Up ahead, Frederick has stopped at a coster’s cart to buy ginger beer for the Girls. I wish he wouldn’t. I’ve seen it done in Manchester, the ginger boiled in the same copper that serves for washing, and it’s not healthful. Jenny halts us in order to keep our distance from the others. She bends down and picks some flowers from the verge.
“What are these?” I says when she puts a posy in my buttonhole.
“Snow-in-the-summer,” she says. “It’s rare to see them still blooming this late.”
“They’re lovely,” I says.
She gives a vague smile and, seeing that the others have moved off, starts us up once more. “I realize I have been talking only of myself.”
“That’s all right, Jenny.”
“Well, I do not want to talk anymore. It is only boring you and upsetting me. And distracting us from the other matter.”
The other matter is, of course, the house. She reminds me that the maid, Camilla Barton, is due to arrive in a fortnight’s time, and gives me advice on how to keep her, which is harder than I might think, for things aren’t like they used to be, in sixty-eight and the crisis years, when the good families were letting go of their help and the registries were brimming with girls to be had for the asking and for a price much closer to their worth. Nay, things have changed and a girl will walk if she finds a better situation, and it’s often not even the mistress’s fault, for it’s difficult to define in exact terms what’s owed a girl and what she herself owes, and not everyone can learn the art of leaving the servants alone.
“I recommend a second girl,” she says. “Frederick instructed me to find only the one, and I followed those instructions, but my true feeling is that you will need two. Everything works better with two. The girls are happier because they have company and get to sit down in the evening, and you are happier because the work can be divided out and gets done. You do not want to be a slave with your apron never off. London is your retirement. If I could afford it, I would get another.”
“Can’t Nim manage? Has she ever threatened to leave?”
“Nim? Oh, she’s different. We’ve had her for so long she’s like family.”
In the distance, Karl beckons us to a tree where he thinks we ought lay the picnic. Jenny flutters her handkerchief in answer.
“Speaking of family, Lizzie, I would like to say something to you.”
“What’s on your mind, Jenny?”
“I’d like to clean the air.”
“Does it need cleaning?”
“About your sister.”
The other matter. The real matter.
“Jenny, you don’t have to. It’s not important.”
“Nein, nein, it’s on my mind, Lizzie, and I’d like to say it out.” She turns into the wind so the loose strands of her hair fly back over her bonnet. “Mary was your sister, Lizzie, and you loved her as any sister would and should, and I don’t think little of you for it.”
“And I’m glad for that, Jenny.”
“You already know relations between her and me weren’t easy, and I’m not going to insult you by pretending otherwise now.”
“Well, we can’t get on with everyone.”
“But there are reasons, Lizzie, good reasons, I did not, as you say, get on with your sister, and I want to share some of those with you. I want to tell my side. Not to vindicate myself, you understand, or absolve myself of any wrongdoing, but to let things out in the open, so we can be friends, you and I, honestly and truly.”
I shake my head and keep my gaze on the path ahead. “What’s past is past, Jenny. What’s to be gained from walking back over it? Mary is gone, and what spite there was between you has gone to the grave with her. There’s no point digging it out and giving it life again.”
She tugs on my arm in an effort to turn my eyes towards her. I don’t give in to it. “You are a good person, Lizzie, and I appreciate most deeply your trying to save me the pain. But I must talk on it. Otherwise it shall always be there, haunting me. The only way to put a thing behind one is to put a name on it and to know it, or?”
She goes quiet, leaving just the wind in our ears, and it seems for a moment like her mind has countered itself and decided against naming or knowing anything, but the moment passes and she turns to me now, intent on my face.
“As you well know, Lizzie, anxieties and vexations are the lots of all political wives, but I can say with certainty that few are familiar with the misery and anger I have experienced over the years. With Karl I have lived a Gypsy life, forced from place to place, this country to that. I can barely remember a week when I did not have to struggle in some mean way to keep the family healthy and alive in the hovels our poverty pressed us to live in. I often went to pieces and saw Karl weep. Many times I felt I could no longer keep my strength. I became an expert at composing begging letters. I lost my looks.” She wipes a hand across her cheek as if to remove the pits that the smallpox has left there. “And through all of this, the only means, the only means I had of preventing a total collapse was the show of respectability I was able to maintain. It may sound silly to you now, Lizzie, but I was young and I had certain ideas, and my public face was all that kept them alive. And when Frederick took up with Mary, it threatened to take away even that.” She takes my hand from where it was warm in my skirt pockets, and she holds it. “Did Mary speak to you of me?”
“Speak, nay. She fumed. Called you all sorts. And she had some right, Jenny. It was no business of yours what she and Frederick did.”
“Yes, I know, Lizzie. And if it were only that they were not married, then it would not have been a problem. Please, I am not a fanatic. But the fact was, they were using each other. Mary was using Frederick to get ahead. And Frederick was using Mary to make a splash. Nothing was real. They were playing each other like a game, and that was all. She took his money and gifts, and lived like a fine lady of society on the back of him. And he showed her about like a prize. He said it himself, she was his finger-up to his family and the whole blasted bourgeoisie, and it was clear they both enjoyed it a bit too much, she and he. It was vulgar and intolerable, and it was doing no good for the Movement. People, our comrades, were asking questions. I remember hearing them wondering out loud to each other why such an intelligent man was involving himself with one of his workers. They could accept he was a capitalist and a millocrat. That was the family burden he had to carry. But did he also have to behave like one? He was taking advantage of his position. He was no better than the other rich sons of Manchester who used the young girls of the proletariat for their pleasure. Frederick, they said, was an exploiter. They thought he was exploiting the—”
She stops here. She sees my face and is clever enough to know she ought. She gives me back my hand and I put it away again. “Can you forgive me, Lizzie? Do you think we can be friends?”
I’m far from charmed. It’s not in me to offer any softening words. But nor do I push her to the apology she’s paining to reach. At bottom she’s a good woman. Her affliction is only that she believes, still, that she has a right to be free from all that’s disagreeable. “Of course,” I says, and touch her on the shoulder.
She moves around to allow an embrace, but before anything can happen—before I’m seen stood in this park in this woman’s arms—I come away to help Nim with the final bit of carrying.
“Do you need a hand with that, Nim?”
“I can manage, thank you, Mrs. Burns.”
October
V. Let Us Hear
I lie under, his whiskers like a broom of twigs and stinking of liquor, till I’ve come to terms with the dark and my situation in it. “Angels of grace, defend us,” I says,