‘Are you warm enough? Quite comfortable?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ They were lying side by side in this great bed, yet talking to each other like strangers.
‘Does it feel odd sleeping here, in a strange bed? Would you like another pillow, or blanket? Would you, my love?’ He was teasing her, she could tell by the lightness in his tone, and it pricked at her conscience that he should be driven to use such tricks on her which, in turn, caused her to flare with fresh annoyance.
‘I didn’t say I was cold, I said I was tired.’ She thumped her pillow and tried to move away from him as far as the bed would allow but he laid an arm about her waist, capturing her again, and Kate felt certain he would feel her heart beating.
He stroked the back of her wrist with his thumb and, sensing the weakening effect his caresses were having on her, she flounced up in the bed, masking her trembling with a coating of anger. ‘How will I ever get to sleep if you’re interfering with me the whole time.’
To her utter amazement he burst out laughing, lay back against the cool sheets and roared till even Kate found the corners of her lips twitching.
‘What? What is it? What have I said?’
‘I thought a husband was supposed to interfere with his wife on their wedding night, particularly if she is as lovely as you.’
She could see the gleam of his eyes reflected in a shaft of moonlight, the whiteness of his teeth in the semi-darkness, and something inside her began to melt. ‘Is that what I am? Your lovely wife? You think I’m lovely, or are you making fun of me again?’
He reached up and stroked the glorious tumble of red hair, smoothing his hand over her soft cheek, along the line of her throat, sliding the thin nightgown from one naked shoulder and making her shudder with longing.
I swear you are the loveliest creature I ever set eyes on. I always thought so. Why, in God’s name, we’ve spent so much of these last years at odds, I cannot comprehend. I shall carry the image of how you look this night with me forever. Will you write to me every single day, my love? Will you remember me with perhaps just a little affection when I’m out there in the mud of the trenches?’
She was lost. Kate felt a great lump of emotion rise in her throat, could barely breathe, let alone speak. ‘Oh Eliot, course I will. Don’t you know that I love the bones of ye. I always have. I’ll love you to till the day I die. Why else would I have agreed to this madness?’
Eliot felt his stomach tighten in that all too familiar way, yet still he managed to maintain his control. One wrong move now and he could lose her for ever. He gave a rueful smile, cupping her cheek with a soothing hand. ‘Will you stop being angry with me then, at least long enough to kiss me,’ and this time when he pulled her gently into his arms, she came willingly.
When they woke the next morning Kate put out a hand and instinctively reached for him. Amazingly, he was still there. It hadn’t been a dream but magical reality. She rolled over to straddle him, kissing him awake. ‘Wake up, are you tired of me already?’
‘Never!’
She nibbled at his ear, licked the erotic curve of it, rubbed her lips enticingly against his, angling her body so that he could enjoy the soft fullness of her breasts. ‘I think perhaps ye don’t have the stamina to keep up with me.’
‘Minx, I’ll show you who has stamina,’ and grabbing her around the waist, he pulled her beneath him and began to make love to her all over again.
Out on the landing, as the aunts bustled down to the dining room, they heard the squeals and made small clucking noises with their tongues. ‘I really can’t think what came over him to behave in such a dreadful, devil-may-care fashion. He’ll rue the day,’ Aunt Vera said, in her sourest tones. ‘Rue the day.’
‘Oh, indeed, you are absolutely correct, sister. They will both regret this marriage,’ Cissie agreed, and, calling to the two pointers to stop snuffling at the bedroom door, the two maiden ladies made their way down to breakfast; spines rigid, heads held high, deliberately deaf to the noises emanating from behind the closed door.
In the nursery, Flora was already regretting her mother’s hasty marriage. Yesterday had been so exciting, what with the new blue frock, the thrill of the wedding, and getting a new daddy. Now, Aunt Lucy was standing by her bed, ordering her to get up in a very nasty, bossy voice. ‘You’re a naughty girl to be still lying in bed. You should have been down to breakfast fifteen minutes ago. Don’t you understand that it’s rude to be late for meals? You aren’t even dressed.’
