Chapter Eight
Kitty had to fight feelings of guilt as Miss Eddowes was shown into the Peacock Room.
Her emotions were still raised from the unpleasantness that had preceded the princess’s departure, and the part of her that had been brought up always to be good found it hard to defy a parent’s strictures.
But her mother-in-law had had no right to dictate whom she might or might not receive – and what Maud could find to object to in this prosaic woman anyway was a mystery.
Kitty had put off the ‘appointment’, feeling too upset to go ahead with it, but now she was on a more even keel she had made a new one.
Refreshments were offered and refused. Miss Eddowes looked around and said, ‘What a pretty room this is. I have never seen it before.’
‘It is my private sitting-room,’ Kitty said. ‘I thought it would be more pleasant for us than the drawing-room. Have you been to the Castle before, then?’
‘Oh, yes, many times, but only for public gatherings. There used to be a ball here every summer at the end of the annual fair. And at one time the house was open to the public for two days a week – just the main saloons, the library and the state bedroom. I remember money was raised in that way to build the cottage hospital – oh, which reminds me, Lady Stainton, I’m sorry to report that John Weaver died yesterday. ’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Kitty said.
‘Yes, it was a sad end, poor man, but not unexpected. That brings the number to twenty-six dead, twenty-seven if you count Mrs Sweeting’s miscarriage – though that might have happened anyway,’ she added fairly. ‘A collection is being raised for the relief of Weaver’s widow.’
‘Of course I will make a donation.’
‘Thank you. But that is not what I came here to discuss.’ She gave Kitty a hesitant look, as though wondering whether the course she was about to embark on was wise.
Kitty felt a tremor of apprehension, but it was laced with curiosity. Was she about to find out what the princess held against Miss Eddowes? ‘Please, go ahead,’ she said.
‘There is a scheme which is especially dear to my heart,’ Miss Eddowes began, ‘and I hope very much that I can persuade you to involve yourself with it. Your predecessor, I’m afraid, was very hostile to the idea, and there are several in the neighbourhood who do not approve.
I fancy there are others who would condemn the scheme if they knew about it, so I am careful to judge which people I approach, and I keep it secret from the rest. If you find you do not care to help, I do ask you, in simple charity, not to talk about it. ’
Kitty looked her surprise. ‘I don’t think I can promise to keep a secret if it’s something wrong or disgraceful,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Christian compassion can never be disgraceful. There may be elements of disgrace in the human misery that requires it, but all the more reason, in my view, to do all one can to relieve it.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ Kitty said.
‘Of course not. May I tell you, please, a story, by way of illustration?’ Kitty made an uncertain gesture of assent.
‘When I was a child,’ Miss Eddowes went on, ‘there was a housemaid at Weldon House of whom I grew very fond. She was the one who lit the bedroom fires in the morning. I always woke early, and used to watch her without her knowing. It was hard, dirty work, but she always seemed so cheerful. One morning she started singing as she worked – quietly but evidently without realising she was doing it. Suddenly she saw me watching and stopped, and her face was transformed with fear. She begged me not to be angry with her for waking me. She thought I would complain about her and she would lose her job.’
‘Would she have?’ Kitty asked.
‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Eddowes. ‘Households were run on stricter lines in those days. At all events, she certainly believed it. I reassured her, told her I had been awake anyway, and that I liked her singing. After that we became friends, and would chat every morning while she worked. Nellie was her name. She was a few years older than me, and I confided many of my childish notions to her, while she told me about her life, so different from my own. It was the beginning, I believe, of an education for me in the strange inequalities of life.’
She paused for so long, staring into the past, that Kitty eventually prompted her. ‘What happened to her?’
Miss Eddowes roused herself. ‘She was walking out with a nice young man in the militia. We often had regiments billeted on our village in those days. One day the regiment was sent overseas at short notice. The young man promised Nellie he would come back and marry her. They said their goodbyes. Some weeks later she discovered she was with child.’
Kitty stirred uncomfortably. She was afraid she had an idea where the story was leading.
