Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [88]
‘She did,’ Violet said. She sat down on the sofa next to Grace. ‘In fact, my mother made me promise to keep looking for you, and said that if I ever found you, I was to tell you something very important. The truth.’
‘The truth!’ A spasm of fear crossed Grace’s face. Something had been wrong with the child she’d birthed! It had been crippled, maimed, horribly disfigured in some way!
‘It’s not a bad truth,’ Violet said, seeing the way Grace’s mind was working. She hesitated, then glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece and seemed to make up her mind about something all at once. ‘Will you take a walk with me?’
Grace wondered for a moment if she had misheard. ‘A walk?’
‘Yes. I’ll explain everything on the way, I promise.’ Violet gathered up her mantle, bonnet and gloves, showing Grace her only concession to mourning on her outer clothes – a spray of purple flowers around the bonnet’s brim.
‘We must go towards Bloomsbury,’ she said.
Once safely across the road, past the big hotels and shops and heading towards Russell Square, Violet took her arm.
‘I’m sorry if I seem strange and mysterious, but this is the last thing I shall ever do for my mother and I want to get it right. Mother said I should take you, and explain carefully, and then everything would be up to you.’
Grace did not reply to this, for her mind was a mass of questions.
‘After my father died, my mother became a midwife in order to survive,’ Violet explained as they passed by two ragged children squabbling over a cigar end. ‘She was one of the first women to train properly. She attended women at home, mostly, and also worked at Berkeley House two days a week in order to help those less fortunate. She told me once that she thought she must have delivered a thousand babies.’
Grace nodded, trying to keep calm in order to understand what was being said and not to jump ahead of herself.
‘Of course, not every baby survived, and some mothers died, too – childbirth is such a perilous business. Some women lost many infants before they had a live birth. One woman in particular lost five babies one after the other, and at the final death was so devastated that her husband thought she would lose her mind.’
‘Poor woman . . .’ Grace said softly.
Violet went on, ‘The very next day, a young unmarried girl came to Berkeley House. She was friendless and alone, with no protector nor family, and she lived in a slum. She had nothing prepared for the birth and no money put aside for the child’s requirements.’
She looked at Grace searchingly. Grace, mouth dry, nodded at her to go on.
‘My mother feared that this girl’s baby wouldn’t survive for – although born healthy – its birth weight was low and it had various other small problems that the girl would not have been able to afford to have treated. She felt that if she let the girl take the baby home, she was almost pronouncing a death sentence upon it. So . . . so she did something she should not have done.’
Grace, fearing and longing for what might come next, gave a little cry, stopped walking and turned to face her.
‘She took the baby and gave it to the poor woman who had lost five of them,’ said Violet.
‘No!’ Grace cried hoarsely. ‘She should not have done that!’
‘She knew she shouldn’t. She knew she was doing wrong,’ Violet said pleadingly, ‘but she said that at the time, it seemed the right and proper thing to do.’ She looked at Grace. ‘That baby would not otherwise have survived its first few months.’
Grace thought about trudging around the cold streets with a baby, about having nowhere to bed it down at nights, about having no food all day bar a crust of bread. ‘But what about the poor girl?’ she asked with a sob.
‘Yes, what about the poor girl?’ Violet sighed. ‘My mother couldn’t forget her and it played upon her mind. Once she knew that she was going to die – for she had been diagnosed with a cancer some months previously – she began looking for her.’ She turned her gaze to Grace. ‘Looking for you, and when she didn’t find you, she made me promise that I would