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  ‘Oh Father, Father.’

  Sadie was crying now, great choking sobs that shook her frame, but it was noticeable to Father Hedley that it was the child and not the mother who went to comfort her, and when Peggy said, her voice low and pained, ‘What’s to be done, Father? Oh, what’s to be done? I told her no good would come of this,’ he knew Peggy’s thoughts had moved along a similar line to his own.

  ‘When is the child due?’

  ‘In two months’ time, Father. At the end of March.’

  Two months. Dear God, two months in the depth of winter and with no means of support; do You intend to let it be the workhouse?

  ‘Father?’

  There was more, much more, he had come to say, but with the old lady staring at him with haunted eyes and the child with her arms round the shaking figure in the bed, Father Hedley felt it was enough for one visit. He had told them Jacob wouldn’t be back and that was all they could cope with; he’d tell them the rest when he came next time.

  But life was going to be hard, there was no doubt about that, and stuck out.here without any neighbours to lend the odd helping hand they really were on their own. Mind, perhaps that was a blessing in disguise in the long run. How Sadie’s association with a married man would have been viewed by any neighbours was questionable. Only last week he had had to break up an angry scene between a woman in the same position as Sadie and a group of red-faced housewives who fancied themselves annointed to tar and feather the unfortunate young lass. As it was the girl had got away covered from head to foot in soft filth and with the loss of her hat, but he didn’t like to think what might have occurred if he hadn’t happened along. The self-righteous frenzy of a mob was a dangerous thing, and in that particular case he had a nasty suspicion the cronies of the wife had been encouraged to show their displeasure by Father McGuigan. In fact half of the problems he encountered every day seemed to be incited – if not caused – by his compatriot in arms.

  Father Hedley sighed inwardly. Only a few days ago Father McGuigan had read out the newspaper report stating that at the turn of the new century Britain’s imperial power had never been greater – ‘The empire, stretching round the globe, has one heart, one head, one language and one policy’ was how it had gone if he remembered rightly – followed by more pieces declaring this century would see more compassion and understanding than any other man to man. How he could do this and then go and stir up certain of their congregation to all but murder some poor girl in the name of God was beyond him. By, it was. But then, they would never see eye to eye on matters like this, and perhaps that was why the good Lord had decided to place them together in this corner of His vineyard? Saint Paul had had his thorn in the side, and who were Father McGuigan and himself to expect anything different?

  The thought of the other priest, who was more of a trial than the rest of his flock put together, caused Father Hedley’s voice to be thin as he said, ‘I must be away, Peggy. I’ll talk with you again soon.’

  ‘Can I come with you to the road, Father?’

  He was about to refuse Connie as the child appeared at his side but there was something in the small face that checked his response, and instead he nodded abruptly. ‘Wrap up warm, it’s very cold outside.’ He turned and glanced through the bedroom doorway but Sadie was now huddled under the thin blankets, Larry sitting in a disconsolate heap at her side, and she was still crying.

  Once outside the air cut his throat with its coldness, but the child seemed oblivious to the bitter chill as she marched along at his side, her small face set in a frown.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Aye, Connie?’ He knew the tone. Almost from when she could talk – and that had been exceptionally early if he remembered right – this little mite had engaged him in conversations that had at times fair amazed him with the depth of her inquisitiveness and intelligence. It was a sin to have favourites among the flock – the good Lord had spoken about that very thing Himself – but this child was different somehow. She touched something deep inside him that he hadn’t known was there, and it had been that way since the first time, as a bairn of three or four, she had reached up and taken his hand when she had walked to the road with him, very much like she was doing now.

  ‘Uncle Jacob isn’t going to come back, is he.’

  It was a statement, not a question, but nevertheless Father Hedley said, ‘No child. He isn’t.’

  The pure brow wrinkled some more, but then the priest missed his step and almost went headlong as the clear tone said, ‘Then who is going to fill up the money jar?’

  Father Hedley cleared his throat several times. ‘The money jar?’

