Ragamuffin Angel Page 11

  ‘You watch yerself, lass. Just watch yerself.’

  ‘I will, Gran, I promise. An’ the matron said I can have a sub on me first week’s wage an’ bring home some bits, so I’ll get a nice piece of brisket an’ a half-stone of flour an’ some yeast, an’ some scrag ends an’ cheese . . . Oh, it’ll be all right, Gran. Don’t cry.’

  Connie left quickly – it was either that or not go at all – and walked swiftly along the narrow path at the side of the vegetable patch, and past the wooden hen coop to which the goat’s lean-to was attached which the lads from the farm had constructed for them two years ago when her mother had bought the livestock. She paused at the edge of the clearing, turning to wave, and when she saw her grandmother’s bent, frail frame and trembling lips and the way she was hugging Larry tight with her poor, distorted hands, she almost didn’t follow the path through the trees. Almost.

  But like she had just said aloud, there was no other way, she had to go. And she would soon be home again, two days wasn’t all that long, and she’d bring a bag of acid drops and juju’s for Larry as a surprise, and some of the soft liquorice sweets her granny liked to suck. The thought of the rare treats gave her the strength to smile and wave and then turn into the trees, emerging moments later in the field beyond, where she made for the road, leaving the house in the wood and its two occupants to the gentle warmth of the lovely summer’s day.

  Chapter Eight

  Kitty was troubled. There was something afoot, she knew the signs – her holiness and John ensconced in the morning room for an hour or more with the door shut and their voices low always meant bother for some poor soul. The last time it had been Matthew – or rather the lass he had been courting for a few months – who had come under fire. John had gone in with a tasty titbit about something in the girl’s family’s past and within hours Matthew had been told to finish the relationship or suffer his mother’s wrath. Exit the lass.

  Kitty was frowning as she stood with her ear pressed against the morning room door. The twins were currently courting two sisters whose family was one of the leading lights in the town, but a plainer pair of lasses she’d never seen, and if either Gilbert or Matthew were in love she’d eat her hat. But their mother would get her own way, she’d be bound, and it wouldn’t be long before a double wedding was in the air. Edith had organised John’s wife for him so this wasn’t the first time; it was only Art who had gone his own way up to now. By, the damage Edith Stewart could do when she opened her mouth; she fair terrorised the lot of them.

  Why stick it then, feeling as you do? The voice in her mind was sharp and confrontational and she answered it almost immediately with an irritable shake of her head. Because even with Henry gone she was still tied into this family through bonds of love. She felt like Henry’s bairns were her own – oh, not John, not him, he had always been a sly, cruel child with a vicious streak that was pure Edith, but the others she loved. Oh aye, she loved them, as fiercely and as passionately as she had loved their father, God bless his soul.

  She had been nowt but a bit lass of thirteen when she had come over the water from Ireland to live with an aunty in Sunderland’s East End. Her own family, consisting of mother, father, and six younger brothers and sisters, had been wiped out with the cholera within weeks of her father – a seaman – first bringing the disease home. Her mother’s younger sister had been kind but harassed; her own large family were eating her out of house and home and she hadn’t needed another hungry mouth to feed, so within days of her arrival in Sunderland Kitty had found herself applying for the job of nursery-maid to the Stewarts.

  Kitty shook her head again as she thought of that interview with Edith. John had been two years of age and his sister, Mavis, barely one, and their mother had completely duped the homesick, bewildered Irish lass she had been then, when she had said Kitty’s main duties would be to care for the children. Caring for the children, cooking, cleaning, waiting on table – she had been doing the whole lot within six months. But by then it had been too late to leave. She had fallen in love with Henry Stewart almost from the first time of meeting him, and her love had told her that Henry was desperately unhappy with his tartar of a wife. And so she had stayed, and their love – something purely of the mind and never of the body, much as she would have wished it differently – had continued until the day Henry had died. She had had his heart, his wife had had his name and their children. Kitty doubted if one of them loved their mother. Respected her maybe, feared her almost certainly, and in John’s case craved her approval with obsessional single-mindedness, but love? No, not love.

