Break of Dawn Read online

  Break of Dawn

  Rita Bradshaw

  Headline Publishing Group Ltd (2011)

  Tags: Historical Saga

  * * *

  Synopsis

  Each day brings a new beginning... Her mother's death in childbirth leaves Sophy Hutton at the mercy of her cruel aunt and uncle, and her childhood is brutal. At sixteen, Sophy learns the shocking truth behind her birth and escapes to London to pursue a career as an actress, determined to put the past behind her. But life for women at the turn of the century is fraught with danger and Sophy soon discovers the darker side to London's glamorous theatres. Young and innocent, she doesn't recognise the man who really loves her when he appears; instead she is charmed into marrying handsome actor Toby Shawe, a flawed and amoral individual. Then the heartache really begins...

  Break of Dawn

  Rita Bradshaw

  Copyright © 2011 Rita Bradshaw

  The right of Rita Bradshaw to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7112 9

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Also by Rita Bradshaw

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Homecoming, 1880

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: The Child, 1890

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Three: Destiny, 1896

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Four: Liberation and Subjugation, 1897

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Five: The End of One Beginning, 1908

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Six: A Woman of Substance, 1909

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Rita Bradshaw was born in Northamptonshire, where she still lives today. At the age of sixteen she met her husband – whom she considers her soulmate – and they have two daughters and a son and five young grandchildren. Much to her delight, Rita’s first attempt at a novel was accepted for publication, and she went on to write many more successful novels under a pseudonym before writing for Headline using her own name.

  As a committed Christian and passionate animal-lover Rita has a full and busy life, but her writing continues to be a consuming pleasure that she never tires of. In any spare moments she loves walking her dog, reading, eating out and visiting the cinema and theatre, as well as being involved in her local church and animal welfare.

  By Rita Bradshaw

  Alone Beneath Heaven

  Reach for Tomorrow

  Ragamuffin Angel

  The Stony Path

  The Urchin's Song

  Candles in the Storm

  The Most Precious Thing

  Always I'll remember

  The Rainbow Years

  Skylarks at Sunset

  Above the Harvest Moon

  Eve and her Sisters

  Gilding the Lily

  Born to Trouble

  Forever Yours

  Break of Dawn

  For our infinitely beloved grandson, Reece Benjamin Bradshaw, born 26 July 2011; precious baby son for Ben and Lizzi, beautiful new cousin for Sam and Connor, Georgia and Emily, and Lydia. You were prayed for and wanted more than you will ever know, little one, and we praise the Lord for his treasured gift and give all thanks to God for you. ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’

  And I couldn’t let this moment go by without mentioning Bailey, our dear grand-dog, who was going to be put down simply because he’s a Staffie cross and his face didn’t fit, before Ben and Lizzi took him in. He’s the most endearingly daft canine in the world, an utter softie and a comic genius without knowing it!

  Acknowledgements

  In the twenty-first century, few people think twice about women having the vote along with equality before the law in Britain, particularly in the divorce and custody courts, but these rights were won at great cost.

  In the Victorian and Edwardian eras and beyond, courageous women from all walks of life and all classes rose up to fight for what we now take for granted. Many women’s movements existed, among them the Actresses’ Franchise League featured in this story.

  I’ve gathered material from many sources, but particular thanks go to Julie Holledge for her wonderful history of women in the Edwardian theatre. Her book, Innocent Flowers, was quite a revelation.

  It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions they fail not. They are new every morning: great is Your faithfulness.

  Lamentations 3, v. 22-3

  PART ONE

  The Homecoming

  1880

  Chapter 1

  Every jolt of the coach was torture. She didn’t know how she had stood the journey thus far, but this last leg was the worst. Or perhaps it was that she knew she was going home.

  Esther Hutton, or Estelle Marceau as she liked to be known, attempted to ease her swollen body into a more comfortable position on the hard wooden seat, but it was no use. She gritted her teeth, opening her eyes – which she had kept closed for much of the time since leaving London in an effort to avoid conversation with any fellow passengers – and sat staring out of the grimy window. The November afternoon was dark and overcast. The weather had got progressively colder over the long, tedious days since she had left her lodgings in Whitechapel, and for the last forty-eight hours, squalls of wintry rain had battered the coach roof and stung the travellers’ faces when they had hurried into the various inns for a meal or overnight stay.

