The Daughters of Ironbridge

by Mollie Walton

  ‘Mother, this is a travesty. How can you support such lies?’

  ‘So, now you speak. Once the children are gone.’

  ‘I would not deign to argue like fishwives before them. But now you and I will have this out. What can you be thinking, giving in to their demands? It’s a disgrace! Never in all his years would Father have accepted such a thing.’

  Queenie looked at her son and heard his wheedling voice, as she might watch a fly buzzing against a window, aware of its struggle but having no pity for it, just annoyance at its noise.

  She said simply, ‘We will agree to it. They are not lies, as well you know.’

  ‘We do not know that.’

  Queenie sighed. She had no time for nonsense. ‘Cyril is capable of all this and far worse. Let us not pretend, not to each other. And the girl is right. The scandal of it all coming out would ruin us, coming after the monumental mess you made at the furnace.’

  ‘That was an accident! How many times do I . . .’

  ‘Do not pretend with me, my son. It is your mother who listens to your pathetic protestations. All of this is your fault. Penny-pinching and lack of forethought. Spoiling that wretched boy and not attending to his rotten behaviour earlier. Yet the fault lies not only at your door. I blame myself, too. I should have been more vigilant. I have not been myself these past years. But all that will change now. I am taking control again.’

  Ralph stood up and loomed over her. But even this physical show of strength had no impact on her. She saw him only as he once was, red-faced in short trousers, throwing himself on the floor in a tantrum. ‘You are not yourself!’ he spat at her. ‘You are quite right. You have lost your mind. And if you insist on allowing those two little sluts to blackmail us, I’ll send you away. I will denounce you, you and your traitorous granddaughter. You’re all the same. Just like your crazy sister.’

  Queenie had heard such threats before. But she had her own plan now for how to waylay that one. ‘Oh, you could try, Ralph King. You could try. But first, consider this. Not only would your mother and daughter be denouncing your lying, thieving, raping son. They would then be tainted with the poison of madness. Who would marry into the King family then?’

  ‘I don’t need you or them, any of you! I have a new, young wife who adores me!’

  ‘Ha!’ crowed Queenie. ‘Your weakest strike yet. Everyone knows Benjamina does not allow you to bed her these days. Even if you did manage to breed, it would still have tainted blood if this all comes out.’

  Queenie thought her son might strike her then. His cheeks, always a little purplish due to his debauched state of health, seemed to darken further, as did his hateful eyes. But he said nothing. He had nothing to say. Everything she said was true.

  ‘And furthermore, if you threaten me again with the asylum, never forget that I have the controlling interest in the business and of this house. And I will sell. I will sell my percentage of the ironworks and I will even sell Southover if I have to. I will do so and go to live abroad, alone.’

  Ralph’s chin actually dropped. He hadn’t seen that one coming. ‘And you know how useless you are at managing this business. You would never manage with a new partner, who would see through your incompetence in a flash. And the thought of you trailing behind me and coming to live abroad is ridiculous. You are not an adventurous man, Ralph. You never have been. Always lazy, always useless. A life of indolence and luxury is all you are fit for.’

  He was staring at the floor now, his eyes dazed. He muttered, ‘Because of you. If I am a useless son, then it is your fault. You are the mother. You should have loved me more.’

  Was there a tear in his eye? This gave Queenie pause, but only momentarily. Ralph King senior had taught her the value of a heart of stone. ‘Love did not make us rich. Love did not raise the Kings above all others in Ironbridge and its environs. Your father knew that. I know it. And so do you. Look at your children. They hate you. Everyone does. But it is no matter. The business remains, the money remains and the name of King remains. You cannot manage without me. You never have. This latest disaster is proof of it. You can’t pass it on to your son either, as he is as bad as you – worse, if that’s possible. No, you need me to run this for you, or you will drive this business into the ground. My mourning period for your father is done. I am coming back to take over the business. I am stronger than ever. I will not require anything of you other than to behave yourself and spend our money, when I give it to you. Cyril must be left in Germany until all whispers of this scandal have passed. Margaret must be taken in hand and married off as soon as we are able. Now, all you need to do is inform the magistrate that you wish to withdraw the charge of theft against Anny Woodvine. Do it immediately and insist it be acted upon with haste. Now go.’

