Nell Thrupp

By Dorothy Witt

Born in 1863 in Ipswich, England, during the Victorian age, to a mother who did not want her, Nell was both illegitimate and nearly blind. The mother, Salome, gave her to a reluctant Aunt Winifred who saw to her physical needs but lacked understanding. Salome had another illegitimate child, Violet, this one adored and kept. In school, Nell was unable to learn because of her poor eyesight, but an observant teacher understood the problem. When Nell was fitted with glasses, she became the scholar that she wanted to be.

In a cruel turn of events, Nell was taken out of school to care for her mother who had consumption, an ordeal that lasted a year. At her mother’s death she went into service as a maid-of-all-work and Violet was shipped off to Canada to an orphan asylum. Nell was stunned and saddened, but with the help of an odd cast of characters, she was able to find a way forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781304839824

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Welcome

Salome gazed out the window of her room and watched a brisk November wind whip leaves from the chestnut tree down Catherine street. She wasn’t often given to thoughts of weather but today she allowed that the tempest without matched the storm within. She had missed her time of month twice.

Her mother, had she lived long enough for Salome to have a clear recollection of her, and her father, had he not bolted at her mother’s death, would surely have expected to see their daughter marry. But Salome didn’t want marriage. The models of that estate that she had observed warned her away. But a child was not wanted, most certainly not wanted.

As Salome removed her clothes and stood before the looking glass, she thought about the marriages she had known. Of her mother and father, there was too little experience of it to yield a picture or a story. In Uncle Severn’s house, where her father had deposited her, at age eight, in the manner of a postal package, she watched her uncle and aunt move through the rooms of the house in icy silence. In her time there, she had learned what she must do and the person she must become in order to keep her wits. Now she considered that the sour smell of misery that Aunt Lottie and Uncle Severn gave off had worked its will on her spirit. No, she wanted nothing to do with marriage.

She stood before the looking glass, turning one way then another. The image of her slender self revealed nothing of future maternity. Putting on her clothes, Salome went to her writing table and penned a letter to her friend Louisa Trant. They had become friends soon after Salome was told at age eighteen that her time beneath Uncle Severn’s roof must come to an end. She had finished such schooling as English girls of the middle class were afforded. She could embroider a pillow slip, sew a neat seam, speak a little French, play the piano and sing, and carry on a polite conversation. Girls like herself were, in fact, not like herself at all. She was an orphan who must find a position and make her way in the world of Ipswich in the year 1863. To that end, her uncle knew a milliner in Corn Market Street where Salome might learn the art of decorating hats. It was here at Lady Marian’s Fine Hats that she began to place feathers and ribbons on hats of straw and hats of felt. And it was here that she met Louisa Trant.

Dear Louisa, she wrote. The person who writes this letter comes to you with a sorrowful request. I am two months gone and have no wish to marry, as you know.

My only aim is to be rid of the unwanted thing. Do you know a remedy for my predicament?

Your distraught friend, Salome.

Louisa answered, Salome, first try hot baths. I mean to say very hot baths, the kind that will turn your skin scarlet and raise tiny pink bubbles. Wait. Do not succumb to impatience. But if the baths fail, climb on a high stool and let yourself fall, being careful not to break a limb. An acquaintance of mine took a bloody, bruising tumble and the unwanted creature departed. Last, if the above measures fail to bring relief, get yourself to the chemist and ask for a pint of quinine. Drink small doses until you achieve the desired result. Quinine was most effective in my case. There was pain, yes, but you cannot succeed in this matter without a dose of affliction, in fact a good two or three days of downright female misery. Keep this advice a secret, Salome dear. To your success, your friend Louisa.

Salome was obedient. For three days in a row she took hot baths. As she let herself down little by little into the copper tub, she asked herself what had gone astray in her life’s design. She was not a wicked person. She had not knowingly been unkind to others. And thanks to Selby Thrupp, the cause of her present woes, she dressed in fashionable gowns and was considered by their friends to be attractive. Why, then was this happening to her? Suppressing an urge to scream, she lay in the tub until the water turned tepid. The skin of her buttocks had turned crimson but nothing inside her changed.

The day Bowring the Borrower came to ask the loan of a bit of tea, Salome asked, in a turnabout, to borrow a high stool. Carrying it to her rooms, she climbed it and, looking down, decided that this was not to be her method. Instead, after settling her nerves with a cup of tea, she donned a cape and set out for the chemist. On her way, she reminded herself to act the sweet young lady for nothing would be gained by rashness or harsh words. Bending into the wind-driven snow, she reached Westgate street and entered the shop. I need quinine, she told the chemist. It’s for my father. He came down with the fever in India and now he’s home having a shaking fit. It’s upsetting seeing my dear father so ill.

