The Workhouse Nurse

Chapter One

Leaning back in the wooden-armed chair, he lifted his spectacles from the bridge of his nose and blinked his watery-blue eyes several times to clear their blurring.

Using a scrap of soft cloth taken from the pocket of his black, club-tailed coat, he started to polish the square lenses of the spectacles.

While the short fat fingers gently rubbed the convex surface of the glass, the clergyman’s mind focussed on a problem that was causing his gentle nature great concern.

Matilda Seymour, his wife’s maid, was pregnant, only a few weeks from confinement, and the man responsible was one of their own manservants, Thomas Crawford.

There came a soft tapping on the door, breaking Wren’s train of thought. He sighed again, and called out.

‘Enter!’

A young girl, dressed in the tiny-bibbed white apron and plain linen mobcap of a maidservant, came into the sombre, dark-furnished room. Wren replaced his spectacles and composed his plump features into the expression of sternness which he felt befitted his position in the world.

‘Yes, Matilda, what is it?’

She kept her eyes downcast and dropped a curtsey, moving gracefully despite the ponderous heaviness of her swollen body.

‘If you please, sir, the churchwardens are here to see you.’

Her voice was soft and musical, with only a suggestion of rustic burr.

Wren nodded his bag-wigged, powdered head. ‘Very well, show them in.’

She curtseyed again and left the study, to return almost immediately with two stocky, ruddy-faced men, both wearing the thick fustian coats, breeches and leather gaiters of yeomen farmers, and carrying wide-brimmed, shallow-crowned hats in their work-roughened hands.

The girl would have slipped away, but the clergyman stopped her.

‘Stay here, Matilda, I don’t doubt but that the matter, these gentlemen have called to see me about, concerns you.’

The elder of the two men seemed ill-at-ease, and he shuffled his heavy shoes and coughed nervously, before agreeing.

‘Indeed it does, Reverend, indeed it does.’

Wren, resenting their presence because it would finally force him into making a decision about the pregnant girl, made no effort to put the man at ease.

‘Well, Master Whitehouse,’ his stern expression became a frown. ‘Let us get on with the business at hand.’

The churchwarden coughed again and, to cover his discomfiture at the rector’s manner, started to bluster.

‘I dunno as how it’s fitten to talk of this matter in front o’ this young ’ooman, Reverend. Arter all, if there’s to be any dispute it don’t seem right that her who is the cause o’ that dispute should see her betters rowing wi’ each other.’

Wren assumed a tone of exaggerated surprise.

‘Oh, you expect there to be high words exchanged between us then, Master Whitehouse?’

The second churchwarden, Joseph Whittington, was of tougher fibre than his companion. Scowling, he broke his silence.

‘Wi’ all respect, Reverend Wren, we’em wasting time that could be better spent.

You knows well why we’em come… We wants your decision as to what you intends doing about this wench, Tildy Seymour, here.

We come on behalf o’ the congregation, and as parish officers, because as you well know I’m the overseer to the poor in this parish, as well as a churchwarden.

’ He half-turned and pointed at Matilda.

‘Now this wench here is acarryinga bastard in her belly, and by the looks on it she’s nigh on her time.

She arn’t o’ this parish, and if I recollect rightly only come to work here at the rectory last Michaelmas Hiring Fair, so she’s got no settlement in this village.

‘I ’udden’t be doing my duty as overseer and churchwarden if I allowed her to birth a bastard within the parish boundary. Her and her babby would become a charge on the poor rate, and we’ve enough native-born bastards to maintain as it is…’

While the men were speaking Tildy had stood silent, her body erect and her head held proudly even though her face burned hot with embarrassment.

Eighteen years old, her dark hair and eyes, coupled with the flawless skin of her oval face and shapely neck made her a strikingly attractive girl; and despite her misshapen body she could still turn men’s heads to stare at her admiringly.

She listened with growing anger to the harsh words of Whittington, and felt ever more protective towards the unborn child she felt moving in her womb.

Truth to tell, Baby, I never wanted you, she thought. And I want your father not at all…but I’ll never give you up to the hands of such as these, that I promise.

