Candles in the Storm

by Rita Bradshaw

  ‘I’ve seen this afore,’ Nellie piped up from her bed where she had been watching proceedings with great interest. ‘Your granda knocked himself out once; actin’ the cuddy he was, though, not like this poor devil. Anyways, it was two full days afore he knew his arse from his elbow an’ he had a bad head for a week or more. This ’un’ll be all right, lass, now he’s talkin’ again.’

  Daisy nodded. Maybe. ‘Granda hadn’t all but drowned though, had he?’

  ‘No, no, there is that, hinny, but you can’t do more than you’re doin’. Look, you’ve got to get some rest or you’ll be the next one flakin’ out. Have one of them blankets, he don’t need ’em all, an’ settle yerself on the saddle for a kip. I’ll give you a call if he wants anythin’.’

  Daisy shook her head. If she gave in to the exhaustion which was dragging at her limbs she wouldn’t come to again till morning, besides which her grandmother always slept the hours away, snoring loudly and with gusto, while proclaiming the next morning she hadn’t slept a wink all night. She couldn’t risk it. ‘I’ll stay awake a bit longer, Gran. You go to sleep.’

  ‘All right, me bairn. I know it’s no use arguin’ if you’ve made up your mind, but it’ll be a long night, you mark my words.’

  It was a long night, but by the time the inky darkness was finally stretched and broken on the rack of sunrise Daisy felt her patient’s slumber was a more natural one. She had dozed once or twice, sitting sentry duty on the hard wooden saddle, awaking every so often with a start and immediately checking that the man was still breathing.

  With the coming of the cold, mother-of-pearl dawn she roused herself fully, beginning the normal mundane chores like stoking the range and setting the kettle to boil. Chores that spoke of normality. When her da and Tom came home they would expect everything to be ticking along as usual, and ticking along it would be.

  Once she had seen to breakfast and made her granny and the young man comfortable, she would slip along to Mrs Hardy’s and ask Alf to make enquiries in Monkwearmouth regarding the ship which had sunk. It had been a big ship, important. Someone would know something. And likely her da and Tom would be walking through the door soon, and wouldn’t they get a gliff when they saw the visitor? Aye, they would. Pray God, pray God they would . . .

  Alf did not have to make the visit to Monkwearmouth. Before Daisy had even finished mashing the tea the first cottages in the village were astir, buzzing with the news that a search party was making enquiries regarding the ship which had sunk the day before. Of course they had been directed to George Appleby’s place; it was his bit lass who had been foolhardy enough to risk life and limb rescuing a lad from the water, a toff by his clothes according to Ethel McCabe. As if any of the gentry would lift a finger to help a fisherman in similar circumstances! Less than the muck under their boots to the gentry, fishermen were. She’d get no thanks for her trouble would Daisy, sure as eggs were eggs.

  Daisy wasn’t thinking of thanks as she faced the four men standing outside her cottage door. She had answered the impatient knocking as quickly as she could, considering she had taken the opportunity to nip into the scullery to wash her hands and face there while the tea was brewing, but it clearly had not been quick enough for the sour-faced individual who seemed to be in charge. He snapped at her the minute the door swung open, asking her name and then demanding entrance into the cottage in a manner which was offensive but brooked no argument.

  Daisy’s face was resolute and her voice low as she said, ‘I’m sorry, but I shall need to know your business first.’

  ‘Know my business?’ Josiah Kirby had been valet to the master of Greyfriar Hall, situated south of Felling, the largest and best-run country estate in Durham - according to the army of servants who worked there - for thirty-five years, and considered this position superior to any other, even that of Middleton the butler. He had his master’s ear in a way none of the other servants did and was the recipient of his confidences. All the staff were aware of this and treated him accordingly. He demanded and received the utmost respect, and now this little chit of a fishergirl dared speak to him in this fashion? His thin mouth became even thinner as he said icily, ‘I am here as envoy for Sir Augustus Fraser. Let me pass, girl.’

  ‘When I know your name an’ your business.’

