Mistress of Green Tree Mill

by Mistress of Green Tree Mill (retail) (epub)

  With a proprietorial air she looked obliquely up at David, convinced that there was not another man in the promenading crowd to equal him in his glossy top hat, long black overcoat and gleaming patent leather shoes. Clinging to his other hand was Georgie, blue veins shining through the pale skin at his temples. The girl’s face clouded as she noticed how white her brother looked. She tugged at David’s hand to attract his attention.

  ‘I’m worried about Georgie. He’s eating all the things the doctor said but he was coughing again last night. I gave him a spoonful of rum and sugar but he couldn’t sleep for coughing.’

  Georgie peered round at her as if she were betraying a confidence, ‘Oh, Lizzie, don’t talk about it,’ he said.

  Her father smiled. ‘You look after all of us, don’t you, Lizzie? You’re a woman before your time. What you need is a new mother. Would you like that?’

  She stiffened and said nothing. It seemed to her that the sun had gone behind a cloud and all her old fears returned.

  Chapter 5

  It was not really a surprise when Mrs Adams drew her aside a few weeks later and said, ‘I want to speak to you alone, dear. Come up to my boudoir.’

  This was a small sitting room on the first floor of Tay Lodge, overlooking the river. In it were lots of pictures, an ormolu-trimmed writing desk, two soft armchairs and an embroidery frame as well as several cabinets full of knick-knacks, stuffed birds in glass cases and ornaments made of shells. On one wall was a painting of Dorothy, but Lizzie had never seen it because Mrs Adams kept it covered with a black cloth.

  The child’s mouth went dry with nerves as she sat down at Mrs Adams’ bidding and folded her hands in her lap.

  ‘Your daddy asked me to speak to you – to tell you that he’s thinking of marrying again. It’s the right thing for him to do, Lizzie. A man can’t be expected to live on his own and he’s chosen a very respectable lady. It’s the best thing for you and Georgie too. You need someone to look after you.’

  The old woman’s face was anxious for she did not appreciate being the bearer of such tidings. She had a good idea of what Lizzie’s feelings would be.

  ‘But we don’t need another mother, I’m looking after them. Maggy and I try very hard,’ protested the girl.

  ‘But you’re only a child, eleven years old. You should be reading books and playing with friends, not worrying about your brother’s health and running your father’s household.’

  ‘I read books and so does Georgie. We go to school. I’ve got friends. Anyway, even if Father did marry again, I’d still go on worrying about Georgie,’ she protested.

  Mrs Adams shook her head sadly. She knew that Lizzie had few friends of her own age and the only children she knew well were Maggy’s family.

  ‘My dear, you must be sensible about this. Your daddy will be married soon and he wants you and Georgie to be happy about it,’ she said gently.

  Lizzie sat straight backed and frightened in the chair as she said, ‘Then why didn’t he tell us himself?’ She felt a sudden uprush of anger so strong it made her want to jump to her feet and start shouting. Only the awe in which she held Mrs Adams restrained her.

  Once back home, however, the pent-up fury broke loose in a terrible torrent. She stormed through the house like a raging whirlwind and broke her father’s finest Meissen china, a figure of a goddess carrying a basket of flowers on her head. Then she threw herself on the floor, screaming and drumming her feet until her face went purple. When David Mudie turned the corner of Shore Terrace he heard her yells and knew what she was crying about. Even when he saw the shattered fragments of the goddess he could not chastise his daughter because deep in his heart he felt guilt about his decision to take another wife.

  David Mudie was not an authoritarian father. By the standards of his contemporaries he was excessively indulgent to his children and especially to his eleven-year-old daughter, who could twist him round her little finger.

  His attempt to have Mrs Adams break the news failed miserably. His daughter refused to answer him whenever he mentioned remarriage. In desperation he followed her around, pleading, ‘Listen to me, my dear. I’d like you to come and meet Mrs Simpson.’

  She turned on him in a fury and snapped, ‘Take Georgie. He doesn’t mind.’

  ‘And neither should you,’ said her father. ‘She’s a good woman who’ll look after us all. You should be glad.’