‘Mammy helps me dress.’
‘A big girl like you? What nonsense! Anyway, your mammy isn’t interested in you any more, not now that she’s got a new husband.’
‘She is. My mammy loves me.’
‘Not any more.’ Lucy whipped back the sheets and eiderdown and Flora instinctively curled up into a tiny ball and closed her eyes, hoping the nasty lady wouldn’t be able to see her any more, or that when she opened her eyes again, she would have vanished in a puff of smoke.
‘Get out of bed this minute and wash and dress yourself before I take my slipper to you. Don’t expect any help from your mammy. She’s too busy to spend any time with you now, so you must do as I tell you. This is my house. I’m in charge here, not your mammy! Come along now, stop shivering, get that nightie off.’
Flora struggled out of bed and obediently began to pull off her nightgown, small tears forming at the corners of her eyes, although she was desperately trying not to let them fall. She quickly pulled on her drawers and her vest with the little sleeves, but then got confused as she tried to tie the ribbons on her petticoat. She could do a knot on her shoe laces, like Miss Williams had shown her, but didn’t always get the bow quite right. Her small fingers went round and round with the loop, in and out, but somehow it wouldn’t stay in place. It kept coming undone and now she could hardly see what she was doing, for the tears in her eyes had grown too big to see through them properly.
‘Get on with it child, we haven’t all day.’
‘I c-can’t …’
‘There’s no such word as can’t, and don’t answer back. You are a very stupid girl. Put your hands on your head. Now!’
Flora jerked as if she’d been struck.
‘Do it now!’
In an instinctive bid to protect herself, the child obeyed. She clasped her hands on top of her head and her lips started to tremble. Even though she pressed them together very hard, the bottom one still wobbled.
‘Don’t you dare move an inch,’ Lucy warned, grabbing her by the shoulders and giving her a little shake, ‘or there will be a worse punishment for you. You shall miss breakfast this morning because you’ve been so lazy. But if you’re a good girl and do as I say from now on, then I won’t tell your mammy how naughty you’ve been. Do you understand?’
Wide-eyed, the frightened little girl pressed down even harder on her wobbling lip and dutifully nodded.
Chapter Seven
The workers at the factory found it hard to accept her. Simply being Eliot’s wife wasn’t enough, since the working man’s view of women was pitifully low. Wives, in their opinion, had a limited value, a role which should be confined either to minding the children and keeping house, or in the bedroom. Certainly not on the factory floor. Nor were they interested in the fact that Kate had made her mark in the shoe industry with her own workshop, which was smaller and entirely different. And it had produced only boots for the army. She knew nothing about making classic lines, the quality shoes for which Tyson’s was famous.
And of course far too many of them, Swainson included, remembered her as a simple nursemaid. Without exception they thought she’d got above herself.
‘Who does she think she is?’ they would mutter whenever she issued an order, encouraged to react in this way by Swainson himself.
Kate had expected trouble from the foreman, and she got it. She was aware of these rumblings of discontent, knew the men were deliberately working to rule and not pulling together. One by one they would come to her
and complain that a consignment of shoes, or boots, could not possibly be produced in the time she’d allowed; that some order or other had been ‘accidentally’ overlooked; that the leather was faulty; a machine had broken down; any and every excuse under the sun. She tried talking to them, man to man as it were, appealing to their better natures, their patriotic spirit, but got absolutely nowhere.
‘Come on lads,’ she would say, ‘there’s a war on. You can do better than this. Jump to it.’ But they didn’t jump to it. They didn’t put themselves out in the slightest. And all the while she was aware of Swainson smirking in the background.
She’d left Toby Lynch, her trusty foreman, in charge of her own workshop at the old ropeworks, and with gritted teeth told herself she’d just have to learn to work with Swainson here at the factory. Eliot had warned her not to expect too much, that they were behind him for some reason, and would have no compunction about walking out and destroying the business completely if she did anything hasty they disagreed with, such as sack him. So she held her patience. For now.
