The Black Candle

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘You’ve been lucky. Yes, very lucky.’ Lily’s voice was high and sharp, but her son’s was low and there was a puzzled note in it as he said, ‘You’ve been telling me that for years on and off, Mam, and I’d really like to know why. All right, all right, they put me to a good school and now I’m in the Royal Grammar, and they’re paying for me. And Mam, let me tell you, I know it, and I feel it, all the time I’m very aware that they’re paying for me.’

  ‘Well, that’s because of your own make-up. They never mention the matter.’

  The boy sighed now, then dropping down again onto the kitchen chair standing by the side of the wooden table, on which there were a number of his books and paper already written upon, he picked up a pencil and stabbed the point into the paper, saying, ‘I feel at times that I’m astride a ravine or some such, a foot on either side and the gulf getting wider. There was a time when Amy and I were allowed to scamper from one end of the place to the other, and Mr Filmore treated me like…well, as if…well, as if I belonged…as if I was one of the family. He still does, but…’

  ‘Well that’s because he’s a kind man an’ you’ve taken advantage.’

  ‘What d’you mean, Mam?’ He was up on his feet again, his hand flat on the table leaning towards her to where she had turned now from the oven, a brown dish in her hands. ‘Taking advantage? Advantage of what? I’ve run my heels off for years doing what I was told, keeping my place. But what place? Here we are living in the Lodge, where there’s not room to swing a cat, but I’ve had the run of that house.’ He pointed towards the window. ‘Since Amy was born, at least from when she could crawl, I’ve played with her and nobody objected. I’ve run the woods with her; I’ve even run by the carriage whenever I could.’ He didn’t add, ‘And Jimmy Tierney would never stop even when Amy yelled at him.’ This was another thing that troubled him, the servants. The women were all right, but the men, the older ones who had been in the family for years, they didn’t treat him like the master and mistress did, especially Frank Matthews. But of course, he wouldn’t because he had been after his mother for years now; and because she wouldn’t have him he seemed to hold it against him. He said now, ‘Mam, there’s something I can’t get to the bottom of at times. It worries me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to worry about; you’ve got a good life.’

  The boy closed his eyes, turned from the table and shook his head slowly from side to side as he said, ‘Mam, you don’t get the point, you never have. You’re like a clam and you won’t face the fact that I’m not a little boy any longer. I’m twelve years old and I am told that I’m bright. I am almost two years ahead in the mathematics class; they don’t know what to do with me. “What are you going to do?” they say. “What are you going to be?” “I don’t know,” I say.’ Now he swung round to her and he repeated loudly, ‘I don’t know, Mam. There’s lots of things I don’t know. You won’t talk about my father. You won’t talk about your people who live in Gateshead. I have a granny there, I understand, and uncles and aunts, but I’ve never clapped eyes on them; why?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve told you that until I’m tired. They’re rampant Catholics and I committed the sin of marrying a Protestant.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ve got that far, but that trouble was with your stepfather and mother. What about the half-brothers and sisters? You know, I’d like to see somebody that belongs to me.’

  She stared at him in silence; then she said, ‘I belong to you.’

  Her voice was so low and held such a depth of sadness that he almost scrambled round the table and put his arms about her, saying, ‘I know, I know, Mam. And I’m grateful. I’m grateful for everything. But there’s some things I don’t understand, and neither can Amy.’

  She immediately pressed herself away from him, and said in some surprise, ‘You don’t discuss…well, I mean, you don’t talk about that…well…?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we do. We talk about everything, not just my side, but hers, too. There’s her uncle who lives in this big house, married to her mother’s cousin and whom she has never seen in her life, either of them, because they never visit. She only knows they’ve got a daughter called Henrietta who is slightly odd, and they only know this because the butler writes at intervals.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘Amy told me. Amy is as anxious to see them as I am to see my granny and uncles or aunts or whatever. But you know what I think, Mam?’

  She smiled faintly at him, saying, ‘Whether I want to know or not, you’ll tell me.’

