Wild Heritage

by Wild Heritage (retail) (epub)

  Gladys laughed. ‘And they’re always so pleased with themselves afterwards, like little boys! That’s when you get the big tips.’

  Kitty remembered making love with Gerry on the grass above the waterfall and shook her head. ‘I couldn’t.’ She didn’t see any point in having stabbed Thompson in order to save her integrity only to give it away for a few pounds to anyone who had the money.

  Because she was so valuable as a bookkeeper and because Cora was genuinely afraid of annoying her sisters, no pressure was put on her and when a client drew the proprietrix aside and enquired about the red-haired girl in the hall, she shook her head and said, ‘You’ll have to ask her yourself, dear.’

  Unknown to Kitty some of the girls and a few of the customers were making bets among themselves about how long it would take before she fell from her haughty perch. By the time three months had passed, the ones who set their time limit too short had lost their money.

  Summer came and Kitty had saved enough money to send another five-pound note to Tibbie for her mother. Again she cautioned Tibbie not to let anyone else know where she was but pleaded, ‘Please tell me how my mother is and if there’s any news of Marie. I miss them both.’

  The hot weather in the city unsettled her. For day after day the sun shone down from a copper-coloured sky and it seemed as if heat were trapped between the buildings, radiating out like a blast from an oven.

  The atmosphere in the club was oppressive. The stokers in the back worked naked and sweat coursed down their bodies, leaving runnels of white on the ingrained coal dust.

  In the attics under the slates it was impossible to sleep and when they were not working, the girls sat in the back yard with their dresses open at the neck and their skirts lifted up over black-stockinged legs. They sent Laverty out to the Plume of Feathers for jugs of beer and regaled themselves through the long lazy hours with drink and gossip.

  Kitty sat with them but did not drink much because if she did, she could not do her work properly. When she got tired of listening to the gossip, she went for a walk, but the tar in the city streets bubbled up and stuck to the soles of her shoes, her hair clung damply to her neck and temples and the sweat ran down her back in an uncomfortable trickle. She longed for open country, for a gentle summer breeze and fresh air, for the sight of a tree-covered hillside and a silver, unpolluted river.

  Sometimes she walked to the Thames and stared at its sluggish, scum-topped water, thinking about Camptounfoot where the swifts would be dashing over the surface of the river and Jo would be casting his line in the hope of catching a trout for his supper. Homesickness caught at her heart but she drove it away.

  She was restless and knew that though she was happy at the club, soon she must leave. There was another adventure waiting for her round the corner.

  On the hottest day in August she came in from a walk and sat down to sort through piled-up chits on her table in the hall, thankful for a faint breeze that came through the frequently opened front door. The work was engrossing and she was deeply involved in it when she heard a voice coming from Cora’s office that made her sit up in surprise.

  It was a lilting Irish voice that she thought she recognised. It took her back to Camptounfoot and the day a tall, dark man with a curling beard had given her a half-sovereign. A terrible feeling of disappointment seized her.

  ‘Surely Tim Maquire isn’t here?’ she thought. Hearing about the peccadilloes of the Duke of Allandale and Lord Godolphin had only been a mild surprise but to find Tim Maquire patronising the Excelsior Club would be a blow, her childhood idol would be smashed, her illusions gone.

  Laying down her pen, she slipped off her stool and tiptoed quietly to the office door. The voice was louder there and she listened with her head cocked. It was so like Tim Maquire’s with the same soft Irish lilt, the same note of amusement running beneath whatever what was being said. She groaned beneath her breath. Turning back to her desk, she grabbed the first sheet of paper that came to hand and hurried towards Cora’s sanctum and the voices.

  The little room seemed full of people. Cora was standing in the middle surrounded by four men and she was speaking directly to one of them, a thin young fellow with curly brown hair and a wide humorous mouth. They heard Kitty’s approach and all looked at her with undisguised interest as she hurried up to Cora with the paper outheld and a frown on her face.

  ‘I wondered if those figures could be right, Mrs White… They seem larger than usual,’ she said.

