THE FIRST MONTHS of Jane’s married life were so extraordinarily happy she felt she was still living in her dream. After years of being a servant in someone else’s house, it was a joy to organize her home in exactly the way she wanted, to plan her own meals and eat them in her own dining room with her dear Nathaniel beside her. Her dear Nathaniel. He was everything she’d hoped and dreamed he might be and even the delights of running her own home paled into insignificance compared to the private and delectable pleasures of being his wife. Her brief affair with George Hudson had left her feeling that love was passionately urged but brutish in the act; now she was discovering what tenderness and delicacy were like and her senses were blooming.
The weeks passed in a glow of rewarding sensation. The months threaded her happiness with the heady colours of autumn. Now fires were lit to crackle in their new hearths and roar up their new chimneys and the first chills of coming winter brought hoar frost to the fields.
‘We must hold a party at Christmas, Nat,’ she said over breakfast one morning late in November. Outside their window a grey mist was swirling about the city walls but inside the room their fire was burning warmly.
‘Indeed we must,’ he agreed. ‘Whom shall we invite?’
Her parents, naturally, and Milly and Aunt Tot and Audrey Palmer ‘because she’s the kindest girl I know and she has no family beyond the farm’.
‘A family party.’ He understood. ‘You will need a new gown.’
‘I shall wear my wedding gown,’ she told him. ’Tis just the occasion for it.’
It was a surprise to her that the gown seemed to have shrunk. It was very tight about the waist and didn’t fit at all well. She stood before the pier glass examining her image with some concern, aware that she’d put on rather a lot of weight since September, which was only just over ten weeks ago when all was said and done. And as she tried to adjust the dress over her burgeoning curves she suddenly realized what was happening to her. She was carrying. Of course. What a wonderful blissful thing. Oh, just wait till I tell Nathaniel. If he hadn’t gone off to work she could have told him there and then but, never mind, waiting would make it sweeter.
She told him late that night when their lovemaking was over and they were cuddled together in their comfortable bed. It was a great surprise to her that instead of telling her how wonderful he thought it was or kissing her or doing any of the things she’d expected, he sprang from the bed, lit the candle and ran across the room to their linen press.
‘Art tha not pleased?’ she asked.
‘Wait, wait,’ he said, pulling the sheets and towels this way and that. ‘I’ve something to show you.’ And he pulled out a small brown box, much scuffed with age, carried it to the bed and laid it tenderly in her lap. ‘Open it,’ he said. ‘’Tis for you, with my love.’
It was a gold ring, set with blue stones, shaped like the petals of a flower and set about a central stone that shone so brightly in the candlelight she knew at once that it was a diamond. ‘Oh Nathaniel!’ she said.
‘My father made it for my mother when I was born,’ he explained, ‘and when she died he gave it to me and made me promise I would give it to my wife when our first child was born. The blue stones are turquoise, which signify lifelong love, so he told me, and the one in the middle is a diamond, which signifies constancy.’
‘’Tis the most beautiful thing I ever saw,’ she said and took his eager face between her hands and kissed him lovingly. ‘Only ’twill be months afore our baby’s born. Should ’ee not wait till then?’
‘I couldn’t wait,’ he said. ‘I love you too much.’
Jane spent the next morning writing invitations to her Christmas party and the next afternoon she hired a pony and trap and went to visit her mother and father at Scrayingham, fidgeting with impatience all the way there because she couldn’t wait to tell them her good news.
Her father said he ‘wor reet glad to hear it’ and her mother wept and said she weren’t a bit surprised for she’d thought it likely last Thursday. ‘What does our Milly think on it?’ she asked.
‘Nowt yet,’ Jane admitted, ‘on account of I’ve not told her.’
‘She’ll be reet happy for ’ee,’ Mrs Jerdon said. ‘That’s certain sure.’
But Milly took the news coolly. ‘I thought it like as not,’ she said, ‘being as you’re married. ’Tis the way of it wi’ married women. Look at Mrs Hudson. She has a baby every year.’
‘You do exaggerate,’ Jane teased. ‘Every other year I’ll grant but not every year.’
‘I’ll tell ’ee one thing,’ Milly said. ‘She gets cantankerous when she’s in t’family way and she were short wi’ my Dickie this morning. So nowt would surprise me.’
I’d get cantankerous if I were married to Mr Hudson, Jane thought, nasty bad-tempered thing, and she looked down at her new ring and was glad, all over again, that she’d chosen such a gentle loving man.
