Molly

by Molly (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  “You’re mad! Stark, raving mad!” Ellen Alden stormed around her kitchen like a tempest, unable in her angry incredulity to remain still. Sam stood by the table, an even more hectic flush than usual on his thin face, stubbornness in every line of him. He said nothing.

  “To marry her! Marry her! A penniless Irish beggar? She’ll be the death of you, do you know that?”

  “Mother, I won’t argue. I’ve made up my mind. I’ve asked Molly to marry me and she has agreed.”

  “I should think she has,” sneered his mother.

  Sam plodded on. “If you absolutely refuse to accept the idea then we’ll have to leave, find somewhere else to live.”

  “So it’s come to that, has it? She’s put you up to this, hasn’t she? Coming between mother and son. It would serve you right if I did throw you out. You’d starve together in the gutter if I did. Which is no better than she deserves. What about Lucy? You’ll break her heart—”

  “Oh, Mother, no. N-not that. Lucy thinks no more of me than I do of her, and you know it. She j-just couldn’t be bothered to find anyone else, to s-stand up to her father and mother.” He struggled angrily, knowing his stutter was getting worse. “Lucy’s that idle that she’d starve to death if her m-mother didn’t cook her dinner. What kind of wife would she make?”

  “And what sort of wife will that flighty Irish piece make, do you think? Oh, I was sorry for her, I don’t deny that, her Harry dying and all. But she’s got over it pretty sharply, hasn’t she? Only weeks since we heard. What kind of girl could do that? She’s marrying you on the rebound, that’s what.” She stabbed a finger at him, certain of an irrefutable point. “On the rebound.”

  “I know that.” His voice was quiet.

  “What?” His mother was struck to stillness by the shock of his words. “Now I know you’re mad. I’ll have you committed—”

  “I’ve made her see that it’s for the best.”

  “Best for her,” his mother hissed.

  “Maybe. Anyway, there it is. M-Molly and I are getting married. The only question is, do we stay or do we go? That’s up to you.”

  Ellen did not for the moment answer; she watched her son with a lowering anger that would normally reduce him to a jelly.

  “Very well,” she said at last, deceptively mild, “let me put it another way. Does your Molly know what she’s getting in this bargain?”

  “What do you mean?” He was wary.

  For answer his mother turned and strode to the dresser. She opened a drawer, rummaged in it, then came back to the table. “This is what I mean.” The anger was almost gone from her voice; only pain was left as she dropped onto a table that gleamed with cleanliness a bloodstained handkerchief. “I took it from the dustbin. You didn’t tell me. Have you told her?”

  He felt a dizzy rushing in his ears. The stains looked much worse than he remembered: dark and foreboding.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t. And you won’t either.”

  He lifted his eyes from the disgusting, crumpled piece of material to his mother’s drawn face. “If you do I’ll g-go. I swear it, Mother. And you’ll n-never see me again. Never.”

  For the only time in his life he saw his mother collapse before his eyes. Her shoulders slumped, she would not look at him. “Do as you like,” she said. “You’re over twenty-one, supposed to be a man, God help us. I can’t stop you.”

  He turned and walked to the door, hesitated there.

  “I w-want us to be happy,” he said, knowing it hopeless. “All of us. Together.”

  He closed the door on silence.

  * * *

  On the last day of February 1900, a cold day with a hard frost in the air, Molly Meghan Teresa O’Dowd became the wife of Samuel John Alden at the tiny chapel in Green Street before a small gathering of his friends and relations. The bride might have been made from the ice that frosted the world outside; her dress was not whiter than her small, bleached face, nor the inexpertly embroidered flowers around its hem more lifeless than her eyes. Yet she smiled at Sam as she spoke the words that bound them, held his hand, as if for comfort, as they left the rather ugly little building. If she missed the grandeur and ceremony of her native church she did not mention it – though in any case an odd circumstance checked the wedding with a gaiety of which, under other circumstances, most of the dour congregation would not have approved; as the couple came into the crisp February air and made their way back to Linsey Grove where Ellen, concerned as always with outward appearances, had grudgingly laid on a meagre wedding breakfast, all over London, all over the country, the bells began to ring. Thousands of miles away the town of Ladysmith had been relieved; the tide of war had begun to turn.