  The sudden scrape of a chair within the morning room told Kitty she better make herself scarce, and she hurried along the gleaming, thickly carpeted hall into the drawing room where she left the door slightly ajar and stood behind it, listening. She felt no compunction at all about spying on her mistress and John – it had served both herself and the rest of the family well in the past – but this time she heard nothing she could make head or tail of as the two of them emerged into the now deserted hall.

  ‘Be a man, John, for once in your life.’ Edith’s voice was low but of a biting quality that carried quite distinctly to Kitty in her hiding place. ‘You say you recognised the woman when she was carrying out her trade and she was quite brazen about it? She needs teaching a lesson. How dare she assume she can proposition you!’

  ‘I sent her packing, I told you.’

  ‘I should hope so, I would expect nothing less of a son of mine, but that is not the point. The mere fact that she had the gall to approach you and think you would receive her kindly is scandalous. She should be drummed out of town, that is the truth of it. The woman is gutter material.’

  Some poor lass the two of them had got their teeth into for one reason or another, Kitty told herself silently. It didn’t take much to get on the wrong side of John, and the mother was a bigger upstart than the son. Look at how she had gone for Dan two or three months back when the lad had said he approved of the bill aimed at giving miners under eighteen a maximum eight-hour day, when it was having its second reading in the Commons. It had ended with Dan slinging down his newspaper and storming out of the house before he’d finished his breakfast, after Edith had started on her tack of the working class knowing their place and being prepared to work all hours for the privilege of receiving a wage packet. She would push Dan too far one day soon if she wasn’t careful. He was easy-going all right, like his father, but Edith didn’t seem to recognise that he wouldn’t be led with a ring through his nose like the twins and John. He was more like Art, Dan was, but whereas Art’s manner had always been abrupt and defensive, Dan’s lazy affability could fool you into thinking he was going along with things until he blew up and said what was what.

  John had been mumbling something or other whilst Kitty’s thoughts had wandered, but now Edith brought the housekeeper’s mind back to the matter in hand when she said, ‘Then see to it, John. Do what needs to be done.’

  ‘What needs to be done?’ John’s voice was agitated. ‘What do you mean? I’m not sure what you mean.’

  There was a pause for some seconds as if Edith was weighing carefully what she was about to say, and Kitty found herself leaning forward, not daring to breathe, her hand pressed to her throat. Then Edith’s voice sounded, curiously flat and emotionless, as she said, ‘I’m sure you will think of something, John. Some act of . . . persuasion. The community needs cleansing of such women and you would be doing the town a service. Look at it like that.’

  Landsakes, what was she provoking the lad to do now? Kitty let out a shuddering breath, but the front door had been opened and John and his mother had stepped out on to the drive, and she could hear no more. All the troubles in this family could be laid at Edith Stewart’s feet, Kitty told herself bitterly, peering out into the hall before walking quickly through to the kitchen at the back of the house and from there into the scullery beyond, where the sheep’s head and the two rabbits the butcher’s boy had delivered
earlier were waiting to be dealt with.

  Kitty lifted the sheep’s head from the big copper pan where it had been soaking for the last hour, having been ready dressed by the butcher. After placing it in the deep stone sink, she split the head open and removed the tongue and brains to cook separately. She filled the pan with three quarts of fresh cold water, positioned the two halves in it and carried it carefully through into the kitchen, setting it on the range to bring to the boil while she prepared the vegetables laid out on the kitchen table, ready to add them to the saucepan once the scum from the meat had been removed.

  Her hands moved swiftly and adeptly and anyone observing her would have thought she was fully concentrating on the task in hand, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Why did she have the feeling that whatever John and his mother were planning boded ill for all of them? she asked herself worriedly. There had been an inflexion in Edith’s voice at the beginning of the conversation, a virulence, that suggested this was something more than her usual meddling. But who was the object of her wrath?