‘We had a housekeeper in those days. She found out and reported the matter to my mother and Nellie was dismissed without a character. Her parents would not take her in. She had nowhere to go, no way of supporting herself. A few days later she was pulled out of the Ash river, drowned dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kitty said. ‘I expect you were upset.’
‘I was,’ Miss Eddowes agreed. ‘I had become fond of her. In tears I asked my mother why she couldn’t have stayed with us – I was, remember, just a child, only eleven or twelve years old, with no understanding of such things.
My mother explained that there were rules, and rules must be kept.
She said I would understand one day. I was still upset, so on the next Sunday after church she asked the priest to speak to me.
We were, as you probably know, Roman Catholics.
He told me that Nellie was a sinner, and that sin must be punished or it would flourish.
It was like weeds in the garden – if you didn’t pull them up they would grow and choke the true flowers. ’
Her tone had been so neutral that Kitty couldn’t tell whether or not she endorsed the argument. ‘What about the young man – the soldier?’ she asked. ‘Did he ever come back?’
‘I never heard what happened to him, but I do know that his regiment suffered heavy losses, both in skirmishes and through sickness, so he might have meant to come back but not have survived to do so.’
She paused. Into the silence there came, from beyond the partly open window, the insistent song of a blackbird, clear and close – it must have been on the roof above the window.
In between its phrases, Kitty became aware of the fast, light ticking of the French clock on the chimneypiece.
She didn’t like to look at the time, as it might seem rude, but she worried that Giles might finish his meeting and drop in on his way out as he sometimes did.
Miss Eddowes resumed: ‘It was many years later, Lady Stainton, after my dear parents had gone to their reward and I had inherited my father’s fortune, that I remembered Nellie.
I thought that if only she’d had somewhere to go, someone to help her, she need not have died – remembering that to her initial wrongdoing had been added the sin of suicide, and guilt for the death of her unborn child.
Her soul had borne a heavy burden, at least some of which could have been avoided.
Would it not have been a good thing, I wondered, to help her at the beginning so that she did not compound her error?
I put it to our priest – not the present incumbent, you understand, but his predecessor – who was quite clear that helping Nellie, and other girls like her, would be an encouragement to vice, and would put my own soul in danger.
I thought long and hard about it, but in the end I considered St Paul’s words to be a better guide than the priest’s, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”.
The first book of Timothy, chapter one, verse fifteen,’ she added helpfully.
‘Yes, I’m familiar with it,’ Kitty said. It was repeated in the Liturgy every Sunday.
‘And surely, therefore, I argued with myself, it behoves us to show compassion to those lost sheep whom Our Lord is said to love more than the sheep who do not stray. Just at that time, the house High Beeches, in New Ashmore, was put up for sale, so I bought it and set up a home to care for girls like Nellie.’
After the long preamble, Miss Eddowes had come abruptly to the point. Kitty drew a sharp breath. No wonder her mother-in-law had disapproved. But was that enough to turn the disapproval into such hatred?
Miss Eddowes regarded her with an enquiring tilt to her head. ‘Shall I continue, Lady Stainton? Or will you ring to have me shown out, with instructions not to admit me again?’
Kitty folded her hands together in her lap to steady herself.
She was not Maud. And she could make up her own mind about things.
This business was shocking, but there was truth in what Miss Eddowes said about preventing further sin.
She tried to imagine what it must feel like to be cast out, with nowhere to go.
How frightened Nellie must have been, how desperate, to believe suicide was her only way out!
‘Please continue,’ she said, her voice feeble to her own ears. She went on more firmly, ‘What is it, exactly, that you do at High Beeches?’
‘We provide bed and board to the girls during their pregnancy, we give them work to do, and after their confinement we find a position for them, usually in domestic service but sometimes factory work or some other position suited to their abilities. We have an agency in London that specialises in placing them with respectable employers. The child we place with suitable parents, a couple who cannot have children of their own, or decent people who will care for it in return for a weekly sum.’
Kitty considered this. ‘The girls – the mothers – they don’t care for the child themselves?’