December Girl

by Nicola Cassidy

  December Girl

  Copyright © 2017 Nicola Cassidy

  The right of Nicola Cassidy to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  For English teachers everywhere, who light the spark of a dream.

  Prologue

  Ireland, 3,200 B.C.

  The sea was grey and the skyline missing. A whiteness had descended along the east coast. The leathered boat dipped up and down, the small waves lapping and dashing as they rowed. The rough granite sat squat in the boat, steadying the small currach, as the men, with their auburn hair matted and long, made their way slowly through the sea.

  They sailed from the sea to the Boyne, floating over dark water, fronds waving from below. It grew still as they rowed upstream, past the rushes and the marsh. On land, rough ropes pulled the square stones from the boat on to the oiled logs lined up on the shore.

  They rested that night, sleeping beside the stones, their fire smouldering in the spring dew. The weak sun warmed their arms that morning and as it rose in the sky, beads of sweat dripped from their brows, down their necks and flowed freely under their arms to their torsos.

  They sat when the stones reached their resting place, ready to be carved and formed into their passage tomb. Some lay their bodies against the stone, feeling the warmth, the scratched surface and the spirit of the stone. They smelled the granite, breathing in its air and thought of the great tomb the stones would build. The warmth was a gift. The stones were a sacrifice. A delivery from the Gods to the sun.

  And this was the beginning of Dowth.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  MOLLY

  London, August 1896

  Putting my hand on the door of the shop. Stepping in. Queuing behind that old woman with the mauve hat who wouldn’t stop nattering about her sore hip to the grocer behind the counter.

  Him laying out my bits on the brown wrapping paper. Small loaf of bread. Half a dozen sausages. A lump of corned beef. A slab of dripping.

  Handing the coins over. Putting my hand on the door. Pulling it open. And turning to face the pram.

  Empty.

  Oliver.

  Gone.

  I looked around, thinking maybe he’d fallen out or someone was behind me holding him. Maybe he’d been crying. There was a man walking a big dog on the other side of the road. And a horse pulling a flatbed cart rolled by. But there was no one else on the street. Just me, my empty pram and the package of groceries in my hand.

  I threw the groceries down and ran all the way to the end of the street. It criss-crossed a busy road and there were more people walking, footsteps filling the path. I put my hand out at a woman coming along with her own pram.

  ‘My baby!’ I say. And she stops, almost looking scared of me. ‘My baby’s gone! Did you see him? Did you see

  anyone? With a baby?!’

  She shook her head.

  ‘He’s been taken,’ I say. ‘Out of the pram.’

  I pointed back up the street to where my pram sat, on its own, outside the shop.

  I looked around, circling, taking in all the people on the street. Looking for someone holding a baby.

  I ran past the woman and ran to the end of that street, stopping people and asking them the same question. I stepped into the middle of the road, almost under the hooves of a horse and I asked the people on that side of the road too. But no one had seen him. And they all looked at me like I was a mad woman.

  I was in a vicious panic now. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. This couldn’t be happening, I thought. This isn’t real. No one actually came and took my Oliver. There’s been a mistake, a misunderstanding.

  I looked into the shops, opened the doors and asked if anyone had been in with a small baby? The shopkeepers came out, rubbing their aprons, and stood at the doors looking up and down the street. A little crowd had formed around me now, people stopping, wondering what all the commotion was about.

  A policeman was summoned. A young bobby, with his tall hat on his head. I told him what happened, all my details, what Oliver was wearing, where I lived. No, he couldn’t talk, he’s only a baby, I said. No, he couldn’t have gotten out and wandered off. He wasn’t creeping. He was only a baby.

  All the time I was waiting for someone to walk up, holding him, saying they’d just taken him off for a minute, that he was a bonny baby and they were sorry for the trouble they’d caused. But no one came, except the nosy parkers and the curious, all gathered round me and

  suddenly I was screeching in the street.

  I let the panic take over. There were screams now. I could hear them coming from my throat. I was wailing. They were trying to get me into a shop to give me a cup of tea, to calm me down. But I didn’t want tea. I didn’t want off that street where maybe Oliver was, somewhere.

  I told the policeman that he had to go searching, that whoever took him couldn’t be that far away. He said they would start enquiries but that he needed all the details first and that I needed to calm down.

  I took deep breaths in. There were hands patting me on the back. The woman with the pram was still there, a concerned look on her face, patting her own baby’s head.

  My body was shaking. There were tremors in my hand when I put it to my mouth. I touched my head, searching for comfort, wondering what I could do. What did a mother do when her baby was stolen?

  Someone produced a brown bag and I was hunkering on the ground watching it blow in and out with my breaths. It didn’t calm me down, instead, I felt sick.

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ I say. ‘We need to find him. He could be in any of these streets.’ I wave my hand.

  I looked at the policeman and I saw the blank look on his face. He didn’t look as if he had any intention of taking to the streets in search of Oliver. He looked like he didn’t know what to do.

