by Marie Joseph
Contents
About the Author
Also by Marie Joseph
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Copyright
About the Author
Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.
Marie Joseph began her writing career as a short story writer and she now uses her Northern background to enrich her bestselling novels. Down-to-earth characters bring a vivid authenticity to her stories, which are written with both humour and poignancy.
Her novel A Better World Than This won the 1987 Romantic Novelists’ Association Major Award.
Also by Marie Joseph
A BETTER WORLD THAN THIS
EMMA SPARROW
FOOTSTEPS IN THE PARK
THE GEMINI GIRLS
A LEAF IN THE WIND
LISA LOGAN
THE LISTENING SILENCE
MAGGIE CRAIG
PASSING STRANGERS
POLLY PILGRIM
THE TRAVELLING MAN
Non-fiction
ONE STEP AT A TIME
THE
CLOGGER’S CHILD
Marie Joseph
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Stoll Moss Theatres; Chappell Music Limited; EMI Music Publishing Limited, London; Redwood Music Limited; MCA Music Limited and the Methodist Publishing House for allowing us to quote from the Methodist School Hymnal.
For Stuart, Sheila, Nichola and Antony
One
IF YOU WERE wealthy and famous, then a good place to live was the London of Edwardian England. The King, come belatedly to his throne, was pining, but not too uncomfortably, for his mistress, the beautiful Lillie Langtry. She was touring the provinces with her own theatre company, enchanting every man who set eyes on her, even the very old, who saw in her the embodiment of their forgotten dreams.
On an early spring day in 1907, the trees in the London parks were turning slowly green, and in the West End theatres business was booming.
The suave and elegant Gerald du Maurier was striding the boards as Raffles, and at the Palace Vesta Tilley strutted the stage in trousers.
The streets of Mayfair were thronged with fashionably dressed women. The restaurants were crowded, and the parks filled with strollers out to enjoy the first warm sunshine that year. London was truly a good place to be.
There were slums of course, but then there was poverty everywhere. Not that one needed to think about it. And only in passing, if then.
Farther north, over two hundred and fifty miles away, the county of Lancashire was a windswept place, with cotton towns cross-threaded by narrow cobbled streets winding their identical ways down to the mills.
Up there, so it was said, life was sombre, grim and drab, a million light years away from the gaiety of London’s West End.
And yet, in that same early spring, at Easter time, for four days and four nights the townsfolk of a certain cotton town in the northeast of the county had thronged the market square. As darkness fell, workworn Lancashire faces were illuminated by towering flares. Clog irons had struck sparks from the cobbles, and pennies and halfpennies, carefully hoarded, had been gleefully squandered on sideshows and roundabouts.
Collins’s Dragons, the Flying Pigs and, most exciting of all, the Big Boats, swinging screaming occupants high into the air.
Flat-capped fathers, with wide-eyed children riding piggyback on their shoulders, had skimmed rings at the hoopla stalls, trying with desperation to win a doll dressed as the Fairy Queen, or an orange-plushed teddy bear with crossed button eyes.
‘Give us an ’apenny to go on the horses, our Dad!’
Young voices, hoarse with tiredness, red-rimmed eyes round with wonder at the music blaring out and the great roundabouts revolving merrily. Then, as the music increased to a terrifying tempo, a frantic clinging to the brass poles rising from the horses’ backs, with the ring of watching faces blurring out of comforting recognition.
Mothers holding shawls round pinched faces, frightened almost out of their wits as their children ignored frantic warnings.
‘Stop standing up in them swingboats! Tha’ll end up like a squashed black pudding if tha doesn’t sit down!’
Woollen mufflers flying as young legs bent to work the boats so high it seemed inevitable that the shouted warnings would become reality.
‘Higher, our Albert! Higher, our Agnes! Tek no notice of our Mam!’
