Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman (27 page)

“Sounds to me like she really did her best to do a good job for the family, so what changed? Something must have happened to make her throw over everything and run off. Running away would be a scary business for a young village girl. What would she know of the world and where could she have possibly gone? Must have been something really bad, something that made her risk leaving the known for the unknown and a world where she knew no one at all. Life in Haversham village does not prepare anyone for life outside it. So think about the worst things that can happen to a young helpless girl in service that would make her take such a risk. I wonder what that could have been.”

Mrs. Jackson felt he was putting her on the spot and she was uncomfortable. “I can't, really I can't. She was not a reckless girl.” Her thoughts went back to her own first years in service. Sometimes it had been unendurably hard: years of endless toil as a scullery maid working for a critical kitchen maid. But there had been good parts. The cook had been kind, had helped her learn her letters and encouraged her to read and write. She had worked hard, though, harder than any of the girls at the house did. The family she worked for had not been as well-to-do as the Talbots, so the few servants they had worked excruciating hours. She had dreamed of a better place, but there was nowhere for her to go until she had the skills to offer. It was this that had pushed her on. Remembering her youth made her feel acutely miserable. It had not been youth in the way the young lived now, even those in service.

“Ah, well, I see you probably have to do some more thinking on it. You've a smart head on your shoulders, I've noticed. Remember yourself at fifteen, and don't let duty to the family and your job take away your compassion for what it was like to be scared, out of your depth, and vulnerable.” Stafford stood aside from his collection of mosses and looked across at her, sitting on the bench in the sun, confounded and uncertain, and he said, “Violet was a good girl. So why did the poor little thing run off, leaving her sick dad all alone? I heard at the Goat last night the poor man's taken another turn for the worse. It always happens with these lungers—worry and distress can break them down faster than anything.” He returned to the bench and sat down next to her. She felt his nearness and liked the scent of his freshly laundered linen shirt, which was open at the neck, where she saw three gray hairs. She looked away, rigid with embarrassment and shame. She wished he would go back to his mosses; his nearness was disconcerting and her heart was beating rapidly. She stood up and smoothed her hands down the front of her dress.

“Thank you, Mr. Stafford, you are most kind, really. Yes, you are right, I must think about this from another angle.” She glanced at her watch. It was half past nine. “Oh, I must be getting on.”

“I know you'll come to it, Mrs. Jackson. It might take a bit of work, but I'm sure you can do it.” He turned back to planting his moss garden.

*   *   *

An hour later, she was standing in front of Lady Montfort with the most surprising request. “I would like the day off, m'lady. It will not inconvenience Mr. Hollyoak.” Mrs. Jackson then briefly explained her reasons.

“Well of course, Jackson, I am surprised we didn't think of this before. Of course you must go. We'd better get Simpson to drive you to the station if you want to catch the next one up to town. Take all the time you need,” Lady Montfort replied as she rang for the chauffeur.

 

Chapter Twenty-five

Sitting alone in her second-class compartment, Mrs. Jackson looked out of the window as the train, sending out a plume of thick, oily black smoke and cinders into the pure air, trundled heavily through a shallow valley of fields and copses.

Over the hill to the north lay Haversham Hall and Iyntwood, and to the south, over the brow of another hill, lay Cryer's Breech. Market Wingley was already several miles distant and she had been on the train only five minutes. It had taken just five minutes to cross the only world she had known for nearly twenty years. It had been nearly two years since Mrs. Jackson had traveled alone by train up to London, so her sense of adventure was almost overpowering. The train rocked in a comfortable rhythm as it picked up speed and Mrs. Jackson gazed unseeing out of the windows. In her mind she saw Haversham village: the church on the edge of the green; village women as they gathered at the pump; the men grouped at the forge as Bernard Oldshaw shod the great, round feet of shire horses while the plowman leaned against the door of the Goat and Fiddle with half a tankard of cider, enjoying a moment of respite from his labors. It was an idyllic image and Mrs. Jackson knew it was one much prized in the hearts of the English, especially when they were abroad. She was also aware, however, that behind it lay narrowness and an insularity that prevented any comprehension of life in a wider world.

