Ragamuffin Angel Read online

  Connie eased the blood-stained bundle of old sacking, with its jelly-like substance which had followed the baby, from beneath her mother, so that Sadie was lying on the lumpy bare mattress. She pulled the thin blankets over the inert figure in the bed and lifted her gaze up and out through the doorway to check on Larry – fast asleep on the makeshift bed she’d made earlier for him on the saddle – before turning back to her grandmother who was sitting on the pallet bed.

  ‘Oh me bairn, me bairn.’ Her grandmother raised her grey head from the minute bundle in her arms, and the old woman’s streaming eyes made Connie even more frightened. Her granny never cried. Her mam maybe, and their Larry often, but her gran . . .

  ‘Shall I heat up some broth for me mam, Gran?’

  It was a moment or two before Peggy could speak, and then she said, her voice quivering, ‘Aye, you do that, hinny. That’s a good idea. Your mam needs somethin’ nourishin’.’

  The morning brought its own set of problems. The snow was deep – three or four foot in places, even deeper where it had drifted – and although the wind had abated slightly the air was a good few degrees colder. They had no wood for the fire which meant no hot food or drink, and Connie knew her granny was worried about her mam. Her mam was hot and sticky despite the icy chill in the bedroom, and she didn’t seem to recognise any of them, not even Larry when he clambered on the bed and hollered in her mam’s ear before Connie could get him away.

  ‘I’m goin’ to the farm, Gran.’

  ‘No, lass. The snow’s too deep an’ them drifts are treacherous. You remember old Sam Mullen? I’ve told you about him, haven’t I. Two weeks it was afore they found him an’ old Sam knew these parts like the back of his hand. One of the lads from the farm’ll be along shortly.’

  ‘Will they come today, Gran?’

  Straight for the jugular, as always. Peggy stared at her granddaughter as she struggled to keep the panic and fear from showing. The cottage was like a block of ice; Larry was already blue with cold, and from the look of her Sadie had a fever. They could die waiting for help and the bairn knew it, young as she was. Dear Mary, holy mother of God, what should she do? If she let the bairn go and something happened to her she’d never forgive herself, but if she didn’t . . .

  And then the decision was taken out of her hands as Connie said, with a maturity far beyond her tender years, ‘I have to go, Gran, you know I have to go. The farm’ll send one of the lads for the doctor an’ I’ll see if they’ll let us have some coal or wood or somethin’ to tide us over for a bit. Shall I take me grandda’s walking stick?’

  ‘Aye, you do that, lass, an’ stick it in the snow afore you to test how deep it is, eh? An’ it’s Doctor Turnbull we want, all right? An’ . . . an’ tell ’em to say to be quick.’

  ‘All right, Gran.’ Connie glanced across at the tiny towelling bundle lying in a makeshift cot in one of the dresser drawers, and the lead weight in her chest became heavier. This was all them men’s fault, it was, and she hated them. She hated them all, and she wished they’d go straight to hell and burn in everlasting torment without a drop of water to quench their thirst, like that story about the rich man and Lazarus and Father Abraham they’d had at school the other week. She sighed heavily, picked up the walking stick from the side of the cold range and, after saying goodbye to her grandmother, opened the front door and stepped into a white frozen world.

  Dan Stewart hadn’t slept properly for nights on end – fifteen nights to be exact, ever since he had accompanied his brothers on their mission to the house in the wood and their lives had been changed for ever. He wished with all his heart he hadn’t listened to John. By lad, he did. When he thought about what had happened because of it . . . His stomach heaved and it was in answer to that he told himself, No more, no more. He had been physically sick several times in the last two weeks, his stomach so knotted up that even trying to eat produced acute nausea, although none of the others seemed so affected.

  They had originally planned to take Jacob back to his wife that fateful night, but when he had started the terrible blood-curdling groaning they had left the road and cut across the back of Ashbrooke Hall and Hendon Hill, approaching his parents’ secluded detached residence in Ryhope Road as quietly as they could with John’s handkerchief stuffed in Jacob’s mouth to stifle his moans. He’d gone in first, to make sure that Kitty – their housekeeper-cum-cook-cum-maid of all trades – was abed, and then once the others had brought Jacob into the room his mother liked to call the morning room, he had gone up to his parents.