  ‘If you come with me, I’ll take you down to the

  station,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t want to leave here,’ I say. ‘He could still be here, around, with someone.’

  ‘We’ll make an official report and get the word out,’ he says. The people around him nodded.

  ‘We’ll keep an eye here, love, see if he comes back. Don’t you worry,’ said a shopkeeper in a brown flat cap.

  I felt as though they wanted me out of there. That seeing me go off with the policeman was the best thing for it. That they would shake their heads and say, ‘isn’t it awful, that poor girl’ and then go back to their shops and their lives and their customers and all the while, my whole world had been tipped on its head. The bottom taken out of it. My Oliver, gone.

  I got the pram and followed the policeman as he walked ahead, striding with purpose. All the while I searched the arms of the people around. Was anyone holding him? Could he have fallen out?

  I had an awful sense of foreboding. I knew by my stomach. I knew that he was gone.

  I was hiccupping now. There were tears streaming down my face, as I walked behind the bobby, pushing my pram with only its parcel of groceries in it. I saw that the blanket was gone. It was a red, woollen blanket which I’d knitted in squares in the evenings, beside the fire in Tubular’s house.

  ‘The blanket,’ I said half shouting at the policeman. ‘It’s gone, they took the blanket too.’ />
  He turned and nodded at me and kept walking. I felt like we were walking the wrong way. That we were going away from Oliver. But I’d no choice only to follow him. It seemed like it took hours to get to the station, that we would never get there, wading through the crowds of people going about their business and none of their faces, Oliver’s.

  A policeman looked up from a desk, his face white, his moustache bushy. It took me an age to manoeuvre the pram into the small waiting area of the police station. I saw the policeman who’d led me there look at the pram, as if to say, sure, leave it outside, but I wasn’t leaving it outside again. It was the only connection I had to my baby.

  ‘Name,’ said the policeman at the desk. And I told him. But then I said I had given all my information to the first policeman and we needed to do something quick.

  The desk sergeant looked up and he saw my face and my eyes and my panic.

  ‘It’ll just take a few minutes, love,’ he says. ‘And then when we have all the information, the full description, we’ll get word out to all our stations. If there’s no sign in a few hours, we’ll get notices done up. Don’t you worry, I’m sure he’ll turn up,’ he says.

  I welcomed his kindness. I welcomed his explanation of what was happening and his reassurance that things would be alright. That somebody, even this minute, could walk in that door, clutching Oliver and say they’d made a terrible mistake.

  I described Oliver, right down to the small balding patch on the back of his head.

  ‘He has a little mark, on his leg, on the back of his right leg,’ I tell the policeman.

  He wrote it all down, carefully, in a big notebook.

  And when he had all the wording down he told me I was free to go.

  ‘Where?’ I say, feeling my eyebrows raise up.

  ‘Home,’ he says. ‘Go along now, home to your husband and if we find anything, we have your address.’

  ‘I can’t go home,’ I said, shocked. I was ready to lead a search party, to walk right in front of a group of men and women and policemen and shopkeepers who would hunt down and find out who had taken my Oliver.

  ‘What about the search?’ I say.

  ‘PC Devine will make some enquiries,’ he says, pointing at the young bobby who was now hovering by a drunk who was shouting obscenities at the top of his voice in the waiting room.

  ‘We need to search for him,’ I say. ‘Somebody’s taken him. For themselves. We need to find them. Now!’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Mrs Cotton, I know this is a shock for you. PC Devine will take you home now. See that you’re looked after. You leave the police work to us.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I can’t go home, not without my baby.’

  The desk sergeant looked over at PC Devine and nodded. Devine came over, put his hand on my shoulder and gently turned me away.

  This time he assisted with the pram and helped me get it outside.

  ‘I’m going back to the shop,’ I say and I started walking back the way we came. He went to protest, but then he followed, passing me out and walking straight ahead. Me, the pram and the policeman, marching up the road.

  ‘Have you ever come across this before?’ I ask him, trying to think of answers or questions that might help.

  He nodded his head a bit.

  ‘Aye,’ he says. ‘The odd case of child-stripping, where they take the baby, for the clothes,’ he said. ‘Oh, and there was a babe taken in the East End. A few years back.’

  ‘Did they get it back?’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘It was the father who’d taken it. Smothered the poor thing he had.’

  I stopped, the wheels of the pram halting in their tracks, staring after the policeman and the stupid thing he’d said. He kept walking, not even noticing I was behind. I swallowed a load of air, told my mind that I had to keep going, that no one was going to harm Oliver and that most likely by the time I got back to the shop, he’d be in there with the shopkeeper, gooing and gaaing the way he’d been doing of late.

  But when I got back to the shop, it was empty and the shopkeeper came out and he looked surprised to see me.

  ‘Stolen?’ he says, when I told him what I thought.

  ‘Oh love, surely not,’ he says. ‘Must be a mistake. Couldn’t be, surely.’

