by Penny Thorpe
Diana ignored the rebuff and went on, ‘I’ve made some arrangements concerning that other matter we touched on when I visited you yesterday.’
‘I can see that.’ Cynthia looked to the chair beside Diana where Bess Norcliffe was smiling benevolently.
‘I’ve spoken with the Norcliffe sisters as I said I would and Bess has agreed to come and nurse you when you are discharged from hospital. The doctor has said that you’ll need someone to help you wash in the mornings and brush your hair, feed you your egg and soldiers. Bess got used to doing all that for babies when she ran the factory crèche, so she can easily do it for you. You’ll have Dolly Dunkley at the factory to take dictation and do your typing, so between the two of them you should be able to function just as before.’
Cynthia squirmed uncomfortably. ‘I can’t possibly pay for a nurse …’
‘You won’t be paying for a nurse,’ Diana said. ‘Your room in the boarding house is a room with twin beds and Bess here needs bed and board somewhere while she works at Mack’s. Her mother died very suddenly and her sister is marrying a widower with a family, so you would be doing her a very great favour by sharing your room with her and she would repay you by helping you in your recovery. Bess can take the extra bed in your room and I won’t increase your rent.’
‘What if I don’t want her doing all of those things for me? What if I don’t want anyone to …’
Diana cut in pragmatically. ‘Then you’ll starve to death in your pyjamas. Just try not to do it too loudly; it will cause a noise nuisance for the other tenants.’
Cynthia felt sick. She had been frustrated enough at having one incompetent assistant under her feet, but now she would be trapped with two of them, and she knew that no matter how much she wanted to be independent, she badly needed this offer of help.
‘Very well.’ Cynthia swallowed her pride and addressed herself to Bess. ‘Thank you for offering to come and help me in my recovery. I’m very sorry to hear of the loss of your mother, and I do hope that you will be comfortable in my accommodation.’
‘Oh, I know I will!’ chirped Bess, happily. ‘I’ve already been round and filled the wardrobe. I saw your walls were very bare so I’ve begged pictures off all my friends and put them up on every wall and I’ve got all kinds of potted plants – I’ve even taught the cat to sleep on your pillow so it will be warm when you get back. I’m going to make it all just lovely!’
Chapter Sixty-Six
It was a little after dawn on the morning of the wedding and the Quality Street girls had been getting ready to leave Diana’s boarding house where they had dressed and slept the night before, as much as any of them could be said to have slept. They were now hurrying to the chapel, via the stable at the back of the Old Cock and Oak in the centre of town where Reenie had stabled her horse for the night. It was an anxious time for all of them, but most especially for Mary. She had asked her sister to look after the wedding ring, but now she could see that Bess was skipping along beside her with it in her hand.
‘Bess! What are you doing? Put that in a pocket somewhere safe or something will happen to it.’
‘I haven’t got a pocket to put it in.’ Bess waved the ring around airily, possibly hoping to catch a pocket as it floated by her.
‘Bess, I gave you one job to do—’
Reenie cut Mary off mid-sentence. ‘Can’t you just put it on your finger until we get there? We need to hurry.’
‘Oh no,’ Bess was admiring the shine of the new wedding band, ‘it’s bad luck to put it on if you know you’re going to take it off again.’
Reenie plucked it not unkindly from her friend’s fingers. ‘Give it here! I’ll look after the ring.’ Reenie took it and reached inside her coat pocket but then thought about what she was about to do and worried that it might drop out if she put it in her pocket loose. Sometimes Reenie thought too much and had a tendency to be a trifle elaborate; this was one of those times.
‘Reenie Calder, what are you doing to my wedding band?’
Reenie had reached into her other coat pocket and pulled out the shiny red apple she’d brought to give Ruffian and now wouldn’t and was jamming the ring into its flesh. ‘Well, if it’s lodged in here and then I put the apple in my pocket, the ring definitely won’t fall out of my pocket.’
‘And then when you take it out it will be covered in apple juices!’
