by AJ Wright
She envied too their closeness, the friendship they seemed to enjoy in the mist-shrouded mornings when their voices seemed to drift from below, the easy laughter they shared at some coarseness.
But Emily had been encouraged to be different.
‘Those girls have no ambition,’ her mother had told her. ‘They’re nothing but sheep being led into the fold. What difference do they make to anyone’s lives? Besides, you have a good brain, Emily. It would be a shame to smother it in cotton dust or coal dust.’
Emily heeded her mother’s advice, absorbed her ambition and set her mind on becoming a teacher. When her mother became sick and lay dying – her mind wandering and restless a mere twelve months after the pig who called himself her father had died – the ambition had become something more, a determination to honour what her mother had set in motion. She had promised her faithfully to work as hard as she could to make her proud of her daughter.
Deathbed promises were all well and good, but as she sat in the headmaster’s office now, waiting for him to return, she’d have given anything to be working a mule spindle or riddling coal. What did those old friends of hers have to worry about?
The door swung open and Mr Weston came in, accompanied by the teacher in charge of Standard 4, Miss Ryan.
Emily immediately stood up, but Weston signalled for her to sit back down. He held a chair for Miss Ryan before taking up his place behind his desk, facing the two of them with his hands clasped together.
Esther Ryan sat erect and stern-faced. She was thirty-seven, sharp of feature and with eyes that held the cold glimmer of marble.
‘Now, Emily, you are aware of why I’ve sent for you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Miss Ryan here has made certain complaints about you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And she has asked me to speak with you.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It concerns the noise emanating from your classroom.’
For a moment, Emily hesitated. She said nothing but lowered her eyes to inspect her hands.
‘Miss Ryan says her pupils in Standard 4 find such a noise distracting.’
There was a cough, and Esther Ryan spoke for the first time. ‘Distracting is not the word, Headmaster. Perhaps deafening would be more apposite.’
‘Emily? Is there a reason why your children are making such a disturbance?’
Emily glanced up. He could see there were tears in her eyes.
‘It’s the dictation, sir.’
‘Dictation?’
‘Yes, sir. They say I go too fast so I slow down and when I slow down they say it’s borin’ an’ could I speed it up a bit. Then someone’ll throw somethin’ an’ another’ll do the same an’ before I know it it’s like a snowstorm in there wi’ paper flyin’ everywhere.’
She started to sob, a demonstration of feeling that brought only a sharp and impatient exhalation from Miss Ryan.
‘In my view, young lady, you would be well advised to pull a few ears and smack a few hands,’ was her advice.
Weston, seeing the tears flow freely now, had heard enough. ‘Thank you, Miss Ryan. If you’d care to leave us now, I’m sure we can bring about a satisfactory solution.’
‘It’s a satisfactory silence I want, Headmaster. Nothing else.’ With that she stood up, turned and left the room.
Weston stood up, moved to stand beside the weeping pupil-teacher, and placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘Now then,’ he said quietly. ‘What’s this all really about?’
He had no visitor for the rest of the day. And for the first time, he began to be really afraid once the total darkness came. The rat bite had frightened him. It had sunk its teeth in deep, in several places, and now the small wounds felt sore, and he was sure he could feel the skin swollen where it had attacked him.
The darkness seemed to press black thoughts into his head.
What if he were left here? No food any more, no visits. It might be, he thought, that the police were already close, sneaking up on him and ready at any moment to drag him out into the street above and hurl him into one of their black wagons.
But his mam and dad? What about them? He knew they’d already been told he was all right, that he was safe and out of harm’s reach. They’d said as much, and they’d said he was forgiven. They’d asked for a message to be given to him, for him to make sure under no circumstances was he to go back home. Why, the police could well arrest his mam and dad if they took him back in.
‘Thanks very much for lettin’ us know,’ they’d said. ‘As long as ’e’s out of ’arm’s way, that’s all we ask. It’s very good of you. God bless.’
Those were their exact words, he’d been assured.
And it seemed to fit in with the fragments of dream he’d been having, where his mam and dad were nice, and he could almost feel her stroking his head and singing to him in front of the fire, and his dad talking to him ever so nice, and the house was nice, and everything was nice …
But he wished someone would come. Even his mam. He wished everything was all right again and the police would go away.
And he wished the pain would go from his hand. It was throbbing now.
It had been a golden rule that he kept work in its place. Once he left the station and made his way home, he would normally feel the burden of whichever case was dominating his thoughts drop away with each step. He’d told Ellen once that she should imagine a coalman carrying a hundredweight of best cannel coal on his back, and in the sack there was a hole at the bottom. Every step he took would see a lump of coal drop out so that, by the time he got to his destination he had no coal left to deliver.
‘Only when I get home,’ he’d told her, ‘I feel much better for shedding all that weight. I don’t suppose the coalman’d feel the same way with an empty sack on his back!’
