A Dark Dividing (45 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
Viola and Sorrel. Harry sat back on his heels, no longer aware of the tiny bookshop with its wares spilling over on to the floor, and the musty shelves filled with nameless publications.
Viola and Sorrel
. And Floy had dedicated
The Ivory Gate
to ‘C’ and to Viola and Sorrel. It was an enormous leap of faith to think he had found Floy’s Viola and Sorrel, but surely there could not have been two sets of girls with those names in that era. But did this mean that Floy’s Viola and Sorrel had been Siamese twins, performing in what sounded to be a fairly seedy music hall?
At last he got up, paid for the purchase of the playbill, which was £7.50, watched jealously as the proprietor slid it into a manila envelope, and went back out into the hustle of the Soho streets, the envelope clutched in his hands. By the time he got back to his flat he was wholly unable to remember precisely where the bookshop had been.
He rooted out an old photograph frame that was about the right size, discarded the unimportant contents of it (himself and Amanda at some meaningless charity bash), and put the playbill in so that it would be protected by the glass. Then he sat looking at it for a very long time, almost as if by doing so he could draw from it the essence of those long-ago people. Viola and Sorrel. OK, so where do I go from here? How do I go about finding some more?
And why bother? demanded his mind sneakily, kicking in with its opinions as usual. What’s the point? No point at all. Aha, said his mind: Simone Marriot again? Oh, shut up, said Harry to the annoying voice, getting up to reach for
The Ivory Gate
in case there were any more pointers leading back to the past. He might as well finish it in any case.
Floy wound up the story of his small sad heroine neatly and satisfactorily. He gave Tansy a happy ending—at least, he gave the reader the strongest possible hint that a happy ending finally awaited her. Harry was absurdly pleased at this.
One of the children—a boy called Anthony with whom Tansy had grown up in the fearsome old workhouse-cum-orphanage, and who had made brief appearances in the early years in a supporting role—had left the orphanage and come out into the world. He had done so to find work, but also, it appeared, to find Tansy, and there were a couple of quite tense chapters telling how the boy—now a young man of twenty or so—had scoured the twilit half-world of the greedy brutish men who stole children for brothels. Inevitably his search had brought him to the house in Bolt Street, and inevitably when he got there it was just after Tansy—by now sixteen or so—had summoned up sufficient courage to walk out, and had found work in a small flower shop near Covent Garden. Out through the deceiving ivory gate at last and forging a new life among the flowers and the sweet-scented flowering herbs. Violets and wood sorrel. What else? thought Harry.
But Tansy’s new life was to include Anthony, of course, and with help from the older girl who had befriended Tansy in Bolt Place, the story wound its way on to an emotional reunion. Harry, reading this scene critically, was again aware of Floy’s annoyance at not being able to get his two main protagonists into bed together. No sex please, we’re still in the early twentieth century, you know.
The book ended with a deeply satisfying confrontation with the rascally owner of the Bolt Place brothel, and this time there was no doubt about the writer’s enjoyment; Floy had relished every syllable of his villain’s ignominious end.
Tansy had seen the confrontation; she had accompanied Anthony, and she had watched as Anthony had cornered the man, accusing him, threatening him and then finally losing his temper and beating him to a pulp. Harry quite expected her to faint or succumb to hysterics, but heroines in those days—at least, Philip Fleury’s heroines—appeared to be made of sterner stuff. Tansy watched it all from just inside the door, and although several times she had to cram her fist into her mouth to stop herself from crying out, she did not do anything to prevent the man’s punishment. When finally he slumped back on the floor, blood trickling from his mouth, his head lying at an unnatural angle to his body, she knew that he was dead and the lines of a song that the children used to sing ran through and through her mind.
On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.
A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air…
Harry did not recognize the lines, but he thought the meaning was clear enough. Retribution. The justifiable killing of an evil man.
And naked to the hangman’s noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string…
And sharp the link of life will snap,
And dead on air will stand
Heels that held up as straight a chap
As treads upon the land…
The image of the hanged man was startlingly vivid. Harry understood that Floy was saying, as clearly as if he had written it out, that the killing had been deserved; that turned over to the authorities the man would have been sentenced to death anyway. He was not sure he could subscribe to Floy’s outlook but he could not fault Floy’s logic.