Her thoughts of the village led her back to Violet. Since her conversation with Stafford, she reflected that she was perhaps rather intransigent when it came to stepping outside her own experience and what she considered the proper way of doing things. She had acquired status in the house of an important family by often having to squash down her personal needs and sensitivities, to accomplish her lofty status. She had perhaps sacrificed almost too much to attain her position, and now she found it hard to step away from the rigid conventions she clung to and find compassion for the likes of Violet. She had forgotten how hard it was to fit in to a strange new culture with its own language and government.

She had initially believed that Violet had chosen to run off, but around the edges of this belief now crept the beginning of doubt. Wouldn't it be too daunting for a village girl to leave this known rural backwater and venture out with no idea of what was waiting for her in the great wide world? What if Violet had been forced to run away by something she had witnessed on the night of the ball, perhaps the murder of Teddy Mallory? Mrs. Jackson was a practical woman. She was on the whole well meaning and kind, but she was not blessed with a rich imagination. She left all that sort of stuff to Lady Montfort.

Her train pulled into Marylebone station on time at seven minutes past one. As she got down onto the platform it took her a moment to adjust to the noise and throng of passengers alighting from the train. It was hard to get her bearings with carriage doors slamming like volleys of gunfire. The harsh hiss and clash of steam engines pulling out from other platforms was disorienting. She startled at the train conductor's shrill whistle and the whir of a flock of pigeons as they flew up to roost in the vaulted glass roof. She joined the orderly crowd walking toward the ticket collector and stopped to look for the Bakerloo Underground sign, causing people to step around her. Her tuppenny tube ticket was tucked into the inside of her glove so that she didn't drop it as she clutched the handrail of the escalator, steeply descending deep into the underworld.

She hadn't ridden on an underground train in well over five years. The Bakerloo line was new, she now remembered. At the bottom of the escalator she turned left and walked along the brightly lit, white-tiled tunnel to the station. On the platform, she had to hold on to her hat as a gust of warm, stale air preceded the hum of the train in the tunnel before it clattered into the station, shining with lights, glossy painted maroon coachwork, and gleaming glass. Twenty minutes later she rose to the street and a mass of traffic. The noise was deafening: horse-drawn cabs, motorcars and omnibuses, errand boys on bicycles, and pedestrians—all competed for right-of-way as they swept past her, dexterously weaving in and out among one another, and another horde of the same spun by in the opposite direction. A tall police constable blew his whistle and threw up his right arm to stop traffic, and she joined a group of people crossing to the other side of the street, where she asked directions to Clevellan Square.

When at last she arrived at the house and walked down the area steps below street level to the servants' entrance, she felt she had come a thousand miles from another country and had made every step of the way as a pioneer in some foreign land.

It was a scullery maid who answered the door and indicated with a wrinkled, soap-stained hand that Mrs. Jackson should walk through into the butler's pantry. Mr. Evesham greeted her with great civility, unusual in butlers to domestic staff from other houses; Lady Montfort must have called ahead. She followed the butler down the dimly lit central corridor to the far side of the house. He opened the garden door and out she went and up steps to arrive at last in the house's large walled garden, which took up the entire center of the square. There among the trees, sitting in a lawn chair, as pretty as a watercolor and as if Holloway Prison existed only on the front page of
The Times,
sat Lucinda Lambert-Lambert.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Jackson,” she said politely, sitting up a little straighter and indicating a chair next to her. “I hope you had a pleasant journey.” She sounded like a little girl playing at tea parties; her words came out self-consciously, almost haltingly, as if Lucinda was listening to them carefully and checking herself for adult inflection and manner.

Mrs. Jackson sat down but did not presume on the invitation; she sat on the very edge of the chair, her hands in her lap. She returned Lucinda's greeting just as carefully.