Her gentle loving man was in Tanner’s Yard with Mr Hudson that afternoon examining a possible site for the start of the proposed York railway. They’d already looked at half a dozen possibilities but, in Nathaniel’s opinion, this one was the best. The yard was full of tanners all hard at work and it was an evil-smelling place, like all tanneries, the air rank with the stink of the raw hides that hung in rows waiting treatment, but it had one obvious advantage if they were to build a station and a railway line there and that was the long pit that had been dug out like a moat between the sheds. At that moment it was full of hideously stained water and very smelly but it lay at right angles to the city wall and was pointing in exactly the right direction for the rails that would carry Mr Hudson’s trains out through the wall and off into the open countryside towards Leeds and Manchester.
‘We would need to open an exit through the city wall,’ he said to Mr Hudson.
George took that calmly. ‘Aye. We would an’ we will. Once we’ve got the city fathers on board ’twill all fall into line. You’ll see. How soon can ’ee draw up a plan?’
As always Nathaniel was impressed by the confidence and energy of the man. ‘By the end of the week,’ he said.
‘Mek it Thursday,’ George told him. ‘Now I’m off to woo the Tory Party.’
He will too, Nathaniel thought as he watched the portly figure striding purposefully out of the yard, for they both knew how important it was to have an MP onside if they were to get their proposal through the House of Commons, and even though York was a staunchly Whig town and had been for years, the Tories had friends in court.
The Tory club was in the centre of town and in some disarray. The party funds were lower than they’d been in years and just at the very moment when they had the chance of an excellent candidate, the son of a baronet, Sir John Lowther of Swillington Park, no less. Sir John was a wealthy man and would undoubtedly back his son, but, in all honour, they had to match his contribution pound for pound, they could do no less, and at that moment they couldn’t begin to see how it could be done. If they could persuade Mr Hudson to contribute….
Mr Hudson blew into their sober committee room like a gale, hand outstretched to greet them, the gold chain on his impressive fob-watch shining in the wintry light, loud, bold and the picture of confident wealth. Within minutes he had told John Henry Lowther he was just the man the town needed, commended the committee on the wisdom of their choice and invited them all to dine with him. They were swept along by his enthusiasm whether they would or no and, although some of them found his brashness hard to countenance, the gleam of his coin soon put such petty considerations to one side. By the end of that first dinner, they had decided that he was a strong, confident man, and one, moreover, who put his money where his mouth was. By the time they had partaken of his lavish hospitality at a party at his house in Monkgate, they had decided to invite him onto the committee.
John Henry was bewitched by him. Having been reared in the sedate and cultured environs of Swillington Park, he had never come across such a storm of a man.
‘You should meet him, Father,’ he said to his wealthy parent over dinner two weeks later. ‘He’s a rough diamond, I’ll grant you, but a man of great strength and considerable vision. He saw at once that I was the man for York.’
Sir John condescended a faint smile.
‘Believe me, Father,’ John Henry urged, ‘you really should meet him. In my opinion you would agree with him a deal more than you might imagine. He holds the soundest opinions.’
‘A tradesman, I believe,’ Sir John said.
‘Yes, sir. A draper.’
‘Does he hunt?’ Sir John inquired.
‘I doubt it,’ his son had to admit. ‘Drapers ain’t huntin’ men, by and large.’
‘No,’ his father agreed. But he had already decided that despite his shortcomings, Hudson was a man to be cultivated.
Jane’s Christmas party was a much gentler and more loving occasion than the drunken feast George held at Monkgate but in its quiet, hospitable way it was every bit as successful. She and Nathaniel had made sure that their guests would be warm and well fed and when the meal was done and the servants who had stayed with them for the season were gathered in the kitchen for their own meal, she and her family gathered round the fire in the drawing room to roast chestnuts and tell one another ghost stories. At the end of the evening, when they went their separate ways to the beds Jane had prepared for them, Aunt Tot said she’d never known a Christmas so full of good things and Jane’s mother and father and Audrey were so overwhelmed by those good things they all said they didn’t know what to say. Only Milly found the words she needed.
She put her arms round her mother’s neck and kissed her lovingly. ‘Your baby’s uncommon lucky to have you for a mother,’ she said, ‘as I should know.’
Jane was moved to tears. ‘My dearest child!’ she said, holding her close.
‘Never a truer word,’ Nathaniel told her, coming up beside them.
