Born to Trouble (21 page)

On the fifth day she washed all over in the burn before washing her hair too. Once it was dry she wound it into one thick, long plait and tidied herself as best she could, brushing the dust and grass from her clothes and cleaning her boots. When she was as respectable as she could make herself, she set off for the big house. She had to know what had happened to Christopher. She held out no hope now that they could be together, but she had to find out whether he had pulled through. If he hadn’t . . . She didn’t dare let herself imagine he hadn’t.

She didn’t try to enter the grounds by way of the lodgekeeper, knowing instinctively that she would be turned away. Instead she climbed over the high stone wall which surrounded the house and grounds and skirted through the gardens, making sure no one saw her. Once the house was in sight she stood looking at it for some time.

She
had
to know and she would do whatever it took to find out. She would shout and scream and fight them all if necessary.

Her heart beating fit to burst, she left the shelter of the bushes and trees and set off across a smooth green lawn which led on to the drive that curved round the side of the house. She was on familiar territory here. Moving swiftly but not running, she came to the stableyard where two men and a boy were working. Her chin up and her walk purposeful, she nodded briskly at them as she passed, and such was her stance they didn’t think of challenging her. Once she was in the courtyard beyond, she went straight to the kitchen door. Here she hesitated. If she knocked and waited she might not be admitted into the house but she could hardly just walk in.

Her dilemma was solved in the next moment when the door was pulled open and a young kitchenmaid carrying a bucket of kitchen slops emerged. When the girl’s look of surprise changed to one of recognition, Pearl knew it was no use pretending.

‘You’re the one Mr Parker brought here a few days ago, the one all the fuss is about. What are you doing here?’ The girl was young, fourteen or fifteen by the look of her, and as she spoke she took a step backwards as though she was frightened Pearl was going to leap on her and rend her limb from limb.

Struggling to remain calm, Pearl appealed to the girl’s mercy. ‘I’m not supposed to be here but I have to know how–’ she stopped herself saying Christopher, changing it to – ‘the young Mr Armstrong is, whether he’s better.’

‘We were told if we saw you we had to tell Mr Parker at once.’ The girl was still wary but something in the bright eyes told Pearl she was a perky piece. This was confirmed when she added, ‘Mr Parker told the housekeeper who told the cook that you cheeked him. Did you?’

Pearl nodded.

‘By, you’re a one.’ This was said with a touch of admiration and something approaching friendliness. ‘He’s a real tartar, is Mr Parker.’

‘Do you know how Mr Armstrong is?’ Pearl asked again.

The girl leaned forward, her voice a whisper. ‘We’re not supposed to know owt, but is it true you an’ him were . . . well, you know?’

Again Pearl nodded. She wasn’t quite sure exactly what she was admitting to, but it didn’t matter in the circumstances.

‘And he caught his toe when one of your lot found out.’ The girl didn’t wait for an answer, a note of bitterness coming into her voice when she said, ‘Makes a change for the gentry to come a cropper – it’s normally the other way round. My sister was in service at a big house Sunderland way, and when she came home with her belly full by the master, an’ him old enough to be her granda, it was the workhouse for her. Me mam says I’ve got to scream an’ keep screaming if anyone tries it on with me.’

For the third time, Pearl said, ‘Mr Armstrong, how is he?’

‘Poorly.’

‘He’s alive then?’ She felt the world turn upside down for a moment and reached out a hand to steady herself on the wall of the house.

‘Oh aye, he’s alive, or he was when he left this mornin’.’

‘Left?’

‘The mistress went with him. He’s supposed to be con – convales – getting better abroad. Cook says it was foolhardy to move such an ill man. She says the upstairs maid told her Mr Christopher didn’t know what day it was – rambling all the time, she said. She can’t understand what possessed the mistress to insist they leave.’

Pearl stared at the girl. She knew what it was. Christopher’s family were determined to get him as far away from her as possible. No matter if the journey might kill him.

