Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

She nods once. Message received. Her needle trails a brown thread. ‘I do not know if she has spoken to you of her childhood. Of her family life.’

He stops himself twisting the button on his cuff. ‘She lost her sister. A shipwreck in the Hebrides.’

She looks up, towards the sunshine filtering through the lace curtains. ‘May was dear to all of us. She should never have been on that island. Her mother, my sister, is not an easy woman. If you have serious regard for Ally you must know this.’

‘I do. Have serious regard.’

She gives him a smile. ‘I know, my dear. That is why I asked you to come and see me.’

Mrs. Dunne’s own sister Elizabeth, she says, is the elder daughter, and perhaps took the brunt of their own rather strict upbringing. Her own mother, Ally’s grandmother, was something of a Puritan, a woman who meant well—although it is Mrs. Dunne’s experience that most of those who cause harm do so while meaning well—but lived in constant, perhaps relentless, awareness of the sufferings of the poor, and since the family resided in central Manchester both suffering and poverty were ubiquitous and severe. Only a monster could not be turned towards charity by the sights that were quite ordinary in the childhoods of Mrs. Dunne and her sister. But for their mother, charity for the poor was perhaps almost equally balanced with severity for her own daughters. Despite the family’s prosperity, the girls were raised on a meagre diet, ill-clad and harshly disciplined, but perhaps worse than that, taught to consider themselves worthless and sinful beings who must strive every moment against all natural inclination. While Mrs. Dunne might say that this childhood led her to value comfort, to appreciate the small pleasures in life, to make a point of believing herself essentially deserving while doubtless also capable of improvement, her sister took on their mother’s qualities, devoting her life to the advancement of her mother’s charities and adding a particular commitment to women’s suffrage. Mrs. Dunne takes up her embroidery again. Ally and May spent their girlhoods intimately acquainted with the lives and troubles of the poorest women on the streets of Manchester, working alongside their mother in the Home for Fallen Women to which Elizabeth continues to devote most of her waking hours. There is no depravity with which the girls were not familiar from childhood, and it was their mother’s only wish for her daughters that they practice a profession that would combine the service of the poor with the furthering of women’s rights. Ally was taught from an early age that nothing but a career in medicine would be acceptable, but it is of course the case that even a career in medicine is not enough, that Elizabeth will understand any deviation from her own ideas about Ally’s life as a sign of absolute moral failure. You would think, Mrs. Dunne says, that having lost one child to her impossible demands my sister would have more care for the other, but I am afraid that despite her grief it is not so. She does a great deal of good, I don’t doubt, and she is right that women will not win their freedom by sitting at the fireside embroidering in silk, but make no mistake, Tom—Mr. Cavendish, forgive me—she is harmful to Ally.

One of the dahlias drops a petal onto the marble hearth. It is the colour of blood. The light in the room has shifted so that it points to the painting behind Mrs. Dunne’s chair. Does Ally know, he wants to ask, that you’re telling me this? Does she agree with you? He shouldn’t ask, should leave it for Ally to tell him, but nonetheless the words form.

‘And May?’ he says. ‘May I ask—what happened to May?’

She leaves her brown thread trailing, snips a green one. ‘Ally has not told you? May trained as a nurse. I believe it was at least in part her choice. She was not reluctant to be useful, you know. She did not aspire to idleness.’

He nods, as if he has been set right. As if he had considered May frivolous.

‘I never really understood why she went. It was something to do with Aubrey. Aubrey West, you know? Both girls used to model for him. Well, you’ll know the riverside painting, at least.’

He makes a noise of recognition, although he does not know the riverside painting and has never heard of Aubrey West. A friend of Ally’s father, presumably. Part of the Manchester circle.

‘Anyway, Aubrey went painting in Scotland. He somehow made friends with Lord Cassingham, who seems to own half the islands. His sister, Lord Cassingham’s sister, concerns herself with the tenants’ welfare. Well, sometimes. Not in the way that Elizabeth would. She thought the island women needed a nurse, and she told Aubrey West all about it and he told Elizabeth and May and May decided to go off and live there.’ She looks up, tugs sharply on her needle. ‘It was a ridiculous idea from the beginning, her not yet eighteen and admittedly bred to hard work and hard living but not on a windswept island in the north Atlantic. They should have got some doughty old matron who knew the lie of the land. Anyway, off she went and—well—no letters came and we all thought winter on the island, of course there’s no post, but still, you’d expect something, after a while, after months, and at last her father had a telegram. She’d tried to leave, you see.’ She stops. The embroidery sinks to her lap. She closes her eyes, bites her lower lip. ‘May had tried to leave. She had to get away, something made her—and then there was a storm.’ She takes a breath. ‘There was a storm and the boat sank. Only a little boat. She should never have been there, you see. Never have been on that island and never have