Tonight, however, as he made his way beneath the Wallgate Bridge, past Queen Street and Fisher’s Yard before turning left into Caroline Street, it felt as though the sack had been mended and the weight remained constant.
A few people nodded at him, one or two of them exchanging the odd word of greeting, but he felt in a surly, uncommunicative mood as he turned the front door knob and walked into his front room.
‘Dad!’
Little Barry Brennan scampered from the rug before the hearthstone and ran into his father’s waiting arms. He squeezed his dad’s neck tightly, until he gasped for mercy. It was a nightly ritual, and Brennan always cherished the moment between them. There’d come a time when it would transform itself into a gruff hello or a firm handshake, so he needed to make the most of his son’s childhood.
Ellen came from the kitchen, wiping the flour from her hands onto her pinny. They kissed lightly. As he removed his coat and sat in his armchair before the fire, Ellen, who could invariably read his moods, said quietly, ‘Not a good day?’
‘Not really,’ he said, ruffling Barry’s hair as the boy settled back down before the fire to continue manning the small wooden fort Brennan had built him last Christmas, ready for the siege to come.
‘Is it the missing boy?’ She sat on the floor beside him, causing Barry to groan when she knocked over his dashing lieutenant.
Brennan looked at her curiously. ‘What?’
‘Billy Kelly. That’s his name, isn’t it?’
He sighed. He’d forgotten how effective the local gossipmongers were. ‘That’s the one, aye. Been missing since Friday night.’
She stroked his arm, leaving tiny particles of flour on his sleeve. ‘The poor woman,’ she said with a glance at Barry, now engaged in defending his fort against all manner of invisible attackers.
He said nothing. It wouldn’t do for him to let her know what the poor woman was really like, a slatternly rough-tongued female it was difficult to picture showing any tenderness. Yet immediately he rebuked himself – Edith Kelly might be all of those things and worse, but he’d seen glimmerings of worry – just glimmerings but they were there nonetheless. Perhaps her feeli
ngs of tenderness had been ground down over the years, and any attempt to show them would be seen as feebleness and nothing else.
His reflections cast a gloomy expression to his features. Then, quite out of character, he found himself speaking his thoughts aloud. He told her about the information he’d been given concerning Dorothea Gadsworth and Tilly Pollard, and his conviction that she recognised someone – either the youth David or Julia Reece – last Friday.
‘It stands to reason,’ he said, staring at the flames that seemed to sway from side to side mockingly. ‘So if she did recognise someone, then as far as the ages are concerned, the only ones who fit the bill are the headmaster, Weston, and the three teachers Nathaniel Edgar, Jane Rodley and Alice Walsh. And the vicar, of course.’
Ellen’s eyes widened. ‘Dear Lord!’
They both remained silent for a while, the only noise being the crackling of sparks from the burning coals and Barry’s idea of what gunfire sounded like. Then Ellen finally broke the silence.
‘It seems that school’s unlucky.’ She rested her chin on his arm now, her eyes looking up at him, catching the glow and the sparkle from the flames in the grate. ‘That poor mother. Imagine if our Barry had gone to that school and walked into the classroom to find … And then that school inspector, eh?’
‘That’s another thing. Why did he have to die?’
‘Could that have been a separate thing altogether?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just him being in the wrong place at the wrong time. An assault gone wrong?’
He gave the idea some thought, then said, ‘I don’t believe in coincidences, Ellen.’
He stroked her head and nodded towards Barry, who had called a ceasefire and was now watching the two of them, aware that serious things were being talked about, because they always lowered their voices then.
She gave him a big grin and said, ‘Your mam’s silly, aren’t I?’
A reassured smile crept onto his face and he returned to his men and the continuation of the siege.
‘Happen we can talk about it after, eh, Michael?’
He picked bits of flour from her hair.
‘Happen not,’ he replied.
There were times when Alice Walsh could be very single-minded, so much so that everything else drifted into oblivion. Tonight, for instance, at the meeting of the Women’s Franchise League at the public hall, she immersed herself so completely in the fervour of the speakers and the camaraderie of the audience that she lost all sense of time.
Even when the meeting broke up, she stayed behind and joined in the smaller discussion groups that spread themselves throughout the hall, where those who had earlier felt somehow intimidated by the large number of people in attendance now felt confident enough, in the intimacy of rearranged chairs, to express their own feelings and pass comment on the views presented from the platform.
Alice herself had spoken up on several occasions during the meeting proper, pointing out that words and speeches were all very well but what was needed was something a little more startling.
‘We need to win the argument before all else,’ the platform speaker had replied. ‘And that’s why I propose the petition to both Houses.’
‘That should make their lordships quiver in their ermine!’ Alice had yelled in reply, to the satisfying echo of laughter in the hall.
Fired therefore by her call for more direct action to bring attention to the justice of their cause, others had joined her circle and listened eagerly to her stirring words.