The shock came at the end of the chapter, four pages before the end. Tansy’s abductor, the man who had spun the evil, sticky spider-web network of brothels and child prostitution, was the same man who ran the music-hall with the heart-breaking speciality acts. Matt Dancy.
Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
2nd November 1914
If my mind was in turmoil after that afternoon when Floy so unexpectedly came back into my life, the feeling is a drop in the ocean compared to the soul-scalding emotion now engulfing me. Am not even sure I can write it down with any degree of coherence but if I do not do so, think I may burn up with the intensity of it.
My babies are alive. Viola and Sorrel are
alive
. And even though I have written that down on this page, and even though I have spent a long time staring at the words, I still find it difficult to accept. Had thought I would be able to record my emotions tonight and find relief in it, but I cannot; the tears are blotting the page and I must break off…
Later
Midnight, and I am still not able to find words to describe the crushing weight of emotion. But incredibly, somewhere mixed up in the confused tumble, is guilt, because I should have known, I should have
sensed
that my babies weren’t dead—what kind of a mother am I that I did not know they were alive somewhere in the world! But there was the funeral that day and that heartbreaking coffin, and Edward said they had died—
Edward said they had died. That is the thought to which I keep returning.
2.00 a.m.
Am not a great deal calmer, but think am at least calm enough to try to write down all the events. (And will I one day be able to show these pages to Viola and Sorrel? The prospect terrifies me as much as it fills me with delight.) So I have wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders, and I am sitting at the little desk under the window. Clary (Maisie’s replacement as maid-of-all-work) had lit a fire for me, and the glow from the embers is still warming the room. The light is not enough to write by though, so I have lit a small lamp and placed it on the desk. It’s very quiet outside and in here is only the measured ticking of the mantel clock and the occasional settling of coals from within the dying fire. I feel as if I’m the only person awake in the world.
Today—no, yesterday, for it is already long past midnight—began like any other ordinary day, except that no day which might contain Floy could ever be wholly ordinary. But when I went along to the hospital centre everything felt ordinary. It was cold and sharp—the kind of autumn day I love—and I took a tramcar to the centre. Edward finds it shocking that I do this, but I like tram-cars; I like looking at all the people on them and wondering about their lives. Also, it is a quick and convenient way to travel across London (although rather rattly, and dusty, so I wear a motoring hat with a chiffon scarf).
Floy was at the centre ahead of me, talking to one of the men who had been in the group that he had helped bring back from France. When he saw me he came across the long room towards me, and said, without preamble, ‘Charlotte, there’s something you must know at once. Where can we be private?’
So we went into one of the tiny rooms that had been the performers’ dressing-rooms when this was a music hall, and that is now an office, and he made me sit down, and then—unusually for Floy—seemed not to know what to say next. At last he knelt down in front of me and took my hands in his. Then he spoke, and his words sent the entire room spinning crazily around me.
‘Charlotte—my dear love. It’s Viola and Sorrel.’
‘What about them?’ I said, my heart starting to thump with apprehension.
Floy hesitated again, and then said, ‘They’re alive.’
At least I didn’t faint or cry although have to say it was a near thing on both counts. What I did do was to cling to Floy’s hands like some ghastly, die-away Victorian heroine, while I waited for the room to stop whirling madly around me. After what seemed to be a very long time, I was able to say, ‘They can’t be. There was a funeral. There was a coffin—They were
buried
, Floy!’ I had to break off there because I was having a nightmare vision of the twins lowered into their graves while they were still alive. Not dead but only sleepeth…
‘Something was buried that day,’ he said, and then seeing my expression, ‘No, I don’t mean anything macabre, Charlotte. I think the coffin was probably weighted with stones or something. But Viola and Sorrel weren’t inside it.’
‘I must be dreadfully stupid, Floy, but I don’t understand—’
‘I’ve had longer to think about this, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘In fact I’ve had all night. Listen now, is it possible that Edward lied to you about the twins’ deaths? Is it possible that he bribed people at the time?’