“I am very relieved to see you looking well, Miss Lucinda, after that awful experience. It must have been quite dreadful in…” Mrs. Jackson was careful to keep any judgment about Lucinda's recent doings out of her expression and voice.

“… Prison,” Lucinda firmly finished for her. “Actually, that was the point of it all, to go to prison. Yes, it was an awful experience. I believe it is supposed to be.” This condescending statement was in such contrast to Lucinda's pretty-picture-book appearance that Mrs. Jackson was jolted out of her tactful consideration toward the girl.
Goodness me,
she thought,
what a self-righteous little prig.

She remembered the Lambert-Lamberts patiently standing in the hall at Iyntwood, waiting for the telephone to ring. Feelings of annoyance and impatience began to gather and then evaporated when she noticed that Lucinda looked very pale, and there were dark smudges under her eyes and her lips were dry and cracked. Lucinda must have felt her sympathy rather than her irritation, as she continued with little less bravado.

“The whole thing was frightful, but I had to do it, had to do my bit,” the girl muttered and folded her thumbs into her fists. Mrs. Jackson had already noticed how bitten-down the nails were. She understood that Lucinda had naïvely taken on what she believed to be a just and deserving cause out of a passionate need to be useful. The poor girl was probably under the impression that she had joined a noble crusade and that right would prevail over might. Mrs. Jackson's understanding of the political machinations of their modern world was limited, but she understood human nature. She knew enough to recognize the pitfalls of the hidden ambitions involved where the suffragette cause was concerned—the Pankhurst women on one side and the home secretary, Mr. McKenna, and the government on the other. Nothing was as it seemed; there were always hidden agendas.

“Holloway was hellish, but they'd told me it would be,” Lucinda went on. “The noise was the worst because you can't see what's going on. They keep WSPU prisoners in the horridest part of the building, poor, brave things. Most of them were striking.”

No doubt she was referring to the hunger strikes, thought Mrs. Jackson. Accounts of them in the newspapers had been hair-raising. Now there was this Cat and Mouse Act, which meant that they released starving women from prison before they died, to allow them to recover, and then put them back in prison. It was a form of suicide or murder in itself, depending on how one looked at it. It got the government off the hook if their prison inmates starved themselves to the point of death in prison but died conveniently at home.

She listened as Lucinda spoke of her forty-nine hours in Holloway. Female wardens built like men, who smelled of sweat and greasy unwashed hair, and their refusal to let her be with other political prisoners; the oppressive silence that fell between the sound of heavy footsteps on hard stone and the ceaseless slamming and locking of heavy doors; and, worst of all, the voices of women calling out in entreaty, pain, or outrage. It would have been an appalling experience for gently reared Lucinda, Mrs. Jackson thought, alone in her cell, left to imagine the worst … The girl was evidently still suffering the effects of her ordeal.

Mrs. Jackson was not unsympathetic but she was in London for another reason, and it was one that mattered far more than the self-induced fears of an indulged girl who had spent a couple of nights in prison before her father rescued her. She leaned forward with her eyebrows raised in polite inquiry; it was an expression that worked well on housemaids, and she found it had its effect on Lucinda.

“You didn't come to hear about all of that, Mrs. Jackson.” She watched Lucinda push back a long lock of hair that had fallen out from under her hat. It refused to stay put and slid down again, and she spun the end of it around her forefinger.

“I am very sorry for everything that happened to you, Miss Lucinda, but I am sure you have heard what happened at Iyntwood.” She sat in her chair, back straight, signaling that she had heard enough about Holloway.

“Yes, I have, Mrs. Jackson. Terrible news about Teddy, I had no idea. Mother says there was a gang of people who had followed him down from London. It was an awful, terrible thing to have happened.” Lucinda's voice was flat and expressionless.

“Yes, quite dreadful.” Mrs. Jackson kept her voice neutral, as if she were talking about missing a bus, or dropping sixpence down the drain. It sounded too dismissive, so she added truthfully at the last moment, “Poor young man, he certainly didn't deserve that end.”