But all meetings must come to an end, especially when the custodian of the hall began extinguishing the gas lighting as a tangible reminder of his desire to close the place up and quench his thirst in a nearby hostelry, and eventually Alice’s group dispersed with heartfelt promises to continue at the next meeting. It was only as she left the building that she remembered where she had promised to be. And from the chimes of the parish church clock, she realised it was now too late. He would have to wait until tomorrow.
Sometime in the night, Billy Kelly began shivering. Not the sort of shivering you get when you’re cold and a good thick blanket would shift it. No, this was a different type of shivering altogether, made all the worse by the terrible pain in his head. His mouth felt warm and sticky, and before he could do anything about it he vomited all over the cellar floor, hearing but not seeing it splash on the uneven flagstones. The stench was awful, and it made him retch even more. He slithered away from where he imagined the vomit was gathering, so far away that, in his haste and hampered by the absolute blackness of the place now, he tripped up and fell headlong into the wall, smashing his head so hard that he fell to the floor, all pain and shivering fading away into the unconsciousness that welcomed him into its cold embrace.
Emily Mason’s grandmother, with whom she lived, was almost seventy, and she had lost her hearing suddenly one night when Sidney Mason had come in rolling drunk as usual and had started on Emily’s mam. No parent would sit there and allow such wickedness to go unpunished, so her grandma had set about the animal with a poker, which he soon wrenched from her grasp and gave her a sound beating around the head. She lost all hearing that night, but as she declared later, it was worth it to save her daughter from yet another battering.
Emily, a mere four years old at the time, had sat under the table terrified. When he died a few years later, she felt nothing but relief that the dark shadow had gone from the house. When she started school at five years old, it seemed like a daily escape, a sanctuary from the wickedness at home. At school, grown-up people actually treated her quite well – better than her so-called father anyway, and she could never understand those in her class who complained about the punishments and the harsh regime of the classroom. Here at school, you were punished if you did something wrong: back home you were just punished.
Sometimes, though, she woke up in the middle of the night and imagined she could hear her late mother’s screams or the sickening thud of knuckle on bone, and then the sounds just drifted back into the past where they belonged. But then she could hear nothing at all – no trams or horses’ hooves or distant train whistles – and she had to hum a tune softly and listen out for her grandmother’s harsh rattling breath to confirm she still had her hearing and to give her the peace of mind to return to sleep.
This morning though, as the headmaster sat at his desk with her lesson notes before him and a pile of her pupils’ copybooks, she wouldn’t mind just half an hour of her grandma’s deafness, she told herself, just to block out the lecture she felt sure was coming her way.
‘They don’t look like words, Emily, do they?’ he said, passing one of the copybooks across the desk. She opened it, looked down at the spidery scrawl that claimed to be lettering, and shook her head.
‘No, sir.’
The school was still empty, and it would be a good half hour before the first of the staff members arrived, and half an hour after that for the pupils. Only the caretaker, Mr Prendergast, could be heard clattering about in the cellar directly below the open window in Weston’s study.
‘And this,’ he said, passing across another book. ‘Why, judging from the number of ink blotches on the page it would seem there’s no room for writing of any kind.’
‘No, sir.’
‘I know it’s difficult, Emily, but you need to exercise control first. Don’t let them scribble away as if it’s a drawing lesson. These are, after all, copybooks. I think perhaps I was wrong to ask you to give Standard 1 copybooks in the first place. It’s entirely my fault. It might be better to return them to slate writing. We’d save gallons of ink that way.’
He’d meant it as a joke, for he could see her eyes were filling with tears. But Emily held her hands together tightly. No smile lightened her expression. Perhaps, she thought again briefly, she really would have been better off choosing the cotton mill or the pit brow.
There was a pause of some minutes while Weston read through her lesson notes. He nodded occasionally, and
made approving noises as he turned each page. He looked up into her eyes, and she could tell he was softening. Not for the first time, she reflected on the huge difference there can exist between two grown men: Sidney Mason was a man, and Richard Weston was a man. And there the similarities ended.
‘You see, your plans, your aims for each lesson, are good. It’s just a matter of turning theory into application.’
Before she could reply, a knock came on the door.
‘Enter!’ he called out with a note of irritation in his voice.
The door opened and Prendergast stood there.
‘What is it?’
Prendergast coughed and spoke over Emily Mason’s head. ‘You’d best come down to t’cellar, Mr Weston. See what I’ve found.’
When they reached the school cellar, Prendergast walked straight over to the dwindling pile of coal near the trapdoor. During delivery days, this door, once unlocked, was always held open with a catch while the coalman emptied the sacks of coal into the gap. Delivery was at two-week intervals, and today the coal supplies were low, with new supplies due tomorrow.
‘There!’ said the caretaker with arm outstretched towards the base of the coal.
Weston stepped closer. ‘Where?’
‘That book, curled up an’ stuffed into the coal.’
Weston bent forward and saw that indeed a book was embedded into the coal.
