The Overlooker (29 page)

‘I felt the same. It was uncanny. When I knew he was following us, nowhere seemed safe. You thought I was behaving like a madman with the Redferns.'

‘He went looking for Dominic, didn't he? Harry Redfern? He wasn't just going to be a passive victim. He really wanted to change him.'

‘And nearly died for it.'

‘We'll see him this afternoon. And meanwhile . . . we've got this.'

She stood in silence, turning slowly to take in the ranks of the Pennines, the distant peaks of the Lake District, the glint of the sea in Morecambe Bay.

Nick followed the circuit of her eyes. His home country, on his father's side. Where generations of them had come to breathe the clean, keen air, far above the taint and smoke of the cotton mills.

On the way down, he was trying to think of all the questions he wanted to ask Uncle Martin this afternoon. He ought to take a notepad, write the answers down. After lunch tomorrow they would have to set off for home. This would be his last chance to ask.

Nick paused at the hospital entrance and glanced at Millie anxiously.

‘You're all right? About doing this?'

‘Of
course.
I want to see if Mr Redfern's come round. I like him. And there was no need for Mum to stand guard outside my bedroom door. I wasn't going to run away again. Well, I didn't know, did I? Nobody
told
me there was a madman trailing us.'

‘Yes, I'm sorry about that. We didn't want to scare you. It didn't occur to me that you needed to know.'

They asked at the desk and found their way to Arkwright Ward. Nick felt a cloud of apprehension at the door. He still did not know how badly Harry Redfern was injured. He had taken a massive blow to the head from the falling masonry. He might still be unconscious. He might have taken a turn for the worse.

Nick's eyes raked down the ward. He was afraid of seeing closed curtains around the Baptist minister's bed. He was just about to ask a nurse for directions when Suzie gave a low cry at his side.

‘There he is!'

Harry Redfern was propped up on pillows. His plump face was dwarfed by the huge swathe of bandages round his head. Nick's joy at seeing him awake was tempered by the fact that he was not alone. Bethan Redfern sat beside him. Of course, he should have realized Harry's wife would be at his bedside.

‘We won't stay long,' he told the others. ‘Just say hello. I don't know if they have a limit on the number of visitors. We don't want to look like a congregation.'

He led the way towards the bed. Harry Redfern looked up. Under the bandages, the brown eyes twinkled with warmth. But when Bethan Redfern turned her head, the expression on her hollow face was anything but pleased.

‘You again! What do you want here?'

Harry laid his hand over hers. ‘I'm sorry, love. I'll explain it all to you one day. When I've got less of a thumping headache. It's a long story. But don't be too hard on Nick. This is the man who saved my life.'

‘Dad!' gasped Millie. ‘You didn't tell us that!'

‘It was nothing much. I just wanted to get us all across that canal as fast as I could.'

‘And the police tell me that meant towing me, after I was knocked unconscious by a piece of the mill. Under the circumstances, you could have left me to drown.'

Bethan Redfern blushed. She held out her hand. ‘I'm truly sorry, Mr Fewings. I had no idea. When you came storming after Harry that day . . . and after we'd been through all those threats from Dominic . . .'

‘Harry told me you'd had hate messages. It just never occurred to me that ours had come from Dominic too.'

‘He threatened the children. That's what really scared me.'

‘Well, he's out of it now, poor boy,' Harry Redfern sighed. ‘God rest his soul. He's got the short cut he wanted to Kingdom Come, but only for himself, thank God.'

‘You really think that?' Tom asked incredulously. ‘That he's on his way to heaven, after all he did to us? And not just us. He'd have made half London radioactive if he'd carried through his plans for the bomb.'

‘
Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.
Who am I to act as judge?'

‘That's what he did,' Millie said. ‘Judged everybody else.'

There was a silence. Then Suzie said, ‘Look, we don't want to take up your visiting time with your wife. We just came to see you were OK. I'm glad it wasn't worse.'

