Daughter of Dark River Farm (37 page)

Something about her face stopped my fury in its tracks; she looked stricken, not angry, and I eased my voice down into a softer tone. ‘What’s wrong? Why don’t you trust them?’

‘You can’t trust anyone in this world,’ she said, her own voice catching suddenly. ‘Not
anyone
.’

‘Jess—’

‘Stop saying that!’

‘Well what do you want me to call you? Your real name’s Frances, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Call me that.’

I looked at her for a moment, wracking my brain for something that would explain this strange behaviour. ‘It’s going to get confusing,’ I said at last.

‘Then call Frances Mrs Adams.’

‘Oh, not that again!’ My irritation crept back. ‘You’ve never liked that, have you?’

She ignored that. ‘Why did Lady Creswell throw you out of Oaklands, Kitty? Same reason as your mother doesn’t want to know you?’

I hurt with the need to make her stop. ‘You don’t know anything about that.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘No.’

‘Why can’t you go home?’

‘Why can’t
you
?’

She stopped then, and her mouth opened and closed, then she shrugged. ‘I can. If I want to. I just don’t want to.’

‘What’s your mother done to you?’ It was my turn to throw the barb, and it struck true; she lashed out, thumping the wall.

‘Stop it! I told you, nothing.’

‘Shall I write to her, like you wrote to mine? Would that be fair?’

‘What?’ Her face went blank with surprise. Had she forgotten already?

‘You did your best to send me away, and it nearly worked, so perhaps I should do the same to you.’

‘You think
I
wrote that letter?’

‘You…you didn’t?’

‘No!’ She laughed then, and it wasn’t wholly unkind, but neither was it the slightest bit mirthful. ‘You idiot, that was Belinda!’

‘Don’t lie; Bel wouldn’t.’

‘Oh, wouldn’t she? Not even if she thought the handsome stranger had taken a shine to you?’

‘Nathan? Don’t be—’

‘I didn’t write the letter, Kitty.’

I spoke, not with disbelief now, but with a sort of bewildered betrayal. ‘Why would Bel want to send me away? We’re friends.’

‘Why do you think? It’s always men with you girls, isn’t it?’

‘What do you mean, us girls?’

‘You flighty, pretty types.’

I almost laughed too, then, but it would have been through humour, at least. ‘Are you poking fun at me?’

She ignored my question. ‘Look, ask
her
your stupid questions. I’m more concerned about those girls, and what they want with Amy.’

‘They don’t want anything with her. They just want her to have a good start in life.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

I was really cross again now. ‘Well what do
you
think they want?’

‘I…she…’ Jessie stopped and closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again and looked at me steadily. She seemed to come to a decision, and took a deep breath. ‘Kitty, what do you know about Amelia Dyer?’

‘Who?’

She glanced past me down the landing, and then opened her bedroom door. ‘Come in here. I want to talk. It’s time.’

‘What about Amy?’

‘She’s with Lizzy. She’s safe.’

It was an odd thing to say, but curiosity got the better of me and I followed Jessie into my old room and sat down on the bed. Jessie sat beside me, but wouldn’t look at me. We remained silent for a while, and although I was desperate to ask her something, anything, to get her talking, it would only upset things. So I waited.

Eventually Jessie took a deep breath and began. ‘Just over twenty years ago a woman called Amelia Dyer was hanged. Her daughter Polly was arrested too.’ She fell silent, but again I bit my tongue against the obvious questions, sensing her need to get her thoughts straight before she voiced them.

‘They were baby farmers.’

I flinched. ‘
Baby
farmers?’

‘Didn’t you hear about the “Reading Horrors” then?’

I shook my head, tight with apprehension at the thought of what I might hear next. Jessie’s voice was calm enough as she explained, helping to steady my rising horror.

‘Amelia used to take in children. Unwanted children. She used different names over the years, and she’d take payment from some poor girl who’d been caught out, ten pounds, something like that, and offer to give the child a good home. Save the girl the disgrace, and the cost, of bringing up a child.’

‘That’s…well, it’s awful, but surely it’s good for the child?’

‘It might have been. Except they never brought those children up. The children died, Kitty. Almost every one. Hundreds, they said, by the time those women were stopped.’

My mouth suddenly dry, I couldn’t swallow for a second, couldn’t breathe. I waited for my heart to start beating again, and when it did it hurt. But the air moved through me again, and I was able to speak.

