The Glass Painter's Daughter Read online

  ‘The dress will have to wait until another day now, I’m afraid, dear. We barely have time to call on the Coopers–and you must remember your father has invited Mr Bond for luncheon.’

  Laura sighed, but seeing the two worry lines between her mother’s brows deepen, she stifled her disappointment.

  They wove their way back through the crowds on Victoria Street, where brass plaques of architects and lawyers–one of these Mr Bond’s–shone at nearly every doorway, before turning left, heading south towards the river. Almost immediately they found themselves in a different world, where men loitered, as grey and grimy as the filthy street, and where a dismal cacophony arose, of wailing infants, arguing voices, and the banging of ill-fitting doors. The stink was indescribable. Laura always fancied her clothes reeked long after one of these visits to the slums of her father’s parish. To her, these back streets spoke of the most desolate regions of Hades in the book of Greek myths she had read aloud to her younger sister during the days of Caroline’s long illness.

  As the two women picked their way through the muddy rubbish, a thickset lout lolling in a doorway called out something menacing, and Laura glanced at her mother for guidance. Mama’s head was held high, like a thoroughbred on a tight rein, but two angry red spots on her cheeks betrayed her agitation.

  ‘Come along, Laura,’ she snapped, leading her on, past a building site where some of the more dilapidated housing had been pulled down to make way for new, but where whole families had broken in and erected makeshift shelters for themselves. Past the ragged school through the broken window of which birdlike Miss Pilkington could be glimpsed pointing a cane at a tattered map on the wall. Down an even narrower, darker lane, through a battered door and up some steps into a tiny hallway that smelled of damp and rotten wood on top of other, more repulsive odours. Laura remembered to breathe only through her mouth as she followed her mother up another flight of stairs.

  The door to the Coopers’ rooms was ajar, but Mama politely knocked and waited. A small girl peered out, fearful, before admitting them.

  ‘Hello, Ida,’ Mama said. ‘This is my daughter, Miss Laura. How’s your mother today, dear?’

  ‘Not good, mam, but she ate the broth you and the other lady left,’ the small girl said, peeping shyly at Laura. Mama had taken their maid, Polly, with her last time.

  Her eyes getting used to the dingy light, Laura became aware that the room was full of children lying on revolting-looking straw pallets or sitting wrapped in ragged blankets on the bare wooden boards, hungry eyes staring out at the visitors. As for Ida in her filthy torn dress, Laura remembered Mama had said she was twelve. She would have looked puny for eight.

  Mama handed Laura the bag and Laura brought out the parcels of bread and dripping packed by Mrs Jorkins the cook and handed them round to the children, who had hardly the energy to receive them. There was a flask of milk, too, which Laura poured into enamel mugs and administered to the smallest of the children. It was all too quickly gone. Next, she knew she was to ask Ida for help washing them, but in the meantime she couldn’t resist looking where her mother had gone.

  Through the doorway of the second room, a woman with a mass of untidy red hair could be seen lying under a thin blanket on a mattress on the floor, her face flushed with fever. Mama was shaking out a fresh bedsheet and Laura helped her carefully roll the sick woman over so Mama could peel away the soiled bedding. Laura felt her gorge rise when she glimpsed the pool of fresh blood.

  ‘We must fetch the doctor to you, Molly,’ Mama said gently, then as the woman murmured something about the cost, ‘Don’t worry, we will take care of that. You must think of yourself. And the baby.’

  Laura knelt by the littlest Cooper, a newborn boy who lay still in a wooden box next to the mattress, his skin sallow, his eyes roaming unfocused, as though searching for something he would never find in this derelict house he had been unlucky enough to get born in. She lifted out the child tenderly, remembering with a bittersweet pain how she’d once held her little brother Ned when he was a sunny, chubby baby, and her heart swelled with pity for this tiny silent scrap. The cloth that swaddled him was soiled. She called out to Ida to fetch water, searching in the bag for clean napkins.

  After everybody was fed, washed and changed, they left, Mama promising again to send for the doctor.

