The Black Candle

by Catherine Cookson

  When Douglas looked at Bridget their glances dropped away from each other, and Douglas said, with a smile, ‘Well, I think there’d only be a civil war if I made any objection. Bridget did not speak, but her silence went unnoticed because Amy, jumping up, ran to them and, standing behind them, put her arms around their shoulders and kissed first one then the other and, almost gabbling, she cried, ‘It’s wonderful! Wonderful! I never thought of that. And I’ll love the place. Oh! Daddy; you will have to tell me what it was like, and I’ll see to all the inside, and Joseph will see to the outside. Oh!’—she was kissing them again—‘I love you both very much.’ When Joseph heard Bertha’s cough coming from the scullery, he called to her, ‘Bertha! Bertha! Come here a minute. ’And she came into the room, saying, ‘Well, what is it? By, you look cheerful!’ And he went to her and put his arm around her waist and said, ‘We are going to be married.’

  ‘Oh, lad’—she flapped a hand at him—‘this is so sudden.’ And at this he laughed out loud and pushed her from him, and she, looking at Amy who was coming towards them, said, ‘Well, I guessed as much. It was as plain as the nose on your face,’ and holding out her hand she took Amy’s and shook it as she said, ‘You’re pickin’ a good lad, and if good wishes can make you happy, you have mine.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Hanratty. Thank you.’

  Both Douglas and Bridget had risen to their feet and, speaking for the first time, Bridget said, ‘Well, we must be off. We’ve got a long journey before us.’

  Amy now glanced at Joseph; then, looking at her parents, she said softly, ‘I’d like to stay.’

  ‘But, my dear, it’s all arranged, and your Aunt Victoria will be all ready to leave when we get back.’

  ‘I…I could find my way. I could get a cab to the station and…’

  ‘There’s another bed up above goin’ beggin’.’ They had turned to Bertha, and she nodded ceilingwards before adding, ‘’Tisn’t fancy: ’tis a bedroom but the bed’s as dry as a bone. She’s welcome and she’ll come to no harm.’

  Neither Douglas nor Bridget gave any answer to the old woman but they looked at each other and they both knew what the other was thinking. They were going back to a similar situation, a certain New Year’s morning when she hadn’t returned to her own bed, the morning when the glowing girl standing opposite had been conceived. The fact that there was this old woman in the house with them would make little difference, and she seemed the type, at least to Bridget, that would condone the outcome of suppressed passion. And in both her daughter and Lionel Filmore’s son there was suppressed passion at this moment. Yes, there was a snag to this union, at least in her mind, for he could not cease to be the son of Lionel Filmore, that cruel man, the adulterer and murderer.

  Well, she could do nothing more about it. She who had begun the series of events was helpless now in the face of the present situation.

  She heard herself say, ‘If that’s what you would like to do, dear, I’ll get Minnie to pack up some nightclothes for you and Ron could slip along with the case.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Mammy. Thank you, and you, too, Daddy.’ She was once more kissing them.

  Following the goodbyes, they went out and got into the carriage, and as they drove away Bridget looked back at the figures posed in the doorway, Joseph, his arm around Amy, and the little woman standing to his other side, that strange little woman who seemed to have taken him over, and, by the look of it, not only him, but also Amy. She had lost her daughter. Within the last half hour she seemed to have gone from her entirely, and the loss was already weighing on her.

  She was lying back in the half-circle of Douglas’s arm. He was talking soothingly to her but she was only half listening. She loved Douglas. Oh, yes, she adored him; but there was in her a need for her daughter.

  She had long ago realised that a woman needed not only male companionship, she needed female companionship, too. It started with one’s mother, she supposed, and then perhaps a sister, followed by a friend, just one friend. You could never have two women friends, not really. But what were friends compared to a daughter? Your mother had bred you but you had nothing to do with that; the sister was connected by blood, a friend by affection; but a daughter was something you had created. You had fostered the seed; then you had thrust it from the shell and tended its growth. At times even the feeling for it had outdone that for the sower. Such was your love for it that you planned its life: not only was it to be impregnated with love but it was to be surrounded with it; and yet you even saw the day when you might have to relinquish your hold on it to another. You saw it as painful but compensated for by the uprightness in the character of the man into whose hands you were allowing your beloved flesh to pass.