  Dan shut his eyes tightly for a moment and then opened them again as he glanced at himself in the full-length mirror attached to the back of his wardrobe door. He saw a soberly dressed young man in a suit and tie – a black tie, the colour his mother had insisted they all wear from now on.

  If he lived to be a hundred he would never forget the look on his father’s face when he saw what his lads had done to his daughter’s husband, or the pandemonium that had followed seconds later when his father had had the seizure.

  Apoplexy, the doctor had called it. A sudden inability to feel and move due to a rupture in the brain. And this pronouncement with Art and John keeping Jacob quiet in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and his mother already planning how her son-in-law’s multiple injuries came about by a fall down the steep stone steps leading from the canned and dry goods warehouse to the cellar below. His mother was a cool one all right. Dan clenched his teeth together. The thought had been neither laudatory or cheering.

  His father had lingered for a full week before he had died, although the doctors had assured them he was aware of nothing. Jacob, on the other hand, was going to linger for a lifetime, trapped in a body that was useless but with his mental capabilities unimpaired. Damn it all . . . Dan felt himself begin to sweat. And all because one of John’s rages had got out of control. But no, no. He had to be honest with himself here. John was merely the bullet in the gun. The hand that pressed the trigger was his mother’s. It always had been, Art was right in that respect, and it had only been misguided loyalty on his part that had prevented him seeing it clearly before. But he saw it now. By all that was holy he saw it now.

  He left the large, well-furnished bedroom quietly and stepped on to the landing, which showed highly polished floorboards either side of the blue carpet running down the middle of it. This carpeting continued down the wide staircase and into the spacious hall, but here the carpet reached the walls on all sides, which were of a dark brown and hung with many fine pictures.

  Kitty had just closed the door to the breakfast room and the middle-aged housekeeper was dressed, as his mother had demanded, in a black alpaca dress over which she wore a starched white apron. She smiled at him now, raising her eyebrows slightly as she saw him reach into the alcove to one side of the front door for his overcoat. ‘She’s waiting for you to go in and join her,’ she whispered softly, inclining her head towards the closed door. ‘Gilbert and Matthew are already down.’

  ‘I don’t want any breakfast this morning, Kitty. Tell her I was in a hurry, would you.’

  ‘Now, lad, you know you’ll get it in the neck when you come home tonight. Just go in for a minute to appease her.’

  Dan was aware it was concern for him, and not his mother, which prompted Kitty’s coaxing. The large rotund housekeeper had been part of his life for as long as he could remember, and from a very small boy he had known it was Kitty’s strong and deep respect and affection for his father, and her unconditional love for himself and his brothers and sister, that enabled the forthright Irishwoman to tolerate his mother’s fussy pedantic ways and sententious attitude. Certainly it was the only thing that had her clothed in the black dress and apron, he reflected wryly.

  It had been eight years ago when his mother had made the decision that their social standing now made it desirable for Kitty to be so attired, but he could recall the announcement as though it were yesterday, and the squall that had followed which had rocked the household for d
ays. But there had only ever been one possible outcome, and so Kitty had consented – albeit grimly – to the uniform, balking only at the starched cap with the long ribbons that tied under her chin. ‘I won’t be looking like a badly made Christmas cake that needs covering up for no one, now I do put me foot down about that.’ And so, with his father acting as gentle arbitrator, an uneasy peace had fallen again.

  ‘Kitty. . .’ Dan shook his head at the big Irishwoman who, if the truth be known, had a bigger place in his heart than the woman who had given birth to him. ‘I really don’t think I can face going in there this morning.’

  ‘You’d be surprised what you can do if you need to, lad.’

  No he wouldn’t. Not any more he wouldn’t. ‘I’ll make it right tonight, bring her a bunch of flowers or something.’

