The Gypsy Bride

by Katie Hutton

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Two

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Historical Background

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Welcome to the world of Katie Hutton!

  A Letter from the Author

  A Recipe for Spiced Crab Apples

  Memory Lane Club

  Tales from Memory Lane

  Copyright

  For Anne Booth – who insisted

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved . . .

  John McCrae, In Flanders Fields

  Last Leave

  Chingestone, Oxfordshire, 29th April 1917

  ‘I can’t stay out long, Charlie. I musn’t go annoying Grandfer.’

  ‘Oh, Ellen. He’ll cut you some slack, surely! He knows I’m due back tomorrow.’ Charlie leaned against the flint wall of the cottage and pulled her closer, but Ellen held back, her palms flat on his chest.

  ‘Can’t you pretend the old wound is troubling you?’ she said.

  ‘You know I can’t. “Lying lips are abomination to the Lord, but they that deal truly are his delight”.’

  The girl made an impatient movement, glad that in the dusk he couldn’t see her expression.

  ‘They’ve lied to you, Charlie,’ she said. ‘They said it would be over long before now.’

  ‘They haven’t said that in a long time,’ he said gently. ‘Please, Ellen, it’ll be a while before I can kiss you again. I want to remember your kisses. I need them in that place. You know I’ve given my word; I have to go back.’

  ‘At least tell me where you’re going.’

  ‘You’ve to tell no one, mind.’

  ‘Who would I tell, Charlie?’

  ‘Arras. Now please hold me and stop talking.’

  He folded her in his arms and kissed the top of her head, the way he always began. Then he lifted her chin and quietly fed on her mouth, easing her lips open.

  Oh, Charlie! Yet she knew even kissing like this was something he’d learned in France. A conversation in a dug-out, he’d said, with those boys from Poplar, who had laughed at him when he’d told them of their chaste embraces, the dry pressure of his lips on hers. Well, three of them had their mouths full of earth now.

  ‘Please . . .’ he murmured.

  *

  Three weeks later Ellen hid behind the curtains, as she always did when the motorcycle came puttering up the lane, as if not seeing its rider meant not getting the news he carried. But that day, swathed in her mother’s faded chintz, she could not help but hear, in a heart-stopping moment, the click of the latch of Grace’s cottage gate further up the lane; the sound she’d always heard just before Charlie came to call for her. She stumbled out of the cottage without shutting the door, and ran to where Grace Lambourne, white-faced, sagged against her doorframe. The man looked round, unable to disguise the relief on his weary face that he could leave this woman with someone else. He had other telegrams to deliver.

  Wordlessly, Grace held out the piece of paper. ‘Died of his wounds’, the telegram said. The two women clung to each other, but Ellen could not cry. She heard her own thoughts as though she had spoken them aloud. You must be strong, for Grace! Eventually, hearing a shuffling, she looked round, into the faces of ten or eleven villagers, her mother amongst them. Someone said, ‘I’ll make tea,’ and Grace stood aside to let the woman past.

  Ellen broke free of the little crowd, and ran unseeing down the lane, onto the path leading to Surman’s Wood.

  How long did he take to die? Was he left hanging on wire, or did one of his pals put him out of his misery? Was there a stretcher, with the Quaker men sliding about in the mud?

  She tried to picture instead Charlie’s face, pale against a hospital pillow, a kind nurse holding his hand, hearing his last words. Her own name, or ‘Mother’ – poor Grace, who had no other child. Alone, Ellen howled against a tree, pounding the trunk with her fists until they bruised.

  That evening the doctor called, and administered a bromide. A week later, he came again, and after he’d gone her mother came up and sat by her bed.

  ‘He wants you to go to Littlemore Asylum,’ said Flora Quainton. ‘For a rest. Only your grandfer won’t hear of it. Says you mightn’t get out of there.’

  ‘I wouldn’t care if I didn’t.’

  Yet the following morning, Ellen dressed, crept downstairs and twisted the prospectus for the teacher training college into kindling.