‘And we’ve bin told to say he fell off his horse while out riding and did himself an injury, if anyone asks.’ The girl made a ‘Huh!’ sound in her throat. ‘Think we’re half sharp, the gentry do.’

No, they didn’t think their servants were half sharp, merely bought and paid for, body and soul. As Christopher’s father had said to the butler that day, the servants could think what they liked as long as they didn’t voice it. Their servants’ opinion of them mattered so little it wasn’t worth considering.

‘Do you know when they’re expected back?’

The girl shrugged. ‘Not for months, Cook said. The housekeeper told her she wouldn’t be surprised if Mr Christopher decides to live in Italy or somewhere foreign where there’s plenty of art an’ books an’ such. A great one for poetry and art, Mr Christopher is. But then I suppose you’d know all about what he likes,’ she added slyly. ‘He hasn’t left you with a belly full, like my sister, has he?’

Pearl straightened. ‘No.’ And then she softened the brusqueness of her tone when she said, ‘And thanks – thanks for talking to me.’

‘That’s all right. It fair broke me mam’s heart when our Betsy was taken down,’ the maid said by way of explanation.

Pearl walked away from the house in the same way she had approached it, with her head held high, and this time she continued down the drive. When she reached the iron gates, the lodgekeeper came running out, his eyes wide as he spluttered, ‘When did you come in, lass?’

Pearl walked to the narrow side gate and waited until he had unlocked it. ‘Earlier,’ she said briefly.

She left him scratching his head and muttering to himself, but he didn’t try to detain her. Once she was clear of the lodge she veered off the road and into the fields, and it was then she felt free to sink onto the ground and give way to a paroxysm of weeping. She had ruined Byron’s life and lost Corinda and the family in the process, and now she would never marry Christopher, never marry anyone. If she couldn’t have him, she didn’t want anyone else.

She cried until there were no more tears left and she was limp and spent. The grass was warm and sweet-smelling under her face, and the air carried the fragrance of ripe blackberries from the hedgerows. She sat up eventually, her eyes tired and heavy as she gazed into the distance. Along the wayside, elms and sycamores were faintly touched with yellow, and the landscape in front of her was chequered in a patchwork of subtle tint and mellow hue which indicated autumn was round the corner. The summer was all but gone.

There was nothing left to live for.
The thought came in with the swiftness of an arrow and just as swiftly she thrust it aside. A few weeks ago, days even, she wouldn’t have thought herself capable of surviving without her adopted family, but she had and she would. Halimena had said she had a curse on her. Holding her hands tightly against her chest, she swayed back and forth several times. She didn’t know about that. What she did know was that life was a battle and you couldn’t stop fighting until it was over. And her life wasn’t over. She was still breathing and feeling, wasn’t she? She had her eyes and her ears and her limbs, which was more than some poor souls had.

Looking up into the blue, blue sky, she longed for Seth like she hadn’t done for years. And with the thought of one brother, memories of James and Patrick crowded in. They had been little more than babies when she had been forced to flee the East End, now they’d be lads of nine and ten. She was old enough to stand up to her mother this time round, so why shouldn’t she seek her brothers out? She was free now, free to do what her heart told her. Once she was reunited with James and Patrick, she could make enquiries and see if she could find out which prison Seth and the others were held in. Or maybe they were back in the community? Whatever, she’d try to trace them.

The melancholy calls of lapwings in the stubblefields picking off the plentiful supply of grubs and beetles drifted on the air. Halimena had taught her that those birds were the host of departed human spirits who could find no rest and were doomed to wander the earth; their cries, which sounded like, ‘Bewitched, bewitched!’ were proof of this and were thought to bring evil down upon all who heard them. Halimena had plenty of stories like this and all contained gloom and destruction.

Pearl closed her eyes for a moment. She had always thought the birds beautiful with their distinctive raised crest and prominent black and white markings shot with iridescent specks of metallic turquoise. Halimena had seen death and darkness, while she had seen beauty and grace. The lapwings were birds, that was all. Halimena was wrong.

She opened her eyes. And if she could be wrong about the lapwings, she could be wrong about the curse. Christopher would live, Byron would be reunited with his family in time, and she? She would find James and Patrick and the others.

