Outside the coffee house door early newspapers smelling of printer’s ink with huge black headlines were being hawked by Old Billy, the one-legged vendor. He held a copy out to David who took it without speaking and pushed open the unlocked door with a shoulder that showed bare through rips in his shirt. A pool of rain water had formed on the floor but he hardly noticed it. Behind the counter he reached down for the bottle of brandy he kept there for spiking the drinks of favoured customers. He was not a drinking man but on that morning he uncorked the bottle, put it to his lips and took a deep draught.
Then slowly and painfully he climbed the stairs, pausing on each step to read another sentence of the newspaper’s account of the storm. Losses everywhere else seemed trivial to him – at Kelso, the flagpole of Floors Castle had been blown down; a brig, the Rival, was dashed to pieces off Yarmouth; in Edinburgh trees were uprooted and people were blown off their feet by the wind. But at Dundee, as he knew only too well, the storm had taken its worst toll. The famous Tay Bridge had collapsed, taking with it a train full of people. He read the stark words over and over again in an attempt to understand the horror. Here in print his worst nightmare was recounted in cold detail. What the report did not say was that his Martha was among the dead.
* * *
‘Is that you, Mammy?’ Lizzie’s voice rang out as he opened the door and he could see her face, peeping like a little animal out of its burrow from the nest of bedclothes.
‘No, it’s me, it’s Daddy,’ he whispered, not wanting to waken Georgie and Maggy. It was an effort to make his voice sound normal because of the agony of unshed tears burning in his throat.
‘Where’s Mammy?’ Lizzie was out of bed now and, arms extended, towards him. He knelt on the floor and held her close. It had not been his intention to break the news yet but somehow all the pain burst out of him.
‘Oh, Lizzie, Mammy was in the train last night from Newport and the storm blew the bridge down!’
He felt the child stiffen and draw away from him. She stared into his face, her intelligent eyes absorbing everything he said. Very slowly she asked, ‘Did Mammy fall into the river?’
There was no use telling a pack of lies. The bairn would find out quick enough and he did not want well-meaning people filling her head with nonsense. Besides, in a strange way he felt as if he needed the support of his solemn eldest child so he nodded wordlessly.
Lizzie held herself upright, like a little statue. ‘She’s not dead?’ she asked, but her voice seemed to come from far away.
He nodded again, gave a broken sob and held out his arms towards her. She threw her own arms round him and they clung together while the first scalding tears of bereavement flowed unchecked.
Their weeping wakened Maggy and Georgie, who sat up and gazed in dismay at the tragic scene before them. Georgie’s little face crumpled like a used handkerchief as he too ran towards his father, who clutched his children and was unmanned by grief. He knelt weeping, his back and shoulders heaving in agony while the children clung to him, tearfully. Maggy, weeping too, crept downstairs and pushed a kettle of water into the middle of the still burning grate. A cup of tea would help, she decided.
Chapter 3
By lunchtime on Monday, 29 December, Dundee was afire with rumours – the train driver’s cap had been found on a beach at Newport; a woman’s body was being brought ashore by the boat searching for survivors; the corpse of a young man was washed up at Broughty Ferry where it had been spotted spreadeagled on the sand like someone sunbathing. A woman, who had providentially missed the train at Cupar the previous night, arrived home all unknowing by the Fife ferry to be greeted by her hysterical family who had feared her dead. Relatives of those thought to be on the train besieged the railway station with requests for information but, as the hours passed without news of any survivors, hope died and the town’s despondency deepened.
Then the grim procession of bodies began arriving. The passengers’ dining room at Tay Bridge station was turned into a makeshift mortuary and slowly it filled up with the dead. Many of the people waiting for news passed the time in the warmth of the Exchange Coffee House which David opened to cater for them. There seemed to be little point hiding himself away upstairs while people were wandering the streets in need of warmth and sustenance. With a strained face and none of his usual laughter he served coffee and he served it free. Only a few close friends knew that Martha was on the lost train and when they came in they reached over the counter to shake his hand in silent sympathy.
