Kept (50 page)

“Well,” said the superintendent, Mr. Mortimer, breakfasting with his wife and daughters one Sabbath morning, “the attachment between our Mrs. Ireland and the woman who attends her is a very singular one.”

“I had not remarked it,” observed Mrs. Mortimer, continuing to butter an egg. “Grizelda, you may ring for John footman and tell him we shall not be needing the fly from the stables for church.”

(The superintendent of the Ware asylum resides in the neatest little villa imaginable, and Mrs. Superintendent is naturally its most delightful ornament.)

“Nevertheless, it is so,” Mr. Mortimer went on, not quite liking the instructions about the fly but fearing to countermand them. “One might almost call it a sisterly affection.”

“There was some scandal, was there not?” enquired the eldest Miss Mortimer, who could not be kept from reading newspapers and was thought to take an excessive interest in the doings of her father’s patients.

“It is all very shocking,” countered her mama. “And if my opinion had been asked—which it was not—I should have said that the arrangement originally proposed for the young woman would have been much better allowed to persist.”

“There was a gentleman, was there not?” continued the eldest Miss Mortimer, who was quite incorrigible.

“That will do, miss. It is a wonder to me that your father allows such talk.”

But Mr. Mortimer was not listening. He was still thinking of the cancelled fly and the play of Mrs. Ireland’s hands as they moved restlessly in her lap.

“Neverthless, I think it very creditable to the girl that she minds her duty. You will oblige me, Maria”—and it was a measure of Mr. Mortimer’s exaltation of spirit that he said “Maria” rather than “my dear”—“by seeing if there is not some small thing, some dress or bonnet of the girls, that might be looked out and given to her.”

“I should hardly have thought it worthwhile, Augustus”—it was a measure of Mrs. Mortimer’s temper that she said “Augustus”—“but if you insist.”

“I do. And now, if you will excuse me, I have business to attend to.”

(“It is all the fault of that Mr. Farrier coming yesterday and being so solicitous of Papa’s opinion,” Mrs. Mortimer told her daughters. “You know what he is like with such gentlemen.”)

But Mr. Mortimer, walking alone to church through splashes of summer rain, knew that he had done the right thing.

“Take it away, Esther! You know I cannot abide such stuff.”

“Certainly not, miss, for without it you will be ill again, and it’s I that shall have the nursing of you.”

The draught, newly mixed by Mr. Mortimer’s apothecary and fetched by that gentleman beneath a folded napkin, lay on the deal table between them.

“I shall not drink it. Indeed, I shall fling it out of the window and startle the birds.”

“In that case, miss, you will try my patience, which you know you would rather not.”

Mistress and servant regarded each other anxiously. Then, in the manner of one who submits to an inexorable fate, Mrs. Ireland picked up the glass and began to sip at it. Evidently, what it contained was not wholly inimical to her, for she drank off perhaps half the contents before seating herself on one of the leather-backed chairs at the further side of the table. Moving forward once or twice as if there were something she urgently wished to say, she yawned hugely, shook her head with a bewildered air, as if the yawning were a procedure wholly beyond her comprehension, and then fell into a light sleep. After studying her intently for a moment or so, Esther took the half-full glass from where it lay in her hand and bore it away to the kitchen. Here, having ascertained that no other domestic duty had escaped her, she remained, half her attention alert to any sound that might come from the adjoining room, the remainder bent inwardly upon her own concerns.

Three months had elapsed since the trial: Esther supposed that the time had not gone unhappily with her. Of William, Sarah—that whole life that had occupied her from the moment she left Easton Hall—she had not ceased to think, and yet there was a vagueness about it, a diffusion of sentiment and memory, that calmed her apprehensions. Here and there about her person she carried mementoes of those days—a little twist of sprigged muslin bought at the Earlham Street market,
an ornamented card with William’s great scrawled signature on the reverse. Sometimes of an evening, when her mistress lay asleep or sat comfortably installed in her chair at the window, whose peculiarities of scene never ceased to amuse her, she would take out and examine these items and ponder the events that they reawakened in her mind. But though the remembrance of them lingered, she found—and she believed that the finding was agreeable to her—that the circumstances of her new life did not encourage a propensity to brood. There was Mr. Spence, the apothecary, at the door, or a walk around the grounds to negotiate, or an illustrated magazine sent with Mr. Mortimer’s compliments for them to examine. Such occurrences were not an antidote to her loss, but they were a drag upon it and thus she welcomed them with perhaps a greater eagerness than they deserved. Certainly there cannot be many persons who would regard a half hour with the
Illustrated London News
as balm for a bruised spirit.