  How she hated the north – and her home village in particular. Her full, somewhat sensual lips curled. From as long as she could remember, Southwick’s residents had successfully fought off attempts by Sunderland’s corporation to integrate the village into the township, as though there was something worthy in remaining separate. She had been brought up listening to her parents talk about the dregs of humanity ‘across the river’, as though poverty and disease and squalor didn’t exist in Southwick. The hypocrisy, that’s what she couldn’t stand. All right, her family might be middle class, her father being a vicar and all, but his work must have brought him into contact with the seamier side of life in the village. When she had been able to escape her mother’s obsessional control and run wild in Carley, the area closest to the vicarage, it was the smell and flies she
had noticed the most.

  Esther swallowed hard, the memory of the ash middens rising up in her throat as the child inside her kicked as though in protest at her thoughts. The children she had played with on those oc casions had never seemed to be aware of the stench filling the back lanes, but once, when she’d had no choice but to use one of the backyard privies shared by several families or soil her drawers, the excrement was piled up practically to the top of the wooden seat and she had thrown up the contents of her stomach right there on the rough stone floor. Some of the children had even played in the field where the scavengers who cleared the human muck each week dumped their grisly load. Flies lived in their millions on the dung hill and during the summer months they invaded the tightly packed terraced houses closest to the farmer’s field, resting on food and getting into jugs of milk and crawling on babies’ sticky faces.

  She swallowed again as her stomach churned, telling herself to think of something else.

  How would she be received when she reached the vicarage? The grey landscape mocked the foolishness of the question. Why ask the road you know? Her father would be full of icy fury and her mother beside herself as to what people would think. To have their daughter’s sin paraded in front of their eyes was their worst nightmare. She glanced at the cheap gold band on the third finger of her left hand. She had bought the wedding ring before leaving London. It wouldn’t fool her parents but it gave some semblance of respectability to her homecoming.

  Her gaze wandered and she caught the eye of the wife of the young couple sitting opposite. The woman immediately dropped her gaze to the neatly gloved hands clasped in her lap, her sallow cheeks flushing. Since leaving London, Esther had had to change coaches several times. This one, which had left Middlesbrough early that morning, held yet another different batch of travellers. Besides the young couple, a portly, red-faced man was sitting dozing next to the husband, and an elderly gentleman with snow-white hair and a frock coat was sitting reading from a book of prayers on the seat beside Esther.

  All her fellow passengers were dressed soberly and the woman in particular was the very essence of propriety, her dark-brown coat and hat and high-buttoned black boots speaking of dignified refinement. Esther appeared like a bright exotic bird that had somehow found itself among a group of sparrows, and the young wife’s fascinated and covert glances as the journey had progressed had made Esther very aware of her mistake. Among the company she had mixed with in London her blue brocade dress and matching coat with its elaborate fur collar would have been considered almost dull. It was the most subdued outfit in her wardrobe, which was why she had chosen to wear it for her imminent arrival in Southwick, but too late she realised she should have pawned a couple of the dresses one or other of her ‘gentlemen’ had bought her and used the money to buy something plain and serviceable.

  She looked out of the window again, studying her reflection in the glass. Her hat with its sweeping blue and silver feathers brought out the deep violet of her eyes and pretty tilt of her chin, but she lamented the loss of the paint and powder she had used regularly for the last decade. Her mother would have become apoplectic at the faintest suggestion of such wickedness.

  The coach lurched drunkenly, its wheels struggling over the thick ridges of mud and deep icy puddles in the narrow road they were travelling on, and Esther banged her forehead on the window, knocking her hat askew. Suddenly hot tears pricked at the back of her eyes, not because of the bump which had been nothing in itself but because of the position she found herself in. She had vowed never to come back to the north-east when she had left it fifteen years ago, but what choice did she have? Her hands rested for a moment on the mound of her stomach. None. The music-hall audiences didn’t want to see an actress heavy with child entertaining them, and her admirers had vanished one by one over the last months as her pregnancy had progressed. She had sold every bit of jewellery she possessed and the lovely fur coat one of her gentlemen had bought for her in the early days, and she still hadn’t been able to pay the rent for the last few weeks. A moonlight flit had been her only option and she had left with the remainder of the clothes she hadn’t sold for her coach fare packed in her carpet bag and little else.

  She blinked the tears away and sat up straighter. But she would return. Once the child was born and she had rested and was strong again, she would plan her escape. She had managed it fifteen years ago and she would do it again. Her parents would take care of the baby, they would see it as their Christian duty however much it stuck in their craw. She would make her way back to London and with her figure her own again she could take her life up once more. She was still pretty, and what she didn’t know about pleasing a man and catering for their more . . . unusual desires wasn’t worth knowing.

