For a moment the boy looked down at her hand on his arm. Then his hungry heart reached out and he fell helplessly in love.
* * *
Every afternoon, Lizzie went to visit Mrs Adams. At first the old lady appeared to have only a mild attack of fever but in spite of the ministrations of three doctors, the symptoms refused to improve. On the third day Lizzie was hushed at the door by a nurse holding her fingers to her lips.
‘Is she asleep?’ asked the girl.
The nurse shook her head. ‘No, she’s worse, I’m afraid. Her husband is with her.’
‘Can I see her?’
The woman looked doubtful before she nodded. ‘Only for a minute then.’
Mrs Adams lay in her vast curtained bed, her fragile body hardly making a mark beneath the sheet. Her sweet little face looked like a skull against the lace-trimmed pillows and even the liberal application of lavender water had not taken away the stench of the sickness. As she tiptoed across the turkey carpet Lizzie was struck by how the room smelt the same as Vickie’s in the Vaults. The old lady was unconscious but Mr Adams was sitting beside the bed holding her hand. When he heard Lizzie, he turned his head and tears glittered in his eyes. She knelt at his side and took his other hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, for she knew that he would not appreciate mollifying assurances.
He clasped her hand tightly and whispered, ‘Lizzie, the first time we met, you said you were sorry. It helped me then and it’s helping me now.’
Mrs Adams died next day and her husband sent a note to the Castle Bar asking the Mudie family to attend the interment and also the funeral tea at Tay Lodge. When the small group were gathered in the big drawing room after the service, Mr Adams took Lizzie and George aside and said, ‘I’d like you to stay with me after everyone else leaves. The lawyer’s coming to read my wife’s will.’
The lawyer wore pince-nez on the end of his nose as he read out the short document. Mrs Adams had left £200 to George and to Lizzie she bequeathed all her clothes, furs and jewellery.
‘I want Lizzie to have the things that would have passed to my dear Dorothy,’ read the lawyer in his dry-as-dust voice.
When she heard this, Lizzie started to cry, weeping the tears that had been pent up in her for a very long time. It took all the efforts of George to calm her but she was very emotional and clung to Mr Adams as if she wanted to protect him.
‘I’ll come and visit you every week, I promise,’ she told him.
* * *
The first Lizzie knew of Johnny Davidson’s attachment to her was when Georgie started teasing her about it.
‘Your lad’s out there waiting for you,’ he sometimes said in the evening if he spied Johnny hanging about on the corner opposite the Castle Bar.
Sure enough, if she ventured forth, dressed in the silks and lace bequeathed to her by Mrs Adams, he would appear and walk along at her side. She did not want to be cruel and tell him to go away for she respected Johnny and was fond of him, but there were several reasons why she found his surreptitious courting an embarrassment.
The first was because of her brother’s teasing.
The second was because of the fantasies she sent herself to sleep with every night about the sailor who had rescued Davie from the dock. ‘I’ll come to see you,’ he’d said and she was waiting impatiently for the day of his return. In her memory he grew taller, more dashing and heroic as each week passed.
The third reason why she shied away from Johnny’s courting was ambition. She had to admit it. Just as she hated having to work as a barmaid because she felt destined for better things, she did not see herself married to Maggy the maid’s brother. She knew too much about the poverty-stricken lives of the Davidsons for that. She’d seen Johnny when he didn’t have a pair of shoes to his feet, and, worst of all, he still spoke with the broad Dundee accent that made her cringe. She could never introduce him to the smart people in whose circles she longed to move. ‘This is my husband,’ she would have to say and she could hear Johnny’s voice adding, ‘Eh’m pleased to meet you.’
* * *
September brought a golden tinge to the trees in the valley of the Tay. The breeze that blew from the sea up the narrow streets and alleys that led down to the docks carried a crispness of frost on its morning breath. When people woke to a silvering like sugar icing on their garden walls, they felt easier in their minds. Fever could not flourish in the cold.
