The Wild Rose (26 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Josie put another shovelful of coal on the fire. The summer evening had turned cool. She stoked the flames until they were burning brightly, leaned the shovel against the wall, and turned to look at her friend.

Jennie was sitting in a nearby chair. Her eyes were open, but dull. Her face was gray. She had stopped weeping—that was something—but now she just sat lifelessly, staring into the fire, not speaking.

The little life inside her had died this morning. And it seemed to Josie as if Jennie had died along with it. She was wrung out. Empty. A shell. There was no spark left in her.

It hurt Josie terribly to see her this way. Jennie had been like a second mother to her. She’d made sure Josie had learned how to read and write. She’d coached her on how to speak properly. At least, she’d tried to. She’d encouraged her love of music and singing. When Josie’s father drank his wages, leaving nothing for food, Jennie had fed her. When he came home from the pub and started hammering on Josie’s mother, and Josie ran away because she could not bear it, Jennie had taken her in and let her sleep in her bed.

Jennie was the only reason Josie was on stage. She’d saved her, years ago, from a life of drudgery in the factories of Wapping or Whitechapel, and she’d saved her again, just a few weeks ago, when Madden had put her up the pole. There wasn’t anything Josie wouldn’t do for Jennie—if only Jennie would let her.

Josie took a deep breath now and pulled a wooden chair over to where Jennie was sitting. She sat down in it, so close to Jennie that their knees were touching, then she took Jennie’s hands in hers and said, “We can do this. I know we can. The two of us together.”

Jennie shook her head. “It’ll never work,” she said.

“Yes, it will. If we want it to. If
you
want it to.”

Jennie said nothing, but her eyes flickered from the fire to Josie’s face and back to the fire again. Josie took this as a hopeful sign.

She’d hatched a plan—a plan that was clever and perfect. She’d thought it up as she was rushing Jennie into Dr. Cobb’s, and then she’d refined it that afternoon, after she’d got Jennie home from the doctor’s and into bed. She’d made herself a pot of tea, sat down at the kitchen table, and thought the whole thing through once more, carefully and slowly, testing it for flaws, just as she’d seen Madden and his men do when they were planning some new piece of villainy.

Only this wasn’t villainy. This plan wouldn’t hurt anyone. It would only help.

Jennie, out of her mind with both grief and laudanum, had told Josie everything after they’d come home from Dr. Cobb’s. She told her about the accident and how it meant she couldn’t have children. She told her about meeting Seamus Finnegan and falling in love with him and marrying him without having told him the truth about herself. And she told her about Willa Alden.

Josie knew her plan would solve both Jennie’s problems and her own, but she hadn’t been able to convince Jennie of that. She’d tried to explain it to her earlier, but Jennie, distraught and inconsolable, refused to listen, telling her it was impossible. Josie decided now to try one more time.

“The hardest bit’s already taken care of, the rest will be a doddle,” she said. “Dr. Cobb thinks you’re Josie Meadows and I’m Jennie Finnegan. He’s written it all down and has his notes all safely tucked away in a file.”

Josie had done all the talking at Dr. Cobb’s. She’d told him that her friend Mrs. Meadows was visiting her at her cottage for the week and had started experiencing terrible pains.

It hadn’t taken Dr. Cobb long to confirm Jennie’s greatest fear—that she was indeed miscarrying her baby. He did only a cursory exam, gave her laudanum, and told her to expect cramping and bleeding for the next few hours, as her uterus expelled its contents. He told her that this was an unfortunate occurrence, but not an uncommon one, and that she would surely conceive again within the year.

“All we have to do now is go on exactly as we have been,” Josie said to her.

“How, Josie? I lost the baby. Even if I don’t tell a soul, everyone will know. My belly won’t be growing,” Jennie said.

“Yes, it will. Because you’ll stuff a pillow under your skirt.”

Jennie shook her head. “Josie, it’s impossible. It won’t work,” she said.

