‘Clear off. Come back at suppertime. And mind that you bring something that we can eat back with you.’
As she clambered clumsily aboard, Sarah was reminded of what Joe had said about the theft of eggs, or even chickens, as well as fruit and vegetables from the gardens of those nearest the canal when the boat people were moored up. His own thieving, learnt along here as a child, was what had landed him in prison. Then she registered the interior of the cabin where she was standing and it drove all other thoughts from her mind. It was tiny, with seemingly just enough room for the two of them standing side by side. Even though Sarah was petite, she suddenly felt like a giant, filling up all the space. However did they manage when the all the children were on board? she wondered.
Kitty pointed to a bench seat. ‘Sit you down,’ she said. She made no motion to offer Sarah refreshment; she was probably unused to entertaining anyone other than family, Sarah thought. Yet when she took a closer look at her surroundings, she was struck by how neat and clean it was. Crocheted strips edged every cupboard and shelf, plates that were clearly just for show decorated the walls and there were few signs that the space was anyone’s living quarters, let alone the sleeping quarters, too, for what appeared to be a large family. On closer inspection, though, there was a stove in the corner, with a narrow chimney stretching up and out of the cabin. And some of the panelled wood interior clearly hid the necessities for everyday living; as Sarah’s eyes got used to the gloom of the interior after the brightness outside she could make out cupboard doors that hadn’t completely shut against the fullness of their contents.
‘So it be Joe that you’re after,’ Kitty said. Sarah noted uneasily that the menace seemed to have returned to her tones. She nodded, mute, wondering whether to ask the woman whether she was indeed his sister although now she came to look at her more closely she could see little family resemblance. She looked careworn and considerably older than Sarah herself. Kitty’s hair, all but grey, was loosely bundled back under a faded blue scarf and her sack-like clothes disguised the sort of bosomy figure that Ada would have described as ‘mature’.
‘Joe’s dead,’ Kitty said.
Sarah, her thoughts otherwise engaged, at first didn’t register what she had said.
‘Dead, do you not hear me? Gone these six months past, leaving me with this boat to manage and all the bairns too.’ Kitty looked defeated suddenly.
Sarah, still unable to fully comprehend what she had been told, could only focus on the latter part of Kitty’s speech. Had she shared the boat with her brother? Why had Joe never mentioned this?
Kitty shook her head impatiently. ‘Do you not understand? This Joseph, this man you say was your husband, well, he was my husband Joe. I long thought he had a fancy woman in town but I didn’t know he’d been and married her.’ Kitty’s eyes were fixed on the wedding ring that Sarah was once again twisting in some agitation.
‘How many children do you have?’ Sarah’s head was filled with so many questions she hardly knew where to begin but she blurted out the first one that came to mind, the memory of the ragged children on the path returning to her quite forcefully.
‘There be four living with me here on the boat and two lent out to t’other boats, to bring in a mite of earnings,’ Kitty said. She looked at Sarah’s face and an expression of horror crossed her own. ‘Don’t be telling me you’re with child?’ she said, her eyes flitting over Sarah’s figure.
‘No,’ Sarah declared. ‘But I have five already, the youngest not yet a month old and never seen her father.’
Both women sat in a kind of stunned silence while they contemplated the enormity of what they’d discovered.
Chapter 62
Neither Sarah nor Kitty had stirred from their silent contemplation for some time. Sarah’s thoughts ranged here and there and although she had an over-riding urge to get up and leave the boat she wasn’t sure whether she might regret not seeking answers to some of the questions that plagued her.
‘So what happened?’ she asked at last. ‘To Joe,’ she added, as it was clear from Kitty’s puzzled expression that she, too, had been wrapped up in her own thoughts.
‘He were crushed,’ Kitty said. Sarah couldn’t suppress a gasp of horror but Kitty’s tone was matter-of-fact. Of course, Sarah realised, she had probably known of Joe’s death for a while and had had time to come to terms with it.
‘How? When?’ she asked.
‘Unloading in Manchester. The chain snapped as it were lifting the cotton bales and Joe were caught underneath. There were nowt they could do for ’im.’ Kitty’s mouth was set in a straight line. ‘Course it were no one’s fault. So we haven’t seen a penny or owt. We’re just meant to get on wi’out ’im.’
‘And when did it happen?’ Sarah all but whispered.
‘Like I said, it were six months ago now.’