In mid-month the customers of the Castle Bar discussed the news of the whalers’ catch. It had been a good year, they said, and the city looked forward to the arrival of the first ships.
She listened avidly to everything that was said and hardly dared leave the bar in case she missed news of the returning whalers. They came straggling in over two weeks – first the Fearnought and then the Lady Diana, both carrying large catches. Their arrival was a more muted affair than their departure for the stench that filled the town as their cargoes of blubber were discharged made the fastidious walk around with handkerchiefs soaked in toilet water held to their noses. Throughout day and night, half stripped men worked on the huge wooden ships, heaving the viscous, stinking yellow blubber down into barrows and carts which trundled from the dockside to the oil refineries of Baffin Lane and Whale Alley.
Lizzie dressed herself with care every day, pinning the neck of her blouse with one of Mrs Adams’ brooches and even daringly hanging pretty earrings – not knowing they were diamonds – from the lobes of her ears.
The customers complimented her on her appearance but she hardly heard them for she was scanning the face of each stranger who came through the door and could barely conceal her disappointment when it was not Sam Kinge.
It was impossible for her to ask outright about his ship because she dreaded the reply. What if it was lost? She heard returned whalers in the bar saying one ship had been crushed to bits in the pack ice but it was reputedly North American. What if the Pegasus had come in already and paid off its men? She could not bear the thought of her six months’ dream coming to such an anticlimactic end. So she did not ask but waited, avid for any scrap of information. Then one night her ears pricked up like a wary animal’s when she heard: ‘The Pegasus was sighted off Broughty Ferry this morning. It’s the last in and it’s got the biggest catch. The captain’s a great whale hunter.’
She turned towards the speaker and asked casually, ‘Who’s the captain?’
‘A chap called Jacobs and he’s a hand-picked crew, the best in the business. He won’t have any others. They’ll have plenty of money in their pockets this winter. They’ll no’ have to push barrows in the street for their bread.’
That night she did not sleep, arguing with herself: You’ve been a fool about this, you’ve imagined the whole thing, you’re just a silly lassie… He’ll not come. Anyway how do you know he’s not married already?
Thoughts like these ran round and round in her head and when morning came she felt she could not pass another day waiting for news.
‘It’s my day for visiting Mr Adams,’ she told Jessie, ‘but I’ll be back by teatime and I’ll work then.’
Tay Lodge soothed her as it always did. She sat with the old man on the terrace in the autumn sunshine, forcing herself to gaze out across the silvery expanse of river because that was his favourite view. The peace, the unostentatious comfort, the softly ticking clock in the room behind her, the scent of flowers made her taut muscles uncoil.
Mr Adams was failing in his health and was content to sit with his eyes closed, speaking only now and then and listening while Lizzie read him passages out of the newspaper. Some of the news reports had been written by John Davidson and she was astonished at the cleverness of Maggy’s brother.
When the sun was setting she turned her back on a river that shone like shot silk and walked home along the Perth Road. The town was calm, the streets wide and empty because the reeling figures of over-indulging whalers which had filled them for the past week were beginning to disappear. When she pushed o
pen the door of the Castle Bar the place smelt of hops and ale but it was quiet and there were no customers in the saloon so she headed for the stairs. When she reached the top landing, an excited Maggy was waiting for her.
‘There’s a man been looking for you. He’s been in three times since this morning,’ she whispered.
Lizzie tried to act unconcerned. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’
‘No, but it was yon loon that saved wee Davie in the dock, ye mind the one, the big one…’
Words were tumbling out of Maggy like water from a faucet but Lizzie hardly heard them because her heart was, a song that filled her whole being and obliterated everything else.
Chapter 8
For both of them it was as if they knew each other well although they had never been properly introduced. He stood in the middle of the bar floor with his navy-blue peaked cap in his hand and stared at her. She wasn’t exactly pretty. Her face was too distinctive, her eyes too slanting and her mouth too wide to fit the conventional ideal but she was very unusual, with brilliant green eyes above high, almost Mongolian cheekbones. Her brown hair was vigorous and gloriously abundant, curling in enchanting corkscrews on her forehead and around her temples. The shape of her was delightful too, compact but shapely with a high proud breast, broad shoulders and a tiny waist which he knew he could span with his hands.
