The Daughters of Ironbridge

by Mollie Walton

  From that day forward, Anny did all she could to avoid the young master, but somehow he always contrived some way to be near her.

  It was just a few days later when she saw Cyril hanging around outside the office at home time. Shaking at the thought of her long walk alone through the forest, she asked Mr B if she could stay behind to do some extra paperwork.

  ‘But you’ve done more than your fair share today, my dear,’ said Mr B. ‘You run along home.’

  She turned and eyed the courtyard nervously, hoping his figure had gone, but there he was, kicking about a stone, hands in pockets, waiting, waiting for something. Or someone. Mr B joined her at the door and then said, ‘I see.’

  He pulled the door to and said to Anny, ‘Wait here for a moment, then you will see that you can go home soon, unmolested.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Anny, so grateful she wanted to cry.

  Mr B smiled and a glance was exchanged between him and his wife, who came to Anny and asked after her mother and father. Anny answered politely, yet her attention was on Mr B, who had gone outside and was talking to Cyril. The boy looked annoyed as he looked in her direction. Anny flinched at the expression on his face, as if burned by it. But Cyril did leave, and soon he and Mr B were gone behind the line of trees that led up to the big house.

  ‘Off you go now, Anny. Don’t dilly-dally on the way. Quick march home,’ said Mrs B, a knowing look in her eye.

  ‘I will. Thank you, ma’am,’ said Anny and Mrs B looked down at her kindly, yet her eyes were worried.

  Anny ran home that evening, a stray twig scratching her face as she rushed through the woods to the safety of home. All the way, her mind twisted in knots. She must work out a way to escape this creature, this fly in the ointment. Her job at the office had been like a gift from heaven, so happy and fulfilled she felt. But then there was Cyril. She sensed he could ruin her happiness, every last drop of it. She wished he were an insect she could squash beneath the heel of her boot. If only. She knew there was no way to avoid him. He was a gatekeeper for the next stage of her life and she had to work out how to charm him, evade him or destroy him. Surely there must be a way.

  She could not eat much that night, and felt sick all evening. She said she had a bad belly and went to bed early. She wanted to tell her mother and father about Cyril, about his strange looks and his declaration, but how could she frame it? She did not know how to explain it to them. It shamed her. And anyway, what could they do about it? What could anyone do?

  She kept her candle alight to write a letter to Peggy. It always cheered her to write to her friend. Peggy, dear Peggy. So nice and caring, so interesting and interested. So different from her elder brother; how could they be siblings and turn out so opposing, like sun and moon? She knew Peggy hated Cyril. Perhaps she could write to her about Cyril’s unwanted attentions, see if his sister could reason with him. But she knew it was hopeless. Peggy feared Cyril even more than she did. She put her pencil down, the letter unwritten.

  But if Peggy knew her friend was in danger from Cyril, the kind of danger that the poor maid Lucy had suffered in the woods, surely she would do something? Anny decided that a letter was not the place to approach this. It must be explained to Peggy face to face. It needed to be somewhere away from the office, away from the big house or even the woods, in case Cyril found them on one of his roaming walks. She decided on a plan and began to write, new hope fuelling her tired fingers.

  Chapter 7

  Dearest Peggy,

  I am considering that it is high time we meet up again as friends do. I also wish to speak to you of a private matter that would be best away from your home or even the woods. I cannot explain by letter but all will become clear when I see you. I am wondering if you would like to try a small adventure. If I meet you by our fairy tree, I could bring for you some clothing such as an ordinary working girl of my circle may wear, and you could use this to dress in. As you never come to the village, no one will recognise you. Then we could go to my house and I would introduce you to all as another girl who works at Mr B’s office. They would not know the difference and would be accepting of it if I explained it right. I think this would be fun, and would allow us to talk freely away from the big house and my work, and away from other prying ears. It could be such fun, and I imagine it would amuse you to dress up and to see where I live and my neighbours. You are always so nosy about such things in your letters, which I find most curious as I cannot imagine what a young lady like yourself could possibly find interesting in my way of life, but indeed your many questions on the subject convince me of this.

  What do you say to my plan, Peggy? Are you game for such a thing?

