Off the Rails (13 page)

Jane took the baby on her lap and motioned to Lizzie to sit beside her, which she did, leaning forward to slip a practised finger into the infant’s small curled fist. ‘They’re so pretty at this age,’ she said. Then she paused to take a kerchief from her reticule and held it in front of her mouth for several seconds.

‘Are you not well?’ Jane asked.

‘A little sickness,’ Lizzie said. ‘Nowt to speak of. ’Twill pass.’

‘You are carrying again,’ Jane said.

‘Aye,’ Lizzie admitted. ‘How quick you are, my dear. ’Tis due in January, so Mrs Hardcastle says, but I’ve been uncommon sickly from the word go, not that I’m complaining. I mean to say, that could be a good sign, couldn’t it? I mean to say I were never sick wi’ t’others an’ if I’m sick this time happen ’tis a girl. I would so like a girl. Not that I don’t like my boys. They’re darlings all of ’em, especially my poor little James, but a girl would be so …’

‘Would tea be helpful?’ Jane offered.

‘And then there’s this dress,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what to wear for the best and ’tis such a worry. ’Tis such a grand occasion, you see, and up in London, what is worse, and I wouldn’t want to let him down. The seamstress says blue and white are all the rage but I favour red and orange myself. Such pretty colours. What do ’ee think?’

Jane had to admit she knew nothing about the sort of gowns that would be worn at society dinners. ‘But the seamstress should know,’ she said. ‘Happen you should be advised by her.’

Unfortunately Lizzie went her own way and chose a dress that was wildly unsuitable, being a concoction in yellow, amber and red. The next day the society gossips were busy in their parlours and salons tearing her to shreds for her lack of class. And two days later Milly had a letter telling her all about it. She read it through twice and on her afternoon off she took it to Shelton House to show to her mother.

It had come from the Lady Sarah Livingston, who was, as she invariably signed herself, ‘
your old friend from our nursery days at Foster Manor
’, and had been writing to her at frequent intervals ever since she started work with the Hudsons. Their letters were usually full of the latest news of their families but this one was rather different. It was bubbling with amusement at the terrible gaffs Mrs Hudson had made at a society dinner and the dreadful figure she’d cut. ‘
I know you work for her, my dear, but really she is quite, quite impossible. She is so fat and has absolutely no taste at all. Fat women should never wear yellow. Everybody knows that. I can’t think what she was thinking of. Howsomever, poor taste one can forgive but lack of wit is something else entirely and she has no wit at all. When they asked
if she would like sherry or port, she said she would have a bit of both. Can you imagine that? She was an absolute laughing stock. Emma and I have been in stitches ever since
.’

Jane read it in silence, occasionally shaking her head.

‘What do ’ee think of that?’ Milly asked.

‘She was always hoity-toity,’ Jane said, ‘but I’d never have thought she was spiteful. Poor Mrs Hudson.’

‘Should I say summat when I write back?’

‘No,’ Jane said, ‘you should not. There are plenty of other things to write about. Tell her about our little Nat. And ask after Felix.’

‘Should I say summat to Mrs Hudson then?’ Milly asked. ‘To warn her.’

‘No,’ Jane said again.

‘Will you?’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘’Tis not for us to criticise our betters. Leave it to Mr Hudson. He was the one what took her there and exposed her to being a laughing stock and he ought to have known better. Let him deal with it.’

So they left it to George.

It was four weeks before Lizzie came visiting again and Jane half expected her to be cast down but, on the contrary, she was triumphantly happy.

‘Oh, ’twere a great success,’ she said when Jane asked her about the dinner. ‘I can’t think why I were so worried about it. I were foolish, that’s the size of it. Mr Hudson were that pleased, you’d never believe. He said I were the best dressed woman there. A credit to him, he said.’

So Jane changed the subject and asked after her health instead. But later that afternoon, as she sat comfortably in her bedroom suckling her baby, she turned the conversation over in her mind and decided that she couldn’t make any sense of it. If George had really told poor Lizzie that she was the best dressed woman there, when it was plain from what Sarah had said that everybody else had a very different opinion, he was either blind to what people were saying or he was deliberately telling her lies. Either way it didn’t show him in a very good light. But she must be
charitable
. Happen he was so busy climbing the social ladder, he didn’t notice things.

Jane was in her parlour, sewing a new gown for Nat, who was rapidly growing out of his old ones, when the parlour maid arrived with a message from Mrs Hudson. It was a roughly written note, short and to the point. ‘
Please come dear friend. Matthew has taken a fever. I am at my wits’ end
.’

