A Fall from Grace, Maggie Ford [best english novels to read txt] 📗

‘I don’t want your explanations or your excuses or even to know who the father is. It is certainly not Hamilton. You’ve never been alone together. Had you been, it would not have crossed his mind to abuse his position.’

‘What is he going to say when he is told?’ came her mother’s wail. ‘The poor man.’

‘Be quiet, Dorothy!’ he barked, then turned back to Madeleine, his voice growing deep and calm.

‘You will stay in your room. Your mother and I do not want to set eyes on you. Your meals will be sent up to you and you will not leave this house. Tomorrow I will arrange for you to be sent to an institution for unmarried mothers. We will not visit you and you will not contact Hamilton. Nor will you try to contact any of my wife’s mother’s family; not her sister nor her brother’s family. If you attempt to contact any of mine, they will be told not to respond.’

Tears were already streaking down her cheeks. But having him refer to her mother as his wife rather than her mother tore a racking sob from her but he was indomitable.

‘When the child is born it will be immediately given up for adoption. But you will not come back here, ever again. Your mother and I wish to have no more to do with you. When you leave that home you will find your own living and provide for yourself. I will put a small sum of money into an account for you. When that is exhausted, you will make your own way and never return to this house, nor come begging. It may be that you will marry this man whoever he is but your mother and I do not wish to see you or hear from you again, do you understand? Now please, return to your room. When the arrangements for you to leave are complete you will be taken out by the servants’ door so that we do not have to look on you.’

Madeleine forced herself to speak through her weeping, her voice hoarse and cracked. ‘You can’t do this. You love me.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said slowly, almost as if her words had bewildered him. ‘I do not know you.’

It sounded so terribly childish yet held a sting that went through her like a knife. In that second she had been cut out of his life as he turned from her to say something to his wife that they would take their nightcap together in the lounge before retiring to bed.

She watched them cross the hall, her mother trading a little behind him. She saw him catch her arm as she was about to turn back to look at her, compelling the woman to continue walking towards the lounge door.

As they disappeared, the door closed with a click that sounded so utterly final that Madeleine wanted to fall to her knees where she stood. Instead she too turned away, her whole body a leaden weight under the burden she knew she had made for herself by her own folly, and she forced herself to mount the stairs to her room.

Five

How she had survived the trauma of leaving home she still couldn’t believe. True, most of her life had been spent away from her family but the love of her parents had always gone with her. This time no love at all had departed with her.

That morning in late September, ordered to leave the house by the trade’s entrance, there’d been no sign of her parents; no one to say goodbye to her or help her as she struggled with her weighty suitcase to the waiting taxicab. Only Mrs Plumley and Maud their kitchen maid, with no other reason to be elsewhere in the house, had been there to see her off; the other servants at their duties elsewhere – more by design than duty she suspected. So leaving had been lonely, heartbreaking.

There had been light rain as the taxicab pulled away down the drive; she watched her home disappearing in the early morning drizzle, but she was glad of that. A bright and sunny sky would have only made it feel worse, as if the weather itself had chosen to mock her.

Now she sat by the window of the small day room, ignoring the few other women sitting around as she recalled that day now almost six months back. In all that time she, like these other unmarried women in this place, had been conditioned to feel utterly shamed and unworthy of any genuine sympathy. Not that they were ill-treated or underfed, food was adequate if plain; but all were expected to do their share of work towards keeping the place in order, any excuses not to meeting with harsh frowns and little sympathy.

‘You are not ill,’ was the response to any complaint of feeling unwell. ‘Pregnancy is not an illness and you have only yourself to blame for your condition!’

That hard-hearted approach, even though her father had paid for her to be there, had come as a shock. And to one who’d never done a day’s work in her life: having to make her own bed, sweep, dust, made to work in the steamy laundry, carry damp and heavy linen baskets out to hang on clothes lines; to scrub pots and pans and tables, just as her own father’s scullery maid had done, by the end of the day she was worn out, having to endure the misery of muscular pains all over her body.

It mattered not to those in charge that she was pregnant, that she’d been tenderly brought up. She was still an unmarried mother, disgraced, cast out by others to pull her weight alongside those less privileged than she. Like them she had allowed herself to be used, ignoring or ignorant of the consequences in an eagerness for a cheap thrill, looked upon with scorn and contempt, despite her family’s high standing