  ‘Do it for me then. You know what she can be like, she’ll make me life hell all day. And she loves you, lad. Whatever else, she does love you.’

  He knew that. His mother’s love had always been like a thick blanket, suffocating him, weighing him down and filling him with enormous guilt because he had known, right from a bairn, that he couldn’t reciprocate the feeling. She didn’t give a fig about the others, not deep down. Oh, she went through the motions, made the appropriate noises and so on, but they all knew it was as though she had only had the one child. Art, he knew, felt sorry for him; perhaps Mavis did too as she’d had her share of being smothered, although in a different way. The twins had each other and didn’t care much about anyone else, but it was John who bitterly resented the favouritism. John, who was so like their mother and so ached for her approval.

  The thought of his brother brought Dan’s mouth into a hard line and he said, opening the front door as he did so, ‘I’ll talk to her tonight, Kitty. I’m sorry.’

  ‘All right, lad. All right.’

  His father’s funeral the day before had been a nightmare, and the empty places belonging to Jacob and Mavis a constant reproach, but it wasn’t that, or the harsh words he and his mother had exchanged when her calm composure had driven him to voice his disgust at her lack of emotion, which had prevented him from joining his mother and the twins in the breakfast room. He hadn’t wanted to walk to work with Gilbert and Matthew this morning, he had other matters to see to, and Art, bless him, was providing him with the necessary cover by saying he’d sent him to oversee a consignment of marine engine, cylinder and burning oils being given speedy shipment down at the railway, should anyone enquire of his whereabouts.

  He hadn’t allowed for this wretched snow though. Nevertheless, in spite of the conditions Dan walked swiftly, almost at a trot, cutting through the Cedars and then across the open ground away from the built-up area of the sprawling outskirts of Bishopwearmouth to avoid seeing anyone he knew. He skirted round the edge of the Old Quarries and into the road bordering Tunstall Hills Farm and then the fields beyond where he found himself wading knee-deep.

  He could have missed her. That was the thing that haunted him for days afterwards. As it was he ignored the thin, reedy cry at first, putting it down to the solitary call of a bird if it registered on his consciousness at all. It was only when he had walked some ten yards past the great bank of snow that bordered a dry stone wall that something – a second cry, the disturbance of the smooth, lethal white coverlet behind him – caused him to swing round and retrace his steps.

  And then he saw the tip of a small gloved hand sticking out of the pale silver tomb, and the beating of his heart filled his ears. His face blanched, turning as ashen as the beautiful frozen world around him, and he sprang forward, digging at the snow frantically and all the time babbling that it was going to be all right, that he was here now, he was here . . .

  When he uncovered the small white face he thought for a moment that she had gone, that he had been seconds too late, but then the eyes opened and two orbs of a startling deep violet-blue stared at him. ‘Me feet are stuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think I’ve slipped in a ditch an’ me feet have gone through the ice an’ they’re stuck in the mud,’ said Connie matter-of-factly.

  ‘Right.’ He didn’t have time to marvel at her stoicism, that came later, but once he had dug and dug and uncovered most of the small form he found that her feet were indeed stuck fast in the glutinous mud beneath the ice, and that she had sunk to above her calves. It was her instinctive raising of her arms in front of her face that had saved her and formed a pocket between the suffocating white mass and her upper arms, but she was cold, very cold. She wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

  Once he had pulled her free and lifted her up into his arms her tininess became all the more poignant, and he found himself raging in his mind against the adults who had allowed so small a child to venture forth in such dire conditions. These people! You wouldn’t send a dog out in this. Something his mother had said recently when she’d been on her high horse with his father came back to him. A family had been begging for bread at the back door, and the mother’s and children’s feet had been bare and bleeding and the lot of them clothed in rags. His father had happened in the kitchen as Kitty had been sending them away with a loaf and some cold brisket and cheese, and he had fetched some old clothes and a couple of pairs of boots that he, Dan, had outgrown, and handed them to the snotty-nosed little urchins. His mother had been furious, absolutely furious, insisting that they would immediately be taken to the pawnbrokers and the money used to buy beer and tobacco for the man and woman.