Ah, malaria. We have many cases here in England, brought to our shores from foreign lands, said the chemist, who disappeared into a backroom and in moments returned carrying a pint of the needed liquid. Handing it to his customer, he warned, Don’t give your father too large a dose. A teaspoon, two at most, should settle him. Keep him well covered until he warms up. Should you overdose your poor father, he’ll do worse than shake.

On the way home, Salome thought about Louisa’s sparkling musical evenings. You’ll find an amusing society at my gatherings, Salome, Louisa had told her. A dozen of us meet around my piano once a month to sing the latest songs and old favorites. Do you sing? Salome said, Yes, I think I do. I haven’t done so since we sang those woeful dirges in school. Remember them? But yes, I sing.

Salome put on her new green gown and went to Louisa’s the following Saturday. She understood in a matter of moments that Louisa had opened the door to a new social experiment, one that required skills she had not yet mastered. Turning herself into an actress, she prepared to walk before a new audience and to reveal herself. Not only did she have to relearn the art of reading notes, she had to teach herself to engage in amusing conversation, when to ask a question, when to remain silent. In the early days of the musical evenings, Selby Thrupp struck Salome as an attractive, even exciting, man. At Louisa’s gatherings, he seemed to comprehend her want of social ease and set about demonstrating how to move freely about the room at the end of the singing. He took care to invite her participation with others and saw that Salome was on her way to mingling comfortably with Louisa’s fellow singers. His kindness called up in Salome an openness of feeling such as she had never before enjoyed. And in a matter of three months she had moved into new rooms paid for and regularly visited by Selby Thrupp.

Soon Salome found the musical evenings more than agreeable; they became the object of her daily thoughts as she worked in the millinery shop adding ribbons and feathers to ladies’ hats.

Turning the key in the lock against her neighbor Bowring the Borrower, Salome uncorked the bottle of quinine and drank. In the time it took her to remove her cape, she was seized with dizziness and a ringing in the ears, then a convulsing low in the belly. Good, she told herself, the worse I feel the more likely I’ll be rid of it. Two days later, still awaiting good news in her drawers, she drank the remainder, in all enough to send a horse to heaven. The following days she paced the floor and waited. Nothing in her undergarment, nothing in the chamber pot.

A week passed. Salome, feeling a North Sea gale rise inside her, opened the drawer of the rosewood chest Mr. Thrupp had given her on the occasion of sealing their alliance, and drew out an ivory buttonhook, a cunning little tool she used to fasten her boots. Gazing up at the ceiling, she found the familiar stain above, seeing in it a parody of Selby Thrupp, the assertive chin, the flying buttress that was his nose, and the ice-blue eyes closed to her anguish. Like a general before his troops, Salome issued commands to the hand that held the buttonhook, Plunge! she cried, then Plunge again! Tears streamed from her eyes and sweat drenched her as wetly as it had her imagined father in the grip of his India fever. Be rid of it, she whispered.

***

Nellie was born in July of 1863 on an unusually hot day for Suffolk County, as hot indeed as the winter had been cold. Salome lay in the bed in which she had tried to improve her fortunes with a buttonhook. When the labor pains began, she called her neighbor Bowring the Borrower to send for the midwife. The labor lasted seventeen hours, not long by the midwife’s reckoning but an eternity for the mother. The Borrower hovered in the background, wringing her hands and urging Salome on to greater effort. Salome believed she was lying on the ground of a moor. Her tongue tasted of soil, she inhaled it. Her lower parts were being ground away. When a large stone rolled over her, she heard a cry.

There, there, missus, calm now, calm, urged the midwife, That’s the way to do. You’ll be all right, surely. No need to cry. The little one has arrived, a fine baby girl, a wee lovely girl. The midwife bent down to place beside Salome a red-faced infant not much larger than a plucked chicken. No, Salome whispered, not yet.

In the next hours, the mother showed no inclination to have the baby near her. Each time it was offered, she turned away. In her delirium, she understood with a terrible clarity that the birth had been a mistake, that the infant’s arrival would be annulled. On the midwife’s instructions, the Borrower stood in wait, nibbling on Salome’s biscuits and drinking her tea, watching for the new mother to stir or open her eyes so that she might pick up the baby and bring it to its mother. Salome’s answer was always the same. Take it away. I don’t want it.