Early in the new year, Kate found that she had a serious shortage of men. With a fall off of volunteers, the government were bringing in conscription. It was not a popular move and many men objected, but the decision was irrevocable. The war must be brought to a satisfactory conclusion and with all speed. Even Dennis, along with many of her most skilled operatives, had been called up. Kate thought, for a time, that she might be about to lose Toby, but managed to get him excused on the grounds of his being in charge of the production of boots for soldiers.
Finding herself in dire straits, she put an advertisement in the local Westmorland Gazette, offering training to any women willing to take their place. She got a surprisingly good response with more than enough women ready to take on the challenge. Patriotism was running high.
Kate took them on and resolved to make some changes. She made adjustments to the shift patterns to allow those women who wished to, to work nights along with the men, so they could be with their families for at least a part of each day. All hell broke loose. The older men strongly objected, resenting the idea of the factory being invaded by a bunch of women, and a strike was called in protest. Each day the men would gather at the factory gates, waving their placards and shouting offensive remarks to anyone brave enough to breach the picket line. Many women stopped trying, refusing to go in to work because they were too afraid. But there were others who valiantly turned up each and every morning, determined to get in somehow. Sally Wilshaw was such a one, showing her resourcefulness by climbing in through a lavatory window, until one of the men spotted her and bolted it from the inside.
‘They’ll not stop me,’ she cried, gritting her teeth and rolling up her sleeves in a burst of fighting spirit that would have gone down well on the Somme.
One morning, as Sally and her two best mates, Joan Enderby and Nell Benson, marched boldly up to the gates, things suddenly turned nasty. The three women were jostled by a group of angry looking men who very swiftly surrounded them. ‘Hey up, you lot,’ Sally yelled at them. ‘Bugger off. We’ve a right to go to work, same as you lot. We allus have worked harder than you, you daft lump.’
‘Not in our factory, you haven’t. Go back to yer bloody kitchen. We don’t want no women here, taking work away from men.’
‘Don’t talk daft. There’s no men round ‘ere, they’re all off fighting in t’war, where you should be, Bill Grigson.’ Suddenly becoming aware of other men drawing close behind her, Sally swung round to face them, fists clenched, ready to punch any who dared touch her. ‘Here, what the ‘ell,’ but she got no further as a stone was thrown. It hit her on the back of her head and knocked her out cold. Nell and Joan ran to help but the men refused to let the women through, jeering and yelling, pushing and shoving them back and forth like rubber balls between them, till the women were sobbing with fear.
A voice rang out above the din. ‘Holy Mother, what do you lot think ye’re doing with my workers? Get yer hands off them, Jack Milburn, if’n ye know what’s good for ye.’
A hush fell in the factory yard as all eyes turned towards her. Kate was a fearsome figure to behold as she stood, hands on hips, the blazing oriole of hair around her head matched only by the fire in her smoke-grey eyes. ‘Isn’t your son at the Front, Will Barker? And yours too, Tom Perry, and yours Joe? So you can all take that menacing look off yer daft faces and get back to work afore I sack the lot of you.’
Jack Milburn, ever the troublemaker, took a step forward, not a sign of softening in the cold hard lines of his face. ‘My son will be back when the war ends, probably by next Christmas, and then where will he be, with no job to come back to? Out on the streets, that’s where.’
‘There’ll be work for him right enough, don’t you fret, whenever he comes home. And you know as well as I do that this war won’t be over by Christmas. In the meantime, we have boots to make, if’n your lad isn’t to fight the Hun barefoot, so get back to your machines, the lot of you.’
Kate thought for a moment that they were going to obey her and go quietly back to work, albeit grumbling under their breath, but then a familiar figure emerged from the shadow of a doorway. Swainson. Dear Lord, she should have guessed he’d be behind this.