He had thought about this girl often during the six months of hard work and danger, lying in his bunk with the pack ice grinding its cruel teeth against the wooden walls of the ship. The memory of the impetuous lassie on the dockside who had thrown her arms around him with such strange intensity had shut out awareness of danger. Now that he saw her again, the force that came from her touched an equal force in him. They did not know it but they were a heaven-made match. Deep wells of passion in both were only waiting to be tapped.
She twisted her hands in front of her apron and stared back at him, absorbing every aspect of this stranger she’d dreamed about. Yes, as she remembered, he was tall, straight and well made. Yes, his hair was dark as a raven, uncurling and flat on his head. During his absence at sea he had grown a luxuriant moustache which suited him very well. Yes, his eyes were dark-fringed and deep set and there was a yearning in them that matched the longing in her own. She cleared her throat and was the first to speak.
‘I never thanked you properly for saving my wee brother.’
He grinned at her. ‘Oh, yes you did. Don’t you remember?’
She flushed, the colour rising in her matt skin like the flush on an apple. There was an awkward silence for a few seconds until he spoke again, still twisting the seaman’s cap in his hands.
‘I’ve come to ask if you’d like to go to the theatre with me on Saturday night.’
She nodded. ‘I’d like that,’ she told him without any pretence at reluctance.
‘Maggy, Maggy, where’s my shoes? Maggy, Maggy, where’s Mrs Adam’s garnet necklace? Maggy, Maggy, did you press the Paisley shawl like I told you?’
Excitement ran through the house that Saturday evening like a bolt of lightning as Maggy bustled about in Lizzie’s wake, tweaking at her skirts, tucking up her hair and complaining, ‘What a to-do, what a cerry-on! You’d think you were going out with the Prince of Wales, no’ with a man aff a whaling ship.’
He appeared on time, just as the preparations finished, and Lizzie swept into the evening crowds, proudly holding his arm as they walked solemnly along the street to the Palace Theatre where the best music-hall acts performed. On the way they passed Johnny Davidson, hanging about in the roadway in front of the Steeple Church with his friends. He thought he had never seen her look so magnificent and when he saw how she smiled at the man at her side, he felt as if someone had aimed a cruel blow at his stomach.
The theatre was crowded with fashionably dressed people and Lizzie felt like a duchess when she discovered that Sam had reserved a box for them. Her heart was racing as she settled down in a plush-covered armchair and carefully spread out her silken skirts to their best advantage. From her eyrie she could see the glamorous interior of the appropriately named Palace spread out before her. The walls were painted scarlet and gold; the circle was held up by lines of huge carved figures of goddesses, wrapped in clinging gowns. Cherubs blowing trumpets decorated the ceiling and batteries of hissing gas lights lent glamour to the auditorium. The stage was closed off by a heavy red velvet curtain fringed with golden braid and in the pit she could see the orchestra in evening suits tuning up their instruments. She had only been to a theatre once before and her face glowed like a child’s with anticipation as she looked at Sam and whispered, ‘Isn’t it exciting?’
He grinned back, pleased by her reaction. ‘I love the theatre. When I’m on shore I come every week. There’s a grand bill tonight. You’ll enjoy it.’
She did. She thrilled to the acrobats, expressed amazement at the cleverness of the jugglers, laughed at the saucy comedian who was all dressed up in a kilt and tarn o’shanter. When a singer in a beautiful gown poured out a love song, she and Sam were deeply moved and became acutely aware of each other’s physical presence. First they exchanged surreptitious looks in the darkness of the theatre and then their hands found each other’s. Lizzie’s were soft in her lacy gloves, Sam’s were big, capable and calloused with clean, square-cut nails.