As to the patterns of this new life, Esther did not cease to wonder at them. The cottage that they inhabited she had adopted as if it were her mistress’s own, and Mr. Mortimer only some friendly visitor, and she polished its surfaces and tended its linen as if her wages depended on it. Mr. Mortimer noted this application and commended it. “Why, Esther,” he said, “forgive me if I say that you are doing work that is not yours to do.” And Esther bridled, as at the wildest compliment. In this way they grew very confidential, and Esther was encouraged to impart certain details of her mistress’s condition, born of long observation, which it is to be hoped that Mr. Mortimer appreciated.

“Do you think she knows herself?” he asked once.

Esther considered the question. “It is hard to say, sir. She knows me. And there is that which she says which has a point, only you would not notice it to begin, if you take my meaning. And then she is so forgetful.”

“You must help her to remember.”

But Esther thought privately there was much her mistress wished only to forget.

Once, at one of these times, moving nervously at the window—for she liked to see the birds, or if not the birds then the play of the wind in the trees—she had enquired, “Esther. Where is William?”

“He has gone away, miss.”

“Gone away? What, to Lynn with the master? I did not hear the dogcart in the drive.”

“No, miss. He has gone away forever.”

“Forever? I—that is—you must forgive me, Esther.”

And Esther forgave her, treasuring the remark, as we value some shiny pebble found amongst a heap of broken stones on the beach.

Looking now at the kitchen clock, Esther saw that the supper hour was approaching. “You must try and get her to eat,” Mr. Mortimer had frequently enjoined. “It would be a great thing if she could be got to eat—eh?” And Esther, agreeing with him, had promised. Moving beyond the kitchen door, she saw that Mrs. Ireland had woken up and was surveying the room in which she sat with a kind of startled benignity, as if its dimensions, while not displeasing, were the source of some bewilderment to her.

“Gracious, Esther! I have had such a dream. That the Queen herself stood by my bed and enquired of a receipt for damson preserves. Very civil, indeed, she was, but most dreadfully superior.”

The rain beat suddenly on the window, and mistress and servant laughed and were very comfortable together. And Esther, presiding over the teapot, in the stuff gown that Mr. Mortimer’s daughter had presented to her, thought of the orchard at Easton Hall, and the carter’s van receding across the blue horizon, and Mrs. Finnie’s jet-black hair, and Mr. Randall’s psalms, and William helping his master down from the carriage door, and the blue cockade in his hat, and the time when he had first come to love her.

UNFORTUNATE CASE IN CLERKENWELL

THE CORONER
, Mr. Samuels, said that the police had been called to a house in Clerkenwell Court. Here they found the body of the deceased lying in a chair. Mr. Crummles, surgeon attached to the Clerkenwell force, who attended the scene, certified that the deceased had died of a phthisis, exacerbated by malnutrition. Mr. Samuels asked, by this did
he mean that the deceased had starved to death? Mr. Crummles said that he supposed he did.

Constable Gaffney, who had arrived first at the house, testified that the room in which the deceased had been found was empty of everything except a bed, the chair in which the body was lying and a small cupboard. The latter contained the smaller part of a quartern loaf and a minute quantity of tea.

Mr. Edward Scrivener of Balls Pond Road, Islington, stated that as the deceased’s landlord he had been accustomed to receive a rent of six shillings per week, payable on the preceding Friday. This rent had been in abeyance for three weeks. “Were you acquainted with the deceased’s circumstances?” “I was not.” “Had you taken any steps for the recovery of the money?” “This is a poor house, sir, and the rent is often owing.”