  Ralph had nothing left to fight with, no words to use as weapons. He was a fool at times, but he knew when he was beaten. He summoned as much dignity as he could to stand and then said pompously, ‘I shall inform the magistrate that I wish to withdraw the charge of theft against Anny Woodvine,’ as if it were his own idea, all along. With that, he walked sedately from the room.

  Queenie’s head fell forward. She felt utterly shattered. She would call for dear Jenkins in a minute, but not yet. She did not want her son to see her in need. She had to appear fearless now. But she was not fearless. She looked at her hands to see them trembling. She thought, Is it enough? Would paying off Cyril’s victim and saving this poor girl from prison be enough? From now on, every act must serve to save the name of King and to atone for their past sins. She congratulated herself for taking control of this latest drama. Every decision she made must serve the aim to prevent the fall of the house of King. But still Queenie wondered. The image of the white-haired spirit beside her husband’s grave sprang up in her weary mind. Would it be enough to appease the ghost of Betsy Blaize?

  Chapter 25

  Margaret and Jake were married a day after they had arrived in Paris, in a shabby little church with strangers for witnesses. Their honeymoon was a stay in a mangy hotel for a few nights. He quickly found them an apartment owned by a musician friend of his who was off travelling: two rooms, above a butcher’s. They had so little, but Margaret had never been happier. And Paris, beautiful Paris, its thronging streets alive with liberty, did not disappoint. Their early days were spent together, in and out of cafés and bistros, sipping bowls of coffee and chocolate, feasting on sweet, sticky pastries and crusty bread spread thickly with apricot jam or honey. They ate tiny sardines in oil mashed onto toasted bread, chicken in a rich red sauce or beef with tiny onions and whole cloves of the stinking yet succulent garlic. The Kings kept a good table, but the food of Paris was a riot of taste and colour like nothing she’d ever consumed before. Her days were spent walking and kissing and eating, her evenings spent in more feasting and drinking with his artist friends, she sipping the local wine, careful with the quantity, as she was not used to it. But Jake and his friends guzzled it down nightly, until they could barely walk. To trip along a dark Paris street long after midnight and giggle herself hoarse at the antics of Jake and his drunken friends – what larks! Never had she laughed so much in her life!

  Those who were still not too far gone would come back to their little room, or they would go to friends’ apartments and chat and read till the dawn chorus brought her to the window to see the pink light of day seeping into the dark skies. One of Jake’s friends loved to read and Margaret scoured his bookshelves, taking down favourite French novels she had read and discussing them with him. Sometimes she spoke in French, soon realising her language was a little bookish and rusty. They laughed at her, but good-naturedly, as at least she tried. Jake’s French was hopeless and they appreciated her making the effort. She quickly learnt some of the new street lingo and felt more at home in the language as the days and nights passed. Another friend had a piano in his room and Margaret delighted them with Mozart and Beethoven, as much as her fingers could remember through the fog of memory and wine. She was
a good player and many said so, that she should perform, that she should teach them, or their sisters, or their children, or the children of friends and family. It occurred to her that this could be a way for her to support Jake, to give lessons and charge for it. To earn her own money would be quite something – utter freedom! As she played, she became lost in the music and delighted with her talent, now properly appreciated. They applauded her and asked for more; they laughed with her and talked to her. For the first time in her life, she felt at home in society. There was no small talk, only discussions of literature, art and music. She was a small-town girl come to the big city, yet still she held her own in these talks, citing books she had read and music she loved. She listened to their knowledge of painting and sculpture, drinking it all in, learning new ideas from them as a child gulps milk. At Southover, she had grown up in an icy, loveless existence consisting of confinement and bullying. Now she was bathing in the warmth of Paris, her whims indulged and satisfied, her voice heard and answered, her thoughts echoed and delighted in. She had found a place where she belonged.