For Lizzie the autumn days were a voyage of discovery, about herself as well as about Sam. It was not a gradual falling in love but a headlong plunge. From the first night they went to the theatre, she knew she loved him and hoped he loved her back.
Every moment she could snatch away from the Castle Bar they spent together and when she was working, Sam sat in a seat at the corner of the saloon, reading the newspapers and waiting for her. Her father, on his flying visits to the bar, noticed the attachment between them and made a point of sitting down beside the dark-haired sailor and engaging him in conversation.
‘That’s a fine chap,’ he said approvingly to Lizzie after several conversations with Sam. ‘He’s a fellow that’ll go some place in the world.’
She beamed. ‘I think so too. He wants to have his own ship one day.’
Her father looked fondly at her. She was glowing with love and her exhilaration touched his heart, for it made her look so like her mother in the days when they were courting.
‘Do you fancy sailing the seven seas, Lizzie?’ he asked jocularly.
Her expression became solemn. A haunted look flashed across her eyes. Her father thought that he’d offended her by presuming a marriage between her and the sailor but that was not what worried her. She was irrevocably bound to Sam in her heart but if she married him, she’d be in thrall to the dreaded sea as well and her soul cringed at the thought that she and the man she loved would be in its power.
When she took Sam to meet Mr Adams in Tay Lodge she was thrilled by how well her suitor fitted in with the elegant surroundings. He looked even taller and more patrician in the drawing room while she made the introduction and her heart leaped when she saw approval in the old man’s eyes. It mattered to her very much that Mr Adams approved of Sam.
George too shared her high opinion of the sailor and they laughed and joked easily with each other from the time of their first meeting. Beside the sailor her brother looked thin and frail and she talked to Sam of her fears about her brother’s health.
Sam had a wonderful power of making her less anxious. ‘Those skinny fellows are sometimes the strongest of all. I’ve seen chaps that look a lot less healthy than your brother standing up to terrible weather and hard work far longer than red-faced, sturdy fellows,’ he told her.
They had so much to discover about each other, the days were not long enough and words could not fully express all they wanted to say. Sam liked to walk and in the afternoons he asked Lizzie to walk with him but he could not understand why she always avoided going along the Esplanade.
‘There’s such a fine view of the river from there,’ he said.
She decided to share her most
secret fear with him. ‘My mother was killed when the Tay Bridge went down. Ever since then I’ve been terrified by the river. I think it’s waiting for us – for me and my family. It’s as if it’s put a curse on us. For a long time I couldn’t even look at the broken bridge.’
He did not scoff but led her off towards a bench at the road side and sat down holding her hand.
‘I knew there was something like that. Your father told me about your mother, but you mustn’t brood about it now. Walk along the riverside with me. I’ll take your arm. I’ll look after you, Lizzie. I want to look after you for the rest of our lives.’
They walked along the Esplanade and they talked. She told him about the day of her mother’s death and of her desperate longing to protect her brother and father, her anxiety in case something terrible happened to them as well, her jealousy when her father married Jessie. He listened and said ‘I understand’ every now and again. Then, feeling guilty at talking about herself all the time, she asked him about his family.
He led her towards the river parapet and pointed across to where a de-masted man o’ war floated in the middle of the river. It was painted black and white and from the distance it looked like a floating beetle.
‘I grew up on that,’ he told her in a strange, tense voice.
She stared at him in amazement. ‘You grew up on the Mars?’
He nodded, his face solemn, and they both turned to stare out at the Mars, a wooden warship from the time of Nelson where bad boys were sent to be schooled under a discipline of terrible severity, where whippings were common and punishments draconian. The name of the ship was used by parents in Dundee to threaten disobedient sons. ‘I’ll send you to the Mars’ was enough to make any little ruffian think twice about breaking the rules.
Lizzie’s horrified gaze was fixed on the sinister hulk. There was no sign of life aboard but she knew that about a hundred boys were housed within it in conditions that she could not imagine. He was waiting for her reaction and her voice rang out, full of love and sympathy.
Mistress of Green Tree Mill Page 8