  Part II

  Autumn 1900

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sam Alden leaned for a moment against the front gate of number twenty-six, battling for breath and fighting a painful spasm of coughing. The weather was dry and warm for late October; the dust that lifted and blew in the gusty wind stung his eyes and aggravated his sore chest. With the sun low to the south, the early afternoon was golden and mellow. Irresistibly he was reminded of the first time he had seen Molly – small, determined, dirty and, he had thought then, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He still thought so.

  The painful grip on his diseased chest relaxed a little and his breathing eased. He wasn’t well, he knew it; knew that never before at this time of the year had his troublesome chest been so bad. He saw in the mirror each day the shadowed hollows of his face, the pallid transparency of his skin, felt the awful, drained weariness that defeated him more and more often and that, combined with the constant and now quite open warfare that existed between his wife and his mother, wore him down, tired him to death. His long mouth turned down at the apt phrase.

  Not long after their marriage Sam had fallen very ill indeed; he had been aware, as he lay fighting for breath and drained of strength, that his life had been ebbing from him as surely as water drains through parched ground. But the sight of Molly’s pinched and lifeless face, the ominous look in his mother’s eyes as Molly’s pregnancy had at last become impossible to conceal, had been the goads to make him fight on. Slowly he had pulled himself back, had even gained a little ground, so that by the early summer he had been feeling better than for some time. He had, as never before, followed to the letter the doctor’s instructions, taken every drop of medicine and tonic prescribed – and several that Ellen had found advertised in the chemist’s besides. He’d rested for long hours upon the day bed that Molly had made up in the sitting room of number twenty-six, the room that by arrangement with Ellen was supposed to be the couple’s own. Regrettably, during those first, lethargic months of their marriage and the trauma of Sam’s almost fatal illness Molly had had neither the strength nor the particular desire to stand up to her dominating mother-in-law, and during that time precedents had been established that now Sam no less than Molly resented, but that no amount of fierce argument on Molly’s part nor reasoning on Sam’s could change, among them the fact that Ellen took it as her inalienable right to walk into the younger Aldens’ room at any time she thought fit, and without knocking. In consequence, in the eight months of their marriage, Sam and Molly had had hardly any privacy at all, and this, compounded with the inevitable antagonism that had grown between the two women as Molly had slowly recovered from the shock of Harry’s death and become more herself again, had made for a turbulent and contentious atmosphere that tightened the nerves and would have made quarrelsome the most peaceful nature. And Sam had to admit that neither of his women had exactly that.

  Ellen’s bitter outrage when she had come to realize that not only could the coming child not possibly be Sam’s, but that Sam had known of Molly’s pregnancy from the start, had only been surpassed by her furious and indignant disbelief at the discovery that neither Sam nor Molly had any intention of playing the world’s game of pretence that might have been expected of them. Molly flatly refused to juggle
with dates, to speak of premature births, to agree to go away for a few months at the appropriate time so that the actual date of the birth could be respectably blurred; and Sam, to his mother’s scandalized horror, backed her up. The child, he insisted, would be his, whatever the world – or his mother – chose to say of it. It was nobody’s business but their own. And when, at the beginning of September, a crumpled, fierce-tempered, bawling scrap had struggled through Molly’s agony to life, no blood-father could have felt a more amazed and genuine surge of feeling for the screaming little bundle that was placed in his arms than did Sam for Daniel Seamus Alden. Molly, totally exhausted by that last unbelievable effort that had brought her son finally to the light, had lain back on her pillows and watched in astonishment the look on Sam’s face as he had cradled her son.

  “He’s b-beautiful,” Sam had said softly, “beautiful as his m-mother—”

  In that moment Molly had perhaps come closest to truly loving him.

  And Ellen Alden, her mouth set to an embittered and acrimonious line, had stalked from the room with no word, her rigid back a warning of things to come.

