The Orphan Collection

by Maggie Hope

  ‘I’ll come to see you tomorrow,’ Jonty whispered. He stood in the shadows just inside the gate, holding Meg’s hand in his. She gripped the warm fingers and put them to her cheek in a gesture of love, holding them there. From the street, the horse nickered softly, restless.

  ‘I must go,’ said Jonty, and drawing her further into the shadows, he kissed her, a tender, loving kiss, a comforting kiss.

  She watched him mount and ride away before going back into the house, closing the door behind her and slipping the bolt.

  ‘A fine mess, isn’t it?’

  Alice, arms folded across her chest, was standing before the range. Meg looked at her uncertainly.

  ‘What is?’ she asked.

  ‘You know fine what I mean,’ said her sister. ‘You’ve said nothing to me about getting so friendly with Mr Dale, or Jonty Grizedale as he says he is.’

  ‘We were raised together as bairns,’ said Meg, on the defensive.

  ‘Oh, aye?’ Alice was scornful. ‘Till the ripe old age of four, wasn’t it? Or was it five?’

  Meg didn’t answer. She felt so wrung out emotionally with all that had happened, she couldn’t face her sister’s censure. She sat down heavily in the rocking-chair and stared into the fire.

  ‘Why Meg, man,’ said Alice, in a gentler tone, ‘I don’t want you to be making any daft mistakes. I know Wesley’s no man to you, but you’re still married to him, aren’t you? An’ this Jonty, you don’t really know him, do you? Maybe he thinks it safer to go with a married woman. You’re not likely to trick him into getting wed, are you?’

  ‘He loves me!’ cried Meg. ‘It’s not like that at all.’

  ‘Aye. I dare say.’

  Alice looked at her sister’s downcast face, seeing the dark shadows under eyes still haunted by tragedy.

  ‘Goodness knows, you deserve some happiness,’ she remarked. ‘But are you sure he’ll stand by you if anything happens? I mean, if you fall wrong, Wesley’s not going to let you pretend the babby’s his, is he now? He’s not been near you, has he?’

  ‘I love Jonty, Alice,’ Meg said simply, looking up with tears in her eyes.

  ‘Aye, a blind man can see that.’

  She knelt on the clippie mat before Meg and took the work-roughened hands in hers. Her heart ached for her sister. Men! she thought savagely, and not for the first time, it was men caused all the pain and trouble in this world.

  ‘Howay, lass,’ she said, drawing Meg to her feet. ‘Come to bed. Things’ll likely look better come the morn. It’s no good thrashing it all out now, the both of us are over weary.’

  Next morning, Jackie was sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the kitchen when a knock came on the door. Alice and Meg were out, gone together for the shopping from the store, so Jackie had to get to his feet to answer the knock. When he saw who it was, his brow darkened. Wesley Cornish stood there, dressed respectably in a clean shirt and suit.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Jackie, making no move to ask the visitor in. ‘You hadn’t the sense to come to the funeral yesterday. You should think shame on it an’ all. But then, you never did think of nowt but yourself, did you?’

  ‘I don’t want to light with you, Jackie,’ said Wesley. ‘Can I come in, like?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I want to see our lass.’

  ‘Your lass?’ Jackie laughed his derision. ‘Our Meg, do you mean? It’s a long time since you treated her like any lass of yours.’

  ‘Let us in, Jackie,’ said Wesley, ignoring the jibe. ‘We don’t want the whole row to know our business, do we?’

  ‘Our Meg’s not in, and even if she was, I don’t think we want a shite like you in the house, any road,’ said Jackie, looking down his nose at his brother-in-law. ‘Now, hadaway with you, before I do something worse to you than swearing. I don’t want to mucky me hands with the likes of you.’

  Wesley bristled, an angry gleam coming into his eye. He clenched his fists and raised them in fighting stance, but thought better of it and let them fall to his sides.

  Jackie looked speculative. It wasn’t like Wesley to let insults pass without a fight.

  ‘I have to see her, man,’ said Wesley.

  ‘Aye. Well. You can wait for her in the back row if you like. I’m telling you, you’re not getting in here.’

