Rose crumpled up the note in fury. ‘It’s all right for her!’ she railed at Maggie. ‘She can afford to be a respectable widow with a posh son-in-law to keep her. I’ve got no other choice. If she cared that much about her son’s precious memory, she would have tried to help me out when I needed it. But she’s never stopped punishing me for winning William away from her. When did she ever lift a finger to help her own grandbairns? She washed her hands of us years ago!’
‘Don’t upset yoursel’,’ Maggie comforted. ‘She’s never had a good word to say about us McConnells - why should she start now? It doesn’t matter what she thinks.’
‘But Florrie too?’ Rose said in distress.
‘She’ll just be going along with it to keep the peace,’ Maggie reasoned. ‘It’s her we should be sorry for - having to put up with a mam like that every day.’
Rose’s anger subsided. ‘Aye, you’re right,’ she sighed. ‘I just thought we could have kept friends.’
Maggie put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’ll not be a Fawcett much longer. That’s all in the past, so stop dwelling on it. It’s the McMullens are your family now.’
Rose felt a deep pang of longing for her old life, for the name she had borne so proudly and that still linked her to William. But her sister was right, she had to put all that behind her and make the best of her new life with John. At least his family did not judge her harshly and his mother was as kind and welcoming as could be.
So on the eve of her marriage, Rose plunged her left hand in cold water and rubbed fat around her knuckle to help ease off William’s wedding ring. Unable to part with it completely, she tied it to a piece of string and hung it around her neck, out of sight under her bodice where she could feel it touching her breast close to her heart.
The marriage ceremony was over swiftly, without fuss, but the McMullens were not going to be done out of a celebration. They brought jugs of beer and jars of whisky up to Simonside and danced outside until the stars came out. Rose’s father thought he was back in Ireland, broke into song and then wept like a child. He had no idea whose wedding it was.
‘Shouldn’t we be going?’ Rose tried to coax John away. ‘The lasses are falling asleep.’
‘Aye, in a minute,’ John answered, giving her waist a pinch, then helping himself to one more drink.
Finally the beer ran out and, amid much noise and confusion, a party set off down the hill towards the town, a procession of John’s brothers carrying Rose’s bundles of clothes, bedding and sleepy-eyed children. All except Mary, who had crawled into Maggie’s bed and been found fast asleep.
‘Leave her be,’ Maggie suggested. ‘You can fetch her the morra.’
Rose accepted, not relishing the thought of waking her youngest and provoking a tantrum. They arrived noisily in Albion Street, Rose embarrassed by the loud laughter and ribald jokes of her new brothers-in-law as they pushed an unsteady John through the front door of Number 54. To her dismay, one of them produced a bottle of whisky and the drinking continued in the kitchen, where the fire was still to be laid and lit. The men did not seem to notice.
Rose sent the girls outside to use the privy and went upstairs to lay blankets on the beds. Soon she had the three girls bedded down in their old feather bed, while she made up the narrow brass bed that John had secured from the Kennedys. ‘We’ll have a new one soon,’ he had promised.
‘They’re makin’ too much noise for us to get to sleep,’ Elizabeth fretted.
‘I like to hear voices,’ Kate yawned. ‘It’s homely.’
‘Everything’s covered in black dust, Mam,’ Sarah complained. It was true. Rose had spent hours scrubbing floors and ledges two days ago, but the grime had blown in once more under ill-fitting windows and doors.
‘Hush now,’ Rose bade them. ‘Tomorrow you can help me clean out the house - we’ll have it looking grand in no time.’
There was a loud thud from below followed by cursing and laughter.
‘What’s that, Mam?’ Elizabeth asked, wide-eyed.
‘Just the McMullens carrying on,’ Rose said disapprovingly, then checked herself. It wouldn’t do to be too critical of them now that they were family. She didn’t want to show John in a bad light to her daughters for they were under his authority now. She felt a small prick of misgiving as she added, ‘Everyone’s entitled to a bit of carry-on at a weddin’. It’s tradition.’
