‘Disrobing!’
‘Bad translation; it’s a cloakroom where people hang up their coats. It’s also the Bute Street Blues Band’s rehearsal room.’ He smiled in amusement and she coloured in embarrassment.
‘The public room and my bedroom are upstairs. If you’ll excuse me,’ he walked ahead of her, ‘my mother taught me that a gentleman always walks up the stairs before a lady so he can’t look up her skirt.’
‘And follows her downstairs.’ A young woman, tall and slim, with startlingly blue eyes and white hair like Micah’s, stood at the top of the stairs. ‘Was anyone seriously hurt in the fight, Micah?’
‘Only one had to be sent to the Royal Infirmary. I patched up the others and they’re sleeping it off in the cells.’
‘Why do sailors always behave badly when they drink? But you, poor girl,’ she turned her attention to Edyth, ‘look as though you have been in the wars. And you’re wearing a police shirt.’
‘Miss Evans, my sister, Mrs Helga Brown,’ Micah introduced them. ‘Miss Evans’s dress was torn so the police loaned her the shirt. As it was so late they thought she would be more comfortable with us than in the cells.’
‘I should think so, too. Pleased to meet you.’ She offered Edyth her hand.
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mrs Brown.’ Edyth shook the woman’s hand.
‘Come in. I’ll get you something to eat and drink.’ Helga Brown stepped back and indicated the door behind her.
‘I’m not hungry, but I am tired.’ Edyth followed her into the large public room. She found it strange that Helga hadn’t asked Micah to elaborate on his brief explanation for her presence, or questioned why she was in the police station in the middle of the night.
‘Miss Evans can sleep in my room.’ Micah loosened his collar and tie.
‘For the little that’s left of the night,’ Helga commented. ‘I’ll change the sheets.’
‘There is no need,’ Edyth demurred, upset by the amount of work she was creating.
‘It wouldn’t be proper for a young girl to sleep in a bachelor’s sheets. Waffles and coffee for Micah and our guest, Moody,’ she called out to an African boy who was standing behind a counter that held an assortment of cups, saucers and plates.
‘Miss Evans, please sit down.’ Micah indicated a table and chairs set slightly apart from the rest. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I must talk to my sister about Mrs King.’
Chapter Ten
Edyth studied the spacious loft that had been built into the rafters of the church as its public room. It was furnished with low tables, open bookshelves and simple, wooden-framed chairs padded with calico-covered cushions. The effect was plain and rustic, yet she considered it charming. The clean lines of the bleached wood, whitewashed wooden walls and pale upholstery reminded her of a snowy winter’s day, until she saw the tapestry that almost filled the longest wall. It was of a steep-sided, conifer-clad mountainside that tumbled down to a sheer grey cliff. Below it, the sea swirled in blue shades of satin stitch, punctured by stab-stitched rocky outcrops and French knots of white-crested foam.
‘That is beautiful,’ she complimented Micah when he returned.
‘It was begun by my mother and finished by my sister. And now I think we should tend to your face and arms.’
‘No, please –’
‘I have antiseptic and plasters. Please, come down to the bathroom. My sister will accompany us,’ he added.
She resigned herself to following him. Ten stinging, uncomfortable minutes later, she looked at herself in the mirror Helga handed her. Micah had bathed her wounds in iodine and put plasters on the deepest cut, which was next to her mouth.
‘Your hair looked worse than it was.’ Helga gently washed the area that had been scalped. ‘The blood had dried. Now that I have dampened it, you can easily cover the spot and it will soon grow back.’
‘Really?’ Edyth asked hopefully.
‘It will,’ Helga said emphatically. ‘And now, Micah, I’ll take your jacket, if you please, before those stains set.’
‘It’s ruined.’ Micah examined the white linen sports coat he had hung on the back of the chair. It was blotched with blood.
‘It will be if you try to wash it.’ She took it from Micah, folded it over her arm and left the room.
‘Shall we go back upstairs, Miss Evans?’
‘My name is Edyth and, given the circumstances, I think you should use it.’