  That had been almost two months ago. Two months of hell. Molly’s strength had returned rapidly; and, with pregnancy and childbirth behind her and little Danny now to protect and defend, it was with a new Molly that Ellen had found herself contending. Every scrap of the stubborn willpower that had so characterized her before had returned. Whatever ascendancy that Ellen might have enjoyed during Sam’s illness and before Danny’s birth had gone; but not without a bitter fight. And poor Sam, his nights broken by the baby’s crying, his days made nerve-wracking by the dissent of the women, slept less and coughed more, knowing all the while that the cold threat of winter was creeping closer.

  Now he leaned tiredly against the gate and listened to the sounds of battle that drifted to him through the open window of the house. He could make out no words, but the harsh and wrathful tones of his mother’s voice and the softer yet somehow more fiercely violent sound of Molly’s told their own story.

  Sam sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, unable to summon the energy to interrupt them. “Go and get some rest, boy,” Uncle Thomas had said sympathetically a little earlier, listening to the rasp of his nephew’s breath and seeing the signs of strain in his face. “We’re slack today. I’ll finish up here.” The strangest outcome, in Sam’s opinion, of his rebellious action in marrying Molly had been a great improvement in his relationship with Uncle Thomas. Through Lucy’s somewhat surprising hysterics and Maude’s indignant fury, Thomas had remained, while still firmly beneath his own women’s thumbs, placidly approving of his nephew’s sudden – and only – assertion of independence. “Rest,” he had repeated, in his eyes that shadow of worry that Sam had come to recognize in those who cared for him, “that’s what you need.”

  Rest. Not much chance of that by the sound of it.

  Sam pushed open the gate and started up the path just as the front door flew open and Molly, clutching baby Danny, erupted from it, her face a blaze of rage. None too gently she thumped Danny into the perambulator that stood by the porch, and the baby, who already showed signs of a considerable will of his own, yelled angrily.

  “—and take the brat with you!” came Ellen’s suppressed and vicious voice, held down so that the neighbours should not be given too great a treat. “Good riddance to the pair of you!”

  “What’s g-going on?” Sam could not resist the paroxysm of coughing that rose suddenly to his throat.

  Molly turned, startled. “Sam? What’re you doing home at this time?” A flash of concern replaced the fury in her face as she heard the racking cough and noted the handkerchief pressed to his lips, the way he hunched his shoulders and turned from her as he coughed. Leaving the screaming child she flew to him, “Are you ill? Oh, Sam—”

  He shook his head, wiped his mouth carefully and with practised deception, keeping his head turned until he was certain there were no tell-tale stains to be seen, said, “I’m all right. I’ve been coughing a bit, th-that’s all. Uncle Thomas sent me home. To g-get some rest—” His long, expressive mouth twitched. Molly, with a sudden, affectionate gesture, laid her curly head upon his chest.

  “I’m sorry, Sam. Truly I am. But you’ve no idea what she’s like when you’re not here. You just don’t know. I believe that she’d harm the baby if she could—” She sensed shocked dissent in his sudden movement and she caught his arm fiercely, “She would I’m telling you. I’m afraid to leave him for a moment—”

  Sam shook his head gently. “You’re exaggerating, Molly dear. You mustn’t l-let things get out of proportion.”

  A spasm of irritation crossed Molly’s face and the anger smouldered again, hardening her momentarily softened mouth. By the front door the child screamed enragedly, determined to regain his mother’s attention.

  “W-were you going out?”

  “Yes.” Molly marched to the pram, tucked the baby in firmly and rocked him to silence.

  “Where were you going?”

  “I don’t know. Out. That’s all. Just out. Anywhere, to get away from that—” Molly jerked her head towards the house.

  “Perhaps you should. A w-walk might do you good, and little Danny too. It’s a lovely afternoon. Here—” leaning surreptitiously on the porch for support Sam put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a half-crown and a couple of shining shillings, “—take this. Perhaps you’ll see something in the shops, some l-little thing that you’d like. A present from me.”