  Jackie closed the door in Wesley’s face. His blood was up. By, he thought to himself, I’d have liked to belt him one. He sat down before the fire again, one hand rubbing the knuckles of the other as he imagined what it would have been like to bray Wesley’s face to a pulp. He might yet do it, if the man said anything to Meg.

  He was dead tired. Going back down the pit with the night shift had been the hardest thing he had done in his life. He didn’t know which was worst: the quiet expressions of sympathy from his marras, or the way some of them looked away, creating an uncomfortable silence which was hard to break. They just didn’t know what to say, he knew that, but still, it was hard.

  Wesley was lounging against the yard wall when Meg and Alice came back with their baskets of shopping. He straightened up as he saw them turn into the row, waiting for them to draw closer.

  ‘What are you after?’

  Alice halted close to her sister and glared at him uncompromisingly. Meg stood quietly, holding her basket in front of her like a shield.

  ‘I want to talk to Meg,’ he said. ‘Your Jackie said I couldn’t go in, I had to wait out here.’

  ‘Quite right an’ all,’ snorted Alice.

  ‘Can I come in, Meg?’ he asked.

  ‘Our Jackie’s the gaffer in the house now,’ snapped Alice. ‘If he says you can’t come in, you can’t.’ Her eyes glinted like chips of blue ice as she nodded to give emphasis to her words.

  ‘I have to talk to you, Meg,’ he insisted. ‘We can’t let everybody in the row know our business, can we?’

  ‘Do you think they don’t, like?’ Alice asked with a hard laugh.

  ‘Alice,’ Meg at last found her tongue, ‘go in now. Tell our Jackie I want to fetch him in.’

  ‘Meg! Don’t be so soft, man, he just wants something from you. You don’t think he’s come to pay for his bairns’ keep, do you?’

  ‘Go on, Alice,’ Meg said quietly, and her sister exploded, turning to Wesley and letting rip.

  ‘By, Wesley Cornish,’ she yelled, losing control altogether. ‘If you were my man you wouldn’t have done to me what you’ve done to Meg. She’s been a saint to you, and you carrying on with that Sally Hawkins like that, even before Kit was born. Aye, you wouldn’t have done it to me, I’m telling you. I’d have knifed you first!’

  Wesley looked at her, her cheeks red with anger and her eyes snapping and flashing and he was unable to suppress a spark of admiration for her.

  ‘Nay, lass,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Nay, if I was your man, I’d have used a knife on meself.’

  Meg decided it was time she intervened. She was beginning to be afraid that Alice, in her fury, would attack Wesley physically and that would be a mistake. Woman or no woman, Wesley would knock her down for it.

  ‘Go on, Alice,’ she urged. ‘Go on, ask Jackie, I don’t want any trouble in the row.’

  Reluctantly, after a final glare at Wesley, Alice marched inside the house, coming out a minute later.

  ‘Jackie says you can come in.’

  Once inside the kitchen, Wesley glanced nervously at Jackie and Alice before speaking to Meg.

  ‘Private, like,’ he insisted.

  ‘You can say what you have to say here,’ snapped Jackie. By his side his fists were clenching and unclenching; his lips were compressed so tightly they had a thin white line round them.

  ‘No, Jackie,’ said Meg, ‘we’ll go in the room.’ She led the way through the connecting door and sat down on the settle, indicating for Wesley to sit opposite her. She shuddered slightly, deliberately not looking to the side where Miles’s coffin had stood. It would be a while before she stopped seeing it in her mind’s eye whenever she
looked that way.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘I heard they took your da away. I’m sorry, Meg.’

  She studied him, well aware that he had not come to see her just to offer his sympathy. Though not yet thirty, already his paunch bulged out below his chest and broken veins littered his face. His hazel eyes were bloodshot, she noticed, and unbidden came the thought of clear dark eyes – Jonty’s eyes.

  ‘Aye,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Er … I was thinking, Meg,’ Wesley said awkwardly, looking down at his hands. ‘There’ll only be your Jackie and Alice living in the house now?’

  ‘Say what you’ve come to say.’

  Wearily, she got to her feet and walked to the window, staring out at the garden.