  ‘Ellen!’ exclaimed her mother, coming in with eggs fresh from the hens.

  ‘I’m just going for a walk.’

  ‘Just give me a minute . . .’

  ‘No, it’s all right. I want to go alone.’

  By the time Ellen returned, the card advertising for an assistant in the window of Colton’s Drapers had been taken down.

  *

  Many times after the telegram came, Ellen went to lean in darkness against that cottage wall, unbuttoning her blouse to the cool autumn air.

  ‘Charlie, oh, Charlie,’ she wept, trying to remember the touch of his lips on the secret skin of her breast. ‘Don’t leave me!’ But with each day another detail of face or gesture was lost.

  CHAPTER 2

  One day I saw a few blades of grass growing between two slabs of stone in the exercise yards. Young and green, they excited me like wine. I feasted my eyes on them each day.

  Fenner Brockway

  Lincoln Prison

  20th August 1917

  ‘C3.46! On your feet, slacker! Fight me, if you dare!’

  The voice crashed round the cell. The prisoner unfurled, stiff and confused, from the bare board on which he had been fitfully sleeping. The warder looked down into a pinched, swarthy face, a young man’s, whose cropped hair and obligatory beard made him look tougher and older than he really was. The warder knew little more than the prisoner’s number, but enough to hate him.

  ‘Sir?’ said C3.46, bleary with fatigue. He glanced up at the high barred window – pale dawn.

  ‘Talking not allowed!’ screamed the warder, and punched him in the mouth where he sat. The taste of blood woke the prisoner completely. C3.46 swayed to his feet and put up his fists. He’d been taught to box as a boy without ever taking to it, other than as a means to defend himself. He had the advantage of the warder in height and youth, but was faint from lack of nourishment. His opponent laughed, though his face was wet with tears.

  ‘No Queensberry rules in here!’ he shouted, and brought up his knee. The prisoner doubled up, his hands clutching at the agony between his legs. As his head went down, the guard grabbed the little stool that was one of the few furnishings of the cell, and smashed it over the prisoner’s cropped skull. That stool was the reason
the prisoner had only a plank bed to sleep on. A warder padding silently in felt overshoes had seen him, through the spyhole in the cell door, standing on it as he tried to look through the window bars; the offence had been listed on a notice he could not read. The blow brought him to his knees. He tried to rise, but a kick knocked him sideways.

  ‘Bloody funk! Gippo! Englishmen are dying for cowards like you!’

  The prisoner put up his hands in surrender, but got more blows to his head. Blood ran into his eyes. He had no thought of hitting the guard back; he only wanted him to stop. As he lost consciousness, he thought, I could not hit a man who is weeping.

  The tapping on the bars that had begun in the adjacent cells grew to a crescendo until the entire wing rang with it, but it was the guard’s screamed oaths that brought his colleagues running from their command post at the centre of the spider. He continued to kick the prisoner’s inert form, his rage concentrated on C3.46’s face. He still held the slop bucket he had emptied over his victim; his trouser-ends and boots were soaked and stinking.

  *

  C3.46 came round to an exquisite stinging above his left eye. He confusedly made out a white-clad figure bending over him, touching his forehead with gentle fingers yet nevertheless intently inflicting pain. The room beyond his tormentor gleamed white and indistinct. Heaven? But heaven surely would not smell so strongly of disinfectant.

  ‘Can you see me?’ whispered the figure.

  The prisoner murmured his assent – it came out painfully, ‘yesh’. He brought his fingers gingerly to his mouth, and winced. His lips were twice or more their normal size. He held his fingers near to his right eye; the other remained obstinately sealed. Blood.

  ‘Better if you don’t move. I’ll be finished with you soon,’ muttered the orderly. ‘If you’d stayed out a bit longer you’d have spared yourself.’ He was tugging at the skin of the prisoner’s browbone.

