The Bobbin Girls (26 page)

Lizzie sat down wearily at the table and sipped at the scalding tea, not caring that it burned her tongue. Then she smiled the smile that Alena had always loved because it lit up her face and made her look like a happy young girl again.

‘I was overwhelmed with joy when I got you.’ Her voice grew soft as the memories flooded back. ‘Welcomed you as if you were my own, I did. I’d longed for a little girl so much it seemed you’d been sent in answer to my prayers.’

Alena struggled to take in what her mother was saying, but the words were becoming distorted by the sound of blood pounding in her head. Something about never feeling safe, Stella Bird interfering, Ray coming home after the war and being upset. Something shifted and tilted, staying just too far out of reach for her to grasp.

‘I know you didn’t always see eye to eye with your father but he was every bit as pleased to have you as I was in the end, once he’d grown accustomed to the idea, and couldn’t have been kinder.’

‘Stop.
Stop
! Alena fought for breath which seemed to have compacted into a steel ball in her chest. ‘Are you saying - are you trying to tell me that although you never were James Hollinthwaite’s mistress, neither were you my mother?’

Lizzie looked Alena straight in the eye. ‘Yes, love. Strictly speaking, that’s exactly what I’m saying.’ Unable to bear the anguish in the girl’s face, she refilled her mug with a hand that trembled, so that most of the tea spilled out over the table and she had to fetch a cloth to wipe up the spreading pool.

Alena leaned her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands. A thousand questions burned in her head but the roaring in her ears, the pain in her heart, made it impossible to speak. She could only shut out the sight of Lizzie’s face and try to make sense of the terrible words.

‘The housekeeper at that time was a Stella Bird. Funny stick of a woman, very well suited to her name. She came to me one day and...’

‘Was Stella Bird my mother? Oh, dear sweet heaven, she and James were lovers, weren’t they?’

Lizzie sipped her tea. ‘There were rumours, but James Hollinthwaite’s never been one for hanky-panky, as you might say. Treasures his reputation too much, so I couldn’t rightly say it was true.’

But if it were, then Alena could indeed be James Hollinthwaite’s child and Rob’s sister. Oh, dear God, the thought made her want to vomit. What would she have left if she lost her darling Rob? And it seemed she’d already lost Ma.

Her voice was thick with tears. ‘I see now why you never properly answered any of my questions. No wonder Dad never loved me. No wonder I sometimes felt the odd one out, as if nobody understood me.’

Lizzie was shaking her head, a deep sadness in her soft grey eyes, and a pain in them which stated she would have done anything -
anything
- to have saved her lovely daughter from this agony. ‘Everyone feels that way when they’re growing up. And in a houseful of men how could you not feel the odd one out? But I never shut you out, love. Never. I always loved you as me own, whether I gave birth to you or not.’

Alena tossed her head, angrily sweeping the tears from her cheeks. ‘How do I know that? Why should I believe you, when you’ve told me nothing but lies all my life.’

‘Oh, Alena.’ Lizzie looked stricken. ‘Don’t say such a cruel thing, lass. Don’t say anything you might regret.’

But Alena was suffering too much anguish to hear the soft words, or respond to the warmth of the loving embrace she needed so desperately. If ever, she thought, she could find it in her heart to forgive the deceit, it was certainly not at this moment while the wound was still raw. The woman she had loved as a mother now sat at the familiar kitchen table with her hands clenched tightly together as if in supplication.

Alena turned her face away, refusing even to look at Lizzie as she fired out questions. ‘You admit, then, that I’m not your child?’

‘Not in the way the boys are, that’s true, but nonetheless precious for all that. Still mine in my heart.’

‘Yet you kept it a secret all these years. Why? You should have told me. You should have.’ Alena was on her feet, anxiety making her voice climb with rising hysteria as she desperately fought to keep herself under control.

