Chapter 15
Mary Jane had met Charlie on the bus.
She told Caroline nothing of her life before, nothing of what she had left behind when she came to London. Only that she’d arrived as Caroline had: alone, by train, with fear and hope fighting like dogs in her chest.
She found work as a maid for a family in Moorgate, and not long after, she met a man.
A handsome, kind man, with starry eyes and a straight back.
An army man. He was bound for war and wanted her to marry him, but she—foolish, superstitious thing—was certain that, if they married, he would die.
So he left, and she waited for him. With every day of his absence, she painted him taller, stronger, kinder.
And when he returned a few months later she threw herself into his arms.
But he was not the man she had met. Not the man she had imagined.
On his insistence she’d left her job, moved in with him, began stitching a wedding veil for a ceremony that would never happen.
“It was good for a time,” Mary Jane said, staring down into the drowned tea leaves at the bottom of her mug.
“The army stipend kept us nicely. We rented a place off Liverpool Street. There was money, more money than I’d ever had, and Peter wasn’t stingy with it.
I liked going about the market in my new bonnet, unwrapping it all on the table, showing him what I’d got.
For a time, we were happy. I started thinking about babies.
Talking about babies. But I wanted to be properly married first. In a church.
Be a real proper family. Not like the one I had.
” She shook her head, a quick tic. “But he was a drinker.”
He drank every night. At first, he just slurred his words, fell asleep in his chair. Mary Jane pulled off his boots and covered him with his coat. But then—
“The first time he hit me, he started sobbing straightaway. Grabbed me, held me, apologized over and over. Said he’d never touch another drop.
When he saw my face the next morning, he poured the whole bottle down the drain and went out to try and find work.
And he did. He found a good job that paid well and kept him out of the house.
I thanked God for the bruises. I thought, He’ll never do it again, he’s that sorry.
” She exhaled a hollow laugh. “Oh, how wrong I was.”
She wanted to leave him, but she had nothing. No money, no friends or relations, no way to make a living. The family she’d worked for in Moorgate had found a new maid; her discreet inquiries for other positions were met with silence. So she stayed, hoping he would change. But he did not.
The only bit of peace left to her was running errands. She began to purposefully forget things—milk, eggs—so she would have a reason to go out again the next day.
The first time Mary Jane saw Charlie Foster, it was on an icy Tuesday in December.
“He was on the bus with a book on his lap, making sketches with his pen, and I was poking fun at him in my head. Who does that? Who draws on the bus? But then he looked up at me. And it was over. There was something about him that pinned me to my seat; I couldn’t move.
Months later, he told me about electricity.
How you can put up a big metal pole so the lightning hits that instead of something else.
That’s how it was for me. There was no choice.
I was struck. The first time I saw him, I was struck. ”
The next day she took the same bus—the 10:10 to Covent Garden—and Charlie was already on it.
“He was sitting in the same seat. But he didn’t have a book. And when I got on, something changed in his face. Like he’d been waiting for me.”
They played this game all week. But then, on the Friday, her fiancé hit her.
“He hadn’t knocked me about in a while. I was always waiting for it, of course, flinching when he reached across the table for his cup.
But this time, something was different. I kept thinking while he was hitting me, That man on the bus wouldn’t do this.
Peter apologized, of course, bought me a new hat, swore he’d never touch a drop again.
But I’d finally stopped believing him. And the next day I got on the 10:10 to Covent Garden with a black eye and a split lip. ”
Caroline could imagine Charlie’s face when he saw her. Her own hurt and anger reflected back at her. That was another of Charlie’s skills: to make you see your own emotions validated, ferocious.
“He sat next to me. I thought I would lose my breakfast, I was that nervous. But he just spoke very quietly. Asked if I was all right, asked what had happened. I told him the truth. At the next stop he took my hand and asked me to follow him.”
He took her to a fancy tearoom on Bow Street.
Her injuries drew eyes, but Charlie didn’t seem to notice.
He ordered her the best pot of tea she’d ever had, and buttery scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam.
And the strangest thing happened. Mary Jane found that, despite her throbbing head and sore lip, despite their differences in class and education and all the rest of it, she was entirely at ease.
