‘I’ll fetch it tomorrow,’ he replied, taking off his jacket and placing it over her shoulders. It was still warm from his body and Josie hugged it around her as he guided her back along the pier.
They hurried up Narrow Street and north towards Stepney Green. The clock of St Dunstan’s church chimed the quarter as they turned into Salmon Lane.
Mrs Munroe would almost certainly know she hadn’t arrived home, but she wouldn’t be unduly alarmed. She knew Josie sometimes stayed out late to have supper with the Coopers, whose manservant would see her safely home. Mrs Munroe tended to retire early and on more than one occasion had already gone to bed before Josie returned.
She hoped that tonight would be one of those occasions as she hurried past the back of the church with Patrick’s arm around her. Even so, she couldn’t risk anyone seeing her ruined dress and dishevelled appearance.
‘We’ll have to go in through the kitchen,’ she said, as they reached the bottom end of Stepney Green.
‘Won’t it be locked?’ Patrick asked.
‘Yes, but Mrs Woodall’s room is under the stairs,’ she said. ‘I can trust her and she’ll fetch me another gown.’
They hurried on until they reached number twenty four. Josie glanced up at the house and her shoulders relaxed. It was in darkness.
The wrought-iron gate to the stairs down the side of the house squealed open. Josie prayed that Mrs Munroe had taken a good measure of her Ladies’ Night Elixir and was now snoring softly in her room.
Picking their way carefully, Josie and Patrick crept down the stone steps to the kitchen door. The whole house was quiet as once the mistress of the house retired the servants, who were up before dawn, could make for their own beds.
‘I think we’re safe,’ Josie said. She went to knock on the window but Patrick caught her hand.
‘I love you,’ he said, pressing his lips on her fingers
‘I love you, too,’ she said, stepping closer to him in the gathering gloom, ‘but will we ever be able to say that out loud for all to hear rather than secretly to each other?’
Patrick placed his hands either side of her face and kissed her gently. ‘If I didn’t have that hope, Josie, I don’t think I could live through another day,’ he said in a low voice.
The gas lamp at the front of the house threw a pale light down the steps and as Josie gazed up at the strong angles of his mouth and chin, the urge to throw herself into his arms and beg him to love her was almost too much. She needed to hold him to her, to feel his lips on hers again, and his arms around her. She needed to have him love her in all the ways a man loves a woman.
His arm slid around her waist and he drew her to him. She stroked her hand up his chest and tilted her head. His lips twisted into a crooked smile.
‘I shouldn’t do this,’ he said. ‘But if I have to live without you I must have something to keep my heart beating.’
He covered her mouth with his and Josie gave herself up to the pure pleasure of it. Her hand went to his hair and she grasped it tightly.
A shaft of light cut across her vision. She and Patrick turned. As her eyes adjusted to the glare her mouth dropped open. There in the doorway, with a lamp in her hand, stood Mrs Munroe.
‘Good evening,
Miss
O’Casey.’
Chapter Eighteen
As she opened the door and her eyes rested on Josie O’Casey in the arms of Patrick Nolan, Mrs Munroe sent up a small prayer of thanks to the Almighty.
Since she’d read Josie’s letter her sole aim had been to find a way to unmask her as the wanton woman she truly was. Now that opportunity had presented itself. Discovering Daisy in the pantry with the delivery boy two weeks ago had been divine intervention as far as she was concerned. She would have dismissed Daisy on the spot but kept her on only on the understanding that the maid report to her everything Josie did. It was Daisy who had told her an hour ago that Josie hadn’t arrived home. Mrs Munroe had sat up, waiting in the dark parlour until she’d heard the gate squeak.
With narrowed eyes she studied the guilty lovers.
Look at the strumpet, with her brazen eyes. And him, in his rough clothes, with a wife somewhere and his arm around another.
‘Come in,’ she ordered. ‘
I
have a regard for propriety even if
you
have not.’
Josie stepped in and Mrs Munroe went to close the door, but Patrick put his hand to it.
‘Not you!’ she said fixing him with her most piercing gaze.
Ignoring her, Patrick stepped into the kitchen and stood behind Josie.
Mrs Munroe’s gaze slid over Josie, lingering on the torn dress, the unbound hair and missing bonnet. ‘A fine way to repay the care my son has lavished on you! It will break his heart when he hears how you have been acting the whore with this . . . this
scoundrel
!’
The word adulterer had been on the tip of her tongue but thankfully she remembered in time. If she called him that Josie might realise she’d read her letter to her mother.
Patrick’s eyes darkened. ‘So you’ll not be interested in an explanation then,’ he said addressing her with breathtaking impertinence.
‘How dare you—’
‘I thought you might be concerned by Dr Munroe’s stepdaughter returning home in such a ragged state and would want to know what happened to her.’
‘What has happened is crystal clear. Miss O’Casey has spent the afternoon with you, doing, I shudder to think what, and thought to slip back into this respectable house without being discovered,’ Mrs Munroe replied.
Patrick started forward, but Josie caught his arm.
‘Mrs Munroe, I was on my rounds with the baskets when I heard that Mattie’s husband had been killed,’ she said, shamelessly holding his hand. ‘I went to comfort her and pay my respects to her family. She is with child. I knew it was getting late but I . . . but I also needed to see Patrick. He was very close to Brian and I wanted to . . . to comfort him too.’
Mrs Munroe top lip curled.
‘On my way I was attacked,’ Josie went on, almost sobbing. ‘Thankfully, Patrick found me and saved me.’ Josie looked up at the man beside her with such tenderness that a rare lump unexpectedly formed itself in Mrs Munroe’s throat.
