The Bad Penny (8 page)

Both girls mumbled their thanks and took the proffered treat and Patty said hopefully: ‘So you were here when the baby was left? Please, Miss Thornton, was it your hedge, the one at the front?’

‘I’m Mrs Thornton, not Miss,’ that lady said grandly. ‘All cooks is missus, young woman, as you’ll learn if you go into service like most of them orphings do. I misremember if it were our ’edge – wait a mo’, now I come to think, it were the privet ’edge, two doors further along. Why’s you so interested, queen? Don’t say you’re that babby?’

‘Yes, I’m that baby,’ Patty acknowledged, feeling singularly foolish. ‘But if it wasn’t your hedge, Mrs Thornton, how is it that you know all about the baby – me, I mean?’

Mrs Thornton chuckled richly. ‘Well, for a start, the scuffer visited every house in the neighbourhood next day, tryin’ to find your mam. And, of course, servants like to have a chat over the garden wall now and again, same as their mistresses do, so the news got around like lightning, I reckon. The scuffer asked us whether there were anybody in the house – maids, I mean, not menservants – who’d been acting kinda strange lately. Come to that, he wanted to know whether anyone had gone out that day and not returned until dark, but we couldn’t help him. In the end, he told us it were probably some poor gel from the slums who had chosen a good neighbourhood to leave her babby in the hopes that a rich couple might adopt it, same as in storybooks.’ She sighed gustily. ‘Only real life ain’t like that and you got left in that there orphing asylum. Oh well, I dare say it ain’t so bad, eh? I dare say you’s happy enough?’

Laura began to agree but Patty said, hopefully: ‘The food’s awful poor, Mrs Thornton. We don’t get cakes like the one you give us, not even at Christmas. Mostly, it’s bread and scrape and mugs of weak tea or milk and water. But we have scouse once a week and a piece of currant loaf on Sunday.’

Mrs Thornton tutted. ‘Well, folk keep telling me there’s a war on and I know there’s all sorts of shortages in the shops, though it don’t bother us, pertickler,’ she said. ‘But bread and scrape and scouse once a week… what sort of a cook feeds growin’ girls on stuff like that? I reckon she oughter be ashamed!’

‘I don’t suppose the cook knows that girls get as hungry as boys,’ Laura said timidly. ‘As for the war, I don’t think it’s made much difference to our meals. They’ve been the same for as long as I’ve been at the Durrant. But of course, some girls is luckier than others; they get grub sent in from relatives occasionally. Mebbe Cook thinks we’re all like that.’

‘Oh, go on! They know very well I don’t have no relatives, nor parcels of goodies,’ Patty said stoutly. ‘And the teachers don’t get fed what we get. Sometimes there’s lovely smells come out of the staff dining room, and one of the older girls telled me that when she’s on table-clearing duties she and her friends lick the plates before they take them through to the kitchen, ’cos the food’s so good.’

The cook tutted again and disappeared for a moment, to reappear with two more buns which she handed to the girls. ‘There you are,’ she said gruffly. ‘And if you ever gerraway again, I don’t mind if you come and give us a knock. Shortages or no shortages, there’s always plenty of good food in
this
house, and seein’ as you’re the babby what were found just up the road I’m a-willing to hand out the odd treat now and then.’

‘Thanks ever so, Mrs Thornton,’ the girls chorused. ‘And thanks for the buns,’ Patty added. ‘You must be the best cook in the world, and if we ever get away again, we will come and see you, honest to God we will.’

‘Well?’ Laura said, as they regained the road once more. ‘If the scuffer tried to find your mam, Patty, and didn’t have no luck, what chance have you got? I reckon we oughter give up and go back afore we’re missed. Unless you just look at the hedge as you go past it, of course.’

Patty agreed reluctantly that her friend was probably right, but when they drew level with the privet hedge a large boy erupted from the gate in hot pursuit of a football which whizzed past Patty’s nose, rebounded off the wall opposite and cannoned into her, making a muddy mark on the front of her brown gingham dress which, she knew, would be difficult to explain away. The boy, however, simply snatched up the ball and would have run back into the garden with it had Patty not resolutely barred his way, saying as she did so: ‘Oh, excuse me, but I wonder if you could tell me whether you live there, in the house with the privet hedge?’