  Maggy had relayed the local gossip about David’s intended wife to his daughter. The bride-to-be was a rich and childless widow whose late husband had left her a large bar in Castle Street. Though Maggy did not tell the children this, the gossips speculated that David Mudie’s reason for marrying Jessie Simpson was a financial one. The Exchange Coffee House was losing money because of his extravagance and inattention and there was some suggestion that the lease might be taken away from him and given to a more diligent applicant.

  Seeing his pleading face, his daughter’s heart hardened. ‘What do you want to get married for? Maggy and I look after you very well,’ she said. Jealousy leapt inside her like a fire. She hated Jessie Simpson though she’d never set eyes on the woman.

  ‘Oh, very well, I’ve no complaints – but I’m lonely,’ said David.

  His words struck home. To be told that her beloved father was lonely devastated her. How could he be lonely when he had Georgie and herself? That woman must have bewitched him in some way.

  ‘I don’t want you to get married,’ she said flatly. Her father flinched as he asked, ‘Is it because you think I’ve forgotten your mother?’

  She said nothing so he continued, ‘I haven’t. I’ll never forget her, but life has to continue. I’m marrying Mrs Simpson next month, Lizzie, and it’ll make me happy if you behave well. If you don’t want to live with us you can go to Bella at St Andrews. I know she’d be glad to have you.’

  She blinked in shock, astonished by the realization that the battle was lost before the swords were drawn.

  ‘I don’t want to go to St Andrews,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘Then put on your coat and come with me to visit Mrs Simpson,’ said her father.

  When Lizzie and Georgie arrived with their father at the Castle Bar, Jessie came sweeping downstairs in her best brown taffeta to welcome them into her over-furnished flat. Her nervousness made her stiff and awkward with the children. When she bent to kiss them, she was disconcerted because Lizzie sharply turned her head away so that the kiss landed somewhere near her ear.

  The cluttered sitting room compared very poorly with the elegant apartments of Tay Lodge in Lizzie’s eyes and her disapproval was very obvious as she perched on a prickly chair and turned aside every attempt by Jessie to start a conversation. The adults’ smiles were strained and Georgie’s anxiety to do the right thing ended in him spilling his tea over the carpet. Lizzie regarded the spreading brown stain with obvious approval and made no effort to assist Jessie in wiping it up.

  By the time the tea party was over, David’s daughter and his intended bride had taken each other’s measure and neither liked what they saw. When her visitors left, Jessie fell back in her armchair with a feeling of total exhaustion.

  That wee besom of a lassie is going to be trouble, she told herself, then her face softened as she thought, but Davie’s a fine man and I’m lucky to get him. I’ll break that lassie’s temper once we’re married.

  Maggy was waiting at home, eager to hear the children’s account of their afternoon out.

  ‘What’s Mrs Simpson like then?’ she asked as soon as David disappeared down to the coffee house.

  ‘She’s not very bonny,’ said Georgie. ‘She’s awful tall and sort of bony.’

  ‘He means she’s got a face like a horse,’ said Lizzie. ‘And she looks far older than Daddy.’

  ‘Well, she is older. They say she’ll not see forty-five again,’ laughed Maggy, who’d kept this bit of information to herself till now.

  ‘Then she is too old. The whole town’ll be laughing about us,’ said Liz
zie angrily.

  Maggy was anxious to prevent another outburst. She was sorry for David Mudie, who, she felt, needed a wife, even the skinny widow from the Castle Bar if that’s who he wanted. Lizzie had to be placated so that she did not upset her father’s plans, and a bit of plain speaking was necessary. Maggy pushed a stray lock of hair away from her face and said, ‘Och, it’s just jealousy that’s the matter with you. You’ve been queen of the house since your mother died. You canna stand the idea that someone’s going to put you in your place.’

  Lizzie was outraged. ‘Me, jealous? Don’t be silly. That woman’s a dried-up old prune. Why should I be jealous of her?’

  ‘If your father doesn’t marry her, folk’ll say it’s you that stopped him. He’s not making much of the coffee house now and the Castle Bar’s a grand howff. It would set you all up in style.’