  Her whole stomach shifted as the child changed position, and as she had done so many times, she silently cursed its existence. She hadn’t been able to believe the non-appearance of her monthlies at first, but once she had accepted that the preventative measures she had been instructed in by an older actress at the beginning of her career in the halls had failed, she had tried everything she could to get rid of the thing growing inside her. Bottles of gin, scalding hot baths, jumping down half a flight of stairs and lifting weights so heavy she thought her eyes would pop out of their sockets, she had done it all. All but visiting one of the old wives, of whose dark arts every actress knew. She had seen too many girls die as a result of their ministrations over the years to go down that route.

  She shut her eyes, exhaustion uppermost from the last few days spent on uncomfortable seats in lumbering, swaying coaches and nights tossing and turning on bug-infested mattresses in wayside inns. She was cold and tired and hungry, and already homesick for London and the life she had led before this disaster had overtaken her.

  She didn’t doubt that not a thing would have changed in Southwick; except, perhaps, the streets which had begun to spread eastwards from the village green five years before she left might have increased in number. But the glassworks, shipyards and all manner of industry that jostled for space with the lime kilns built to take the stone from Carley Hill would still be lining the river banks, and smoke and filth from the factories would continue to hang ominously in the air. Wearmouth colliery would still be dominating the western part of Monkwearmouth which led on to Southwick, and cinders and ash blown in the wind from the pit would inevitably find their way on to the washing of Southwick housewives.

  Of course, the air could be thick with smog and the gutters running in filth in London, but it was different somehow, Esther thought drowsily. The taverns and coffee-houses, the theatres and exhibitions and concerts, the galleries and waxworks were all so vibrant and exciting, and the shops . . . Oh, the shops. Full of the latest Paris fashions and so elegant. Shopping being one of the few amusements considered suitable for unaccompanied women, she and her music-hall friends had often indulged themselves as far as their purses would allow. And if it had been one of the times when a group of upper-class young rakes had patronised the theatre the night before, looking for fun after the show, their purses might be very full indeed.

  A small secret smile touched the corners of Esther’s mouth. The stories she could tell . . . But why shouldn’t she live life to the full? You were only here once. And when a woman got married she was finished. She was a slave to her husband, and unless she married well she was a slave to the home too. But in either case her freedom was curtailed, restraints came in their hundreds and all merriment was gone. Not that she intended to end up like one or two actresses she knew, reduced to working in one of Soho’s ‘pleasure halls’ where carnal depravity and unimaginable licentiousness was the order of the day. No, she would get out before her looks began to fade, take herself off somewhere in the country and pose as a genteel widow to snare some yokel who was wealthy enough to see to it she didn’t have to lift a finger.

  She snuggled deeper into her warm fur collar, the rocking and swaying of the coach adding to the overwhelming weariness
. And then she slept.

  ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and it is not for us to fathom the mind of the Almighty, Mrs Skelton.’ Jeremiah Hutton placed a large bony hand on the shoulder of the little woman standing next to him. ‘Life and death is in His hands and His alone.’

  A snort from the corner of the room where a wrinkled crone was sitting huddled in front of the glowing range with a sleeping baby on her lap caused Jeremiah to turn his head. This was the old grandmother, and he had had occasion to cross swords with her before. Shrivelled and skeletal, and possessing black teeth which protruded like witch’s fangs whenever she opened her mouth, she was nevertheless a force to be reckoned with and, in Jeremiah’s opinion, profane and godless. ‘You wish to say something, Mrs Woodrow?’ he said coldly, aware of Mrs Skelton at the side of him flapping her hand silently at her mother in an effort to keep the peace.

  She might as well have tried to stop the tide from flowing in and out. ‘Aye, I do, an’ stop your flutterin’, our Cissie,’ the old woman added to her red-faced daughter. ‘All this talk of the Almighty an’ Him decidin’ what’s what don’t wash with me, Vicar. It weren’t Him who had Alfred standin’ on a plank weldin’ thirty feet off the ground, now was it? There’s not a day goes by that some poor so-an’-so don’t cop it in them blood yards, an’ you know it – but the owners aren’t interested in safety or workin’ conditions. Not them, in their fine houses with their lady wives takin’ the air in their carriage an’ pair.’

  ‘Mam, please.’

  ‘Weeks he’s bin bitin’ down on a bit of wood at night to keep from cryin’ out an’ frightenin’ the bairns, his legs smashed to pieces. You know – you saw ’em, Vicar. An’ when the gangrene set in an’ they brought the maggots to feast on his flesh, even then he didn’t give up. Fought to the last, Alfred did, poor devil. Well, he’s fightin’ no longer.’ The old woman’s rheumy gaze moved to the wooden trestle against one white-washed wall of the kitchen, a bucket standing beneath it to catch the drips from the body lying above. ‘God rest his soul.’