Shadow Baby (15 page)

It was a fortune to her, a sum so substantial it represented absolute security and she wished everyone she had left behind in the village could know the goodness of a man they thought had no good in him. She stood for a moment on the steps of the bank surveying the busy street and thought of what all the money in her possession could buy. There were shops lining the street to which she could give her substantial patronage - dresses she could have and a fur tippet and boots of the finest leather. She smiled, amused at this absurd thought, knowing she would never be tempted. The money was for her keep to give her shelter and food, to pay for a nurse when the baby was born and see her safe until Hugo returned. Her sole concern was to use it wisely. Her first task was to trace the only person in this city whom she knew to be a member, if a distant one, of the family to which she had once belonged. Her recollection of this woman, an aunt she thought, was vague in the extreme. Mary, she was called, Mary Messenger, and she had been kind. It was this Mary who had taken her to the coach so long ago and kissed her and wept over her and hoped she would be lucky in the place to which she was going. Mary had given her food for the journey and a shawl to wrap herself in and, if she was not mistaken, it was with Mary that she had lived up to then. Where exactly she did not know and

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could not fathom, however hard she tried. An impression of crowds came back to her but she could not grasp what this might signify.

Leah walked past the cathedral and turned the corner at the castle to walk over Caldew Bridge. A pub in Caldewgate, the Royal Oak, had been mentioned often by her relatives at the Fox and Hound. Messengers had that pub and it was from those Messengers she had always understood she came. Occasionally, one of these Carlisle Messengers visited, on their way to or from Newcastle, and she would be paraded before them and reminded she was ‘Annie’s lass, poor soul’. Caldewgate was a sorry sight, full of smoke pouring from the tall chimney of Dixon’s factory and from the trains shrieking their way out of the railway yards below the old wall of the city.

The people at the Royal Oak had none of that interest in her which they had begun to show during recent visits to the Fox and Hound. They looked at her belly and looked at her ring and smirked, and were disposed to draw her into the kind of questioning to which she had no intention of submitting. But they gave her Mary Messenger’s address readily enough. Mary now lived in Wetheral, a village on the river Eden some five miles to the south of the city. A washerwoman, she lived by herself and was never seen in Carlisle. Leah made her way to Wetheral at once, walking briskly, her spirits lifting as the river came into view, broad and fast-flowing with the winter rains. Mary lived on The Plains, a row of houses just outside the village, beyond the pretty triangular green. These houses looked too solid and imposing for a washerwoman, but there was a short row of terraced dwellings near the end and here she knew she would find Mary. It was not the most satisfactory of reunions. Mary was in her washhouse, mangling. She stood in her clogs turning and turning the handle and forcing folded sheets through the rollers with such energy that great streams of water shot into the tub below. All around were tin baths of washing in all its various stages and the air was full of steam and dampness.

‘I am Leah Messenger,’ Leah said. Mary did not stop mangling. Leah repeated her name but still the mangle was turned until at last a long sequence of bed sheets had passed through and were piled on top of others waiting to be dried. There was plenty of time for Leah to observe Mary. She saw that she was old, much older than she had expected. Her hair was white and she had no teeth and her body, though it gave every indication of a surprising strength, was bowed. Leah felt a little dismayed - this was not the kindly, motherly

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creature of her memory. In the silence that followed the mangle’s screechings and strainings she said yet again that she was Leah Messenger. Mary stared at her, no hint of welcome or recognition in her fierce face.

‘What are you wanting?’ she asked eventually. ‘I’ve nothing to thank any Messenger for, I’m sure, eh?’

‘Neither have I,’ said Leah. She had not meant this as a challenge or an attempt in any way to cap what Mary had said, but it stopped the old woman from fussing with the washing.