‘You mean paid them to say the twins were dead?’ The room had stopped tilting like the deck of a ship in a storm but I still felt very odd. Like being in a dream where nothing is quite what it seems. ‘He might have done, but I don’t see why.’
Floy was still kneeling in front of my chair, his hands still holding mine. ‘My poorest love,’ he said in a voice that was suddenly very gentle. ‘You’re so honest, Charlotte, you’re so absolutely all-of-a-piece all the way through. Not everyone’s as straightforward as you are, or as—as full of light. People have darknesses in their natures—even I do at times. And Edward certainly does. And he’s pretentious and shallow—he’s puffed up with his own small achievements, and he thinks nothing matters so much as possessions and social standing.’
Floy was perfectly right about this, although at that point I ought by rights to have defended Edward.
‘The birth of the twins put Edward in a dilemma,’ went on Floy. ‘His vision of what he wanted for himself and his family—his vision of how he wanted people to perceive him—didn’t include two flawed children. Edward belongs to the pitiful section of society that regards anyone outside the norm as an embarrassment. Even shameful. And he saw the twins as a very great embarrassment—maybe even as a slur on his manhood.’ He gave me the sweet, infinitely intimate smile. ‘He wasn’t to know they weren’t his anyway,’ he said.
‘No. Go on, please. Tell me it all.’
‘This is all supposition,’ he said, ‘but I can’t see how else it could have happened. I think that as soon as the twins were born Edward conceived the plan to put them into an institution. But he knew that you would never have agreed to it—’
‘Of course I wouldn’t!’
‘Edward knew that, so he simply didn’t allow the question to arise. He told you the girls had died, paid several people to keep quiet—doctors, nurses, church authorities, God knows who else!—and then got the twins away to a children’s home of some kind. It’s the only possible answer, Charlotte.’
‘An orphanage,’ I said, staring at him. ‘He put them in an orphanage.’ Against my will a dreadful image of Mortmain House and all its darkness and sadness rose up before my inner eye. People have darknesses, Floy had said, but buildings also have darknesses sometimes. Had my beautiful babies been taken to a place like Mortmain?
‘Floy,’ I said, ‘where are they now? Viola and Sorrel?’ I realized I was still clutching his hands so hard that it must have been bruising him so I pulled my hands free and held on to the wooden chair-arms instead.
‘They’re in London,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to trace exactly what happened to them—we can do that later—but they’re here in London, Charlotte.’
‘Where—?’
Floy’s eyes were filled with the most intense compassion I had ever seen. ‘They’re in the hands of a man called Matt Dancy,’ he said. ‘Why did you jump when I said that?’
‘It doesn’t matter for the moment.’
‘Dancy owns houses of ill-repute—’
‘He owns brothels,’ I said angrily. ‘Whore-houses. It’s not like you to use euphemisms, Floy.’
‘I’m sorry. Dancy’s brothels are the worst kind,’ he said. ‘Children and young boys. But Viola and Sorrel aren’t in one of them; Dancy has other interests, Charlotte. He puts on music-hall shows.’
I looked at him blankly. ‘The twins couldn’t be in a music hall, Floy. They’re
children
! They’re fourteen!’
‘Dancy’s put them in a freak show,’ said Floy, and that was when the sick darkness came down again, and this time I really did faint.
5.30 a.m.
It’s barely light outside, but I can hear Mrs Tigg and Clary moving around downstairs—there’s the chink of crockery and the rasping of the stove being raked out. In about an hour—perhaps a little longer—I will go downstairs and there will be a pot of tea made and they will give me a cup. Mrs Tigg will exclaim to see me up and about so early, and blame it on this nasty war, upsetting Christian ladies so that they can’t sleep properly in their beds, and why not let me bring a nice breakfast tray up to your room, mum.
At least a merciful Providence has decreed Edward is still away, compiling his inventories for the army. I have absolutely no idea how I am going to face Edward after this, in fact I have absolutely no idea how I am going to be able to go on living as Edward’s wife after this. I can forgive a great many things, but if Floy’s suspicions are proved right I can never,
never
forgive Edward.
I have no idea what I shall do next, but I know I am going to find my babies, I
am
.