Dark Shadows (The Mercy Carver Series Book 1)

by Jana Petken

  The Mercy Carver Series:

  Dark Shadows

  Jana Petken

  First Edition

  First Published July 30th 2013

  Also available from Jana Petken:

  The Guardian of Secrets

  The Mercy Carver Series:

  Blood Moon (Book 2)

  Coming Summer 2015:

  The Truth Gatherer

  Praise For Jana Petken

  “Wow, OH WOW! I have waited ages for the sequel to the first book and am not disappointed. This was everything I expected and so much more!”

  “Blood Moon (The Mercy Carver Series Book 2) by Jana Petken is an legendary piece of fiction that plays out in living color. This story and the others in the Mercy Carver series are exquisitely told, at times bone chilling and done in a realistic manner.

  Blood Moon blew me away with its poetic narration, three dimensional chapters and turns I didn't see coming. It's storyline brought tears to my eyes and moved me.

  I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of this latest installment which was truly worth the wait. Would highly recommend these exceptional captivating stories that are richly told, beyond beautiful and poignant.”

  Prologue

  London, 1842

  All those who saw Joan Carver lying in bed in that softly lit bedroom knew she was dying. No one would say the word death aloud. The word was frowned upon, yet it was a constant hand that took family members, neighbours, and friends on a daily basis in this poor Elephant and Castle district, which stood one mile from the south end of London Bridge and fell under the purview of Southwark Borough Council.

  The Southwark Elephant and Castle area had an elegant side to it. There were grand houses, theatres, and gardens, and plans to build a new church were well underway, but there were also overpopulated, poorer streets where large families, widows, and those without employment lived. The houses provided for them were commonly known as almshouses. They were usually free of rent and were, to all intents and purposes, Christian charity homes. But the houses were small, cramped, and in most cases in dire need of repair. The racket of hammers, saws, and frustrated men cursing was heard every single day inside these crumbling dwellings.

  Thomas and Joan Carver had been married for just over a year. Thomas had fallen in love with his wife long before she was of an age to notice his affections. They had played in the street together as children: hopscotch, tag, and marbles. He had grown into manhood loving her with a passion that was all-consuming. He had often declared that she was his soulmate, sent to earth in order to spend her entire life being loved by him. He called her an angel and a gift from God.

  They lived at 32 Gaylord Street, in a rented house. It contained one bedroom, a narrow hallway, and one other room they called the parlour, furnished with a cooking stove, coal burner, pantry, one armchair, a small table, and four chairs. Thomas Carver prided himself on being able to pay his rent on time every week, but he was one of the very few in his street who could afford to do so.

  Men took whatever jobs they could find for a measly wage and, on a Friday, drowned their woes in beer, taking home an even lighter wage packet to their wives and children. Jobs were scarcer for lower-class women, who fought for domestic service positions in grand houses. This type of work, no matter how menial, was the pinnacle of success for most girls.

  Entire families without gainful employment and not on the waiting lists for almshouses were tossed out of their rented homes and forced to enter the world of disease-ridden hard-labour workhouses. Once there, they were given beds and enough food to sustain them, but husbands and wives were separated, as were the fit and the infirm, the old and the young. It was a fate worse than death for some families, but for others, life in the workhouse was a better prospect than slow starvation, plague, and long chronic illnesses leading to the inevitable journey to the local graveyard.

  Disease was rife in the Elephant and Castle. Large families lived in cramped conditions. Sanitary waste gathered, causing putrid smells to consume the air. Tons of raw sewage dumped straight into the River Thames were eventually carried up the river by the tide. It was a dire situation and one that plagued these poor Londoners, for tuberculosis, typhoid, influenza, scarlet fever, and cholera affected one or more family members in every household in every street. Illness and death became a game of chance in which luck and only luck determined who would remain healthy and who would fall to an often-fatal illness.