  ‘Out looking for work, is what she always says when I ask,’ was Mama’s bitter answer to Laura’s enquiry about Mr Cooper’s whereabouts as they hurried home to Greycoat Square. ‘I’ve certainly never set eyes on the wretched fellow.’

  Laura was shocked by the anger in her mother’s usually mild voice. They were both subdued after this visit but Laura thought that although her mother must be tired, she seemed less tense now.

  ‘Thank you for coming with me, Laura. You have a natural compassion and you see how much there is to do here in this parish.’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ Laura sighed, immediately guilty that instead of glowing with satisfaction, she merely felt relieved to be on the way home. They passed a boy with a scruffy puppy on a string and she thought of the lion cub, confused, trapped in a world where it didn’t belong. Like the newborn Cooper, his eyes shining like starlight, whose visit to this earth might only be a short one. There seemed too much unbearable pain for anyone to deal with in this world.

  Laura’s father was the Reverend James Brownlow and the family had lived for eight years at St Martin’s Vicarage in Greycoat Square, around the corner from the church in Vincent Street. The Square itself was a quiet, genteel place with a central garden where nurses pushed perambulators and children ran about the grass in summer. Amongst their neighbours were doctors, lawyers, gentlemen in trade, the occasional Member of Parliament, but many of these attended the more fashionable St Mary’s Church on the far side. St Martin’s, on the other hand, had been erected by public subscription some thirty years before to minister to the poor. It had been built facing away from the well-to-do townhouses of the Square, towards the slums of Old Pye Street and Duck Lane, now at last being cleared, but slowly, too slowly for the likes of the Cooper family.

  As Laura changed out of her work dress, nose wrinkling at the dirty splashes and lingering smells, real or fancied, she glanced out of her bedroom window. A little boy was tripping along the path in the garden of the Square, hand-in-hand with his nurse. A boy with a burnished bell of gold hair, who laughed and tugged at the girl’s hand. For the second time that day she was reminded of Ned.

  He had been about that age, only four, when he died. Now he was fixed in her memory as a bright laughing child who would never grow any older but who was as much a part of their thoughts as Tom, her elder brother, now away studying Theology at Exeter College in Oxford, preparing to follow in the steps of their father.

  She watched the child until he disappeared from view then went to peer in her tiny looking glass (tiny because her mother disapproved of studying one’s appearance), beholding first one side of her head then the other, to replace the loose pins in her hair.

  The house was quiet; it being a Friday in Lent and hence a day of fasting, a nasty smell of boiled fish was seeping up the stairs. On the landing Laura paused outside Caroline’s room, noticing that the door, normally kept shut, shivered ajar. She pushed it slightly and peered round, half-expecting to see her mother, or Polly with her duster, but there was nobody. She walked in, closing the door behind her, sniffing at the faint aroma of beeswax.

  Within, all was as Caroline had left it. The bed was neatly made, the fireplace swept, the furniture dusted. Caroline’s array of childish treasures–a teddy bear, her doll with the white china face, a box of pretty buttons–lay on the chest of drawers. The sampler on the wall she had painstakingly stitched when she was eight gave her name and her birth date, 18 May 1861. Books, scrapbooks, a pressed-flower collection, were lined up on the bookcase. Fanned out on the lace dressing-table mat she’d knotted were the silver-backed hairbrush, comb and mirror she’d been given for her sixteenth birthday.
>
  All appeared as though Caroline herself might walk back through the door.

  But she would never walk through that door again.

  Laura lay down on the bed, gingerly so as not to disarrange the bedclothes, and folded back the counterpane just a little way to press her cheek against the pillow. Eyes closed, she breathed in hopefully, but no trace of Caroline’s favourite violet toilet water remained. She let her breath go, mouthed ‘Caroline,’ and listened, but there was no ghost to whisper an answer.

  It was a year now since Caroline’s death at nearly seventeen, a long, lingering death after years of a disorder of the blood that had taken her by stealth, reducing her from a lively, round-faced child to a pale willowy girl who never quite reached womanhood.

