Friendship's Bond (6 page)

Leah released a snort of feigned disparagement but her heart warmed as strong arms caught her, whirling her several times before setting her down. All three had greeted her that way from becoming young men. Leah left the yard, full of memories. First would come Joshua, his laugh ringing as he swept her up; tall and strong even at fifteen years of age he could lift her easily as he might a doll; then would come Daniel, close as a shadow on the heels of the brother who was his sun, determined as ever to do exactly as Joshua. But then neither was to be allowed to outdo Edward. He too would catch her up, hold her as he might his own mother, the mother taken in childbed when he was eight years old. The boy had hidden his grief from his father realising even at such a tender age that the man already carried a heavy enough burden of sorrow. But in her home, the house of his best friends, he had cried with his young face hidden in her lap, sobbed at the pain of losing his mother.

Had she tried to become mother to Edward? Leah shook her head at the thought. She would never do that.

Disturbed by her approach a trio of rabbits darted across the heath, tails bobbing white among the dark green bracken. A trio! The scampering rabbits became three young boys racing one after the other. Joshua, Daniel and Edward. As infants they had played together, as children they had attended school together until the age of eleven, when they could each leave to work full time for their living, Edward on his father’s dairy farm and her own sons on the plot given her as compensation by the colliery following Joseph’s death. The long hours of toil had not been sufficient to part the three completely for their few free hours had seen them walk and talk in these very fields, though often when he was visiting, Edward’s eyes had rarely left Deborah.

She had hoped. Leah blinked against gathering tears. She had asked the Lord could the pair come one day to marry, could the affection of children become the love of a man and a woman? But then war had called all three. They had wept together, she and Deborah, shared the sorrow of seeing brothers and friends march away, sat together in the long soul-numbing hours when those brief messages had informed them Joshua and Daniel would never come home, would never again sweep mother and sister into their arms.

She had mourned her sons, longed for them, prayed for them as so many mothers in this and other lands trapped in the bitterness of war, yet had thanked God for the mercy that had let Edward Langley return from that horror. He had suffered a bullet wound to the leg so was to be repatriated. She had thought Deborah would, if not dance with joy, at least be full of smiles. But Deborah had not smiled.

Her daughter had reached for her coat. She was going to the chapel but had shaken her head when Leah said they would go to give thanks together. She had not pressed Deborah nor had she followed. Overcome at the news of Edward’s safety, Deborah had needed a little time alone to thank the Lord for His bounty.

A little time! Leah gasped at the pain cutting through her heart. Noon had given way to evening, the yellow sunlight of afternoon becoming emblazoned with the gold and crimson banners of sunset before ceding to the purple-grey of night. It was then she had gone herself to the chapel. Deborah was not there. She had frowned in confusion on being told her daughter had not been seen there by wives and mothers who in breaks between shifts at their places of work would slip into the chapel to pray for husbands and sons fighting at the front. But of all the women she had asked none had seen Deborah go into or leave that building in Queen’s Place. She had asked the same question of folk as she had looked for her daughter in the adjoining Queen Street, the busier Holyhead Road and almost every other street of the town, then when she returned home to find Deborah was not there she had repeated the process; asking, searching until the market place had emptied of customer and trader, the beer houses had closed their doors for the night and the last street lay empty and deserted. She had walked the long dark hours of night going from town to heath where the open coal shafts lost in the depths of shadow held less terror for her than the fears beginning to build in her heart.

Men exchanging shifts at coal mine and steel foundries had shaken their heads at the woman out on the heath before dawn had lightened the sky and all had answered the same.

No one had seen Deborah!

No one had seen her pass on the road, or cross the waste ground off Lea Brook, no one had watched her come to the bridge spanning the water, no one had seen her fall in.

Leah herself had found her child. A fast-flowing current had thrown and then held her daughter among the thick reeds hiding its verge from the bracken and low bushes of yellow flowered gorse that grew on open land.

She had almost passed by without seeing. With tear-swollen eyes and numbed by hours of unrelenting anxiety she would have walked by, never have seen . . . never have found! But she had seen and she had found.

She recalled the scene in all its detail as her fingers twined in the soft cloth of the shawl, reaching for the comfort which never came.

She might have been beyond that spot, might never have witnessed that horror, but Fate had decreed otherwise. It was not to be given to Leah Marshall that she be told her one remaining child had been found by another, that she see her only when washed clean and laid in her coffin.

With a shuddering pain-filled breath Leah stared into yesterday.

Night was at last surrendering to dawn; the first beams of the rising sun flashing scarlet defiance over the narrow river had gleamed across a tiny island of colour, highlighting the patch of peacock turquoise.

For a moment it had felt her feet were fastened to the ground yet tired as it was her brain had recognised what lay there trapped in the inky water, had recognised the material of the coat Deborah had so loved to wear, a coat of an almost identical colour to her lovely eyes.

But those lovely eyes had been closed, their fringe of long lashes resting on cheeks the colour of marble, and the long fair silken hair was now threaded with slime-covered weed, weed wrapped round the floating figure clutching it. Every eddy of water threatened to rip the body from her grasp; but in that it had failed.

She had cradled her dead child. There in the birth of a new day, alone beside that river, she had held her daughter close, had crooned softly the lullabies she had sung to her as an infant, rocked that cold, cold body as she had when pains of croup or fever had resulted in restless nights, had in the lonely silent dawn kissed that lifeless face gently as at every bedtime.

Her words a mere whisper, Leah murmured to a daughter she could not see. ‘It were only goodnight, child, it were not goodbye for I can never say that word; it be as it is along of your brothers and your father, you don’t be gone for you bides ’ere in my heart where you will ever be.’