  As she spoke she was scrutinising the men. To her infinite relief Tim Maquire was not among them. She relaxed and gave a long, deep sigh that made the curly-haired man grin at her and say, ‘That sounded nice. Like you’ve been running. You’re in a terrible hurry to do your sums, eh?’

  He spoke exactly like Tim Maquire, the same tone, the same pleasant Irish accent. His voice turned the letter ‘r’ into ‘rh’ which gave a softness and sibilance to anything he said and made his merest utterance sound caressing.

  Kitty’s relief that he was not Tim was so overwhelming that she smiled at him while Cora White took the paper from her hand and pored over the figures.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she asked crossly. ‘They’re much the same as usual.’

  Kitty took the paper back and apologised but with a light-hearted air. ‘It must be the heat getting at me,’ she said. The men laughed and the Irishman said, ‘Come and have a bath with me then. That’ll cool you down.’

  Kitty frowned and Mrs White said primly, ‘This girl is my bookkeeper, gentlemen. She doesn’t go into the bathhouse.’

  ‘Now isn’t that a pity,’ said the man with the enchanting voice. ‘And her with such pretty hair too, like a fall of autumn leaves, so it is.’

  His eyes were on her face and Kitty felt herself colour up beneath his scrutiny but did not look away. His very bright blue eyes held her in their beam.

  ‘What’s this beauty’s name?’ he asked, still looking at Kitty.

  ‘Kitty Scott,’ said she and Cora White in unison.

  ‘I’m Freddy Farrell,’ he said, holding out a hand to her. She looked at him blankly. Though she had heard the name, it did not immediately strike some recognition in her.

  He did not seem to mind that she was puzzled and laughed. ‘You must be the only person in Whitechapel who hasn’t heard of Freddy Farrell. I’m the jockey.’

  Cora White chipped in, ‘And he won the Derby and the Two Thousand Guineas this year.’

  ‘That was lucky,’ said Kitty.

  Freddy Farrell laughed again. ‘And so it was, so it was! Come on, my beauty. Share a bottle of champagne with me.’

  Kitty stepped back. ‘No, thank you. I’ve work to do.’

  But Mrs White was behind her giving her a shove in the back. ‘That can wait. Have a little drink with Mr Farrell, Kitty my dear.’ It was obvious she was speaking through gritted teeth but Kitty was not going to be coerced.

  ‘I don’t like champagne,’ she said and turned sharply on her heel, back to the sanctuary of her table. Behind her she heard Freddy Farrell laughing. He was not in the least put out.

  Later that afternoon, when her head was aching with the heat and she was leaning her elbows on the desk to support it, the office door opened. She did not even look round, taking it would be Cora White who was probably still angry about her refusal to drink with the Irish jockey.

  ‘Do you really not like champagne? It’s a lovely drink,’ said the lilting voice that so beguiled her.

  She looked up and saw him standing in the middle of the floor with both hands behind his back and feet slightly apart. He was not as tall as she was herself but wiry and tight-muscled as a steel spring and his clothes were those of a dandy. He was obviously a man who took a great deal of care of his appearance and Kitty, who also loved clothes, could appreciate that.

  His face was flushed from his sessions in the baths – or from the champagne – and his eyes were sparkling.

  ‘I’ve never tasted champagne,’ she said
.

  ‘Didn’t I just know that. There’s a girl with too much taste not to appreciate champagne, I said to myself. When you try it, you’ll love it.’ As he spoke he produced from behind his back an open bottle of gently frothing wine. In one of his waistcoat pockets he had stuck a wineglass and he pulled it forth like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat.

  She laughed, she couldn’t help it. ‘I didn’t expect that,’ she said and he grinned back.

  ‘I’m famous for doing the unexpected. You’ll find that out.’

  Kitty accepted the glass of wine he was holding towards her and said, ‘Will I? That’s doubtful.’

  Freddy walked closer and perched himself on the edge of her table. I’m at my best with outsiders,’ he told her. ‘I’m always bringing them home when no one expects me to.’

  ‘But I’m not a horse,’ Kitty said to him, sipping the wine which was deliciously cool. Bubbles tickled her nose and made her want to sneeze. After only a few sips she felt unaccountably cheerful. It couldn’t be the wine, it must be the influence of the irrepressible jockey who was pressing another glass on her, she thought. She shook her head and held her glass away from his outheld bottle.

