Lovers Meeting (6 page)

But Josie suspected he was still goading her. She turned away and copied him: ‘Naw.’ She started to walk away.

‘Hang on!’ Bob called. And when she looked over her shoulder, he coaxed, ‘I’ve got a house up here.’ Josie could see something like a box in the branches behind him, was eaten by curiosity but still only shrugged. ‘Here you are!’ Bob was encouraging her and now he cast the coils from the branch so they unravelled and the rope dangled to touch the ground. ‘Come on up.’

Josie wanted to but did not know how. She replied with dignity, ‘Girls don’t climb ropes.’

Bob urged, ‘Nobody will know. Tell you what: I’ll show you.’ He grabbed the rope and came down hand over hand. He stood beside Josie but was half a head taller. ‘You’re not very big. How old are you?’

‘Eight,’ answered Josie. Was he talking down to her again?

But Bob said, ‘I’m ten.’ Then he softened it by: ‘I expect you’ll be big as me when you’re ten. Now, what you do, you catch hold o’ the rope up here wi’ both hands, let the end of it lie over your left foot like that, and trap it there with your right foot. See? Then you straighten your legs and stretch up wi’ your hands, pull up your legs, tighten them and straighten them. See?’ He climbed some eight feet then slid back to earth and offered the rope to Josie. ‘It helps if you spit on your hands first.’

Josie spat delicately and seized the rope.

After an hour and a great deal of spitting, Josie sat on the branch with Bob. The house was a rough lattice-work of small dead branches, making a box with one side open and just big enough to hold the pair of them. It served through that day as their ship, carriage, or home, as their imaginations took them.

Peggy worried for a while when Josie did not return to the house for tea. Then one of the gardeners, standing at the kitchen door while he drank a mug of tea Peggy had given him, said, ‘Your little lass is down in the wood, playing wi’ Jem Miller’s lad. Don’t ye worry about her.’ So Peggy worked on, relieved.

Josie finally returned to the house as dusk was falling. ‘I’ve been playing with Bob Miller.’

Peggy, busy with the preparations for dinner, said absently, ‘That’s nice.’

Josie went on, ‘We’ve got a little house.’ She wisely did not mention that it was perched in a tree. ‘Bob’s mam gives him some bread and cheese for his tea so he doesn’t have to go home till it’s dark. He shared it with me, but can I have some tomorrow, please?’

Peggy, hurrying from table to oven and red-faced in the heat of the kitchen, agreed readily. ‘’Course you can. Now move out of my way, there’s a love.’

So Josie spent her days with little Bob Miller. She had to return to the house for lunch but after that she would run off to join him again, her bag of sandwiches in her hand. They were long summer days of blue skies and shimmering heat.

‘Let’s go swimming,’ said Bob.

‘You mean paddling.’ Josie had waded in the stream with the Urquhart girls, searching for tiddlers.

‘Naw!’ Bob was scornful. ‘I mean swimming – in the pool.’

Josie said doubtfully, ‘You can’t swim.’

‘O’ course I can!’ Bob was indignant. ‘Me dad showed me, said I had to learn because I’m going to be a sailor.’

‘Are you?’ Josie was still unsure.

‘As soon as I’m old enough.’ And Bob offered, ‘Tell you what: I’ll teach you.’

The pool lay in a hollow, downhill from the house and hidden in trees. The stream ran into it at one end and out at the other, leaving eddies on the surface and keeping it cool. Bob threw off his clothes and jumped in. Josie hesitated, but then he challenged, ‘You’re scared!’

‘I’m not,’ replied Josie, refusing to be beaten.

Bob taught Josie to swim, in between their making harbours and dams out of mud and a pier built of rocks. At the end of that first day, when Josie dragged her clothes on to her damp body to dry, she could dog-paddle. Inside a week she was breaststroking across the pool.

Until one day Peggy had to go hunting for her daughter and found her by following the sound of the yells. Josie and Bob were leaping into the pool so that it exploded in spray, two racing, shrieking, naked urchins.

‘You won’t see him any more,’ Peggy declared, furious and shocked as she marched Josie back to the house. ‘Disgraceful! I came looking for you because we’re going back to London tomorrow. And
he
’s goin’ for good. His father’s leaving to work with his brother. So that little terror won’t be here next year.’

But nor was Josie.