The next day, seeing how matters stood, Miss Bowring called in her sister who had given birth to a baby boy in April and who lived near enough that it wouldn’t be difficult for her to be wetnurse to the little featherless, unwanted fowl. Perhaps Salome could pay her something for her trouble, Miss Bowring thought. All babies born in or out of wedlock deserve to be fed and cared for. That was plain.

And so it happened, four times a day from early morning to late in the evening, a ruddy-faced woman with dumpling cheeks, a deep pillowy bosom, and a twist of honey-colored braid wrapped around her head came to Salome’s rooms. She clucked her tongue over the newborn, mouthed sweet nothings into its tiny ear, and suckled her. Each night Miss Bowring brought the baby to her sister’s house for her last feeding. The Bowring sisters, now caught up in the unfolding story as surely as if they were the infant’s family, named her Nellie.

Chapter 2

Comely As the Queen’s Own

Nellie was an uninvited guest in her mother’s rooms. From the day that Salome drank the quinine, she moved daily through a gray fog. The events of the outer world had no meaning, food no taste. She craved sleep and sleep would not come. Throughout the pregnancy she had loathed the idea of a child, never giving it a face or body. It was a nullity, worse, a life-long burden. Wishing she had died in labor, Salome sank into a lethargy from which no one, least of all the Bowring sisters, could rouse her. If the child died in the night, they told each other, Salome would send her to an unmarked grave without a backward look. Nor had she a wish to spend another moment with Selby Thrupp, the author of her misery. Mr. Thrupp nevertheless appeared. Salome answered the knock on her door and asked him into the rooms that he paid for.

I came to give you this, Mr. Thrupp said. This envelope contains twenty pounds, more than most women in your circumstances receive, Salome. He donned his hat and said goodbye. Salome opened the door once more, this time to see him out, then walked to the window to watch his black-coated figure grow smaller as he strode down the footpath.

As with giving her a name, the sisters provided the things Nellie needed. Generous Fanny Bowring Branch told her husband, who was a stoker on British Railways, to please bring home an unclaimed trunk. The sisters went after the lid with a claw hammer to pry it off. Next, they took an old feather quilt out of camphor storage, folded and refolded it until it fit the trunk, and that was Nellie’s nest. They cut up sheets and blankets from Salome’s cupboard, with the mother’s grudging permission, and hemmed them to the trunk’s size. For nappies, they borrowed from Fanny’s supply. And Fanny, mother to five robust boys, brought an armload of cast-off baby clothes for the baby Nellie. The nursery was then as complete as it would be.

It pleased Fanny to dress the infant in the hand-me-downs, first a long-sleeved cottonwool shirt, then cotton nappies, followed by a petticoat longer than the baby herself, white lisle stockings, tiny black and tan leather shoes that closed with a button, a bonnet for her head woven with pink and green ribbon, and over all a long white batiste dress with a lace collar and cuffs. The dress threatened to engulf small Nellie in its folds, but to Fanny she made an endearing picture. You’re as comely as the Queen’s own, Fanny crooned, as she opened her shirtwaist to give the infant her ample breast.

Fanny Branch liked Nellie very well, nearly as well, she swore, as her youngest princeling at home, a lusty, insatiable lad she had christened Edmund Montrose. Edmund, who sucked at her bosom as if he must have all of her without a moment’s delay, was chiefly responsible for the bounteous flow of mother’s milk, for Nellie, though hungry, was no match for that colossus. Without question, Fanny’s milk was more than sufficient for both infants.

Sometimes it seemed to the wetnurse as she held Nellie that it would be no additional trouble to take her home, to insinuate a feminine presence into that house of young masters. What was one more in a family of seven? Too bad that her husband, a bit of an Airedale, was a half-hearted worker whose income was as irregular as his trains were punctual. As a stoker, he traveled the length and breadth of England, Scotland, and Wales. A student of the cities of the realm, Mr. Branch walked the winding streets between journeys, and studied the ancient buildings of Britain’s past, forgetting to return to his train at the appointed time and so losing part of his wages. Fanny had plenty to keep her busy while he was away, and though she was always pleased to see him come home, her happiness dimmed when he came empty-handed. The few farthings she earned as Nellie’s wetnurse helped, but it was a point of honor with her not to mention her wages to the irresolute husband. As she suckled Nellie she made her way through the dilemma and at length came to see that it wouldn’t be fair to take the baby to her home. Not that Salome was fair, no, she certainly was not.