Charlie told her stories of his sister in the country, and tales of schoolboy mischief, and she found herself forgetting the man who was surely waiting for her, forgetting her grim life ahead.
They began meeting surreptitiously. Charlie knew she was promised to someone else and never pressured her, just mentioned that he would be at this restaurant on this day, or that he hoped to buy his sister some ribbons at this shop but didn’t trust himself to pick out the right color.
And Mary Jane told herself she wouldn’t go, that Peter would do something unthinkable if word got back to him that she’d been seen with another man, but every time, she found herself walking to where Charlie said he would be, with her heart in her hands.
She decided to leave the man she had promised to marry.
“I knew what Peter would do. I knew he’d kill me before I left.
So I waited until he was so drunk he couldn’t move, I took only the things that I’d come with, and I walked through the door.
Charlie told me he’d found a place, that it wasn’t much, nothing fancy, but it would be mine.
He’d paid the first month’s rent. Found some furniture, God knows where.
” Mary Jane raised her luminous eyes, ran them over the limewashed walls like they were marble. “My own place.”
She had waited with bated breath for her fiancé to find her. But whether he drank himself to death or was unbothered by her absence, she never knew. Moorgate, though not far from Spitalfields, was another world.
“I found work as a charwoman for a merchant in the nice part of Liverpool Street. But he was not a good man. Always grabbing at me, trying to corner me in the larder. I told Charlie. He made me promise I’d quit, immediately, said he would pay the rent until I found other work.
So I did.” Something flickered in her eyes, like a shadow glimpsed beneath a door. “Then Charlie disappeared.”
Mary Jane stared, unfocused, at the dented chipboard table between them as Caroline followed her story to its miserable conclusion. She had no job, had been unable to pay her rent. She’d been left no other choice.
Caroline blinked back her own tears as she asked, “When did you last see Charlie?”
Mary Jane pressed her lips together, gazed up at the water-stained ceiling.
She was like a porcelain figurine, all creams and pinks.
The drabness of her worn black dress, of the abject little flat, only threw her beauty into sharper contrast. She should be walking through Regent’s Park with a parasol. Not selling herself on Dorset Street.
“March. Early March.”
“That was the last I heard from him, too.” Caroline’s heart pumped hard. “Can you tell me about the last…the last time you saw him?”
Mary Jane sniffed. Nodded. “He and Rab started arguing. Right after Christmas. Charlie started spending more time with me, which I loved, of course. But he was distracted. I’d ask him a question, and it was like he didn’t hear me.”
“Do you know what the arguments were about?”
Mary Jane shook her head. “I asked, but he told me nothing. Which made me think it was about me. And I just hated that. Hated to be the reason that they were fighting. They were like brothers, you know.”
Caroline nodded. Like brothers. The man her own brother had never told her about.
“So,” Mary Jane continued, “I went to see Rab. Went to the chemist’s down on Brick Lane.
It was midday, and no one was in the shop, but Rab turned the sign around and took me into the back room.
I started crying straight off, I was that upset.
I said I was sorry he and Charlie weren’t speaking, and if it was something about me, was there anything I could do? ”
Caroline pictured the scene like a play. Mary Jane weeping prettily, Rab ushering her into the cramped storeroom, a predatory gleam in his eye. Don’t go, Caroline wanted to shout at the imaginary Mary Jane. Don’t go with him.
“Rab told me he and Charlie had gotten in a fight, and it was about me, at least a little. That he was running an experiment, trying to make a new medicine, and he needed people to help him by testing it. That it was completely safe, just relaxed you, made you sleepy. One of those nerve tonics, you know? Rab was so close to patenting it, he said; he was certain it would make his fortune, make him a famous chemist. He’d already gone through all his acquaintances; he just needed one more participant.
Before I’d come into the picture, Charlie had promised to try it, but now Charlie was never around, never at the boardinghouse at the times he and Rab had agreed on.
They had argued, and Charlie left in a huff, saying that Rab could find someone else to take the damned tonic.
So I said I’d try it, if that was the only thing standing between him and Charlie. ”