  Jake and Margaret were quite the couple, celebrated as the romantic duo who had escaped their families’ old-fashioned expectations and eloped to Paris. They were welcomed everywhere and kissed on both cheeks, hugged and sang to, spoken about and spoken to, every day and night. The Margaret of her childhood would have run in horror from such extremes of companionship, but she revelled in it. And then there was Jake. Kissing had seemed the height of glory, until she had felt him inside her, truly inside her and the feeling of completeness was so overwhelming, she often cried real tears during their lovemaking. She felt life would be like this forever, an endless whirl of bed and parties, wine and laughter. It was intoxicating, unsettling and sometimes scarily out of control, but it was so utterly different from her previous life as to be as addictive as opium.

  But the months passed, and sex, parties and wine couldn’t make up for the increasing hollowness in the rest of their life together. There was no purpose or direction to their existence. Only chaos prevailed. And she felt Jake was drawing away from her. He began to go out alone much of the time, armed with his sketching book and pencils. She found herself walking the streets looking for greenery, a park or a stream, or even a tree, but there was precious little of it in this part of the city. He would come back hours later, often drunk, often denying it, saying how the muse had left him, shouting about it and throwing himself down in despair. She tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable. He said the muse had abandoned him, ever since . . . but he wouldn’t finish those sentences and she knew he meant ever since the elopement. It racked her with remorse, that through her desire to possess him, she was robbing him of his gift. To assuage her guilt, she would give him money from the roll of cash she had in a stocking hidden in a drawer, and he would disappear again for hours. The night she ran away from Ironbridge, she had stolen the money from her father’s safe. It seemed a vast amount – and appeared to double in size when it was changed into French currency – and she was certain it would last them for years, that they would live the high life until Jake’s undoubted talent would catch the eye of a Parisian gallery owner and his artistic career would be made. But he seemed to be spending most of it on drink. And the money was running out so quickly, too quickly. She knew he was taking from it when she wasn’t looking. She knew he was spending it on drinking, and who knew what else.

  In the long evenings she spent alone, when he had not come home at all since lunchtime, she would think of the library back home – why had she not brought any English books with her? She missed the sight of her own language on the page. She would think of the woods and the River Severn – why did the city feel like death to her, when home had been so full of life, of living things all around her? She even missed the sound of the steam hammer, booming through the trees, marking out time, to be replaced here by the clattering of coaches and hooves, the shouts of street sellers and arguing couples – exotic and exciting at first, harsh and jangling now.

  When he did take her out with his friends, she tired of the constant drinking and began to stop after a glass. But Jake showed no signs of abatement and, if anything, drank more than before. And Jake was not a jovial drunk. His artist friends – who she now began to see in a new light, a ramshackle lot, all come to France to waste away their talent through strong drink and carousing – began to warn her about him. Night after night, one or other would come to her laughing, saying colourful and unsettling things about him, such as, ‘You’ve bagged yourself a blackguard there, Miss Margaret’, and ‘Don’t try to cage him like an animal. He’ll tear your throat out.’

  Then, only three months after their arrival, she had stopped bleeding. She was vomiting each morning and felt drained all day. It was Jake who explained it to her. She was with child. She felt so woefully uneducated and unprepared. She stopped drinking wine as it made her feel worse. Suddenly, without the drink to fog her mind, she saw her life for what it was. And she did not like it.

  Chapter 26

  Anny’s father had walked these miles between Shrewsbury and Ironbridge in one morning. But he had been strong as an ox and tall as a tree. Anny was weakened by her months inside and the minimal rations. The gaol fever that had floored her for weeks was gone, but that had taken a lot out of her too. She used to bound up the forest paths with an innate knowledge of how strong her young legs were, how far they’d take her. She remembered feeling invincible, that she would never tire, never falter, never die even. The folly of youth, that they think they shall live forever. One bad turn of circumstance and the body crumbles. It was frightening how quickly that could happen. She had been a little plump once, a curve to her hips and limbs that was pleasing to the male eye, though she’d sometimes wished to be more svelte and slim like some girls. Now the flesh had dropped from her body and she was skin and bone. It was November, and it was cold. Her body gave her no comfort and she shivered as she walked.