‘I will if you call me Micah.’
Edyth followed him back up the stairs into the public room and sank gratefully into a chair. The cushions billowed around her and she was tempted to close her eyes, but resisted, knowing that if she did she would go to sleep. Micah sat opposite her and Moody brought a tray that held two mugs of coffee, a jug of milk, a bowl of sugar and a stack of cutlery. He set it in front of them and returned a moment later with a wooden board heaped high with steaming waffles and saucers of butter and preserves.
‘Thank you, Moody. Edyth, this is Moody Brown, Helga’s brother-in-law and my brother by adoption.’ He winked at the boy, who smiled and shyly offered Edyth his hand.
‘Pleased to meet you, Moody.’
‘This is just what the doctor – or should I say pastor? – ordered, Moody.’ Micah placed a waffle on a plate and handed it to Edyth.
Edyth looked down at the waffle, which bore the imprint of two fishermen pulling in a net of hearts. ‘This looks too pretty to eat.’
‘The Holsten waffle iron.’ Micah gave her the saucer of butter. ‘Every family in Norway commissions their local blacksmith to make a waffle iron and emboss it with their particular symbol so no two are alike.’
‘So this is a Micah Holsten waffle?’
‘Not mine, but one branch of the Holsten family’s. My grandfather created the design and had the village blacksmith cast it as a wedding present for my grandmother. He was a fisherman and, according to my father, he used to say that the best catch he ever made was my grandmother. I inherited it after the death of my parents.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘The preserves are lingonberries.’ He sniffed them appreciatively before passing them over. ‘The sailors bring them in for me from Norway when they’re in season and my sister and the other women here make the preserves. Try them; I guarantee they’re not like anything else you’ve tasted. A unique, bitter-sweet taste of the homeland I haven’t seen in a quarter of a century.’
‘You don’t look that old,’ she said thoughtlessly.
‘My parents left the country to run the Norwegian mission church in Danzig six months after I was born. I’ve never been back.’ He waited until she’d helped herself to the butter and preserves before taking the dishes and spreading liberal portions on to his own waffles.
Although he’d warned her that the preserves were bitter-sweet, the first mouthful was more tart than she’d expected. She saw him watching her and said, ‘It’s good.’
‘Warming on a cold stomach and quick and easy to make, for an ambitious boy like Moody, who has hopes of becoming a ship’s cook.’ He waved to the young boy, who was busy making more waffles for a crowd of men who’d commandeered the largest table. ‘Which is why you’ll find waffles being served in every Norwegian mission from here to Bombay and Sydney.’ He finished one waffle and helped himself to another. ‘Does anyone know you’re here?’ His tone was conversational, but it didn’t fool her. He was obviously trying to find out just how much responsibility he had taken on when he had vouched for her at the police station.
‘Not here in the mission, apart from the police, that is,’ she replied guardedly, trying not to picture her parents’ reaction if they could see her now, eating waffles in a Norwegian seaman’s mission on Cardiff docks in the early hours of the morning with a pastor and jazz musician, after being attacked, robbed, and mistaken for a prostitute.
‘Do you want to get a message to anyone?’
‘I told the police the truth. I came to Butetown to see R
everend Slater. I intended to arrive much earlier in the evening but the train was delayed for hours.’
‘The vicarage has a telephone. I know it’s late but church ministers are used to being disturbed in the early hours. Peter Slater wouldn’t have minded you calling him.’
‘I didn’t think of it until I reached Cardiff and all I could think of then was reaching him. But there’s no point in trying to get a message to him now. He wasn’t expecting me, and the housekeeper at the vicarage told me he’s visiting a sick parishioner.’
‘So, Peter didn’t know you were coming to see him?’
She sensed condemnation and looked into his blue eyes. They were cold, probing, and she felt the need to offer more of an explanation. ‘Peter asked me to marry him.’
‘And you said yes?’ There was a peculiar expression on his face she was too tired to decipher.
‘My parents refused to give their permission.’