‘You’re right. I should have told you,’ Lizzie admitted. ‘I meant to, when you were old enough to understand, but then - I kept putting it off - left it too late.’ Silence while Lizzie confronted the reality she had avoided for so long. How she’d lived in dread of Alena learning she was not her mother after all. ‘I suppose a part of me hoped I might never have to tell you, that you might never find out. But, of course, that was too much to hope for.’ She’d thought Alena might be too naive, too passionate, seeing things only in terms of black and white, right and wrong. How could all the emotions and complications of that time be properly explained?

Now the girl had heard in a way which was a hundred times worse.

Somewhere, deep inside, Lizzie confronted a memory of Ray as he carried out his own investigations after the war, behaving coldly towards her, not wanting to talk properly about the situation. Coming home to find an infant not of his making had caused a great deal of trouble between them. She’d had a hard time convincing him of the truth, and he’d gone to endless lengths to confirm the validity of her story. And then, out of the blue, James Hollinthwaite had told him there was no longer a job for him, and naturally they’d been more concerned with finding somewhere else to live than establishing the identity of the parents of the lovely child whom Lizzie, at least, now called her own.

Yet the whole affair had left her with an abiding sense of guilt. Even seeing the two youngsters grow up so close had added to that guilt; their friendship keeping the link with the Hollinthwaite family and serving as a constant reminder of the high price Ray had paid. There had been times when it had felt almost like a betrayal to her over-sensitive husband and sorely tested Lizzie’s loyalty. But how to explain any of this to Alena, without making her feel even more rejected than she already did, was beyond her in that moment.

Alena could feel her heart hammering against her rib cage; anger boiled within her, knotting her up in a torment of distress. She could taste blood in her mouth after biting her lips in her torment. Lips that would never again taste kisses from Rob’s sweet mouth. Illegitimate. A bastard, Dolly would call her. The realisation of this alone was enough to dismay her, but she could live with that gladly if there could still be hope, still a chance that she and Rob may not be related. If only she could be anyone else’s child but James Hollinthwaite’s.

‘You
must
know something. All my life has been a lie. How could you do this to me? Who am I then, if not Alena Townsen?’

You are Alena, and always will be. My Alena. 1 think it was fate. We were meant to be together, you and me.’

‘But
who
am I.’

Lizzie heard the pain and fear in the girl’s voice, saw the hardening of the young face, and instinctively got up and held out her arms, dropping them helplessly to her sides when Alena made no move towards them. All right, I’ll tell you what I know, what Stella told me. But you have to remember that you’re
my
lass. Nothing will change that.’

‘Tell me everything.’ Oh, please don’t let this unspeakable thing happen to us!

Lizzie was moving to put on the kettle. ‘I don’t know about you, lass, but I need more tea.’

The tea made, and a mug warming their hands, mother and daughter sat quietly together as they had so often done over the years. The story took surprisingly little time to tell.

Alena learned that her real mother had not been Stella Bird, as she had feared, but some young girl who had got herself into trouble, perhaps with a soldier who never came back from the front. She’d turned up on the doorstep of Ellersgarth Hall one wild night at the end of October 1916, obviously in labour and suffering from having been on the road for some considerable time. There was mud on her clothing, but it had been a fine silk dress and a good worsted coat, not fitted for the harshness of a Lakeland winter but indicating that she came from a good family.

‘She was young and unused to hardship.’ Lizzie’s voice grew soft, filling with sadness as she became gripped by the tale she related. ‘Happen they’d turned her out because of her shameful condition. Or perhaps the family had an argument and the girl left in a huff before they had time to be reconciled. We’ll never know. There was nothing on her to give a clue, Stella said, not even a purse or change of clothes. The girl claimed to have walked out, taking nothing with her, and never gone back.’

Lizzie didn’t need to remind Alena of the time she had done very much the same thing.

‘The birth proved to be a difficult one which the girl did not survive. You were so small and weak everyone thought you would follow her before the night was out. But you didn’t. Against all the odds, you lived.’

Despite herself, Alena found her curiosity irresistibly stirred by this sad tale. ‘So what happened next?’