He stood before her, attempting to intimidate her into submission by his very presence. ‘I’ll thank you to get out of my yard. If you’ve anything to say to my men, you can address them through me.’
‘Is that so?’ Kate wasn’t in the least intimidated by the man, only angry he dared to stand against her.
‘It is. They do what I tell ‘em.’
‘So what gives you the right of life and death over their souls, because that’s what yer saying. If they don’t work, they don’t get paid, and if they don’t get paid, they starve. In the meantime, their sons die on the field of battle, presumably in their bare feet.’
There was a small, telling silence. All eyes turned to look at Swainson, his wandering eye lurching sideways, lip curled into a snarl. ‘We working men are used to fighting exploitation by the ruling classes, and from them jumped-up uns who are pretending to be what they’re not.’
A collective in-drawing of breath, for no matter what anyone might say about the rights and wrongs of employing women, this was the boss’s wife he was insulting here, a woman who’d made quite a name for herself in the town. Kate simply smiled, as if he’d said something to amuse her. ‘Exploitation? Is that you call it? And there’s me thinking we were fighting a war, not each other. I thought it was the Hun who was our enemy, and we were working nicely together, as a team: all British, all Kendalians, all proud to be doing our bit. But then, what do I know? I’m just a daft woman.
‘Seems to me like you’re the one always giving orders round here, not me at all,’ she continued, in a calm voice. ‘Why is that, I wonder? Pissed off, are you, because you can’t get your grubby little hands on my women any more? Is that it? Do these men know how many of their wives you’ve been poking while they pay you to be their spokesman? I bet they don’t.’
The silence in the yard now was oppressive and Kate wondered if she’d gone too far. She still had no proof to back up these allegations. Not one of the women had ever been brave enough to speak up and complain, neither to Eliot, nor to their husbands. It had all been hushed up, swept under the carpet as something unclean and best not investigated too closely. Why should she imagine they’d be any different now? But she’d reckoned without Sally.
‘Aye, she’s right.’ Her voice sounded cracked and raw with pain, a mere echo of its former resonance but there wasn’t a man present didn’t hear every word. ‘He certainly did his worst wi’ me, filthy bugger.’
There was an achingly long silence, and then a second voice. ‘And me,’ echoed Joan Enderby, stepping forward.
‘Me an’ all,’ added Nell Benson.
Thus encouraged by this show of bravery, other women stepped forward, coming to stand beside these three, silently offering their support; the blazing
defiance in their steady gazes challenging anyone to doubt that they’d been anything but unwilling victims in Swainson’s climb to power.
They turned on Swainson as one man and the fear in his ferrety face was palpable. He was driven from that yard by a shouting, rowdy, dangerous crowd of angry men, Jack Milburn, Bill Grigson and Tom Perry along with him. All Kate did was stand by and silently watch, grinning from ear to ear.
Matters improved considerably after that, at least in the factory. At home was another matter. Lucy continued to treat Kate as some sort of glorified servant, if not exactly a nursemaid since there was only Flora to see to. In her opinion, it was most useful to have someone to call upon to do her bidding.
‘Kate, will you just bring my wrap from my bedroom,’ she would say, without glancing up from her magazine or her crochet work. Or, ‘Do ask Mrs Petty if we can have tea early today, and some of her delicious cream buns.’ At first, anxious to fit in and be accepted, Kate would obey, until it came to her one day that she was doing all the running about in the household, all the fetching and carrying, even to lighting fires and filling coal scuttles, particularly since Fanny was no longer there to do any of these tasks, and poor Ida could scarcely cope with all the extra duties. But hadn’t she enough to do, running the factory? Surely if she could deal with that nasty piece of shite, Swainson, who’d never set foot in the works since that stand-off in the yard, she could sort out one snobby sister-in-law.
The next time Lucy asked her to fetch something, a handkerchief this time which she could quite easily fetch herself, Kate politely declined. ‘Sorry Lucy, but I’m just working on these balance sheets, and might lose my concentration if I break off.’
The Child From Nowhere Page 8