She came closer to Leah and peered into her face. ‘You were just a child, eh? When they sent you away.’ She shook her head. ‘Bad days, bad days,’ she sighed. She began to trudge out of the washhouse and in through the back door of the house. Leah followed. The back kitchen was dark and not much warmer than the washhouse, but there was a kettle spluttering above the fire where it hung on a big iron hook. Mary poked the dead-looking coals and flames leapt up and the kettle boiled in seconds. She made tea, measuring one level spoonful carefully into a brown teapot, and covered it with a tea-cosy. Then she sat rocking the teapot backwards and forwards, absently. Leah sat down too, without being asked.

‘Annie’s girl,’ Mary said at last, speaking as if to herself, all in a mutter, ‘poor lass. She died of fever when you were two and then what was to become of you, eh? The Grahams next door had you for a while, their lass had died and you were of an age with her and a comfort, and then he died and she went back to her folk and they wouldn’t have you, that wasn’t their own. What could she do, eh? Nothing for it. “You’ll have to take her back,” she said to the Messengers, and they wouldn’t hear of it, you were about seven then, a long time till you’d be of real use. I tried, I tried. Nearly a twelve-month I tried, begged them to let you stop with us but they wanted more work out of me than I could give with you under my feet and they fixed for you to go to Annie’s uncle but they lied, said you were ten and able to help in the pub, and I don’t know how you weren’t sent straight back, that’s the truth.’

‘I was tall,’ Leah said, ‘and I did work.’

‘Oh, Messengers always get work out of folk, eh? That’s one thing, always get work, worked me to death, then I saw my chance and got away, but not from work. Oh I work, work, no end to it, but not for them, not now. I manage, that’s what, I manage.’

‘Can I help you manage?’ Leah asked.

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‘Eh?’

‘Can I help you manage? I’ve got some money, I can pay my way and I can work hard too. I need a room. I can pay rent. Look,’ and she took out the little cloth bag the bank had given her and tipped the coins out on to the table.

‘Honest money, eh?’ Mary asked.

‘Honest money. I can pay rent.’ And then, in case Mary had not noticed, since she had neither let her glance at any time rest on Leah’s belly nor asked any question about her condition, Leah said, ‘I’m expecting, in February, I need a place to lie in.’

There was no formal agreement. Mary looked at the money steadily, until Leah pushed two of the guineas towards her, and then she grunted and got up and said that since she must return to her mangle, Leah must sort herself out. There was very little to sort out. Mary’s house, if it was indeed hers, which the more Leah thought about it seemed unlikely, was small. There appeared only to be the kitchen and next to it a room with a bed; up the rickety stairs was one other room only. It, too, had a bed in it but there were no covers on it and Leah deduced Mary slept downstairs. She sat on the edge of the doubtful-looking mattress and was relieved to find it was firm and did not smell. There was no rug on the floor, which had several holes in it where the planks had split. There was a trunk in one corner which she did not yet feel up to investigating and two other boxes under the window, both open, both containing blankets and covers. It would do. It would have to do. Some of the guineas could be spent, legitimately, on making this room more comfortable. She could scrub it and distemper the walls and make a curtain for the window. She could help Mary with the washing so long as she avoided lifting heavy weights. And it was temporary, only a way of getting through the next months until Hugo came and rescued her. She would be quite content here with old Mary, waiting for her baby to be born, waiting for Hugo to return, it would work out well.

And it did work out well, very well. Leah was content in Wetheral and Mary was more than content. The difference Leah made in the house was great and, though Mary never commented on this vast improvement in her way of life, she registered it within her. Leah was tidy and neat and a hard worker. She found ways of doing things that Mary had never thought of, ways of making the heaviest work lighter. She was ingenious and saved both of them strain and, though she was four months pregnant when she came to live with

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Mary, she did not let her condition hold her back from almost all the jobs to be done. There was not much communion between them at the end of each weary day but Mary grew to love Leah’s very presence as she sat with her eyes closed in the rocking-chair she’d bought from a woman selling off her dead mother’s furniture. She watched her rock and rock and was pleased by the sight of the young mother-to-be. She asked no questions and would not have had much interest if information had been volunteered - it was enough that Leah was with her, her arrival a piece of good fortune the like of which Mary had never known.