  ‘Uncle Jacob fills up the money jar on the mantelpiece when he comes. It was empty the last time an’ me mam was worried; I hadn’t even got me penny for school or the tram fare, but then Uncle Jacob put in lots of money, even a shillin’ an’ two half crowns, an’ we got a sack of taties an’ other things.’

  Father Hedley gave a short cough. ‘And have you got much left in the money jar?’

  ‘A bit. Me gran made Larry a vest of brown paper rubbed with a tallow candle for his chesty cold last week ’cos she said we couldn’t afford to get the onions an’ black treacle an’ stuff to make a syrup, but when he got worse me mam got sixpence an’ I fetched everythin’, an’ some ipecacuanha wine an’ squills from the chemist an’ all. Me gran played up a bit but mam said we’d pay out more in the long run if he was took real bad.’

  Father Hedley thought of the undersized, puny little boy who always seemed to be ill and nodded slowly. ‘Your mother was right, Connie.’

  ‘Me gran didn’t think so. They had a right do an’ me mam cried a bit.’ There was a brief pause and then, ‘Me mam’s cryin’ all the time now, not like when me Uncle Jacob comes an’ they have a talk in the bedroom an’ me mam comes out all happy.’

  Father Hedley almost missed his step again, and now the childish tone was faintly reproving. ‘You’ve got to look down at the ground all the time, Father. It’s the puddles of black ice you see.’

  ‘I’ll remember that, child.’ Father Hedley felt in his cavernous black pocket and brought out a small bag of bullets. ‘Here, I forgot to give you these earlier, but share them with Larry, mind.’

  ‘Oh I will, Father. Ta, thanks.’ Another pause, while a boiled sweet was tried and tested, and then, ‘So who will fill up the money jar then, Father?’

  ‘God will provide, Connie. God will provide.’

  They were coming to the road and Father Hedley had never been so relieved in his life.

  ‘Will He, Father?’ It was doubtful.

  ‘Aye, in one way or another, but you must do your part and pray now mustn’t you.’

  ‘Oh I do, Father. I do. But . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Does God still strike people dead? Like He did in the Bible? If you pray really hard would He do that for you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bad people,’ Connie hastily qualified.

  Father Hedley peered at her for a long moment and then he said, ‘Who would you want striking dead, Connie?’

  Well that just showed Freda Henderson was wrong when she’d said that priests were like everyone else and remembered everything you said in confession. She’d told Freda it was wicked and that she’d go to hell for saying that, and she was right. She’d told the Father in confession all about them men and that she hated them, and here he was looking at her all blank like.

  Connie gave a little skip as the doubts that had assailed her since Freda’s remark were laid to rest. ‘Just bad people. Goodbye, Father.’

  ‘Goodbye, Connie.’

  Father Hedley stood and watched the small figure as it made its way back towards the trees in the far distance, and now his face was even more troubled than when he had come this way a couple of hours before. That little body held a greater capacity for feeling than most of the men and women he knew. Where Connie loved she loved unreservedly, but where she hated she hated with e
qual determination. She had seen something no child should see that night two weeks ago, and he didn’t like to think how it was going to affect her in the future. No, he didn’t like to contemplate that at all.

  Chapter Three

  Ever since Father Hedley’s visit earlier that day, Sadie had seemed possessed of a nervous energy that wouldn’t let her rest.

  When Connie had returned to the cottage her mother was up and dressed for the first time in days, and wiping over the oil cloth which covered their battered wooden table. From there she had progressed to the oak dresser and hard-wood saddle, polishing and cleaning and carrying the flock-stuffed cushions outside to give them a good beating before replacing them on the gnarled wood. Then she had been on her hands and knees scouring the stone slabs, despite Connie’s protests, and would have taken the clippie mat the same way as the cushions but for Connie wrenching it out of her mother’s hands and lugging it outside herself.