At length Salome gathered her energy. Fanny remarked to her sister that instead of lying in bed the greater part of a morning, the reluctant mother was now up and about when she arrived for Nellie’s first meal. And though Salome’s body had become gaunt by Fanny’s ample standard, she had begun to eat with appetite, a recovery the Bowring sisters hoped would be turned to the infant’s advantage, for they had yet to see her willingly go to the crib to pick her up. Salome held Nellie only when one of them put her in the mother’s arms, and then it was clear that the mother recoiled ever so slightly when the child’s fingers reached out to touch her.

What they did not see, for neither was there for more than an hour at a time, was the unfolding drama of mother and child alone and at each other’s mercy. Nellie was left to cry for what would have been an eternity to one like Fanny. Sometimes Salome stood over the crib to look at the reddening, puckered face, the eyes squeezed shut, and listened to the cries that turned into ear-piercing screams. Then Salome’s anger moved through her until she felt it boiling in her bowels and throbbing at her temples. She wanted to lunge at her infant in the lidless trunk and throw it with all her strength against the wall. What saved Nellie from being thrown or suffocated or dropped, or a long list of other injuries that danced in Salome’s mind, was a cold lump of anxiety that she would be caught and punished. And sometimes Nellie was spared long bouts of crying by the timely arrival of one of the other of the sisters, Fanny generally, who arrived with swollen, dripping breasts and wasted little time throwing off her wraps to go to the child.

In Fanny’s arms Nellie gazed at the light and shadow playing on her face. Her fingers closed around her wetnurse’s breast or touched her cheek and stray tendrils of her hair. When the infant finished her half hour at the luxuriant fountain of Fanny Branch, her face was a portrait of contentment that allowed no doubt as to who was the real and who the false mother.

Nellie’s preference was not lost on Salome. When the mother troubled herself to notice the visible signs of the child’s pleasure at being in Fanny’s arms, she more than ever felt justified in her antipathy. The traitorous infant prefers a stranger to me, her own mother, she told herself. Through the days and weeks of Nellie’s presence in the world, Salome became a barrister preparing a case at law, enumerating the points against Nellie, justifying herself, until nearly all her waking hours were spent in a bitter-sweet drama of revenge. Salome’s suffering nevertheless yielded a plan, one she came upon the very day she named her rooms a prison. But if I am in prison, I must escape, she announced to the looking glass. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? From that moment on, the two souls in perdition waited for the sound of footsteps up the front walk, the rapping at the door, the opening of the gates of paradise. Salome, all but incapable of suppressing her eagerness to be off and away, leapt to the door to open it. In walked the wetnurse and out ran Salome, throwing on her cape and hat and calling out a goodbye over her shoulder.

Where she went and what she did the Bowring sisters only guessed at. They were correct in supposing that she sought out acquaintances of a happier past. Salome went in search of Louisa Trant, the high-spirited friend who had tried to help nullify Nellie’s existence. Moreover, Louisa could always produce a gentleman for an afternoon’s entertainment. At their first meeting after Nellie’s birth, Louisa called for her in a hansom cab in front of her rooms. My, you are thin, Salome, she cried, get in and we’ll fatten you up starting at once. Glad to oblige, Salome told Louisa her story of the failed attempts, the agony of the birth, and what it was like being nailed to the cross of motherhood.

So began the mornings and later the afternoons and more frequently the evenings of what she told herself was her real life. The weather outside was changing to winter and the north wind blew, but the climate inside Salome was warm and flowering. Her cheeks grew rosy, and her figure filled out. Louisa supplied gentlemen friends for carriage rides and tea and on pleasant days strolling at the seaside.

When the bond between the two women was firm, Louisa invited Salome to accompany her to London. She said that a gentleman friend would escort them to see the official public appearance of Queen Victoria. The news that the queen’s fifteen years of mourning for Albert had been broken at Aberdeen reached Ipswich and Louisa made plans to be a witness to the historical occasion at Kensington Palace Saturday week.

At once Salome called upon Fanny to take Nellie home with her for the two days of her absence. The freed prisoner exulted, she sang, she took long waltzing steps around her rooms as she packed for the journey. Pulling the green moiré gown and matching boots from the cupboard, one of the last of Selby Thrupp’s contributions to her store of apparel, she put them on and admired herself in the looking glass. I’m going to London to visit the Queen, she sang.

