Lovers Meeting (7 page)

They stared back at him, shocked. One began to cry and the eldest said, ‘What if we don’t go?’

Reuben eyed her, not smiling now. ‘You’ll wish you had.’ That cowed her and she shrank back among the others. Reuben turned away but paused at the door to say, ‘I’ll get a doctor to come and certify the death and I’ll see to the funeral. You be ready the day after tomorrow.’ Then he left them weeping. He had his own evil course to follow.

While Josie Langley was living out the last of her childhood years.

5

August 1902

‘You’ve as much right to a seat at somebody’s window as some o’ them people upstairs,’ Peggy Langley complained as she struggled into her coat. ‘You remember, you’re as good as they are.’

‘Yes, Mam,’ Josie agreed, knowing it was no good to argue. She was eighteen now and an attractive young woman. She gave her mother’s coat a final yank on to her shoulders and handed her the big cartwheel of a hat with its ostrich feather. ‘Roger’s trying to keep us a place but we’ll never get to him if we don’t leave here soon.’ Besides, she had heard this kind of talk from Peggy Langley increasingly over the last two years and didn’t want to hear it at all, let alone now.

Edward VII was to be crowned this day, belatedly because of an attack of appendicitis, but he was now recovered. Roger, a footman in the Urquhart house, had promised to save a place on the pavement for Josie and her mother to watch the procession pass by, but there were certain to be crowds. London had filled up with visitors and many families, like the Urquharts, had invited friends and relatives to stay with them and see the show. The Urquharts and their guests had in turn been invited to watch from the windows of a private house, owned by a business friend of Geoffrey Urquhart’s, which overlooked the processional route. That was the reason for Peggy’s mention of a seat at a window. But servants would see what they could from the level of the street.

‘Come on, Mam.’ Josie shot one swift glance around the room they had always shared. Her mother stooped before the chest of drawers to look in the mirror on top of it as she skewered a pin through the hat. Josie saw that all was tidy, the double bed neatly made with its little strip of carpet on either side, the small grate empty but clean. In winter they were allowed a fire; Geoffrey Urquhart was one of the best of employers.

‘Right, I’m ready.’ Peggy straightened and moved towards the door. ‘Though to tell you the truth I’d sooner stay home and let you tell me all about it afterwards.’

Josie coaxed her out through the door cheerfully. ‘You’ll feel better when you get out. And it’s not every day you see a coronation. Why, there hasn’t been one for more than sixty years. Lord knows when we’ll see another!’

They descended the back stairs and left the house by the servants’ entrance at the rear. Josie set off briskly but then had to slow for her mother to keep up. Peggy had become very short of breath in recent months and had difficulty in managing the steep and narrow service stairs at the back of the house. Josie wore her only good dress in a pale blue cotton; her working garb of black dress and white apron were hanging in her room. She was flushed with excitement and looked very pretty. Young men frequently told her so but she was still heart-whole.

Roger was one of Josie’s admirers, a thin young man with his hair neatly parted in the middle. They found him, finally and with difficulty. Despite his early start he was still a yard back from the kerb with two rows of people between him and the road. He saw them and waved his cap. ‘’Ere y’are, girls!’

Josie wormed her way through the crowd with her mother in tow. ‘Excuse me, please, our friend is waiting for us.’ The people were good-natured and the men willingly made room for her so the women had to follow suit. Josie and Peggy wound up standing in front of Roger and were able to peer between the swivelling heads in front and the rigid ones of the red-coated soldiers lining the route. They saw Edward and his queen pass by with their escort of the Household Cavalry, and all the rest of the glittering procession. Josie danced and cheered excitedly all the while, until she was hoarse. It was almost done when Peggy Langley sagged against her.

‘Mam? What’s the matter? Mam?’ Josie put an arm around her mother to hold her up and Roger came to her aid. Peggy’s face was screwed up in pain, her eyes closed.

‘Here, let’s get her out o’ this.’ Roger forced a way through the crowd for them and then found a seat for Peggy on a low wall.

Josie crouched to look into her mother’s eyes, open now but still squinted in agony. ‘What is it, Mam?’

‘A pain. Awful. Must be indigestion. Here.’ Peggy laid a hand between her breasts.

Josie asked anxiously, ‘Can you walk?’

‘O’ course I can walk. It’s only indigestion. I want to go home.’