‘I’ll give it a wipe for you.’
Mary sighed, ‘We don’t have time for this.’
This was not the Easter wedding which any of the girls had been expecting to attend. The toffee factory that spring had been a flurry of expectation, educated speculation, and then plain gossip, but the girls on the Strawberry Cream line had all been agreed that there would be wedding banns for one of them before the year was out.
‘Well, these aren’t the decorations I thought we’d be having.’ Reenie poked her head inside the doorway of the church and sighed at the brightly coloured embellishments which had been left there by some other person, for some other purpose. It was a shame they couldn’t have done things differently, but the wedding was going ahead and that was all any of them cared about now.
‘How long do you think we ought to wait?’ Mary was kicking at her shoes because she was wearing them without socks and her feet had slid down to the toe uncomfortably.
‘Why?’ Reenie asked with just a little sarcasm. ‘Did you have somewhere else to be?’
Bess giggled. Bess often giggled.
‘What’s so funny?’ Mary was determined to treat the occasion as a solemn one and her sister’s silliness was getting on her wick.
‘You kicking at your shoe,’ Bess chuckled quietly, just sensible enough that she shouldn’t let the curate inside the door hear her. ‘You look like Reenie’s horse when he’s been given a job he doesn’t fancy doin’. He’s always kicking his shoes off.’
‘I’m not kicking them off, I’m just trying to get my foot straight. The insole’s all over the place.’
All three girls turned to see the curate emerge from inside; he looked more nervous than they did, if such a thing were possible. ‘Ladies, this is really most irregular, I do think …’ The curate’s voice trailed off as he realised that he had no objections left to make. It was the other girl he needed to speak to, the one who was beautiful and terrifying.
For months the toffee factory workers had been laying bets on whose the next factory wedding would be. The smart money was on Reenie Calder; although still only just seventeen she had been courting a very sweet Junior Manager from the Time and Motion department for nearly a year and, according to rumour, had been negotiating with him on the terms of an engagement. Reenie’s friend, Mary Norcliffe would not have seemed a likely candidate for matrimony a year before, but then life had wrought its changes; Mary was no longer known as ‘The Bad Queen’ behind her back because her quick temper had given way in response to the kindness she had found in new friendships in the factory, and now that she had been given the chance to work in the Confectioners’ Kitchen and work closely with the handsome young widower who ran it, some (including her flighty younger sister) whispered that she might make a suitable stepmother to the Confectioner’s two small children.
Meanwhile flighty Bess, still known as ‘Good Queen Bess’ in the factory because her kindly nature never changed, was possibly the Quality Street girl who everyone hoped would wed; Bess was friendly and obliging to a fault and her sister Mary was convinced that if she wasn’t guarded round the clock she would get herself in the family way by obliging rather too much. Mary was clinging to the hope that this latest new home would give Mary’s blood pressure a well-earned rest.
Diana Moore was now so old by the standards of the factory girls that no one seemed to think of her in matrimonial terms, and that was the way Diana liked it; being the talk of the town had lost its appeal for her many years ago.
Now the day of the wedding was here and it had come in an unholy hurry.
Reenie was resplendent
in a satin gown and light fur cape which had been a gift from her young man’s parents when they’d told them they were to be engaged. Reenie was glad of the cape in the chill of the church and she felt sorry for Mary who shivered a little beside her while they waited just inside the nave door. Reenie was not surprised to see that Mary’s dress was of a slightly old-fashioned cut; it had echoes of a dress she’d seen Mary wear on another occasion to church, and she remembered how it had transfixed Albert Baum the factory Confectioner; it seemed fitting that Mary would choose something that he would have liked had he been the one to choose it.