  He would have slapped any of the Hall’s maids had they dared to look at him as this baggage was doing, and seen to it they were sent packing without a reference. Daisy watched him straighten his slight shoulders and adjust the collar of the thick greatcoat he was wearing before he said, slowly and very deliberately, ‘My name is Mr Josiah Kirby and I am making enquiries into the whereabouts of Sir Augustus’s son, Mr William Fraser. I understand you are keeping a young man here, one who was travelling on the Aquitania which left France for England the day before yesterday.’

  He made it sound as though she was keeping the young man a prisoner against his will. Daisy’s answer was prompt and once again without undue ceremony. ‘A ship sank out yonder yesterday mornin” - she pointed to the wide expanse of ocean which was now shimmering calm and placid under a brightening sky - ‘an’ a young man was saved from the water, but he’s in a poor way.’

  She stood aside to let the men pass as she spoke but only Josiah Kirby moved into the cottage. After waiting a moment Daisy closed the door on the other three and turned to find their visitor kneeling by the mattress, saying, ‘Thank God! Oh, thank God, sir. You’re safe,’ to the young man who had his eyes open. And then the older man swung round to glare at Daisy as he barked, ‘What is the meaning of keeping Mr Fraser here like this? Why did you not contact the authorities? Sir Augustus and the family have been out of their minds with worry.’

  She stared at the nasty little man, and resentment and indignation made her voice sharp as she cut across the protests Nellie was making from her bed and said, ‘I wasn’t in a fit state to go anywhere yesterday an’ he couldn’t have been left anyway. I was goin’ to get someone to go into Monkwearmouth today.’

  ‘Really?’ It was said in a tone of disbelief. ‘And where are Mr William’s belongings and his clothes? What have you done with those?’

  Was he calling her a thief? Daisy couldn’t remember when she had been so angry. ‘He didn’t have no belongings an’ his clothes are dryin’.’

  ‘No belongings?’

  ‘Are you barmy, man?’ Nellie’s voice was deceptively soft as she entered the fray. ‘The lass has just told you, the lad was fished out of the water when the boat went down - an’ you’ve her to thank for that an’ all. Without Daisy here riskin’ her own life to save his, your master’s precious son would be with the rest of the passengers an’ their belongings an’ such, at the bottom of the sea keepin’ company with Davey Jones’ locker. Look at him.’ She pointed a bony finger at the figure on the mattress. ‘He’s still in cloud cuckooland an’ likely will be for days, but he’s a darn’ sight better than he was yesterday, an’ that’s due to me lass.’

  Josiah Kirby glared at the old woman before looking down at his master’s son again, and when he saw the young man’s eyes were shut and he appeared to be asleep the truth of Nellie’s statement was borne out. ‘He’s sick.’ His hand reached out and touched William’s brow. ‘You should have got a doctor to him at once.’

  ‘He’s had a blow to the head an’ he was chilled to the bone from the water,’ Daisy stated grimly. ‘The most important thing was to make him warm inside an’ out, an’ that’s what I did. No doctor could have done more. Besides which there was no one to go for a doctor as I’ve already said. All the boats were out an’ they didn’t come home till last night. He’s best where he is for the present.’

  ‘Where he is?’ Josiah curled his upper lip. The smell of fish was overpowering, and although he had to admit this hovel was clean it was no fit place for Mr William. The very idea! The old hag in the bed was clearly useless, and the girl had already admitted she was the only one taking care of his master’s son. ‘I think not.’

&n
bsp; ‘You prepared to answer for movin’ him, eh, me fine feller?’ Nellie put in slyly. ‘Won’t go down well with your master if his son croaks afore you get him home, will it?’

  These people! Common as clarts and as cunning as a cartload of monkeys. What were they up to? But the warning in Nellie’s words had hit home. Mr William was bad, no doubt about it, and they only had the open carriage and the morning was bitter. Josiah stood up abruptly, his mind made up. ‘You had better make sure you attend to Mr William properly,’ he said curtly, ‘or you will pay for it, make no mistake. I shall inform Sir Augustus of the situation at once.’

