The Child From Nowhere

by Freda Lightfoot

  ‘Flora, me darlin’, how good it is to see you. Sure and Mammy’s on the mend now. Can’t you see?’

  ‘Shall we proceed?’ This from Lucy who, as Cissie quite rightly stated, had clearly put herself in charge. But then she’d no doubt organised the entire funeral since Kate had been incapable.

  The solicitor cleared his throat, declared that this was Eliot Tyson’s last will and testimony, and began to read.

  Most of it went right over Kate’s head. She was quite incapable of concentrating. She felt so restless and desperately tired. Even sitting in a chair took every ounce of her will power. All she wanted to do was to crawl back upstairs, put her head under the bed-clothes, go to sleep and never wake up. Except that was a wicked thought. What would happen to her children then? She mustn’t even think such a thing.

  Mr Jeffries seemed to be explaining how a small portion of the business already belonged entirely to Kate, and that Eliot’s will concerned only the ninety per cent of Tyson’s that he owned. She lost track of his comments after that, as it all became far too convoluted and complicated.

  She did hear that there were small legacies for Mrs Petty and even Ida which pleased her as it would secure their future at least. She heard the names of Lucy’s children mentioned, though in what connection she couldn’t have said. The outcome must have pleased Lucy for she gave a satisfied little grunt at one point, visibly relaxing as she cocked a look of pure triumph in Kate’s direction.

  When it was done and the document folded away, Lucy rose gracefully and personally thanked the solicitor, shaking his hand before sweeping out of the room, nose in the air, her children following close behind, without a second glance at Kate.

  The main body of the complicated document had to be explained to Kate all over again afterwards, over a nice cup of tea which Mrs Petty brought to the small parlour.

  The will had apparently been written at the time of their marriage, shortly after Eliot had joined up, he’d therefore made no direct provision for Callum, since the boy had still been missing at the time. The only mention of him was in the instruction: In the event of my adopted son Callum being found I trust my wife Katherine to make due provision for him out of her share of my estate as my sister-in-law Lucy must do likewise with her own children.

  Apparently this had met with Lucy’s approval.

  Mr Jeffries went on to explain how the house and Eliot’s personal effects and disposable funds were left to her in entirety. Now he paused, making sure that he had her full attention before continuing.

  Following one or two charitable bequests and a codicil added later to set up a trust fund for Flora, the business known as Tyson Shoe Industries, shall be divided equally between my wife Katherine and my sister-in-law Lucy Tyson widow of my brother Charles. I trust that as the sisters they have now become they will feel able to work together to maintain the high standards of Tyson Shoe Industries. I leave my company safely in their hands.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Callum felt as if he was burning up inside with hatred and resentment. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Finding his mother had been the answer to his prayers, and even though things hadn’t always gone smoothly between them, at least they were getting to know each other. And he’d been so grateful to get away from the Brocklebanks and that dreadful farm.

  It crossed his mind that Mrs Brocklebank must have wondered what had happened to him, where he’d run off to on that market day. Not that he really cared what she thought. He was free. He had found his mother again. That was all that mattered.

  Kate was kind and loving, and he liked her helping him with his reading. He’d been enjoying those lessons, that peaceful time together, at least until Eliot Tyson had poked his nose in. He hadn’t been near the study since, of course. He’d not be held up as a laughing stock, not by anyone.

  Accepting Eliot Tyson as his father had been one step too far, too much to ask. Callum was ashamed to say that he felt no great sorrow over his death, except for the grief it was causing Kate. Not only had she lost her husband, but the child she was carrying too.

  Callum felt sorry for her. She rarely left her room these days and he would often hear her sobbing late into the night. Sometimes he wondered whether he should go in and comfort her, and once had almost done so when she sounded well nigh hysterical, but then Mrs Petty had come bustling along.

  ‘I’ll see to yer poor mam. I’ll give her one of my potions,’ she’d said, indicating the brown bottle in her hand. Mrs P was the nearest thing to a witch anyone could imagine.

