Page 99 of Rivals at Ashmore Castle

Kitty hadn’t thought about it, but did now, and said, ‘Yes.’ If it was known she had gone to High Beeches, there would be talk.

‘Your own carriage would be recognised. There is a jobbing carriage that I hire from time to time. The driver is reliable and discreet. If you will call at my house, I will arrange for him to collect us there.’

They agreed a date and time.

No-one glanced at the anonymous closed carriage as it rattled up the hill to New Ashmore, but Kitty sat well back just in case. There was a high wall between High Beeches and the road so nothing could be seen but the dark tops of some tall trees. Kitty thought they were yews – certainly not beeches – which gave the approach a forbidding aspect. The high, heavy iron gate had no sign on it to say what was within. Once through, there was a winding drive between gloomy rhododendrons giving no view of the house until they arrived on the gravel forecourt.

She had got herself into a frame of mind where she was expecting a dark Victorian pile in the Gothic mode, with turrets and pinnacles and sinister-looking gargoyles, and perhaps a solitary crow perched on a roof-ridge croaking a warning. But in fact the house was unadorned Georgian, a plain and open-faced rectangle in red brick. The high ceilings and tall windows would make the interior light. And when she descended from the carriage the bird she could hear was no more threatening than a wood pigeon.

There was a large, square hall with green linoleum on the floor, cream-painted walls and a series of rather dull black-and-white lithographs of Shakespearean scenes, which Kitty decided must have been left over from when, long ago, it was a private house. There was a smell of furniture wax in the air, with an underlying tang of disinfectant that reminded her of school. But at her school there had always been a distant murmur of voices and movement, a sense of young creatures suppressing a natural desire to run about and make a noise. Here there was silence to a degree unusual in any house.

‘Where are all the girls?’ she asked.

‘At work at this time of day,’ said Miss Eddowes. ‘Some are working in the gardens. You cannot see them from the approach to the house – they are all on the other side. We grow vegetables and fruit for ourselves, and sell the surplus to help defray costs. Some will be doing housework, laundry, cooking – the necessary domestic tasks. Others will be sewing or making baskets, light work that brings in a little income.’

‘May I see?’ Kitty asked tentatively. The school-like atmosphere took her back to her shy youth and the fear always of being wrong and being told off.

But Miss Eddowes said, ‘Certainly,’ without inflection, and led the way from the hall down a corridor lined with high panelled doors in polished mahogany.

She opened one onto a well-lit but barely furnished room, where four girls were sitting silently around a table, sewing what looked like baby-shirts. They did not look up at the interruption, and there seemed to Kitty something sullen about the silence. It was, at least, unnatural. She had never walked in on a group of maids working without hearing chatter. Each was wearing an all-enveloping Holland pinafore and wore her hair scraped into a severe bun at the back. The combination of pinafore and hair arrangement, plus the silence, put Kitty painfully in mind of Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

‘They don’t speak?’ she whispered to Miss Eddowes.

Miss Eddowes said aloud, ‘We don’t allow talking during working hours.’

It was like school again, Kitty thought – no talking allowed during lesson time. But these were not children, they were women about to become mothers. She wondered if the school atmosphere irked them.

Perhaps Miss Eddowes heard her thought, for she said, ‘Stand up, Dorothy.’

One of the girls put down her work and stood up. She had a doughy face with a heavy underlip and thick black brows. She didn’t glance at Kitty, but she gave Miss Eddowes what seemed a resentful look.

‘Tell this lady why you are here,’ said Miss Eddowes.

‘Got caught f’r a baby,’ the girl muttered, in a country accent.

‘Yes?’ Miss Eddowes prompted.

‘Ma and Pa chucked me out. And he said it weren’t his. Which it was!’ she added, with a flash of spirit. ‘I never went with no-one else.’

‘So you had nowhere to go?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘And what do you have here?’

‘A safe place to live till my time comes. And – and – a fresh start after – after – afterwards,’ she concluded. It seemed she had learned the answers like a catechism. Kitty wondered if she’d been meant to say ‘after the baby’s born’ but couldn’t bring herself to.

‘Very well, you may sit down,’ Miss Eddowes said.

‘’Twarn’t my fault,’ she said angrily. ‘Everyone makes it out my fault.’

Miss Eddowes appeared unmoved. ‘We won’t go into that,’ she said, led Kitty out into the corridor again, and closed the door behind her. The other girls had not for a moment looked up from their work.

Outside, Kitty said, ‘They seem rather subdued.’

Miss Eddowes said, ‘You could not expect them to be happy.’

‘I suppose not. But I thought, perhaps, they might be a comfort to each other.’ She didn’t know how to express it, but she thought surely relief at being rescued from the worst would lighten their spirits.