  ‘Aye, you do that, lad.’ Nellie was openly enjoying herself now but Daisy was so angry she didn’t trust herself to speak. She stood in silence, her cheeks burning and eyes hot, watching as the valet got to his feet and straightened his coat before tapping his bowler hat more firmly on to his head with a disdainful glance round the room again.

  How dare he speak to them like that? He might be dressed up to the nines but he hadn’t corrected her granny when she had referred to Sir Augustus as being his master so he was obviously just a servant, albeit a powerful one. Her granny had told Daisy tales about life in the big houses, passed on to her from Alf’s mam who had heard them first hand from her aunt. The servants far outnumbered the family in many cases, sometimes as many as forty being employed indoors for a large country estate, her granny had said, and the aunt had maintained the upper servants lorded it over the lower ones to a point where they were more uppity than their masters and mistresses. Daisy could believe that now.

  ‘I shall return shortly with instructions from Sir Augustus.’ The valet spoke without looking at Daisy or Nellie, making for the door as though Daisy was invisible.

  ‘Aye, I don’t doubt that, lad,’ said Nellie conversationally from her corner of the room. ‘Gives you instructions on how clean to wipe your backside too, I’ll be bound.’

  The stiff little figure paused for a fraction of a moment, back bristling, before flinging open the door. He turned on the threshold, his hard black eyes going first to Daisy and then to Nellie, and it wasn’t until he was looking at Daisy again that he said, quietly but venomously, ‘Fishing scum! There’s more than fish sold down at the docks an’ the back alleys by the likes of you. I dunno what you thought you’d gain by keepin’ the master’s son hidden away but you’ve bin rumbled, girl, so think on.’

  The door was slammed with enough force to cause the man on the mattress to stir and mumble, and then there followed a moment of dead silence which was broken by Nellie saying, ‘By, lass, it didn’t take him long to lose his cut-glass accent, did it? Prick his balloon an’ he’s as common as the rest of us, even if his linings might be of the finest linen an’ changed daily.’

  Daisy looked at her grandmother, and as a pair of sunken old eyes twinkled back at her she found herself grinning weakly. Her granny was one on her own and no mistake.

  Daisy’s slender shoulders went back and her chin lifted. She was blowed if she was going to let a little upstart like the one who had just walked out of that door get her down, even if his spitefulness had left her reeling for a moment. She wasn’t so naive she didn’t know some of the fishergirls who worked the docks in Sunderland and Tyneside were loose women, and that their activities had got decent fishing women a bad name, or that others who had lost their breadwinner to the sea were forced to take to the streets else let their bairns starve . . . but to tar them all with the same brush! She had done nothing to be ashamed of and nor would she, even if it meant working her fingers to the bone every twenty hours out of twenty-four, and she would tell Sir Augustus himself that very thing - should he ever condescend to put one elegant toe in such humble surroundings, of course.

  Chapter Four

  At exactly twenty minutes past eleven that same morning a further deputation from Greyfriar Hall arrived at the village. This consisted of Jack Mallard, first footman, and Jeremy Hopkins, second footman, in a carriage and pair, with Bernard McArthur, head coachman, and Bruce Fallow, groom, driving the covered coach behind, within which sat Josiah Kirby with the Misses Felicity and Cecilia Fraser.

  Within three minutes of the coach pulling up outside the cottages William Fraser, wrapped in copious thick fleecy blankets and cradled as tenderly as any newborn babe by the two footmen and the groom, was deposited into the waiting arms of his sisters. They were the two younger daughters of Sir Augustus and Lady Fraser, the two elder being married women with homes of their own.

  Josiah oversaw proceedings, and from the moment he entered Daisy’s home, without even the courtesy of knocking first, until the footmen and groom had left with the young master, uttered not a word to the young girl and old woman within. His body rigid and his face like stone, he issued monosyllabic orders to the other three men, following them closely and shutting the front door of the cottage firmly behind them.

  ‘Well!’ The exclamation from Nellie said it all, and she didn’t really need to add, ‘The ungrateful so-an’-sos. That lad wouldn’t have stood a chance without you, hinny, an’ to take him without as much as a by your leave . . . Still, that’s the gentry for you. An’ you lookin’ after him like you did an’ all. You’ll know what to do the next time you see someone drownin’ in front of your eyes leastways.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault, Gran. Mr Fraser’s, I mean.’