‘Is she definitely on her way here?’ The curate looked anxiously to Reenie; he’d never married anyone by special licence before, and when that fourth, more assertive factory girl had presented herself at the vicarage late in the evening with the letter signed by the bishop of his diocese, he had been more than a little taken aback. He knew the law; he knew that in some rare cases respectable people were married without the four weeks of having the banns read, but those were usually in the case of civil servants who had been working abroad and were only returning to be married in their family church. For people who had lived in the parish this was most irregular. Admittedly, Shakespeare himself had been married by special licence, but the date of William Shakespeare’s wedding touched uncomfortably close to the date of his first child’s christening. The curate was assured that this was not the reason for haste in this particular case, and he didn’t know if this worried him more.
That more assertive factory girl who the curate had been waiting for appeared at the bottom of the steps in a Mackintosh’s chauffeur-driven car and made her way quickly up toward them. ‘She isn’t coming.’ Diana did not sound disappointed. ‘The wedding can go ahead.’
‘Who isn’t coming?’ The curate found this whole situation most suspicious and he would have raised objections if a very large, ornate special licence signed by his superior’s superior had not persuaded him to go along with it. ‘Is this a person who knows of some lawful impediment why—’
Diana cut him off before he could waste any more time. ‘There is no lawful reason why this marriage shouldn’t take place. It was a personal reason and I’ve dealt with it.’
Mary looked a bit scared of Diana when she said that, but Reenie knew better and breathed a sigh of relief. A spring morning was stretching over Halifax and it was nearly eight o’clock; in just a few moments it would be legally late enough in the day for the wedding to begin.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
The wedding of Mary Norcliffe and Albert Baum was conducted – without flowers or fuss – in the bridge chantry chapel on the banks of the Hebble Brook. The premises were still fitted out as a sweetshop, but the windows were shuttered and for that morning only the place had an especially sacred ring. The nuptials had been hard won, and for that reason alone it was all the more appreciated by the bride and groom.
The curate who had agreed to marry them held the Book of Service open before him and held it out for the wedding band to be placed upon it.
Nothing happened.
The curate gave them a friendly nudge. ‘Who has the ring?’
Reenie woke out of a romantic reverie and her hand shot into her pocket to retrieve the band she knew that she had put into a safe place. But Reenie’s hand came up empty and she exchanged a horrified look with Mary’s angry one. The ring – which Reenie had shoved into an apple in a moment of overthinking – was gone, stolen out of her pocket by a decidedly put-out Ruffian who could not understand why his beloved mistress hadn’t handed it over herself.
‘No one panic.’ Reenie was swallowing hard and looking around her while she thought of a solution to the problem they now faced.
Mary went white. ‘When you tell me not to panic, Reenie, the first thing I do is panic!’
‘It’s … it’s going to be all right …’
‘What’s going to be all right?’ Albert Baum was not easily worried, but this wedding had been snatched from him once already and he was terrified that some impediment might still be found to prevent it.
‘The ring …’ Reenie said.
Mary sighed. ‘The ring you promised me that you were going to look after and not lose through a hole in your coat pocket …’
‘I think Ruffian must have stolen it when I was patting him earlier.’
Albert Baum stepped forward. ‘Reverend, is the type of ring an essential element of the legal act of marriage; will you refuse to sign the register if we do not have a gold ring?’
‘Well, no, the giving and receiving of rings is not a legal necessity, but—’
‘Then I think we can supply the necessary. Reenie, turn over that box.’ Albert heaved at a crate which they recognised as a Mackintosh’s outer. ‘If we’re lucky we’ll find something with foils.’
‘What are we looking for?’
‘Quality Street.’
‘But there are no rings in Quality Street tins! We need something with a ring, like a washer from a tap or summat.’
‘No, we need Quality Street. In amongst all this we must be able to find a carton at the very least.’
The girls turned over all the boxes, crates and sacks. Bess found four packets of Lyon’s tea and a copy of the American edition of Vogue, but they were not what they wanted.
‘Found it!’ Reenie called out. ‘I’ve got half a carton under the counter, will that do?’
‘Chuck us it here.’ Mary held out her hands to catch it.