Emboldened by his colleague’s bluntness, Edward Whitehouse joined in.

‘There’s another thing, Reverend Wren, sir, and I knows that your good lady wife agrees wi’ us on it, for she’s so told me. It don’t do at all for you as the leader of the Faithful in this parish to give succour to them as flouts the Commandments of the Lord.

‘This wench has fornicated most sinfully wi’ a man, and she not wedded, or even betrothed to him. Why, it’ll tempt other flighty, loose-thinking wenches to do the same if they sees this ’un being protected and cared for by a man o’ God, and allowed to go free of punishment for her sins…’

For a moment Phillip Wren was strongly tempted to tax the man with showing a blatant lack of Christian charity towards the fallen.

‘Oh Lord Jesus, will they never realise that You are a gentle and merciful Being, and forgive most willingly those sinners who truly repent, as I’m sure this poor girl does repent?’ he cried in his mind to the God of Mercy he worshipped.

Whittington’s harsh voice penetrated his consciousness.

‘It’s true what Master Whitehouse has told you, Reverend. Only yesterday your good lady, Mistress Wren, said as how the wicked girl should be driven from here, and scourged back to the place she came from, and the man who lay with her likewise.’

Phillip Wren’s mind’s eye conjured up a vision of his wife’s thin rat-trap of a mouth as it spewed out pious hypocrisies and bitter recriminations directed against those who transgressed her own fanatically intolerant moral code.

He blotted the pinched, mean face from his mind, but with a sense of shame realised that he lacked the courage to stand out against his wife’s unforgiving strictures.

Angry at himself, he snapped savagely at the churchwardens.

‘Damn you both! Will you never cease from hounding me about this matter?’

Both men stared, shocked at this display of temper from their normally mollifying rector. Wren saw their shock and inwardly castigated himself for allowing his feelings to openly overcome him. When he next spoke his voice was its normal, placid timbre.

‘Very well, gentlemen, I believe that you both are acting as the dictates of your consciences demand of you. I pray that my own conscience will not be troubled by what you force me to do in this matter. Will you both please leave, and be assured that I shall make great endeavours to solve this unhappy problem in the best interests of all concerned.’

Once alone with Tildy, he rose and beckoned her to the centre of the room. Placing both hands on her slender shoulders he gently pushed her down until she was kneeling before him then, folding his fingers directly above her bowed head, he closed his eyes.

‘Oh Dear Lord,’ he prayed aloud with intense fervour. ‘I beseech that You will guide Your humble servant, and show him how best he might aid this poor unfortunate sinner…’ His voice rose and fell in the sing-song tones favoured by the Anglican priesthood when they communed with their Master.

To Tildy, kneeling in acute discomfort, it seemed that the prayer would never end.

The hard wooden blocks of the floor pressed relentlessly into her soft rounded knees through the thin fabric of dress and apron, causing sharp pains to shoot along her calves and up the full thighs to her hips and back.

Clenching her white, even teeth she forced herself to remain still.

Reluctant to disturb the man whose ample paunch was just touching her wide brow, and who, she knew, truly wished her well.

At last the prayer ended and she started to rise. Immediately his hands pressed on the crown of her head.

‘Wait child, wait! We must wait in silent reverence for the Lord to answer our prayer.’

For endless minutes they remained motionless, until Tildy wanted to shout aloud to God to send his answer and allow her to ease the dreadful cramps that now twisted her hips and thighs. At last the rector’s watery-blue eyes opened and gazed benevolently down at her.

‘I believe that the Lord has vouchsafed to me the solution to the problem, my child,’ Wren informed the girl happily, and helped her to rise slowly and painfully to her feet.

The immediate relief from cramp made her breathe a thankful sigh of gratitude, which the man took to be her reaction to his words, and he smiled.

‘I cannot think why I did not arrive at this solution before, ’pon my soul, I cannot!

I shall make Thomas marry you by special licence, without the banns being called.

I can marry you myself in the church before two witnesses, and then obtain the bishop’s dispensation afterwards at my leisure…

There now, what d’ye say to that, child? ’

He paused in happy anticipation for her delighted answer.