  ‘It’s all right, Rawlins, you can speak normally – and see if he can,’ said a voice nearby. ‘Helps us see what damage has been done.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. Can you tell me your name, prisoner?’

  ‘Shampshon,’ he replied. ‘Shampshon Luff-widge.’

  ‘Shampshon? Samson? Can you spell it for me?’ He was now dabbing at the patient’s face with antiseptic. It burned. Tears seeped through the closed lid.

  ‘Shpell? Can’t hread an hvrite.’ Despite the pain, the chance to talk was as welcome as running water. ‘Hvwhat happen’?’

  ‘Whitelam? He got a telegram last night. His second. He shouldn’t have been at work today; the chaplain’s taken him back to his quarters. You’d find it hard to believe, I’m sure, but he’s not a bad chap, mostly. I don’t know why he chose you; it could have been any of us.’

  ‘Ush?’

  ‘Yes! I’m a conchie too. Thought I was a doctor, did you? I’m a schoolmaster from Barrow-in-Furness. Gosh, you’d never think a face as battered as yours could show that much surprise.’

  The patient felt about him. He was wearing something loose, of starched cotton. He smelled clean – of tar soap and something chemical.

  ‘Try not to move too much . . . They trust me to do this patching up because I’ve loved to go fishing ever since I was a lad, and I’m a dab hand at tying flies. It’s made me good with a needle, but I wouldn’t recommend you look at my stitching just yet.’

  The prisoner passed his hand lightly over his head, his fingertips searching. His already close-cropped hair had been shaved. Tentatively he explored his cheeks and chin, mindful of bruises. His unwanted, eclipsing beard was gone.

  ‘Three lots of stitches in your skull, and another lot on your browbone. That’s catgut, that is, pure protein – absorbed into the body when it’s done its work.’

  ‘Hat-hut?’

  ‘No, not your dear old tabby. Cow’s tripe. Don’t know why they don’t just call it that. The doctor says your eyes will do. They’re colourful, but that’s only bruising. Fortunately he missed your nose. He’s broken one of your teeth; try not to chew on the right side of your mouth – it’d be painful. Lips are best left to mend themselves – with a bit of ice to help. You’ll not be kissing anyone for a while anyway.’

  C3.46 smiled for the first time in weeks. It hurt.

  ‘I’m afraid I had to shave your eyebrow. But you’ve been lucky. No bones broken.’

  ‘Phor Fwhitela’. He pwobly dunt like Shypsies, thass all. Shawl frong he losht hish boysh. Waysht.’

  ‘You’re right, prisoner. It is a waste. A bloody, senseless un-Christian waste.’

  *

  Three mornings later, C3.46’s left eye opened. His lip was still tender and painful to the touch, but he could talk almost normally, and revelled in the chance of conversation with Rawlins after three months of imposed silence. The whiteness of the long room still hurt his eyes after the gloom of the cell. Two other beds at the far end of the infirmary were occupied by a man coughing up his lungs and another who muttered to himself incessantly. C3.46 was forbidden to call out to either. The pain of his bruises was fading to a dull but constant ache, but whilst he could see clearly enough, sometimes he saw double. Rawlins frowned and talked of concussion. The conchie deftly washed him as he lay on the infirmary sheets, talking incessantly to distract both of them from the most intimate of his ministrations.

  ‘I do what I can for the poor little beggars, though I’ve been told often enough that as they’re destined for the shipyard I shouldn’t waste too much effort on them. That’s the biggest obstacle I’m up against in teaching a boy to think for himself. Turn over that way, would you? Splendid – no, don’t try to get up. I wonder sometimes if the boys miss me.’

  ‘How long did they gev you?’

  ‘Me? Ten years, hard labour. That was after going to France and a court-martial. I’d the death sentence read out to me before the entire regiment – but after a pause that was as long as they could make it, they told me it was commuted. The medical officer got the hard labour scrapped, though – my weak chest. If I’d gone on with the call-up I would likely have been rejected anyway, but me and my principles didn’t want to take that risk. I was brought up as a Congregationalist, you see, and though the chapel doesn’t see me much these days, some of it has stayed with me. Father comes to see me when he’s allowed, poor man, and gives me courage. Cup of tea, Loveridge?’