Noise and light, the smell of apples dipped in burned sugar; peanut brittle shattered into bite-sized pieces by tiny steel hammers. Coconut ice sticking to wobbly milk teeth, and brown saliva from treacle toffee trickling down small determined chins.
Overly excited families shoving through the milling crowds; wives pushing husbands past the booth with its bevy of ‘London Ladies’ on a raised platform, reluctantly forcing them to avert their eyes from the shivering girls showing strips of goose-pimped flesh between flimsy layers of vividly coloured gauze.
‘Nowt there tha hasn’t seen afore!’
‘Aye, mebbe, but better spaced out, lass … or summat.’
Good-humoured clouts, a sixpenny plate of ‘spud’ pie from Sutcliffe’s café across the square, then walking home through gas-lit streets, the Easter fair over for yet another year.
As the town hall clock struck midnight, with the crowds finally dispersed, the fairground folk began their all too familiar race against time.
At first light they would be on their way to Preston, leaving the square empty, its glories dimmed, as the stallholders moved in to erect their tarpaulin-covered stalls in readiness for the Wednesday market day.
In her caravan, drawn up in the dark shadows behind the flare-lit ground, Jessie Bead, the uncrowned queen of the fairground, lolled on her bunk bed, fully dressed, small black eyes closed in a twitching sleep. An unlovely woman, not much thinner than the Fat Lady in the Freak Show, Jessie’s flesh flowed round her with an amoebalike fluidity, and because she had begun to lose her hair in her middle thirties, the receding hairline gave the impression that her face was at least twice its normal size.
Safely and comfortably out of the rain, now driving sideways across the market square, she dozed. That was all. It was said that Jessie Bead never allowed herself to do more than catnap. Every single detail of the organized hammering, banging, shouting informed Jessie that the heavy roundabouts were being a bugger to shift, but that the Flying Pigs had behaved themselves. Just for once.
Ugly, unfeminine, gross Jessie Bead, the doyen of the fair folk, with a mind as sharp as a newly stropped razor and a business acumen that would have put many a successful stockbroker on the Manchester Exchange to shame.
Round her middle, where once a waist had lingered, was tied a massive canvas bag, its cavernous depths holding every single penny taken during the past four days. Four times she had wobbled on surprisingly small feet across the cobbles
to the bank on the corner of Lord Street to change the day’s takings into less wieldy notes and silver. But not until the caravans and the wagons were ready to roll would a penny be handed over in wages, each bleary-eyed recipient making his or her mark in Jessie’s ledger. If anyone asked for more money, she could point to the appropriate page, blinding them by her calculations, proving that a rise was entirely out of the question.
Even as she lay napping, Jessie’s plump hands rested on the bulge made by the bag, her fingers scrabbling like spiders over and around its lumpy contours. She patted it now and again to make sure it was still there.
By her side on the bunk bed, its muzzle resting on her pillow, was a loaded revolver that once, so it was rumoured, had blasted a man’s head from his neck when he’d tried to wrest the canvas bag from its mooring. Jessie reckoned she could spot a phoney from a distance of no more than a good spit, and many a hopeful down-and-out looking for casual work had reeled backwards down the caravan steps with Jessie’s raucous voice spiced with imaginative swearwords shattering his eardrums.
‘This rotten world owes me nowt,’ she was fond of saying. ‘And I owe it nowt neither. I come from nowt and I’ll end up as nowt, but in between there’s nobody going to best Jessie Bead. Certainly not a man, with his brains in his trousers!’
Then she’d emit a roar of laughter that riffled her three chins and left her gasping for breath. ‘Stupid pie-cans!’ she’d end up, shouting gleefully. ‘Fit for nowt but blowing the skin off their rice puddings, aye, and missing doing that proper most of the time.’
When, with a sudden rush of wind and rain, the caravan door flew open, Jessie reached for the revolver before her eyes opened. It was an unwritten law that until the dismantling of the fair was completed she was not to be disturbed. She’d seen them through the bustle of the four days’ occupation of the market place – Sundays excluded; she’d taken on more casual workers than she was sure the lazy so-and-sos had needed, and there was nobody getting a penny piece till she said so.