At the end of that summer the youngest of the Urquhart children went on to boarding school, the last to go, and the governess left. Josie moved to the local board school where she mixed with the children of servants, small shopkeepers and publicans. Her North Country accent had faded from lack of use by that time. She automatically fell back on the accent and language of the kitchen and fitted in. But she was always top of her class.

It was then that she bade a tearful farewell to Albert Harvey. The butler had come into a small inheritance and used this and his savings to take over a private hotel. He told Peggy and the tear-stained little girl, ‘I reckon it’s a business where you’re always sure of a living. Everybody has to sleep somewhere, whether he’s a tinker, tailor, soldier or sailor.’

When Josie had gone to bed he proposed to Peggy Langley but she told him, ‘I’m sorry. You’re a good man and I’m sure you’ll get on and I’m honoured that you’ve asked me. But there was only ever the one man for me and that was David. God bless you for all you’ve done for me and Josie.’

Josie continued to have nightmares in which the giant came tramping and roaring to loom over her and she would wake shrieking. As she grew these became rarer – but she never forgot the giant.

And in Liverpool, Reuben Garbutt had moved off the street by the time he reached his twentieth birthday. Now he owned a pawnshop and lived in a comfortable flat above it. The shop, run by a fawning, frightened manager twice his age, made a good living for him, but not as good as he made from receiving stolen goods and selling them on. And then there were other enterprises – like funding a big robbery and taking a thick cut from the proceeds – where a reputation for ruthless violence stood him in good stead.

His mother and sisters still lived in the slum tenement. He rarely saw them. He had no photograph of them or his father in the flat. Nor did he have anything to remind him of the Langleys. He did not need any such aid to his memory. He would never forget the Langleys and his oath to avenge himself on them. When he was ready …

4

London, June 1893

‘Can we go to see the ships, Mam, please?’ It was a summer Sunday, when Josie was in her ninth year and her second at the board school, and Peggy Langley had a free half-day. She smiled down at Josie’s eager face. Peggy was no lover of ships though she had grown up within sight and sound of them. But Josie loved to see them. Peggy thought that was her father, a shipbuilder, coming out in her. And the day was fine and it would be good to get out of the house.

So Peggy said, ‘All right, bonny lass.’ And Josie shrugged into her coat with its sailor collar and put on her wide-brimmed straw hat. They climbed into a bus pulled by a patient horse that flicked its tail at the summer flies, and rode down to the Pool of London.

As they strolled along the quayside, looking out at the mass of shipping that filled the Pool, Josie asked her usual question: ‘Why was Grandfather so horrible?’

Peggy had become used to answering this because Josie asked it every month or six weeks when they came to the Pool; the sight of the ships seemed to start a train of thought that led back to her dead father and her grandfather. Peggy answered, ‘Because your father and grandfather had a quarrel.’ And she thought that would be the end of it, as usual.

But this time Josie pressed her: ‘
Why
were Daddy and Grandfather quarrelling?’

Peggy hesitated over her answer, wondering what to say, but then she decided it would be best to stay with the truth. ‘Your father married me and your grandfather didn’t want him to.’

That was still not sufficient explanation and Josie persisted, ‘Why?’

‘He didn’t think I would be a good wife for him.’

‘But you were.’ Josie looked up at her mother, appealing for reassurance.

Peggy tried to give it: ‘I tried.’ Then she forced a laugh and tried to change the subject: ‘That’s enough of that—’ It was an attempt bound to fail because Josie was stubborn and already framing another question. But then there was a yell and a
splash
! A bass voice bellowed, ‘Man overboard!’

Peggy and Josie turned and saw a boat sliding into the quay. Four seamen sat on the thwarts gripping the oars and a big, bearded man in a reefer jacket sat in the sternsheets holding the tiller. All the men were roaring with laughter and looking back to where a head now bobbed up in the boat’s wake. Then two arms thrashed the water as their owner swam powerfully after the boat.

Tom Collingwood had been pushed over the side by his skipper, the big man in the reefer jacket. It was a sailor’s joke and Tom took it like a sailor, spat water and grinned. He had grown up in the Langley house. Taken on as a servant he had been treated as a son. When he celebrated his twelfth birthday old William had kept his promise and obtained an apprenticeship for him in the ship now lying in the Pool. He was bound for six years and supremely happy, despite the hardship of a seaman’s life.