  Nellie looked hard at her granddaughter and when Daisy turned away to stare out of the window at the departing coach, her cheeks pink, the old woman said as though to herself, ‘Aye, he was a bonny lad, but bonny is as bonny does. I can still remember when I was a lass a mite younger than you, an’ a little lad from our village did a bit of night-time poachin’ in the grounds of a big house Harton way. The fishin’ had been bad, see, an’ he thought a rabbit or two’d keep the family goin’, but as it was he come across a pheasant that just sort of flew into his hands. But he got caught by the gamekeeper, didn’t he, an’ the young owner of the estate, a lad not much older than the one that was just carried out of that door if I remember rightly an’ just as bonny, he had the boy done for seven years’ transportation, an’ all for the sake of a bird.’

  The coach had gone but Daisy still continued looking out of the window as she said, ‘Them times are gone, Gran. They don’t transport someone for poachin’ anymore.’

  ‘Mebbe not, but the gentry’d still have the last drop of blood out of such as you an’ me, an’ not give us as much thought as the horses in their stables or their favourite dog. It’s bred in ’em, lass, take my word for it, an’ all this talk about unions in the mines an’ the factories won’t make a scrap of difference. Your da’s right on that. It’s power the gentry’ve got, the power of land an’ money. This new party the unions got up a couple of months ago that your da an’ Tom were on about, this Labour Party, it’ll come to nowt. The mine owners an’ the factory owners’ll be havin’ none of it.’

  Daisy turned restlessly from the window. She didn’t care about the unions or the Labour Party or anything else except seeing her da and Tom. Everything else, even William Fraser and his family, paled into insignificance beside that. But she hadn’t minded tending Mr Fraser. She pictured the handsome young face in her mind’s eye, remembering the feel of his hair against her flesh when she had lifted his head for him to drink, and she shivered, her heart giving a funny little twist. Anyway, that was that, he had gone and she would never see him again.

  She breathed in deeply, flung her two thick braids of hair over her shoulders and set about putting the room to rights.

  The next two days were unpleasant ones. Daisy and Nellie and the other womenfolk had to face the fact that their men were not coming home, and their grief was overwhelming.

  Peter’s wife Tilly was inconsolable, and Daisy spent a number of hours each day helping her sister-in-law with the children and trying to keep things as normal as possible, while all the time each of them was waiting for confirmation of what they all dreaded. There had been some attempt by the a
uthorities to salvage the big ship which had sunk off their coast, along with the grisly occurrence of several bodies being washed ashore amid other debris, but such was Daisy’s state of mind that these events did not make a deep impression on her.

  On the afternoon of the third day the body of a fisherman was hauled up in the nets of a boat working at Holy Rock, off Sunderland, but of the other five missing men there was no sign. Alf and the fisherman who worked his boat with him, Henry Ingram, volunteered to go and look at the body the next morning, and as soon as Alf walked into the Applebys’ cottage on returning to the village Daisy knew the dead man was her da or Tom or Peter.

  ‘Who?’

  She hadn’t needed to say anything more, and Alf had answered in like vein when he said, ‘Tom.’

  Later that night Daisy’s three surviving brothers and their wives, along with Tilly, squeezed into the living room for a family assessment of what needed to be done. Daisy, her eyes still red and puffy from a bout of crying earlier, looked round at them all as George, the eldest and named after their father, began to talk.

  He was thirty-eight years old, Ron thirty-four, and Art thirty-two, all three of them alive and well while Peter and Tom, the youngest two, were dead, she thought, the lump in her throat feeling as though it was going to choke her. It wasn’t fair, life wasn’t fair, they had still been so young. And yet could she have picked any one of the others to take Peter and Tom’s place, or her da’s come to that? Of course she couldn’t. She sat up straighter in her chair and blew her nose. It was no use thinking about fairness or unfairness, she cautioned herself grimly, she’d go stark staring barmy if she went down that road. And she forced herself to take in what it was George was saying.