‘Here’s your coat, Mam.’
As Sadie took the coat Connie was holding out she glanced at her daughter’s worried face, and a fresh surge of anguish brought the weakening tears pricking at the backs of her eyes again.
Jacob had loved her little lassie like she was his own. When she thought of the difference between him and Michael Bell . . . He’d been all mouth and trousers, Michael Bell. A charming ladies man who had swept her off her feet and had her married and installed in lodgings in Newcastle, where he worked, before she could say Jack Robinson, but that hadn’t stopped him carrying on behind her back with all and sundry. She had been so blind, so stupid. And then she’d fallen for Connie, and the bigger she’d got the more he’d been repulsed until he’d off and skedaddled with Mrs Grove, their landlady. And Mr Grove had gone mental and thrown her out the same day. But then, later, there had been her Jacob.
‘Do you want your gloves, Mam?’
‘Thanks, hinny.’ The threadbare gloves were more holes than wool, but as Sadie pulled them over her red, rough hands she wasn’t seeing them, her thoughts returning to Jacob. He had cried the first time they’d come together, sobbed like a child and all the time murmuring loving endearments the like of which she had never heard before. He had been so grateful, so amazed, so broken that she had let him love her, wanted him to love her, accepted his body into hers with pleasure and gladness. And his wonder had revealed more about the hell of his marriage than any words could have done. She wouldn’t let him stay trapped in that diabolical existence, even if he was crippled. If he never walked again, she would take care of him. Oh . . . The futility of the thought brought her head swaying as she stood to her feet. How could she? With the bairns, her mam?
What was she going to do?
‘Shall I bring the sack, Mam?’
‘Aye, there’s a good lass.’
The force of the wind nearly took the door off its hinges as they stepped out into the clearing, and after Connie had battled to close it the two of them walked further into the wood, gathering pieces of kindling along with some heavier chunks of fallen branches as they went.
It was just after they had ventured across the wooden bridge over the beck – constructed by Sadie’s grandfather when he had first built the small stone cottage several decades before – that Sadie slipped on the raised root hidden by damp, partially frozen leaves and undergrowth. She tried to save herself, twisting her body as she fell, but only succeeded in falling on her back rather than her stomach and with enough force to drive the breath from her body in a great gasp.
‘Mam! Oh, Mam, Mam.’ Connie was kneeling at her side in an instant but it was a moment or two before Sadie could speak, and then her lips were white as she said, ‘Help me get back to the cottage, lass. It’ll be all right. Don’t fret,’ only to find that the pain made her cry out as she tried to rise.
‘I’ll go an’ get Gran.’
‘No, no, Connie.’ As the child went to dart away Sadie clutched hold of her. ‘Your granny can’t help, not with her arthritis. I’ll be all right if we can just get back, hinny.’
‘All right, Mam.’
The pain was like a red-hot needle now, or rather hundreds of them, and they were all stabbing deep inside her stomach, in her womb. Was she going to lose the baby? She could feel Connie’s arms tight round her and she leant against her child for a moment, a feeling of nausea competing with the needles which were growing and sharpening by the moment. It might be the best thing rather than being born into this. And then the thought was fiercely contested. This was Jacob’s baby. Jacob’s. And he had been so proud of Larry and so excited when she’d broken the news about this one. She couldn’t lose it, she couldn’t.
The pain was filling every part of her, squeezing itself into the core of her being and radiating out in unbearable waves that had her sweating despite the icy air. She had to get back to the cottage, she had to.
‘Come on, Mam.’ Connie’s voice was soft but her little arms were surprisingly strong as she helped her mother to her feet, and it was like that – with Sadie bent double and Connie taking most of her weight – that they lurched and stumbled back to the cottage.