  But it hadn’t turned out like that. No. She hadn’t taken into account Lily’s son…Lily’s bastard son who, in spite of his appeal, must hold within him all the traits of his father.

  Her daughter was from a different line of blood, so she told herself; in fact, at times so opposite did she imagine Douglas to be from his brother that she came to wonder if there was any tie there at all. His mother, she understood, had been a very bright and gay lady at one time. In fact she had almost made herself believe this as the years had unfolded and revealed to her her husband’s inner nature, which was that of a good man.

  Yet being who she was, she was again forced to face up to the fact that she had been the instigator of all that had happened over the past twenty years, even to the hanging of Joe Skinner. For if she had not in her determined way ensured what she imagined to be Victoria’s happiness and allowed her to face life and its inevitable disappointments, Joe Skinner would likely have been alive today. The whole pattern would have been changed and she would not have now lost her daughter…But then she had to ask herself, would she ever have had a daughter?

  But now it was as if she had never possessed a daughter. Amy had gone. The thing she had dreaded had come upon her…

  She was brought out of her dismal thinking by the sound of Douglas’s voice. He seemed to have been speaking for some time.

  ‘What did you say, my dear?’ she said.

  ‘I said, with good nursing and care and a different atmosphere, Victoria could have a long spell before her. But long or short there will still be Henrietta. Oh yes, there will still be Henrietta.’

  She could not tell by his tone if he was glad or sorry there would still be Henrietta. But now into her cold being crept a little warmth at the thought, Yes, there would still be Henrietta, for no matter how far she advanced she would still have to be cared for…and moulded.

  Yes, there was still Henrietta. God, she supposed, had a way of dealing out compensations.

  PART FIVE

  THE INHERITANCE

  1923

  One

  Joseph smiled at Henrietta. She was standing in front of him, her hands spelling out her words and her voice high and fuddled, yet in part clearly articulate. She was saying, ‘I can come on my own. I don’t need to be fetched.’ And to this he answered, ‘All right; but I like to fetch you.’ Dear, dear! How easy it was to lie. He now turned and smiled at Douglas and Bridget, who were standing a little to the side; and she, taking up a position so that she could face Henrietta, spelt out on her hands, ‘Joseph is a busy man; he has to work.’

  The big heavily built woman, whose beauty had seemed to fade as her body had developed and who was now thirty-eight years old, flung her arms in the air and made a motion with one foot as if she were stamping it, and, her voice now coming as a gabble, she cried, ‘Know…I know…I’m not an…infant…child…nor a…girl. He has been…working for…years…years…years.’

  Just as suddenly as she had flung up her arms so she now flopped them down by her side, her head drooped and she swung round and walked out of the hall and up the stairs.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Bridget said as though assuring Joseph, although Douglas, walking towards the door with Joseph, said, ‘She wears one out; she’s so demanding. I suppose, though,
I’m lucky; I’m out of the way most of the day. But I know that when she’s up at the house she never gives you a minute. I can understand Amy’s attitude.’

  ‘And I, dear, can understand Henrietta’s.’ They both turned and looked at Bridget, and she, nodding at them, added, ‘She’s so frustrated by this affliction, it’s understandable.’

  ‘Well, all I can say, dear,’ replied Douglas, ‘is she should be used to it now; but how you’ve put up with it all these years I’ll never know. But then’—he stepped back and put his arm around her shoulders—‘there’s lots of things I’ll never know about you, I being a simple man.’

  ‘Yes, poor soul, and I pity your simplicity too.’

  Douglas laughed, then said, ‘That’s funny. You know the hymn with that line in it “Pity my simplicity”, I always sang “Pity my simple city” when in church, and the servants did too.’