‘Why are you telling me this? Do you think I’d give Amy up to someone like that?’

She looked at me then, and her face was like that of a ghost; not just pale, but blank and lost. ‘Not deliberately, no. But what if you didn’t know?’

‘But they’re dead. You said so.’

‘Amelia is. Her daughter Polly was alive as of ’98, and still up to her old tricks.’

‘Tricks…’ The flippant phrase made me feel sick. ‘But the McKrevie girls…they’re respectable. I’ve been to their home!’ Her knowing look made me realise another lie had come to light, but it didn’t matter any more. ‘I promise you, Jessie, I would have never let her go to them if I didn’t trust them.’

‘That’s really my point, isn’t it?’ Jessie said. ‘It’s like I said, you can’t trust anyone.’

‘But if I refused to let her go, why would they give me money, instead of the other way around?’

‘That’s what worried me,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t know for sure that you
had
refused them, did I?’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps you’d sold her instead of paying them to take her.’

The shock of her accusation was like a slap. It pushed aside the distress at the thought of all those unknown children, and brought my anger back with a flash. ‘How the
hell
dare
you suggest I’d do that!’

I stood up and moved towards the door, my heart pounding, desperate to get out, and away from Jessie and her cruelty. But she leapt up too, and caught at my arm.

‘Kitty! Sit down. Please. I haven’t finished.’

‘I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.’

‘I might have been one of those children!’ she shouted, and this time it took a lot longer to find my breath again. I stared at her, and she stared back at me, and then she gestured to the bed. I sat.

‘My mother, Elizabeth Shorey, made…a mistake. A big mistake. She fell in love with the hotel owner she worked for. He got her pregnant. He was married, of course.’ She cleared her throat, and went on, her fingers twisting together in her lap, ‘He arranged for the baby…for me, to be passed to someone called Mrs Palmer. He paid, and it was even all done through a solicitor.’

‘But didn’t the solicitor know?’

‘How could he? Mrs Palmer was supposedly married to a respectable poultry farmer. All was quite above board. The solicitor drew up the agreement and they arranged to meet at his offices in Gloucester. My mother’s aunt, who’d gone with her, suggested my mother go back with Mrs Palmer for a day or two, to let the…let
me
, get used to my home. Mrs Palmer said no.’

‘What reason could she possibly give to refuse that? It sounds perfectly sensible.’

‘She said she and her husband were in lodgings, and it wasn’t convenient. So they went to the railway station, mother was allowed to hold me for one last time, while Mrs Palmer bought the tickets, and that should have been it.’

When I spoke it was with a kind of breathless wonder. ‘What happened, Jessie?’

‘Mother had a box all ready for me. Pinafores, nightdress, socks. A brush, I think, that kind of thing. And a hat.’ Her voice took on a sad tone. ‘Mother kept talking about that red hat, as if it meant everything. Excused everything.’ Jessie swallowed hard and continued, ‘She gave it over to Mrs Palmer, and just when she was about to let me go too—’

‘I shouted to her.’

We both jumped and turned to the door. Frances stood there, her face as white as Jessie’s. ‘I’ve been listening a while,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to be able to tell it your way.’ She came in and pulled up the little wicker chair that lived by the window. She was far too tall for it, and sat hunched over her knees, and her heels jerked in a restless tattoo against the thin carpet. ‘I knew her, you see, or thought I did. I didn’t really think she’d go through with it, and I didn’t want to bully her into a decision, so I waited for her to come to her senses by herself. But when I saw her give over the box of clothes I knew I had to stop her.’

‘Go back to the beginning,’ I urged. ‘How did you know Jessie’s mother?’

She looked at me, then at Jessie, and then back down at her tightly linked hands. ‘I left Tavistock when I was old enough to go away work, and went to Gloucester. That’s where I met Elizabeth. We got to be good friends, as good as you can be, working all day. When she told me she was in trouble by Mr Aldridge, the hotel owner, I said I’d try to help, and I did. But when the time came she went off alone, to the union workhouse, for the birth. I found her again, after.’