* * *
In the early evening, word was sent to David that a woman’s body had arrived and was waiting to be identified. With a grim face and terrible dread in his heart he left the coffee house to walk to the mortuary but when the sheet was drawn back from the face it revealed a stranger. His relief surprised him.
‘It’s not her, it’s not my Martha,’ he said, shaking his head. The dead woman was middle-aged with streaks of grey in her hair. The poor soul’s face was badly bruised and there was a deep gash in her forehead. Later he was told that she worked as lady’s maid to a woman of title in Edinburgh and had been travelling with her employer’s daughter, whose body was not recovered.
He walked back through empty streets feeling the desolation of the stricken town pressing in on him. All thought of celebrating Hogmanay had been forgotten, blinds were pulled down over shop windows, door knockers were muffled with black felt, the hurrying crowds who would normally have been rushing from shop to shop buying their festive provisions were absent, orders had been given by the Town Council that no church bells would ring in the New Year. This year would end in tears and not in gladness.
Each time he heard of another grim recovery David went to the station where people like himself were gathered, waiting for the terrible confirmation that would signal the official beginning of their grieving. On one visit he met an old man who was looking for his son.
‘It’s bad enough to lose a laddie but only last year we lost both his brother and his sister to the consumption. He was our last bairn and I’ve not been able to tell my wife yet. She’ll go mad when she hears,’ he sobbed.
As David tried to comfort him a well-to-do-looking gentleman with a neatly trimmed beard came up and said sadly, ‘It’s a terrible thing. I sympathize with you. My daughter Dorothy was on the train too – only nineteen years old, and tomorrow she was to be married in the Steeple Church. It’s impossible – we’re having a wake when we should be having a wedding.’
While the families waited for news, a stream of dignitaries from the railway company arrived in Dundee. The designer of the bridge, grey-faced Sir Thomas Bouch, came with his son and was booed in the street by an angry mob. He looked ashen as he boarded the steamer Forfarshire to sail out into the middle of the river and inspect the broken piers of what he had once considered his greatest achievement.
Next morning, Tuesday, the Courier carried the names of some of the dead. Davie’s eye ran down the list, hardly taking in the information – Mrs Mann, aged sixty, of Forfar with her fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Lizzie Brown; David Neish, a teacher from Lochee, who left a widow and a young family. Lost with him was his daughter Bella, aged five. The little girl’s mother had been reluctant to allow her to go on a trip to Kirkcaldy with her father but because the child was a great favourite with him, the mother’s objections were overcome. A young couple engaged to be married had died together; a domestic servant employed by a butcher, one of David Mudie’s friends, was also lost. He knew the woman had been the sole support of a tubercular daughter who depended on her mother’s earnings to keep her from the workhouse. What would happen to the poor thing now? Another friend among the dead was David Watson, the only son of a widow and a regular customer at the coffee house. He had given up a career at sea because of his mother’s anxiety about his safety. When Davie reached Martha’s name in the grim list he read it almost dispassionately. The printed letters had little significance for him. His grief was much more painful to bear when, o
ne by one, people started coming in to the coffee house to offer their condolences and advice.
‘You’ll have to get some of your women relations to bring up the bairns. A man can’t do it on his own,’ they all said, but David did not want to send his children away. He needed them with him, they were his last link with Martha.
‘There’s no one I’d want to take them,’ he said, for there were no women in his own family and his brother’s wife was cold-hearted. Martha’s family lived across the water in Fife and he didn’t want to send the bairns across the cruel river that had snatched their mother. Maggy, swollen faced with weeping was looking after Lizzie and George who huddled upstairs, quiet and subdued with shock.
When the coffee house closed, David went wearily upstairs to the flat which now seemed an empty, unwelcoming place. Lizzie was still awake, eyes round and pupils huge as she watched for his arrival.
‘Is Mammy really dead?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes, lamb, she is.’
‘Will she never come back?’
