“Well, she found herself pregnant, and she thought he might have tampered with the protection she used. All the girls at Barstowe’s used protection, against the clap. Though he was an ugly gentleman, he was a clever one, she used to tell me. He was a scientist, and would talk about the strangest things, like those experiments with frogs. Raising things from the dead and turning things into gold, like that. She used to laugh at some of his ideas. Well, when he found out she was pregnant, he said he would support her and the child, and he put her in that house in Soho. He told her he hoped it would be a girl. She was surprised, because gentlemen usually want a boy, but no, he was particular and said if it was a girl, he would be most pleased.
“And then one day, she heard a knocking at the door. She wondered who it could be, because no one ever visited that house—Hyde had no friends. She opened the door, and who should it be but the police. They said he was wanted for murder, and would she know where to find him? ‘No,’ she told them. They asked her if they could come in and look around. ‘Certainly,’ she said. So they looked around, and they questioned her again, and the housekeeper who lived with them. After a couple of hours, they left, knowing no more than when they had come. She thought he would show up after a while, that he had gotten himself in trouble and was hiding, but would eventually return. He never did. She stayed until the end of the lease, then sold the furniture and moved to cheap accommodations in Spitalfields. And that’s where I was born. We damn near died of hunger, although she worked hard enough, walking out with gentlemen while the butcher’s wife minded me. But the windows were cracked, and the wind blew in, and we had scarcely a blanket between us, with nothing to eat most nights. I was so hungry, I would have eaten the rats, if I could’ve caught them. . . .”
“To think that you were born in such a place!” said Mrs. Poole. Suddenly, her heart swelled with pity for the poor orphan child, and she regretted her earlier harshness.
MARY: It’s a good thing Mrs. Poole is sorting laundry, or whatever she’s doing. I don’t want to hear what she would say to that!
DIANA: How do you know her heart didn’t swell with pity? Mrs. Poole can say what she likes, but she always gives me the largest chop and the most pudding.
CATHERINE: That’s because you’re so scrawny.
DIANA: How do you know? Wouldn’t it be rich if our precious Mary wasn’t her favorite after all?
MARY: For goodness’ sake, can you just finish your section?
DIANA: You were the one who interrupted in the first place.
“Yes,” said Mary, also feeling a surge of pity for her long-lost sister.
MARY: Oh please!
“One day,” continued Diana, “Mum ran into a friend from Barstowe’s, who promised to speak for her, and Mrs. Barstowe agreed to take her back, although she usually turned away girls who’d been foolish enough to get with child. I was four or five, then. The girls would take care of me while Mum was working. They all liked to play with me. They were still children themselves—the youngest girls at Barstowe’s were fourteen. Mrs. Barstowe wouldn’t take them younger. ‘I have standards, I do,’ she used to tell us. They sang to me, and told me stories, and made me clothes out of their cast-offs, decorated with bits of ribbon and lace that gentlemen had given them. As I grew older, they taught me games and rhymes, and even my letters. I learned about the world—there’s no place in it for girls whose parents aren’t rich and respectable, or who have Lascar blood in them, or who are addicted to laudanum. One step off the path of respectability, and that’s where you end up: Barstowe’s.
“It was a happy enough life for me, though maybe not for the girls there, until Mum became ill. One day, she started coughing, and she just kept doing it until blood started coming up. Mrs. Barstowe called the doctor and paid for the medicine herself, but finally Mum was too sick and had to go to St. Bartholomew’s. That was where she died, in one of the common wards with their long rows of beds. The girls took me to visit, but several days later they told me she was gone. Mrs. Barstowe herself held my hand as I watched her being lowered into the ground, in the graveyard next to the hospital. She was wrapped in a shroud, and all I could see of her was her hair hanging out, like blood on the ground. I’ll never forget the sight of it, or the stench of the corpses.
“I was only seven, but the girls talked to Mrs. Barstowe and she decided I could stay, if each girl gave up enough of her pay to support me until I was old enough to support myself. All the girls agreed, though they had little enough themselves. They called me their mascot, and said I would bring them luck. A week later, Mrs. Barstowe called me into her parlor and said, ‘There’s a gentleman here to see you on behalf of your father, Diana.’?”
“A gentleman?” said Mary. “I thought it was my mother who took you from that place—Mrs. Barstowe’s—to St. Mary Magdalen. Although how could she have known that Hyde had a child? Mrs. Poole, I think my mother had her secrets as well.”
“Or was trying to keep your father’s secrets, like as not,” said the housekeeper.
“I never saw your mum or any other woman,” said Diana. “All I saw was a man in a frock coat and top hat. He said he was a lawyer who’d been sent to take me away from Mrs. Barstowe’s to a place where I would be educated and cared for. Well, little did I know that it would be Our Lady of Dullness! If I had, I would have kicked and screamed before letting him take me. But I thought he was going to take me to my father, and Mum had always told me he was a rich man.
“So I went with him, and did I ever regret it! The girls at Barstowe’s had let me wear their dresses and jewelry, and put rouge on my cheeks, and perfume on my wrists. They had laughed and sworn and gotten drunk. At St. Mary Magdalen’s, I had to wear a gray dress with a white pinafore. My hair had to be up in braids and under a cap, so it was proper—how they pulled it, braiding it in the mornings! There were no more bonbons, no more magazines with pictures. Just prayers and sewing. I swore under my breath and tangled the thread, just to make the sisters mad!”
“But what about this man?” said Mary. “Do you remember his name?”
“He never gave a name, at least not to me,” said Diana.
“Was he short and crooked, like Hyde?” asked Mrs. Poole.
“No, he was tall and straight, like a lamppost. He had sharp eyes that looked me up and down, and thin lips that he pressed together with disapproval when he saw how I was dressed. He carried a cane with a dog’s head in silver as the handle—I kept looking at it because it was so lifelike. I wished it would bark.”
“Mr. Utterson!” said Mary. “Mrs. Poole, I’m completely mystified. Why would Mr. Utterson have been involved in this affair?”
“Well, he was your mother’s solicitor at the time,” said Mrs. Poole. “Could he not have made all those arrangements for her—the documents, the account, even the child?”
“You’re talking about me as though I’m invisible,” said Diana, once again pushing her big toe into the hole in the sofa and giving it a good tear.
“But Mr. Guest didn’t know about any of those arrangements,” said Mary. “Why would Mr. Utterson not have informed his own clerk?”
“Perhaps Mr. Utterson didn’t trust him,” said Mrs. Poole. “Would you?”
“Not as far as I could throw him,” said Mary.
DIANA: Have I done the he said she said enough now? I’m getting tired of this.