‘That’s hardly surprising.’ He cut into his second waffle. ‘You are very young.’
‘Eighteen,’ she retorted defensively. ‘Bella’s married and she’s only eighteen months older than me.’
‘Someone mentioned at the wedding that she’d known her fiancée for some years.’
‘What have years got to do with it?’ she retorted, exhaustion making her irritable. ‘I may have only met Peter a few weeks ago, but I know him as well as I know myself.’
‘You do?’ His sceptical lift of the eyebrow tipped her impatience into anger.
‘I love Peter, and he loves me. He asked my parents if we could marry, they refused. They took me to Swansea today and left me in the teacher training college …’ She fell silent when she realised she was arguing with him exactly as she would with her father.
‘Didn’t you want to go to college?’ He scooped more butter on to his waffle.
‘I did – before I met Peter.’
‘Peter changed your mind about going?’ he enquired mildly.
‘A college place is wasted on a woman who intends to marry. Even if I had stayed in Swansea, worked hard for three years and qualified as a teacher at the end of it, I wouldn’t be allowed to teach – not after we were married.’
‘Do you really believe a woman shouldn’t be educated?’ he challenged.
‘In my case, yes,’ she affirmed, conscious that she was reiterating Peter’s arguments not her own.
‘So, the minute your parents left you safe and sound, or so they thought, in Swansea, you caught the train to Cardiff to join Peter Slater?’
‘Yes,’ she said defiantly.
‘I know you said you were delayed but, given the distance between Pontypridd and Swansea, you must have left Swansea in the afternoon.’
‘Early evening.’
‘Couldn’t you have waited until morning?’
It was the same question she had asked herself earlier, but his directness annoyed her. ‘I needed to talk to Peter right away.’
‘If it was that urgent, you could have telephoned him. Presumably there was a public one that you could have used in the college?’
‘I wanted him to see that I had decided not to go to college for the right reasons. And, as you heard me tell the police, the housekeeper wouldn’t let me wait in the vicarage, so I decided to sit in the church. It was then that those women attacked me.’
Micah finished his third waffle, set his knife and fork on his plate, and pushed it aside. ‘First thing tomorrow morning you must telephone the college, Peter Slater and your parents to let them know you are safe.’
‘I told the college I was going to my brother Harry’s house in the Swansea Valley. He lives on a farm there.’ She couldn’t bring herself to repeat her lie to the bursar that Harry’s wife was ill. ‘My parents think I am still in Swansea and Peter doesn’t know I’m here.’ When Micah didn’t comment, she felt that he considered her a foolish, spoiled brat, and what was worse, with good reason.
He glanced at his watch. ‘If you’re absolutely certain no one is worried about you, there’s no point in disturbing anyone now. But you’ll have to contact all of them in the morning.’
‘Peter certainly,’ she agreed.
‘And your parents,’ he added.
‘I told you, they don’t know I’ve left Swansea.’
‘And if the bursar telephones your brother to find out if you arrived safely at his farm?’ He continued to look at her intently. ‘Harry does have a telephone?’
‘Yes,’ she conceded.
‘As do your parents. I saw one in the hall of your house.’ He stacked his mug on top of his plate. ‘You can use the telephone here.’
‘I’ll pay for the calls, just as soon as I am able to draw money from my bank account.’
‘Thank you. The mission pays the bills, but our only income comes from charitable donations made through the Lutheran Church.’ He glanced up as Helga rejoined them.
‘The bed’s made up for Miss Evans.’
‘Thank you, Helga. Edyth, is it all right if I ask Helga to wake you at seven so you can make those calls? It will mean that you’ll only get four hours sleep, but you can catch up later in the day.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m very sorry to put both of you to so much trouble.’
‘I’ll show you the washroom.’ Helga led Edyth back down the stairs and opened the door on a small room furnished with a toilet and sink. She handed her a clean towel, but Edyth was too tired to do more than wash her hands. Micah had warned her not to touch her face. When she’d finished Helga took her back upstairs to a tiny room no more than seven feet square.