‘So am I.' Harry smiled. Then, more soberly, ‘You had the worst of it, I think. Tied up under that loom, with a bomb maker in the next room.'

‘Never mind that. Actually, you're not the only reason we've come. We're on our way to see Nick's great-uncle. He's in the next ward.'

‘Old Martin? Give him my love. I'll be round to see him when they let me up.' Harry looked up at Nick. ‘I haven't thanked you properly, have I?'

‘There's no need,' Nick said awkwardly. ‘I'm only thankful you're alive. When they pulled you out of the canal, I couldn't tell.'

‘We were all lucky – except Dominic. Though we could have an interesting theological argument about what “luck” actually means.'

‘Harry!' admonished his wife.

He winced as he turned to smile at her. ‘Sorry, love. Maybe not this afternoon.'

Nick felt tense with anticipation as he led the way along the corridor. It was only a short step from Arkwright Ward to Haworth.

He felt self-conscious about the clipboard and notepaper in his hand. Would it have been better to bring a small portable recorder? He was new to this business of recording family history. He was afraid to trust his memory, or even the combined memories of the four of them.

They reached the door into the ward. Nick's eyes were going ahead, seeking the bed towards the far end with the frail old man. Would he be sitting up in the chair again, in his blue dressing gown?

His view was blocked by a woman hurrying towards them. She was holding a tissue to her face. He almost collided with her as she reached the door. Shorter than he was. Grey, permed hair. A flowery scent of face powder.

Suzie recognized her a split second before Nick's preoccupied mind.

‘Thelma!'

Nick's eyes flew back from the line of beds to the woman directly in front of him. With slowly registering shock, he took in his cousin's face. The eyes behind her pink-framed glasses were red.

A cold fear was knotting his stomach.

‘Thelma? What's wrong?' Though he knew.

‘They rang me. He's . . .' She gestured helplessly at the ward behind her. ‘He had another stroke.'

The line of beds swam into focus now. The curtains around the one where Great-uncle Martin should have lain. He felt a bitter grief.

Into his mind came the elderly man with his shrunken face distorted by the stroke. But, too, the sparkle in his blue eyes. The sense of the tall, upstanding man he must have been in his army uniform. The overlooker patrolling the mill with a keen eye for quality cloth. The boy spinning down the dales on his bicycle with the youth club.

A handful of precious memories.

‘Is he dead?' Millie's wondering voice came to him from a great distance.

‘Are these friends of yours, love?'

For the first time Nick became aware of the nurse following Thelma.

‘My cousin and his family.' Thelma's voice was surprisingly strong and steady. ‘They're staying with me.'

‘That's a good thing.' The nurse turned to Suzie. ‘There's a waiting room over there where you can get a cup of tea. Can I leave her with you? Come back when you're ready and Sister will tell you about the arrangements. I'm sorry, but you know . . . the paperwork.'

‘We'll handle it,' Suzie said. ‘Come on, Thelma. You could do with a sit down.'

‘I always knew, of course.' Thelma dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘After the first stroke. At his age. It's not as if I wasn't prepared for it.'

‘We're none of us really prepared until it happens. It takes a while for the reality to sink in.'

Nick's voice detained the nurse who was hurrying away. ‘I wonder . . . Would it be all right if I had last look at him?'

She looked momentarily uncertain. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Do you want me to come with you?'

‘No. That's all right. It's the bed with the curtains round, isn't it?'

‘Yes.' Still she hesitated. ‘Better not to touch anything.'

‘I won't.'

Suzie was already leading Thelma away to the seating area. Tom was following them. His hands were in his pockets, shoulders hunched. For once, his merry command of any situation had deserted him.

Only Millie still stood in the doorway. Her grey-blue eyes were very bright as she raised them to Nick.

‘Can I come too?'

‘Are you sure? You didn't . . .'