Rose didn’t go back downstairs, but made ready for bed. When John failed to appear, she blew out the candle and settled to sleep in the hope that he might have drunk too much to climb the stairs. Let him sleep it off on the large uncomfortable wooden settle that he had won in some wager on his return from India and that had been cluttering up his mother’s house ever since. She did not relish his drunken attentions or whisky-reeking breath tonight, she thought as she drifted into a pleasant state of semi-sleep.
A clatter on the stairs and a thumping on the wall behind her head shook Rose wide awake. It was pitch-black and the voices below had ceased. Feet stumbled outside the bedroom door.
‘Where’ve you gan, lass?’ John shouted. ‘Where y’ hidin’?’
She sat up, alarmed he would wake the children. ‘Hush! I’m in here,’ she answered in a loud whisper.
John laughed and pushed at the handleless door. ‘Are you warming the bed, Mrs McMullen?’ he chuckled.
‘Haway and shut the door,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll wake the neighbours with your shouting.’
‘Bugger the neighbours!’ John cried, and lurched towards the bed. Belching roundly, he plonked himself down and contemplated his feet. ‘Rose, me boots seem a long way off.’
Rose sighed and hauled herself out of bed. ‘Here, let me help you.’
He let her undress him, hiccupping and laughing like a schoolboy when it came to removing his trousers and braces. Lunging at her in the dark, he pulled her to him.
‘Gis a kiss,’ he urged, enveloping her in beery fumes.
Rose wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘You smell like a brewery.’
‘Aye, and taste like one, an’ all,’ he laughed. ‘But then I’ve seen you down a mug of beer like mother’s milk at the mill. So don’t go turning your pretty nose up at me.’
Rose decided it was best to say no more, but lie back and get on with it. She closed her eyes tight shut as John covered her mouth in a slobbery kiss and held herself still as his hands cupped around her breasts and squeezed them hard. His breathing came harder as he kissed his way across her face and licked inside her ear. He whispered things to her that made her hot with embarrassment. Drink had loosened his tongue and bawdy thoughts about her.
‘I’ve waited years for this,’ he rasped, as he tugged at her nightgown and hitched it up around her thighs. ‘You’re mine now, Rose, the way you should’ve been years ago.’
John climbed on top of her and took her swiftly, grunting with pleasure and effort. Rose was reminded of one of her father’s pigs, but tried to rid her mind of the image in case she snorted with laughter. It was over quickly and John collapsed back on the bed with a triumphant sigh. He laid his head on her breast, one arm thrown over her belly.
‘It’s done,’ he murmured. ‘Now it’s your job to give us a bairn.’
Within seconds, he was asleep and snoring gently like the drone of a bee.
Rose lay staring in the darkness, wide awake. It felt strange to have the weight of a man’s head on her chest and the heat from his body next to hers. She had grown used to Kate’s restless movements in bed beside her and Elizabeth’s troubled sleep-talking.
But now she was Mrs McMullen, a married woman again. It had to be better than the lowly, vulnerable status of widow. For she had a house to call her own once more; she had escaped the servitude of the puddling mill and had a man to provide for her children. She put a tentative hand on John’s head and stroked his thick wiry
hair. What kind of a man had she married? Rose wondered. She had yet to discover.
But the feel of his strong body lying contentedly next to hers was not unpleasant. She was no longer battling in the world alone. Her guardian angel, whom she had come to doubt, was looking after her still. With that comforting thought, Rose closed her eyes and allowed herself to sleep.
Chapter 27
That summer Rose was happier than she had been for an age. The long period of uncertainty since William’s death seemed at an end, the raw grief for her former husband and eldest child had subsided to the bearable. To her surprise, she realised that this was partly owing to John’s regard for her.
Her new husband could not do enough for her. If she liked the look of a piece of second-hand china or a tablecloth in a shop window, he would buy it. When a poster advertising a touring troupe at the Albert Hall caught her eye, he took her to see them. Even though they sat far up in the highest tier of the theatre, Rose enjoyed the music hall acts and John sang snatches of the songs for days afterwards.