  ‘One’s enough,’ she told him.

  He looked downcast. ‘Don’t say I’m wrong about you. Don’t say you don’t like champagne after all. Don’t say you’re one of those Bible-thumping teetotallers. Don’t tell me you’re an abstainer!’ He rolled his eyes and sounded anguished.

  She reassured him. ‘I do like it but I’ve got work to do. If I drink any more I won’t be able to add up.’

  ‘What does it matter? It’s a lovely day outside. You’ve only got one life. Have another drink and come for a drive with me… I’ll take you to the Strand and show you off.’

  She bridled. ‘I’m not for showing off. Thank you for the drink. Go away now please so I can finish what I was doing.’

  He went without protest but next morning, when she came down from the attic, the hall was packed solid with baskets of flowers. It was almost impossible to make a path through them. Roses and lilies, huge sprays of gladioli and brilliant white daisies with yellow hearts filled the space with a riot of colour and the scent from them was almost overpowering. The girls were crowded at Cora’s office door admiring the floral tributes while more messengers kept arriving with other bouquets which had to be stacked.

  Mrs White was vainly trying to remonstrate with the florists’ messenger boys.

  ‘Take them away. We don’t want any more. Take them back to the shop,’ she was crying, holding out her hands to bar the way of a man carrying a huge sheaf of heavily scented white lilies, but he would not listen. He’d been told to leave the flowers at the Excelsior Club and that was what he intended to do.

  At eleven in the morning the last gift arrived, a spray of pale yellow and green orchids. They alone bore a card and it was addressed to Miss Kitty Scott… ‘Give me and champagne another chance, Freddy Farrell’ was all it said.

  He arrived at noon, with his followers behind him. This time he stood at Kitty’s flower-encircled table and bowed very low.

  ‘Will Miss Scott agree to take a little turn with me in my dogcart? I promise not to bump and bore, not to drive too fast or cut anybody else out at the corners and Miss Scott can sit with her parasol up if she doesn’t want to be shown off.’

  He gazed at her, both eyebrows raised and mouth wide in a grin. His impertinence was so engaging that she laughed.

  ‘I shouldn’t but I will if it’s going to stop you emptying the flower shops of London and sending their stock here,’ she said. ‘Mrs White’s desperate about what to do with all those flowers. They’re even in buckets in the kitchens.’

  His face looked downcast. ‘Now don’t tell me that as well as not liking champagne, you don’t like flowers!’

  I love flowers,’ she protested. ‘But I don’t like to see them dying for nothing. Poor things, they were wilting away when I got down here this morning.’

  He walked over to her and laid his hand on hers. She noticed he had long, tapering fingers and a broad palm. It looked a very competent hand. ‘You come with me, Kitty, and I’ll give you a garden,’ he said softly.

  She could not resist him. It wasn’t so much the way he looked, for he was three inches shorter than she was and till now she had always preferred dark men and his hair was a much lighter brown than Gerry’s. As a child he would have been blond.

  It was his voice which did it, that lilting voice that seemed to turn her bones to water and took her back to the time when she cherished the hope her father would look and sound like Tim Maquire.

  When she agreed to go driving with him, she was not in the least surprised to see that he had the same effect on horses as he had on her, for when he stroked the silken ears of the smart little bay mare harnessed between the shafts of his dogcart that stood outside the Excelsior Club and whispered to her, the mare perked up, stood tall and whickered through her nostrils back at him.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked Kitty when they were seated side by side on the soft, cushioned seats.

  I don’t know,’ she said. Apart from occasional tram journeys with Brigid ‘up west’ and her walks to the Thames on sunny afternoons, she knew nothing of any other part of London except Whitechapel.

  ‘I’ve an errand to do. I’ll show you Camden Town,’ he said, and gave the reins a little shake to which the mare responded immediately as if she had been listening to him.

  They bowled along at a smart trot and people recognised him on the street, waving and shouting greetings like, ‘Well done, Freddy. Win next year too.’