Another silence fell. Joe had been killed even before she first expected him home, Sarah thought. Why hadn’t she been able to sense the loss of him? How come nothing had told her he was gone?
The two women sat on, bound by an awkward alliance. They shared a common grief and an awkward secret – the same husband. As they contemplated what the news meant to them, each in turn sighed at intervals. Sarah could have sat on like this, in difficult kinship, until darkness fell, but the fact that she had left Alice to look after the family, and Beattie still so young, suddenly struck her.
‘I must go,’ she said, but made no move. She wondered whether she should offer to meet Kitty again, then thought better of it. It was best for both of them that their relationship to the same man remained unknown. Kitty seemed less surprised by it, Sarah reflected. She said she had suspected something. It made her wonder whether Joe had given her cause for suspicion before.
Finally, she stood up. She hardly knew what to say. ‘It was nice meeting you’ was barely appropriate. How did you say goodbye to a woman whose situation you understood only too well, yet despised because it was that very situation that had kept your husband apart from you? Sarah wanted to hate Kitty but she couldn’t. Kitty had surely been as much wronged by Joe as she had. Yet she had no wish to know her better, either. It would have been better for both of them if the other had never existed, she thought bitterly as she made her way back along the towpath.
‘Goodbye. And good luck’ had seemed the only appropriate thing to say to Kitty in the end.
‘Found what you were looking for?’ The man had come out of his hut as she approached. This time the dog was quiet but watchful.
‘You might say that,’ Sarah said. Her tone sounded grim, even to her own ears, and she moved swiftly on before he could ask further questions.
She had solved the puzzle of the whereabouts of Joe Bancroft. She knew now why he had never returned to his family from his last trip. As she walked back towards Northwaite, willing her feet to carry her faster than they seemed inclined, she realised she hadn’t thought to ask where he was buried. She wasn’t sure whether or not it mattered. Like so many things in Joe’s life it would remain a mystery. Perhaps that was for the best. She had a feeling that Kitty believed that she had prior ownership of Joe and maybe it was better to let her have that small victory, at least. She, like Sarah, had precious little to remember him by other than the children.
Sarah was heartsick for some time after the discovery of Joe’s duplicity. She had no one with whom she could share her burden. She would have turned to Martha, but her neighbour had announced that she’d found love again late in life and planned to go off to set up home in Leeds with a butcher. Martha had been so clearly delighted by her good fortune that Sarah couldn’t let her see that her own instant reaction was a selfish worry as to how on earth she would manage without her. Sarah also came to see that it was better that no one knew the shame of her situation – married to a man whom another woman described as her own husband.
Sarah couldn’t show her distress in front of the children, either. Although the three little ones were too young to understand, sh
e didn’t want any of them to carry bad memories of their father through their lives, despite everything. They were, of course, used to Joe’s long absences: the most recent one had stretched to nearly a year. She resolved not to say a word until they asked and, if and when they did, she would imply that he had left them. It seemed safer to reveal as little as possible, certainly not the shameful truth.
During long, sleepless nights, Sarah had ample time to look back over her life with Joe. Were there clues as to what had been going on that she should have spotted? She had racked her brains but come up with very little. There was his puzzling anger in the early days of their marriage when she had darned his socks and sewn on some buttons – was that because he was going back to Kitty, rather than to the solitary life she had imagined for him on a boat? He must have been worried that Kitty would notice. The occasions that he had been late in arriving, or absent, for Christmas – was this another sign of him sharing out his time between two families?
Who had he gone to see first when he came out of prison? She was convinced that he must have come straight to see her and Alice, until she remembered his lack of belongings and her heart sank. Had his tale of leaving prison with no possessions been a lie? Then she remembered how he had left them after a short time, returning a couple of days later in a happier mood. Had he been to see Kitty then, rather than immediately after prison?
The money he had taken from her locked cashbox – he had told her he had given it to Kitty and her children, but Kitty wasn’t his sister, as he had maintained. And the children weren’t his nieces and nephews, but his own. No wonder he had discouraged Sarah’s suggestion that they should offer further help. He couldn’t risk his secret life being uncovered. Sarah felt a blinding rage at the thought. The money that he had taken was her money, money that she had earned to support herself and Alice. He had no right. She had to turn her face into her pillow to stop herself from crying out into the night.
