When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight, till by turning, turning we come ’round right.”
Tennant stood to the side where he could see Julia’s face and watch the performers.
Mrs. Davies introduced the melody again. When her brother joined in, she stopped playing, and he sang the lyrics a second time unaccompanied. The effect was haunting, and Julia looked rapt, her eyes shining with unshed tears. When Lloyd finished and the company clapped, she looked away, blinking.
“Lovely, lovely.” Dr. Lewis escorted Mrs. Davies back to the settee and kissed her hand. “Thank you, my dear. Thank you both.”
“It’s a pleasure to play such a fine instrument, Doctor.”
“It’s all the better for being played. Now . . .” Dr. Lewis looked around. “Ladies and gentlemen, has everyone a glass?” When the company murmured in the affirmative, he turned to Owen Lloyd and lifted his port. “A toast: to the work of the missions, sir, and to all who labor in them.”
“Hear, hear, Brother,” Lady Aldridge said. She and the doctor sipped, and the company followed suit.
“Now, Mister Lloyd.” Dr. Lewis settled into his chair. “Will you tell us more about the Chinese girl you and Mrs. Davies shelter?”
The clergyman set down his glass and glanced at his sister. She nodded.
“I only wish . . . I wish Jin’s ordeal were unique, but such girls are to be found all around our empire and beyond. Theyare a smaller part of a larger problem we Britons choose to ignore, although numbers don’t tell the whole story. Women suffer a particularly abject form of degradation.”
Lady Aldridge asked, “What is the larger story, Mister Lloyd?”
“That a ‘coolie’ system has replaced enslaved labor. Even as we speak, ships that are little better than the slavers of a generation ago carry their human cargoes around the world.”
“Good Lord,” she said. “I thought such horrors were long past.”
“Our mission in Hong Kong has tracked the trade for the last decade. Ten, perhaps as much as twenty percent die on the journey in a modern form of slavery. From disease, most often, but mutinies are frequent and savagely suppressed. Suicides add to the toll.”
“This is appalling,” Dr. Lewis said. “After all the efforts of the abolitionists?”
“Parliament needs another William Wilberforce,” Tennant said.
Mr. Lloyd nodded. “Tens of thousands labor under sham contracts on sugar plantations in the Caribbean. And as for poor girls like Jin, brokers promise them marriage and a better life, but in the end . . .” Mister Lloyd’s voice caught. “I’m sorry. This isn’t a platform or my pulpit. Forgive me.”
“Only one thing surprises me,” Tennant said. “That my case involves girls so far from our shores. There is plenty of prey closer to home. Impoverished girls from the slums of St. Giles or Whitechapel. Shopgirls and servants, as well.”
Tennant realized at once he’d put a foot wrong. The quality of the atmosphere changed. Mr. Lloyd and his sister wore polite expressions, but Doctor Lewis and Lady Aldridge looked stricken.
Julia said, “What is it, Grandfather . . . Aunt Caroline?”
After a pause, Lady Aldridge answered. “We’re remembering Lizzie Sullivan, Julia. Your first nursery maid.”
Doctor Lewis sighed. “Let me tell the story, Caroline, although Richard and Mister Lloyd know its general outlines all too well. It happened in the spring of that terrible year. . . .”
Lady Aldridge looked at the Lloyds. “My brother refers to the year his son and daughter-in-law, Julia’s parents, were lost at sea. They were sailing home from America aboard thePresident.”
“Lizzie Sullivan . . . she came to us from an agency that placed serving girls from Ireland in respectable households. After a few months, a woman enticed her with promised employment in a West End shop.”
“Oh, she was clever, that woman,” Lady Aldridge said. “She befriended the girl as she sat in the park with Julia in her pram. The woman told Lizzie she could earn three times as much as a dressmaker’s assistant.”
Dr. Lewis said, “A year later, Lizzie returned to us, pregnant. The shop was a fiction. She’d been taken to a house, drugged, and . . . they shamed the poor girl into continuing, saying who would believe a ruined girl.”
“The whole procedure was diabolical, Andrew.”
“Lizzie thought she had no choice but to stay. They turned her out when she became pregnant and was no longer useful.”
Tennant asked, “Did you inform the police?”
