Emma conceals her pregnancy and lies to her father about her whereabouts

Emma Harte’s deception about her whereabouts is a practical means of protecting her privacy while she is pregnant and living in Leeds. Rather than break off contact with her father, she sends him carefully constructed letters that make her appear to be looking for work, then employed and travelling with a fictional mistress. The arrangement lets her reassure her family while delaying any discovery of her real circumstances until after the baby is born.

The problem she sets herself

During her first weeks in Leeds, Emma lies awake worrying about the baby. She expects the birth the following March, but comes to see that spending the intervening months fretting is a waste of the time she prizes above all else. She decides she will consider her next step only when the baby is born. Her hopes about the child are bound up with her feelings about Edwin Fairley: she wants a girl and fears that a boy might resemble him, making it harder for her not to hate the child for his father’s sake. Repeating to herself that the baby will be a girl temporarily steadies her.

Keeping her father uninformed requires a separate decision. Emma has already written to him that she did not find a suitable position in Bradford but is staying there in the hope of finding one. She visits Rosie Miller at The Mucky Duck twice and leaves an envelope for Blackie on the second visit, telling him where she lives and works. Yet she is too afraid to post her father’s letter in Leeds. To prevent its place of origin from betraying her, she travels to Bradford, posts it at the main post office, and returns to Leeds on the next train. The extra journey costs money she would rather keep, but concealment takes precedence.

A letter built around a false identity

On a Saturday morning in October, Emma writes another letter to her father in her neat handwriting. She knows it must contain lies, which initially trouble her. She makes them easier to bear by treating them as protective falsehoods: she intends to spare her father the shame of learning the truth and to quiet his anxiety. To limit the risks of contradiction, she keeps the story simple.

In the letter, she claims to have obtained work as the personal maid of a Mrs John Smith and says that she and her employer are leaving that day for London for a month. She promises to visit her father in Bradford when she returns, tells him not to worry, and sends her love to Frank Harte and Winston Harte. A pound note enclosed with the letter turns the reassurance into practical help as well as a report of supposed employment. Once she has sealed and addressed it, Emma dresses and makes the Bradford journey again, mailing it there before returning to Leeds. She feels relieved after posting it and calculates that she need not write again for a month.

The invented job also provides a way to explain her absence without giving her father a usable address. Emma expects that he will worry less if he hears from her regularly, while the false account leaves him believing she is in Bradford and gives him no clear route by which to find her. She feels guilt when she thinks of him, but she judges silence riskier: it might lead him to search for her. Her correspondence therefore sustains a narrow connection while controlling what that connection can reveal.

Blackie helps maintain the story

As Emma’s pregnancy advances, Blackie helps carry the deception beyond the October letter. He knows she remains anxious about her father and Frank Harte, and she presses him to find acquaintances who are travelling to London and can post letters for her. In November and December, men he knows from the pub who are going south to find work on the East End docks agree to do so. They forward Emma’s letters without asking questions that might expose her situation.

Blackie identifies a practical weakness in her plan: without an address, her father cannot write back. Emma answers by explaining that she has told him she is travelling with her supposed employer, first to Paris and then to Italy. In her view, regular news from her is enough; an exchange of letters is not necessary. Blackie is astonished by how thoroughly she has anticipated the difficulties, but she does not pursue the conversation. The episode shows that concealment is not a single fabricated letter but a continuing arrangement, with new destinations invented to explain why she remains unreachable.

Concealment alongside a future plan

The account also places Emma’s secrecy beside her growing attention to work and business. After the Bradford trip she is so hungry that she buys mussels and then a meat pie at Leeds Market. She continues on to Briggate and makes a habit of looking into shops, studying their displays, merchandise, and customers. She is already imagining a shop of her own, then corrects the ambition to shops. This commercial attention gives her time in Leeds an active purpose beyond waiting for the birth, while her letters keep that life hidden from her family.

Her clothes likewise connect her new circumstances to the past she has left. For her Bradford trip she wears the black dress that served as her evening uniform at Fairley Hall, altered with a lace collar and cuffs. She had wondered whether taking her uniforms was theft, but packed them in Edwin Fairley’s suitcase, reasoning that the Fairleys had already exacted enough from her and that the clothes would not suit another servant. The detail links her former service to the independent life she is attempting to build, even as her invented position as a maid disguises her actual situation.

By the time Blackie accompanies her on a tram towards Armley, Emma is in the last months of pregnancy and the correspondence still depends on his assistance. He knows she worries about her father and Frank Harte, and he urges her to consider living with Laura Spencer, who has room for a paying guest, and taking work at Thompson’s mill, where Laura works. Emma remains silent as Blackie makes the proposal. The exchange establishes a possible next arrangement, not a completed move: at this point, the deception has kept her family at a distance, while the decision about where she will live and what she will do after the birth remains deferred.