The Servant Girl

by Maggie Hope

  ‘I have a proposition for you, Hetty.’

  Not now! Oh no, she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. ‘I’m very tired, Mr Painter, I was working in the garden this afternoon and I have to clear away the tools yet,’ she said. She didn’t want to look at him so stared at the cups and saucers on the table.

  ‘They can wait.’ He was insistent. He leaned forward and cupped her chin in his hand, forcing her to look at him. It took a supreme effort of will for her not to shrink from him, to pull away and go out into the garden, along to the cliff top, anywhere she could feel the clean, cold wind from the sea.

  ‘Mr Painter?’

  His eyes were a pale blue, glittering behind his glasses. He had a thin mouth, she noticed, pale hair and eyelashes.

  ‘Have you considered what you are going to do after the birth?’

  Yes, she had considered it but could find no solution to her problem. But she wasn’t going to tell him that.

  ‘I have friends in Saltburn.’ She had, there was Alice.

  ‘You could stay here. I have thought of using this house for entertaining clients. Of course, I would employ other staff, I wouldn’t want you to do the work.’

  ‘What would I do, Mr Painter?’ She wanted him to say it. She wanted to be able to refuse him. She wanted him to leave so that she could go upstairs and lie down on her bed and cry and cry.

  ‘I think you know what I want,’ he said. ‘You would be my hostess, Hetty. Think what it would mean – security for you and your child.’ He put out a hand and touched her breast and he thought, this is Matthew’s woman, Matthew’s child, and I have them now. Matthew, his old enemy. There was triumph in it. He smiled thinly at the thought.

  Hetty jumped to her feet, brushing his hand away, and the smile faded. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Painter, I can’t do that,’ she said. He would tell her to go now, she thought, panic-stricken. Would Susan take her in? Just for tonight?

  But he had recovered himself. The smile had gone and he coughed, holding his hand up to his mouth. ‘I must go,’ he said, for all the world as though they had been discussing the weather. ‘I must congratulate you on the way the house is looking. Quite takes me back to my grandfather’s day.’ He walked to the door to the hall before turning back to speak again. Now he will tell me to go, she thought, but he did not.

  ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I know all you will be able to think of now is the birth of your baby. I won’t speak of it until after that. I think then you will come to see it will be for the best, for you and the baby.’

  After he had gone Hetty pulled on her coat and tied a scarf around her head. She felt stifled, she must have some fresh air. It was already turning to dusk outside but she walked along the track to the edge of the cliff and stared out to sea. A light winked on the horizon, and another, further along. The gulls were quiet now, they must have bedded down for the night. She walked along to the path which led down to the little bay but it was too late in the day to wander down it so she turned back reluctantly.

  She would have to go as soon as her baby was born. The family would take her in, of course they would. But there was the memory of that last time Da and Frank had come to see her. They had just gone, not said goodbye or anything, because of Matthew.

  Next morning, Hetty woke with a headache and aching limbs. She had had a night of bad dreams, dreams where her baby and Cissy were in danger and she had to protect them. Anxious, hectic dreams. She decided she would walk along to see Susan. Her life was so normal, she was such a sensible girl, Susan would never have made such a mess of her life as Hetty had.

  She got as far as the farm gate before she remembered that Susan would be out; she was going into Whitby with her husband today. Hetty would walk down to the bay, then. It would be the last time before the baby was born, probably the last time she would walk down there at all for soon she wouldn’t be here. The day was overcast and the sea covered in whitecaps, but at least it wasn’t raining. She could easily get down the path to the bay, she told herself.

  Once there, she walked in the shelter of the cliff. The wind was from the land for a change, a west wind. She noticed a large shell. She would look for more, she thought, with some idea of making a mobile to hang over the baby’s cot when she was a little older. It would be a girl, she thought, a girl like Cissy, a girl she would cherish and never allow out on a sledge, never.

  Hetty found half a dozen shells, pretty pink and white on the outside with shining cream-coloured insides. Just what she wanted. She sat on a rock and laid them out before her. A hot needle would make holes in them, she reckoned, so she could thread them on strong crocheting cotton.