Now she stared in disbelief at the man booting the door closed behind him, cradling in his arms a young girl as wet and sodden as if she’d been rescued from the sea.
With a rolling motion Jessie slid from her bunk, clumps of hair standing up from her head. Stretching out a hand, she turned up the wick of the lamp so that its light fell full on the face of the girl.
‘What’s going on, Neilly? What the ’ell’s happened to her? She looks like a goner.’
Cornelius Brown, known as Neilly, lowered his burden onto Jessie’s bunk bed. ‘She were found behind the big tent. I reckon she’s been lying there since it went dark. For hours, I’d say.’ He snatched a red kerchief from his neck and mopped his face. ‘One of the men trod on her belly, but he didn’t see her an’ it weren’t his fault. I fetched her here, Jessie. I reckoned it were the only thing to do.’
Jessie sniffed. Neilly had been drinking. His face was wrenched out of shape with an emotion only partly gin-induced. He had a soft side to him, did Neilly. Jessie accepted that. He could drink all day, and generally did, but she had never once seen him incapable. He was her right-hand man and, rumour had it, once upon a time her lover. She accepted too that Cornelius Brown would lay down his life for her, if need be.
‘I think the lass is dropping a baby,’ he said now, his anxious expression belying the crudeness of his words.
Jessie bent quickly over the girl. ‘Oh, may the saints preserve us, Neilly! You’re right! Her big face hardened. ‘How the ’ell did I miss it? How could I miss a thing like that?’ She rolled up her sleeves, revealing arms like ham shanks. ‘It’s time I gave this lark up, Neilly. I knew the lass had run away from home, but then most of them have, we both know that.’ She patted the girl’s ashen face. ‘It was the way she spoke that decided me to take her on. Top-drawer talk.’ She began to unlace the girl’s boots. ‘You know I set a great deal on the way folk speak.’
Neilly kept nodding, agreeing with every word she said. It was policy, he decided, at a time like this.
‘She’s been on the stage, if you ask me.’ Jessie started to unroll the long black stockings. ‘Look how the crowds rolled in when she did her little dance. Aye, and she could sing as well, that’s if she could’ve been heard over the row old Collins’s Dragons made … She sniffed loudly and stood to face Neilly, hands on ample hips. ‘Look sharp and put the kettle on. Get me scissors out of the box over there, and stop looking like you’ve lost a tanner and found a threepenny bit. It won’t be the first time I’ve delivered a babbie.’ Her voice was gruff. ‘Remember I delivered me own a long time ago. Aye, and buried it in a shoebox the day after. Aye, and went back to work in the kitchens at the workhouse the day after that, and none the wiser.’
Taking a strip of towel, frayed but clean, she wiped the mud from the girl’s face. ‘She’s got a fever. Likely pneumonia with lying out there.’ Jessie laid a hand on the swollen stomach. ‘No wonder this lass managed to deceive me. She’s nobbut much fatter than a decent-sized football, but it’s dropped, the little tiddler. I don’t reckon it’ll be long now.’
‘I’d best be going, Jessie.’ Behind her Neilly shuffled his feet. ‘It’s not a man’s place. Not a man’s place at all, at all.’ As usual, when troubled, his Irish accent surfaced.
Jessie spoke without turning round. ‘No. But the day will come. Cornelius Brown! You mark my words. The day will come when a man will be forced to watch his babbies being born, and then he’ll be laughing on t’other side of his face when he sees what a woman has to go through.’
The girl moaned, a moan that rose to a scream.
‘He should have been consecrated, the man who did this!’
Jessie heard the caravan door slam, then bent again to her task. Pulling up two layers of petticoats, she reached for a pillow and slipped it under the small of the girl’s back. Bitten lips spotted with blood blisters were drawn back over sharp white teeth. But even in her agony, she was beautiful.