  Callum had left her to it, and while he was thankful to be free of the responsibility, not being entirely sure what he would have done if he’d gone in, he’d also felt a nudge of envy. It might be quite nice to be needed by your mother, for her to want you to sit beside her and know exactly what to do to help. But should Kate ever feel the need to have him by her, she had only to ask. So far, there’d been silence. Even the crying seemed to have stopped now.

  Sometimes he offered to take in her breakfast or dinner on a tray. Generally she was lying in bed, oblivious of the fact that he was there. Until this morning when he’d discovered her sitting in a chair, staring blankly out of the window. He wondered if she’d been there all night.

  ‘I’ve brought you breakfast,’ he said, as he always did.

  Rarely did she even respond, except on her better mornings. Sometimes she would smile a little, thank him or say that he was a good boy. Callum loved to see her smile. He ached to make her happy again.

  This morning Kate startled him by saying: ‘Would we have been happier, do you think Callum, if we’d stayed in Poor House Lane? Millie did, and she survived, along with most of her brood.’

  ‘I don’t know, Mam.’ He liked calling her that, and did it more and more. It was much less formal, more personal somehow than mother.

  He was rewarded with another of her rare smiles, as if she liked it too, but there was still that faint crease between her brow as if she sought the answer to a puzzle. ‘Did I do the right thing? That’s what I keep asking myself. It was for you, I did it for you. I was so afraid you might catch something dreadful and die. I wanted the best for you. Do you hate me for that? I didn’t mean to give you away and nor did I, not entirely. I wouldn’t have agreed to the adoption if they hadn’t let me stay on as your nursemaid. Well, that was my official title, but you and me knew different. Wasn’t I always your mammy?’

  ‘Aye, Mam, you were.’ Flora still called her Mammy, but Callum didn’t. He was nearly a man after all.

  ‘But then you vanished and my world fell apart. I went back to Poor House Lane. Did you know that?’

  He was surprised. He hadn’t known that.

  ‘Now I’ve lost him. I’ve lost my Eliot. Why do I always lose those I love best? Is it a punishment for wanting too much from life, for being greedy?’ Her eyes filled with tears and Callum hurried forward to give her an awkward pat on her shoulder.

  ‘Of course it isn’t a punishment. Anyroad, who from?’

  ‘From the gods. They get jealous if we mere mortals are too happy, so they do.’

  Callum made a scornful sound deep in his throat. ‘You’ve been listening too much to Mrs P and her weird notions. The old witch is poisoning yer mind. You were poor, near starving, stands to reason you’d want to better yerself. Who wouldn’t? And from all accounts, tha’s med a grand job of the business. All the men say so.’

  ‘Do they?’ She perked up a little at that, but then seemed to collapse in upon herself. ‘But how can I carry on? How can I go on without him?’ And she put her face in her hands and sobbed.

  Life had been difficult enough before, but now the situation was a thousand times worse. And that accident was all far too convenient. Why had they never found the car that had hit him? Why was it going so fast, and why didn’t it stop? It all sounded a bit fishy to Callum.

  What was worse, as a result of Eliot Tyson’s death, Lucy now owned nearly a half-share in the company. She was
forever flouncing about the house as if she owned that too. And while his mother continued to lock herself in her room, she might as well.

  Kate was filled with a terrible restlessness. If she sat on her window seat for five minutes, she must then get up and go and sit on her chair by the fire, or lie on her bed for a while. She would pick up a book and try to read, or glance at the newspaper, but the things that were happening in the world - riots in Liverpool in response to a police strike, with hundreds arrested and talk of a rail strike soon - seemed unreal. Kate was too tired to care. She wasn’t going anywhere, so what did it matter if the trains weren’t running?

  Thoughts tumbled over themselves in her head. She kept asking herself why it had happened, replaying that day in her mind like a stuck gramophone record.

  Had Eliot been thinking of her and the baby, was that why he was knocked down? Because he hadn’t been paying proper attention to what he was doing.

  What a dreadful thought. In that case it would all be her fault. The more rational part of her mind told her this was nonsense, but then the questions and the need to apportion blame would start up all over again.

  ‘It’s my fault that I lost the baby,’ she told Flora, as the little girl sat stroking her hand. Flora was appalled.