What followed was painful in the extreme for both women. The fever was sharp and virulent. Within three days the little boy was so ill he couldn’t keep anything down and he was losing weight visibly, lying motionless in his sour-smelling cot with his eyes tightly shut, as if he’d given up on life. Jane visited every day as soon as she’d settled Nat and she and Lizzie kept vigil and did what they could to ease his suffering. They tried coaxing him to take sips of water but that only exhausted him; they cleaned his soiled clothes but that exhausted him so much he was gasping for breath; and from time to time Lizzie eased him gently out of his cot and took him on her lap to nurse him and croon to him and tell him how much she loved him but he was too far gone to hear her. He died in the small hours of the tenth day without opening his eyes. She was inconsolable.

‘I can’t keep my babies alive,’ she wept to Jane. ‘First my poor little James and I
did
try. I tried so hard. No one will ever know how hard I tried. And now my poor Matthew. I knew he wouldn’t live. I said so at the time. I did, didn’t I? You remember. Oh, what’s to become of me?’

Jane did her best to comfort her, pointing out that most women lost at least one baby in the course of their lives, ‘that seems to be the way of it’, that she still had Dickie and another child on the way and that there would be others, ‘bound to be’ – but nothing she said made any difference. Lizzie didn’t want ‘others’. She wanted James and Matthew and she wept for them both uncontrollably. It took more than two months before she could take any comfort from anything at all. And as far as Jane could see, George wasn’t being any help to her at all, for he was always out at one meeting or another and seemed to be leaving her to get on with it on her own. But he was certainly climbing. By the time Christmas arrived he had become the treasurer of the York Tory Party and had befriended the Tory MP for Sunderland, who was also a London alderman and a former Lord Mayor of London, no less.

‘This Christmas, we’ll throw the biggest party this city’s ever seen,’ he told his long-suffering Lizzie. ‘Make ’em all sit up, eh?’

Lizzie may have learnt to cope with her grief but she was now so heavily pregnant it was all she could do to sit still, leave alone up, as she complained to Jane when she visited her in the new year.

‘Not that I can tell Mr Hudson,’ she said, shifting her bulk
uncomfortably
on Jane’s padded settee. ‘
That
wouldn’t do at all, would it, being he’s so particular to have everything just so, and of course he’s right to have everything just so, when so much depends on it, but, I tell ’ee, there are times when my back aches summat cruel, specially when they go on, and they
do
go on, some of ’em. I shall be glad when this one’s born. Oh, I do so hope ’twill be a girl.’

It was a private and much-wept disappointment to her when the child turned out to be yet another boy, healthy enough and really quite pretty, but a boy. His father called him George – ‘What better name, eh?’ – but otherwise paid no attention to him. He was too busy pushing for a post with the newly formed York Union Bank. And the push, as Lizzie
discovered
a few weeks later, meant that she was expected to join him at another grand party in London.

‘Although,’ as she confided to Jane, ‘how I shall mek out wi’ my poor Georgie to feed I do not know. I suppose I shall have to tek him with me and what a to-do that will be, I dread to think.’

‘Then tell Mr Hudson it can’t be done,’ Jane said practically.

But Lizzie was shocked. ‘I can’t do that, Jane. Not when so much depends on it. No, no, I must mek shift somehow or other.’

So she went to London with her baby and his nursemaid and so much luggage that they were hard put to get it all in the coach.

Milly didn’t think much of it. ‘She should stand up to him,’ she said to her mother. ‘Dragging all that way with a new baby. ’Tis the most
ridiculous
thing I ever heard. What if he takes a fever? What will she do then?’

‘I daresay they have surgeons in London,’ Jane said. But she had to admit that she agreed with her daughter and didn’t think her poor friend was being wise. ‘Howsomever, there’s nowt we can say to change her mind. That’s plain and obvious. He’s her husband and if he wants his own way he’ll get it, on account of she’ll do whatever he tells her. He’s got her under his thumb.’

But the months passed and Lizzie obeyed her husband and only complained about him very occasionally and Jane enjoyed hers and rejoiced in him every single day and their children thrived, despite Lizzie’s trip to London. At the end of the year, they discovered that they were both carrying again and that their babies would be born within weeks of each other, which pleased them both. This time Lizzie didn’t say anything about
how much she wanted a daughter, accepting that she was doomed to produce boys and only boys. Even when July came and Jane gave birth to her third child and her second daughter, she kept quiet and tried not to show how envious she was. So it was a surprise and a reward to her when her own fifth baby turned out to be a girl too. The two babies were
christened
in the Church of the Holy Trinity together, Mary Cartwright and Ann Hudson, and it would have been hard to say which of the two mothers was the happiest. And ten months later, when Lizzie had yet another boy, they made a celebration of that too and took young Dickie and all four of their babies to the church to see him christened John.