  Thomas Carver was indeed lucky, for at the age of sixteen, he had managed to procure highly sought-after work on the London and Croydon railway line. This line had been followed by the London and Brighton Railway and the Southern Railway lines, and these additional lines had generated new job opportunities. Thomas had a solid and secure job, and he was recognised as being a naturally talented engineer, yet he was compelled to take on a second job at night, delivering coal to the local publicans and hoteliers. Somewhere along the way, Joan was left alone, pregnant and desperately unhappy.

  The doctor and local midwife had arrived at dawn on this dull October day. They had also been present the previous day but had left for a few hours’ rest, promising to come back at a moment’s notice. Both were of the same mind regarding Joan’s prognosis, making this morning particularly painful, for the very same doctor and midwife had delivered Joan seventeen years earlier.

  Thomas paced up and down his narrow hallway, cursing himself now for not spending that precious time with Joan because of ambition and greed. He found himself thinking about their last quarrel, Joan’s tearful face, and her arms around his neck as she pleaded with him to spare her a thought and a moment of his time.

  “Money will not bring us the happiness we seek,” Joan had stated. “Happiness comes when we are together. Whether we are dressed in new clothes or rags makes not an ounce of difference. Thomas, I need you in my bed at night, not the extra sixpence you make heaving sacks of coal.”

  Joan had been right all along, he thought, for his happiness was complete only when she was in his presence.

  As Thomas paced, deep in thought, the house was steadily filling up with family members. His mother and mother-in-law were with Joan in the bedroom. His father and father-in-law sat in the parlour, along with two of Joan’s male cousins and Thomas’s brother. Thomas was joined in the hallway by three female cousins, who were beginning to get in the way of his pacing.

  A growing number of friends and men Thomas worked with had also joined the small group of close neighbours already outside number 32. They came to sympathise, to pray, and to comfort Thomas Carver and his family. Joan had already gone in their minds, for they knew they would never again see her alive. She would not walk down the street with her bright smile, lightening the moods of those she met along the way. She would never again make her customary broth for sick neighbours or enrich lives with her kindness, exquisite beauty, and graceful countenance rarely seen on these poor streets.

  The crowd continued to grow, not to listen to the doctor’s pronouncement of death, which would surely come, but hopefully to hear and cheer news that Joan had somehow managed to deliver a healthy living baby that even now fought bravely to leave the womb before its mother took her last breath.

  Some of the women living in Joan and Thomas’s street had brought an assortment of baked goods and anything else they could spare from their measly pantries. The men, sensing that young Thomas would appreciate a drop of whisky, had dutifully chipped in to buy him a bottle.

  As the morning wore on, Thomas, a mild-mannered man, transformed into a frightening mess of jumbled and unpredictable reactions. His wife’s screams of “Mercy, God, have mercy” were like daggers
slicing into his heart, and he silently cursed God, his Son, and all his angels. Thomas no longer paced but rather stepped in time in the now-crowded hallway, filled to the brim with the presence of yet more family members. He wasn’t in the mood to talk and told those present to stop asking questions. He drank a cupful of whisky and told his three female cousins, who were chatting among themselves, to shut up and go outside. Finally, he came to stand inches from the closed bedroom door.

  “Where the blazes is God?” he inadvertently said aloud.

  His sister-in-law, Lizzie, was praying, and she gasped at his foul language.

  Thomas’s face was creased and filled with rage as he turned to stand nose-to-nose with her. “Shut up! Shut up right now, you! Who are you praying to, eh?” he shouted. “There is no bloody God, and if there were, I’d call him a cruel and heartless bastard for what he’s putting my poor Joan through!”

  He turned from Lizzie, and his hands caressed the bedroom door. Tears ran unabated down his face. He knocked on the door. “Let me in,” he sobbed.

  It was scandalous for any man to behave like this in front of other men toughened by life’s tribulations, but Thomas was past caring about what was right and what was wrong in the eyes of old women and men he could knock down with one punch. He needed to see Joan, to hold her and to comfort her. If she was going to leave the world with him alone in it, he wanted to say goodbye in his own way. He had every right to be with her until her last breath.