  ‘Don’t say such a terrible thing, Mammy. It is not your fault at all. You were grieving for Daddy. You were sick. Aunt Vera said you might have died.’ Her lovely chestnut eyes filled with tears. ‘What would I have done then, if you had died?’

  ‘Aw, cherub, I’d never leave you, I swear it.’ And she grasped Flora to her breast while the pair of them sobbed out their grief. Then Kate pulled out her hanky and scolded herself for giving in to her emotions, trying to smile, for the sake of her little girl. But scarcely were the words out of Kate’s mouth before the tears were flowing again. They just wouldn’t stop.

  And when she wasn’t crying, she felt sick, nauseous. Sometimes she would shake with cold, even as sweat slicked her skin as she constantly relived those dreadful moments when Constable Brown brought her the news.

  Worse than that, in her mind’s eye she saw the car, mysterious and black, driving very fast. She saw Eliot’s startled expression transfixed and blinded by the sun glinting on its windscreen, eyes wide with terror. She heard the screech of brakes, the impact of a heavy body on steel, the sound of glass breaking. It seemed so real in her mind, almost as if she’d personally witnessed the event.

  If she could but focus her mind on the sequence of events, on how the accident could have happened, yet it seemed impossible. One minute it was numb, the next racing, not a coherent thought in it, only a tumult of questions going round and round in her head.

  Who had been driving that car? Why had the driver not bothered to stop? Who would be so cruel, so uncaring? Or was it simply fear that had made them drive on?

  Most terrifying of all, she needed to know if Eliot had died instantly, or if he’d lain in the road dying slowly as he waited for help? Oh, it was all too awful to contemplate, too dreadful and confusing.

  If only she had the answers to these questions, she might then be able to accept that he was dead, that he wasn’t ever coming back to her. And yet a part of her still expected the door to open and Eliot to come breezing in, sweep her up into his arms and tell her how much he loved her.

  Sometimes one of the aunts would creep in. Vera with hot lemon, as if she had ‘flu or a sore throat, Cissie with a chocolate drop or mint humbug, as if she were a dog needing a treat. They brought her cups of tea she couldn’t drink, meals she couldn’t eat, their eyes full of pity.

  The nights were the worst, long and silent and endless, her body aching from exhaustion as she sat and rocked herself in anguish in the chair, Eliot’s photograph clutched to her chest. Sometimes she would walk quietly down the stairs and out into the starry night, slip through the stillness of the garden, as she was doing now, the heady scent of night-stocks filling her nostrils.

  The will had given Lucy everything she’d ever wanted, and Kate felt as if she had nothing. She’d lost her child, most of the business that she’d worked so hard to build up, and even her beloved Eliot. How was she ever going to live without him? One short step and she’d back where she started, in Poor House Lane.

  Oh, but she still had Callum, and Flora, she reminded herself. And didn’t her children mean the world to her?

  She sat in the summer house, not crying now but with a small smile on her face, remembering, finding some solace and peace at last in blissful memories. And she kept on counting her blessings, the ones she had found through Eliot’s great love for her, and those she found in her children, and in her work. She sat on, oblivious to the cool night, thinking. When dawn crept over the horizon, only then did she go back inside and called her children to her side.

  ‘What would Daddy say if he could see us now?’ she asked, as the pair of them stood together, watching her with an anxious expression on their lovely young faces, Flora clinging to her older brother as if for support. ‘Sure and he’d be ashamed of me, so he would. I remember him once telling me that I must never be defeated, or give in to self pity if the worst happened and he didn’t ever come back from the war. “Grieve for a little, if you must, but then you must get on with life,” he’d say. “Nobody guarantees that we’ll all have our three score years and ten, now do they?” And that’s what we’re going to have to do m’cushla. Like it or no, I’m going to pull myself together for the umpteenth time, and find some way to go on without him. Will you help me?’

  ‘Oh, yes Mammy, we will,’ cried Flora running into her mother’s arms.

  ‘You can always count on me,’ said Callum.

  Kate smiled into her son’s eyes. ‘And didn’t I know that all along?’