Mrs. Hannah Hook, a seamstress residing at the property, stated that the deceased had fallen into a decline following the death of her husband in a street accident. She had been accustomed to perform small services for the deceased, providing her with supper, coals, &c., but lately these attentions had been refused.

Constable Gaffney said that it was the poorest house he had seen, that in a dozen years of service he had seen none worse. The deceased’s clothing, which would customarily have been given to the relieving officer, had been burnt as verminous.

Mr. Samuels said that it was an unfortunate case, but that as no person or institution could be shown to have failed in any duty that was owed to the deceased, he could only record a verdict of death by natural causes.

HOLBORN AND CLERKENWELL GAZETTE,
December 1866

 

The clergyman, shovel hat pulled down over his forehead, hands plunged into the pockets of his coat, strides swiftly over the wet sand. It is low tide, and the sea is far away: half a mile at least lies between him and the flat, rippling breakers. At his feet have been flung inter
esting deposits from its passage: knots of purple-brown weed, spars of driftwood, a coil of rope, a string of onions. To his left-hand side, behind the dunes, pine trees rise into the pale air. The clergyman sees neither the trees nor the flotsam and jetsam at his feet, for his mind is bent on other things. Tall, thin, vellum face emerging above a white stock, Gainsborough could have painted him, placed him on a horse, even, to emphasise the curve of his legs, but this is not Gainsborough’s age. A mile behind the shore there is a tarmacadamed road and a few miles beyond that a railway line, and in Wells, on the boundary of the clergyman’s parish, a photographer has recently opened up a studio. Wearing their best clothes, the clergyman and his wife have been photographed by this man, sitting in stiff-backed chairs, with an album open between them. This is the way of things, he thinks.

There are jellyfish lying dead on the sand, and the clergyman stops to look at them: immense things the shape of
diskoi
that he once saw cradled by the athletes in one of Mr. Leighton’s Attic paintings. Despite the chill and the intensity of the February wind, he is not quite alone. Two hundred yards further along the shoreline there is an old woman, like himself dressed in black, gathering up driftwood, to whom, having ascertained that she is a member of the Wesleyan chapel a mile from his church, he has nodded rather than spoken. Nearer at hand another person—almost a gentleman, the clergyman thinks, from his dress—is prodding with a stick at some unidentified object lying on the lip of a rock pool. Interested in spite of himself and the wind, the clergyman alters the line of his walk. As he approaches, the man—he is gaunt and tall with a red, weather-beaten face and carries a knapsack at his shoulder—looks up.

“
Mollusca irridens
. It is rare in these parts.”

For a moment the clergyman wonders what he means. Then he sees that his gaze is being directed to a small, grey-backed crustacean that seems to have embedded itself into the crown of a rock.

“Indeed?”

“One would customarily see it in Scotland. The Baltic, perhaps.”

“You are a collector, I take it?”

The man pats his knapsack, whose contents—pieces of what look like seaweed, the yellow beak of a gull—are bulging out of their bind
ing: rather, the clergyman thinks, like
Mollusca irridens
. “My name is Dunbar,” he says, producing a card which corroborates this fact, as if there is a chance that business can be done between them here on this beach. “Are you in the collecting line yourself, sir?”

The clergyman smiles bleakly. “Humanity is sufficient for me.”

The man laughs, rather high and cracked, so that the clergyman wonders if he is quite right in the head: a man with a knapsack and a high complexion laughing into the wind on a rainswept Norfolk beach in winter. There used not to be such persons naturalising among the rock pools. It is another new thing, the clergyman thinks. He touches the peak of his shovel hat with a forefinger and presses on through the spongiform graveyard to the sea. Here the wind lifts. In the distance, beyond the breakers, wild water rages.
The world is changing
, the clergyman acknowledges, thinking again of the curious sepia representation of himself and his wife, and of
Mollusca irridens
, whatever that may be, and Mr. Dunbar’s card pressed into his hand,
and yet I am the same
.