Jessie remembered clearly the day the girl had come to her caravan, begging for work. Something about the way she walked had suggested the trained dancer in her, and Jessie had immediately realized her potential. Although it had been a dark day, damp and misty, the girl’s pale gold hair had glistened as if caught by a sunbeam, and when she spoke her accent and the clear cadence of her speech had told Jessie that she’d been brought up and schooled in a place far south of the cotton town where the fair was being held that week.
As usual, apart from demanding the promise of unquestioning loyalty, Jessie had asked no questions. ‘It’s hard work, lass,’ she’d said. ‘Even sitting outside the booth taking the money, where I’m thinking of starting you off till you can join the troupe. Cold winds and chapped hands. Smiling at the customers, giving ’em a taste of what’s waiting for ’em inside. And you’ll have to wear rouge and lipstick,’ she’d added, gazing at the peach-soft skin with a silken fuzz of down by the ears, round which the Saxon fair hair clustered in babylike coiled curls.
‘Run away from her family, I reckon. Give or take a few weeks and she’ll have had enough,’ Jessie had told Neilly later that day. ‘She’s nobbut a child when all’s said and done. Running away with the gypsies, in her mind, or summat just as daft. Romantic, she reckons us to be, no doubt.’
Here, her cackling laugh had erupted, ending in a fit of coughing. ‘Romantic? Sitting all day and most of the night in yon canvas booth, with the wind whistling round her ankles and her backside getting more numb by the minute. She’d’ve been better off with the gyppos, I reckon. At least they light themselves a fire now and again.’
The girl’s eyes flew wide with the shock of a pain that arched her back and brought the sweat streaming down her face. Transfixed by terror she stared up into Jessie’s large face.
‘You can’t just go with the pain, lass.’ Jessie leaned closer, suspecting that the huge green eyes were already glazed by blindness. ‘When the next one comes you’ve got to work. To push. See, catch on to this bi
t of rag and bite on it next time. Hold on to me, love. Hold on to owt, but work! You want your babbie to be born, don’t you?’
The eyes stayed open, showing no recognition, nothing. When the next pain came her whole body went rigid as a plank.
‘There’s no strength left in her, poor lass. And it’s a bloodless confinement as well.’ Muttering to herself, Jessie rolled her sleeves farther up her arms, fired with a fierce resolution.
Nobody in their wildest dreams could have called Jessie Bead maternal. What softness there had once been in her had been subdued long, long ago. Fending for herself from the day she left the workhouse after the birth of her own baby, she had accepted the score. And the score was one she had written for herself.
‘Expect nowt and you won’t be sorry when nowt comes your way. Get nowt and learn not to be disappointed. Never call on God, because He won’t be listening. All right, Jessie Bead?’
She knew the girl was dying. The long hours lying out there in the darkness and the rain had seeped away her strength as surely as if her life’s blood had been drained away through a funnel. This beautiful girl didn’t want to live. There was no fight in her. She had gone to a place from where there was no coming back. And if her babbie was going to be born alive, then it would have to do the work itself.
Dipping her hands in a tub of goose grease, Jessie’s cure for all ills, she slid them round the tiny head, pulsating softly in the last throes of birth. Panting spasmodically, holding her breath at the crucial moment, Jessie did what she had to do. When at last the baby emerged, head first, mucus-coated limbs following, Jessie gave her own shout of triumph.
‘A girl!’ she yelled. ‘A bonny, bloody perfect little girl! Thanks be to God!’ she cried, forgetting that by her own code the Almighty would have had no hand in the miracle.
Tiny, wrinkled, the child was so beautiful that for a moment Jessie’s coal-black eyes filled with tears. Outside the caravan the hammering and shouting rose to a crescendo. The rain beat down on the flimsy roof in a frantic drumming. Jessie blinked. It was as though a button had been pressed, bringing the sudden noise to her attention, shattering her concentrated calm of the past hour.