  ‘Well, I mean, like, there’s plenty of room for you and the lads here, isn’t there?’ Wesley blurted out.

  Bitterness welled up in Meg. ‘You mean you want to take my house away from me?’ she demanded.

  ‘Aw, Meg, look at it from my side,’ he pleaded. ‘Sally’s cottage is falling to bits and what with the pay cuts an’ all, we could do without paying the rent. I need the house more than you.’

  Meg stared at him. He was actually going to take her house from her. She couldn’t believe it.

  ‘You can live here, you know you can, man,’ argued Wesley. ‘Now your da’s not here, you and the lads can have his bedroom.’

  ‘Da will be coming home. What then?’ she asked evenly.

  ‘Aw, no he won’t, he’s gone crazed, everybody knows that, or why would they take him to Sedgefield?’

  ‘He’s not crazed! It was just the accident, he’ll be coming back!’ cried Meg.

  ‘Hadaway, man, he’s a loony. Always has been …’

  The door from the kitchen burst open and Jackie stormed in, glowering at Wesley. He looked so menacing that Wesley stepped back from him and cut off what he had been going to say.

  ‘Get out of here, Wesley Cornish, get out of our house, or I’ll put you out meself,’ Jackie shouted.

  ‘Hey! Who do you think you’re talking to, like?’ blustered Wesley, but nevertheless he was moving to the door, whilst keeping a wary eye on Jackie.

  ‘I’m not going to fight you, man, not now, I’ll go. This is a bad time for you, too soon after your trouble, like.’

  He walked to the back door before turning and speaking directly to Meg.

  ‘I want the house, Meg, I want it for me and Sally. She’s my lass and it’s me has the house through the colliery, I have a right to it.’

  ‘Get out!’ Jackie exploded in a fury and ran to the door after him, but Wesley was gone, down the yard and away up the row before any neighbours thought to join in the argument. For Wesley had felt the cold disapproval of his fellow pit folk, intensified this last week since tragedy had hit the Maddisons. He knew it wouldn’t take much for the whole row to turn on him and help Jackie throw him out of the village, let alone the house. But still, Sally would be waiting for him in the tumbledown house in the old part of the village, the part which had been a hamlet in the days before coal reigned in the county.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘Well, what did she say?’

  Sally, a new baby on her knee, was sitting by the fire in the dirty kitchen. Ashes had spilled over from the ash box on the hearth and some even on to the filthy proddy mat under her chair. There was a strange smell in the air, a sickly smell which permeated the whole house. Bed bugs, Sally said it was, they couldn’t get rid of them. They were embedded in the crumbling plaster, coming out to plague them at night.

  ‘I’ll have to go back, later on like. Mebbe it’s a bit soon,’ he said, excusing his lack of success.

  ‘You get away back there, Wesley Cornish! I want that house,’ yelled Sally, jumping to her feet and waking the baby who began screaming in fright. Wesley was saved for the moment by the pit whistle, the fore shift men were coming to bank.

  ‘I will in the morn, I have to go to work now,’ he reasoned with her, beginning to take off his clothes and change into the pile of pitclothes by the hearth, still lying where he had left them the day before.

  ‘Some bloody man you are!’ snarled Sally with cutting contempt.

  Wesley bent his head without replying, concentrating on getting dressed for the pit and out of the house away from her scorn.

  ‘Could you not have dashed me pitclothes against the yard wall, Sally?’ he said, careful to speak softly. If she thought he was complaining she wouldn’t make him any dinner to come back to. ‘Get rid of the coal dust, like?’

  ‘Don’t you tell me what I should have done. An’ me just out of childbed!’ bawled Sally.

  ‘No, no, I’m not.’ Placatingly he dropped a kiss on her cheek and went out to work.

  ‘Are you going to let him have the house?’ enquired Alice. She was pinning on her hat before the overmantel mirror for she was going out tonight. She had started going to classes in Bishop Auckland a few weeks before, determined to educate herself, get a certificate so that she could start some vocational training. She wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do but she was sure she didn’t want to stay in the village and be kept by her brother, taking on other women’s housework and washing in the way Meg had had to do for a bit of extra money. Plenty of time to decide what she was going to do the next year, when she finished her course.