  Leaving the prison had been nothing like Anny had imagined. No family to greet her, no friends to ferry her home. The prison warden hadn’t let her leave till the afternoon and her progress on the road to Ironbridge was slow. She had little natural sense of direction and had to wait around for passers-by to ask at various junctions of roads if she were on the right path. She had a vision of wandering around in circles for the rest of her life, until she dropped in exhaustion. It was good to be outside, though. She’d rather die on the road than in that vermin-infested hospital. A man died in there one night and the surgeon didn’t come till morning and the rats were already on him by the time they came to take the body away. The smell was still in her nostrils, the rich and heady variety of prison stench. She wondered if she’d ever lose it. As she walked, slowly, she breathed deeply, taking in the scents of fresh, new air, winter greenery and earth.

  People used to delight her. She had once loved to be in crowded places, like the fair at Christmastime or the May Day dancing, surrounded by the excitement of new faces and the buzz of humanity. Now, people disgusted her. She had seen bodies and minds at their most degraded. Peggy had told her once of a book about a man who travelled to foreign lands and met giants and midgets and also intelligent horses who had people as beasts roaming around on all fours. That writer must have been inside a gaol. Thoughts of Peggy. Yes, well, she did not wish to think of Peggy.

  She’d had no word from home since that day. She’d not heard from Peggy or Brotherton – not surprising, but still. Nothing from Jake, of course. Most worryingly, nothing from Mother. It had been four months since her father’s death. Two months since she had been called into the warden’s office and informed that the charges had been dropped and she would soon leave. She had told no one. She’d heard of prisoners bragging about release and then being beaten or even murdered by inmates or guards, as a kind of revenge and punishment, as if to say, You’re not getting away that lightly; you must suffer, as we do. She kept it quiet. Instead she lived as much inside her own head as she
could, in a time before all pain, where she washed clothes with her mother and ran to take her father’s lunch. That was when it all started, with Mr Lakelin’s death. If she’d not written a note to her father, Pritchard would not have noticed how clever she was. She should have refused Pritchard’s request, should have said no to Brotherton, should have stayed at home with Mother. Everything would have been different, everything would have been better, if she hadn’t got ideas above her station. It was all her fault. Well, she’d learnt her lesson. As she trudged along the road home, she knew her life would not aspire to be anything more than it was. That way pain and madness lay.

  She had to sleep on the roadside that night. She had no food, no money. She asked the guard at the gate about her earnings while she’d been in prison, her promised earnings of a penny a week for this or that duty, more for her washing work and her role as monitor. He laughed at her. She was packed off in someone else’s shabby dress, too short, halfway up the leg and too tight under the arms. No bonnet. A tatty shawl with holes in it. She looked like a ragamuffin. Her smart work clothes she’d been brought in wearing had gone, probably sold on by the guards. Her boots pinched and by nightfall she had red raw skin where her heels should have been. She found a quiet road with woodland running along it on one side, fields on the other. She went behind a little copse of trees, so that she could not be seen from the road. She didn’t want any unwelcome attention from travellers. It was a bitter night. She did not sleep. Her body was racked with quaking.

  When dawn came thinly, she pulled her boots back on and cried out at the blisters. The sky above was luminous, a bright yellow-grey that promised snow. The wind whipped up. There were few people on the roads. All sensible folk were inside. Carriages rumbled past and she barely looked up. She had to keep going, keep going, keep going. She had to get home. Snow began falling; bright flecks of ice lashed by the wind into her face, hair, eyelashes, sticky and wet. She was afraid, very afraid her body would not hold out and she would collapse there, in the deepening snow and simply die, a few miles from home. To come so far, to be so near. No, no, that would not be her fate. She willed herself onwards and banished all thought but the movement forward, onwards, home. One foot before the other. Her whole existence was reduced to her feet.