Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [40]
At midday the gravediggers stopped to eat their newspaper-wrapped hunks of bread and cheese and, with no one to consider, didn’t hesitate to throw the paper, discarded rind and apple cores into the burial pit after. (‘Did you see that?’ Grace asked her companion, shocked, but Jane remained silent, staring dutifully ahead.) Their rough dinner finished, one of the men disappeared to the nearby tavern, The Fox and Grapes, and came back with a jug of ale which he balanced on top of the dug-up skull, causing the other man a great deal of merriment. The jug being emptied, work resumed and, having dug deeply enough, the pauper bodies were thrown in the pit, covered with earth and a light sprinkling of lime, and the gravediggers went back to the tavern to drink their wages.
Grace and Jane carried on waiting. Waiting, Grace thought, was not altogether agreeable, for it afforded too much time for worrying about her plight and, more especially, that of Lily. Her sister had always been protected, first by Mama and then by Grace; she’d had allowances made for her simplicity and been sheltered from the harsh truths of life. Who was looking after her welfare now? Was she being treated kindly at the Unwins’? Grace had asked Mrs Unwin several times how her sister was faring, but had only been told ‘The girl is doing as well as one might expect’ and ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’ – statements which did nothing to allay her concerns. Grace knew that she’d feel easier in her mind if she could visit Lily and see for herself, but so far she’d been unable to get to the Kensington house. The Unwins allowed their servants to have Sundays reasonably free, but on this day they were expected to go to the public baths, do their personal washing, darn their stockings, make repairs to clothes, press and brush down their mourning clothes and attend church morning and evening. However, Grace had calculated that it would take about an hour to walk to Kensington, and decided that she would get up very early the following Sunday, complete all her chores before the church service at noon and set off for Kensington straight after.
In the weeks that she’d been working for the Unwin family she’d learned a lot. The first few days had been deeply miserable while she tried to come to terms with all that had happened and endeavoured to accept that, from now on, this was how her life was going to be: she’d be separated from Lily; working long, hard hours (for when not attending funerals she was busy making shrouds, sewing coffin linings or embroidering mourning souvenirs); sharing a tiny room with Jane and having neither privacy nor a life of her own. But at least she had no concerns about the rent, she kept telling herself, or where the next crust was coming from, or about dying of cold on the London streets. Life at the Unwins’ wasn’t hard in the way it had been hard before, with starvation, destitution and the workhouse always at her shoulder, but hard in that she worked fourteen hours a day in miserable conditions and had no one she could call a friend.
She had a feeling, too, of something like homesickness. This didn’t make sense when her last home had been a bare and awful room and she and Lily had near starved to death in it, but that was the only word that came close to her feeling of being lonely and dispossessed.
All of it was that man’s fault, she knew that for certain; the man with one hand who’d come in the night and destroyed everything. If that hadn’t happened then she wouldn’t have run away; she would have stayed at the training establishment with Lily, learned to be a teacher