  There was a spot of rain. She looked up and saw the clouds had changed to black; rain was spattering on her shells. The waves were thundering now, coming close to her feet. What a fool she was! She had lived by the sea, knew well what it could do in a storm. Gathering her shells together, she turned for the path – but no, the waves were almost up to the cliff along that way. The cave was the answer, the only way she was going to make it back to the house. It sloped gently at first but rose above the highest seas as it turned into the smugglers’ passage.

  It was only five minutes to the cave but by the time she got there the rain was coming down in sheets and her feet were wet where she’d had to wade through the oncoming tide. But she reached the cave and ducked into the entrance and waited for her eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom. The water was over her feet. Thank goodness she had had the presence of mind to string her shoes round her neck. Her feet sank into the soft, wet sand but she could see that the water extended for only a few feet into the cave.

  Carefully, Hetty picked her way between rocks and boulders to the back of the cave and began to climb. The way wasn’t very steep near the bottom and she didn’t find it too strenuous to reach a point above the high water mark. There was a sort of platform, hollowed out by the smugglers of long ago, she thought. She rested on it, looking back to where she had climbed. The water came swirling in. Already it was creeping up behind her. She could see the white froth on the waves but not much else. The light which had filtered in from above the last time she was here was poor today. Of course, the sky outside was black, she reminded herself.

  She debated whether to try to climb up to the house, or wait until the storm blew itself out and the water went down. It could be hours and hours, she knew that. But the floor was level and there was even a sort of platform where she could sit with some comfort at least. Hetty sat down and leaned her back against the wall of the cave. Suddenly she was tired, so tired. She closed her eyes and listened to the storm. There was a sort of music in it, crashing and reverberating about the walls of the cave and being channelled up through the tunnel, coming out in this wider part. She listened, too weary to worry about anything any more, and after a while she slept.

  Chapter 28

  Hetty woke with a start. She was cold and wet. Disoriented, she stared up at the dark shadows of the roof, shifting to the patch where light filtered down, very little light, barely enough to lighten the gloom. Her back ached, her shoulder was painful where a pebble had been digging into it.

  She was in the tunnel, the passage which led up to the house. Memory returned as a wave washed over her, making her gasp and splutter and scramble to her feet. The water was washing over the platform. Even as she watched another wave swept across it and receded. Down below, the cave bottom was awash, the mark left by previous high tides already underwater. The baby moved restlessly within her, turning. There was a small pain as it kicked her ribs. Hetty put her hand over the spot and felt the bump of its foot or knee. Something, anyway.

  Straightening up, she caught the back of her head against a projection from the wall and sat down suddenly on a rock, feeling sick, letting the water wash over her feet and recede. She had to go on up. No matter how hard it was, there was no other way. The next wave might not recede at all and then there would be more. With an effort of will, she gathered herself togeth
er, got back on her feet and walked over to the source of light, the place where the tunnel led up from the platform. Somehow she had to reach the top. She was wet and shivering. Even if the tide rose no further the cold would get her, she thought.

  At the bottom of the shaft, her foot slipped against something hard and though the toes were numb with the cold, the pain as she caught her little toe was excruciating. ‘Blast it!’ she shouted, bending down and feeling it gingerly. It was then that she saw, as yet another wave receded, a gleam of something … she didn’t know what. Despite the cold and the wet and the threat of the sea, she was instantly curious. She scrabbled in the sand around it and revealed a drawstring bag, a purse maybe, rotten with age for even as she tried to pick it up the leather burst and there was the chink of metal as coins fell to the floor.

  Her imagination had really run riot now, she told herself, she was seeing things! This wasn’t a fairy tale, this was hard reality. A person didn’t just find treasure in a cave except in books, not even a smugglers’ cave. She was going daft in the head. Another wave came, washing round her legs as she knelt on the ground, moving the bits of leather that had come off the bag, even moving some of the coins.