  End of Book Two

  Now read a sneak preview of the next in the series:

  The Woman From Heartbreak House

  Chapter One

  ‘How can I stay calm?’ The high treble voice rang the entire length of the landing, right to the small room at the back of the house where Callum was sitting hunched on his bed with his fingers in his ears, trying not to listen to their row. ‘Would you, if you’d just put your bare feet on to a slimy toad?’

  ‘It isn’t slimy, and it’s a frog not a toad,’ Georgie shouted back, hooting with laughter.

  ‘I don’t care what it is, it shouldn’t be in my bed!’

  A fair enough point, Callum thought, pulling the pillow over his head.

  As if having the woman who’d abducted him back in this house wasn’t bad enough, he now had her children to contend with as well.

  Georgie was forever up to some stupid schoolboy prank or other, like tying tin cans to the cat’s tail or putting that frog in his sister’s bed this evening. Callum could hear Bunty … (stupid name) … still screaming like a banshee and running all over the landing. Heaven help Georgie when she finally catches up with him, Callum thought, without too much sympathy.

  She’d barely glanced at him since arriving earlier in the week in time for the funeral, except to look at him down her nose when her mother introduced him - if you could call Lucy’s offhand remark an introduction: ‘and this is the workhouse boy.’

  Bunty had not responded, not even to say hello, but there’d been curiosity in her eyes, and, surprisingly, sympathy. He was sure of it.

  Jack had snorted with laughter, but then he was a pompous, middle-class prat. Full of his own importance, he looked upon himself as the man of the family. Even the way he dressed in cravats and three piece suits worn with silk waistcoats, made him seem like a forty year old instead of a boy of eighteen. And he was so arrogant! Callum could hear him now lecturing his younger brother, scolding his sister, just as if she had encouraged Georgie to play this practical joke on her.

  The door burst open and Bunty burst in, flinging herself on Callum’s bed in a paroxysm of tears. ‘You’ll protect me, won’t you? I hate to be teased! It’s not fair, two against one.’

  He gazed
at her in utter astonishment while she turned upon him a pair of blue eyes puffy with crying in a round face that was crimson with fury. She was a plump girl with untidy, mouse-brown hair. For once her mouth had lost its perpetual pout as she pursed her full lips tightly together in temper. Nobody could call her beautiful, yet there was something about Bunty which was appealing. Perhaps it was the sense of humanity so obviously missing in the rest of her family.

  Callum glanced anxiously at the door, which she had quickly closed after her. ‘I’m not sure I can do owt,’ he said. He preferred to keep himself to himself and avoid becoming embroiled in their constant rows and upsets.

  ‘Oh, but Georgie makes me so mad I could kill him!’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  She looked up, startled, and then the fury in her eyes instantly died, to be replaced with compassion. ‘Oh, I didn’t think. I’m so sorry. Do you miss your father terribly?’

  ‘He weren’t me father. He adopted me. Mam came to tackle him about her brother being sacked, and he offered to take me, and herself as nursemaid, rather than have me starve to death. Then one afternoon some years later I was snatched and taken away to that farm. I were nobbut a nipper, so I never really got the chance to get to know him that well.

  She seemed to consider all of this for a long moment. ‘It must have been awful for you. I don’t remember much about my father either. He died when I was quite young. Did you hate it there, at the farm?’

  ‘Aye, I did. Not the farm so much as the people, the Brocklebanks. I quite liked the animals, they were my friends.’ Callum could have kicked himself the minute the words were out of his mouth. Heaven help him, what would she think of a chap who had sheep for friends? But Bunty wasn’t laughing. Quite the contrary, she seemed to be agreeing with him.

  ‘I used to have a cat called Tiddles.’ She gave a half smile. ‘I wasn’t a particularly imaginative child. Anyway, it disappeared, and then I discovered that Georgie had swapped it for a jar of worms from a friend. I hated him for that. Tiddles was my friend. I never had many either, as a child. I was away at school, you know, and people there prefer you to be pretty or terribly clever or rich, and I was none of those things. And I couldn’t – couldn’t make things happen like Jack can, or make fun of everything as Georgie does. And I’m not beautiful like Mummy. I was always the odd one out. Do you see?’