  Connie had already prepared a pan of broth for their evening meal that morning, with twopennyworth of pulses and vegetables and a meaty ham bone the farmer’s wife had slipped her when she had fetched a can of milk the day before, but Sadie had insisted on fetching out her baking tins and making a batch of dough with the last of their flour, saying that they needed a round of stottie cake to eat with the broth.

  It was now four o’clock, but the sky was so low and heavy that it was nearly dark outside – they had lit the two oil lamps at three that afternoon – and a fierce wind whipped the bare branches of the trees making them moan like poor lost souls in purgatory. So it was all the more perplexing that Sadie was determined to go and gather wood for the fire.

  ‘Mam, please.’ Connie was beside herself. Her mam looked bad – strange, funny; she ought to put her feet up, her granny had said so and she was right. It wasn’t often her grandmother said anything like that – certainly not to her mam – so it made it all the more portentous. ‘I’ll go to the farm tomorrow an’ get one of the lads to deliver a load of logs.’ She didn’t suggest their buying coal; she knew the money jar couldn’t run to that. They hadn’t had coal on the fire for weeks.

  ‘We can’t afford it.’ Sadie’s voice was dull..‘An’ that’s the last of the logs you brought in earlier.’

  ‘They’ll last until tomorrow, Mam.’

  ‘An’ if we get snowed in?’

  ‘Stanley or Thomas or Percy from the farm will come to see if we’re all right. They did last year, didn’t they?’

  ‘Listen to it, Sadie.’ Peggy added her weight to that of her granddaughter. ‘It’s blowin’ up for a blizzard, lass. Now have some sense. You know they love the bairn at the farm an’ they’ll let her have a load of logs on tick. They know we’re good for it.’

  ‘But we aren’t, Mam, are we. Not any more. Not if we want to eat, an’ we shan’t soon be able to do that.’

  ‘The good Lord will provide –’

  ‘Mam!’ Sadie made them all jump, and when she said in a harsh voice, ‘Me da always said that God looks after them as looks after themselves,’ Peggy’s mouth set in a straight thin line. She reached for Larry, and, setting him on her knee, remained silent.

  ‘I’ll get the wood, Mam. You stay here,’ said Connie anxiously, after a swift glance at her grandmother’s angry face.

  ‘We’ll both go, lass.’ Sadie was pulling on her old boots, which needed soleing and heeling, as she spoke, and the weariness in her voice emanated all through her heavy swollen body. Was it possible Jacob wasn’t coming back? She didn’t dare think that, she couldn’t believe it. They had been making plans the last few months, plans to move away down south, where no one knew them, and start afresh. His wife wouldn’t give him a divorce, Jacob had known that without asking. The mother, Edith Stewart, would rather see her daughter dead than divorced, he’d said, and Mavis was completely under her mother’s thumb. But she wouldn’t have minded about him not being able to marry her, legal like, if they could have been together. Well, she would have minded, but with Jacob beside her she could stand anything. Oh, Jacob, Jacob. A wheelchair . . . No, she wouldn’t believe that. He would get better, he had to get better. For all their sakes.

  ‘Here’s your coat, Mam.’

  As Sadie took the coat Connie was holding out she glanced at her daughter’s worried face, and a fresh surge of anguish brought the weakening tears pricking at the backs of her eyes again.

  Jacob had loved her little lassie like she was his own. When she thought of the difference between him and Michael Bell . . . He’d been all mouth and trousers, Michael Bell. A charming ladies man who had swept her off her feet and had her married and installed in lodgings in Newcastle, where he worked, before she could say Jack Robinson, but that hadn’t stopped him carrying on behind her back with all and sundry. She had been so blind, so stupid. And then she’d fallen for Connie, and the bigger she’d got the more he’d been repulsed until he’d off and skedaddled with Mrs Grove, their landlady. And Mr Grove had gone mental and thrown her out the same day. But then, later, there had been her Jacob.

  ‘Do you want your gloves, Mam?’

