It was a bad day for a funeral: the wind was high, the sun weak and the threat of rain too strong. Impossible to dress for. Impossible. The sun came out and one wilted under all those layers – the woollen greatcoat, the sober waistcoat, the top hat – and then a breeze took up and one’s fingers turned blue. Impossible.
Mr Radcliffe noted the sparse congregation. As the deceased’s solicitor, he was duty bound to attend, but the vicar’s wife had had to practically coerce people from the parish to pay their respects, so she’d said. St Bartholomew’s was a crumbling relic of a church, so at least the small pews didn’t appear so vacant. Mrs Alma Chapman had insisted on being buried there, in ‘the real church’, next to her husband. The church proper was now in the main village; a bigger, better church, for a bigger, better England.
For each shovelful of earth the gravedigger attempted to throw on top of the late Mrs Chapman, a gust of wind blew most of it across the faces of the people standing around the grave willing the whole torturous event to a conclusion. A last laugh, perhaps; an indication of the old woman’s feelings towards the congregation. It was not a dignified or elegant spot; the farm was in plain view, the donkey could be heard braying, and as the wind took up the gravedigger’s earth once again, the gathering finally gave up and started to move away. Even the vicar retreated.
Now it was only Mr Radcliffe and the Chapman granddaughter, a tall column of black, her mourning veil pressed against her cheeks by the wind. Hands clasped in pious, observant grief. She appeared young enough, though according to his records the girl was very much a woman. But then everyone looked young to him these days, and he never had had a firm grasp on how to judge a woman’s age. They did things to themselves, with hair, and feathers and hats; it could be most confusing.
Mr Radcliffe knew Susannah Chapman the way he knew most people, through annotations in documents: records of life and death, the stuff of ink and blotting paper. The poor thing, what should a girl-woman do with herself when she had no male relatives to offer protection and no real wealth behind her? Throw herself on the mercy of those that would have her, he supposed. In his head he had already prepared what he would say to her after the funeral. A few short words of solace, inspiration, even. He had been overly preoccupied with this, for what could a man of his age have to say to a young woman? For once he wished he’d brought his wife along.
He would start along the lines of: ‘Death, to those left behind, does not mean the end but a new beginning. We must forge a new path, over muddy tracks and hard ground…’ He was especially fond of the ‘muddy tracks’ part, but as he took the first step to deliver his monologue, the girl gathered her skirts out of the boggy ground and turned to leave, and he had to almost gallop to catch her. It was not lost on him that it was now he who was negotiating a muddy track.
‘Miss Chapman, won’t you wait a minute. I only want to speak with you a moment.’ Mr Radcliffe waved his hat, quite out of breath by the time he caught up with her.
‘Forgive me, I’m sorry to bother you so soon after your grandmother’s passing. I only mean to leave you with a thought, and that is that, for you, this is a new beginning—’
‘Yes, Mr Radcliffe, thank you. I understand. I’m sorry, I must hurry. I have much to do.’ And she turned like a great black obelisk, the veil making it impossible to see her features clearly.
‘Allow me to walk with you, Miss Chapman. I have news that could offer you some reassurance, security, even,’ he said, making strenuous efforts to keep up with the young woman’s stride.
He explained how he had been approached by the vicar’s wife with an offer of accommodation and a small salary in exchange for domestic and educational assistance with her six girls. Now that both Miss Chapman’s grandparents were dead, the best she could do would be to rent their house to tenants and find herself a husband, quick smart.
‘I would ask you to thank the vicar and his wife for me formally, but I will have to decline their kind and generous offer,’ she said. ‘I’m off to London, on the first train tomorrow.’
Well, that was quite unexpected.
‘Whatever for?’ he said, feeling dread at what he anticipated would be the most naive of answers.
What was it about London that turned the heads of silly women? What could a spinster of twenty-seven from a small village know of London and its insatiable appetites? How many girls had floated to the city on clouds of dreams only to fall into bad habits with bad people? The air was yellow, the stink of the river enough to make one choke, and beggars slept in heaps in the open like flea-ridden cats. More than once he had walked a street and not heard a word of his own language. In his own country!
It was certainly no place for an unmarried woman. These young girls, they thought it would be all hats and dresses. That they would go to the races every day, pick flowers in the park and be courted by a line of enamoured dukes waiting on bended knee. If only they knew of the broken-spirited, the hungry and the homeless, they’d never set a foot on the train.
‘I am to become a nurse, Mr Radcliffe, at the London Hospital, in Whitechapel. Really, I am grateful for the offer, but I can’t stay, not another minute. Not now they are both gone. You must understand.’
‘Well then, my dear, I wish you good luck in your endeavours. I was making assumptions, but I can see you are a strategist – no, a pioneer!’
She bid him farewell and left him sinking further into the mud. There was scant hope she would thrive. It was not the way of the city. In a village, a man could make a little money with hard work, be honest, fear God and heave himself up a rung or two. He could call himself a success. London was no place for ascension, despite all the promises. Oh, there was gold, all right: a fortune could be won and lost, or stolen, on the same day. But only the rich, the criminal or the criminally insane thrived in London.