  ‘What else can I do?’ asked Meg.

  Alice picked up her exercise book. She would have to be going if she was to walk to Auckland and still get there in time. There was a horse bus now, running from Winton Colliery to the station, but it cost a penny each way and she could only afford to use it for the return journey.

  ‘Well, for a start, I think you should go back into your own house. If you stay here any longer, Wesley will say you don’t need it.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Meg. ‘I might go over tomorrow. I have to make some sort of a fight. Any road, our Jackie will likely be getting wed soon, he’ll want the house then, won’t he?’

  ‘Getting wed? He’s never said anything about a lass to me,’ exclaimed Alice.

  ‘No, I know, but you know how he is, he doesn’t tell us much about anything. He could meet somebody and decide to get wed all in a hurry, couldn’t he?’

  Alice went to the door. ‘That’s a fact, then it’ll be me an’ all who’ll be in the way. Well, I’m off.’

  Next morning, Meg sent the boys off to school and went round to George Row. The house seemed very quiet as she let herself in, the fire dead long since in the grate and the iron range beginning to show signs of needing a polish with black lead before the rust took over. Well, she thought, a bit of hard work would keep her occupied. Besides, she needed to get the oven hot. Her money had run out and she would have to start up her baking business again.

  She got out her box of cleaning materials and soon was brushing rhythmically, burnishing the range till it shone. Without washing the black lead from her hands, for to do that she needed hot water and hot water wasn’t to be got until she had the fire lit and the boiler heated up, she laid the fire with sticks and cinders and a shovelful of good round coal on top and put a lucifer to it. Then she put the tin blazer in position and leaned back on her heels, watching the sticks catch alight through the bars and hearing the chimney roar as the blazer did its work.

  A knock at the front door made her get to her feet and hurry to answer it, rubbing her hands across her forehead as she did so. It must be Dolly, she thought, she would have heard her working through the thin wall which separated the two kitchens. But it was not Dolly, it was Jonty.

  ‘Oh!’ Meg looked at him and lifted the sacking apron she wore to do the range so that she could hide her grimy hands in it.

  Jonty smiled. ‘Can I come in?’

  Wordlessly, she stood back so that he could enter, blushing with embarrassment that he should have caught her looking such a sight.

  ‘I was just cleaning up,’ she mumbled, closing the door behind him.
/>
  ‘So I see,’ Jonty said gently. He touched her brow where her hand had left a sooty streak, and his touch was a caress.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ Meg whispered.

  ‘I had to see you. Your aunt told me you were here.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ sighed Meg. He had been to Pasture Row and now here he was in George Row. Everyone would know.

  ‘I am your cousin, Meg,’ he pointed out. ‘Isn’t it perfectly natural to come to see my cousin at a time like this?’

  Meg nodded, not convinced. She led the way into the kitchen and took down the blazer and a lovely warmth spread into the room immediately.

  ‘I’ll have to wash my hands, I’ll put the kettle on.’ But as she turned to the kettle on the hearth, Jonty took her into his arms and held her tightly to him, caring nothing about the state of her hands or her apron.

  ‘Jonty! You’ll get black lead all over you,’ she protested, but it was a half-hearted protest to say the least. Her emotions, still so raw after all that had happened, were easily roused. She clung to him, eyes closing as he brought his mouth down to hers and she was caught up in a sea of feeling which threatened to drown her.

  Jonty held her for a few moments then he sat down on the chair by the fire and took her on his knee.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come, folks’ll talk,’ she murmured in his ear.

  ‘Shh, my love.’ He rocked her to him and Meg felt the waves of comfort and love coming from him to her, and could no more have put him away from her than fly to the moon.

  ‘Well! I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  They were brought out of their private world by a voice at the window, the voice of a woman shocked to the core. Meg jumped to her feet and stared at the kitchen window, at the woman standing outside, a baby in her arms.

  ‘Sally Hawkins!’ gasped Jonty, and the woman nodded her head triumphantly.

  ‘Aye, it’s me, Master Jonty,’ she said. ‘How’s your da, then?’

  ‘You know Sally?’ asked Meg, eyes widening in surprise as she looked from Sally to Jonty.