‘I know how long I’ve been married, Art,’ Jacob said heavily, and there was such bitterness in his tone that it caused the five faces in front of him to stretch slightly. ‘If anyone knows, I do. And I’ll tell you something else an’ all while I’m about it; if it wasn’t for that woman in there – the woman you call a strumpet and a trollop and worse – there might have been murder done before this day. I was reeled in by your mam, do you know that?’ His angry gaze took in each man in turn but no one said anything, not even John.
‘When I came to work for your father as his accountant and chief clerk she looked me over, although I didn’t know it at the time, and decided I was eminently suitable as her future son-in-law. I was an educated man, and with my father being a schoolmaster and my mother involved in various good works, I was a darn sight more suitable in your mam’s eyes than some of the lads who were sniffing about. Oh she reeled me in all right, same as your sister did, although with Mavis she was only following orders. Your mam thought I’d be malleable, that once I became part of the family and had my security and daily bread tied up with Henry Stewart & Co., Oil Merchants and Importers, I’d be happy to take orders, keep my mouth shut and feather my own nest.’
‘What are you griping for, you’ve done all right,’ John challenged roughly. ‘There’s not many as well set up as you and Mavis in your own place, and bought and paid for at that. Granted it’s not Ryhope Road but me and Art aren’t complaining and our places are no bigger than yours.’
‘This isn’t about the size of the house, man.’ Jacob swore softly, shaking his head before repeating, ‘It isn’t about that, that’s nothing. Dammit all, what do you take me for?’
‘What then?’ Art’s voice was low and steady and he took a step forwards. ‘What’s really eating you?’
‘You want to know, Art?’
‘I’ve said, haven’t I?’
‘Aye, you’ve said, but it strikes me the lot of you just want to hear what you want to hear.’
‘I’ve had enough of this.’ John’s glare took in Art as well as Jacob, and the smaller man’s hands were bunched fists at his side. ‘The plain facts are that that whore in there has two brats already and a stomach full of the next one, and she’s making a fool of all of us –’
‘You shut your filthy mouth!’ Jacob’s face was drained of colour. ‘You don’t know the first thing about her. She’s a good woman, a warm woman, and meeting her helped me keep my sanity after I’d lived with your sister for two years. I was ready to top meself when I met Sadie and I tell you that straight.’
‘You –’
As John’s fist struck out, Art caught his brother’s arm and held on to him as Jacob continued, a spate of words flowing out of his mouth now. ‘I should have known on the wedding night how it was going to be but I thought she was just frightened, being a young lass of nineteen and all, and that she’d come round. Come round!’ He made a guttural sound in his throat. ‘Your mam had done too good a job for that, damn her. How would you feel if your wife was physically sick with fear every time you came near her, eh? You answer me that. I’ve taken Mavis five times in six years of marriage and each time I felt I’d raped her. The things your mam had drummed into her . . .’ He swore again. ‘She’s not normal, she can’t be, and she’s made her daughter worse than she is. You don’t know how many times I’ve thanked God the rest of you were lads.’
‘You dirty liar.’
The blizzard was ferocious now, whipping the snow into a mad frenzy, but it was nothing on John as he wrenched himself free of Art and flung himself on the man in front of him, Gilbert and Matthew adding their weight to his as the three of them began to rain punches on Jacob’s tottering form.
The speed with which the cottage door opened indicated that the inhabitants within had been listening to the proceedings, but as Sadie Bell, heavily pregnant and screeching like a banshee, made to hurl herself into the mêlée, Art caught hold of her, shouting for Dan, who was standing transfixed by the violence in front of him, to help hold the distraught woman.
Dan would have obeyed, but out of the comer of his eye he’d become aware of another figure, that of a slight, golden-haired child darting after its mother, and when the small girl of around six or seven tried to go towards the fight he reached out and caught her, lifting her off her feet as she began to struggle and add her cries to those of her mother.
Jacob was on the ground now and he was screaming as John’s thick hobnailed boots belted into him again and again with savage intent. Twice Gilbert and Matthew tried to pull John away, shouting the while for him to stop, that Jacob had had enough, but each time John flung them aside and returned to the blood-soaked figure on the red spotted snow like an enraged animal that, having scented blood, was determined to go for the kill.
