Sara Sheridan - The Secret Mandarin

‘Jane,’ he roared.

She did not call back to him, only raised an eyebrow and went to the door. I stared into the fire. There was anger in his voice already. It did not bode well. Right enough, Robert’s eyes were alight as he pushed into the room past his wife and stood on the carpet in front of me, staring.

‘After all your indiscretions! Mary, have you no shame?’

‘I was washed ashore,’ I started.

But he was not listening.

‘We have tried everything for you.’

Jane slipped back into her seat. She must have sent a message to the Gardens while I was talking to the children and dandling baby Henry on my knee. Robert never came home in the afternoon except in the middle of winter when it was dark early and his beloved plants could not be tended. I had often remarked to Jane that her husband treated his orchids with more care than his three children.

She used to shake her head. ‘Don’t be silly, Mary.’

I realised that we should have discussed this between ourselves before Robert returned. I also realised that Jane had decided not to.

‘You are reckless, Mary Penney,’ Robert snapped, the fury dripping from his lips. He ran a hand over his dark hair, in desperation, I expect. ‘The worst of it is that you are reckless not only for yourself but for all of us.’

He strode to the chair beside Jane’s and sat down. He was wiry but strong and his body was tense with anxiety. When he was angry he did not blink. Jane tried to calm her husband. I knew that she wanted me to stay, however shocking my return.

‘You do not feel it time enough then, Robert?’ she asked. ‘A few months?’

I hung my head. I could see the difficulty I brought them. They could have done far worse than send me away to start a new life. Many in their position would have.

‘I will go back to the theatre,’ I declared.

At that Robert jumped out of his chair with his cheap pocket watch bouncing against his peacock-green waistcoat.

‘And forsake us all?’ he raised his voice. ‘You go back to the stage and you will be dead to the children. It is enough, Mary.’

He meant it. And in that moment I knew that I’d never act again. Having the baby had changed me. It had changed everything. The day had come and gone when I would risk anything for a chance to play Rosalind. I had been foolish but still my blood rose and I could feel the colour in my cheeks. If I did not leave and could not go back to the stage then I would be a spinster—the children’s penniless, spinster aunt. I was unmarriageable to anyone in polite society for all my tiny waist, my smooth skin and indeed, my talent. Still, I did not want to leave. England was my home and I was sure all that awaited me abroad was a string of second-rate suitors. My choices were limited and I railed against all of them. As far as I was concerned, I had been happy before all of this in London. I wanted to be happy here again.

‘They die in Calicut,’ I said. ‘There is dysentery and worse.’

Jane sipped her tea silently. Between us we had scarcely caught a chill all our lives. When little Helen was only two she had a fever. Both Jane and I had been shocked. We had so little experience of sickness that we had to nurse her from a household manual, learning page by page. Penney women were small but strong. Our mother had been a full sixty years of age when she died.

‘You will not catch it,’ Jane said.

‘We will secure another passage,’ Robert added. ‘We will send you to India again.’

This, of course, would take some weeks and I resigned myself to the decision slowly. For a woman like me there are few options. I had, I realised, come back to London hoping for something that was no longer there—an insubstantial promise of love that I had trusted like a fool—a promise, that, despite everything, I could not believe was truly gone. I had hoped that a few months’ absence, might, at the least, allow me some shadow of the life I had before. I missed my friends in Drury Lane—the bright-eyed actresses and their dowdy dressers, our plump and jolly regulars backstage who accompanied us on afternoon trips to Regent Street and Piccadilly, shopping in Dickins, Smith & Stevens or setting out to James Smith’s to buy umbrellas or fancy parasols. I missed the fun of sherry and shortcake in the early evening and the backstage parties later on, the lazy band tuning up in a side room and the whores plying their trade on our doorstep. If I had expected to return to any of that I was mistaken—in the event of wanting to keep my son respectable, that is. I was at my family’s disposal once more. It hurt. Still there were many women in a far worse position than I.

It’s so easy to fall. From my sister’s house in leafy Kensington, on Gilston Road, it is but a small drop to some damp room down by the river where you grow very thin and are used very harshly. I wanted no son of mine to dwindle to a stick. Too many children, half abandoned, live their lives hungry. Open your eyes and you’ll see them in the filthy, dark corners, angular and ravenous. Even their hair is thin. Their mothers, poor souls, have nothing to give as they disappear into the quicksand, penny whores if they’re as much as passingly pretty and washerwomen if they’re not. Most people of our acquaintance do not even notice the desperation of the thousands, but there are plenty who regularly pawn their clothes for a little bread and would sell their honour, their spirit and their children if they could, for a life less comfortable than a nobleman’s dog.

We were doing our best to salvage my mistake and, with a little stake money, India at least offered a decent chance for Henry (who, raised respectably with his cousins, would be free of my disgrace) and for me (since abroad I might still marry tolerably well).

I moved into my old room at the back of the house. Like a beating heart, in the background the city pulsed with vitality, but I might as well have been in Calcutta for all I could partake of it. I had nothing to do apart from spend time with the children for a few hours in the morning but I accepted that, for Henry’s sake.

‘He has your smile, Aunt Mary,’ Helen said.

‘I am not sure I am pleased by that,’ I told her. ‘Henry has no teeth yet.’

And this set us giggling. We drew pictures with coloured pencils and I kept Helen and Thomas amused with stories. I liked to hold Henry. I allowed myself to dote on him for hours until Harriet came to take him out in the perambulator after lunch.

Then, most afternoons I read an old copy of Moll Flanders and pondered on a woman, fallen like me, and attempting to be practical while indulging a hopeless love. I ran over again and again what had happened and cursed the unfairness of it. Damn William and his upper-class sang-froid that had left me abandoned like this. And yet I did not believe I was capable of settling for what Jane had. My spirit is too unruly. I loathed Robert and his like—their grasping, scraping self-righteousness. The lack of passion. The awful fear of what Others May Think. It seemed to me preposterous that Jane should love him—a man who calculated every step from a very high horse. To Robert what I had done was incomprehensible. For myself, I regretted what had happened, but running over the events in my mind, I knew why I had made my choices. I had been unlucky.

The night Henry was conceived William had been courting me for a year with what gentlemen call ‘no satisfaction’. He took me to his private rooms for dinner. The hangings on the wall glowed sumptuous red in the candlelight. We ate roasted boar with pear relish and crisp parsnips studded with rock salt, all served on silver platters that seemed to dance as the light flickered down from the sconces on the wall. As he downed French burgundy, I sipped champagne and William wove a wonderful spell. He would keep a house for me, he said. Anything I desired. Anything. Of course, such promises of devotion fired a passion in me that was blinding. I lived to be adored and here was a Duke’s son, on his knees.