued. “What on earth were you doing up there?”

Elizabeth tried to lift her head and the movement filled her eyes with a million dancing stars. She waited for them to fade and settle before she dared to whisper her answer.

“I wanted it to be the End of the World.”

“I don't know about the End of the World,” Mary said, “But it's the end of your work at the Castle Mill for a while. The foreman – a man called Tom – tried to keep you. He tried to have you treated in the apprentice house there until you were well enough to get back to work. He even tried to have the mill pay for you to be treated in one of the Harrogate hospitals, but the owner, Mr John Walton, said no. He said that it would be commercial folly to do that when there is a perfectly good infirmary here. 

You've been hurt in your fall, Lizzie; badly hurt. You could have easily died. I dare say you'll be in this infirmary bed for a time to come yet.”

“Where's Rachel, Mary?”

She felt Mary's hands take her own. 

“Rachel died, Lizzie. It was a month or so back. She died very peacefully in her sleep.”

Lizzie felt a deep stab of grief, and perhaps another of envy. A peaceful death in her sleep: Old Rachel had deserved that. It was a special death, just as Old Rachel herself was special. Grace Darling had not been allowed a peaceful death. Hers was a lingering, tortured death from consumption. But Grace had died when she was twenty-seven, and Rachel had been made to wait until she was old. But now Rachel would be in Heaven, watching over her like she always had, and watching over Baby Sarah.

Sarah! Dear Lord, what if she'd died? What if the witch pool had drowned her with its icy fingers, or Tom had been right after all? What if the viaduct had been high enough to kill her? Mary had said that she could easily have died. What would Baby Sarah have done if she had come back to her and found that her dear mama was dead, just as her own dear mama was dead, and Old Rachel was dead? Dear, sweet Lord, what would have become of her then?

How could she not have thought of little Baby Sarah? How could she have been so selfish? 

One and eight and eight and one, was Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One, when she now knew for sure the world to an end shall come.

She knew also that she was bound, but not only bound; she was chained. She was bound and chained to this world until the day it ended, by her wickedness and by her love for Baby Sarah.

 

The prosperous town of Gosforth lay just to the north of the great industrial engine of the Empire that was the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was just far enough from the city for the residents not to be unduly bothered by the noise, or the sight, or the smell, of the myriad mills and manufactories there; nor by the small armies of workers that laboured twelve hours each day in the murk and gloom within them. But it was also close enough for the owners of those same mills and manufactories to watch over them as geese might watch over their golden eggs. Like Harrogate, Gosforth was a town of estates and of villas, of polite conversation and of elegance.

A long train journey up the East Coast Main Line of the North Eastern Railway, and a few polite questions, brought Atticus and Lucie Fox to the imposing front gates of one of the modern, red brick, Gosforth villas. An empty wicker bath chair by the prettily-painted front door confirmed that they were indeed at the house of Mr Samuel Elswick, esquire, and most importantly, of his wife Sarah Beatrice. It also confirmed just how difficult obtaining a private audience with Mrs Elswick was likely to be.

Once again, Atticus took out one of their calling cards and wrote ‘Affaires' neatly in one corner. Then he underlined it. The motto embossed onto each card read:
Quo Fata Vocant.
It translated as: ‘Whither the Fates call,' and it seemed somehow especially appropriate with this commission, since so many parts of it seemed to lie so firmly in the unknown spinning of the Fates.

“Do we have a plan for this?” he asked.

Lucie glanced at the bath chair and shook her head.

“I think we've no choice but to play this one as it comes, Ad libitum. So it would be better I think, Atticus, if I lead the conversation.”

Atticus frowned, but nodded and reached for the latch.

Their knock was answered promptly by a housekeeper, who took their card, and showed them into the drawing room, with the customary promise to enquire as to whether the master was at home. But it was not the housekeeper, but the master of the house himself, who returned a few short minutes later, and he was puce with rage.

“How dare you!” he hissed without introduction. “How dare you come to my home, bringing your abominations with you? Tell me why I shouldn't send for the police this very instant?”

“Because you wouldn't want a society scandal, most probably,” Lucie replied evenly, almost insolently.

Elswick glared at her, his face a contortion of hatred and venom.

“Let me tell you exactly what a scandal to society is, woman. It's when people like you take your pieces of silver from monsters like the Roberts and don't give a damn about the consequences or the pain they might cause.”

“So you know why we're here?”

Atticus was shocked.

Elswick turned his fury onto Atticus.

“I presume that you've come to take my daughter away with you – or try to, anyway, although I can't see how you could possibly imagine you might succeed. I'm not some derelict who'd sell his daughter for a bottle of gin.”

He looked conspicuously at the visiting card.