He was a large, well-grown boy with a heavy, rather sullen face and mousy hair which needed cutting, but he said in an imperious voice: ‘What business is it of yours where I live? As it happens, I do, but what are you doing here, you nasty orphan brat? You aren’t allowed to come down Peel Street; your way home is by Ullet Road. This is a good area, this is, and my father told your matron, after that baby was found in our hedge, that he didn’t want scores of scruffy kids marching up and down Peel Street. So go on, clear off!’

Laura took hold of Patty’s arm and tried to pull her away but Patty stood firm, excited by the mere fact that the only two people she had so far addressed, not counting the maid, had known about the abandoned baby. ‘I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to come down Peel Street,’ she said. ‘But I’m trying to find out as much as I can about that baby. It was me, you see. Matron named me Patty Peel after the street and – and I was sort of hoping that someone might know something about my – my mother. I know it was night time when I was left and it was raining, but surely someone must have seen something, wouldn’t you say?’

The boy stared at her for a moment and then gave a bellow of raucous laughter. ‘You want to know about your mother?’ he said incredulously. ‘Well, that’s easily remedied; everyone hereabouts knows. She was a little slut working the docks who met up with half a dozen sailors a night and got paid in pennies for her services. If you were to meet her, she wouldn’t be able to tell you who your father was – it could have been any one of a dozen that night, I dare say. Why, she probably had a little bastard every nine months and dumped the lot of them; that’s the sort of woman she was.’

Laura tugged urgently at Patty’s arm. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ she whispered. ‘He’s just making it up so’s we won’t walk down Peel Street no more. He don’t know anything really.’

Patty, however, her cheeks flaming, did not move. ‘You’re a hateful liar,’ she said furiously. ‘Why, when I were found here, you were no more’n a baby yourself. I bet you don’t remember anything about it, not anything at all.’

‘Why, you cheeky little bitch!’ the boy said, now equally furious. He grabbed one of Patty’s plaits and swung her round by it, and in two minutes there was a furious fight going on with both girls doing their best to escape from their brutal attacker. A well-aimed punch from Patty, however, put a stop to the fight, for she struck the boy full on the nose and as soon as he saw blood spurting he clapped both hands over his face and, screaming imprecations at the top of his voice, disappeared back into his garden.

The two girls promptly took to their heels and ran all the way home, but as soon as they entered the cloakroom and had a chance to see the state they were in they realised they were unlikely to escape notice. Both girls had suffered in the fracas. Patty was blood-streaked and muddy, her dress torn, one plait unravelled and both knees grazed where the boy had flung her down. That the blood was not her own was one comfort, but both she and Laura realised that they would have to think up a very good reason indeed for the state they were in.

Even as they stared speechlessly at each other, the door at the far end of the cloakroom opened and Miss Dawson began ushering in her charges. ‘At least we aren’t late,’ Patty whispered, beginning to replait her hair, though since she had lost the ribbon she knew it would not stay plaited for long. ‘But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to get into awful trouble!’

As a result of what had happened in Peel Street, Patty and Laura were forbidden to leave the house for a whole month, and this in glorious summer weather, too. It had been obvious to both teachers and other pupils that something had happened to Patty and Laura, but before they could think up a convincing reason for the state they were in – not the truth, obviously – Matron sent for them. She told them that she had had a complaint; a Mrs Tennant, who lived in Peel Street, had complained that two Durrant House girls had jeered and called names at her little boy as he played with his football in the garden. She said that the girls had attacked him, punching his nose so that it had bled fiercely, and had then stolen his football and had run off with it.

Faced by this tissue of lies, the girls had done their best to explain what had really happened, but Matron had been so furious over the fact that they had abandoned Miss Dawson’s crocodile to go off by themselves that she had not seemed to hear a word. ‘Two girls bullying a little boy is despicable, but disobeying every rule and abandoning your teacher is almost worse,’ she said impressively. ‘You will have no tea today and on Sundays, when your companions have currant loaf, you will have dry bread and water to drink, instead of tea. I hope this will be a lesson to you.’