‘Stella came for me. We were living on the estate then, in the gamekeeper’s cottage, and since I already had four children of my own I was an obvious choice to look after a sickly bairn, until your future could be settled more permanently.’
 

Lizzie reached out and grasped her daughter’s hand between her own, giving it a little squeeze. ‘Only when I went to fetch you, I took one look at you, like a little peg doll in the laundry basket, I fell in love with you on the spot. You were the daughter I’d always longed for. I made up my mind, there and then, to keep you for myself.

‘The housekeeper didn’t like it, said the minute you were well she’d find another home for you. But I kept putting her off. You had jaundice, weren’t suckling well, suffered a lot of colic and were weakly. Then she left and, what with a war on, no one else had time to bother about one small infant.’

Tears were frighteningly close. Even now Alena could feel them running down her cheeks as if she no longer had any control over her own body. Was this all true, or another lie? What was she supposed to believe?

‘Ray came home on leave and found me with a bairn. That really put the fat in the fire.’ Lizzie gave a wry smile. ‘In the end I convinced him how it had all come about, that I’d been faithful. So he set out to settle the matter, to make you safe. But when he came home for good, after the war, he lost his job with Mr Hollinthwaite.’

‘Why? Was it because of me?’

Lizzie sipped at her tea, taking her time. What good would it do for Alena to hear of the disputes and recriminations of that time? She’d no wish for the guilt to live on into the next generation. ‘Ray was late coming back because of an old wound that had flared up, and Mr Hollinthwaite hadn’t the patience to wait. There were more men than jobs coming home from the battlefields, so he’d already taken on someone else. Ray never forgave him, though he found work quick enough at the mill, and earning more money too. The mill didn’t belong to James Hollinthwaite in those days. He bought it later. Ray had saved enough to get us this grand little cottage. And a bit left over to put everything on a proper legal footing, so no one could take you away from us.’

Lizzie smiled softly. ‘So, you see, life has its ups as well as its downs, and you haven’t had too bad a life with us, now have you? Or happen you think so. Happen you’d rather have been taken on by someone else?’

‘Oh, Ma. How can you say that?’ Somehow it was no longer a question of forgiveness. Alena knew that she could never have hoped for a better mother, nor one who would have loved and cared for her more. In a strange way she felt even closer to Lizzie now, as if she were the only certain thing in a topsy-turvy world. She was still her ma, always had been and always would be. Tears were running down her cheeks again, soft tears of love, and she wasn’t even bothering to wipe them away.

‘What’s this? Crying? And you my tough little tomboy?’

‘Not any more, nor so tough as I like to pretend,’ Alena confessed, the sad fate of the poor unknown girl filling her with such poignant sadness that pride no longer seemed to matter.

‘We’re none of us that, love. Are we still friends? Am I forgiven?’
 

Alena didn’t even protest when her mother wiped her nose for her as if she were a baby still, and then wrapped her close in a great big hug.

‘For ever and always.’

‘I’ll say this. Your poor mother, whoever she was, would be proud of the way you’ve grown into such a fine young lady.

‘Did you ever see her, this young girl?’

‘Nay, like I said, she were dead when I collected you.’ Lizzie dabbed away the tears from her daughter’s cheeks.

‘But you saw the coffin, went to her funeral?’

A small silence, the hint of a frown. ‘I don’t reckon I know aught about any funeral.’ Now the silence between them lengthened and grew.

Alena kept her brilliant blue gaze fixed upon Lizzie, willing her to say more, to offer some definite information concerning the existence of this young girl. Her thoughts churning, she plucked one out of nowhere. ‘Is that why you were writing those letters that time?’

Lizzie flinched at the realisation that Alena knew of this, must have picked it up from an overheard conversation. Was that one of the reasons she had run away? The pain she felt for her beloved child deepened. ‘I was trying to find out summat about her. I thought you’d want to know. But I’m afraid I failed, love. I could find neither the vicar who buried her, nor Stella.’