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CHAPTER XVI.

CONTAINING MATTER OF A SURPRISING KIND.

W hen Mrs Pounds invites her lady friends over for afternoon tea, they come bearing both children and gifts – a wooden spinning top for Andrew and a doll for Drusilla, whose hopes of being regarded as a lady and invited to stay for tea are demolished. She sulks, retreating upstairs while lugging the doll by the waist of its pale silk dress (more beautiful than any Drusilla herself owns), its poured-wax head swaying as if nodding to a tune. I anticipate staring into the emptiness of its glass eyes when I sniff its human hair later ( I must not I must not ).

The ladies, five in all, are herded into the drawing-room amidst the loud rustle of down-quilted petticoats – each woman carrying forty-five yards of fabric.

One of them, a Mrs Fancey, shrilly asks the servants to ‘Bring me Duchess. Where is Duchess?’

‘A pretty name for a pretty child,’ says Mrs Pounds, nodding affectionately at Mrs Fancey’s baby as it is wheeled into the room in an expensive wicker carriage with brass joints.

‘Duchess is the model of the baby carriage,’ Mrs Fancey says coolly. ‘My son’s name is William, after my father.’

Mrs Pounds’ smile freezes as she no doubt discerns, in her friend’s eyes, a future of snowballing cruelties she will have to endure to make up for the transgression.

The ladies surround the baby and coo in its general direction without touching it, unaccustomed as they are to the rearing of babies. Bored, it makes a guttural sound that indicates it hates us. One of them pats it timidly on the head. I notice she wipes her hand on the skirt of her dress afterwards.

‘William Ebenezer Poncy Fancey,’ Mrs Fancey announces, then sighs proudly. ‘Heir to the family name and fortune. He is going to do great things, and I pray I may bear witness to them all.’

Meanwhile, his three useless sisters, who are standing dully by the drawing-room doorway, look down at themselves as if searching for hitherto undiscovered penises.

Already tiring of his gift, Andrew throws it to the floor. Mrs Fancey fixes her eyes on him. ‘You are an important little heir yourself,’ she says to him. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ says Mrs Pounds as Andrew stares up at them, mouth agape. ‘Andrew is the bearer of the Pounds family legacy.’

The baby belches. Andrew laughs loudly and points at it. Mrs Pounds shoots me a glance, upon which I pinch Andrew’s neck. The children are immediately handed over to the nurse, and subsequently forgotten. All except the baby – who stares at the ceiling from its carriage while the women settle onto upholstered chairs and assume rigid postures, as if sitting for a portrait. They sip their tea loudly and discuss their nieces or cousins who were seduced by ne’er-do-well militia officers.

‘There is a great deal more gold than the last time we were here,’ a dim-witted one named Marigold lisps through her buck-teeth as she points out a pair of gilded candelabra. ‘She seems to have developed a taste for it, hasn’t – ooh, is this French porcelain? Limoges .’ She giggles to a lady on her right, who pretends not to hear. Then, louder: ‘ Limoooshhh .’

They do not appear to notice I am still present. I stand quietly in the shadow cast by the hefty golden harp, watching them with fascination – taking in their perfectly groomed ringlets and their protruding clavicles and their folded hands.

The gentlewomen’s interest in their families soon wanes, and their conversation turns to the vicious besmirching of Mrs Someone-or-Other who allegedly begged for a tincture of opium during childbirth – an unforgivable flouting of the biblical decree that women must bring forth children in pain and anguish.

‘She was indeed punished, for did she not die mere seconds after delivering twins?’ Mrs Fancey says with glacially raised eyebrows.

‘Indeed! Indeed she did,’ Mrs Pounds says, slightly out of breath, trying to regain favour with Mrs Fancey as the other ladies lower their gazes with embarrassment at her sudden animation.

Carefully, I make my way towards the door, avoiding the two-tiered dumbwaiters being wheeled across the room. I peer into the women’s teacups as I pass, imagining they are drinking loose stool of varying shades.

‘Is that your new governess?’

‘She’s a rather large one, isn’t she!’

‘Clearly not as woefully underfed as one would hope one’s governess to be . . .’

‘She’s not Irish, is she?’

‘Good gracious, no!’

(Relieved giggles.)

‘Governess, have you ever tasted such a delicate blend as this?’ asks Mrs Fancey, waving her teacup, flashing its gold interior.

‘Back home, we drank death,’ I reply.

So we did; rain filtered through the overcrowded, crumbling graves and seeped through the layers of rotting flesh and earth, coalescing at the nearby springs that provided Hopefernon’s drinking water.

The women gawk at me. ‘How thrilling,’ Marigold says.

Mrs Fancey’s baby, forgotten until now, emits a scream piercing enough to drill a hole in one’s bones. Mrs Pounds’ face crumples like a heap of wrinkled muslin.

‘Allow me to take him off your hands, Mrs Fancey,’ I say in a wild outburst of good cheer. ‘If Mrs Pounds agrees, I shall bring him to the nurse.’

My advertisement in the Times said I was willing to make myself generally useful.

BUT THE NURSE, foreseeing the loudness of the group and the irritability of her mistress, has taken the children outside, where they sniff each other’s rumps like dogs, as one of the footmen plays a repetitive tune on the concertina that reaches the windows in waves.

Alone in the nursery, I deposit the fat, important baby in a cot by the window. I meet its eyes and it starts bawling – wails so acute the brain is impaled on them.

It is a larger specimen than I had initially thought, almost gargantuan in the mahogany crib. Surely it should be walking by now. I recall the babies at the foster mother’s home. How she would pinch their legs when they cried. This baby, I can tell from its haughty stare and its screams – which are rageful rather than saddened or desperate – has not known a moment of anguish in its life.