The child, a little girl, was born just before midnight and it never drew breath. Connie had stayed with her mother all the time – Peggy’s distorted hands were little more than useless when it came to handling hot water or bearing any weight – and so it was she who cut the umbilical cord and wrapped the tiny perfect body in a piece of rough towelling before placing it gently in her grandmother’s arms. Connie was aware she was crying, she could feel the tears running down her face and there was a salty taste on her lips, but she also knew she had to be strong for her mam. Her mam was poorly, very poorly. This wasn’t like when Larry was born. Her mam and her granny had seen to things between them then, and although her mam had grunted and moaned and cried out a bit, she’d been sitting up straight after, laughing when Larry’d yelled his head off until he’d been put to the breast. But there was no laughing tonight. And no yelling.
The babby was dead. That tiny, doll-like scrap that had eyelashes and little nails and everything was dead. Its little face had been beautiful but there had been nothing she could do. And she was frightened, so frightened, her mam was going to die too, but until the storm stopped she couldn’t even go for help.
The blizzard had started almost as soon as Connie had got her mother back to the safety of the cottage, and the howling wind was still driving the snow against the stone walls of the dwelling place with enough force to batter them down.
Connie eased the blood-stained bundle of old sacking, with its jelly-like substance which had followed the baby, from beneath her mother, so that Sadie was lying on the lumpy bare mattress. She pulled the thin blankets over the inert figure in the bed and lifted her gaze up and out through the doorway to check on Larry – fast asleep on the makeshift bed she’d made earlier for him on the saddle – before turning back to her grandmother who was sitting on the pallet bed.
‘Oh me bairn, me bairn.’ Her grandmother raised her grey head from the minute bundle in her arms, and the old woman’s streaming eyes made Connie even more frightened. Her granny never cried. Her mam maybe, and their Larry often, but her gran . . .
‘Shall I heat up some broth for me mam, Gran?’
It was a moment or two before Peggy could speak, and then she said, her voice quivering, ‘Aye, you do that, hinny. That’s a good idea. Your mam needs somethin’ nourishin’.’
The morning brought its own set of problems. The snow was deep – three or four foot in places, even deeper where it had drifted – and although the wind had abated slightly the air was a good few degrees colder. They had no wood for the fire which meant no hot food or drink, and Connie knew her granny was worried about her mam. Her mam was hot and sticky despite the icy chill in the bedroom, and she didn’t seem to recognise any of them, not even Larry when he clambered on the bed and hollered in her mam’s ear before Connie could get him away.
‘I’m goin’ to the farm, Gran.’
‘No, lass. The snow’s too deep an’ them drifts are treacherous. You remember old Sam Mullen? I’ve told you about him, haven’t I. Two weeks it was afore they found him an’ old Sam knew these parts like the back of his hand. One of the lads from the farm’ll be along shortly.’
‘Will they come today, Gran?’
Straight for the jugular, as always. Peggy stared at her granddaughter as she struggled to keep the panic and fear from showing. The cottage was like a block of ice; Larry was already blue with cold, and from the look of her Sadie had a fever. They could die waiting for help and the bairn knew it, young as she was. Dear Mary, holy mother of God, what should she do? If she let the bairn go and something happened to her she’d never forgive herself, but if she didn’t . . .
And then the decision was taken out of her hands as Connie said, with a maturity far beyond her tender years, ‘I have to go, Gran, you know I have to go. The farm’ll send one of the lads for the doctor an’ I’ll see if they’ll let us have some coal or wood or somethin’ to tide us over for a bit. Shall I take me grandda’s walking stick?’
‘Aye, you do that, lass, an’ stick it in the snow afore you to test how deep it is, eh? An’ it’s Doctor Turnbull we want, all right? An’ . . . an’ tell ’em to say to be quick.’
‘All right, Gran.’ Connie glanced across at the tiny towelling bundle lying in a makeshift cot in one of the dresser drawers, and the lead weight in her chest became heavier. This was all them men’s fault, it was, and she hated them. She hated them all, and she wished they’d go straight to hell and burn in everlasting torment without a drop of water to quench their thirst, like that story about the rich man and Lazarus and Father Abraham they’d had at school the other week. She sighed heavily, picked up the walking stick from the side of the cold range and, after saying goodbye to her grandmother, opened the front door and stepped into a white frozen world.