  Little Ned, by contrast, had gone quickly. One day he had been racing around the rambling vicarage garden in Hampstead after the neighbour’s dog that had slipped through the fence, the next he lay sunk in a coma, a scarlet rash spreading like fire beneath the perfect lustre of his skin. Eight years ago that had been, and then their mother couldn’t stand to live in the house where he died, and their father had accepted this placement. James Brownlow had hoped that if his beloved Theodora absorbed herself in her other children and could devote herself to parishioners impoverished in body, mind and spirit, she would be healed of her sorrow.

  Perhaps this might have worked, had not Caroline then fallen ill.

  Laura felt a tear slip down her cheek, heard it drop onto Caroline’s pillow.

  Deep down in the house the front door bell clanged and Mrs Jorkins called out, ‘Polly? Where is the girl? Polly!’

  Then came the clattering of the door being unfastened and a man’s booming voice, and the clump of boots. Mr Bond had arrived. Laura pushed herself to her feet, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. She smoothed down the bedclothes then shut the door quietly behind her and went downstairs.

  Anthony Bond, Papa’s solicitor and principal churchwarden, was a man of five and thirty, neither plain nor handsome, neither short nor tall, neither fat nor thin. Indeed, he was average in all visible respects. His straight brown hair and beard were neatly barbered, his movements were neither graceful nor clumsy. There was nothing arresting nor objectionable about him. One would pass him in the street without a second glance–and Laura frequently did.

  Papa had, most unusually, invited him to lunch because he and Bond had some business to discuss in advance of a meeting with the church’s architect that afternoon. Laura felt sorry that their visitor must endure the Friday Lent menu, but as a concession to the presence of a guest Mrs Jorkins was today allowed to serve a white sauce with the obligatory fish and there would be damson jam with the semolina pudding.

  When she crept downstairs, it was to find that Papa had taken the guest into his study. She stood for a moment, listening to the sound of their voices–Papa’s clear tones and Bond’s deep ones–rise and fall through the clatter from the kitchen.

  The shut door was all too familiar. Since Caroline’s death Papa retreated to his study more and more. He was writing a history of the Church of England, he told them, but once when she was sent to fetch him for supper, she’d found him deeply asleep in an armchair. She’d picked up the book that had fallen from his grasp and turned it over. It was Cardinal Newman’s poem about the journey of a soul, open at the page where the dead man’s guardian angel bears his soul to judgement. She read the words of the angel’s song:

  ‘This child of clay

  To me was given

  To rear and train

  By sorrow and pain

  In the narrow way.’

  Poor Papa. She watched him sleep on, lines of his own sorrow and pain etched in his face. Beneath their brave faces to the world they seemed so…diminished…her parents, since the loss of Caroline. Of course, they had their other children, but Tom had left home, would take holy orders and tread his own ‘narrow way’. Harriet was married, expecting her first child, fussed over by her voluble mother-in-law. Only she, Laura, was left–‘my unplucked rose’ as her father teased her sometimes. Perhaps she was meant to stay with them, never to marry. Did she mind? She did a little. She was still only twenty-two. It would be nice to know what it felt like, to be wanted by a man.

  At luncheon, she and Mama sat disengaging the flesh of their cod from its gritty black skin, as Mr Bond and Papa discussed Mr Gladstone’s proposals to allow married women further rights in law and property. Mr Bond had his reservations, it seemed, but was a pragmatist. Papa was concerned that giving women greater independence would chip away further at holy matrimony, which made man and woman one flesh.

  Mama picked at her food, the two lines deepening on her forehead. Was she getting one of her headaches, Laura wondered anxiously. These, when they came, usually condemned Theodora Brownlow to several days in bed, the curtains drawn. But Mama was at least eating a few mouthfuls of fish, which was a good sign. It must be just weariness.

  ‘How then would a man guide a young and wilful wife?’ Papa was enquiring of no one in particular.

  ‘Why should not an educated woman stand mistress over her own wealth, Papa?’ Laura said quietly. Her father swallowed a mouthful and frowned.

  ‘You are still very unformed for such a suggestion, dear Laura,’ he said. ‘Perhaps were you to be married to a man you trust with all your heart and soul, as your Mama does me, you would recognise the good sense of the current principle.’