Rising to her feet, Pearl picked up her small bundle of belongings and set her face for the town she had left behind eight years before.

October 1908

It was the first week of October – a cold, bleak October with icy rain and bitter winds. Pearl was standing outside the forbidding building of the Union Workhouse and she was trembling, not so much because of the weather, although her thin coat and felt hat offered little protection, but because she had every reason to believe James and Patrick were incarcerated behind its walls. She had knocked on the workhouse doors earlier in the week but had been told to come back on Visiting Day by the porter who had barred her way.

Like all working-class folk, Pearl had a fear of the workhouse which bordered on horror. Everyone knew that to enter its walls was to give up hope. Men were separated from women, thus breaking up families, and both groups were divided into the able-bodied, the aged and children. The sick and mentally ill had their own quarters, and this ward could be smelled as soon as you stepped through the workhouse doors. She knew this, along with the fact that all inmates wore hideous uniforms, and the hair of both boys and girls was cropped, subjecting them to ridicule if they were taken out of the workhouse confines, because her mother had told her so. Many a time Kitty had threatened to leave her children at the workhouse doors where they’d be taken in and made to eat food infested with cockroach droppings.

Pulling her hat more firmly on her head, Pearl nerved herself to go inside. It was the only way she could check if her brothers were really inmates, and although she didn’t want them to be there, if they weren’t she didn’t know where else to look for them.

She hadn’t arrived back in the town until the middle of September due to the fact that on her journey she had found a few weeks’ work picking fruit at a big farm. The farmer’s wife had been a kind, genial soul, allowing Pearl to sleep in one of the hay barns at night and providing her with the leftovers from their evening meal. With the fruit she’d eaten whilst working, this had meant Pearl had been able to save every precious penny of the wages she’d earned, rather than spend anything on food and lodging. The work had been exhausting but welcome; she’d fallen into the hay each night too tired to think.

When she had left the farm and reached the town, she’d had enough money to rent a room in a lodging house in the East End. She had visited the Old Market and bought herself some cheap second-hand clothes and once she was tidy immediately looked for work, procuring a job at the pickling factory two streets away the next day. She hated the work; the brine was so strongly impregnated with salt that it made her hands raw, and the overpowering smell of fish worked its way into her hair, skin and clothes, but the worst thing was the fact that the four walls of the stinking factory seemed to press in on her after years of living in the fresh outdoors.

That very first weekend, she’d made her way to Low Street only to find strangers living in the house in which she’d been born. They hadn’t any knowledge of what had become of her mother and brothers. She had knocked on neighbours’ doors but got no joy that first visit, but when she’d returned later in the week she had recognised a face from the past, a Mrs Weatherburn who lived at the end of the street. Mrs Weatherburn had invited her in and made her a cup of strong black tea, after which she’d informed Pearl that her mother had died years ago after falling into the fire whilst drunk and badly burning herself.

‘Dreadful business it was,’ Mrs Weatherburn told her. ‘Lingered for days, she did. Everyone said it was a merciful release when she went.’

And her brothers? Pearl had asked. What had happened to James and Patrick?

Mrs Weatherburn had looked at her compassionately. ‘Why, the workhouse of course, lass. They were put in the workhouse as I recollect, there being no family to take ’em.’

No family. Pearl swallowed hard and then stepped up to the front door. Well, James and Patrick did have family – and if they were in this terrible place, she intended to get them out.

The officer on duty in the vestibule was sitting at a long wooden desk with several big heavy ledgers in front of her. Two more female officers were standing by a pair of wooden doors which led into the hall of the building. There was a middle-aged couple in front of Pearl and a short stout man in front of them. Pearl watched as the man gave his name, then the name of the person he’d come to visit followed by a number. A ledger was opened, pages turned and then the sitting officer called a name and ward number to one of the officers by the door as the stout man walked across to them and disappeared into the hall. Pearl had never been to a prison but she couldn’t imagine the procedure was much different.