  The scum skimmed off and the vegetables added, Kitty left the broth to simmer and walked back into the small stone-floored scullery to skin the rabbits. She always insisted the rabbits were delivered with their fur on; there had been cases of butchers passing off dead cats to the gullible, and she had no intention of being fooled. But through all the cleaning and jointing and preparation of the humpty-backed rabbit pie, her brain continued to worry at the question in her mind like a dog with a bone.

  She had felt this same sense of acute unease five years ago if she thought about it, but she hadn’t known why until it was too late, and the whole family had been blown apart. So much misery . . . She clenched her teeth against the pain, which was still as raw as ever. First Henry dying, then poor Jacob taking his own life three months later. ’Course, her holiness had insisted the overdose was accidental, but that was a story and a half.

  Kitty’s hands became still, and she found herself staring back down the years. Jacob’s face when he had learnt he would never walk again, never be free from the pain which made him cry out if he was touched . . .

  She shivered, shutting her eyes tight. Jacob had told her on the quiet – before his mother-in-law had had him and Mavis shipped off – that he would go mad if he had to be confined twenty-four hours a day with his wife. Aye, and maybe he had gone mad at that, poor soul. And another poor soul was Mavis, her wee bonny lass that she’d dangled on her knee. Jacob’s death had sent her over the edge all right, and there she was spending her days incarcerated in a lunatic asylum which her dear mother had made sure was in the back of beyond somewhere down south, far enough away for any scandal to be kept under lock and key.

  But she was rambling here; Kitty brought her mind back to the matter in hand. All that was in the past and finished with. Jacob was gone and they had never heard another word from his lass after she had turned up on madam’s doorstep that day with her two ragamuffin bairns in tow. Aye, it was finished with.

  So why – and now Kitty’s stomach turned over and the palms of her hands began to sweat – why was she feeling like she did? Her sixth sense, that Irish intuition that Henry had always made fun of but which was very real, was telling her that some insidious tentacle from those days was curling about her family again. She had no firm foundation for her suspicions – save that deep malignant note in Edith’s voice – but she could almost smell the dark, decomposing matter beginning to ooze up from where it had been buried. She wasn’t worried about her holiness, or John either if it came to that, but the twins and Art and Dan, her precious Dan who was more her bairn than any flesh and blood child could have been, mustn’t be hurt. She’d have to keep her wits about her. She nodded in answer to the thought. Aye, she would, and do a bit of careful snooping on the quiet.

  There was something going on, and it was more than Edith disapproving of some lass one of the twins had got involved with, or a petty irritation concerning the business. Kitty had promised Henry on one of her visits to his bedside in the Infirmary during that last week that she would take care of his bairns. Never mind that they all said he couldn’t hear or respond to anything; he had heard her. She knew he had. And that’s why she had kept quiet about the lads and Jacob, although she would carry the guilt with her to her dying day, and why she kept her mouth shut about other things too.

  Kitty glanced round the large and very pleasant kitchen. The shining, blackleaded hob with its two ovens – one solely for bread – and the steel-topped and brass-railed fender which was five feet long, the massive brightly coloured clippie mat either side of which sat two comfortable rocking chairs with flock-stuffed cushions, the large kitchen table with its leather-covered top around which were positioned four high-backed chairs, and another two poorer tables set along the far wall under a window, all suggested wealth and abundance. As did the row of shining copper pans, the flounced and full curtains at the window in the same material as the cushions, and the tall, wide and ornate wooden dresser against a second wall in which stood assorted crockery and glasses. The general opinion of folk would be that she should consider herself lucky to be working for Edith Stewart in such surroundings. An easy going-on they’d say, especially now the bairns were grown up and off her hands. Aye, that’s what they’d say, sure enough.

  But then people didn’t know the half of it. Even her aunty, in whom she confided most things on her weekly visit to the East End, when she’d take a bag of groceries and the odd joint of meat, was unaware of the true facts concerning the affair of Jacob’s ‘accident’. And how could you explain to someone unconnected with the family what it meant to live with Edith Stewart? The manipulation and manoeuvring to achieve her own ends, the control she exerted? And the frighteningly cold-blooded lack of remorse? She never seemed to doubt herself, and even her vindictiveness was of a nature that was all the more powerful for its frigidity.