  ‘Well, it’s this. They’re sending Amy to boarding school to keep her away from me.’

  Lily drew in a deep breath and it was some seconds before she could bring out with any semblance of truth the words, ‘Don’t be silly. Who d’you think you are that they would go to all that trouble just to stop you and her running around like bits of kids, when you’re no longer bits of kids?’

  ‘No. No, she’s a grown woman, she’s ten and a half.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Joseph. But you know, you worry me at times. You take too much on yourself, you take liberties.’

  ‘Oh God!’ He turned away.

  And now she cried at him, ‘And don’t use that expression to me!’

  He had turned to face her again and cried back at her, ‘Well, I get tired, Mam, of you telling me to know my place and not to take liberties. I…I’m not made to bow and scrape. I don’t know why it irks me, but it does. And anyway, they’ve never treated me up there as if I should bow and scrape. They don’t expect anybody to bow and scrape to them. It seems it’s only you who expects me to bow and scrape.’

  ‘I don’t, son, I don’t. But it’s like this: no matter how nice the master and mistress treat me, I’m still a servant, and…and you are, unfortunately, the son of a servant. I say “unfortunately” because you’ve got a head on your shoulders. Your teachers say you’re streets above those of your own age. But it’s this way, Joseph, I only want you to see life as it is. It is no fairy tale. When Miss Amy comes back from the boarding school her ideas will likely be changed and you’ve got to be prepared for that. She may no longer see you as the boy she played with or the young lad that she argued with. And what is more, she’ll be goin’ to balls and meeting young men and and I don’t want to see you hurt by bein’ put on the side and…’

  ‘Shut up, Mam! Please, shut up, will you?’ The boy now turned away, grabbed up his school cap from a chair and went out. And as the door banged behind him, Lily hurriedly left the kitchen and went up the narrow stairs and into her box of a bedroom. Here, sitting on the edge of the single bed, she folded her arms tightly across her chest and began to sway. The time had almost come, she felt, for what she had daily been dreading for years, the time when he would demand to know why she didn’t talk about his father. Once out of the blue he had said to her, ‘How did my father die? Was it of the cholera?’ and she had taken a fit of coughing that almost choked her. Luckily, in his concern for her state, he hadn’t repeated the question, and she had hoped he had forgotten it, but now she knew he hadn’t.

  After a time she got up and, out of habit, bent down and smoothed out the hollows in the counterpane where she had been sitting. Then she walked to the little window and looked out over the backyard to the stretch of vegetable garden and beyond to the open grassland that led to the copse; suddenly, she put her hand to her throat, for there she saw her son hurrying towards a young girl. She watched them meet and stand for a time as if talking in earnest; then they went towards the wood. And on this she muttered to herself, ‘Dear, dear Lord!’

  It wasn’t so much that they were full cousins, nor was she worrying about Miss Amy, it was her son she was worrying about and the effect on him when he would come to know, as he would some day, how it had come about he was who he was.

  Many times she had wished she had never taken up the mistress’s offer, and this was one of them.

  Two

  Joseph was tall for his age. His eyes were a deep brown,
his nose was largish and his mouth was wide. And there was no fresh blush on his cheeks: his skin looked slightly tanned and overall had a matt appearance. And as Amy looked at him her young heart ached at the thought that after next week and for some months ahead she would not be seeing him.

  She couldn’t recall a time, except when they had gone on holiday to France last year, that she hadn’t seen him every day of which she had been aware in her life: Joseph had appeared to be one of the family; in fact, for her he was the family. She had played with him all her early days. She had fought with him and even scratched his face, then followed him around for days saying she was sorry, until he had yelled at her to shut up, when they had gone at it again. Such was the relationship between them.

  He was saying, ‘You’ll like it when you get there, I suppose.’

  ‘I won’t. No, I won’t.’

  ‘All right, you won’t, but you’ve got to go and be made into…a young lady.’ And now there was a cynical twist to his lips as he said, ‘Although I don’t know how they’re going to manage it.’