‘Yes, Matron. I’m very sorry, Matron,’ Laura said, sounding as if she meant it, but Patty thought that dry bread was not so very different from their usual fare and cold water very little less palatable than weak tea. Fortunately, she did not say as much but perhaps there was something in the way she compressed her lips which made Matron suspect that she was not as sorry as she might have been for, a couple of days later, Patty was called again to the study, this time without Laura.

For a long moment, Matron and Patty stared at one another, then Matron said in a neutral voice: ‘Sit down, Patty, I want to speak to you. I must tell you that I went round to Peel Street this morning to apologise to Mrs Tennant for what happened to her son. As it happened, I met young Master Lionel Tennant in the hallway. Far from being the small boy I had imagined from his mother’s complaint, I thought him twelve or fourteen and clearly quite capable of looking after himself. I asked Mrs Tennant whether she had other children, thinking that I might have been mistaken, but she assured me that Lionel was her only child.’

She paused, as if expecting Patty to say something, but Patty had learned, from her previous encounters with Matron, that trying to give adults an explanation which they are unwilling to hear does no one any good, so she remained silent, her eyes fixed on the older woman’s face.

‘Mrs Tennant informs me that you had been enquiring about a baby which had been abandoned in Peel Street some years ago and whom you believed to be yourself,’ Matron continued. ‘How did you come by this knowledge? It is not something that I usually tell my girls until they are twelve or sometimes older.’

Patty’s mind raced furiously. She had no intention whatever of disclosing what Selina had told her, but she realised that simply saying nothing would get her into even more trouble. Still gazing at Matron, therefore, she said steadily: ‘I guessed. You see, I’d heard the maids talking about how one of the children had been found under a hedge on Peel Street. My name’s Peel, so I set myself to finding out whether the baby under the hedge could possibly have been me.’ She tried a very small, hesitant smile. ‘That was why Laura and I walked down Peel Street, to see if I could discover anything more. There was a kind lady at the first house we went to, who remembered the baby and gave us a bun. Then I asked the boy–’

‘You asked Master Tennant, you mean,’ Matron said, but her voice was no longer quite as cold as it had been. ‘What did you ask him, Patty?’

‘I asked him if a baby had been found under his hedge,’ Patty said, glad to be back on the straight and narrow path of truth once more. ‘I said I thought I might be that baby, and – and he said some very nasty things, Matron.’

‘I can imagine,’ Matron said drily. ‘Have you ever heard the expression
curiosity killed the cat
, Patty?’

Patty, who had heard it many times and usually applied to herself, agreed that she had. ‘Only if you don’t ask questions, Matron, how are you ever going to find out anything?’ she asked, rather plaintively. ‘When I was first moved into Miss Briggs’s class, I had to ask a thousand questions or I would never have caught up with the other girls.’

Matron smiled. ‘If you hadn’t asked so many questions about the baby in Peel Street, you would not have been condemned to spend a whole month in the house,’ she observed. ‘Because you were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and doing what you should not have been doing, part of your punishment will stand, but you may tell Laura that both she and yourself may have normal meals once more. And in future, Patty, if you are tempted to make off again to satisfy that rampant curiosity of yours, the punishment will be more severe. Go to a member of staff with your questions or, if all else fails, come to me.’ A bell rang out and Matron got to her feet and walked over to the door, beckoning Patty to precede her through it. ‘There’s the dinner bell – off with you!’

As soon as she was able, Patty told Selina what had happened and admitted that Matron, though strict, had been very much nicer to her than she had expected. ‘She seemed to understand that I wanted to know about me mam,’ she explained. ‘And she didn’t nag me to make me tell more about how I discovered I were the baby under the hedge; she might have, I suppose. She never even asked which of the maids I’d heard talking about it, which is as well! Why, if I’m really good for ages and ages I reckon I might ask her if I could go round to Mrs Thornton’s place once in a while. She invited Laura and me to go back … and those buns were the best thing I’ve ever tasted, Selina! And because Matron listened to me, I wanted to please her. You like her too, don’t you?’