Dan Stewart hadn’t slept properly for nights on end – fifteen nights to be exact, ever since he had accompanied his brothers on their mission to the house in the wood and their lives had been changed for ever. He wished with all his heart he hadn’t listened to John. By lad, he did. When he thought about what had happened because of it . . . His stomach heaved and it was in answer to that he told himself, No more, no more. He had been physically sick several times in the last two weeks, his stomach so knotted up that even trying to eat produced acute nausea, although none of the others seemed so affected.
They had originally planned to take Jacob back to his wife that fateful night, but when he had started the terrible blood-curdling groaning they had left the road and cut across the back of Ashbrooke Hall and Hendon Hill, approaching his parents’ secluded detached residence in Ryhope Road as quietly as they could with John’s handkerchief stuffed in Jacob’s mouth to stifle his moans. He’d gone in first, to make sure that Kitty – their housekeeper-cum-cook-cum-maid of all trades – was abed, and then once the others had brought Jacob into the room his mother liked to call the morning room, he had gone up to his parents.
Dan shut his eyes tightly for a moment and then opened them again as he glanced at himself in the full-length mirror attached to the back of his wardrobe door. He saw a soberly dressed young man in a suit and tie – a black tie, the colour his mother had insisted they all wear from now on.
If he lived to be a hundred he would never forget the look on his father’s face when he saw what his lads had done to his daughter’s husband, or the pandemonium that had followed seconds later when his father had had the seizure.
Apoplexy, the doctor had called it. A sudden inability to feel and move due to a rupture in the brain. And this pronouncement with Art and John keeping Jacob quiet in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and his mother already planning how her son-in-law’s multiple injuries came about by a fall down the steep stone steps leading from the canned and dry goods warehouse to the cellar below. His mother was a cool one all right. Dan clenched his teeth together. The thought had been neither laudatory or cheering.
His father had lingered for a full week before he had died, although the doctors had assured them he was aware of nothing. Jacob, on the other hand, was going to linger for a lifetime, trapped in a body that was useless but with his mental capabilities unimpaired. Damn it all . . . Dan felt himself begin to sweat. And all because one of John’s rages had got out of control. But no, no. He had to be honest with himself here. John was merely the bullet in the gun. The hand that pressed the trigger was his mother’s. It always had been, Art was right in that respect, and it had only been misguided loyalty on his part that had prevented him seeing it clearly before. But he saw it now. By all that was holy he saw it now.
He left the large, well-furnished bedroom quietly and stepped on to the landing, which showed highly polished floorboards either side of the blue carpet running down the middle of it. This carpeting continued down the wide staircase and into the spacious hall, but here the carpet reached the walls on all sides, which were of a dark brown and hung with many fine pictures.
Kitty had just closed the door to the breakfast room and the middle-aged housekeeper was dressed, as his mother had demanded, in a black alpaca dress over which she wore a starched white apron. She smiled at him now, raising her eyebrows slightly as she saw him reach into the alcove to one side of the front door for his overcoat. ‘She’s waiting for you to go in and join her,’ she whispered softly, inclining her head towards the closed door. ‘Gilbert and Matthew are already down.’
‘I don’t want any breakfast this morning, Kitty. Tell her I was in a hurry, would you.’
‘Now, lad, you know you’ll get it in the neck when you come home tonight. Just go in for a minute to appease her.’
Dan was aware it was concern for him, and not his mother, which prompted Kitty’s coaxing. The large rotund housekeeper had been part of his life for as long as he could remember, and from a very small boy he had known it was Kitty’s strong and deep respect and affection for his father, and her unconditional love for himself and his brothers and sister, that enabled the forthright Irishwoman to tolerate his mother’s fussy pedantic ways and sententious attitude. Certainly it was the only thing that had her clothed in the black dress and apron, he reflected wryly.