“No, listen to me! It
will
work. We do it all the time at the music hall. For a gag. A girl goes off stage left, hand in hand with some rake, then comes back stage right crying and carrying on with a big fat belly. You start with a small pillow and change it for bigger ones as the weeks go by. I’ll show you how to do it. The only tricky part will be your husband. If he wants relations, I mean. You’ll have to put him off. Say you’re poorly and it’s bad for the baby. Doctor’s orders.”

“That won’t be a problem at all,” Jennie said bitterly. “My husband doesn’t want relations. Not with me, at least.”

“All right, then. So that part won’t be hard. You keep the act going for a few months, and you come here when you need to take a break from it. In a few months, my baby comes. Dr. Cobb delivers it and writes out a birth certificate for baby Finnegan. Just make sure to figure out a name well in advance, right? I’ll get word to you when the baby arrives. You come to Binsey immediately. You don’t write home for a day or two, then you ring your husband from the pub, tell him what’s happened—that you stumbled and fell, and your pains came on, and the baby came a little earlier than expected. He’ll probably throw a wobbly and say that he wants to come to Binsey straightaway to collect you, but you tell him that the baby came easily and that you feel fine, and that you’ve engaged a girl from the village to travel to London with you and help you with your bags.”

“A girl from the village? What girl?” Jennie asked.

“Me, of course,” Josie said. “I’ll get some sort of frumpy farm girl outfit together, put on a bonnet, and ride to London with you. I’ve never met your husband, so he won’t know who I really am. There’s always a chance he saw the
Zema
posters, but I had a wig on in those and not much else. I’m sure he wouldn’t recognize me. Before you ring off, you tell him what time the train’s arriving at Paddington and ask him to collect you. He does. I say hello and good-bye, then pretend I’m getting on a return train to Binsey, get on a train to the coast instead, and then on the ferry to Calais.”

Josie paused to let her words sink in, then she said, “When your husband sees his baby, the baby he wanted so much, he’ll be happy, and maybe he’ll remember his wedding vows. And then you’ve got your child and your husband. And I escape to Paris, far away from Billy Madden, knowing my child won’t grow up in some horrible orphanage, that she will grow up with the best woman in the world for a mother.”

“Do you really think it could work?” Jennie said, her voice a whisper.

“I do.”

“What if the baby looks nothing like me? Or Seamie?”

“We’re both blond, you and I,” Josie said. “And we both have hazel eyes. So if the baby looks like me, she’ll look like you, too.”

“It’s ever so risky. So much could go wrong,” Jennie said.

“No, luv,” Josie said. “So much could go right.”

Jennie looked Josie in the eye then, and for the first time since they left the market, Josie saw a spark there—faint and struggling, but a spark nonetheless. “Well?” she said hopefully, squeezing her friend’s hands.

Jennie nodded, and squeezed back.

CHAPTER FORTY

“Good night, Mr. Bristow. Safe trip home,” Sir David Erskine, sergeant at arms for the House of Commons, said to Joe.

“Good night to you as well, Sergeant,” Joe said, as he wheeled himself down St. Stephen’s Hall, out the door, and toward Cromwell Green.

Outside, the air was soft and warm and the sky twinkled with a million stars. It was a beautiful summer night—a night to make anyone feel glad to be alive. But Joe didn’t even notice it. He’d just come from another late session in the Commons. Earlier that day, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. Fearing the worst—Germany’s imminent involvement—a wary Britain was now in constant contact with France and Russia, its Triple Entente allies, trying to determine a plan of containment should the kaiser actually declare war. Fortunately, the
Entente
had been put in place long before Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.

France, who’d suffered a bruising defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and had seen her territories of Alsace-Lorraine annexed to Germany, had aligned with Russia at the end of the last century, both countries finding common ground in their shared mistrust of the kaiser. Russia was especially concerned about Germany’s warm relationship with Turkey. The tsar feared that if Germany gained a foothold in Turkey, the kaiser would try to take control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits—waterways that connected the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and which were crucial to Russia’ s ability to trade with the rest of the world.