The baby was born in the middle of March when Leah was well past her time both by her own reckoning and that of the midwife whose services she had engaged. ‘We can’t leave it for ever,’ this woman said after two weeks of high expectation that the birth would occur at any moment, I’ll have to bring you on soon, my lass.’ But Leah, though tired, did not want any interference. Every day she walked down the hill to the river Eden and up through the woods, lovely with all the new spring growth, and with every step over the rough ground she felt her child turn and kick and knew it would come when it was ready. Mary did not like her to walk alone in the woods in case she went into labour far from help, but Leah was sensible, she took no risks. The first strong pain came when she was indeed far from home, at the very top of the high woodland path, but she was not frightened. Slowly, slowly, she made her way down, even pausing to break off a branch full of dancing catkins, and at every subsequent pain she stopped until it was over. Her waters broke at the foot of the steep hill leading up to The Plains but she did not panic, only shifted her shawl from round her shoulders to round her waist to hide the stain and then she continued, a little faint it is true, but determined not to rush. Mary, looking out for her, as she always did now, knew from the way Leah walked that she was at last in labour and went for the midwife before ever she reached home. The birth was not as swift as this beginning had promised. All night Leah laboured and it was not until dawn that the baby was born after a great loss of blood which had alarmed the midwife. It was a girl and she was small, not the robust creature Leah was reckoned to be capable of bearing. There were many distraught tears because it was not the boy, the image of Hugo, that she had desired. But she requested pencil and paper - an envelope

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had been prepared long since - and wrote the news of the child’s safe arrival upon it.

After that had been done, it was only a matter of waiting.

THE HABIT of obedience was so natural to Hazel that it took a mighty effort for her to query an order or instruction. This had always made her popular with teachers and much loved by her parents and relatives but, not surprisingly, except to Hazel herself, it caused problems with her siblings and contemporaries. ‘Why do you always do what you’re told?’ they asked her angrily and were exasperated that she did not even understand the question. It was effortless for her to do what she was told since she automatically respected authority. Life to her was simple. It was governed by laws and rules which had been designed to protect her and she saw no reason to reject them. She enjoyed being obedient, and quick in her obedience, not because of the praise she earned, the frequent ”good girl’, but because of the sense this gave her of everything being controlled.

This made her pregnancy at seventeen the most astonishing and unbelievable occurrence. Her mother could not stop herself in the first instance from saying, ‘Hazel, are you sure?’ and she did not mean was her daughter sure of her condition but rather was she sure she had had sexual intercourse at all. She had warned Hazel of its dangers, of the horror of an unwanted pregnancy, at an early age; her daughter being such an obedient girl, she had hardly thought it necessary to go on reinforcing this warning. Hazel was only a schoolgirl and a model one at that. Her A-level results had been better than expected and both her parents were eager for her to go to university. She had not yet gone out much into the world and so far as her mother was aware knew no boys beyond her brothers and their friends whom she only ever saw in their company. It was simply extraordinary to think of Hazel having sex, and Mrs

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Walmsley had to block from her mind the vision she suddenly had, of her daughter crushed under some oaf. Because, of course, it must have been some brutish oaf, whatever Hazel said to the contrary. She would have told her mother the name of her seducer but this was banned. No names were to be divulged. A university place could be deferred. And nobody, nobody, was to know, not even her best friends.

It was easy for Hazel to obey this order. She had no best friends, no girls with whom she had intimate conversations. She was a solitary girl, self-contained, who at her boarding school made no lasting alliances. Since she was pretty and gentle-natured she was perfectly attractive to others but she resisted all efforts to involve her in relationships. This was noted by her teachers, who would write pointed comments on her reports about her failure to mix. They concluded that Hazel’s problem was twofold: she was considered a goody-goody by her peers, and she was a true loner, best left to get on with life as she wished, by herself. So far as could be judged, she was not unhappy, nor did she appear shy and reserved. She spoke to other girls quite freely and joined in games and other activities but preferred not to carry friendship any further.