She bit on her lower lip, feeling wretched. She was weary and at this moment there was no fight in her. Shutting her eyes, she let the heavy mantle of sleep slip over her.
Jack walked to Portland Park, but after an emotional reunion with May, he flagged down a horse-drawn cab for the return journey. It being a Sunday, the tram service was limited. They were on their way when he said casually, ‘And this Grace? What do you know about her?’
‘All I need to know. She’s been a good pal to me, Jack. The best. Somewhere like Earlswood has a way of bringing out the real worth of a person, believe me, and Grace is a diamond.’
‘She’s certainly done a good job convincing you.’ A corner of his lips was pulled up in a one-sided smile.
May shot him a keen look. ‘Don’t you like her?’
‘Don’t be daft, I don’t know the lass.’
‘Well, I do. She’s been through a lot and she’s inclined to keep herself to herself, and who can blame her? But we’ve both decided the past is the past, and we’re not going to dwell on it. The future is what matters now.’
‘Is that a sisterly way of telling me to keep me trap shut and mind my own business?’
May grinned. ‘If the cap fits . . . ’
‘Aye, all right, I get the message. She’s a saint, and I won’t do anything to upset her. Now what about Mam an’ Da? You want them to know you’re back?’
Now May’s voice was bitter as she said, ‘I don’t want to see them again for the rest of my life. If they’d stood by me, the Franklins wouldn’t have dared put me in that place.’
‘So it’s you an’ me an’ St Grace?’
‘Don’t call her that. Jack, I know you’re in one room, but if we could just stay till we get work and can rent a room ourselves? Please? It’ll only be for a few days, till I can walk on this ankle and—’
‘Lass, you don’t have to beg. There’s not enough room to swing a cat, but we’ll manage. There’s five of ’em living in the room next door, poor devils. What’s your pal going to think about it, though?’
‘She’ll be grateful, same as me.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Thanks, Jack. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’
‘Lass, it’s eaten me up inside, knowing you were in that place and what he’d done to you. I’d have given ten years of my life for five minutes alone with that Franklin swine. I found their estate, you know – Hexham way, isn’t it? Waited about all one Sunday and caught one of the housemaids going back after her day off. Got her talking, made out I was interested in seeing her again, and she told me the son of the family had just got married and was on his honeymoon in Europe. Doing the tour, she said, and wouldn’t be back for months. First and last time in my life I’d carried a knife when I went there that day.’
‘Oh, Jack.’ May stared at him, horrified. ‘You wouldn’t have?’
‘Do you know, lass, I would have. If I’d seen him that day I would have – and gone down the line for it. It would have been worth it.’
‘No, no, it wouldn’t.’ May took his hand, pressing it to her face. ‘How can you say that? You’ve always said the way to fight injustice and oppression is in the courts, to get laws changed and men in government who are for the ordinary people. You said—’
‘I said a sight too much, May, standing on my lofty ideals and preaching from my soapbox. It’s different when one of your own is treated with less consideration than their damned dogs and horses. Perhaps I needed to learn that. Not that I don’t still hold with doing it legal, like, but action’s needed sometimes, too. I can understand how a man can get so angry and frustrated that he can do murder now. I couldn’t before.’
‘But murder – violence can never be right, Jack.’
‘I didn’t say it was right, lass. I said I understand it. Now, now, don’t look like that. I haven’t done anything rash, like following the swine to Europe, now have I?’
‘It’s not funny, Jack.’
‘Believe me, I’m not laughing. Nothing about Franklin and the rest of his kind makes me laugh.’
May said nothing, resting her head on his shoulder as the coach rumbled on. Jack was her big brother and the one person she loved in all the world, and she had never kept anything from him before. But it had been right to hide who Angeline really was. She had felt bad about it all morning; she still did in a way, but Jack was so very black-and-white about some things. Angeline belonged to the enemy camp, in his opinion, and nothing she could do or say would change that. And her first loyalty was to her friend. Jack wouldn’t understand that. She wasn’t sure if she understood it herself, but what she and Angeline had been through together – the asylum, Verity, their support of each other, and especially the last few days of escaping and tramping the roads – had forged a bond that was stronger even than her love for her brother. With each of her younger siblings she had longed for a sister. Now she had one.
Jack unknowingly heaped coals of fire on her head when in the next moment he murmured, ‘Now don’t worry, lass. You’re home, that’s the main thing. An’ you’re right, the past is the past, and it’s the future that counts. If you can look at it like that, after all you’ve been through, I’m damn sure I can. I’ll nip to the pie shop and get the three of us something to eat once we’re back, an’ ask if they know of any rooms coming up round about.’
‘We’ve no money, Jack.’
‘I’ve got enough to tide you over, till the pair of you are back on your feet and working.’
‘We’ll pay you back every penny, I swear it.’
Jack’s big hand covered hers. ‘Don’t be daft – you’re my sister. I don’t want paying back.’
‘Nevertheless, we will.’
‘We’ll see.’