  Yours sincerely and with great friendship always,

  Anny

  Margaret’s delight could barely be contained. A ‘small adventure’, Anny had called it. Nothing could be further from the truth for Margaret. It was the greatest adventure of her life so far, bar none! To not only escape her home and environs, to dress up in the costume of another class, to meet new people and pretend to be another. Another name, another girl, another life. It was the most thrilling idea she could imagine. At breakfast on the Saturday morning, she almost gave herself away by laughing aloud when spooning out her eggs. She could barely eat, but knew she had to keep up appearances. Nobody cared where she was most of the time or what she was doing. Cyril was busy with their father and Queenie had a bad chest and was staying in bed, ringing her bell commandingly for Jenkins to bring warm compresses and hot lemon drinks at regular intervals. Everything was perfect. She passed the morning in a frenzy of anticipation. Margaret found her least fussy dress and smallest bonnet with the least number of ribbons to tie to keep it in place. At lunchtime she asked for lunch in her room, tied it up in a cloth and left the house by the back stairs.

  It was November and unseasonably warm outside. She was glad of this, as the thought of shedding her coat and dress and putting on Anny’s clothes – whatever on earth Anny had found for her to wear – would be a chilly business in the woods on a normal November day. In the shade it felt brisk, yet the sun was out and the feel of it on her face was good and warm. She loved the creaking of the tree boughs and the slow splash of heavy fish in the river beyond, the bird calls of alarm as she passed by and then the unmistakable sound of her friend, calling her name, the name only her dear friend reserved for her.

  ‘Peggy! Over here!’ Anny stood, a bundle in her arms, in the midst of a circle of trees just beyond their fairy oak. She had chosen her spot well, as it afforded a little cover from the elements and any passing strangers, though they rarely saw walkers here.

  ‘Anny!’ called Margaret, beside herself with excitement, breaking into a run and nearly tripping over some tree roots in her rush to see her friend.

  Anny placed the bundle on the ground as Margaret approached, then the girls threw their arms around each other, laughing and laughing. It was so good to see each other!

  ‘Those ringlets,’ Anny said and tutted. ‘They shall never pass for a working lass. What were you thinking, putting those in today?’

  Margaret’s hand went to feel one of her sausage curls defensively. ‘Royce does this with my hair every day. One cannot arouse suspicion by changing one’s routine for no good reason.’

  ‘Who’s Royce again?’

  ‘My maid, of course.’

  Anny laughed, a rich, throaty laugh like a boy. ‘Well, of course, it was my maid’s day off, hence my locks resemble a fox dragged through a hedge backwards! One canna get a reliable maid these days, can one?’

  ‘You are mocking me!’ cried Margaret, good-naturedly, though she was a little affronted.

  ‘I am, I am. It is my job to laugh at the rich and your job to take it. It is the way of things. Now then, let’s get those fine clothes off and here’s my cousin’s dress. She is away with family and I borrowed it from her closet. Here, let’s dress your hair too. I’ll pin it back up and hide those ringlets. Dunna fuss now. Dear to goodness
, these ribbons take an age to undo.’

  ‘Oh, you are a scold!’ cried Margaret, laughing, poking Anny in the side to make her laugh, as they pulled off her clothes. The cousin’s dress was of a rough brown checked material but was a decent enough fit. There was a shawl of beige and dark green, so soft to the touch that Margaret held it to her cheek. There were stout boots and a plain bonnet, Anny re-dressing Margaret’s hair to take some of the lady out of it. Bonnet on, boots on and Anny stood looking her up and down.

  ‘We’ll have to hope nobody eyes your fine stockings. But other than that, you’ll do. Oh, but we need a name for you. Something ordinary.’

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘Yes, Mary will do. Mary . . . Brown. That’s the dullest name I ever heard.’

  ‘Mary Brown it is,’ said Margaret, thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what Mary Brown’s life is like.’

  ‘Oh, awful,’ said Anny. ‘She’s beaten every day at noon by her father, a terrible drinker. Her mother is on the streets of Shoosby and thrown in prison for doing terrible things with rich gentlemen. She has five younger sisters who all rely on her weekly pennies from Mr B’s office to survive, and Mary Brown cooks them cabbage soup every night of the week so they all have stomach cramps and fart themselves to sleep.’

