Nellie made a gesture of dismissal towards the nurse. The nurse found herself obediently withdrawing, bewitched by Nellie’s mysterious powers.
Edith had confessed to her mother when on her near-deathbed in the back of the Bentley. “Back street?” a bewildered Nellie had said. “Some woman with a knitting needle and a spoon?” When there were perfectly good clinics in Harley Street that she could have taken Edith to. What was she thinking?
Edith did not, however, admit to the identity of the father. “Who is he?” Nellie persisted. “Is he married?” But Edith had remained tight-lipped and then slipped into unconsciousness, and Nellie had been left in the dark as well, which was not a place that she liked to be. Edith was never fawned over by men. She seemed an unlikely candidate for lust.
Now, Nellie was creeping around, spying on her own daughter in the hope that the mysterious lover might show his face. This was most certainly not a job for the spies she had in her pay. Far too private.
There he was, perched on the edge of her bed for all the world to see. Maddox—Maddox, of all people!—holding Edith’s hand, like any common lover. He stood up as if to leave and Nellie slipped out of sight behind a screen, although not before she had seen Maddox lean over and kiss Edith goodbye.
All the time she had been in Holloway, Maddox had been seducing Edith. Edith was the key to the Coker empire—turn her and you had entrance. The books, the money, the connections, how it all worked. The pregnancy would have been the cherry on the top for him. Not only would he have possessed their secrets but her blood as well, although the two were interchangeable, really.
* * *
—
Edith had been corrupted by Maddox. Edith, her most trusted child. Edith must be brought back into the fold and protected from Maddox, who was undoubtedly using her for his own ends. He had already harmed Edith, how much more damage could he wreak? On Edith, on all of them.
If nothing else—God, patience, flowers, all lay by the wayside—Nellie still believed in loyalty. She had always known that Maddox would betray her one day, he didn’t have a trustworthy bone in his body, but she was surprised at the method he had used to achieve his ends.
When she was sure that he had gone, Nellie made her way out to the Bentley, parked in a side street to avoid curious eyes.
“Home?” Hawker asked optimistically. He was hoping for an early night.
“No, drop me at the Amethyst,” Nellie said. She would have been a grandmother if the knitting needle had not intervened. The thought made her queasy.
* * *
—
Before she had left the hospital, Nellie had collared a young ward maid on night duty and told her to draw the curtains of Edith’s room. “And get rid of those freesias as well. Throw them out with the rubbish.” The ward maid did not do as instructed, instead she took the flowers home at the end of her shift and gave them to her mother. “Freesias,” she said. “How lovely.”
Though She Be but Little She Is Fierce
Tired and hungry, Freda trudged wearily on through the inhospitable streets, eventually finding asylum in, of all places, a public library, in Westminster. It must have been the owner of the Neal Street café who seeded the idea in her mind. （“Oi, miss, this isn’t a library.”）
Cissy, of course, had suggested to Freda that her friend Gwendolen might get her a job in York Library. Freda had recoiled at the idea, but now was a different matter. She would happily spend all day shelving books if it meant that at the end of it she had food to eat and a bed to lie in. It could not be worse than anything that had happened to her in the Adelphi.
The reference section seemed to afford the best refuge and so Freda chose a book at random from the shelves and took a seat at an empty table, tucking her suitcase beneath her feet in an effort to make it inconspicuous. So far she had managed to avoid the eagle eye of any librarian. She imagined one saying, “Oi, miss, this isn’t a café,” although a librarian probably wouldn’t say “oi.” Gwendolen certainly wouldn’t.
It wasn’t long before an elderly gentleman approached her and Freda thought, Uh-oh, here we go—she was either going to be thrown out or he was going to proposition her. But instead he bent down and in a gentle murmur said that he had noticed that she had no writing materials, could he lend her paper and pencil so that she could take notes from her book?
Thus it was that Freda spent a fair bit of the afternoon having to scribble nonsense from Jane’s Fighting Ships to maintain the charade. Who was Jane?, she wondered. Women were not usually interested in ships, let alone “fighting ships.” What on earth did people see in books? They were so boring, although not the Greek myths, she was willing to make an exception for them. If only books were edible, how much more use they would be!