She glanced at Jessie again, her long, homely face filled with pain. ‘You were such a dear little thing. I took to you right away. I tried to make your mother come back down to Devon with me. But by then Mr Aldridge had made his arrangements and paid his money to Mrs Palmer. He had no idea, of course. Thought he was doing right by everyone, and so did Elizabeth. I was glad she had her aunt to help her, but I…well, I didn’t trust Mrs Palmer. And rightly, as it goes, ’cos she turned out to be Amelia Dyer’s daughter.’

‘So you stopped it all just in time!’ I was forgetting, for a moment, that these were real lives I was hearing about; it all sounded so tense and exciting it was like reading it in a book.

‘Thank goodness, yes,’ Frances said. ‘I watched, and waited until I was sure, then I stepped in. Eventually Elizabeth saw sense, and came back with me to Devon. We only meant to come home for a little while, but I met my Harry, and we wed. We put together a story of widowhood for Elizabeth, and she went back up to Gloucester with little Frances here.’

‘So that’s why Elizabeth named you after Frances,’ I said.

Frances nodded. ‘She was so grateful, especially two years later, when the full story came out. I think it was only then she realised how close she’d come to losing her little girl for ever.’ She touched Jessie’s still furiously twining fingers and spoke softly. ‘Is that why you came down here to work? Because you found out?’

She didn’t reply, but her fingers stopped twisting. Frances cupped her hand over them and raised them to her lips. ‘Sweetheart, you can’t blame your—’

‘Don’t defend her!’ Jessie shouted, ripping her hands out of Frances’s gentle grasp. ‘It was only thanks to you that I’m not dead!
She
wouldn’t have cared!’

‘Of course she would!’ Frances curled her own hands back into her lap in a clear effort to stop herself reaching out again. ‘She was horrified when she realised I was right about Amelia and Polly.’

Jessie went very still. ‘How
did
you know?’

Frances blanched. I felt a sick heat sweeping through me as I watched her face slacken into defeat. ‘Because I lost a child to them,’ she said at last, in a low, hoarse whisper.

The silence stretched. The clock ticked away the minutes, while the reality of what had passed between us settled like a thick, choking layer of ash.

Eventually Jessie spoke, and her voice was hard and cracked. ‘You sold your baby.’

‘It wasn’t like that! I wrote, and sent money, and clothes…and…and…I got letters back. Filled with news about how she was learning to walk, how she couldn’t say certain words and how charming it all was. I believed them…’ Frances caught her breath in a sob, and I felt my own throat thicken with anguish. I reached to touch her hand, and Jessie slapped my arm. Hard.

‘How can you be kind to a woman who would let someone kill her baby?’

‘She didn’t mean it to die!’ I shouted back, and at the awful, bald word, Frances broke down. Her face dropped into her hands as she wept, and I didn’t know what to do to help her. My arm was stinging from Jessie’s slap, but I couldn’t be angry with her. ‘She wanted what was right for it,’ I said, more quietly.

‘Just like you do for Amy?’

‘I haven’t sold her! I told you, I refused them.’

‘So you say.’

‘You’re going to have to trust me. What else
can
I say?’

‘It’s just as I said, you can’t trust anyone. Now do you believe me?’

I kept my voice even, but the anger was making my throat hurt. ‘If you had a single ounce of decency in you, Frances Jessie Goulding, you’d see your behaviour is unbelievably selfish. You’re lucky you have a mother who loves you, and has done all your life. And Frances
saved
your life
,
for goodness’ sake! What possible good can it do to punish someone who only wants to help? Not that you deserve it!’

There was a faint flicker in Jessie’s eyes, but she didn’t answer. She went to her drawer and started to pull out clothing. She threw it onto the bed, and Frances looked up at her in dismay.’

‘Don’t leave, Jessie! Let me tell you how it happened. You’ll understand—’

‘I understand why you feel this need to take in every waif and stray who comes to your door,’ she said, shooting a dark glance at me. ‘You feel guilty.’

‘No! I feel…’

‘What?’

Frances choked on the word, ‘Empty,’ and my own tears spilled over. I moved to hold her, and Jessie, also crying now, dragged her suitcase out from under the bed. She dashed her hand across her wet, shining eyes.

‘Kitty, be truthful: do I need to take Amy with me?’ Numb, I shook my head. ‘Good, because I don’t know where I’m going yet.’ She fixed me with a strange, half-furious, half-understanding look. ‘I’ll come back for her if I have to though. I believe you love that little girl, but—’