  Maggy’s wisdom, culled from the gossip of the streets, silenced Lizzie. She knew it was true. To think of the marriage as one of convenience took the sting out of it a little, but did not make her feel any more kindly towards Jessie Simpson. The light of battle came into her eye as she promised herself: I’ll make her rue the day she married again.

  When her father climbed up the stairs that night, she was waiting for him. ‘I’m sorry I was horrid to you about Mrs Simpson. If you want to marry her, do it, but don’t call her our mother. She’ll be our stepmother,’ she said. She was not giving in altogether.

  During the preparations for the wedding, Lizzie seemed to go out of her way to make difficulties. She forgot to post the invitations until the very last minute; on the morning of the ceremony, she singed David’s best white shirt as she pressed it – having insisted on doing the job over Maggy’s protests.

  Eventually however she found herself in church but persisted in wearing such a gloomy face that the other guests felt they were attending a funeral instead of a wedding whenever they looked at her.

  ‘Do something about that child. Make her smile at least once,’ whispered the bride to the groom as they lined up to receive guests at the reception.

  David stepped back and whispered to his daughter, ‘Smile, Lizzie, please smile.’

  Raising her voice so that it was audible to the bride and the group of guests to whom she was speaking, Lizzie said, ‘Why should I smile? It’s not a Punch and Judy show is it?’

  Jessie looked around with such a thunderous glare that Lizzie did smile then, but not in a friendly way.

  After the reception, the possessions of David and his children arrived at the door piled high on a horse-drawn cart. Jessie was all smiles when it rolled up but her expression faltered when she saw Maggy perched on top of the pile.

  ‘What’s she doing here? You’re not bringing her,’ she whispered to David, holding him back by the arm as the carters trooped up the stairs.

  He looked confused. ‘Lizzie said she wouldn’t come without her.’

  ‘Lizzie!’ Jessie’s tone of voice made it very obvious what she felt about her stepdaughter. ‘She can say what she likes but I’m not having that ragamuffin in my house.’ Her face was scarlet and two deep lines marked the sides of her downtumed mouth.

  He put an arm around her shoulders and whispered, ‘I’ll speak to Lizzie about it. Don’t take on, Jessie.’

  His attempts at intercession were fruitless. Lizzie had yielded the main point about the marriage but she was not prepared to give in over Maggy. She looked at her father and said, ‘If Maggy doesn’t stay I’ll start screaming. I really will. Then I’ll run away. You’ll never see me again.’

  So Maggy stayed, a continual thorn in Jessie’s flesh. Lizzie had drawn first blood in the contest.

  Every day David heard his wife’s complaints: ‘That lassie’s a halfwit. She can’t go a message for me without getting it wrong. She can’t be trusted to dry a glass without breaking it. She’s a poor cook, she’s no good at ironing, she’s useless altogether.’

  Jessie’s anger was made worse when she noticed that if Lizzie asked Maggy to do something, it was done well. She was sure the girls were intriguing against her and an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility filled the flat above the Castle Bar.

  At first Lizzie would have given almost anything to be able to live away from Jessie, but the idea of abandoning her father and Georgie was inconceivable. She was convinced that Jessie would neglect her brother and make her father’s life a misery with continual nagging. As the months passed into years, however, she became so skilled at the game of needling Jessie that she would have missed her daily cut and thrust if she went away. The feud she waged against her stepmother became one of the most important things in her life.

  For her part, Jessie began her married life wishing she could persuade her husband to send his daughter away to her mother’s family in Fife. The girl was a perfect annoyance: idling around the house when she was not at school; refusing to help unless it was something that Jessie did not want done; continually talking about the grand place Mr and Mrs Adams had in the Perth Road where Jessie herself was very rarely invited; gossiping with that maid in the scullery… the gossiping was hardest to take because Lizzie loved talking to Maggy about David and who he’d been seen talking to in the street, especially if his acquaintance was a young woman. Those loudly voiced revelations fuelled Jessie’s feverish jealousy and when David came home she was waiting for him with reproaches. She berated him, saying that the bargain she’d made was not a good one after all. He was gallivanting around town and spending money like water; he loved his children better than his wife; he and those bairns were eating her out of house and home. She could hardly wait for the day when Lizzie was old enough to go out and find some work that would bring in a wage to help pay for her own expensive tastes.