  They fell about laughing at that, so much so that Margaret got a stitch.

  They stashed Margaret’s rich girl clothes beneath a bush in the little copse she’d changed in, then linked arms and walked on through the woods towards the tiny hamlet that Anny called home. All the way they talked and talked, a rushing river of words. As Margaret talked, she glanced at her friend and saw she was frowning at her.

  ‘What is it, Anny?’

  ‘That voice of yours, the words you use. Too much governess talk for this lot. You’ll have to curb it. Use a bit of local talk. Now then, instead of How are you? you say Ow bist?’

  ‘How be-ist?’ attempted Margaret.

  ‘Well, just say it quicker. And when you wanna say going to you wanna say gunna, and when you wanna say want to, you wanna say wanna. Like, you might say, I’m gunna wanna do that after. You try it.’

  Margaret looked at her friend’s eager face and wanted so very much to please her. ‘I’m gur-ner wur-ner do that arrfter.’

  Anny’s face was a complete blank. ‘I think it’s best all round if you just keep your mouth shut!’

  At that, Margaret laughed and agreed, ‘You know best, Anny.’

  They went on their way. Margaret did not want to let her friend down. She decided to play the shy card – she could do that. She knew it well.

  ‘Here we are!’ cried Anny, as they quickened their step down an incline. Ahead of them was a shambling collection of huts and small houses along the riverbank, mostly housing ironworkers and some miners, some brickmakers and a few random others. Anny’s neighbours were hanging clothes out to dry, feeding pigs, collecting eggs, smoking pipes, talking, shouting at the children. A girl saw the two of them coming and shouted out to Anny, asking who the stranger was. Anny said simply, ‘From the office.’

  ‘Another’un who never uses her hands, is it?’ shouted the girl.

  Anny turned to Margaret and said, ‘They think I reckon I’m big-sorted because I dunna do hard labour anymore.’ Then Anny turned back to her friends and called out, ‘Try writing a letter without using your hands!’

  Margaret marvelled at Anny’s bravery, shouting at her friends like that. There were a few retorts and shakings of the head and hand gestures. It was all good-natured banter but something that Margaret had never experienced. She may as well have been on the moon. This was a world where people shouted at each other for fun. The only shouting in her house was in anger and usually preceded violence: a slap across the mouth, a verbal insult. You’re a great disappointment. You’re an embarrassment to this family. You killed your mother. And so forth. She really would rather be Mary Brown, for all her flatulent sisters.

  ‘Day off from pushing a pen, is it, Anny?’ said a boy behind them. The girls turned to see a tall blond lad, hands in pockets, smiling at Anny. ‘What terrible hard work it must be.’

  ‘Oh, it is, Peter Malone. Those pens are awful heavy.’

  ‘I’m sure. I warrant those hands are nice and soft, with no washing done or ironstone picking. I warrant they’re soft as kitten ears.’

  ‘You’ll never know!’ laughed Anny. ‘I wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole!’

  Peter Malone glanced in Margaret’s direction, then stepped closer to Anny and whispered to her, loud enough for Margaret to catch it, ‘A kiss is out of the question, then?’

  ‘Get off with you, hobbety-hoy!’ cried a good-natured voice close by and Margaret turned to see a woman with flushed cheeks and broad, strong forearms, hands on her hips. Meanwhile, Peter Malone slunk off in response, grinning all the while. The cheek! The way these people spoke to one another! It was shocking. It was also thrilling.

  Anny said, ‘This is my mother. This is Mary Brown, who works at Mr B’s office.’

  Margaret was about to bob down in a curtsey when she remembered Mary Brown and said quietly, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Is that something a lower-class girl would say?

  ‘What’s for tea, Mother?’ said Anny. Margaret sensed she was changing the subject to distract her mother’s curious gaze.

  ‘Why, it’s two jumps to the pantry door, Anny. Now run along, you lasses.’