  He exchanged glances with Mr Bond, who gave an irritating little laugh. What had she said that was funny, Laura wondered.

  ‘An educated and dutiful woman is well able to advise her husband, Miss Brownlow,’ Mr Bond said gently. ‘And he may then decide for the both of them.’ He took his last mouthful of fish, placed his knife and fork together on the plate and dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘In the majority of cases,’ he went on, ‘marital harmony will prevail. However, the new Parliament might be swayed by the need to right wrongs that result in those few monstrous exemplars when the man neglects or, ah, abuses his responsibilities.’

  Laura gave up on the mess of bones and scales on her plate and, as they waited politely for Mrs Brownlow to finish, her mind drifted to a story she might write about a woman abandoned by her husband. Perhaps she would start it tonight now that the Eastertide altar linen, the embroidery of which had occupied many long evenings, was complete.

  When she tuned into the conversation again, Mr Bond was discussing a recent legacy to the church. ‘Mrs Fotherington’s nephew has shown me her will. Coloured glass for the Lady Chapel, his aunt specified, “to represent a suitable theme”.’

  Laura missed Sarah Fotherington, who had dropped down dead during a ladies’ missionary meeting less than two weeks ago. Not because she had liked her particularly, but because she had shared the burden of Mama’s work in the parish and helped run the Sunday school, tasks that Laura seemed now to be expected to perform instead. No one had asked her; it was just assumed that she would.

  Mama finally laid down her knife and fork, most of her meal uneaten, and Polly stepped forward to clear away the plates. Mama said in a dreamy voice, ‘A mother and child. That would be right for the Lady Chapel–the Virgin and Child.’

  Laura and Papa looked at one another in alarm, both sensitive to Mrs Brownlow’s lapses from strong capability into melancholy. But Mama’s brown-eyed gaze was firm and serious, with no sign of tears.

  ‘A most apposite suggestion, my dear,’ Papa soothed.

  Mrs Jorkins bustled in with bowls of semolina, then ceremoniously laid a large pot of her best damson jam on the table.

  Mr Bond glanced anxiously between husband and wife. He said, ‘I can discuss Mrs Brownlow’s proposal with Mrs Fotherington’s nephew, Mr Stuart Jefferies, if you so wish, Rector.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Brownlow, passing the jam to Mr Bond. Laura watched him take a polite amount. He looked as though he really wanted more. ‘Jefferies seems a reasonable enough fellow.’

  ‘And, James, are t
here not several windows in the Lady Chapel?’ Mrs Brownlow said quietly, taking the minutest spoonful of jam.

  ‘Yes, indeed, my dear, but one is half-obscured by a cupboard. The Virgin and Child might fill the light above the chapel altar, do you not think?’

  ‘Oh, yes, and the child…James, might we choose an artist with care, find one with facility at portraying babies?’

  ‘There are such ugly babies,’ Laura said, ladling a generous helping of the purple plum over her hated semolina. ‘It’s as though the great artists were more interested in their female model than in evoking the Christ Child.’

  ‘Oh Laura,’ said her father, smiling. ‘But, of course, the child’s appearance is important. We’ll seek advice, Theodora.’

  ‘Thank you, James. One more thing. The money my own father left: would there be enough there for a second window?’

  Papa waved away the jam Laura offered him and frowned. ‘We haven’t discussed how we should use that money yet,’ he said. ‘There is the–ah–vexing question of Tom’s rising expenses.’

  ‘I know, but I’d like a window for Caroline, to remember her,’ Mama went on, a slight break in her voice.

  ‘Oh, Papa,’ cried Laura, ‘that’s a splendid idea of Mama’s! Do let’s have another window.’

  Mr Brownlow conferred upon his wife a look of such compassion that Mr Bond, who sat patiently waiting for the signal to start eating, stared down at his semolina, his face reddening.

  ‘It is an excellent idea that perhaps we should discuss later in private, Dora,’ Mr Brownlow said firmly, and at last picked up his spoon.

  ‘An angel, James,’ whispered Mrs Brownlow, a beatific smile transforming her tired features. ‘Think about it. It will be Caroline’s angel.’