  ‘Oh please!’

  ‘I’ll get you a straw. We’ll see if we can’t feed you up a bit before you have to go up before the governor. When was it they put you on bread and water?’

  ‘Oh, days ago. Can’t tell. I missed the cocoa most of all. That pale meat they gev us, that’s horse, ain’t it?’

  ‘Yes – not to everyone’s taste, of course, but nourishing enough. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I was right not to eat it, then.’

  ‘You mean you’ve not eaten any meat since you came in here?’ asked Rawlins.

  ‘Could you eat a dog?’

  ‘Of course not. I have a dog – at home, that is.’

  ‘Well, we can’t eat horses,’ said the prisoner.

  ‘Good Lord, man, no wonder you’re so famished.’

  ‘I dunt know about them boys, bein’ boys, but I’d miss you, Rawlins.’

  *

  ‘Take off your cap, Loveridge, when you’re talking to me.’

  ‘Yes, sir, sorry, sir.’ C3.46 pulled off the arrowed cap and passed a hand nervously over his sand-grained scalp. The stitches were itching; Rawlins had assured him this was a good sign.

  ‘Do you intend persisting in this business?’ asked the governor, frowning at him from behind his desk. C3.46 stood in a raised dock, a warden with a truncheon either side. For a short, bewildered moment he had thought himself back before another tribunal. An assistant sat at the back of the office, recording the meeting in shorthand. The place was spartan: a book-case held a Bible and a few box files. The one barred window was as high up as a cell’s. But a fire in the small grate kept the room pleasantly w
arm, and its austerity contrasted oddly with its club-like smell of hair oil and tobacco. The longing for a cigarette made C3.46 feel even more light-headed.

  ‘Business, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t cheek me, Loveridge.’ The governor waved a hand over the papers on his desk. ‘At none of your hearings has any evidence of conscience been found . . . You don’t claim the Almighty and you don’t talk about the international brotherhood of the proletariat or other such rot – your justification is, quote, “Don’t know as it has anything to do with me”. You’re hardly an Englishman, are you, Loveridge?’

  ‘I dunt know what else I might be . . . sir.’

  ‘Are you an absolutist?’

  ‘A what . . . beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Evidently not . . . Loveridge, you cannot get out of your duty by saying it has nothing to do with you – oh, Bateman, walk round and get C3.46 a chair, would you? He’s not quite steady yet.’

  The warders grasped the prisoner’s upper arms firmly enough to bruise, forcing him to attention. Bateman put down his notepad and, wearing an expression of compressed irritation, left the room by a side door and shortly afterwards the door behind the prisoner was unlocked and a chair brought in. There was silence until Bateman reappeared in the office; the governor was writing notes as though he’d forgotten the prisoner was there. Then, without looking up, he said, ‘I don’t want you in my prison, Loveridge. As soon as the medical officer says you are fit to travel, you’ll go to Princetown Work Centre. Anyone you need to inform?’

  ‘No, sir. If I may ask, where is that, sir?’

  ‘You may. Dartmoor.’ The governor picked up a hand-bell, and the two warders turned the prisoner round.

  *

  ‘Cigarette, Bateman?’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  The governor leaned over Bateman’s match.

  ‘So, what do you think? Trouble?’

  ‘No. He could hardly write to the newspapers, even if he got hold of the means.’

  ‘But the Bolsheviks or the Bible-thumpers could do it for him.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s difficult enough for them to do that for themselves. The socialists, most of ’em, have an expensive education and he’s not one of their class, and he’s a Godless sort of animal anyway. The cat that walks by himself. If it did get into the papers, not even The Socialist could make anything of “nothing to do with me”. Whitelam would come off best, I should think: “grief-stricken father of fallen heroes goaded beyond endurance by cowardly Gypsy”.’