  ‘Thanks, hinny.’ The threadbare gloves were more holes than wool, but as Sadie pulled them over her red, rough hands she wasn’t seeing them, her thoughts returning to Jacob. He had cried the first time they’d come together, sobbed like a child and all the time murmuring loving endearments the like of which she had never heard before. He had been so grateful, so amazed, so broken that she had let him love her, wanted him to love her, accepted his body into hers with pleasure and gladness. And his wonder had revealed more about the hell of his marriage than any words could have done. She wouldn’t let him stay trapped in that diabolical existence, even if he was crippled. If he never walked again, she would take care of him. Oh . . . The futility of the thought brought her head swaying as she stood to her feet. How could she? With the bairns, her mam? What was she going to do?

  ‘Shall I bring the sack, Mam?’

  ‘Aye, there’s a good lass.’

  The force of the wind nearly took the door off its hinges as they stepped out into the clearing, and after Connie had battled to close it the two of them walked further into the wood, gathering pieces of kindling along with some heavier chunks of fallen branches as they went.

  It was just after they had ventured across the wooden bridge over the beck – constructed by Sadie’s grandfather when he had first built the small stone cottage several decades before – that Sadie slipped on the raised root hidden by damp, partially frozen leaves and undergrowth. She tried to save herself, twisting her body as she fell, but only succeeded in falling on her back rather than her stomach and with enough force to drive the breath from her body in a great gasp.

  ‘Mam! Oh, Mam, Mam.’ Connie was kneeling at her side in an instant but it was a moment or two before Sadie could speak, and then her lips were white as she said, ‘Help me get back to the cottage, lass. It’ll be all right. Don’t fret,’ only to find that the pain made her cry out as she tried to rise.

  ‘I’ll go an’ get Gran.’

  ‘No, no, Connie.’ As the child went to dart away Sadie clutched hold of her. ‘Your granny can’t help, not with her arthritis. I’ll be all right if we can just get back, hinny.’

  ‘All right, Mam.’

  The pain was like a red-hot needle now, or rather hundreds of them, and they were all stabbing deep inside her stomach, in her womb. Was she going to lose the baby? She could feel Connie’s arms tight round her and she leant against her child for a moment, a feeling of nausea competing with the needles which were growing and sharpening by the moment. It might be the best thing rather than being born into this. And then the thought was fiercely contested. This was Jacob’s baby. Jacob’s. And he had been so proud of Larry and so excited when she’d broken the news about this one. She couldn’t lose it, she couldn’t.

  The pain was filling every part of her, squeezing itself into the core of her being and radiating out in unbearable waves that had her sweating despite
the icy air. She had to get back to the cottage, she had to.

  ‘Come on, Mam.’ Connie’s voice was soft but her little arms were surprisingly strong as she helped her mother to her feet, and it was like that – with Sadie bent double and Connie taking most of her weight – that they lurched and stumbled back to the cottage.

  The child, a little girl, was born just before midnight and it never drew breath. Connie had stayed with her mother all the time – Peggy’s distorted hands were little more than useless when it came to handling hot water or bearing any weight – and so it was she who cut the umbilical cord and wrapped the tiny perfect body in a piece of rough towelling before placing it gently in her grandmother’s arms. Connie was aware she was crying, she could feel the tears running down her face and there was a salty taste on her lips, but she also knew she had to be strong for her mam. Her mam was poorly, very poorly. This wasn’t like when Larry was born. Her mam and her granny had seen to things between them then, and although her mam had grunted and moaned and cried out a bit, she’d been sitting up straight after, laughing when Larry’d yelled his head off until he’d been put to the breast. But there was no laughing tonight. And no yelling.

  The babby was dead. That tiny, doll-like scrap that had eyelashes and little nails and everything was dead. Its little face had been beautiful but there had been nothing she could do. And she was frightened, so frightened, her mam was going to die too, but until the storm stopped she couldn’t even go for help.

  The blizzard had started almost as soon as Connie had got her mother back to the safety of the cottage, and the howling wind was still driving the snow against the stone walls of the dwelling place with enough force to batter them down.