  Joseph looked from one to the other, thinking now, as he had done so often before, how amazing it was that after all these years they were still in love. There was Douglas at sixty-six and Bridget at sixty-three, and they always seemed to act like young lovers. Why didn’t Amy take after her mother, or her father? These two loved, and yet they each gave the other their freedom. Bridget still saw to her business, and Douglas still chipped away at his stone; and that was big business now, too, although nothing like Bridget’s. And he was part of that. Or was he?

  It had taken him fully six years to put the house, garden and farm back to what Douglas felt it should be, and he had gained a lot of experience during those six years, so much so that Bridget, seeing another branch to her little empire, had acquired an estate and land agency and let him run it. He had enjoyed that. Oh, yes, he had grabbed at it. At the time he did not realise it was a form of escape from the house and…other things.

  When Bridget said, ‘Wrap up well,’ Douglas put in, ‘Never mind wrapping up well; he doesn’t need that in the car. By the way, how are you finding it?’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Better than the Austin two-seater?’

  ‘Oh yes, miles ahead, and more comfortable.’

  ‘Yes’—Douglas nodded—‘I found that too when I changed over.’

  ‘Mind how you drive. You’re a bit reckless, you know. Amy was on the phone yesterday and she said you scared her. Thirty miles an hour! That’s far too fast. Now be careful.’

  ‘Very well, ma’am.’ He touched his forelock, and Bridget immediately slapped him on the arm.

  ‘Are you going straight home?’

  ‘Yes, but on my way I’ll stop at Gateshead and look at that property. It’s a very fine house, you know, with four acres. That’s unusual in that quarter of the town. It had been attached to a farm at one time, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, give my love to Amy and the children,’ said Bridget, ‘and we’ll see you all on Christmas Eve, weather permitting. But if it’s snowing I’m not coming by car.’

  ‘Trains have been known to slip off the rails.’

  As Douglas closed the door against the bitter wind Bridget shivered for a moment before she said, ‘Have you noticed any change in Joseph?’

  ‘Change? What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I say, dear, change.’ They were near the drawing room now and she added, ‘There are times when I see him going back into the boy he used to be.’

  ‘Well, you had better tell him, dear, and he’ll be pleased about that, being thirty-nine now. That’s what he is, isn’t he, thirty-nine?’

  ‘If you’re not exactly blind I think you close your eyes to a lot, Douglas Filmore.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, Mrs Filmore, I think I do, and it makes for happier living. Come and sit down.’

  Once seated, he said, ‘I’ll tell you what does worry me, though, and it’s Etta’s obsession with him. If it wasn’t for Amy’s firmness in saying she can only stay there a week at a time, you wouldn’t get her away.’

  ‘Yes, I think you’re right, dear, but what I find odd is that she doesn’t like Amy.’

  ‘You think it’s odd?’ Douglas drew his brows together as he spoke. ‘My dear, I think it’s you who are blind in that direction, because from the very first Amy has always made it plain she doesn’t care for poor…Cousin Henrietta. Perhaps it was the way Henrietta, finding a new brother, or half-brother or whatever, tried to monopolise him.’ He laughed as he added, ‘And our dear Amy didn’t want an opponent in that line, did she, if you remember? That was always her aim, and still is, I think.’ He now lay back on the couch before saying musingly, ‘He must get a little tired of it all.’

  But Bridget did not lie back beside him as she usually did, she bounced to the edge of the couch, saying, ‘Douglas! What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I say, dear. He must get a bit tired, because our daughter, you must admit, has eaten him up since first she set eyes on him, and she had never known any opposition until Henrietta came on the scene; and then of course the six children, and she’s always been jealous of them, one after the other, their clamouring for his attention; and mind, I think he’s enjoyed that sort of monopolising.’

  ‘Are you meaning to say, Douglas Filmore, or do you know what you are saying? You’re inferring that Amy’s love has tired him, or is tiring him as much as Henrietta’s.’