And so they continued until the cholera came to York.

I
T BEGAN SLOWLY
on a bright April morning with an unobtrusive report in the
York Courant
. Two patients, both resident in Skeldergate and both ‘
men in poor circumstances
’ had been taken to the hospital suffering from Cholera Morbus. Two days later one of them was dead, there were thirteen new cases in the town and the new Board of Health had been called to a meeting to decide what should be done.

George Hudson had no doubt about what action should be taken and demanded it forcefully. The cholera was spread by effluvia. Very well then. The first thing they should do was strip the patients of their clothes, the minute they arrived in the hospital, and take every single garment away to be burnt. If they died, their bedding should be burnt too.

‘’Twill cost,’ his fellow members told him.

‘Aye,’ he said, grimly. ‘’Twill. But think on’t. If we allow it to spread into an epidemic,
that’ll
cost a darn sight more. We need to fight this and fight it now.’

‘It’s all very well saying burn their clothes,’ another board member objected. ‘Some of ’em might not have other clothes to wear. Have ’ee thought of that?’

He hadn’t but he was quite capable of thinking on his feet. ‘Then we must collect old clothes from folk as can spare ’em,’ he said, ‘and provide replacements. We could use t’Guildhall as a collection point. If t’committee are agreeable, I will organize it.’

He was full of energy and determination, driving them as he used to drive the horses when he was a lad, allowing them to snort and balk and pull at the traces but knowing they’d give in and do what he wanted, come the finish. After all, they had no option for he was George Hudson, the man who got things done. It was a disagreeable surprise to him when he finally returned to Monkgate, a great deal later than he expected but glowingly pleased with himself, to be met with a furious attack in his own dining room.

Lizzie was standing by the window where she been watching out for him for the last hour and she was incandescent with fear and fury, her face so twisted by it that for a few seconds he didn’t recognize her and thought he’d come into the wrong house.

‘What are you going to do about this cholera?’ she said, attacking him before he could open his mouth to tell her how successful the meeting had been. ‘Tell me, why don’t you. Don’t just stand there. There’s people
dropping
like flies. ’Tis no earthly good you pulling a face. I
know
and don’t ’ee think I don’t. Like flies. ’Twas in the paper. You must
do
summat. Oh, what are we to do? I’ll not lose
another
baby. Not to the cholera. I’ve lost two and that’s enough, I’ll not lose another. I couldn’t stand it. You must tek us out of here this minute. This very minute as ever is. Afore we all tek ill and die.’

He tried to bluff her into a more amiable mood. ‘You’ll not tek ill,’ he said. ‘You’re safe here.’ And he ventured a joke to clinch it. ‘Safe as houses, you might say.’ It was a waste of effort. She was scowling worse than ever. So he changed tack again. ‘See sense, woman. Nobody’s dropping like flies. That’s all silly talk.’

‘Silly talk!’ she screamed at him. ‘Silly talk! ’Twas in the paper. Dropping like flies.’

‘One or two cases, that’s all,’ he said, ‘and they’re in the Shambles and Skeltergate. Nowt for you to worry your head about.’

‘All over the meat!’ she shrieked. ‘What we’re supposed to eat. Oh, I won’t stay here. Mek up your mind to it, George. Not in this hell-hole. Not another minute. You must
do
summat. Don’t you understand? You must get us out of it.’

He didn’t know how to cope with her. She looked as if she’d gone lunatic, with her eyes staring and her hair falling out of her cap and her face twisted as if it was being blown sideways by some great gale.

‘Do you hear me?’ she shrieked.

‘Aye,’ he said angrily. ‘The whole house can hear you. Have ’ee no shame?’

‘Shame!’ she yelled. ‘Don’t talk to me about shame. You’re the one who
should be ashamed. Leaving us here in this hell-hole. You’re a disgrace to the universe.’

‘Shut your mouth!’ he yelled back at her, now thoroughly angered. ‘I won’t be spoken to like that in my own house. Do you hear me?’

‘I’ll speak as I please,’ she shouted back. ‘’Tis my children we’re talking about. Don’t you understand? My children, what I love to distraction. I’ll not stand here and let ’em be took by the cholera and you needn’t think it. I’ve lost two and I’ll not lose any more. ’Tis more than human flesh and blood can stand.’