  Hetty was galvanised into action. She picked up the purse and as many of the coins as she could and thrust them into the pocket of her dress until it bulged then lifted more and put them on a ledge, as high up as she could reach. But the water was swirling round her knees now and she had to go. She stepped up and began to climb away from the platform.

  Her knees ached. She struggled higher and higher and thought her back would break in two. She couldn’t catch her breath. There was a terrible pain in her side, the weight in her pocket pulled her down and at last she had to stop and lean against the wall of the passage. After a while she looked up at the light filtering down from the chimneys and somewhere else, she couldn’t fathom where. She was little more than halfway up. She would have to leave the coins, or most of them. She lifted a stone and hollowed out a hole with her hands for them though why she didn’t know, she was fairly sure no one came near the passage.

  Climbing on slowly, taking her time, she took frequent rests, but the ache in her back was turning to a pain, recurrent, insistent. When finally she reached the door to the attic she thought she was dying. She fell on to the dusty boards and closed her eyes. The light from the skylight shone red through her eyelids, she could feel her heart racing.

  Please God, she prayed, please God, let me reach the telephone. Don’t let the baby come here, please God. Susan … she had to telephone Susan. After a while she recovered enough to get to her hands and knees and crawl slowly, oh so slowly and carefully, down the stairs, pausing and doubling into a crouch when the pains came. They came ever faster, the intervals between less and less. But she reached the telephone and huddled over it, panting.

  ‘Come on, howay man!’ she cried into it when the operator was slow to answer but at last she heard Susan’s voice at the other end of the line. She sank down on to the floor of the hall. She could hand over the responsibility for the day to Susan now, could stop resisting and let nature carry her away. There was one more thing though, she’d almost forgotten. She delved into her pocket and found the two coins still there. She pushed her handkerchief over them, deep down in the pocket. Then she forgot all about them in the urgency of the moment.

  It was a girl, not born until the middle of the night. ‘There’s plenty of time for Nurse Bainbridge to get here,’ Susan had assured her, and there had been. Next morning, as Hetty lay in the bed she had shared with Matthew, her baby in the cradle which she had brought down from the attic only a week before, she remembered the coins. Susan had gone home to see to her own family but had brought in a fourteen-year-old girl from the miners’ cottages.

  ‘I can manage,’ Hetty had said, but Susan had laughed.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she replied. ‘You need someone here, especially the first week.’ She had paused. ‘You can afford it, can’t you? Sylvia won’t want much.’

  There was the money she had saved to make a new start for her and the baby, thought Hetty. It was then she remembered the coins from the cave. But it was so unreal, had she dreamed it? Pushing back the bedclothes, she found the dress she had been wearing, ruined with salt water now, shrunken and stained. But there, in the pocket, were the coins. Hetty drew them out and got back into bed. There was a gold coin and a silver one. She stared at them. They didn’t look to be worth much. The silver one had ‘four pence’ round the edge, and a head on it she didn’t recognise. But the gold one was a sovereign, or at least she thought it was. She had seen sovereigns before but this was very old and it hadn’t the head of Queen Victoria on it either. She rubbed it with her thumb. The date on it was 1792.

  She lay back on the pillow imagining that time so long ago. A smuggler could have dropped the bag – by, they must have made a mint of money with their smuggling! Fancy ordinary working people with all that money. Or no, perhaps it was that John Andrews, the Scot who had lived at Saltburn. They said he’d run all the smuggling on the coast. Perhaps the revenue men had been after them, mebbe they had run into the cave to get away and then one of them dropped the bag in his hurry to escape the law.

  Hetty smiled to herself. Sometimes the real world was more fantastic than her imagination. The smugglers must have been there. After all, there was the passage and the leather purse, rotten with age. But the money wasn’t rotten, it was here and it was Hetty Pearson who had found it.

  ‘I’ll make good use of it an’ all,’ she whispered to her baby. ‘John Andrews won’t miss it now.’ Penny, she’d call the bairn, after the first coin. Well, she could hardly call her fourpence now, could she? The baby whimpered and she leaned over from the bed and picked her up, cuddling her into her breast. Penny snuffled blindly into the softness, searching for the nipple.