  “Oh, Sam?”

  “I’d c-come myself if I felt a bit better. Perhaps tomorrow?”

  “That would be nice.” Molly stood on tiptoe and kissed his cold, thin cheek, trying not to flinch from the sick and fragile feel of him, trying as she had tried every day in the last months not to compare it with the memory of Harry’s vital warmth.

  “At least you’ll get some peace with me out of the way,” she said honestly.

  He walked to the gate with her, held it open as she manoeuvred the great, easy-sprung black perambulator – Uncle Thomas’s surprising birth gift – through it, watched her as, without looking back, she marched to the end of the road and turned the corner. Then, after a moment’s hesitation he went into the house to his mother’s anxious and reproachful ministrations.

  At first Molly took no note of where she was going. Her blood still boiled in her veins, her mind, whenever she thought of Ellen, was almost blanked out with fury. Danny was asleep, lulled by the rocking movement of the pram; Molly slowed her steps a little. With nowhere particular to go there was little point in travelling at the rate of a cavalry charge. She tried to turn her mind from her latest virulent exchange with her mother-in-law, her temper not in the least improved by the fact that in this instance at least one of her charges – that she, Molly, had been the cause of the deterioration in Sam’s health – might have in it some grain of truth. She remembered him as he had stood there on the path just now. She had been shocked to see him: he had looked ill, worn out. It saddened her to see him so. Poor ailing, kindly Sam, who asked for no more than affection and a little peace and quiet. Through the desolate emptiness of the time since Harry’s death she had taken for granted Sam’s quiet presence, his unswerving and total devotion that seemed more than grateful to accept in return the only thing she had been able to offer: a mild fondness tinged with pity. If Ellen’s charges were in the least true – and she could not in her heart entirely deny them – then she was sorry. She would not deliberately hurt Sam for the world, though she knew too well that in impatience she often did so.

  She turned a corner, aware that she was walking a familiar route, but for the moment unheeding. She peered into the pram. Danny was sleeping peacefully, the curls that strayed from beneath his bonnet gilded like flame in the sunshine; she had almost become resigned to the fact that the hair that had started as wispy blond was slowly but unmistakably turning to her father’s bright marigold hue. “My little Irishman,” Sam called him, laughing
at the soft downy hair and bright blue eyes; but it was a gentle half-truth and they both knew it. It was not from his mother’s family that Danny had inherited those eyes.

  Her footsteps slowed a little as a thought that had been fluttering at the back of her mind suddenly presented itself fully fledged and ready to fly; and she knew where she was going, where she had been heading from the time she had left Sam at the gate. There were others who, if they wished it so, might be said to have some claim upon Danny. Indeed, Molly’s only consolation in her bitter feuding with Ellen came from the fact that the woman she detested was no blood relation to the son that, to her own surprise, she adored. Danny had a grandmother who, so far as Molly knew, did not know of his existence. Molly had had no contact with the Bentons since Harry’s death. Twice Nancy had come to the house during those awful days after the news, and once Jack, on his own. Each time she had not been able to bring herself to see them. Neither had she told them about or invited them to her odd, dreary little wedding, an event that now seemed to have happened to some stranger, in another life. At the time she had not been able to endure the thought of seeing an echo of Harry in other eyes, hearing him in other voices. But since the baby’s birth it had occurred to her more than once that her treatment of Sarah, to whom she knew she owed her life, had been less than kind. Should she not be told that her dead son had left this fragment of life behind him? Should not she and Danny be brought together, now, before such an introduction, through the passing of time, became impossible? After the fraught and unpleasant atmosphere of the house in Linsey Grove the thought of the Bentons, their affection, their laughter, their total lack of malice, was irresistible.

  The baby stirred; small hands, like the petals of a flower, opened and closed again. A small, sick flutter of misgiving stirred in Molly’s stomach. It came to her suddenly that she had, unconsciously, held this last refuge in reserve; what if she were not, after all, welcome? In the circumstances nothing could be taken for granted.