  He looked at her for a long time before he gave her an answer: ‘I didn’t actually think of it in that way, but as you put it so plainly, yes, I think it might. You see, you and I love each other. We know we can’t love each other more than we do, it’s impossible, we’re never happy when we’re apart, yet you give me my freedom and I give you yours. We both have a hobby, as it were. Our businesses are our hobbies. If I had wanted to paw over you and hold your hand for twenty-four hours a day you, being who you are, would have tired of me…’

  ‘Don’t talk so…’ She rose to her feet and went towards the fire and looked down on it for a moment, before turning towards him again and, her gaze soft on him, she said, ‘How is it you are always so right?’

  ‘Oh’—he preened himself—‘I suppose it’s because, as Ron up at the house would say, “I’m a clever bu…”’

  ‘Be serious, dear, please…because this is a serious business, one we seemingly can do nothing about. For instance, I can’t go to my daughter and in any kind of a motherly way say, stop loving your husband so much.’

  ‘We are not talking about love, dear; we are talking about possession.’

  ‘Possession?’

  ‘Yes, possession. There are people who cannot live unless they possess something or someone. With some it’s money. Lots and lots of money and the power it gives them. With others it’s a person. I think that’s the worst kind when it’s applied to a human being.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that, dear. Now I’ve got something to worry about.’

  ‘Oh, well, you should have started worrying about this when Lily lived in the Lodge and worked in the kitchen here, and the two children were scampering through the wood together, never separated…It’s too late to start worrying about them now. But come on, sit down. I want to possess you.’

  She pulled a prim face and tried to stop herself from laughing, and when she was encircled by his arms, their faces only inches apart, she said, ‘You’re the one to talk about possession.’

  He had parked his car in the nearest garage to the house, about five minutes’ walk away. When he had last looked at the house three days ago, he found a number of boys playing in the deserted garden, and after walking around the house he had come back to find one of them sitting in the driving seat. The boy did not scamper away on his appearance, but peppered him with questions; and when later he had reached home he found a name chalked on the back of the car. Tommy Trotter, it said; and this had caused Ron Yarrow to laugh and say, ‘I used to play that; there’s a game called Tommy Trotter.’

  Well, he didn’t want any more Tommy Trotters on the back of his new car; hence his leaving it in the safety of the garage.

  But after leaving the gar
age he found he had to thread his way carefully through a number of side streets, for there was a thin drizzle of rain falling and this, on top of the already slush-covered streets, made for careful walking. He had turned up what he imagined to be a short cut, a plaque on the wall naming it Downey’s Passage. He had noticed it before when he had been driving the car slowly, looking for Bradford Villa.

  One side of the broad passage was a blank stone wall which, he assumed, would be the back of the scrapyard he had just passed. Opposite were two or three shops: the first was a second-hand clothes shop; the second had opaque windows, a bill in one of them stating the premises to be the office of a printing company; the next single shop window brought him to a halt and there, across the top of the window in large-lettered print, was the word ‘Agency’. Well, as he was a land and estate agent himself, he stopped, then read with amazement a section headed: ‘Lodging-house keepers’, and underneath this a long list of names and addresses.

  Under the heading ‘Dressmakers’ was another list. But what brought his eyes wide were the words printed in large letters: LUNATIC ASYLUM—PRIVATE, and printed underneath:

  William Garbutt, Proprietor;

  W. Marsh Taylor, MA, Medical Supt., Dunstan Lodge, Dunstan.

  Well! Well! He had seen everything now. And there were more; the window was stacked full of them. And finally he read the statement which said the owners of the shop were Land Agents; and underneath this, ‘Enquire Within’.

  So they were Land Agents, too, were they? As one would expect, many businesses were advertised in the newspapers, but he had never seen so many ‘stacked’ in a shop window. This would amuse Bridget. Oh yes.

  The next premises were obviously an off-licence, or outdoor beer shop, as such were usually called, and this business, in comparison with the rest in the short street, appeared spruce. It had bottled spirits, including whisky, brandy and gin arranged as the centrepiece to an array of wines in one window, with bottles of beer from pint size to an enormous decorative flagon in the smaller window beyond the entrance door. He thought that the shop might be out of the way for the sale of such commodities, but then realised that at certain times the area would be alive with workers of one kind or another. Then there was the scrapyard behind that wall opposite.