If anyone had told May that she would look fondly on the docks and the filthy streets of her childhood, she would have laughed in their face. But as Jack lifted her out of the cab after paying the driver, she had a lump in her throat. She was home. She was safe. Even the rank smell permeating the air was comforting, and infinitely preferable to the odour of the lunatic asylum.
They had taken two years of her life in that terrible place, but she could begin again, she told herself as they entered the house and Jack carried her up the stairs in his arms. And as he fumbled with the door and it swung open and she caught sight of Angeline, fast asleep at the table with her head resting on her arms, she thought: we can begin again. Angeline was the sister she’d never had and they were in this together now, for good or ill.
Angeline opened her eyes, a look of relief on her face as she said, ‘Oh, he’s got you, thank God!’ And as she jumped up and touched May’s arm, May put her arm round Angeline’s shoulders, drawing her close, and just for a moment the three of them were joined, their heads together and their bodies close.
PART FIVE
Though the Mills of God Grind Slowly
1900
Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting,
With exactness grinds He all.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW,
‘Retribution’
Chapter Twenty-Two
In the seven years that had passed since the day Angeline had arrived on Jack’s doorstep, she had changed beyond recognition. Not in her appearance; although she had matured into a poised, reserved young woman, her beauty was still as fresh and radiant as the day she had stepped into King Street. It was in her self-confidence and capability that the real change had taken place. She was now twenty-five years old, and her new life had given her self-respect as she had learned to stand on her own two feet. Whenever she thought about the old Angeline, it was with a feeling of pity for the childlike, ingenuous girl who had married Oswald so trustingly and been so ill-used. The new Angeline – or Grace, as she was known to everyone – was a different creature altogether. And if she sometimes felt a pang of regret that the sweet, naive girl had metamorphosed into
a woman who was wary and guarded and who kept folk at arm’s length, it was gone in an instant. Only May knew her secret, and that was the way it had to remain. And she was content in her new life – or she would have been, but for the ever-present ache in her heart concerning Jack Connor.
She glanced over at him now, sitting by the fire on the other side of the sitting room with May. The new century had been rung in the night before, amongst much celebrating; and today, the first one of the new year, most people had a thick head and were feeling the worse for wear. Her gaze lingered on Jack before moving round the room, and as always she felt a little thrill of pleasure that this was her home and she had the key to her own front door. It hadn’t always been that way.
On their escape from the asylum she and May had spent a few days with Jack, but as it had meant Jack sleeping on the floor and she and May sharing his single bed, it had been a relief for all three when a room in a neighbouring house had become available. The previous residents, an Irish couple with a young baby, had been clean and respectable, and as they were going back to Ireland to be with family, Jack had bought the three-quarter-sized bed and two small armchairs the room had held, along with a kettle and a few pots and pans.
May’s ankle had healed within a couple of weeks and she had got work in a rope- and wire-making factory on the other side of the river. Jack hadn’t been too pleased – the women from this particular workplace were notorious for their foul language, which was worse than any sailor’s – but, as May had commented, a job was a job, and beggars can’t be choosers. It had been nearly two months before Angeline could use her arm, and as May’s weekly wage of five shillings a week barely covered the one-and-sixpence rent and their food, she had been anxious to get work, although secretly terrified at the prospect.
May had flatly refused letting Angeline try for a job at the rope factory – ‘They’ll rip you apart, lass, the way you speak an’ all. Anyone a bit different an’ they’re on them like a pack of dogs’ – and so they had decided on shop work. They had borrowed four shillings off Jack and kitted Angeline out at the second-hand clothes market near Castle Square with a matching dress and coat and a pair of shoes. May had gazed at her in admiration. ‘By, lass, you look the ticket, you do straight. An’ the way you talk could work wonders in the right job. You ought to aim high.’
Aiming high had meant applying for a job in a draper’s establishment, one of a row of shops in the centre of town near Ginnett’s Amphitheatre off Northumberland Road. She had walked in on the morning of her interview, looked at the other girls waiting in the small room at the back of the shop and nearly walked straight out again. When she had left the premises an hour later, she’d got the job. As the slim, elegant manageress had confided some months later, ‘As soon as you opened your mouth, it was yours, Grace. Adds a bit of class to the shop.’
Her starting wage of four shillings a week rose to seven once she was trained, and she and May didn’t spend anything on themselves until they had reimbursed Jack fully for every penny he had laid out since the day they had arrived in Newcastle.
The shop hours were long – from eight in the morning until eight at night, six days a week – but Angeline loved every minute. The shop prided itself on selling the latest fashions, but at a much cheaper price than the exclusive establishments that the gentry patronized. The women who frequented it tended to be the wives and daughters of white-collar workers, or other shop owners and the like.
Angeline had been at the draper’s for just over a year when she and May had moved into the downstairs of a house a short distance away in Dean Street, further from the wharfs. Here they had a front room, which they used as their bedroom, and a kitchen with a range and room for a table and chairs and two armchairs. A pair of spinster sisters occupied the top floor of the two-up, two-down terrace; quiet, clean women who worked at a laundry in the town. It was bliss after being confined to one room and having to share a privy with the other tenants of the house, who hadn’t been too particular in their habits. Now the privy in the small back yard was kept fresh and sweet with daily buckets of ash by the four women, and the days of clearing up other folk’s excreta – including vomit on a Friday night when the men got paid – became a thing of the past. King Street had been a harsh baptism into her new life, but it had taught Angeline plenty.