“‘A and L. Fox, Commissioned Investigators.' Commissioned procurers don't you mean? My mother-in-law told me that you'd been creeping around her in Harrogate, and she warned me you might try to bother us here too. Now you listen to me, Fox: I don't care a tinker's cuss what happens to the reputation of Barty Price. He's dead now anyway, and his widow can live here, with her daughter, well away from any ‘society scandal' there might be if she chooses. But I will not give up my daughter to Roberts and his abomination of a Gentlemen's Club. What sort of father do you think I am? Do you think I could just stand by and see another life ruined?”

“Mr Elswick, Mr Elswick!”

Lucie somehow didn't need to raise her voice to break the force of his diatribe.

“I don't know what Mrs Price has told you, but we have no interest whatsoever in taking your daughter, or anyone else for that matter, anywhere.”

As he stared, Elswick's expression turned firstly to bewilderment, and then to guarded curiosity.

“You don't? Then why are you here?”

Lucie silenced Atticus with a glance and said: “Roberts' – Alfred Roberts' Gentlemen‘s Club – closed years ago, and Alfred Roberts is dead. We represent his grandson Michael Roberts, who had nothing to do with the club, and who hated his grandfather and everything he stood for even more perhaps than you do. I presume you knew that your late father-in-law was a close associate of Alfred?”

Elswick nodded.

“I did, and he caused my wife – his own adopted daughter – more misery than you can possibly imagine.”

“I can assure you that we have spoken to enough victims of the Friday Club to well imagine exactly what kind of misery your wife must have endured,” Lucie said.

“So you know then?”

Lucie nodded.

“Michael Roberts told us. He's an eminent psychiatrist who has devoted his life to helping people who have been forced to suffer exactly as your wife has.”

Relief seemed almost to pour out of Elswick, and he turned his face suddenly away from them.

“Did he take her to the Friday Club?” Lucie asked gently.

Elswick turned back. His face was flushed and his eyes were moist and glistening.

“No, Mrs Fox, in the end he never did. He kept her entirely for himself. She was threatened with it though. Yes indeed. He told her precisely what did happen to the young girls who passed through the doors of that Hell-hole: How they were kept locked in a dungeon by a monster of a steward; how they were passed from bed to bed for the gentlemen's pleasure, and how eventually they would be shipped off to God-knows-where to work as whores and slaves for the rest of their lives. He told her that if she ever breathed a word about what he was doing to her, even to her own mother, then she would be taken there and left. He even took her and showed her the sign they had above the door, some Latin expression telling them to abandon all hope. She still sees it in her dreams now. But no, Mrs Fox, in the end she was spared the tender mercies of the Friday Club. She was his own adopted daughter, you see, and he loved her too much to share.”

“And what do you know of her mother – of her natural mother?”

“Oh, I know all about her mother too, Mrs Fox. She was a workhouse girl wasn't she? Sarah – my wife – had a blazing row with her father one day and he told her, in the heat of the argument, that she was the illegitimate daughter of a workhouse prostitute.”

He shrugged.

“It makes no difference to me who or what her mother was. She had no more control over her mother than this Michael Roberts had over his grandfather.”

He managed a weak smile.

“In the weeks leading up to our wedding day, Sarah became very anxious. It made her quite ill in the end. She seemed to me to be looking for a reason to call the whole thing off. Eventually we had sharp words and it all came out; who she really was and how she'd been born in a workhouse; how she had been adopted by her parents and eventually what… what her father used to do to her.”

“I understand that one of Alfred Roberts' associates took a young girl up to Roberts' hunting lodge in Northumberland for a time,” Lucie said grimly. “A little time later that girl found out that she was with child.”

The air in the room froze.

“What did you say?” Elswick asked.

“We've been told that the girl was used wretchedly whilst she was up there,” Lucie continued, “And that not long after her return, she ran away to the workhouse to have her baby. It was a baby girl.”

“An associate of Alfred Roberts took a girl up to Northumberland and left her with a baby girl? Who was that?”

Atticus and Lucie's brutal silence served as answer enough.

“Price – you mean that Sarah was Price's own daughter, his real daughter?”

The relief in its turn vanished from his face, and he reeled visibly.

“We don't know that for certain,” Atticus interrupted hurriedly, “But it appears your father-in-law for one was convinced that she was his own daughter.”

“Price used a prostitute?”

Lucie shook her head.

“Elizabeth Wilson, your wife's real mother, was no prostitute, Mr Elswick. She was an innocent young girl who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Friday Club. Your wife – her daughter – was the result of her rape, most likely by your father-in-law. I say most likely because it's quite possible it could have been by any one of a number of other men, including her own uncle. Mr Elswick, I'm so sorry.”