He filled their small house with singing. On warm evenings when the kitchen door was thrown open to let out the stifling heat from the range, his lusty voice would carry down the back lane where the children played and Rose sat peeling potatoes.
‘I love a lassie, a bonny, bonny lassie, She’s as sweet as the lily in the dell!’
Rose would blush and laugh and throw a potato at him where he stood washing in the scullery basin, stripped to the waist, showing his taut chest and thick muscled arms. She was silently proud that this good-looking man was hers and that her fears at his waywardness had been unfounded. She had seen no evidence of his reputation for being drunken or boorish since their marriage and she quietly congratulated herself for bringing a calm, sober influence to bear. It had just been a matter of keeping his brothers at bay and John occupied with domestic concerns.
He was not in regular work but there seemed to be plenty of money from his army pension. Some weeks he would pick up a labouring job but mostly he was content to do small jobs around the house such as making a cupboard for the girls’ clothes and painting the ceilings. He was not as skilful as William had been, but he was workmanlike and once set to a task would carry on until it was finished. To Rose’s delight, John was gruffly affectionate with the girls. He played the army officer and marshalled them into helping him with chores: stirring paint, polishing boots and filling the tin tub for the weekly bath. There was much giggling and splashing on a Friday night in front of the kitchen fire. John teased Elizabeth the most because, at nearly eleven, she had grown painfully modest and refused to bath with her sisters.
When her turn came, she erected a defensive wall of shirts and blankets over the clotheshorse so that no one could see her naked. The house echoed with screams of protest and shrieks of laughter from her sisters if John peered over the screen.
‘Tell ‘im to stop peekin’, Mam!’ Elizabeth squealed.
‘John,’ Rose would scold half-heartedly. ‘Let the lass alone.’
But Kate and Sarah egged him on. ‘Gan on, Father. Make our Lizzie scream again!’
Rose liked it best when they all gathered around the hearth after tea, she with a piece of mending and John with the last cup from the teapot. He would hand his newspaper to Elizabeth and instruct her to read it to him, saying the print was too small for his eyesight. Rose knew that he could not read a word of it, had even less learning than she, but would never have wounded his pride by saying such a thing.
Kate would sidle up to her stepfather and rest an elbow on his fireside chair, hoping he would pull her on to his knee as William had used to do. But John rarely touched the girls, apart from the occasional bashful ruffle of the hair or pinch of the cheek. At times Rose saw again in him the awkward, callow youth of her girlhood, the John to whom girls were a mystery.
So Kate and Sarah would have to content themselves with squatting on the wooden fender and listening to his tales of Irish heroes and legends. As daylight dimmed and the flickering firelight cast eerie shadows across his gaunt face, the girls would listen entranced to his stories.
‘Tell us the one about the leprechaun,’ Kate urged one evening when Rose tried to send them to bed. ‘Please! Just one more.’
John winked at Rose. ‘It’s only right they should learn about dear old Ireland - it’s in their blood.’
She relented and let him tell his stories one more time, remembering how as a girl she had revelled in her grandmother’s ancient tales. There was something comforting in the sound of the rhythmic rise and fall of John’s words over the hiss and pop of the fire.
Only when Kate demanded stories about his time in India did Rose see a flash of John’s temper.
‘There’s nowt to tell - not for a bairn’s ears, any road,’ he snapped. ‘What happened there’s best forgotten.’
Rose shooed her daughters upstairs with a hissed warning. ‘Your father doesn’t like speakin’ about his army days. It still gives him nightmares. Don’t you go bothering him with your questions, Kate, do you hear?’
She did not know why he was so sensitive about India, but sensed in him a deep hurt of which he could not speak. Perhaps she would learn in time.