  Immediately she bridled. ‘Oh! Don’t you? Well, I might be such a young lady that I won’t deign to speak to you when I come back.’

  His expression darkened, his eyes narrowed, and he said, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised at all at that because you’ll be meeting with a different class of people. Oh, yes.’

  ‘Of course I won’t! Why should they be a different class?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, of course they will. And you’ll invite them here and they’ll look at me and think, Oh, she hobnobs with the servants then?’

  She stood back from him. ‘What’s come over you, Joseph Skinner? I’ve never heard you talk like that before. You’re not the son of a servant; Lily is a friend of Mammy’s.’

  He poked his head down towards her now, saying, ‘Lily is a maid up in the house.’

  ‘Yes, she works there; but it’s a different kind of work. Since Jessie died she’s a sort of housekeeper, she sees to things. And she and Mammy talk a lot and…’

  ‘Yes, and…?’

  She could not say, ‘Yes, they talk a lot but they don’t let me stay with them when they are talking.’ One day recently her mammy had been angry with her and accused her of standing outside the door when actually she had been just about to knock. Lily had come out and looked hard at her before turning away.

  She said now, ‘I was just going to say, well they have known each other a long time, even before you were born, before Mammy and Daddy were married, so they will have things to talk about. Anyway, it proves that she’s not that kind of a servant.’

  ‘You’re stupid in some ways, you know that?’

  ‘Oh, and you’re clever in all ways, aren’t you? Just because you can do sums.’

  ‘I don’t do just sums. You don’t call them sums. I deal with mathematics.’

  ‘Oh’—she wagged her head—‘he deals with mathematics. You’re getting too big for your boots, Joseph Skinner, that’s what you are getting, and you want to pay attention to that head of yours an’ all, it’s swelling like nobody’s business.’

  There was a suspicion of a smile on his lips again as he repeated, ‘That’s what you are getting…and like nobody’s business. I would recommend, Miss Filmore, that you pay attention to your deliverance in future. Punctuating your speech with colloquialisms does not say much for the teaching at your snooty little school. I think your mother’s money’s wasted.’

  She was biting on her bottom lip now, practically gnawing on it, and a little spray of saliva spluttered from her mouth as she came back at him, crying, ‘You are a nasty individual and…and—’ For a moment she was lost for suitable stinging words until she remembered Mary arguing with Johnny Moran in the yard and saying, ‘You know where I wish you? I wish you at the bottom of the sea.’ And so now she repeated, ‘Do you know where I wish you, Joseph Skinner? I wish you right at the bottom of the sea.’ And to emphasise her words she thrust her index finger emphatically towards the dead leaves on which they were standing and she finished with a bounce of her head, saying, ‘There!’ Then turning from him, she scampered through the copse, and his muttered, ‘Amy. Amy,’ was heard only by himself…

  ‘Now, what’s the matter?’

  ‘He’s a pig, Mammy, a pig.’

  ‘Who’s a pig?’—as if Bridget didn’t know.

  ‘Joseph Skinner. Who else? He’s a horrible, horrible individual and I’m never going to speak to him again.’

  How often over the years had she heard that, and laughed while hugging her daughter and saying, ‘That’s right, dear; I wouldn’t, not until tomorrow.’ But today she did not hug her beloved child to her or comfort her with soft words; she said, ‘Come along upstairs,’ and, taking her hand, she led her up the stairs, then across the first landing and up again to the nursery floor.

  The late afternoon sun was slanting across the wooden table standing in the middle of what had been the schoolroom, at which her daughter and the hated person in question had sat when they were small children and had continually done so for years after starting school; first Joseph and then her, until her daughter’s interruptions had become too much and he’d had to resort to his own home in order to get through his homework.

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Mammy?’

  ‘I said sit down.’

  As if under duress and she was finding the action painful, Amy slowly lowered herself onto the wooden chair; and her mother, leaning towards her, said, ‘You are turned ten and a half years old, and there are times when you act as if you were fourteen or fifteen, but at others, I’m sorry to say, your actions would prove you to be six or seven years old.’