Shortly after she and May had settled into their new home, Angeline had heard that the shop next door to the draper’s, a bakery, would soon require another assistant, when one of the two girls employed by the baker and his wife left to get married. After putting in a good word for May with the baker’s wife, with whom she often passed the time of day when buying her daily loaf, Angeline persuaded her friend to go and make herself known to the couple. The result was that May was offered the position and started work at the bakery the day after the other girl left. The rope factory had been hard, rough and exhausting work, and the women workers who did the same job as the men got paid half the wage of their male counterparts, something that had always rankled with May, although most of the other women seemed to accept it as natural.
The bakery didn’t pay as much as May could earn in the factory, but Angeline had recently had a rise at work, which covered the shortfall, besides which she desperately wanted to see May leave the factory behind. Even after a year May’s hands had been raw and bleeding at the end of each six-day week, and her friend had slept each Sunday away in an exhausted stupor.
There had followed a period of calm routine, and after the events of the previous years their run-of-the-mill days and nights had been pleasant and welcome. Angeline and May had enjoyed their little home, and although May sometimes went to the picture house with the other assistant at the bakery or out for the day on a Sunday with Jack and his group of friends, Angeline never accompanied them. She had bought herself a Remington typewriter and a book by Isaac Pitman, who had developed a new shorthand system, using signs for sounds, but being unable to really afford the shorthand and typing courses that the local school board was running in the evening, had decided to teach herself in any spare time she had.
Although she genuinely wanted to learn shorthand and typing, secretly it was also something of an excuse for her hermit-like behaviour, once she was home. She confided to May she was always worried that she might be seen by someone who recognized her from the past, but again that wasn’t the whole reason for her withdrawal. The main reason was Jack Connor. It had been some months after she had met him, and whilst she and May were still living in King Street, that they had gone to hear him speak at a meeting down by Castle Square at the back of the fish market. It had been a cold but dry October evening, and the smell of fish had been strong, but once Jack had begun speaking he had held his listeners enthralled, in spite of the odd heckler, who was more often than not one of his pals. Jack had talked about a better future for the unborn children of the working class; a country without employment of workers at starvation rates, without rack-renting of insanitary tenements and an absence of opportunities for education of the poor; a land where the death of a child before it was one year old wasn’t determined by the area in which it was born.
She had stood with her arm linked in May’s, her nose pink with the cold and her feet numb, and had seen Utopia. Jack had captured her imagination in a way no one else had ever done, and at one point in his discourse, when his green eyes had looked over the crowd and straight into hers, she knew he had captured her heart, too. She loved him. She had been frozen in shock. May’s brother, Jack Connor, who despised and loathed the upper classes and all they stood for, and who was contemptuous of the sort of woman she had been. ‘Empty-headed dolls,’ he’d called the society ladies once, when he’d been talking with his pals, ‘not fit to be called women at all.’ And when one of his friends had asked him if that wasn’t a little harsh, Jack had said how else could you describe a breed of female who could stand by and see the wretchedness of little ones begging in the gutters for a penny or two, when their own children were dressed
in furs and lace and had umpteen servants to cater to their every need? ‘You’ve seen what our women contend with,’ he’d said. ‘The unending struggle with poverty, the stillbirths, the miscarriages, and the old wives who butcher their own sex who’ve gone to them in desperation, to get rid of another unwanted mouth to feed. Mothers leading their bairns into the workhouse, cos it’s that or seeing them starve. You’ve seen it. And what woman with bairns round here doesn’t look twenty, thirty years older than she is? And you talk to me about being harsh? Wake up, man!’
Angeline had left May that night pleading a headache, and had gone home to weep for hours. And then she had put the lid on that box in her mind and had stored it away deep in the heart of her. Jack thought her cold and unapproachable – she’d heard him describe her that way to May once, when he hadn’t known she could hear; but better that than the truth. Warm and loving as he was to May, with her he was invariably cool and reserved, even taciturn on occasions. It hurt her, causing an ever-present gnawing ache that flared into exquisite pain when she was in his presence, but there was nothing she could do about it. She lived in fear of the day when one of the girls who, according to May, were shameless in their pursuit of Jack would catch his fancy, but again that was outside her control.
And then, a year ago, yet another phase of her life had begun. May had met and married the miller’s son who supplied the bakery with flour, and a month or so before the wedding, Angeline had decided to try for an office post. May’s impending nuptials had been the catalyst for change. Her friend’s leaving would create a huge hole in Angeline’s life. A new job would, of necessity, be a channel for her time and thoughts. She knew her shorthand and typing skills were good, but having no experience of office work and being happy at the draper’s and at home with May for company, she’d resisted spreading her wings and leaving the safety of the niche she had carved out for herself.
Beyond the Veil of Tears Page 26