When the thought finally occurred to her that Joe most probably hadn’t spent as much time away on his trips as she had believed, she was quite beside herself. Of course, it made sense that he had spent equal amounts of time with Kitty. With a great uneasiness, she tried to remember the ages of the children she had seen on the towpath. Were any of them the same age as her children, she wondered? Horrible though the idea was, it seemed likely. She was filled with a terrible despair. She hadn’t known this man at all.
It came to her that when she first met Joe, he must already have been with Kitty. His easy manner, his wooing of her – he couldn’t have intended anything other than taking advantage of her naivety and moving on. ‘Did he take me for a fool?’ she thought. Unbidden, his face appeared before her, his skin tanned and crinkled into laughter lines around his eyes, the blue of cornflowers and always merry. Joe had never taken life too seriously and only now could Sarah fully appreciate the consequences of that.
Would she have felt the same about him if they had met on a cold winter’s day, not on a bright spring one when her heart was full of the promise of the summer to come? Looking back on those heady few weeks, she saw everything in vivid colour. The grass was surely a brighter green than ever before or since, the sun shone out of a cloudless sky more times than one dare hope for in a Yorkshire spring, while the birds puffed out their breasts and poured out their song as though their hearts might burst with joy.
Yet he had returned time and again and he had married her. Would he have done so if Ada had given him no other choice? Sarah wondered. These were questions to which she would never have answers now. Ada had been right about Joe, but she would never have the satisfaction of knowing it, nor would she have welcomed such a discovery. For the first time, Sarah had reason to be thankful that her grandmother was no longer with them.
In the rare better moments, when something gave rise to a fleeting fond memory of her husband, she tried to reason with herself. Joe had been horribly misguided. Perhaps there had been times when he had resolved to leave one or other of his families, then couldn’t go through with it. But he had, at least, tried to do right by both of them.
Still, it was to take many months before Sarah could think of Joe with anything other than anger. Caring for her family filled up so much of her time that there was none left over to spend worrying about the past. Beattie, the new baby, had proved to be a tranquil child, no doubt as a result of having three sisters and a brother to vie for her attention and carry her around. Sarah had been able to attend to her patients and her herb garden within a week of Beattie’s birth and for this she was thankful. It meant they would not need to fall back on her legacy, safely tucked away. And, after she had learnt of Joe’s treachery, her work gave her a focus – something to take her mind away from the treadmill to which it was bound.
Sarah had been absorbed in her thoughts while she stood at the sink, working her way through a pile of laundry. She looked up from rinsing out the final bits of washing, through the window to where Alice and Ella had spread a blanket on the grass and laid Beattie on it, with Thomas and Annie seated on either side of her. It looked as though Alice was telling them a story. Ella had been despatched to fetch something but she had been waylaid – by birdsong, a sunbeam or a dragonfly dancing through the air, perhaps – and had stopped stock still, gazing upwards, rapt.
Sarah looked at Ella, then looked at her other children. Ella’s reddish-blonde curls were the only thing that set her apart from the other dark-haired Bancroft children. Facially, they all resembled each other but Sarah knew, had known from the moment of her birth. If ever her belief began to waver, a gesture of Ella’s such as a shake of the head or a pensive look reconfirmed it.
Other than her own memories, Ella was all she had to remember of the man who might have been her one true love. If Daniel’s ship hadn’t foundered, would he have made the journey from Manchester to visit them? Would he have taken one look at Ella and would he have known, as she had? And if he had, would it have made a difference? Then she put the thought firmly away, for it was of no use to her now, and she went outside to the only people who mattered in her life.
‘Room for another one?’ she asked, settling on the blanket with Beattie on her lap and Thomas and Annie cuddling into either side of her. ‘Now, what shall we play?’
Acknowledgements
Special thanks go to Susanna Jones and Arvon for setting me on this journey, to The Old Ship and Writing Matters writing groups for helping me on my way, to Kiran at Keane Kataria Literary Agency for believing in me, and to the team at Avon for their work in bringing this book to life.
Ella is trying to put the past behind her, but the past won’t always stay hidden.
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Can uncovering a long-forgotten family mystery change your life?
Find out what happens to Sarah’s firstborn child, Alice, in Alice’s Secret.
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About the Author
LYNNE FRANCIS grew up in East Yorkshire. After gaining a degree in English Literature from London University, she worked in non-fiction publishing. She now lives in the unspoilt East Kent countryside – perfect for writing, walking and inspiration.
The Mill Valley Girls Series
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