In London, they rode through Mayfair, down The Mall and the length of The Strand to Fleet Street and finally to Kensington Palace where the Queen was to show herself. They milled with the crowds and waited for a glimpse of the great Mother Monarch. Salome stood on tiptoe and ogled, not believing she was in London, yet believing she was meant to mingle with the smart Londoners. She imagined that if her mother hadn’t died and her father hadn’t abandoned her, if she had instead been given a proper upbringing appropriate to her station, she

would be living the very life she now observed as if from the wrong side of a castle moat. At last the trio from Ipswich saw what they believed to be the waving hand of the Queen on the palace balcony. A hush fell over the crowd who desired only to hear the words their Queen spoke. A few stray whispers of sound rose over the listening crowd, enough to allow Salome and her friends to make their way among the Queen’s subjects with a sense of triumph. That evening they dined at the Anchor and afterward went to Drury Lane for an evening’s entertainment by the author Charles Dickens who recited selections from Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. Unimaginably happy, Salome sat rapt, even as she shed tears for Little Dorrit and fretted for the grown-up Pip living a dandy’s reckless life in London.

The next morning on the train from Liverpool Street Station back to where the North Sea wind blew, Salome imagined herself being dragged like Little Dorrit to the debtor’s prison of Marshalsea. Clinging for days to the memory of London, morning, noon, and night she recited the events in the order of their happening, naming the majestic buildings, recalling images of the handsome men and stylish women. When London receded and she could no longer bring it back to throbbing life, she took to moping, lying in bed, and cursing her existence. She wondered how she would find the will and strength to carry out a plan to escape, truly escape.

***

The means of her liberation revealed itself seven days before Christmas. Louisa invited Salome to a musical evening at her apartment, newly purchased and furnished by the wealthy friend of the London excursion. Louisa declared that the party was to be as amusing as a night in London’s best music hall, for a talented gentleman she had recently met had consented to entertain with songs. Louisa herself would accompany him on the piano.

Louisa hadn’t exaggerated. Arleigh Husbands was his name, and as he said to Salome when they were introduced, I’ve been Husbands all my life, but never a husband! If it was meant as a warning, Salome failed to hear it. She admired his tenor voice, clear and bright as a thrush at dawn, and the dark curl of his hair, the rich look of his glowing face and robust physique.

He sang songs she knew and songs that had just arrived in the music halls of London and Manchester, Brighton, and Blackpool. At the close of the evening he asked for Salome’s address. She answered, Take me home in your carriage and you shall see where to find me.

Inside her rooms, she stood at the window with the evening still enfolding her. One step into the darkness however, knocked her back to earth. There sat Fanny Branch nodding in her chair and lying asleep in her crib was the unwanted Nellie.

Evenings in Mr. Husband’s company followed. He came to Ipswich once a week, and each time sent a note ahead of time to ask her to dine, to join Louisa and her gentleman for an evening of whist or singing around the piano.

Salome would have denied the connection, had anyone formulated it for her, between her longing to be prosperous and free and the sudden affection she felt for Arleigh Husbands. She asked herself, Is this what it’s like to be falling in love?

When the outline of her future took shape, when she could sit calmly with a cup of tea waiting for Fanny’s arrival and erect stone by stone the palace of her future, imagine the new rooms, the closet filled with dresses of quality, the carriage arriving to take her to the shops - the utter absence of Nellie; when the future waltzed across her mind’s eye, she wrote her stepmother, Winifred Broughton.

Winifred was truly her stepmother, although it seemed odd to call her that, for they had never lived under the same roof. Late in life and then only when his heart had grown weak did Salome’s father take Winifred to wife. A year into the marriage, her father died.

Perhaps it was because they had never shared living quarters that Salome and Winifred got on well together. Not the sort one could turn to for help in ridding oneself of an unwanted pregnancy, Winifred was nevertheless approachable after the fact. When she became widowed, her stepdaughter had been of service in finding her a position as housekeeper in a respectable house. Now Salome asked herself if the time had come to call in the debt.

The letter to Winifred had to be carefully written, the groundwork properly laid before arriving at its true aim. She spent over an hour at her writing table and threw away a dozen sheets of paper. At last she was satisfied.

My Dear Winifred,

I am writing you about a matter of great importance. It pains me deeply to find myself in so vulnerable a state when I have no one to depend upon. As you know Mr. Selby Thrupp abandoned me after placing