Reenie threw the carton across the chapel to her friend and she seized on it and rummaged for the sweet she needed: the Toffee Penny. She knew exactly what Albert had in mind. He took it from her as though it was the most valuable thing in the world and untwisted the wrapper with careful but rapid expertise and stuck the toffee pat to the inside lid of the carton. The wrapper of golden paper and yellow cellophane he folded over and over to create a golden strip, then tucked the ends into one another to form a perfect band of gold. He held it up gracefully beside Mary’s hand, and then said to the startled vicar, ‘You may proceed.’
‘Repeat after me, Mr Baum: with this ring, I thee wed.’
Albert Baum’s eyes filled with tears of happiness at the realisation that they had overcome their last obstacle and that he was really and truly about to gain his dearest wish. He said solemnly to Mary, ‘With this ring, I thee wed.’ And slipped the toffee wrapper ring onto the finger of his beloved.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Reenie’s mother was getting her wish; she was celebrating a spring wedding in their parlour and she was keeping her daughter at home a little longer. It was not the wedding she had been expecting, but she was delighted with it. When Mr and Mrs Calder had heard that Mary and Albert were going to have a wedding but no wedding breakfast, they insisted that everyone come to the Calder family farm to eat a good dinner with them and raise a toast to the happy couple. Mrs Calder had laid on a feast of roast lamb with mint and tracklements and Mr Calder had chilled some bottles of his best elderberry wine in a trough in the yard. The Calder men had gone hunting in the outhouses for boxes to serve as extra chairs, and the Calder women had chopped extra logs to build up the kitchen range to a roar.
When Reenie, Peter, Mary, Albert, Diana, and Bess all finally arrived at the Calder farm it was mid-morning and they were ravenous. Mary and Albert’s faces were flushed with happiness, and their friends were singing loudly and merrily with the pure elation at having at last pulled off the great feat of both getting Mary her wedding, and saving the little absent Baums. Diana Moore, who rode along with them in the back of the waggon which Ruffian had been persuaded to pull, did not deign to join in the singing, but dignified as ever, she had the appearance of one who might be entering into the spirit of the thing on the inside.
The party alighted, Ruffian was rewarded, and after much rejoicing, a feast was enjoyed.
‘Well, I’m just glad to have a year where, so far, Reenie doesn’t appear to be in any trouble.’ Mrs Calder bustled aro
und her assembled guests, serving them all sparkling elderberry wine in a mismatch of beakers, glasses and tankards.
‘Was she in trouble last year?’ Bess’s memory, which was encyclopaedic for the astrological signs of Hollywood movie stars, was short when it came to scandals of which she had been the principal cause.
‘Yes, because she was covering up for you!’ Mary reminded her younger sister.
‘To be perfectly honest,’ Kathleen said in a confiding tone, ‘I wouldn’t blame your sister; Reenie’s got a nose for trouble. The three Christmases before she went to Mackintosh’s she was in the soup with our Sunday School mistress for everything from lateness to accidentally burning down the privy. I’m only surprised she’s having a year off from reprimands.’
‘Yes, well, that’s quite enough of that, thank you, Kathleen.’ Mrs Calder said. ‘We’ll just be thankful that this year is different.’
Reenie was not saying anything; she was watching Diana Moore closely. Diana Moore was sipping her elderberry wine with a coolness which Reenie considered to be ominous. ‘Diana,’ Reenie finally plucked up the courage to ask, ‘I’m not in any trouble this year, am I?’
Diana raised an eyebrow in thought and then said, ‘Well, there is the small matter of the mare in the factory stables who has recently delivered a foal.’
‘Oh Diana, you are a card.’ Reenie’s father chuckled. ‘You had us going there for a minute. I know my daughter can be a bit muddle-headed at times, but I know she’d never be Tomfool enough to let our old stallion loose in a …’ Mr Calder’s voice trailed off along with his confidence as he saw that Diana Moore did not appear to be joking.
‘Um … I-I was careful with him, Dad, honest; it’s just I didn’t realise that he could let himself out of the stables he was in at the factory and so there’s a chance that he might have—’
‘It is a certainty.’ Diana Moore was impassive.