‘Please,’ I persisted. ‘I found pills in the medicine cabinet at Haughten Hall – pills that say they are to cure female irregularities and obstructions. If there is some growth in Iris’s system – her blood or her breath – that would surely be serious!’
Her lips pursed round the end of the cigarette, her brow furrowed a little, but she would not look at me, then after a while she said: ‘Has she been taking the pills?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘but her father wants her to, he wants her to be well enough to be the May Queen.’
‘The May Queen,’ she repeated. ‘That involves a procession. How far would she be walking?’
‘It starts at the blacksmith’s yard,’ I said, ‘and then once around the village green and to the crossroads up by Missensham Grange, and then back to the green.’
‘That is over a mile,’ she said. ‘These aristocrats do not have the constitution of the farm girls. Whether the pills have worked by then or not, Iris would be weakened, and it would be too far for her.’
‘I can’t stop it,’ I said. ‘It is her father who wants her to be May Queen, just as her mother was.’
‘Well, you should keep an eye on her,’ she said.
I nodded.
‘And make sure that she does not have to carry that willow arch too far.’
‘I don’t think that will be just her,’ I said. ‘She will have attendants, and it would only be for a little way.’
She wrinkled her lips in disapproval. ‘Well, just tell her not to walk too far if she can help it, or raise her arms above her head.’
They were words that I had heard before on the lips of Dora, the Caldwells’ housekeeper. I remembered her as she stood in the thicket of wych elms and talked of what the doctor had advised for her condition – orders to not walk too far or raise her hands above her head while she was with child.
‘No!’ I cried. ‘I have heard that advice given before. You cannot think that Iris is…’ I still did not believe it.
‘I didn’t mean to say that,’ said Sadie quickly.
But it was too late. I thought of Iris and the way she had embraced me barely a week ago. Despite that, she still had not felt that she could confide in me. ‘She can’t be,’ I said, ‘because she is planning to go to finishing school in Switzerland. She barely leaves the house, and she is not—’
‘—married?’ said Sadie.
We fell silent. Music drifted out from the hall, the stutter of trumpets from the gramophone and then the sound of the women singing along but I could not recognise the words or the tune.
‘You do know, don’t you?’ said Sadie after a while.
‘Of course,’ I said but my voice was faint and would have convinced nobody.
‘Just as I would have expected from a vicar’s daughter!’ she cried. ‘Oh, the church is so irresponsible…’ As she continued to rant about what girls are taught in school – the lack of anatomical textbooks, and the prudishness of society – I realised that the anger in her voice was not directed at me.
She had called me a vicar’s daughter, just as Iris once had when she had dared me to climb on to the back of her skittish horse. I was used to people mocking me in such a way, or assuming that I was a do-gooder, but there had been something else about growing up in the parsonage that meant people thought I should always be ignorant of the relationships between men and women, because to tell me of such things would destroy some sort of sanctity and open me up to evil.
Iris did not need to be married to be in the family way, of course she didn’t, but it was an idea that I could not get past, for Iris was a girl, like me, who liked horses, storybooks and embroidered nightgowns. When I had sat in the stable yard and listened to Sam’s voice and her laugh coming from the tack room, I had thought them overcome by the passionate embraces that I read about in novels. But it had been more than that, and as I thought of the rhythmic thud of the mattress against the wall – the movement that had quivered a spider’s web and trembled the water in a bucket – I realised that I had seen enough of the world to understand, but only just. What I had witnessed that day was nothing like the soft love of a romantic novel but something raw and animal.
‘What are the pills for?’ I asked.
She stopped talking at last and looked up, her face grim, and this time I knew the answer.
‘Will they work?’ I persisted.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know which maker they are from but some will cause damage, whereas others are nothing more than aloe and soap. In most cases, they will do nothing but it depends how many she takes.’
‘The bottle was full,’ I said.
‘Maybe it is none of our business. We should not talk of this.’
‘You think that I am stupid, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Because I couldn’t work it out, because I could barely understand how something like this might happen? You and the Elliot-Palmers call me a lady, but you are the only ones who call me that!’
‘It is best that you stay a child for as long as you can,’ she said, ‘because womanhood comes too quickly for some. Under all those nursery clothes that her father makes her wear, Iris Caldwell has the body of a woman, but not the brains – she may know little more than you about what she has been doing.’
‘What can I do?’ I said. ‘Is there any way I can help her?’
‘You can tell her this, but tell only Iris and no one else.’ She paused, a little crease on her brow as if she was searching for the right words. ‘There are always two nurses at the cottage hospital, so one should always be on hand to help her sort it out.’
‘What?’ I murmured but she said nothing, and suddenly I realised why my mother avoided the cottage hospital and would cross the street when she saw the nurses. I also understood a little of why she had received women into the parsonage sitting room when I was a child – the women who would sew a quilt that showed the life of Eve. I thought I knew at last what they were repenting for and why their eyes were swollen.
‘No!’ I cried. ‘That kind of thing is immoral. It is…’ I could not say the word because I realised that I was only repeating the things that my mother would say.
‘Ungodly?’ she concluded. ‘I see no God where these situations are concerned and I have seen a lot of them.’
‘Iris would not want that. I don’t think she even wants to take the pills. It seems to be her father who is forcing her to.’
She shook her head slowly letting out a long breath as she did so, then took a drag of the cigarette. I fancied that she did it to stop herself cursing. I thought, from the look on her face, that I should not say anything more.
Then she reached down to a large leather bag that she had stowed under the bench and took out a little white leaflet. ‘You can give this to Iris then,’ she said. ‘If it gets any further, for it may not.’
I took the leaflet from her but it was just lines of text and my eyes skimmed over them.
‘It is a list of all the poor houses and homes for fallen women,’ she said. Then she lowered her voice. ‘She can go to one of these places if her father throws her out – it might be her only option if she is to go against his wishes and not starve. She must know that they will only care for her if she agrees to give up the child.’