So their Christmas Day ended with happy kisses.
George Hudson’s, on the other hand, ending with a bout of violent sickness. He’d drunk so much at the table he’d been feeling queasy ever since he retired to his room. Lizzie was sound asleep with her mouth open and she didn’t stir as he splattered the carpet with the remains of his meal. Selfish woman.
He poured a little cold water from the ewer into the bowl and washed his face and hands, groaning and feeling sorry for himself. He was having to work far too hard to get this railway company up and running. Far too hard. Still, even if things were moving slowly, they were moving in the right direction. He’d discovered several very useful things during the course of the conversation that evening – most of them from John Henry, who was indiscreet when he was in his cups. The first was that Sir John was planning to set up a bank in York. He even had a name for it, apparently, the York Union Banking Company, so the plans must be well under way and, even more significantly, he’d estimated how much capital would be needed to get it established which, according to his son, was half a million pounds – a clear indication of how wealthy he was. Then, as if that weren’t good news enough, he also discovered that the baronet had a powerful friend, one George Glyn, who besides being the chairman of Glyns, which was the best known bank in London, had also been appointed chairman of the proposed London and Birmingham Railway Company. Give me time, George thought, and I shall dine with the great. Meanwhile he couldn’t lie here in this stink. He’d never get to sleep if he did. There was only one thing for it and that was to take himself off to the blue room. He groaned to his feet, stepped delicately round his vomit and staggered off to a cleaner bed.
The new year progressed from a very chill winter into the ease of spring and Jane began to make preparations for her baby’s arrival. At the end of May she wrote to Audrey Palmer asking her if she would consider leaving her job as a dairy maid and coming to live in Shelton House with her to be the baby’s nursemaid. ‘You were so good to me when my Milly was born,’ she wrote, ‘I can’t think of anyone I would rather have to help me when this child arrives.’
Audrey needed no urging. ‘I could not think of nothing better,’ she wrote back, adding ‘I could be there by Friday, that being the carter’s day for York.’ And Friday it was. By the time June and the baby arrived, everything was ready and orderly. Audrey had moved into the house and her new job, delighted to have a bed of her own in the nursery corner, and Mrs Hardcastle was making daily visits, not because there was anything amiss with either her patient or the baby but because Mr Cartwright had insisted on it.
He needn’t have worried. His baby arrived with so little fuss that he was born, fed, washed and dressed within five quiet hours. Nathaniel would have named him only for some unaccountable reason Jane seemed to have taken against the name he’d chosen, which, naturally enough, given how much he admired the man, was George. She said it wouldn’t do at all and her voice and her face were so fierce he gave in to her at once and tried to think of another name that would suit her better. In the end, for want of any other inspiration, he suggested Nathaniel, since that was his own name and his father’s and she said that was much better and to show how well she approved of it shortened it at once and lovingly to ‘my little Nat’.
He was an affable baby, and made no complaint even when he was passed from hand to hand like a sleeping parcel. Milly was very taken with him and spent more than an hour nursing him on that first afternoon, saying she’d forgotten how small newborn babies were. ‘He makes Matthew look enormous.’ And Audrey was totally enamoured, calling him her ‘dear little duck’ and waiting on him as if he were royalty. It was the happiest, easiest time.
Lizzie came to visit a fortnight later when Jane had finished lying in. She was so sorry to have taken so long to come and see them, she said, and tried to explain, getting steadily more and more flustered. ‘Mr Hudson is so … What I mean to say is, he has such a lot of work to do and he does need me to be there although why that should be I can’t imagine. ’Tis not as if …’ But then Audrey carried the baby into the parlour and rescued her. ‘Oh, what a dear pretty baby! Such big eyes! How happy you must be my dear, dear friend.’
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.
That summer was what Mrs Cadwallader called ‘a mixed bag what we could well do without’, with days of blue skies and strong sunshine followed by days when the sky was heavy with sodden grey clouds and the showers were sudden and drenching. Jane was glad to stay at home with her little Nat when the weather was bad and saw to it that there were always warm towels ready for his father when he came home from a day on one of Mr Hudson’s railway sites because on far too many occasions he was drenched to the skin.
‘We can’t have ’ee catching cold,’ she said, when he thanked her. ‘That wouldn’t do at all.’
But in the event it wasn’t Nathaniel who took harm from the rain, it was Lizzie’s baby, Matthew.
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.