He shook his head, unable to speak, but she persisted, ‘Never? You mean not ever?’
He choked out the word. ‘Never.’ Then he added, ‘It was God’s will, Lizzie.’
She sat up in bed and stared at him, her face strained like an old woman’s. Then to his horror she closed her eyes, clenched her fists and started to scream, a terrifying, eldritch screech that went on and on. She seemed unable to stop as she sat mouth open, eyes tight closed and face scarlet with the effort. The noise brought Maggy running in and, while David stood shocked and unable to take action, she shook the screaming child, who clawed at her hands like a wildcat. The din woke Georgie and it was only his terrified sobs that stopped the paroxysm of rage. Exhausted, Lizzie flopped down in her pillows with her hands over her eyes, shouting at her father, ‘I hate God, I hate him. Why has he done this to us?’
Next morning Lizzie crept from her bed in the steely dawn and lifted the heavy plush curtain to stare out at a scene of desolation. Dirty slush covered the pavements; the sky was the colour of lead. The few people who shuffled along the street had their heads bent against a bitter wind. She felt a terrible sickness and fear as she gazed towards the river and her heart thudded when she saw the spectral outline of the broken bridge.
An aching pain filled her stomach. It would have been a comfort to throw herself down on the floor and scream, but she kept on staring over the slate-grey river. It drew her eyes because it terrified her. Quieter now, it slipped slowly between its banks but she knew it had carried her mother away. Oh, how she missed Mammy!
She was ashamed of her outburst of the previous evening because, though her father had not reprimanded her, she realized how much she had upset him. Remorse ached within her as if a stone were lodged beneath her ribs and she fought to stay calm for the sake of her father and her little brother who was still asleep in the room behind her.
Maggy came tiptoeing up the stairs, her cheeks and the tip of her nose bright red from the cold. She was clutching a frayed shawl round her shoulders and her broken boots were wet. The two girls looked at each other without speaking and Lizzie let the curtain fall from her hand. ‘You’ve been out? Why did you go out in that dirty snow?’
‘My Ma’s sick,’ Maggy said. ‘I ran over to help because the wee ones need their breakfast. I thought she should rest as long as she can.’
Maggy’s mother Bertha Davidson was a bent careworn widow woman who struggled to bring up her children and at the same time worked as a spinner in Brunton’s jute mill which loomed like a grim fortress behind the Vaults. Maggy was the oldest of the family and if her mother was ill, responsibility for the other children fell on her.
Young and absorbed in her own sorrow as she was, Lizzie could appreciate the prospect that illness presented for Maggy, and she looked at the maid with sympathy.
‘Take some bread from the coffee house,’ she said in the same tone she had often heard her mother using towards Maggy.
Maggy nodded. ‘Your father already said I could. I took some to my mother and she sent her thanks. She’s awful cut up about your ma.’
Lizzie could not bear to talk about her mother’s death and she quickly asked, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ It was important to her now to know every minute where her father was for fear that he too would be taken away from her.
‘He’s gone out.’
‘Gone out where?’
‘A message came for him from the station. He was going there when I came back. He said he’d not be long.’
‘A message from the station?’ Lizzie’s heart gave a little jump. Perhaps Mammy’s come back? she thought, for she was still too young to fully appreciate the finality of death.
Maggy nodded, busying herself with taking off her boots and shaking out her wet shawl. It was obvious that she did not want to discuss why David Mudie had gone to the station.
But Lizzie persisted. ‘What was the message about?’
Maggy went mulish as she sometimes did when pushed too far. ‘If you want to know that you’d better wait till your Daddy comes home,’ she said brusquely.
* * *
Dr McLaren, who knew the Mudies well and had delivered both of the children, was waiting at the door of the makeshift mortuary as David approached. The two men looked at each other wordlessly and the doctor nodded slightly, confirming the other man’s unspoken fears.
‘A woman’s body’s just been brought in…’ he said, his voice trailing off sadly.
