Telling tales of the toils of servants
Gad's Hill Place servants, 1863. © Charles Dickens Museum
These stories have been written by Rosa Chalfen and local community groups - Mosaic LGBT Young Person’s Trust and St Luke’s Community Centre. This project has been funded by the University of Hertfordshire Coproduction Award.
Naked I came
Carcasses lie akimbo on the cold slates, split open to reveal dribbling red, yellow, purplish muscle. Tongues, jowls and cheeks quiver with greyish fat and pale trotters lie curled into claws. Outside, the gutter gurgles with blood.
The butcher is at work. The muscles in his flank and shoulders shift as he brings down the knife in a clean sweep—
—and looks up. There is a light sound on the stairs above. His lodger is coming down.
She appears in the doorway, pale faced at the smell of flesh. She came here in midwinter, the swell of her belly insistent against her dress. Husband in the army, she said, without conviction.
Two months now since she had the baby. The sound of screaming filtered through the cracks in the floor and into the shop, customers looking up, aghast. It didn’t bother him. This place is a temple of bodies.
She gives him a faint nod. The child is in the crook of her arm, her closed eyelids like two crescent moons. The butcher and his animals watch them go with black beady eyes rolling in their heads.
She walks heavily through the park. The dead branches of trees stretch spindly and black across the grey sky, and the sad chittering of freezing camels echoes over the zoo enclosure.
She has left Jemima with the old woman next door, as she does every day. Her house is a filthy tumbledown place, but she takes her for nothing, and there is nowhere else for the baby to go. She hates to keep her in the butcher’s shop for too long. She worries that the blood gets into her tiny lungs. Sometimes she thinks she sees a red gleam in the child’s pupils, like she has a taste for it.
She knows every street and stone of the way to Coram Fields, but she will not go there. Not yet.
At the big house, she knocks hesitantly on the back door. It opens into the thick steam of the kitchen, the inside of a hot belly. The room is full of the charcoal smell of buttered toast. She is starving—she is always starving, but she knows by now that there is nothing for her here.
She follows the maid upstairs into the nursery. He’s wailing already, with the accusatory note that babies master so quickly. But he calms down upon seeing the pale moon of her breast.
It has been months now and her milk is drying up. What once felt like a great river is now a chalky stream, barely enough for the child she’s paid to feed, let alone her own.
She knows that the mother has noticed. Each time she comes, she is sure it will be the day she is summoned to the morning room, where the woman sits like an oversized crow. The mass of her makes Mary feel weak and small in comparison. How smug she is with her flock of children who are grown on other women’s milk and the money of their famous father.
She met Jemima’s father, if that is what he is, at the last house she worked in. It was a place constantly in movement—her mistress was obsessed with making improvements, as she put it, until it became a bloated, monstrous building, sprawling out in strange directions, coating the hats of disgruntled passers-by with the sawdust it spat out.
That day it was the carpets. Every carpet in the house suddenly had to be vermilion. Not crimson, not scarlet. Vermilion.
She met him coming up the stairs holding one of those vile carpets. He told her his name was Job. She trusted him then, she who knew the Old Testament better than she knew her own face. At Sunday school in the village church, she had been given a bible with a leather green cover that became her only real possession. Job, the man who was so perfect that he was tested by Satan himself and still did not turn on God.
Later, after she knew she was pregnant, after he told her he was married, she took the bible and methodically ripped it up, into halves, quarters, eighths, until it was just a pile of paper flurries in her fists.
In the long spring nights after the milk is gone and she has traced her way to Coram Fields, she remembers a line from the Book of Job.
Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
It comforts her. Slowly she pieces the bible back together. Between the fault lines in the paper the words are just visible.
By Rosa Chalfen