Even in his anger he could see that she was lunatic. Lunatic and out of control. And although it was ridiculous and unpleasant to have to admit it, he knew he’d have to give in to her or she’d go on shrieking all night.

‘Very well then,’ he said, calming himself with an effort. ‘Since you can’t see sense and you’re determined to make a scene, you can go to Whitby, and good riddance to you. I will order the carriage for you first thing tomorrow morning. But I warn you, you’ll not be very comfortable. Some of the houses are finished but they’re poorly furnished. They’re not what you’re used to.’

She wasn’t the slightest bit interested in furnishings or comfort. ‘Oh thank God!’ she said. ‘Thank God! I’ll go and get packed.’

‘What about dinner?’ he said. But she was already out of the door.

It seemed most peculiar to be dining alone, especially when he’d had such a victory over the Board, but what else can a man do when his wife runs lunatic?

Jane Cartwright was worrying about the cholera too. She and Nathaniel were discussing what to do over their dinner.

‘Should I take them to Ma’s, do ’ee think?’ Jane asked.

‘Would she have room?’ Nathaniel said. His face was creased with concern, for really this outbreak was very worrying, especially as he would be working on the Selby–Leeds railway for the next couple of weeks and wouldn’t be able to get home He couldn’t bear to have any of his darlings taken ill with the cholera. That was too dreadful to contemplate.

‘She’d mek room. I’m sure.’

There was a modest knock on the dining room door and Audrey came in, very quietly because she could see they were talking.

‘Which one is it?’ Jane said anxiously. Audrey always came down at once to tell her if either of her babies was stirring.

‘Neither of ’em,’ Audrey said at once. ‘Sleeping like babes, they are, dear little lambs. Not a peep out of ’em. No, no. ’Tis Mrs Hudson come. Shall I show her in here or tek her to t’parlour?’

She was ushered into the dining room and urged to sit at the table with them, flustered and dishevelled as she was. She was red in the face from her exertions and so out of breath from her rush to their house that it was several seconds before she could tell them why she’d come. But when she did, what she had to say – once they’d managed to decipher it – was the solution to their worries.

‘I’ve had such a to-do as you’d never believe,’ she said, ‘what wi’ packing and worriting an’ all, I’ve been at my wits’ end all day. I’ve not know’d where to turn, to tell ’ee true, and then Mr Hudson being … Well, you know how he can be sometimes. Not that I blame him. He works so hard he can’t be expected … But really he were so late home I thought he were never coming but he did in the end, thank the Lord, although he weren’t at all agreeable about it – disagreeable is more the word, truth to tell, well, you know what I mean – perhaps I shouldn’t say disagreeable but anyroad I won through in the end, my dear, can ’ee imagine? – although how I did it I really cannot think – and we’re going tomorrow and not a minute too soon. I thought of you in the middle of the packing, my dear, and how worried you must be – well, we all are. Who wouldn’t be? And I thought, I’ll go straight round and see if she’d like to come with us. What I mean to say, if
you’d
like to come with us, which I’m sure you would, what I mean to say I hope you will. This is all such a worry. You and the babies and Audrey and anyone else you need. The house will be plenty big enough. It’s going to be a hotel.’ At which she stopped, now being completely out of breath, and beamed at her friend.

It was Nathaniel who made sense of it. ‘You are leaving York?’ he said, and it was only just a question.

She nodded, puffing from her exertions.

‘Tomorrow?’

Another nod.

‘Where are you going?’

This time she managed an answer. ‘Why, to Whitby, Mr Cartwright, where Mr Hudson has all those houses and a hotel and I don’t know what all.’

‘’Tis a kindly offer,’ he said, inclining his head towards her and smiling, ‘and we thank you for it.’ Then he turned to Jane. ‘I think you should accept it, my dear.’

So early the next morning the two families set out, travelling in a convoy of two four-horse carriages, followed by a dray-cart carrying their luggage. They were a large company: Lizzie and Jane and their six children, Audrey and Milly with their charges and Sally, who was now nursemaid to Georgie,
Ann and little John, and very proud of her new status and her new uniform, and Mrs Cadwallader to cook for them and two of Lizzie’s scullery maids to share all the other work and travel in the cart and look after the luggage, to say nothing of three Moses baskets for the babies, three picnic hampers full of food, various sunshades and umbrellas, a jar of sugar plums to placate the four-year-olds if they got fretful and Dickie’s little dog, Spot, which was not impressed by being put in a coach and escaped the minute he could and barked off to spook the cart horses.