David knew without any doubt that it was Martha and in a way he was relieved because waiting for her to be found had been excruciating agony. If he could really start believing she was dead, he would be able to start mourning. ‘You need me to identify her?’
The doctor shook his head slightly. ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary. She’s not badly disfigured, Davie, I don’t want you to think that – but after all that time in the water – you know. Come into the office and I’ll give you a dram.’
The whisky burned its way into his chest and David felt stronger as the trembling disappeared from his legs. He was able to say, ‘I can do it now.’
Dr McLaren still demurred. ‘It mightn’t be necessary. Let’s see if you can tell from what she was wearing. Here’s a pair of gloves. Do you recognize them?’
Martha’s gloves felt pathetic in David’s hands. He remembered how much she loved good gloves and how neat her little hands always looked in them. When they first met, when she was parlourmaid in that big house in Broughty Ferry, she was so smart, so tidy, so genteel. But after immersion in the river, gloves were difficult to identify. Seeing indecision in his face, the doctor took them back and passed him a brooch and a necklace.
‘These came from the same body.’
He held them cupped in his hand. He knew them well for they were his gifts to Martha. The brooch was a little curve of gold studded with pearls in the shape of a sprig of heather, given to her on their wedding day. The necklace was a heavy gold chain that had belonged to his mother. He nodded and said in a shaken voice, ‘Yes. They’re my Martha’s.’
They were drinking more whisky when the gentleman who had spoken about his daughter, dead a few days before her wedding, was shown in. He was weeping openly after the ordeal of identifying his only child, Dorothy.
Seeing his distress, David jumped up and gave the older man his chair, then reached for the decanter and filled a glass for him. When Mr Adams had drunk the whisky and recovered some of his composure, he said, ‘I must go home and tell my wife the news. I’ve a cab outside, won’t you ride back with me? You run the Exchange Coffee House, don’t you? I pass by there.’
When they arrived at the corner of Shore Terrace, on an impulse David said, ‘Come on in for a minute. You’re looking pretty shaken up. I’ll give you a brandy.’
Mr Adams accepted. ‘Thank you, I don’t feel up to going home yet and telling my wife they’ve found Dorothy – she’s taking it very hard…’
Lizzie came running d
ownstairs as soon as she heard the door open and David was distressed to see tears filling his companion’s eyes at the sight of her. He knew the poor man was comparing the little girl with his lost daughter. He was about to order her upstairs when Mr Adams put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Let her stay. I love bairns… We were looking forward to having grandchildren – but now – let her stay.’
The child sensed the highly charged atmosphere, took the old man’s hand, looked up at his face and said, ‘You’re sad. I’m sorry. I’m sad too. Did you lose somebody in the train like we did?’ In that moment she made a lifelong friend of Douglas Adams.
* * *
Martha Mudie was buried on a day of driving snow in the burial ground behind the Steeple Church in the middle of Dundee. Her children did not accompany the coffin to the graveside, but they were left at home with Maggy and the female mourners while the men accompanied the cortège. David wept bitterly by his wife’s graveside as the last clods of earth were thrown in, then, straightening his shoulders, he turned abruptly and strode off into the blizzard. While he was walking home, he passed Dorothy Adams’ father following her coffin into the graveyard.
In the flat above the coffee house where the mourners gathered for the funeral tea, Martha’s cousin Bella said to David, ‘My mother’s dead. She died the day after the storm. She never knew about Martha. I’ve been wondering what you’ll do about the bairns. I can’t take them both but I’ll take the wee lassie, to live at St Andrews near my brother. If she came with me she wouldn’t be too far away from you.’
‘I’ll ask her if she wants to go,’ David said, for he had begun to realize how difficult it would be to bring up his children without a mother. In a corner Lizzie and George were sitting silently in their Sunday clothes, watched over by Maggy, and he went to speak to them. As he bent down towards her, Lizzie looked up with such bleak misery that his heart lurched painfully but he told her of Bella’s offer.
Mistress of Green Tree Mill Page 3