Sofy’s eye wasn’t couched. The surgeon said it was a perilous procedure with a far from certain outcome and he couldn’t recommend it. He advised her only to preserve the sight in her remaining eye by leaving off all reading. The damage done to women’s health by novels, he said, was greatly underestimated. They overtaxed the eyes, aroused the appetites and wasted valuable time. He said he wouldn’t have them in his house. He had a wife and daughters to protect.
She said, ‘Pompous old humbug. I shall still be read to, Nellie. I rather like to have my appetites aroused and as for time, I have vast amounts of it to waste. I wish you would write me stories, like you used to when we were girls.’
But I was writing Tommy Garth’s story and I had no intention of sharing that with her.
Tommy gained some relief later that year. With a little help from me and from those few friends who pitied Lady Astley, he was able to pay the attorney and receive part of his inheritance from Old Garth. He discharged what he owed his London tailor and a horse veterinarian in Leicestershire, and was able to move out of the room where he’d chummed with two others and move into the Select. You might think it an extravagance that he should have used the extra shilling a week to reduce his debts, but I believe he made a wise choice. The same week that Tommy moved to the State House there was a death on the stinking staircase he had just quit: a case of cholera, and it wasn’t the last.
Sally had a terror of infection. She begged me to cease going to Southwark.
She said, ‘If you stop going Annie will stop too.’
I doubted that. Annie and Robert liked to look into all the worst stews and shambles and discuss what must be done about them. It was their pleasure, their Vauxhall Gardens.
Then there began to be talk of cholera in other parts of the city. They said it came in with men from the North Sea colliers, and by Christmas there were fever boats on the river at Wapping. Sal and I had words.
She said, ‘You must stop going to that dreadful place. What is it to you if that old man’s boy is in there? He brought it on himself, spending what he didn’t have.’
I said, ‘I know that, but the way he was raised is the cause of much of it. He was encouraged to have expectations, then nothing came of them. I go there because his guardian’s dead and gone, and it would break the old General’s heart to think Tommy had been forgotten.’
‘You and that old man,’ she said. ‘I swear you showed him more consideration than you ever did Jack.’
And of course the truth of that stung me so hard I hit back. I called her an ignorant, ungrateful wretch and told her Jack’s words, that if I wanted to bring her from the Foundling Hospital I must pay for her food and keep myself and not expect anything from him. That brought tears to her eyes, for she’d loved Jack and oftentimes called him pa, and he’d loved her in his funny, begrudging way. So we parted on bad terms and I had cause to regret it because the next day she took ill.
Annie came to Seymour Street, to find out why Sally and I had quarrelled.
I said, ‘It’s the prison visiting. Your mother thinks it’ll be the death of you and I’m to blame for putting the idea in your head.’
‘Mother forgets I’m a grown woman,’ she said. ‘But I hate you to quarrel, especially when she’s feeling so low. Go and see her, Grandma Nellie. Make your peace.’
Sal had a stiff neck, Annie said, and her throat was sore. I went to the Pink Lemon next morning and took her a bottle of Lucas’s Drops and a piece of red flannel for the stiffness. Henry was in a fine old mood. He had an order from Lady Haddon for candied chestnuts and a great sugar-work candelabra and he needed Sally to mind the shop.
He said, ‘I suppose we’ve you to thank for this. You’re the one who’s in and out of prisons. She was all right before she called on you.’
I said, ‘And how can I be to blame? I’m not sick. I’ll help in the shop till Sally’s right again.’
‘You will not,’ he said. ‘There’s no telling what pestilence you’re carrying.’
Sal’s throat was swollen. I went down to the ice pit and brought her chipped ice to suck on.
I said, ‘We shouldn’t fight.’
And though it pained her too much to talk she smiled. It was clear she was glad I was there. I sat with her till Annie came home from her work.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Peace has broken out. Good.’
It was Peter, Henry’s apprentice boy, who came to fetch me. The watch was crying three o’clock as we crossed Oxford Street, not a soul about and there was a fine rain falling.
The wind was gone out of Henry’s sails. He said, ‘She’s worse, Nellie. Her breathing’s very laboured.’
Robert Clearwell had gone to fetch a doctor. I said, ‘Why didn’t you send for him sooner?’ But I knew the reason. Money. Just like my Jack, Henry Topham wouldn’t spend it until he had no choice. They weren’t kin, but by God they could have been.
Annie said, ‘Father thinks it’s cholera. He’s worried word will get round.’
He said, ‘Don’t look at me like that, Nellie. I’ve a business to think of. Something like that could ruin a man.’
Well, any fool could have told him it wasn’t cholera, nothing like. With the cholera everything runs through you like water. I went in to Sally. She was red hot to the touch. Her breath was putrid and she struggled for every breath. I held her in my arms while Henry paced the floor and Annie waited on the doorstep, keeping watch for Robert. It was after four when he returned, with a surgeon he’d roused from his bed on Audley Street, a dithering old wreck who should have taken down his brass plate long since. He said it was as bad a case of quinsy as he had ever seen and while he fumbled about, preparing camphor vapour and laying out his lancets, my darling girl turned blue about the lips and expired.
I call her mine. She wasn’t mine by blood, and she had never called me ‘Mother’, only ‘Aunt Nellie’. But Jack and I were all the family she ever had and she’d never showed the least resentment of her lot, never wondered who her mother had been or why she had left her at the Foundlings. Whether I did for her all that a natural mother would I cannot say. I think I did well enough, but it seems the memory of that last silly quarrel will never leave me. Just when I think I’ve conquered it I turn a corner or open a door and it springs out at me: ‘You and that old man. I swear you showed him more consideration than you ever did Jack.’
We buried her at Brompton Road, in the grave where her sons lay, feeble little souls who’d had no interest in breathing. Henry opened up the Pink Lemon the next day and took his grief into the kitchen. Annie did her best to be rational, as recommended by Robert Clearwell. We are born to die and if we don’t the world will soon be so crowded we shall have to stand on each other’s shoulders. Sometimes, though, she came to me in the evening and we enjoyed a good irrational weep together.
It was quite expected that Annie and Robert would marry. They were together every working hour and many evenings too, and they never seemed to quarrel. They were an earnest pair, fond of reading and debating, which I do commend, but I wondered never to see any little touches of longing between them. Those late years with Garth had made me regretful of what I’d missed. And then there was the case of Sofy, primed and brought to a fever of passion by Ernie Cumberland, then cast aside, ruined, without any hope of being loved again. I wanted everything to be right for Annie. They waited six months after Sally’s passing.
Annie said, ‘Grandma Nellie, I have something to tell you.’ I’d guessed it, of course, but not what followed. The marrying was to take place in a meeting hall. There’d be no wedding gown, no flowers, no clergyman. Robert had joined the Society of Friends, Annie intended to follow him, and they were to take up posts as teachers in a Quaker school in Stoke Newington.
I said, ‘I shall never see you.’
She said, ‘You would if you lived with us.’
In Stoke Newington! The very idea! It must be eight miles out of town if it’s an inch.
I said, ‘You know I’m not suited to country living.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you might if you tried it again. Better than staying here alone.’
I did think of that, of course. This is a big house. I’d offered rooms to Georgiana Astley but she preferred to stay at Lant Street, to be close to Tommy she said. And not to run the risk of turning on to Portman Street and seeing people she used to count as friends.
I promised Annie I would go to Stoke Newington when her babies came, to help her with her lying-in.