‘Oh no!’ The dismayed exclamation burst from her. ‘No! I’ve no wish to marry Thomas!’

Wren’s rounded cheeks wrinkled in perplexity.

‘But why not, girl? When Thomas told me that he had offered to wed you before, and that you had refused him, I found it hard to believe the rogue. Then I put it down to girlish vapours… You need not be afraid that he will now refuse to wed you, for he knows well that as a justice of the peace I have the power to commit him to prison for bastardry… Come now, I declare that I think you to be indulging coy fancies. I really cannot understand you. I really cannot!’

Tildy Seymour made no reply, but a silent voice within her poured out a torrent of words.

‘How could you understand, Phillip Wren? Born a man, and of the gentry, able to pursue whatever course you wished in life. My mother died giving birth to me, and my father followed her to the grave before I was yet three. I was raised by my father’s elder sister, and her raving religious maniac husband, who regarded a smile on a child’s face as a mortal sin.

All I knew all my days was drudgery, glumness and Hellfire sermonising.

I never knew laughter or comfort or pleasure.

Even as a child I swore that someday I would make my escape, and that I did, the day before last Michaelmas… ’

It had been her eighteenth birthday, and seizing upon the absence of both her aunt and uncle, the girl had taken her pitifully few possessions and had fled from the isolated country cottage to the nearest town, Redditch.

When she arrived there, the first day of the Michaelmas Hiring Fair was in full swing, filling the town’s streets and alleys with a roaring, laughing, haggling, drunken bustle of packed humanity.

There she had joined the long lines of male and female servants offering themselves to prospective employers.

She had been engaged and given the Hiring Shilling by Reverend Wren, who was accompanied by Thomas Crawford.

As was the custom, the girl was then free until the following day to remain at the fair and take her pleasure.

Once Crawford had been released from duty by his master he had gone to search for the pretty new maid.

Although only five years her senior in age, Crawford was immeasurably older than Tildy in experience.

Flattered, confused, excited and totally out of her depth, the virgin girl had been an easy mark for the worldly-wise man.

Early the next morning, head pounding and stomach churning, still giddy from the effects of the gin and ale he had pressed upon her, she had awoken, her naked body clasped close to his on a narrow bed, in a stale-smelling room above a sleazy alehouse…

‘Think well on what you do, girl.’ The rector’s voice brought Tildy back to the present.

‘Consider the dreadful alternatives that lie before you. If you refuse to wed the fellow, then your child will be born a bastard; and will carry that stigma like the Mark of Cain for all men to condemn until the end of its days.’ The watery-blue eyes blinked rapidly and the man’s voice grew troubled.

‘You cannot stay beneath this roof with a bastard child in your womb…’ He raised his hands palms uppermost in an apologetic gesture.

‘…If it were humanly possible, and it were left solely to me, then I would allow you to remain here. But…’ He shrugged helplessly.

‘You have heard the opinions of the parish officers, and I fear that my lady wife is adamant that you be sent from this house… Really, my dear child, you have no choice in this matter. Would you be so cruel as to force the innocent soul that you carry within you, to pay for your transgressions all its days? Imagine what its life would be like, if it were born in the poorhouse, or under a hedgerow, fatherless and kinless… Unprotected… Why, death would be a merciful release for the poor mite!’ Wren shook his head in doleful acknowledgement of his own prognosis.

As Tildy listened, her own doubts and fears resurfaced overwhelmingly in a tide of confusion.

How often during the past months had she lain sleepless in the chaff bed she shared with two other servant girls in the attic of the house, agonising through the long dark hours on what was to become of herself and the child?

During the early stages of pregnancy, when her belly was still quite flat, she had been able to push away her fears, and hope that something would occur to solve all her problems. Now, with the birth so close, her fears had become too strong to be pushed away, and too great to be buried beneath layers of deliberate forgetfulness.

‘Perhaps the rector is right,’ she admitted to herself. ‘Perhaps I should marry Thomas Crawford? At least it would give the baby his father’s name, and there would be no slur to carry on its innocence.’

Wren continued urging her to marry, and although Tildy still rejected his urgings, yet her resolve was fast weakening. In her innermost heart, she was already conceding defeat…