  When the time came that Lizzie was old enough to leave school, however, Jessie fell ill. Lying in her big brass bed, she vented her wrath on the entire household.

  ‘Here I am lying sick and all you do is amuse yourselves,’ she accused when Georgie and Lizzie were preparing to go visiting at Tay Lodge. ‘You ought to go and live with your posh friends. You’re far too grand to be living here in Castle Street,’ she taunted Lizzie.

  ‘I’ll be moving out soon. Mrs Adams is going to find me a place in a hat shop belonging to a friend of hers in Perth,’ announced Lizzie, whose taste for the battle was disappearing now that her victim looked like being out of the contest.

  ‘You can’t go to Perth. You’ll have to stay here and help me now that I’m not well. You’ve lived on me long enough when I didn’t need you,’ snapped Jessie.

  Lizzie turned on her heel in a fury and swept out of the room. In the kitchen she railed at Maggy, ‘I hate that woman. She’s worse than ever.’

  ‘It’s because she’s having a bairn. I doubt there’s worse to come for all of us,’ Maggy said with hopeless resignation.

  Lizzie leaned back against the table, astonishment and distaste on her face. ‘She’s what? She can’t be! She’s too old.’

  Maggy looked up from the tub of water where she was washing dishes. ‘My word, you’re awful slow sometimes. She’s five month gone at least. That’s why she’s aye sick.’ Feelings boiled and burned in Lizzie as she walked with George to Tay Lodge.

  ‘It can’t be true. It’s just Maggy gossiping. It’s disgusting, a woman like her. She’s too old,’ she kept saying.

  Her brother listened in sympathetic silence for a little while but when she showed no sign of calming down, he stopped in the middle of the pavement and said, ‘Oh, shut up, Lizzie. You’ll just have to accept it. Stop being so jealous. Father’s her husband. He doesn’t belong to you.’ Though she knew her brother was right, anger burned inside her. If Jessie was pregnant, that would be her father’s greatest act of disloyalty to Martha’s memory. Worst of all, Jessie’s pregnancy looked like making Lizzie a prisoner at home when she was almost ready to escape.

  Maggy was right. Jessie’s temper did not improve. Customers drinking in the polished brass and glittering cut-gla
ss splendour of the Castle Bar heard her shrieking at Davie in their bedroom upstairs, ‘You only married me for my money! You’re idle, you’re lazy, you think you’re some sort of a toff and your bairns are as bad. I don’t see why my money should keep you all in style!’

  ‘My’ was her favourite word – ‘My money, my bar, my house.’ To mollify her, David told Lizzie that she would have to give up the hat shop idea and start working in the Castle Bar.

  ‘But I don’t want to be a barmaid,’ she protested. Her dreams were of something far more exalted and ladylike.

  ‘Want has nothing to do with it. You’re needed here now that Jessie’s poorly. Do it for me till the bairn’s born. I’ll see you’re well paid for it,’ he pleaded.

  He did not stay at home himself however but drove out every day in his smart little gig, waving his whip at friends and acquaintances, not coming home till late at night when his family were in bed. George also took to going out to unspecified places when he was not at school and Lizzie was left to help in the bar and cope with Jessie.

  When it was closed she sometimes put a chair out on the pavement in a patch of sunshine where she sat and indulged herself in nostalgic memories. She thought with regret of the cosy flat above the coffee bar and nurtured her memories of Martha, hugging them close like a secret.

  The new Tay Bridge was finished in the year Lizzie left school and though there was no grand ceremony for its opening, it irked her that everything could so easily be forgotten after such a disaster. The new bridge did not hold the same terrors for her as the old, and sometimes she would take a walk along the Esplanade to gaze at it and remember her mother. Looking at the bridge was like turning a knife in a partially healed wound.

  * * *

  A great rushing up and down stairs in the Castle Bar one afternoon made the few customers raise eyebrows in surprise.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked one regular, a clerk from a lawyer’s office over the road.