Ragamuffin Angel (3 page)
‘Me?’ John’s face was mottled with temper. ‘That’s good, that is. You were all on for this tonight, so don’t come it, Dan.’
‘You said we were just going to frighten him.’ Dan pushed the child into her mother’s arms as he spoke, his voice losing its harsh note as he added, ‘Take her inside, Mrs Bell. This is not something a bairn should see.’
‘Aye, an’ whose fault is that?’ The old granny cut in again, but she was looking straight at John. ‘You’ll rue this night’s work afore you’re finished, you see if you don’t. God won’t be mocked an’ He knows a black heart when He sees one.’
‘Mam,
please
.’ Sadie’s voice was agonised as she bundled the still resisting child into the cottage, turning in the doorway as she looked towards Dan and Art, who were standing together and apart from the other three, and said, ‘You’ll look after him? Jacob? He needs a doctor.’
please
.’ Sadie’s voice was agonised as she bundled the still resisting child into the cottage, turning in the doorway as she looked towards Dan and Art, who were standing together and apart from the other three, and said, ‘You’ll look after him? Jacob? He needs a doctor.’
Her concern for the other man seemed to inflame John still further, and his features were contorted as he said, not in a loud tone but with deadly intent, ‘You! You might fool the other poor sots but you don’t take me in, Sadie Bell. You set your cap at him from the first day you laid eyes on him, didn’t you, and all the while acting the virtuous widow. You don’t think you fooled anyone with that tale? A man’s only got to look at you to see what you are –’
‘That’s enough.’
Dan and Art spoke as one but as Dan pushed John backwards, away from the white-faced figure in the doorway on whom the smaller man had been steadily advancing, John swung his body up and round on his youngest brother as though he was going to strike him. And the intention was in his furious face for some seconds before Dan’s steady, quiet stance seemed to check it.
‘By, you make me sick, the pair of you. Soft as clarts.’
Neither Dan nor Art answered John but their unity caused the smaller man to grind his teeth before he turned away, gesturing violently at Gilbert and Matthew to follow him. And it was like that, without another word, that the five men left the clearing and made their way back across the fields to the road with their unconscious bundle, there to begin a grim-faced procession back to the lights of Bishopwearmouth.
Chapter Two
Poverty is relative. As she opened her eyes to the dim light of morning, Peggy Cook’s weary gaze took in the packed bedroom, in which there wasn’t a spare inch of space unoccupied. Aye, it was relative all right. She remembered her Seth saying that more than once and he hadn’t been a man to waste words on idle chatter. She thought she’d died and gone to heaven when he’d married her and brought her to this cottage, and she still thanked God that she wasn’t ending her days in the East End where she’d lived her first fifteen years. Lived? By, she hadn’t lived – existed more like.
She shut her eyes again – Sadie and the bairns weren’t awake yet; the longer they could sleep the better after the horror of the night before – and allowed her mind to drift back over the years.
She had been born fifty-five years before, in 1845, one of seventeen children born to her Irish immigrant parents, only seven of whom had survived to adulthood. Her home, a two-up, two-down back-to-back hovel in the East End, had been a place where foul language, brawling, drunkenness and thriftlessness was rife, the cockroaches, rats and bugs vying for food and space along with the human residents.
She’d met Seth hop-picking when she was a young lass of fifteen and he a grown man of twenty, out for a walk on his day off from the newly opened Ryhope Colliery with some of his fellow miners. They had married as soon as they were able. He had brought her to this cottage on her wedding day, and although they had shared it with his old mam at first – his da being dead – she had cried tears of thankfulness that night. And in spite of her only giving him the one bairn, their Sadie, he had loved her till he’d been killed in a fall at the pit five Christmases ago.
Peggy opened her eyes again, glancing over at the sleeping forms of Sadie and the two children lying in the double brass bed that had been hers and Seth’s for all of their married life. Their Sadie had kicked up a fuss some months before when she’d insisted on moving to the rickety, wooden bed in the corner of the room that had been Sadie’s before she’d left to get married, but to tell the truth it wasn’t just because Sadie needed the room, her being with child again. Her arthritis gave her gyp these days and it was more comfortable in her single berth without any stray elbows or knees catching her unawares; the bairns were restless sleepers like their mam, especially Connie.