Now he came up with the boat where it lay tied up to the steps leading down from the quay. His shipmates waited there and Tom climbed out on to the steps, his captain helping him up with one big hand, slapping him on the back with the other and rumbling, ‘Aye, you’ve got to be able to take a joke to be a sailor. Good lad!’ Tom looked up at the strollers lining the quayside and peering down at him. He saw they were all smiling and sharing the joke – except one. There was a small girl, her little buttoned boots set close together at the edge of the quay, her hair with a tinge of copper flowing loose and shining down her back under a wide-brimmed straw hat. She stared at him solemnly, with great grey eyes. Tom grinned at her.

Josie had been afraid for this boy only a few years older than herself but now was relieved to see him safe and cheerful. After a shy, hesitant moment her mouth curved and her eyes crinkled as she returned the smile. Then the little group of seafarers mounted the stairs and strode away along the quay. The boy, following his elders and lengthening his stride to match theirs, turned his head once and waved. Josie lifted her hand in reply.

They did not meet there again, though Josie often went to see the ships and Tom, at that time serving aboard a collier bringing coal down from Sunderland to London, sailed into the Pool every week. Nor did either remember the incident later.

Now Peggy moved on and Josie went with her. After a while Josie harked back to the subject that worried her. ‘I think all that trouble was Grandfather’s fault.’

Peggy told her, ‘Don’t worry your head over what’s done. Just forget about it.’

But Josie could not. ‘When I’m big I’ll give him a piece of my mind.’

Peggy’s lips twitched as she recognised one of the cook’s expressions, but she said severely, ‘You’ll do nothing o’ the sort, miss. You behave yourself like the lady your father wanted you to be.’

That weighed with Josie, who had loved her father, and she was silent. But she was still vaguely determined that she would make William Langley pay for the hurt he had caused her parents, although she had no idea how she would do this.

It was a decision that would bring her close to death one day.

Olive Garbutt was facing her death that day. She lay in the bed in which her husband Elisha had died and waited for her son, Reuben. Her four daughters sat around the small fire, muttering among themselves and casting occasional worried glances in her direction. For the past few hours she had asked only for: ‘Reuben. I want to see Reuben.’ They had sent for him, reluctantly because they hated him for the way he had left them in poverty while he lived in comfort. But they knew it was their mother’s dying wish. Still, they wondered at it, because she hated him even more than they did.

Now, in her mind, she was rehearsing her speech for when he arrived. She would be ready for him. She had exacted a promise from him to look after the girls and when she told him the truth he would want to renege on it. But he would honour it because he knew her curse would lie on him if he did not.

She would tell him: ‘You’re not Garbutt’s son. You were born on the wrong side o’ the blanket, you were. But your real father was a fine figure of a man, big and strong – hard, like you. He was a bad lot,
bad
, and you’re going the same way. He frightened me sometimes but he had a way with him; all the lasses fancied him – but I had him. He bedded me a dozen times and I laughed behind Garbutt’s back. Garbutt was a snivelling, tight-fisted—’ But she would not tell him that the man who had fathered him had been hanged for a knifing, and not his first.

She did not tell him anything. Olive Garbutt heard Reuben’s heavy tread on the bare wood of the stairs but when he entered the room she was dead, staring wide-eyed and loose-jawed at the cracked and stained ceiling.

One of her daughters said, ‘I think she’s gone.’ She bent over her mother, listening for a breath, feeling for a heartbeat, and found neither. She straightened and said, sure now, ‘She’s gone, all right.’ Then she staggered aside as Reuben shoved her out of his way. He took her place, leaning over the bed. He hung there for a second or two, confirming his sister’s verdict, then turned away.

He looked at the four girls and they returned his gaze with one of a mixture of hope and confidence. He knew the reason for that confidence and now he said, ‘When she was took bad’ – and he jerked his head towards the still body in the bed – ‘she got me to promise to provide for you lot. Those were her words: “You’ve got to provide for the girls.” And so I will.’ He grinned at them.

But they exchanged glances among themselves, still uneasy.

He went on, ‘There’s a ship sailing for Australia the day after tomorrow and I’ll pay for passages for all of you. On top of that I’ll give each of you twenty pounds to give you a start out there. That should be enough; I hear there’s plenty o’ work out there for young lasses.’