  He’d made up his mind. He looked at the grieving faces and saw their silent warnings. Don’t you dare go into that bedroom, they were saying with their eyes.

  Fuck the lot of you, Thomas thought dismissively before turning the doorknob and opening the door.

  As he entered the room, he breathed in the rancid smell that hung in the air. Then his tear-filled eyes saw the blood. He stood motionless.

  Thomas’s mother and mother-in-law left the room immediately, clearly unable to witness Thomas’s reaction to the horror of seeing his young wife dying.

  The doctor and midwife stopped what they were doing and watched helplessly as Thomas gulped for air between throaty sobs.

  Thomas tiptoed closer to the bed. His whole body shook with grief and disbelief. He hadn’t expected Joan to look this bad, so pitiful and shrivelled. She looked like an old woman.

  “That’s not my Joan,” he said to the doctor dazedly. “That’s not my beautiful wife.”

  Blood loss had turned the frayed white cotton sheets bright red. Joan’s raging fever had stranded her in some distant world, parted from reality and without conscious knowledge that she had to push a baby out of her. Her clammy skin, high temperature, and glazed eyes were clear signs that she had already succumbed to birthing fever, an all-too-frequent infection that occurred when a baby was too large for a young and malnourished body. Joan was like a small, fragile bird in size, with narrow hips and a feather’s weight.

  She was whimpering one word that was barely audible – “Mercy, mercy, mercy” – repeatedly, until it sounded like a soft, hypnotic lullaby to Thomas’s ears. Thomas couldn’t take his eyes off her thighs. Her legs were wide open, and drops of lumpy blood were bursting out of her vagina in quick succession. He cried, and then he got on his knees and begged the doctor to save her.

  The doctor tried to pick Thomas up, his expression filled with both anger and pity. He had seen men lose their wives many times, not to mention their babies. Finally, he said, “Get up off the floor and get out of here. I’ll not be disturbed like this.”

  There was no response from Thomas.

  “Thomas Carver, you get up from that floor and let me do my job!”

  Thomas wrapped his arms around the doctor’s legs.

  The doctor spoke to the midwife, standing with her hands at her throat in shock. “Get someone to bloody take him away right now.”

  Thomas’s brother, John, and his father, Tom, appeared and physically dragged him by his shirt collar across the floor and then outside to the hallway.

  Thomas, gaining his senses now, was also filling with a rage he never knew existed in him.

  In the hallway, the doctor begged Thomas to calm down, ordering everyone present to restrain him from entering the bedroom again. “I can’t have you in there, Thomas. I have to get this baby out, and you’re getting in my bloody way. If Joan doesn’t deliver soon, she’ll die with it still inside her!”

  His statement shocked family members, neighbours, friends, and even Thomas into silence. The word death had finally been spoken aloud.

  Thomas heard and lost all reason. His already mangled thoughts were now joined by images of blood pouring down his wife’s open legs, her sweaty hair sticking to her head, her feverish eyes wide but unseeing, and her open mouth asking for mercy in a voice he didn’t recognise.

  He got up off the floor. Before his friends could react, he grabbed the doctor by the throat. He walked backwards, pulling the doctor towards the front door, threatening to kill him. He bumped into friends and neighbours in the crowded hallway, barely noticing their presence but finding the strength to knock aside anyone who barred his way. This was a new Thomas, a stranger to family, neighbours, and workmates, who had never seen this side of his character. The quiet, gentle man had turned into a raging pit bull, intent on killing the doctor who was trying to save his wife’s life.

  Outside the house, Thomas was finally pulled off the doctor and forcibly pinned to the ground by his father, father-in-law, and neighbour.