Connie . . . Peggy’s gaze softened as it took in the small form of her granddaughter curled beneath the scant covers like a tiny animal trying to conserve all its warmth. In spite of Sadie having banked up the fire the night before in the sitting room cum kitchen – the other room the tiny cottage boasted – the bedroom was icy-cold, although the interconnecting door was ajar. She was glad her Seth had had two years with his granddaughter before he’d died; he’d fair worshipped the bairn. Her eyes misted over. Aye, worship wasn’t too strong a word for how he’d felt about Sadie’s bairn. She’d often thought that the countless miscarriages she had suffered all her married life, one after the other, had pained him more than her. He was a man who should have had a quiverful of bairns, her Seth, and certainly his grandchild was more like him than anyone else. By, the way Connie’d gone for that John Stewart last night . . .
The thought of the small stocky man with the gimlet eyes and hard mouth made Peggy move restlessly, and as though her unease had transmitted itself to Connie, her granddaughter stirred and stretched. But today there was none of the usual yawning and snuggling down again that characterised Connie’s reluctant starts to the day. Instead, the small golden-haired child sat bolt upright, her big blue eyes looking straight across at the wrinkled, grey-haired figure of her grandmother as she whispered, ‘Gran? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothin’ me bairn, nothin’. Don’t fret yourself.’
‘Is it that man? Has he come back?’
‘Heaven forbid, lass.’ Peggy crossed herself quickly. As a staunch, died-in-the-wool Catholic she was nevertheless full of myriad superstitions, not the least of which being the foolhardiness of speaking out your deepest fears.
‘He hurt Uncle Jacob, didn’t he,’ Connie said, and then as Larry, Connie’s two-year-old half-brother and Jacob’s son, grunted in his sleep beside her, she slid from under the covers on to the bare stone flags, squeezing between the side of the bed and the massive wooden chest and two orange boxes that held their spare clothes to reach her grandmother’s pallet at the foot of the brass bed.
As her grandmother drew back the sparse brown blankets and hitched herself against the wall to make room, Connie climbed carefully into the space provided. She had learnt at a very early age that her grandmother’s twisted limbs and swollen knobbled hands must be treated gently and with respect, and now, as she wriggled herself into position, she whispered again, ‘Gran? That man hurt Uncle Jacob, didn’t he.’
‘Aye, hinny. Aye, that he did.’
‘An’ he don’t like me mam, does he?’
Would that he didn’t. Peggy looked down into the sweet face of her granddaughter and the pure loveliness wrenched at her heart. Her Sadie had always been beautiful – a rose on a dung-heap, Seth had teased laughingly – and that beauty had caused her bairn nothing but sorrow in the long run. Now it looked as though this flesh of her daughter’s flesh was going to be even more lovely than her mother.
Peggy swallowed deeply. ‘No, he don’t like your mam, hinny.’
‘Father Hedley says we have to pray for them that don’t like us.’
‘Aye, well the Father is a good priest, a holy man.’
‘I don’t want to pray for that man, Gran.’ Small lips curled back from straight white teeth. ‘I hate him, he hurt me Uncle Jacob.’
Peggy’s mouth worked for a moment, but for the life of her she couldn’t come up with an answer to satisfy her granddaughter.
‘An’ the Father says we shouldn’t be hyp – hypo – We shouldn’t tell lies an’ all, an’ if I prayed for him that’d be the same as lyin’ wouldn’t it?’
Two enormous deep-blue violet-tinged eyes surveyed Peggy and again the old woman swallowed. This child of her heart, this child who was so like her Seth in nature, had a way of going straight for the kernel of the nut. For a moment the weight of this present worry that had come upon them was made the heavier for fear of how her granddaughter would fare in the future. The world didn’t like truth – truth could be stark and uncomfortable, it could reveal things that were better left hidden – and it was better by far to cope with your lot and keep your mouth shut.
‘Perhaps the good Father was sayin’ it’s our duty, as devout Catholics, to forgive, hinny?’ Peggy suggested softly.