  But surely, Oliver was gone.

  Now that the policeman had me back at the scene of the crime, I watched him take out a notebook and stop people on the street, asking them if they’d seen anything suspicious in the area in the past hour. I thought he was doing it to have something to do, to not have to stand with me and talk about the horror of what was happening to me. And all the while I searched, looking at the arms of anyone coming towards me, eyeing up any prams being pushed on either side of the street.

  That awful sense of foreboding loomed in the space where he should have been. The dip in the mattress where he lay. The end of the pram where his little toes would have kicked.

  Because I wouldn’t let him bring me home, the

  policeman moved off and said he would make enquiries door to door. I said it was houses we would need to check by now.

  I couldn’t leave the shop. I felt that if I left, he would be brought back and I would miss him.

  I stood, my hands on the handle of the pram, looking left, then right, then left again.

  I asked every single person who passed.

  ‘Have you seen a baby, a little boy? He was taken from his pram, here, about an hour ago?’

  People shook their heads, they side-stepped me, thinking I was begging. Some stopped and answered me and said, ‘isn’t that shocking?’ but I wasn’t sure if they believed me. If maybe they thought I was making it up and I was only a mad woman.

  My legs were tired. The shopkeeper came out a few times, asking me if he could get me anything. The policeman came back. Said there had been no news, but that he’d made some enquiries, taken notes and he would call around to my house that evening. I watched him walk off towards the police station again.

  One minute I was sobbing, the next I was wiping the tears away so that I could ask a woman walking towards me had she seen Oliver?

  I felt the light dip. The sun, dropped behind the rooftops and the intense heat of the day waned. And

  somewhere out there, Oliver was due a feed.

  My breasts ached. They were swollen with milk, one side larger than the other.

  Tubular would be home from work now. He’d be sitting in the kitchen, his foot tapping, wondering where I was and where was his dinner? His meal was sitting in my pram. My hand on its handle, squeezing it tight.

  When the light had faded even more, the

  shopkeeper came out and started moving items inside. Bright flowerpots. Two signs. A wheelbarrow with cabbages in it.

  ‘You poor love,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you head on home now to your husband, I’m sure he’s wondering where you’ve got to. You never know, maybe someone will turn up on your doorstep with him tonight. Has to have been a mistake, I’ve never heard the like of it.’

  I didn’t want to go. But I didn’t know what else to do. Part of me wanted to get home, to tell Tubular the news. To involve him in the search, a plan.

  When the shopkeeper put his key in the door and turned it, he put his hand on my back and we pushed off, me rolling the pram and looking back as we walked away from the shop, from the street where I’d last seen him.

  I babbled to the shopkeeper. About what a special boy he was. About a small dimple he had on the left side of his face. About how he was my whole world and I’d never loved anything like I’d loved that boy.

  He nodded, quietly, as we walked along. It didn’t take long to get to Tubular’s house and when we reached it, I put my key in the door. It opened before I had fully turned the lock.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ says Tubular, his face like thunder, swinging it open, away from my hand still perched in the air.

  He looked at me and then to the shopkeeper and then
to the pram.

  ‘She’s had an awful shock,’ said the shopkeeper.

  I looked at Tubular and let a sob burst out, a spray of tears and snot shooting from my face. I pushed past him into the hall, letting him speak to the man, and I went into the small room at the front where I sat with Oliver when I wasn’t cooking or working in the kitchen.

  There were small things of his lying about. A muslin I used when feeding him. A blanket I used when gently rubbing his cheek to sleep. A small wooden rattle Tubular had produced when we’d first moved in. I took his blanket and his muslin and his rattle and I wrapped them round my face, sniffing and breathing deeply, smelling his scent,

  feeling my breasts lunge forward with milk.

  ‘He’s gone,’ I said when Tubular came into the room, standing in the door frame looking at me on the floor with the materials at my face, rocking back and forth. ‘Somebody’s taken him. He’s gone.’

  Chapter Two

  MOLLY

  Dowth, Co. Meath, Ireland, St Stephen’s Day, 1894

  10:20pm (Twenty months before)

  If I could slit anyone’s throat it would be Flann Montgomery’s. Right here on the slabs of the kitchen floor. I’d take one of our kitchen knives, not even the sharpest one and I’d hold his chest with my knee and I’d drag it lightly across his windpipe. And when his beady eyes were scared enough, all popping out red, I’d do it again, only harder this time.

  I picture him now, his tummy all big, his baldy head shiny, lying on our floor, the embers glowing on his rotten dirty face. I hate that man. I hate him with every single drop in my body, my blood, my sweat, the wet of my eyes, I hate him and he doesn’t even have the decency to do the job himself. He sent the sheriff,

  because he’s a coward. Daddy always said so.

  Michael is crying. Patrick is whimpering, hiding behind the settle bench, peeping out, shaking, his shoulders only reaching halfway up the box seat. I go to him and I stand beside him and I put my hand on his back and tell him to shush.