In the end, and only when Jacob was limp and unmoving, Gilbert and Matthew wrestled John to the ground, urged on by Art and Dan’s frantic shouts, holding him down by brute force for some thirty or forty seconds as he continued to resist.
And then a silence came upon them all, even Sadie, as, Art having released her, she stumbled across to Jacob’s still form and knelt down in the snow by his side.
‘Sadie?’ A bent old woman was standing in the doorway of the cottage, her arms around a small toddler who was clinging to her tattered skirts but making no sound. ‘Is he breathin’, lass?’
‘’Course he’s breathing.’ Art was frightened; it sounded in his voice.
‘Just about.’ Sadie lifted her head towards her mother and the fruit of Art’s voice was reflected in her white face and streaming eyes. ‘But he’s awful still, Mam.’
‘Get him inside.’
‘No.’ John was standing now, Gilbert and Matthew either side of him, and unlike the rest of them his face showed no fear and his voice was cold and weighty when he said, ‘He’ll never set foot in this brothel again, I’m telling you.’
‘It’s not a brothel.’ The old woman’s voice was loud and indignant. ‘An’ you know it, I’ll be bound, but it suits you to say otherwise, don’t it, you evil-minded so-an’-so.’
‘Don’t, Mam.’ Sadie spoke to her mother but her gaze was on John, and his eyes, as hard as black marble, stared back at her through the curtain of snow. She knew this man. When she had first started work in the most menial of jobs at his father’s warehouse in William Street she had been warned about John Stewart almost immediately by the other girls. He was an upstart. The other sons were all right the girls had said, and the father, Henry Stewart, was reportedly just the same as when he had started the family business some thirty years before a few hundred yards away in Norfolk Street. But John Stewart was like his mother – he fancied himself a cut above ordinary folk. Not that that stopped him trying it on, one of the more attractive women packers had warned Sadie. Hands like an octopus he’d got, and he’d talk dirty given half a chance. You had to watch your step with John Stewart, but it didn’t do to get on his bad side either; he could be a nasty bit of work. And from day one he had wanted her- the lust in his eyes had made her flesh creep at times and she had had to repulse him over and over again.
‘That’s right, Sadie. You tell the old crone to mind her tongue.’
Again John seemed to be enjoying himself, but then his gaze snapped from the woman who had been a torment to his flesh and who’d haunted his dreams from the first day he had set eyes on her four years before, as the child still held within Dan’s grasp said quite clearly, ‘You’re a very nasty man you are, a wicked man, an’ you’ll burn in hell’s flames.’
‘Hush, Connie.’ Sadie rose as quickly as her bulk would allow and hurried to take the child from Dan. ‘Go in with your granny an’ Larry, go on,’ she implored on a hiccuping sob.
‘No, Mam.’ As Sadie made to push her daughter towards the cottage door the child resisted, and then, as Gilbert and Matthew hoisted Jacob’s unconscious body upwards and on to Gilbert’s back at a sign from John, with Matthew supporting the limp frame, Connie caused furt
her consternation as she said, ‘Me Uncle Jacob’s a grand man, he is, an’ I’m goin’a tell of you. I’m goin’a tell you hurt him an’ that you made me mam cry.’
‘None of that.’ As John stepped forward, his arm rising and his face ugly, Dan’s voice was not the voice of a fourteen-year-old boy but that of a man, as he moved the child behind him. ‘You leave the bairn alone, you’ve done enough here the night.’
‘Me?’ John’s face was mottled with temper. ‘That’s good, that is. You were all on for this tonight, so don’t come it, Dan.’
‘You said we were just going to frighten him.’ Dan pushed the child into her mother’s arms as he spoke, his voice losing its harsh note as he added, ‘Take her inside, Mrs Bell. This is not something a bairn should see.’
‘Aye, an’ whose fault is that?’ The old granny cut in again, but she was looking straight at John. ‘You’ll rue this night’s work afore you’re finished, you see if you don’t. God won’t be mocked an’ He knows a black heart when He sees one.’