Connie surveyed her grandmother unblinkingly. She didn’t think that was what the Father had been saying at all. She knew her mam had forgiven her father when he left them when she’d still been in her mam’s belly. Her da hadn’t wanted to be married, her mam had told her. It was nothing to do with her; her da would have loved her if he had seen her, but he hadn’t been able to think of that when he had left. And so he had gone, with the lady of the house where her mam and him had been lodging in Newcastle, and her mam had come back home to the house in the wood. And then her mam had heard the ship her da and the lady had been on had sunk and they were dead. And she had cried. Her granny had told her that her mam had cried buckets, and then that had been that.
But this, this with her Uncle Jacob, was different. A pain like earache came into her small chest and she wanted to press her hand against her heart to ease it.
The man who had hurt him was nasty, bad, like the thief who had been crucified next to our Lord and hadn’t asked for forgiveness even though he had been suffering something awful. And the way he had looked at her mam had frightened her, and she knew it had frightened her granny. She, herself, hadn’t been able to get to sleep for a long time after they had all gone to bed, and even when her mam and Larry had been fast off she’d known her granny was still awake. She’d known.
‘I hate him.’
It was an answer in itself and Peggy sighed inwardly.
‘Aye, that’s as may be, but you remember what your mam said last night, hinny? You don’t tell no one what happened here or it might cause trouble for your mam, an’ we don’t want that, eh? Your Uncle Jacob works for that man, or his father leastways, an’ their arm is long, lass. Aye, their arm is long all right.’
Connie had a sudden vision of a long curling tentacle – like the freshwater snake Joe and Len Potts had caught and brought to school in a bucket – with a hand attached to the end of it reaching out all the way from Bishopwearmouth, and she shivered.
‘I’ll go an’ put the kettle on, Gran.’ She slid out of bed again, reaching for her red flannel drawers and petticoat which she pulled over her rough wool vest and the linen smock she slept in, followed by her brown wool dress and calico pinafore.
In spite of the layers of clothing Connie was shivering as she padded through into the other room, there to pull on her stockings and thick black boots which had been drying overnight in front of the range, having got soaked through the day before.
This room was also crammed full of furniture, but the damp musty smell that pervaded the bedroom in the winter months was not so strong in here and therefore Connie liked it best. The room was small and square, the front door leading straight into it, and the fireplace was an open black range enclosed in a steel fender, in front of which was a small clippie mat set on stone flags. Under the window on the side of the cottage an old battered table stood, with two high-backed wooden chairs set under it, and next to that a five-foot wooden saddle with flock cushions. A large oak dresser, holding plates, dishes and cutlery, and a small casket on which stood the tin bath and within that the washing-up bowl completed the sum total of furniture, but every item had to be edged round such was the lack of space.
The lavatory was nothing more than a small stone outhouse some twenty yards from the cottage, with whitewashed stone walls and a scrubbed wooden seat extending the breadth of the lavatory with a round hole in the middle of it. It was kept fresh with ashes from the fire and raked out once a week by Sadie, and was a cold lonely place in winter and somewhat smelly in the summer.
Fresh water was carried from the small beck some fifty yards behind the cottage come rain, hail or snow. But the kettle was full this morning, as was the rain barrel just outside the cottage door, and within moments Connie had poked the fire into a blaze, mashing the tea a few minutes later and carefully carrying a pint mug of the black liquid in to her granny.
‘Ta, me bairn.’ Peggy knew that Sadie didn’t normally approve of the child handling the big iron kettle for fear Connie would scald herself, but today was an exception, and so now she added, her voice soft, ‘Bring your mam a sup, eh, lass?’
An hour and a half later Connie had fetched a can of milk from Tunstall Hills Farm, piled the sides of the range high with logs and fed Larry his breakfast of bread and dripping, and she was now attired in her coat and hat ready for the walk across the fields to the road. At the junction of Belle Vue Road, some two-thirds of a mile further on, she would meet Miss Gibson, a teacher from St Patrick’s school in the East End which she attended, and would be escorted long Tunstall Vale to the tram stop just before St Bede’s Park where the two of them would board the tram and ride the last half of the journey in comfort.
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