Page 31 of The Extraordinary Florence Stoker

‘If there’s one thing you’ll discover about Bram, Florence, if you haven’t already, it’s that he cannot keep still. He must be doing, doing, moving, moving, prove he’s a man of action. Mammy is convinced it arises from him being confined to bed with illness throughout his childhood. Inert for so long, even sleeping is anathema to him. When he’s awake, he’s always making up for lost time. I think these endless messages from Henry Irving provide him with an excuse to keep active.’

I knew Bram had spent the first seven years of his life as an invalid, looked after by his beloved nurse, Ellen Crone, and his mammy, who filled his head with macabre stories of plagues and death and eerie folk tales. His uncle, a doctor, had treated him with everything from bloodletting (leeches!) and the kind of medicines that would be considered quackery today.

Perhaps Matilda was right, and Bram worried that if he stopped, he might never start again. I needed to be more tolerant. More supportive. What did I know about men? About marriage? I was twenty years old. I’d been wed six months. My expectations were unrealistic. The last thing I wanted was to turn into a woman whose husband leapt out of a carriage rather than spend another second beside her, who chose not to come home because anywhere else was preferable.

But what did one do when your husband came to your bedroom only when drunk? And then just half a dozen times. Did he sense that for me, being left alone was preferable to what we’d do together? I grew hot with mortification and swiftly pushed the thought away.

While Matilda helped me understand Bram’s need to always be working, I wondered would he ever have time to toil on his own behalf and pursue his ambition of becoming a writer. Matilda understood Bram’s commitment to the theatre, but she didn’t like his unhealthy dedication to Mr Irving. In Bram’s sister, I found an unlikely ally.

‘Watch that man, Florence,’ she said one day, after a careworn Bram charged out of the house in response to yet another message. ‘If you’re not heedful, if Bram’s not, Mr Irving will drain the bloody life out of him. There’ll be nothing left for you.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

London, June 1879

I pressed my hand against my now thankfully empty belly while I used the other to blot the tears from my cheeks. Mrs Daw, who was holding my hair out of the way as I bent over a washbasin, passed me a wet cloth.

‘Have ye told him yet, Mrs S?’ she asked.

I drew the cool towel across my face, pressing it into my eyes. ‘No, not yet.’ My throat was raw. ‘I wanted to make sure first.’

Mrs Daw made a clucking noise and, releasing my hair, draped a cloth over the pungent bowl. She looked pointedly at my swollen breasts and the slight swell of my stomach. ‘If ye wait any longer, it’ll trot over to the master and call him da.’

I released a very unladylike belch. She was right. But once I told Bram, my condition would be real.

The rattle of carriages and coaches, the low drone of street talk, interspersed with some sharp whistles, drifted in the open window. A dull, deep horn sounded – shipping upon the river. There was the faint trill of birds. Summer was upon us, not that the weather had been notified yet. The light delayed its departure a little longer each day, but the rain and cold decided to remain. It made shopping a singularly unpleasant task, especially as Matilda and I had to rely on the crowded omnibuses to take us to our preferred stores. How could I leave the house, let alone shop, when I had my own growing baggage to carry?

While Mrs Daw fussed, I sat in the chair by the window. Would this be my lot once my pregnancy was revealed? Confined to the flat, unable to entertain, to visit, to roam anywhere? My eyes alighted on the vase of geraniums upon the dresser. The scent had been faint, but with the door closed, and mingled with the sickly-sweet odour rising from the basin, it was altogether cloying. My stomach flipped.

Carrying a child meant I’d be restricted in every sense of the word, and the life I was just starting to make for myself would become insipid, dull, and yes, cloying.

Mrs Daw had to understand, the longer I delayed telling anyone about my state, the longer I was guaranteed some freedom. Nevertheless, I gave her the answer she wanted to hear.

‘I’ll tell him soon.’

‘Make sure ye do, Mrs S,’ she said, lifting the basin carefully and screwing up her snub nose. ‘I fear if ye don’t, either his brother or sister will say something and that wouldn’t be right.’

‘You think they know?’

Mrs Daw chuckled. ‘I think everyone except the dear master does, what with you barking like a seal every morn and looking so wan and pale. It’s no wonder, mind, what with ye gaddin’ about the streets, hosting your teas every other Sunday and the like. A woman in your condition needs rest, and lots of it.’

Mrs Daw had been so excited when she’d found me up-chucking three days in a row. Her reaction would have been heartwarming if I wasn’t so afraid. Not just of being restricted, but of the birth itself. One didn’t grow up in a large family in a busy neighbourhood like mine without being aware of what happened to a woman when she became pregnant, and the dangers of birthing. I thought of Mother’s agony when Alice was born, her sorrow when first Mary, then Maggie, died. Then there were all the other babbies that slipped away in rags or the privy. Mother became so ill after each one. What if this baby never made it either?

When we were very young, Phil and I would ask what happened to the babbie growing inside of Mother, aunty or a neighbour, why it was that one day they were swell-bellied and the next they weren’t. We were told the kiddykin was lost.

We’d lie in bed at night, faces close together, and whisper about lost babbies, wondering where they went. They must be very tiny to fall out of the woman, so we imagined them trapped in another part of the body – under the arm, behind a rib, or perhaps escaping out of the belly button or another orifice, the most obvious one not occurring to us then. We decided lost babbies must go to a special place in heaven, not where Great-grandma and Grandpa, Maggie, Mary or Cousin Bobby Balcombe went, but one with fields of flowers, carpets made of dewdrops and windows of ice-lollies; where angels with rainbow wings would feed and care for them.

Then there was what childbearing did to women. My trim mother gradually turned into a sagging, depleted sack of flesh with heavily stretched breasts and a flabby stomach. It was the same for the women in my Clontarf neighbourhood. Bearing more than two children altered them beyond recognition, stole their youthful svelteness and beauty. Their bodies ceased to be their own and were surrendered to the will of others, to motherhood, before, as time passed, they became invisible.

And what did motherhood mean but a body that oozed, leaked, bled, stretched, ached, was torn asunder and then never put back the same way again? Maybe it was the expression on my face, or my pallor, but Mrs Daw suddenly took pity on me.

‘How about I fix ye a nice cup of tea and some toast afore Mr Stoker rises?’

Before I could answer, bile flew into my mouth. In a flash, Mrs Daw had the basin under my chin.

Just in time.

‘I’m with child.’