White-walled and wood-floored, it held a narrow wooden bed made up with a crisp white cotton eiderdown and sheets. The curtains were also plain white cotton. There was a small chest of drawers, with a simple wooden-framed mirror fixed to the wall above it. An aluminium portable washstand with basin, water jug and slop pail, and an open rail with a man’s dark suit and three shirts completed the furniture. The only decoration was a plain wooden cross above the bed. If it had been a crucifix, the room could have passed as a monk’s cell.
Helga took a man’s striped nightshirt from a chest of drawers and handed it to Edyth. ‘See you in the morning, Miss Evans.’
‘Edyth, please, Mrs Brown.’
‘And I’m Helga. Sleep well. If you need anything during the night I’ll be just outside.’ She closed the door behind her.
Edyth changed quickly. The bed was narrow and the mattress hard, but the quilt that covered it was thick and soft, and the coarsely woven cotton cover was freshly laundered. The cool, clean sensation of it lying against her bare legs only just had time to register before she plunged headlong into sleep.
A gentle knock shattered Edyth’s dreams. She opened her eyes and was almost blinded by the sunlight streaming in through the translucent cotton that covered the window. She looked around in confusion, before recalling the events of the previous night. A second knock followed.
‘Miss Evans – Edyth?’
‘Please come in, Helga.’ Her voice was hoarse, thick and sluggish. She sat up in bed and ran her fingers through her short, waved hair, brushing it back from her face. To her dismay she could feel the bald patch. Helga opened the door and carried in the white handbag and plaid overnight case that had disappeared from outside the church the night before.
‘My bag – my case!’ Edyth swung her legs out of bed and knelt beside them. ‘The police found them?’
‘Let’s just say they found their way back to their owner. Micah telephoned the police station when they were delivered an hour ago, and they insisted on sending a constable down to check the contents against the list you gave them. It all seems to be there, even your purse. I’m sorry, but it’s empty.’
Edyth opened her purse and shook it. There was nothing in it, but her bank book was still in her handbag. She opened it to reassure herself that the balance was the same, although there hadn’t been time for anyone to withdraw any money from the account. She turned from her handbag
to the overnight case. The nightgown, spare dress and underclothes she had packed were rumpled, but at least she had a frock to replace the one that had been torn to shreds, and the use of her own toilet bag.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said sincerely.
‘Thank Micah, not me. He has a way of pricking the conscience of the most hardened sinner, but as you see,’ Helga glanced at the empty purse, ‘with limited success. When you’ve washed and dressed you’ll find Micah in the office. It’s the door facing you at the foot of the stairs. In the meantime, I’ll make a start on breakfast. You’ll eat bacon, eggs, and waffles with us?’
‘Just toast will be fine, thank you.’
‘Are you saying that because you’re not hungry, or because you don’t want to put us to any trouble? I thought so,’ Helga continued without giving Edyth time to answer. ‘Don’t worry about the trouble. You can earn your supper and breakfast by washing and drying the dishes while Moody and I prepare the church for service.’
It was only then Edyth realised that she was going to turn up on Peter’s doorstep on the worst possible day of his week – Sunday.
Edyth washed and dressed as quickly as she could, given the confines of the small room, and the fact that she had to root in her bag for everything she needed. She tried not to look in the mirror. The scratches had become raised, yellowed, iodine-tinted welts, her face, arms, legs and as much as she could see of her back were black and blue, and she could barely open her right eye. Her scalp was tender to the touch and even a quick comb-through of her waves was agonising.
The frock and petticoat she’d worn the day before were beyond repair. She stuffed both into the bottom of her laundry bag along with her stockings and underclothes, before bundling it into her overnight case. Whatever happened, she couldn’t allow her mother or Mari to see the frock. If they did, she suspected there’d never be an end to their lecturing. She also put the police shirt in the bag. Its presence would take some explaining but she could hardly send it back unlaundered and she had all day to think of a suitable covering story.
Tiger Bay Blues Page 18