Lizzie was harassed and anxious while they were packing and
clambering
aboard, but once they’d left the terrible danger of York behind them and were away from the smoke and the stink and out in the clear, clean air of the countryside, she grew steadily more cheerful and by the time they’d passed a place called Norton, which the coachman said was their halfway mark, she was quite herself again. They found a suitable field where they could stop for their picnic and they all tumbled out of the carriages and stretched their limbs while Mrs Cadwallader and Jane and Lizzie unpacked the hampers and spread the cloth on the grass and handed out pies and fruit and table napkins as if it was the sort of thing they did every day of her lives.

‘Isn’t this fun!’ Lizzie said to her eldest.

And Dickie, who was eight years old and adventurous, said it was ‘the best ever’.

It got even better on the second leg of the journey for now they were climbing some extremely steep hills and had to get out and walk to help the horses, which meant that he and Spot could go running off into the fields again and although both of them were getting very grubby nobody seemed to mind. And best of all was when they’d reached the top of a particularly long climb: when they looked down, there was a blue lake shining beneath them. It was the sparkliest thing he’d ever seen and so big he couldn’t see across it to the other side.

‘That,’ Milly told him, ‘is because it’s the sea.’

‘Where does it end?’

‘The sea don’t end,’ she said. ‘Don’t ’ee remember, I showed ’ee on the globe. All that blue. It goes round the world, round and round and round.’

Wonders would never cease.

‘When we get to Whitby,’ Milly told him, ‘what is where we’re a-going, we’ll be right alongside of it and you can walk into it and get your feet wet. How will that be?’

He could barely believe it. ‘Truly?’ he asked.

That made her grin. ‘Truly,’ she said. ‘An’ I’ll come with ’ee and get
my
feet wet an’ all.’

Whitby was a revelation to all of them, all those boats in the harbour and men in great boots and knitted caps and jerseys instead of jackets, and huge baskets standing on the quayside full of fish, and great grey and white birds everywhere swooping and calling and snatching up pieces of fish in their great beaks, ‘caw, caw, caw’, and everything smelling salty and a rickety bridge that Milly said was like something out of a fairy tale.

‘How we ever got across in one piece,’ Lizzie said, when they’d left the harbour and were all safely on the other side of it, ‘I shall never believe.’

And then a town that was built on a hillside, where they had to get out and climb, through narrow alleys and over higgledy-piggledy cobbles and past the oldest shops and houses they’d ever seen, even in the Shambles, until they came to Mr Hudson’s wide streets and squares and the huge house that was going to be a hotel and where they were going to live. They were met at the door by Mr Hudson’s younger brother Charles, who was quiet and gentle and seemed to be the caretaker. When he heard who they were he hastened to assure them that, although the hotel might look ‘
summat empty
’, appearances were deceptive. There
were
rooms ready furnished that he thought might suit them admirably and bowed to indicate that they should follow him and see if they agreed. What he showed them was a suite of eight rooms, a dining room that was really rather fine, a drawing room, five bedrooms and a dear little parlour overlooking the sea.

‘There are servants’ quarters alongside the kitchens,’ he said. ‘And coach houses, of course.’

‘’Tis all most satisfactory,’ Lizzie told him, when she’d carried out a full inspection of all the rooms they would need, and she smiled at him happily. ‘Thank ’ee kindly, Mr Hudson.’

‘I’m glad to have been of service,’ he said, smiling back. ‘I live in t’house on t’corner of t’terrace, should you have need of me. I will call in t’morning and see if there’s owt else in the way of furnishings you might be needing.’

Then what a flurry and a scurry there was as the boxes were carried upstairs and unpacked and the coaches eased into the coach house and the horses led to the stables to be fed and watered and the kitchen fire lit and the scullery maids sent to the harbour to buy fish for their supper. And in the middle of it all Mr Hudson returned with two loaves and a pitcher of milk and a note from his wife to tell them where the best fruit and salads could be had.

After he’d left them for the second time, Lizzie said he was so unlike George she could hardly believe they were related, leave alone brothers. ‘I mean to say, such a
kind
man.’ There was a lot she found hard to believe on that first day – how quickly they settled in, how delicious freshly caught fish could be, how kind it was of Mrs Hudson to send them bread and milk,
how good the children were being and how obediently they’d gone to bed and, above all, how absolutely amazing it was that she’d stood up to her husband.