  How much was a gold sovereign worth now? She had seen some old coins in the curio shop in Saltburn. The older ones were worth a mint, they were an’ all. Penny whimpered in frustration and Hetty bared her breast and put the baby to the nipple and Penny hung on like a leech. By, it was sweet, it was. A wave of love swept over her.

  ‘Whisht, babby,’ she whispered, bending her head and kissing the soft down on Penny’s. ‘Whisht, babby, Mammy’s going to buy you the world.’ She laughed softly to herself. Here she was with a few old coins, she didn’t even know what they were worth, and she was talking as though she was rich. But surely she could use them to establish herself, and then she could go home and hold her head up high. She could show them the baby, and Mam and Da would fall in love with Penny straight away. She fell asleep, the baby at her breast, still making plans for the future, a future which had changed dramatically in the last few hours.

  Exactly three weeks later, Hetty stood outside the curio shop in Saltburn, heart beating so fast she felt as though she was suffocating. She clutched her handbag. Imitation leather it was in dark green and some of the outside had worn, showing the cloth underneath. But inside there were the coins, or at least a selection of them. There had been pennies as well as fourpenny and sixpenny pieces, sovereigns and even guineas. Not exactly a hoard but a nice lot, Alice said when she saw them. For Hetty had thought she would burst if she didn’t confide in someone and Susan lived too near her little bay. She didn’t want anyone, not even her friends, to walk in her bay, maybe even find the cave and the passage up to the house. And Alice had been so pleased for her, not a bit of envy in her.

  ‘I don’t know, love,’ she had said doubtfully when Hetty said she was going to take them to Mr Martin’s shop. ‘I’m sure he’s an honest man but you can’t be too careful. Why don’t you look around? There are other places that sell such things. I’ll mind Penny for you.’

  Hetty hadn’t time to look around, she needed money now. Taking a deep breath, she opened the shop door and went in. Mr Martin was a dapper little man with pince-nez and rosy cheeks. When he saw the half dozen coins which she brought out of her bag,
he drew in his breath sharply.

  ‘But, young lady, where did you get these?’

  ‘I … my grandmother left them to me, they were her grandmother’s. They’ve come down in the family,’ said Hetty. Now why had she lied? she asked herself. But she knew why, she was frightened she might have the coins taken from her.

  ‘And now you have to sell them? What a shame.’ But Mr Martin had accepted her explanation and was examining the coins closely now and Hetty could tell he was excited about them even though he was murmuring about old coins not being worth as much as people thought.

  ‘I can take them into Middlesbrough, or perhaps Whitby,’ she said. She caught sight of a trade magazine, The Coin Collector, lying to one side of the counter. She picked it up and rifled through the pages, her confidence growing as she saw that there were many advertisements. People all over the country were asking for old coins! ‘Or I could write away—’ she began. But Mr Martin looked up from his scrutiny of the coins, frowning as he saw what she was doing, the frown turning to an easy smile.

  ‘I can see you are a businesslike young lady,’ he said. ‘But I assure you, I can give you as good a price as you are likely to get anywhere.’ When Hetty came out of the shop, she had his cheque in her bag for eighty-five pounds.

  ‘Well! Who would have believed it!’ said Alice when Hetty went back in triumph and, picking up little Penny, danced around the cafe, which luckily was empty, it being too early in the morning for the dinner time rush.

  ‘And do you know what I’m going to do?’ asked Hetty. ‘I’m going to buy a house in the jewel streets, I’m going to have my own boarding house. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Oh, but will there be enough?’ asked Alice doubtfully.

  ‘For a deposit at least,’ Hetty assured her. She was filled with a new determination. Fate had given her this windfall and she was going to do something with it, for the sake of her daughter. It was a chance, something people waited years for, and now she had it she was going to take hold of it and do something with it. And if she got as much for the rest of the coins as she had for the odd half dozen she had sold to Mr Martin, she would make about six hundred pounds. Six hundred pounds! It was a fortune, one to work with.