‘Mam, please.’ Sadie’s voice was agonised as she bundled the still resisting child into the cottage, turning in the doorway as she looked towards Dan and Art, who were standing together and apart from the other three, and said, ‘You’ll look after him? Jacob? He needs a doctor.’
Her concern for the other man seemed to inflame John still further, and his features were contorted as he said, not in a loud tone but with deadly intent, ‘You! You might fool the other poor sots but you don’t take me in, Sadie Bell. You set your cap at him from the first day you laid eyes on him, didn’t you, and all the while acting the virtuous widow. You don’t think you fooled anyone with that tale? A man’s only got to look at you to see what you are –’
‘That’s enough.’
Dan and Art spoke as one but as Dan pushed John backwards, away from the white-faced figure in the doorway on whom the smaller man had been steadily advancing, John swung his body up and round on his youngest brother as though he was going to strike him. And the intention was in his furious face for some seconds before Dan’s steady, quiet stance seemed to check it.
‘By, you make me sick, the pair of you. Soft as clarts.’
Neither Dan nor Art answered John but their unity caused the smaller man to grind his teeth before he turned away, gesturing violently at Gilbert and Matthew to follow him. And it was like that, without another word, that the five men left the clearing and made their way back across the fields to the road with their unconscious bundle, there to begin a grim-faced procession back to the lights of Bishopwearmouth.
Chapter Two
Poverty is relative. As she opened her eyes to the dim light of morning, Peggy Cook’s weary gaze took in the packed bedroom, in which there wasn’t a spare inch of space unoccupied. Aye, it was relative all right. She remembered her Seth saying that more than once and he hadn’t been a man to waste words on idle chatter. She thought she’d died and gone to heaven when he’d married her and brought her to this cottage, and she still thanked God that she wasn’t ending her days in the East End where she’d lived her first fifteen years. Lived? By, she hadn’t lived – existed more like.
She shut her eyes again – Sadie and the bairns weren’t awake yet; the longer they could sleep the better after the horror of the night before – and allowed her mind to drift back over the years.
She had been born fifty-five years before, in 1845, one of seventeen children born to her Irish immigrant parents, only seven of whom had survived to adulthood. Her home, a two-up, two-down back-to-back hovel in the East End, had been a place where foul language, brawling, drunkenness and thriftlessness was rife, the cockroaches, rats and bugs vying for food and space along with the human residents.
She’d met Seth hop-picking when she was a young lass of fifteen and he a grown man of twenty, out for a walk on his day off from the newly opened Ryhope Colliery with some of his fellow miners. They had married as soon as they were able. He had brought her to this cottage on her wedding day, and although they had shared it with his old mam at first – his da being dead – she had cried tears of thankfulness that night. And in spite of her only giving him the one bairn, their Sadie, he had loved her till he’d been killed in a fall at the pit five Christmases ago.
Peggy opened her eyes again, glancing over at the sleeping forms of Sadie and the two children lying in the double brass bed that had been hers and Seth’s for all of their married life. Their Sadie had kicked up a fuss some months before when she’d insisted on moving to the rickety, wooden bed in the corner of the room that had been Sadie’s before she’d left to get married, but to tell the truth it wasn’t just because Sadie needed the room, her being with child again. Her arthritis gave her gyp these days and it was more comfortable in her single berth without any stray elbows or knees catching her unawares; the bairns were restless sleepers like their mam, especially Connie.
Connie . . . Peggy’s gaze softened as it took in the small form of her granddaughter curled beneath the scant covers like a tiny animal trying to conserve all its warmth. In spite of Sadie having banked up the fire the night before in the sitting room cum kitchen – the other room the tiny cottage boasted – the bedroom was icy-cold, although the interconnecting door was ajar. She was glad her Seth had had two years with his granddaughter before he’d died; he’d fair worshipped the bairn. Her eyes misted over. Aye, worship wasn’t too strong a word for how he’d felt about Sadie’s bairn. She’d often thought that the countless miscarriages she had suffered all her married life, one after the other, had pained him more than her. He was a man who should have had a quiverful of bairns, her Seth, and certainly his grandchild was more like him than anyone else. By, the way Connie’d gone for that John Stewart last night . . .