  Tom, Thomas’s father, had seen his wife lose three infants. He appeared to be feeling embarrassment and shame, as his son had turned Joan’s last hours or minutes into a bloody sideshow. He leaned in to Thomas’s ear and spoke quietly but with a threatening and aggressive tone. “Get up, you bastard, and behave like a man. You’re a bleedin’ disgrace. Carver men don’t cry. You’re giving me a right showing up in front of the whole bloody street, do you hear me? Joan won’t be the first to lose a babe or her life giving birth. You’re old enough to know that, so get a grip on yourself, for Christ’s sake. I brought you up to be a man, not a weeping woman.”

  Whilst Tom Carver spoke to his son, the doctor crawled on all fours until he managed to get to his feet some distance away from Thomas, who’d been very close to choking the life out of him. He was still coughing and holding his reddened neck as he rushed past neighbours who watched in horror. Fearing for his life, he muttered, “Crazy bastard.”

  Thomas was held by his arms on the dusty ground until the doctor disappeared from sight. He was then freed but continued to sit where he was, crying, apologising, and now deaf to his father’s continued insistence that he should get back onto his feet and make amends to everyone present.

  Another midwife was sent for immediately. Thomas calmed himself and walked back inside his house, apologising to everyone he passed. Minnie Fowler from next door told him that her husband had gone for the best and most reputable midwife in the area. “She’s delivered hundreds of babies, and a lot of them lived,” she said proudly.

  Thomas nodded in appreciation and went back to Joan’s bedside, ignoring numerous pleas not to. “No one will keep me away from my Joan,” he told everyone quite calmly. “I’ll be there with her, holding her hand, until a healthy baby comes out of her and she falls into a peaceful sleep.”

  As he closed the door behind him, he told himself not to lose hope. Losing hope earlier had caused him to go mad. He would cling to it. He would pray. He would kill anyone who mentioned the word death again.

  Joan’s wailing now sounded like the dying cries of a wounded animal. She arched her back to a breaking point. Her body was wracked with spasms that almost lifted her in the air.

  The mothers were with her again. Joan’s mother, Sylvie, made the sign of the cross. Thomas’s mother, Grace, ran from the room, unable to watch the ugliness of it all.

  Mercy. That pitiful word continued to fall off Joan’s tongue as though no other word existed in her mind. Sylvie tried in vain to stem the bl
ood flowing freely between her daughter’s legs whilst urging her to push the baby out at the same time.

  Joan tilted her head back on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. “Oh, God, have mercy! Show mercy to this child! Please, mercy – mercy for my baby!”

  She suddenly stopped speaking and moving. Silence filled the room. Her breathing slowed to a soft, panting breathlessness, and she closed her eyes, unconscious now to her world of pain.

  Thomas left the room. He was leaving of his own accord – he was not strong enough to watch his wife’s suffering, after all.

  In the hallway, he slid down the wall and once again cried openly in front of the men he worked with. He covered his face and prayed between sobs.

  A large-framed midwife with a ruddy face, warts, and heavy chin trotted into the house with a determined expression, but one which also lacked emotion. She stopped suddenly when she saw the multitude of men in the hallway, staring at all the faces in turn. Her hands then went to her hips and rested there, clenched, as though they were ready to do battle.

  “Right, who’s the father here? Who’s the husband that’s being a sissy, by all accounts?” she demanded to know.

  The crowd parted, and Thomas looked up at her for the first time. He wiped his teary eyes, and said, “I’m Thomas Carver. Will you save my wife, please? Save her. She can always have another baby – just save her.”

  “I’ll try my best, boy; that’s all I can do.”

  “Please. She’s young, and she’s got her whole life ahead of her. I can live with the death of a child but not hers – never hers.”

  The midwife rolled up her sleeves with impatience. Her eyes flashed Thomas a warning. “You pull yourself together. That’s enough of that kind of talk. From what I’ve been told, your wife is in a very bad way, and you sitting here on the floor like a bloody moody schoolboy won’t change that. Now, go get yourself a stiff drink and wait like any other man does in your situation. You have to be strong. I can’t be dealing with hysterical fathers-to-be. Do you hear me?”