Why had Deborah not gone to the chapel? How come she had gone instead to the river? And how in God’s name had she come to fall into the water?

Walking on, Leah remained with her thoughts. The years had provided no relief from heartbreak and certainly none from the agony of a question carried in her most secret heart.

She had put that question to no one, especially not to Edward Langley. His face had been alight that day he had come to the house, happiness at the prospect of seeing the girl she had known he loved apparent on every feature. That happiness had died as painfully as Leah’s own.

Edward! Even in her remembered sadness Leah smiled. War had left its mark on him as it would leave it on many yet, but he remained the same honest, trustworthy man she had watched grow from the cradle, a man so different in every way to the one she would speak to next.

Holding her shawl about her shoulders, ignoring the quick March breeze tugging playfully at her bonnet, Leah retraced her path across the open expanse of heath and meadow which bordered a heart of iron and coal.

The Black Country. She let her glance rove over the vista of chimneys rising like a huge flock of crows black against the skyline.

The Black Country was how this very heart of England was described, a term well justified by the pall of smoke overlying the town, a perpetual veil of grey shutting out much of the beauty of daytime skies and then cloaking the majesty of stars spread across the night void. A forest of chimney stacks belched foul black breath from iron works, collieries, steel and brass foundries. Street upon street of tight packed houses huddled close to each other, and to the grudgingly spared communal yards with their shared outhouse and privy. From every roof rose the smoke of coal fires, the one weapon with which families fought the damp of old dilapidated homes, their every brick robed in black soot.

No building escaped. Not even the House of God. Leah’s glance rested a moment on the church of St Bartholomew. Black as any other building it gazed down from its hilltop on the town it had served for centuries.

She sighed heavily. How Wednesbury must have changed during those hundreds of years; how it had changed from the days of her own childhood. It had been so different then. Yes, parents must have found it hard raising a family just as now in this soot-ridden town, but for her as for the children she had played alongside worries of that nature did not exist. She had run with others barefoot across fields, she had gambolled and tumbled among stalks of wheat tall as herself, had danced among stately rows of barley.

So many happy reminiscences, so many cherished memories, but none were so treasured as the recollections of when as a young woman she had walked with Joseph.

‘We shouldn’t go walkin’ amid the crops, a farmer’s labours be hard, it be unkind of folk to go destroyin’ o’ what he works long to produce.’

Joseph, her ever thoughtful Joseph. Even as a young man his actions had been considerate of other folk before himself. So they had taken their strolls here on the heath, his hand shyly taking hers only when they were beyond the sight of houses.

Feeling the brush of bracken against her boots she was again with Joseph, who was laughing at a young girl dressed in her Sunday best gown, her sliding feet hidden among deep drifts of daisies while her cream cotton skirts caressed the heads of kingcups and rich purple clover.

Leah sighed. Where was the golden wheat speckled with scarlet poppies? It was gone, never to gleam again, buried beneath stretches of earth blackened and scarred by the ravages of coal mining. The colour-strewn heath and meadows, once-lush pastures, all that delight was now swallowed beneath an ever-expanding dark sea called industry. The ache of losing it felt almost physical. Standing a moment, she stared ahead. There had been so many changes, and Wednesbury groaned beneath the insatiable demand.

Ugly, noisy, a cancer on the beautiful face of nature; those buildings were all of that but . . . Leah sighed with acceptance. Objectionable as was their presence, the twenty-four-hour ceaseless clang and clamour, the perpetual pall of acrid smoke, those workplaces produced many of the materials with which this country was fighting for its life.

So much had already been given to that fight. How many scars had been left on the hearts of families robbed of their menfolk, and how many yet would be called to face that terrible sorrow?

‘How many more? Lord, how many more before the world comes to its senses?’

Maybe she should have stayed in Darlaston, tried to find a home for herself and Alec there, but how would she have found a place without money to pay for it?

That had been the final straw, the blow which at that moment had drained her will, swept away the determination that had kept her going despite all the trials and tribulation of getting back to England.

‘
Eh wench, your gran be gone these many months, ’ er died but a few weeks after y’self ’ad left to be wi’ y’ parents along o’ that foreign country. Weren’t aught could be done, there be no cure for tumour o’ the stomach. With you gone an’ no other kin a’bidin’ wi’   ’er the house were given over to another family.
’

She had longed for her grandmother, the one person in the world she thought remained to her, who would take her in her arms, welcome her home. But there had been no grandmother, no home.

With no more deliveries to make, with nothing to hold her concentration, memories crept like wraiths into Ann’s mind.

‘
’Er be laid along o’ St Lawrence churchyard.’ The voice of the neighbour went on relentlessly. ‘There were naught but what the penny a week insurance policy paid an’ that barely saw ’er decent into the ground so there be no ’eadstone to mark where ’er lies but there do be a wooden cross wi’ ’er name, my ’usband seen to the mekin’ o’ that.
’

She had thanked the woman for having overseen the burying of her grandmother, asked that those same thanks be passed to all of the houses in the street because the folk would have contributed halfpennies and pennies in order to purchase a wreath; then she had walked to the churchyard.

There, kneeling beside a patch of earth bereft of any enclosing stone border, of any gift of flowers beneath the rough wooden cross with its name traced in white paint, the last of her resistance had crumbled leaving her crushed beneath the weight of guilt for not having been there when she was needed.

‘
I should have known.
’

The words had sobbed from her.

‘
I should have stayed here with you . . . Oh Gran, I should have known.
’