Now they knew where her room was, Adela’s rescue was simple enough. Ivy wore a black servant’s dress and George wore a flat cap and a handyman’s leather apron and looked like someone on his way to fix the pipes. The porter’s lodge on the drawbridge was unmanned. No one challenged them. A few prelates wandered the corridors with prayer books and papers; a few servants bustled around with trays of food but seemed to take strangers in their stride. When guests came to stay they brought their servants with them. Adela’s room was easy enough to find, and she was inside it when they pushed the door open. It was almost too easy. George said later it was as if God had been watching over them.
Adela lay on the great bed reading; her fair hair startling against the red velvet of the bed cover and her black dress. George, remembering the child he had carried through the flames, was shaken by the difference in her.
‘My,’ said Ivy, ‘you have grown up.’
Adela, startled, put down her book and hurled herself towards Ivy, almost knocking her down. ‘Oh Ivy, Ivy,’ Adela cried. ‘Why have you been so long? Have you come to take me away? Where are we going?’
George saw to the door, jamming the lock with the end of the window pole while Ivy helped Adela off with her black dress and put on the red one, made her take down her hair and wrapped her in a pale-blue serge coat. George tried not to look. Ivy said she was coming with her and her new husband George, they had a plan, they were to live in Bath. George was the one who had saved her from the fire and did Adela recognize him? Adela blushed almost the colour of her dress and said yes, she did.
‘Saved you once,’ George said, ‘I’ll save you again,’ and Ivy wondered quite what she had let the girl in for, but it was done now. What would be, would be.
Adela wanted to leave a note but George stopped her. Ivy wanted her to take her few belongings but Adela refused, saying that would be stealing. Nothing was hers, everything was borrowed. The three of them walked out boldly, Adela with her head held high, her hair loose, her clothing bright, looking like someone no one had ever seen before but would want to see again, and still no one challenged them.
George said she had a fine future on the stage, she was a born actress and Adela blushed again. On the way home on the bus she went on about how she didn’t want to be married and go to Australia, but it had suddenly seemed better than being a nun, and how then it seemed too late to stop it, and she felt like a rabbit being hypnotized by a snake. Ivy felt better about it all. It was only a few weeks until Adela’s birthday and no one would then be able to say she had been coerced into running away, but had gone of her own free will.
The landlady had kicked up a fuss and said she wasn’t having an extra, a girl who for all anyone knew was no better than she should be, in a room for two, and George forked out for an extra room, without too much argument. They had fish and chips in the front-floor back.
‘Ivy,’ Adela said, ‘I’m so much older now. Please tell. What does “no better than she ought to be” mean? Is that me now?’
‘Not yet,’ said George, ‘not yet. We’ll get too good a price for you as you are.’
Adela looked puzzled.
He was joking, of course, about something Adela didn’t understand but Ivy did. Later that night Ivy found the bottle of chloroform and the gauze pads in the pocket of the coat George had worn on the bus, and worried. But he’d never have dared to have used it, surely. It might have ended up in the law courts and a really heavy sentence. They tried to be really quiet that night, because of Adela in the next room.