Britain—already aligned with France as the result of the Entente Cordiale, a treaty signed in 1904 after both countries had settled their skirmishes over colonial territories in Africa—saw an alliance with Russia as also advantageous, and so the Anglo-Russian Entente had been signed in 1907. Britain had pledged to come to the defense of both France and Russia should they be threatened by Germany, and they had pledged the same for her.

In addition to strategizing with his country’s allies, the prime minister had also approached Britain’s own Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener—a soldier and statesman who’d distinguished himself on several major battlefields—and asked him to become secretary of state for war.

Joe had spoken with Kitchener and had learned that, unlike many of Asquith’s advisors, the field marshal did not expect a war with Germany to be quickly fought and won. On the contrary, he had made the dire and unpopular prediction that such a war would last at least three years and would result in enormous casualties—a prediction that gave Joe renewed energy with which to argue against the warmongers in the Commons.

But his arguments were all to no avail. Joe could see that. Everyone could. Kitchener himself had come up to Joe in the Commons dining room, after he had spent the day giving a speech in the House and listening to many more. “Save your breath, old chap,” he’d counseled Joe. “It doesn’t matter what I say. It wouldn’t matter what God said, had He the patience to sit in the Commons and endure Churchill’s endless harangues. They will have their war.”

It would be soon, Kitchener felt. Perhaps as soon as the coming autumn.

Weary and dispirited now, Joe wheeled himself across Cromwell Green to the line of carriages waiting just past it on the street. He saw his carriage in the queue and knew that Tom, his driver, would be nearby—fetching water for the horses or talking to one of the other drivers. As Joe drew up to his carriage, he saw a flower girl walking up and down the queue, trying to sell bouquets of roses. She was having little luck.

Joe stopped to watch her. He watched as people walked by her, deaf to her entreaties, blind to the holes in her shoes and the hollows in her cheeks. And he felt as if his heart was breaking. For he knew that while this child—she couldn’t have been more than ten years old—walked the dark streets of London, desperately trying to make a few bob, men who had been raised in great homes and palaces, who had all the privileges wealth and power conferred, swept their make-believe armies across maps of the world. While she shivered and pulled her threadbare shawl around her thin shoulders, they poured more port into their crystal glasses and lit cigars.

They thought of borders broken and territories taken, these men. They thought of victories won and of medals gleaming, but they did not think—not once—of the struggle this child endured, every day, to simply survive. And they did not think to wonder what would become of this child and of every child like her, poor children in every town and every village in Britain and Europe, if they lost their fathers to bullets, their houses to cannons, their fields and animals to the pillaging of foreign invaders.

It was this child I fought for, Joe said to himself. And it’s this child I’ve failed.

He wanted to go to her now. He wanted to tell her that he’d tried. But she would think him mad if he did that. So instead he wheeled himself over to her and told her that he wanted to buy all her flowers, everything she had.

“What? All of them?” she asked, stunned.

“Yes,” Joe said. He turned to Tom, who had joined him now. “Tom, could you put these in the carriage, please?”

“Right away, sir,” Tom replied, picking up the child’s heavy basket.

Joe gave the child more than the price of the flowers. “You keep the extra for yourself,” he said.

“Thank you, sir! Oh, thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” Joe replied.

Tom gave the child her basket back, and Joe watched as she hurried off, her money still clutched in her hand.

“That was good of you, sir. To help that child,” Tom said.

“I didn’t help her, Tom,” Joe said. “A year from now, she’ll likely be worse off than she is. With her father at the front. Her brothers, too, if she has any. Men earn a lot more than women do. It’ll be her and her mum and her sisters, all shifting for themselves on factory wages and what they can make selling flowers. Poor little thing should be in school, learning how to read and write. Not out on the streets at all hours.”

“Can’t fix the entire world, sir. Not even you. Not tonight, leastways,” Tom said.

Joe watched the child as she turned the corner and disappeared into the night. “Ah, Tom,” he said, shaking his head. “Why did I tell her ‘You’re welcome’? When I should’ve told her ‘I’m sorry.’ ”