She wavered. Despite what the whole situation looked like, what Josie said had a ring of truth about it. Then the words from Josie’s letter burst back into her mind. Words of loving and wanting. Sentiments a decent young lady would balk at but which this girl, standing before her with love in her eyes and her dress ripped to shreds, wrote boldly across a page.
Her mind moved on from Josie’s letter to her five grandchildren asleep upstairs, and her heart galloped unevenly in her chest. She studied Josie again.
She may have been attacked, but she had probably had been on her way to a clandestine meeting with this Nolan fellow, rather than to comfort his bereaved sister. Mrs Munroe’s eyes flitted to Patrick, standing protectively beside Josie, and her lips drew into two harsh lines as she studied his commanding height and powerful hands. Who knows how many times Josie had pretended to be about on good works but instead had been meeting this Irish oaf to fornicate in secret? And what if there were to be a bastard from their immoral union?
‘You expect me to believe that?’ she screeched.
‘It’s the truth,’ Josie replied, but Mrs Munroe barely heard her as her mind imagined her dear Robert disgraced and his children tarnished by Josie O’Casey’s adulterous liaison.
Oh, dear Lord, no - not again, she vowed.
The door under the stairs opened and Mrs Woodall, in her dressing gown and nightcap, stepped into the kitchen. Mrs Munroe barely saw her as the loneliness of Robert’s self-imposed exile swamped her mind, and she jabbed her finger at Josie. ‘The truth is you are a wanton light-skirt whose unbridled desires will bring disgrace on your family if I don’t restrain them.’
‘Restrain? In what way?’ Patrick asked, taking a step closer to Josie.
‘There are sanatoriums where women with natures such as Miss O’Casey’s can be curbed and moulded,’ she said, thinking of the one in Leyton she had heard of only the week before.
Mrs Woodall gasped and Mrs Munroe sent her a scalding look. The cook backed away but stood in the doorway.
Patrick strode over to Mrs Munroe. She was used to having people, even men, look up to her, and she was irritated to have to crane back to remain in eye contact with him.
‘You’re
not
putting Josie in a queer house,’ he told her. ‘Miss O’Casey has been attacked. Didn’t you hear her? She needs care, not locking away.’
Patrick’s eyes narrowed and, despite herself, Mrs Munroe’s gaze flickered.
Mrs Woodall shot Josie a sympathetic look but slipped back into the doorway of her own room.
‘You’re taking a lot on yourself, Missus,’ Patrick told her. ‘Dr Munroe might have left you to oversee the nursery but Miss O’Casey isn’t one your charges, and this is
her
home.’
Mrs Munroe pulled herself up and gave Patrick a caustic look. ‘Do not take that tone with me, you scoundrel. And I would like to point out that this is
my
son’s home and you’ - she jabbed her finger at Josie - ‘only live here, in a comfort you were never born to enjoy, because of his generous nature. And might I also remind you that although you have no call on his affection whatsoever, my son has cared for you as if you were his own child and
this
’ - her hand swept over Josie’s tattered clothes and then onto Patrick - ‘is how you repay him. By grinding his good name in the dust.’
Patrick’s eyes narrowed and he made to step forward. Josie gave him a pleading look and he stopped, and fixed Mrs Munroe with an impertinent stare instead.
‘I was attacked,’ Josie repeated, with a tremor in her voice. ‘For pity’s sake, I—’
Mrs Munroe’s nostrils flared. ‘Pity! You talk of pity! Your dear mother has been gravely ill but do you have pity on her feeble state? No! Do you have pity on my poor son who not only grieves for his stillborn son, but who has ignored his own health and nursed his wife day and night for over a month? No. You have no regard for anyone but yourself. Your mother’s health, my son’s position, and your brothers’ and sisters’ reputations are nothing beside your own selfish desires.’
Josie’s shoulders started to shake. ‘How
dare
you say such things. I love Mam and Pa and would never do anything to cause them harm—’
‘I warned my son that he was nursing a viper to his bosom,’ Mrs Munroe’s voice boomed around the kitchen. ‘And that one day your father’s base blood would rise up in you and you would bring disgrace on us all.’ She fixed Josie with her steeliest stare. ‘It seems that day has arrived, you cruel, ungrateful, heartless girl.’
Josie blanched. ‘No!’
Patrick put his arm around Josie’s shoulder. ‘Don’t take any notice, Josie.’
Mrs Munroe’s lips drew together as she studied their corrupt intimacy, relishing the stricken look on the young girl’s face.
Josie raised her head and looked bleakly into Patrick’s face then, clutching her ripped clothes around her, she dashed out of the back door.
Patrick looked at Mrs Munroe, his eyes alight with anger. ‘May God forgive you.’ He turned and disappeared up the scullery steps after Josie.
A smug look stole over Mrs Munroe face. If Josie left of her own free will then Robert could hardly blame her for Miss O’Casey’s disgrace, nor could he take her back after she had thrown herself into the arms of a married man. Suppressing a satisfied smile, she glided across the floor and shut the back door, throwing the iron bolt across the top with a crack.
She turned to the cook standing half in and half out of her under-stair room. ‘That will be all, Cook,’ she said crisply. ‘We are locked up for the
night
. Do you understand?’
Mrs Woodall muttered something and went into her room, slamming the door behind her.
Mrs Munroe shot the middle and bottom bolts in place then picked up her lamp and made her way back to her bedroom through the silent house. As she reached the first floor she looked up the stairs and pictured her grandchildren curled up in their beds. A smile crossed her lips as she closed the door to her bedroom behind her. Setting the lamp down, she sank to her knees on the rug beside her bed, clasped her hands together and closed her eyes. Her mouth moved silently as she fervently thanked God for helping her remove the sinful influence of Josie O’Casey from her son’s lovely family.