  ‘They don’t want to rise above their squalor, that’s what you don’t understand, Henry,’ she had stated coldly. ‘They wallow in it, their hands forever stretched out as they shun honest toil. They don’t think like us.’

  It was one of the rare occasions he had heard his father raise his voice to his wife, and in the heated exchange that had followed, when his father had reminded his mother that both he and she had come from working class stock and he – for one – was proud of the fact, Dan’s sympathies had all been with his father and the destitute family, but now he wondered if there hadn’t been a grain of truth in his mother’s declaration.

  He glanced down at the child in his arms. ‘Right, we’d better get you back to your mother and get you warm.’

  ‘I can’t go back home yet, I haven’t bin to the farm.’

  The small figure wriggled but the last had been said through fiercely chattering teeth and Dan didn’t relinquish his grip. ‘Nevertheless, home it is.’

  ‘You put me down, you!’ A small part of Connie’s brain was acknowledging that she wouldn’t have got out of the ditch without this lad helping her, but a larger part was telling her he was one of them – one of them that had caused all the nasty things that had happened – and now her struggles became frantic as she began to beat her small fists against his chest and yell, ‘You! You! It’s all your fault. It is. Me mam’s bad an’ the babby’s dead an’ it’s all your fault.’

  By the time Dan got to the cottage he had got the gist of what had happened, but nothing had prepared him for the freezing cheerless interior of the tiny dwelling place, or the sight of that drawer with its pitiful package, and he was to remember the feeling, as though burning coals had been heaped upon his head, for the rest of his life.

  Raw emotion was tearing at him as he ran as fast as he could to the farm, thrusting a handful of coins into the farmer’s wife’s hands and telling her to get fuel and food to the cottage while he went for the doctor, and it was still with him in all its searing intensity when he struggled into Bishopwearmouth, his chest on fire from the exertion and the breath rasping in his throat.

  No, Doctor Turnbull wasn’t here at present, the small neat maid informed him when he reached the practice in High Street East in the East End. Peggy had been adamant that only Doctor Tumbull would do – she had been treated by his father as a child and later, when the son had inherited the practice, had found him as understanding about such matters as payment by instalment as his predecessor. Some of the more highfalutin of
the medical fraternity wouldn’t turn out before you had greased their hand with a half crown, and what good was that when you were faced with an empty purse and a sick child or whatever? Peggy had challenged Dan bitterly.

  If the matter was as urgent as it appeared, the maid continued, perhaps the young gentleman would like the address of the patient Doctor Turnbull was attending? It wasn’t too far.

  Yes, the young gentleman would like it very much indeed, Dan assured her quickly, and so it was that he found himself running the twenty or thirty yards into Hartley Street and then along into Northumberland Place where he banged at the door of one of the houses.

  Dan knew this area; his father’s business stretched from William Street to more warehouses storing heavy goods such as tar, pitch and resin in East Cross Street, while ships’ provisions, consisting of mess beef and pork, together with the overspill of canned and dry goods from the central warehouse in William Street, were catered for in another two-storey warehouse overlooking the river in Sunderland Street, so in spite of living in the seclusion of Ryhope Road he had, to some extent, seen how the other half lived. He and his brothers, without their mother’s knowledge, would oft times escape the house to the old market in the East End of a Saturday night, which would be full of people from the collieries and shipyards round about. Besides all the stalls holding second-hand clothes and such, there were barrels of nuts and raisins sold at ha’penny a bag, sweet stalls, buskers playing accordions, a roundabout – like a fairground – at the top of the market, even boxing most Saturdays.

  Dan had always loved the Saturday nights, from drinking at the tap in the centre of the market which had a lead basin and a lead cup attached to it with a very heavy chain, to the walk home when they would spend their last pennies on fish and a halfpennorth of chips, and finish off with a quarter of brazil nut toffee from the large sweet stall at the bottom end of the market. Everyone always seemed happy on Saturday nights and – in a childlike fashion – he had never questioned the poverty that was apparent under the jollity.