The thought of the small stocky man with the gimlet eyes and hard mouth made Peggy move restlessly, and as though her unease had transmitted itself to Connie, her granddaughter stirred and stretched. But today there was none of the usual yawning and snuggling down again that characterised Connie’s reluctant starts to the day. Instead, the small golden-haired child sat bolt upright, her big blue eyes looking straight across at the wrinkled, grey-haired figure of her grandmother as she whispered, ‘Gran? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothin’ me bairn, nothin’. Don’t fret yourself.’
‘Is it that man? Has he come back?’
‘Heaven forbid, lass.’ Peggy crossed herself quickly. As a staunch, died-in-the-wool Catholic she was nevertheless full of myriad superstitions, not the least of which being the foolhardiness of speaking out your deepest fears.
‘He hurt Uncle Jacob, didn’t he,’ Connie said, and then as Larry, Connie’s two-year-old half-brother and Jacob’s son, grunted in his sleep beside her, she slid from under the covers on to the bare stone flags, squeezing between the side of the bed and the massive wooden chest and two orange boxes that held their spare clothes to reach her grandmother’s pallet at the foot of the brass bed.
As her grandmother drew back the sparse brown blankets and hitched herself against the wall to make room, Connie climbed carefully into the space provided. She had learnt at a very early age that her grandmother’s twisted limbs and swollen knobbled hands must be treated gently and with respect, and now, as she wriggled herself into position, she whispered again, ‘Gran? That man hurt Uncle Jacob, didn’t he.’
‘Aye, hinny. Aye, that he did.’
‘An’ he don’t like me mam, does he?’
Would that he didn’t. Peggy looked down into the sweet face of her granddaughter and the pure loveliness wrenched at her heart. Her Sadie had always been beautiful – a rose on a dung-heap, Seth had teased laughingly – and that beauty had caused her bairn nothing but sorrow in the long run. Now it looked as though this flesh of her daughter’s flesh was going to be even more lovely than her mother.
Peggy swallowed deeply. ‘No, he don’t like your mam, hinny.’
‘Father Hedley says we have to pray for them that don’t like us.’
‘Aye, well the Father is a good priest, a holy man.’
‘I don’t want to pray for that man, Gran.’ Small lips curled back from straight white teeth. ‘I hate him, he hurt me Uncle Jacob.’
Peggy’s mouth worked for a moment, but for the life of her she couldn’t come up with an answer to satisfy her granddaughter.
‘An’ the Father says we shouldn’t be hyp – hypo – We shouldn’t tell lies an’ all, an’ if I prayed for him that’d be the same as lyin’ wouldn’t it?’
Two enormous deep-blue violet-tinged eyes surveyed Peggy and again the old woman swallowed. This child of her heart, this child who was so like her Seth in nature, had a way of going straight for the kernel of the nut. For a moment the weight of this present worry that had come upon them was made the heavier for fear of how her granddaughter would fare in the future. The world didn’t like truth – truth could be stark and uncomfortable, it could reveal things that were better left hidden – and it was better by far to cope with your lot and keep your mouth shut.
‘Perhaps the good Father was sayin’ it’s our duty, as devout Catholics, to forgive, hinny?’ Peggy suggested softly.
Connie surveyed her grandmother unblinkingly. She didn’t think that was what the Father had been saying at all. She knew her mam had forgiven her father when he left them when she’d still been in her mam’s belly. Her da hadn’t wanted to be married, her mam had told her. It was nothing to do with her; her da would have loved her if he had seen her, but he hadn’t been able to think of that when he had left. And so he had gone, with the lady of the house where her mam and him had been lodging in Newcastle, and her mam had come back home to the house in the wood. And then her mam had heard the ship her da and the lady had been on had sunk and they were dead. And she had cried. Her granny had told her that her mam had cried buckets, and then that had been that.
But this, this with her Uncle Jacob, was different. A pain like earache came into her small chest and she wanted to press her hand against her heart to ease it.
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