Roger urged, ‘I reckon that’s the best thing. I’ll give you a hand.’ So Peggy tottered home between Josie and the young footman and Josie put her mother to bed, with Peggy still murmuring, ‘Just indigestion, I tell you.’ But an hour later she had another, more savage heart attack. Geoffrey Urquhart was told by Merridew, the butler now, and sent for a doctor.

Josie knelt by the bedside, holding her mother’s hand and frightened as she had never been. Peggy was grey-faced and drawn and no longer talked of indigestion. Now she said weakly, ‘You’ve got to go up North and see Billy Langley. I never wanted owt off him but his son, my David, and the good Lord saw fit to take him from me. I never wanted the yard or the money. But you’re David’s lass. You should have his inheritance. So get yourself up there and tell him who you are.’

‘Just rest, Mam. The doctor’s coming. Just rest.’

But Peggy Langley died only minutes later and before the doctor could arrive.

Josie passed through the next few days, culminating in the funeral, in a blur of grief and tears. One of those who tried to console her, though he grieved himself, was Albert Harvey. He had been hugely successful since leaving the Urquhart household and now admitted to owning four hotels and that he was shortly to cross the Atlantic to open another in America. He blinked in astonishment and admiration at Josie and told her, ‘You’ve grown into a lovely young lady. Your mother must have been proud.’ Josie managed a tremulous smile.

The day after Josie returned from the cemetery Merridew told her, ‘Mrs Carrington wants to see you.’ And seeing her down-in-the-mouth look change to one of apprehension, the butler reassured her: ‘Don’t worry, she hasn’t got any complaint about you.’ But Josie wasn’t so sure. Mrs Carrington was the housekeeper, a woman in her early forties, dressed smartly but severely in a dress of dark grey, her rich brown hair drawn back severely in a bun. She was a strict disciplinarian and insisted on everything being done just so. Along with the butler she saw that the household ran as regular as a clock – and the accounts balanced to a halfpenny.

‘Sit down, my dear.’ She pointed to a chair when Josie entered her room and the girl perched on the edge of it. Mrs Carrington went on briskly, ‘Now, when you were taken on here you spent your first two years helping in the nursery, then when you were stronger you moved to kitchen-maid and for the past year you’ve been housemaid. Mrs Urquhart spoke to me this morning and said she thought a bit of a change would do you good.’ Elizabeth Urquhart had said, ‘The girl needs something to keep her busy, to take her mind off this sad business and help her get over it.’

‘Yes, ma’am?’ Josie was both attentive and wary now. She was ready to take on anything – but what was it?

Mrs Carrington did not beat about the bush. ‘You spend an hour or two every day doing Letty Barker’s work because she’s too idle to do it herself.’ Josie blinked. She hadn’t thought that had been noticed. And Letty
was
lazy; Josie helped her because she could not bear to see a job badly done. The housekeeper went on, ‘And I want you to help me instead.’ She waited, not for Josie’s agreement, because Mrs Carrington was confident that ‘gels’ of that age did not know what was good for them anyway. But she expected an acknowledgment.

Josie knew the rules too: ‘Thank you, ma’am.’ But she liked the idea.

‘Very well, off you go.’ Mrs Carrington closed the interview. ‘And tell Letty I want to see her.
Now
!’

So Josie found herself learning a host of new skills, those of managing a household and a budget. She was eager and quick to learn and soon was as happy as she had ever been. She had not forgotten her mother’s last wish but Sunderland and the Langleys were nearly three hundred miles away. And the scene in the kitchen of the Langley house, her memory of the giant, huge and raging, was still only too clear. Sunderland and the Langleys could wait.

6

June 1904

Josie sang as she worked, running a smoothing iron over the pages of
The Times
to remove the creases put in it by the paper-boy. Merridew would then lay it on Geoffrey Urquhart’s breakfast table. Betty Baynes, the children’s nurse, came hurrying into the kitchen. The two children she cared for were those of the eldest Urquhart girl, now married to an army officer serving in India, where they were living. They had left their son and daughter in the care of Geoffrey and Elizabeth Urquhart.

Betty peered over Josie’s shoulder. ‘Is the announcement in? Their engagement, I mean?’ Josie flipped over the pages good-naturedly, though she was just as interested as she had grown up with the youngest Urquhart daughter, now to be engaged, and was the same age, twenty. Betty squeaked, ‘There it is!’