  Kitty sighed deeply, her shoulders slumping. What she would give to tell someone all of it, to get it off her chest. How many times in the last five years had she regretted allowing her faith to lapse? Hundreds, thousands. But Edith had put pressure on her when she had first come into the house to work, making it difficult for her to get to mass and being awkward for days if she attended church. And then, once she and Henry had admitted how they felt she had been overcome with guilt . . .

  Kitty sighed again and then straightened up before walking through to the scullery, where she washed her hands and changed her apron in preparation for serving the coffee and little cakes and fancy biscuits at Edith’s coffee morning for the Christian Women’s Guild of Fellowship, of which Edith was president. Christian Women . . . Her lip curled and her eyes were bitter, but at the sound of the doorbell she wiped her face clean of all expression and went to answer the door.

  Chapter Nine

  Had she only been working in this terrible place for one day?

  It was Friday evening, and Connie couldn’t believe she had still been with her granny and Larry first thing that morning. It felt as though weeks – months – had elapsed since their tearful farewell.

  When she had arrived at the workhouse carrying her few personal possessions and meagre clothing wrapped in a brown paper parcel under one arm, an inmate had escorted her to the officers’ quarters and her small, square room. It held a narrow iron bed, an ugly battered wardrobe, a two-foot square table and straight-backed chair, and the window was covered by a paper window blind which, when raised, showed a depressing vista of a brick wall directly opposite. Her uniform was laid out on the surprisingly thick grey blankets on the bed, and once she had changed the same inmate led her directly to the laundry.

  She found her work as a laundry checker consisted of checking in all the soiled washing from the main hospital, the male and female mental blocks and the infirm wards, and entering each article into a massive ledger which covered most of her large desk. When the laundry had been washed and ironed it had to be noted in an adjoining co
lumn and sent out again. Some of the dirty washing smelt to high heaven – especially from the mental blocks and the infirm wards – and although Connie had two female inmates to do the actual sorting the stench was sickening and for the first couple of hours she actually felt quite faint. At five o’clock she had to total up both columns, check that each block and ward had its requirements for the night, make a separate list of items that needed mending or replacing, and then ask the head laundress to check her work.

  At various times during the day, due to her two inmate helpers being great lumps who bordered on the mentally deficient themselves, and who stared at her vacantly if she asked them to do anything outside the actual sorting, Connie found herself humping heavy piles of clean and ironed washing to their collection points, sorting out the clothing from the sheets and blankets where necessary, pulling enormous wicker baskets of dirty laundry from one place to another, and doing a hundred other little jobs that had her head constantly spinning and her arms and legs aching.

  ‘You all right, lass?’

  She had just had her work signed off by the head laundress, a big, buxom woman who looked nice and jolly but who had a tongue like a knife if anyone got anything wrong – as Connie had on various occasions throughout the day – and was standing somewhat disconsolately in the now empty laundry realising she didn’t have the faintest idea how to get to the mess room, where the staff were having tea, by herself.

  ‘Mary!’ She had to restrain herself from falling on the other girl’s neck but she had never been so glad to see anyone in all her life.

  ‘They had a panic in the nursery, several of the bairns have got gastroenteritis accordin’ to the doctor, so a couple of us have bin helpin’ out. Bedlam it was,’ said Mary cheerfully. ‘Fast as you shovelled in milk an’ food one end it come out the other an’ the whole lot were screamin’ with the bellyache. Puts you right off havin’ bairns, not that I ever wanted any in the first place. Here, come on.’ She dug Connie in the ribs, something Connie was to learn was a familiar gesture. ‘The others’ll eat the lot if we don’t get a move on, like bloomin’ vultures most of ’em, an’ them that are after gettin’ a bit of refeenment’ – she parodied the word with a ludicrous caricature that had Connie giggling – ‘are the worst of the lot. Tight as a duck’s arse when it comes to passin’ the cake round.’