  Margaret felt she had evaded capture, thanking providence that Mr Woodvine was doing his Saturday shift at the furnace and was not due home until teatime. If anyone might recognise her as the young lady of the big house, it might be him, though she doubted it. How much attention was paid by everyone to her on her rare trips out of the house, she imagined it was little if any.

  Anny chatted merrily to Margaret for a while about the different families who lived in her row of houses and what they were like, what jobs they did, tittle-tattle and gossip. Then they spent some time watching the little ones play a game of jacks that they’d fashioned from old animal bones found in the woods. Then, a man came from one of the little houses, an older man, dressed in plain clothes, the telltale flat-brimmed hat of a Quaker bobbing past them. Margaret saw that behind him toddled a very young child, maybe a year old, its arms outstretched, its hands opening and closing and its face upturned in delight towards the Quaker man. The child called out and he turned around, picked the child up and whispered in its ear, carrying it back to the cottage as it squirmed and giggled in his embrace. At the door stood a woman around the same advanced age. They were perhaps in their sixties, both white-haired. He gave the child to the woman and went on his way.

  Margaret thought of Queenie and wondered if she’d ever carried her granddaughter in her arms. Again, that sense of deflation, that she would rather have Mary Brown’s life any day of the week than her own. ‘What nice grandparents,’ she observed to Anny.

  ‘Oh, not grandparents but parents,’ said Anny.

  ‘Indeed?’ questioned Margaret, intrigued. ‘But, their age?’

  ‘Well, they adopted her. The baby came in recent months to live here. The Quaker family have taken it in. They have a grown-up son, a miner. Nobody knows who the baby belongs to and tongues do wag about it. But they are such good, caring people that nobody really minds, and so the villagers have taken the child to heart as one of us.’

  Margaret thought, It must be their son’s child, surely, born out of wedlock and brought from the mother. She watched the old woman take up the child. Ah, it was pretty, golden-haired with a laughing face.

  ‘Anny, wonna you help with this a minute?’ called Mrs Woodvine and Anny trotted off to her mother, who was doing something with a knife to a heap of turnips. Margaret had not the first clue how to deal with a turnip, and anyway, she did not want to engage in conversation with Mrs Woodvine too much, lest she give herself away. Also, she found herself drawn to the Quaker family and wanted to continue watching them. She wandered towards their house, listening to the child’s swe
et laughter. The woman was chucking her under the chin and talking gently to her.

  ‘Come ’ere, little’un. Weer’st thee bin, eh? What’s thee bin doin’? Me little ducky egg.’

  Did anyone ever speak so lovingly to me? she wondered. The woman looked up as Margaret approached. Margaret stopped, unaware that she had even walked over there, so lost in the reverie was she.

  ‘Good day,’ said the woman.

  ‘Erm . . .’ Margaret cleared her throat. ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘A friend of the Woodvines, I see.’

  ‘Yes, of Anny’s. We work together.’

  The toddler was staring at Margaret now, an uncertain hand grasping at her adoptive mother’s apron for reassurance.

  ‘What is her name?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘This be Martha,’ said the woman. ‘And I be Hannah Beddoes.’

  ‘I’m Margaret,’ said Margaret. ‘No! I am not. I am Mary! Mary Brown.’

  Hannah Beddoes looked amused, then replied, ‘An easy error to make. The names are similar. Margaret and Mary. And Martha.’

  ‘Yes,’ muttered Margaret, keenly aware of her flaming-hot cheeks. What a terrible liar she was.

  ‘Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma,’ babbled the child, her eyes firmly fixed on Margaret, who crouched down and held out her hand to the child. One swift glance at Hannah gave her the courage she needed and she took some wobbly steps over to Margaret. Her speed increased, but the momentum was too much for her newly acquired walking and she tripped, falling into Margaret’s arms. She was a brave little thing and did not cry. Up close, Margaret stared at the girl’s upturned face, now able to see what bright, large green eyes the child had. Extraordinary eyes.

  ‘You are so pretty,’ murmured Margaret, transfixed by the eyes. It was as if she had seen those eyes before somewhere, in another face, so familiar were they to her. ‘Such a pretty one, she could be a fairy child. A changeling.’