‘No. I bottled out, didn't I? And I haven't seen a dead person before. But like everybody keeps saying, it happens to all of us. Yesterday, it might have been me.' She glanced down at her bandaged hand. ‘I'm sorry now that I ran away. I should have come to see him when I had the chance, shouldn't I?'

He put an arm round her shoulders. ‘We all have regrets when someone dies. All the things we could have done and said, and didn't. Me, too.' He gestured with the clipboard in his other hand. ‘The questions I never asked. I guess we have to accept that we're not perfect, and just try to do a bit better next time.'

They walked along the ward, past all those other beds, where visitors sat talking to the patients. Eyes followed them.

Nick moved the flowered curtains aside.

Great-uncle Martin's face looked grey and sunken as it lay back upon the pillows. It had looked a little like a death's head when Nick had visited before. But then it had flowered into a welcoming smile. There had still been a merriment in his expression then, a ghost of Tom's. The eyes had been as bright as Millie's, sharp and full of intelligence as he warmed to his memories of the past. It struck Nick with a pang of both regret and gratitude that Great-uncle Martin had really enjoyed having someone to talk to who genuinely wanted to hear him reminisce about the past.

Just half an hour they had stayed yesterday. There had been so much more he could have told them.

Nick put his hand out and closed it briefly over his great-uncle's cold and bony one.

Millie stood quietly, looking down. ‘I wish I'd come. He actually talked to Millicent Bootle, didn't he? I still can't believe that.'

‘He went to her eightieth birthday party.'

She looked up at him seriously. ‘Do I have any other great-great-uncles?'

‘Not on my side of the family. You'll need to ask your mother about hers.'

‘I will.'

She gave him a grave smile and put her undamaged hand in his. They closed the curtains behind them and walked away to find Thelma.

T
he people, places and institutions in this book are fictitious. But I am indebted to many real-life people and organizations who have done so much to help my own family history research in ways which have inspired and informed this book. They include the following:

www.ancestry.co.uk

www.rootsweb.ancestry.com

www.freecen.org.uk

Queen Street Mill Textile Museum, Burnley.

Helmshore Mills Textile Museum, Lancashire.

The Weavers' Triangle Visitor Centre, Burnley.

My son, Mark Priestley, for the history of the Priestley and Tootle families.

National Institute of Medical Herbalists.
www.nimh.org.uk

Slater's Directory for Burnley, 1865.

My mother-in-law, Annie Priestley, née Tootle, weaver.

Edith Judson, née Tootle.

My husband, Jack Priestley.

Correspondence between the Priestley brothers of Goodshaw and Heald in Rossendale, 19th century.

www.howstuffworks.com
and others, for information on dirty bombs.

A Village in Craven.
William Riley. It includes a picture of a herbalist.

While I have given free rein to my imagination here, many details owe their inspiration to people and places in my husband Jack Priestley's family history.

James Bootle, handloom weaver turned herbalist – John Tootle of Padiham, Burnley.

Millicent Bootle – Robert Tootle, who was a cotton factory worker at nine.

Nick's grandmother – Annie Tootle, cotton weaver of Burnley.

Hugh Street – Moore Street and Perth Street, Burnley.

High Bank – Green Bank, Earby, Yorkshire.

The letters of the Fewings brothers – letters between the Priestley brothers of Goodshaw and Heald, including their refusal to pay church tithes.

The brothers who helped set up cotton mills in Russia – the Priestley brothers of Goodshaw.

Skygill Hill – Pendle Hill, Lancashire.

Briershaw Chapel, where the pews were carried over the fells – Goodshaw Old Chapel, Rossendale.

The musicians who carried their instruments over the fells – the Larks of Dean, who carried theirs to Goodshaw Chapel in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The sheep in the churchyard – Thornton-in-Craven, Yorkshire.

Enoch and Hannah Fewings' headstone – James and Alice Priestley's tombstone, Sunnyside Baptist Chapel, Reedsholme, Rossendale.