On a nearby table, I spot a vial of Godfrey’s Cordial. I unstopper it and swallow it in great gulps, pausing only to gasp for breath. The sugary, ginger-laced laudanum tincture pours warmly down my chest and around my Darkness in heavy whorls. There is that familiar feeling from childhood – like I have become my shadow and must anticipate my movements with sluggish accuracy.

The concertina continues to trill from the gardens below. I peer out the window. The nurse, playing some sort of alphabet game, repeats ‘D, D, D,’ a sweaty smile plastered on her face like pasty rouge.

D for Dismissed. After the great efforts it took me to get here, pawning Mother’s watch and pipes in order to bribe the Grim Wolds innkeeper to lead Mrs Able to my advertisement, and I cannot think further because the baby is still screaming.

I kneel beside the crib. The baby, robed in fur and lace and sporting the most minuscule of signet rings on its pinkie, purses its lips at me disapprovingly from inside its many layers of chin. ‘Your mother doesn’t love you,’ it drawls in the accent of the monarchy.

‘My mother’s dead,’ I reply. (Isn’t she?) She is. Mother perished in a burst of flame when the Reverend set fire to their bed while suffering a bout of delirium tremens. All that remained of her were her teeth, grinning in a pile of charred bones.

‘Your father doesn’t love you either,’ the baby says, his voice rich and deep, spittle flecking his plump lower lip.

‘Well, he doesn’t know me sufficiently yet,’ I say.

‘Only heirs are worthy of their father’s love.’

‘I am my father’s heir,’ I say, striving for conviction. ‘I am his eldest. I carry his blood.’

‘You don’t even carry his name,’ the baby replies. ‘You’re but a trollop’s daughter. Twat,’ he adds.

I whip out my father’s razor and I slit William Ebenezer Poncy Fancey’s throat, severing the carotid artery, which spurts, as if oblivious to gravity, a stream of blood into my mouth. The grisly scene unfolds rapidly before the rocking horse, reflected in the warm patina of its eyeballs.

I spit out the blood and see, as so often happens when one slits an infant’s carotid artery, that the baby is dead.

I have not thought this through.

Heart racing, I stand upright, razor still in hand. I look down upon the baby, look down upon it again – definitely dead – I sprint out of the nursery, cry out, ‘He is sleeping, do not wake him!’ in the general direction of the servants as I rush past them, my petticoats flying, down the servants’ staircase to the kitchen and out the door and across the gardens and down the drive and through the open gates, past the stone pillars and down the lane towards the nearest cottages – farm labourers’ quarters.

I stumble along the narrow, winding road, wheel tracks furrowed deeply on either side and brimming with rainwater. I hike my skirts up to my waist and gather speed.

I fly past the farms, dismissing each one – pig, pig, dog, petunias – until I spot a baby – never have I been quite so joyful to see one – squirming in a wicker cot as its older sister feeds the chickens scraps in their coop. A lonely pig snorts at me from its pen.

Quietly, heart pounding in my ears from the exercise, I hop (‘hop’ is a rather optimistic word, ‘slide’ being perhaps more accurate) over a sunk fence surrounding the property, its sole separation from the fields around it. I approach the cot and hoist the baby in my arms, not turning to see whether I’ve been spotted, and make my way over the fence again and up the lane – sweating profusely from the effort – past beckoning stiles leading up stone walls and raked fields which propitiously seem only just abandoned by labourers.

My stockinged feet damp in my boots, I enter Ensor House through the kitchen, huff and puff my way up the staircase and turn into the corridor that leads to the nursery, where, unexpectedly, I cross paths with Drusilla. I grip the farmers’ baby writhing in my arms. Was she coming out of her bed-room or out of the nursery? Does she appear blanched? She appears quite blanched, though Drusilla’s pallor naturally inclines to the cadaverous.

Staring into her eyes as if I could attempt to read the very insides of her conscience, I say: ‘I hope the baby’s cries did not disturb you,’ between sharp intakes of breath.

Drusilla shakes her head no. This isn’t clarification enough, but the baby is wretchedly impatient and I can’t bear its weight for much longer. Awkwardly, I step around Drusilla, enter the nursery, and fasten the door.

There are now two babies.

I lay them side by side upon the floor. Original Baby looks waxy, almost regal, in death, if a tad deflated. Other Baby squirms under my grip, its fists clenched like balled-up peonies.

I dress Other Baby in Original Baby’s robes, one excruciatingly unwieldy satin button at a time. The signet ring is a looser fit on Other Baby’s pinkie, this baby being malnourished, and while the furs are bloodstained, the stains could pass for feeding stains. Probably. I won’t bother with further rationalizations – I have found that, when faced with the inexplicable, humans will find ways of explaining most horrors away.

I fit Original Baby into the empty box that contained Drusilla’s new doll. I prepare the parcel, which I will send anonymously in the post to a Benedictine nunnery in Lancashire, with a note that reads Sorry, here’s another one . I picture these nuns, with their rosy, bulbous cheeks, like bulging turnips; their frowning white wimples and hidden hair; who receive dead babies in boxes from an unknown sender. I have the urge to get drunk, sometimes, and tell people about it.

I address the box in my finest calligraphy and call for the kitchen maid to carry it to the butler’s pantry. I watch her fumble down the stairs under the weight of it. The butler will arrange for the box to be taken to the station the following day, where it will be weighed and shipped.

Other Baby seems several months younger than her actual child, but Mrs Fancey doesn’t seem to notice. She smiles at it tenderly as I bring it to her. I quickly scrape off a mole on the side of the baby’s chin with a blood-crusted fingernail before placing it in her arms and seeing them off.