They read the announcement together and then Josie said, ‘Not long for you, now.’

Betty laughed and blushed. ‘Just two weeks.’ That was when she would be married. ‘And it can’t come too soon.’ She blushed again as Josie cocked a teasing eye at her. ‘I didn’t mean that! I was talking about getting away from Mrs Stritch.’

Mrs Carrington had left the Urquhart service a month ago to join a bigger, ducal household where there was more scope for her considerable talents. Mrs Stritch had replaced her as housekeeper. Now Betty muttered, ‘Should be Witch, not Stritch.’ And went on her way. She would have to leave service when she married and so would escape the attentions of the new housekeeper. Mrs Stritch was a bad-tempered bully who blamed her staff for her own incompetence.

There would be no such escape for Josie and she had already incurred the hatred of Mrs Stritch. She resented the position of trust the girl had enjoyed under Mrs Carrington and had swiftly engineered Josie’s return to being just a housemaid. More than that, she had a strong suspicion that Josie could measure her inefficiency, comparing her performance with that of her predecessor. That was intolerable and Josie would have to go.

Josie had sensed this already and now bit her lip in worry at Betty’s reminder. Then a name in the columns of
The Times
caught her eye: Langley.
Langley
! She read: ‘To James and Mrs Maria Langley of Monkwearmouth in Sunderland, a daughter, Charlotte …’

‘Come on, my girl. Finished that paper yet?’ Merridew appeared at her side.

‘Yes, Mr Merridew. Just now.’ Josie handed it to him and he bustled away. She was left, startled by the news she had read, but at least it took the place of her worry about her future for a while.

That afternoon was Josie’s half-day and she went strolling in the summer sunshine. She cut a trim figure in her black skirt that nearly brushed the ground and her high-necked blouse, topped by a straw hat with a black ribbon. All were cast-offs, given to her by the Urquhart daughters and she had learned a lot about dress sense and fashion from Gabrielle, Mrs Urquhart’s French maid. Several young men took a second look but Josie was lost in her thoughts.

So James Langley had married and had a child. James was her uncle and his daughter was Josie’s cousin. It was strange to realise that she had a family so far away in the north. Now Josie noticed Betty Baynes was ahead of her, pushing a perambulator with the two Urquhart grandchildren in it. Josie absently quickened her pace as her thoughts ran on: A family, yes, but she had never seen the wife or the daughter and had only the vaguest recollection of the boy James had been when she last saw him in the Langley yard. While her grandfather – she remembered him only too well.

Betty Baynes was swinging the perambulator around to cross the road, taking advantage of a break in the traffic. Beyond her was a coster’s barrow piled high with fruit and parked by the kerb. The coster was bawling his wares: ‘Luvverly apples an’ pears!’ A motor car had passed and was rumbling away up the road while a cart loaded with sacks of coal was approaching, drawn by a trotting horse, its driver seated precariously on the shaft. But there was plenty of time for Betty to cross – until the car back-fired with a
crack
! like a gunshot. It was passing the cart and the trotting horse took fright, reared and threw its driver into the road. Then it broke into a gallop.

Josie halted, hands to her mouth, then hitched up her skirts and started to run, shrieking, ‘Go on, Betty! Get out of the way!’ Because the nurse had frozen in the middle of the road, clutching the handle of the perambulator and staring at the oncoming cart as if mesmerised. It hit the coster’s barrow and hurled it onto its side, fruit scattering and bursting across road and pavement, and came on without checking. Josie saw the terrified horse would run through Betty and the perambulator, spilling her and the children as it had spilt the fruit.

Josie raced on, her little straw hat blowing away unnoticed, as the horse bore down on all of them. She reached Betty just in time to seize the handle of the perambulator in one hand and plant the other on Betty’s back. Her impetus, and strength born of desperation, enabled her to thrust the girl and the perambulator clear. But then something, horse or shaft, struck her shoulder like a club and the world exploded.

Josie woke minutes later with a circle of faces above her. One face was nearer and belonged to a heavily built, tweed-suited man who was kneeling beside her. He held her wrist in one hand, his pocket-watch on its chain in the other. When he saw that her eyes were open he said, ‘Ah! You’re with us again.’ He slid his watch into a waistcoat pocket. ‘Your pulse is all right. I’m Dr Featherstone and I saw the whole affair. Don’t move, but tell me how you feel.’