Soon afterwards, John followed them upstairs and waited impatiently for Rose to join him in bed. His appetite for intimacy seemed never to be satisfied. Sometimes he would wake her in the middle of the night, aroused and eager. He made love with quick urgency, with hardly a word spoken and then sank back to sleep just as swiftly as he had awoken. It was as if he were releasing the pent-up desire of years. Rose did not look on these brief, passionate episodes with the same enthusiasm, yet she was flattered that his want for her was so great.
Only in one matter did they disagree and it caused the single cloud that hung over those contented summer months. That was the question of what to do with Mary. When Rose went back to Simonside to fetch her youngest daughter, the stubborn infant stamped her feet, threw herself on the ground and screamed so loud the rooks in the chimney flew away in panic.
‘Me stoppin’ here!’ she wailed. ‘Me stoppin’ with me mam!’
Rose looked on in dismay. At first she tried to coax the child. ‘Haway, hinny, come to Mammy. We’ve got a canny new house to live in - I want to show it to you. Your cot’s already there and your father’s got you a new rag dolly all of your own.’
But when Rose tried to pick her up, Mary turned puce-faced and screamed all the louder. She kicked against her mother, then bit her on the arm. Rose gasped in shock and let go. Maggie tried to intervene.
‘You naughty lass,’ she scolded. ‘You mustn’t hurt your mam. You have to gan with her, Mary.’
The hysterical girl clung to Maggie as she lifted her towards Rose and refused to look at her mother. ‘You’re me mam!’ she sobbed into Maggie’s breast. ‘Won’t gan wi’ her.’
Rose’s upset turned to anger. ‘I’m your mam whether you like it or not. You’ll stop that noise at once and come with me, you little devil! You’re not going to spoil things for the rest of us.’
She grabbed Mary roughly and wrested her from Maggie’s arms. The girl kicked and screamed and squirmed to be free, but Rose hung on to her, astonished at the strength in the wiry little body.
Maggie followed them anxiously to the door. ‘You could leave her a day or two more,’ she offered.
Rose clenched her teeth. She could not bear the thought of having to go through such a battle again. ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘John wants to give her a home. She’ll come with me now or not at all.’
The sisters exchanged helpless looks, then Rose was hauling the resisting child down the rutted path and out of the gate. All the way down the bank, Mary’s shrieks of protest and sobbing rang in Rose’s ears. Ashamed and furious, Rose hurried on, not daring to glance about her at the people who stopped to stare at the spectacle. Sh
e prayed that she did not run into the priest or a teacher from the girls’ school and would have to explain why Mary was in such a state. At that moment she hated her daughter for loving Maggie more than her and for making her feel such a bad mother.
She said terrible things to her youngest that day, hurtful words that later she felt sick at heart for having uttered.
‘Your father’ll lock you in the cupboard when he hears how bad you’ve been,’ she threatened. ‘And you can stay there for ever, for all I care! Your Aunt Maggie’s spoilt you rotten. Well, you’ll not get any favours from us, you little brat. And if you carry on screaming like this I’ll give you away to the gypsies the next time they come selling round the doors.’
By the time they reached Albion Street, both of them were shaking with temper and exhaustion. She pushed Mary through the door and banged it shut on the gawping neighbours. Mary hammered on the door to be let out, but could not reach the handle. Rose was thankful that the girls were at school and that John was out on some errand of his own. She went to the scullery, poured out a cup of water and threw it over the distraught child. Mary froze in shock. She turned and stared at her mother with red, swollen eyes, her cries subsiding. Rose stood wheezing, the storm of anger that had raged in her dying at the sight of her daughter’s fearful face. She was seized with remorse.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, holding out her arms to the child.
But Mary just stood petrified and whimpered, ‘Mammy, Mammy, Mammy.’
By the time John returned, Mary was curled up on the hearth asleep, her thumb half in her mouth. Rose was in the yard grimly pounding washing in the poss tub.
‘It’s not washday, is it?’ he smiled in surprise.
‘No,’ Rose answered curtly, bashing the poss stick with all her might.
THE JARROW TRILOGY: all 3 enthralling sagas in 1 volume; The Jarrow Lass, A Child of Jarrow & Return to Jarrow Page 24