  He acknowledged their calls with a waggle of the whip that stuck up from a holder by his side but which, Kitty noticed, was not used on the briskly moving mare. He encouraged her by words, crooning ‘Come along, lass, clever lass, that’s good now, step it up a bit, slow down here, girl, that’s a good girl…’

  There seemed to be some special bond between the man and his horse, which made Kitty warm to him.

  They bowled along road after road, through street after street all full of shops and people, until they came to a leafy district with long avenues of pretty but tumbledown-looking houses.

  ‘This is pleasant,’ said Kitty, breathing in the clear air.

  ‘I live up here,’ he told her.

  The street where he stopped the dogcart was lined by red brick houses with leafy gardens in front and front doors approached by a flight of steps. The house where Freddy pulled up was the only untidy one in the row and this surprised Kitty, for he seemed so fastidious. Its garden was filled with rubbish and dirty-faced children were running around it, yelling and screaming like savages.

  They crowded up to Freddy, grabbing his legs and fighting for his attention, but he cut a way through them, holding Kitty by the hand. In the house he introduced her to a blowsy woman called Peg, who, it appeared, was the mother of the children in the garden plus another five who were older and not at home.

  Peg was large and slatternly and sat with her huge arms on the kitchen table and a jug of beer at her elbow. She was also the most blatant flatterer Kitty had ever heard in operation, crying out to Freddy over and over again, ‘Oh, aren’t you a grand fellow, Freddy? The finest fellow walking the streets of London today. There’s not a man to touch you in the capital.’

  To Kitty she launched into a eulogy about Freddy’s personal qualities that made him sound like a cross between Angel Gabriel and Samson. He didn’t pay much attention to her except for laying a half-sovereign on the table and saying, ‘There you are, there’s your money. You can send one of the children out for more beer to keep you going tonight.’

  ‘God bless you, Freddy,’ she cried, grasping his hand and kissing it. ‘I praise the day that you stepped into this house, I surely do.’

  Kitty was mystified as to why she had been brought to see this gargantuan woman. They left after about fifteen minutes, and she said curiously to him, ‘Was that your
mother?’

  He was genuinely surprised. ‘My mother? Of course not. What made you think she was my mother.’

  ‘All that adoration of you. How can you stand it?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t listen to her. She’s my landlady and just afraid I’ll move on and leave them now that I’ve hit the big time. Her old man drinks his wages every week and they live on what I give them. I owed her some money so that’s why I went there today.’

  ‘How long have you lived with her?’ she asked, curious at how Freddy could turn himself out so well when he lived in such a mess of a house.

  ‘About fifteen years but I’ve rooms in London too. I keep my place with Peg though because she needs the money and I don’t want to hurt her feelings.’

  ‘Fifteen years!’ she was astonished because he didn’t look much older than she was herself. That meant he must have been with Peg since he was a child.

  ‘Come on, ask. You’re wondering how old I am, aren’t you?’ He grinned. ‘I’ll tell you if you tell me.’

  She laughed back. ‘All right, I’m nearly twenty. I’ve been in London for almost a year.’ It was almost true.

  He nodded. ‘I’m twenty-five but I tell people I’m twenty-nine. They like age and experience on their horses’ backs. I’ve been in London since I was ten. I came over to work in a hotel stable. Then I rode a winner at Ally Pally and it was the turf for me after that. I’m the highest-paid jockey on the turf. I scooped up six thousand on the Derby. Aren’t you impressed?’

  ‘Six thousand! I didn’t know jockeys were paid as much as that,’ she gasped.

  ‘They’re not but you’ve heard of betting haven’t you?’

  She nodded and her mind went back to what he had said about his youth when he left home. ‘Weren’t you scared coming to London on your own at ten?’ she asked.

  He raised his shoulders in a shrug. ‘It was that or starving. I’m an orphan and I had an uncle working in the hotel who said he’d take me when my folk died. The priest in our village paid my fare. Father Corkery his name was. I say a prayer for him every time I go to chapel… but that’s not very often, I’m afraid!’ Again the grin changed his face as if he were reluctant to show that he had a serious side.