  ‘Oh Mammy!’

  ‘Yes, oh Mammy!’ Then smiling, Bridget asked, ‘What has he done this time?’

  Amy sighed, then looked towards the window and brought her hands together on her lap before saying, ‘He said, I don’t speak correctly; I use colloquial…isms.’ Her tongue stumbled over the word. ‘And he said when I come back from this school I likely won’t bother speaking to him because—’ Now she was looking straight at her mother. ‘You know what he said? I wouldn’t speak to him because his mother is a servant.’

  ‘He didn’t!’

  ‘He did; but not exactly like that, but…well, that’s what he…yes’—her head was bobbing—‘yes, that’s what he meant…that’s what he said. He said, no matter how you treated Lily, she is a servant.’

  Bridget sighed. Deep waters here, deep waters all around. Her voice was low now as she spoke: ‘Well, there might be something in what he suggests,’ she said, ‘because you know, you will meet different people.’

  ‘That’s what he said: I’ll be meeting all kinds of people, and I won’t want to talk to him.’

  Bridget sighed again. ‘As I’ve just said, yes, you will meet all kinds of people, but I hope you’re not the kind of person who will throw over your old friends.’

  ‘Of course I won’t, Mammy. But he’s awful; and he always thinks he’s right. He talks so clever he makes me mad.’

  Bridget rose from the chair and went to the bookshelves and began to rearrange the books. That’s what she was fearful of, her daughter getting mad at this young boy who was no longer a young boy, not in his mind anyway. Douglas had said he couldn’t imagine from where he had inherited his brain, that it wasn’t likely it had come from his mother’s side, although of course there could never be any proof of that. And yet, he had maintained that there were no startlingly brilliant members of his own family either.

  Her daughter’s feeling for this boy, Bridget knew, was something very like her own when she had first seen Joe. But then she had been sixteen and Joe something new on her horizon. Her daughter had been brought up with young Joseph; they had been like brother and sister. But they were not brother and sister.

  She had for the first time been forced to bring the matter to the fore by telling Lily they thought it was best that Amy should go to a boarding school. There h
ad been no need to explain why; nor did she explain that it was she who was plumping for the boarding school; Douglas had said, ‘Must we do this? In any case, it’s calf love and it’ll likely peter out; but if it doesn’t, would it be so bad?’

  And she had answered, ‘Not in the ordinary way, but there are so many underlying factors. The boy doesn’t know from where he sprang; he thinks he is Joe Skinner’s son,’ to which Douglas had replied, ‘Well, let’s face it, my dear, that’ll come out some time or other. It’s bound to. That boy’s got a head on his shoulders and he is not going to be easily fobbed off. And besides my side of the business, there are her people, you know. And up till now she hasn’t allowed them to come in contact with him. But…well, he’ll get about. And there is the future.’

  Yes, there was the future, and because of it she wanted to protect her daughter…but again, from what? It wasn’t only the close relationship, it wasn’t only that Lionel Filmore was the boy’s father, because as Douglas had already pointed out to her, if there was any bad blood in the boy, then there could be equally as much in Amy, because it all stemmed from the one tree.

  ‘Mammy.’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Why must I go to a boarding school ? I thought you liked Miss Tripp.’

  ‘Yes, my dear, I do like Miss Tripp, but I think that the teaching there is limited. And Cresswell House has such a good name. Your father has looked into it.’

  ‘I don’t think Daddy is all that keen.’

  ‘Oh, he is, he is. He wants your education to be of the best.’

  ‘I could always do things and be sent home.’

  They were looking at each other now, and they both laughed, and Bridget said, ‘Yes, you could, dear; and I’d send you straight back.’

  ‘You wouldn’t!’ The child had her arms around Bridget’s waist now. Looking up into her mother’s face and her mouth wide with laughter, she said, ‘Not after the third time, for they wouldn’t let me in.’