A Mother's Courage

by Maggie Hope

  They wouldn’t stand much chance of a permanent arrangement with him but what if he took up with a woman from a better way of life, someone who expected more and usually got it? Not many could resist his charm, as she well knew. And now she had her son to think about. She wasn’t going to have his inheritance taken away for any other woman’s brat, that she was not.

  Mary laid her hand on her stomach and as she did so the baby moved and kicked and, by, it was strong; her lad would be a proper bruiser and she would defend his rights, oh aye, she would. She grinned to herself; Morgan was so convinced it was a boy that he had her thinking the same.

  She paced up and down until she was tired, then sat and dozed in the chair on the balcony until the sun began to drop over the waters of the harbour a mile away and a slight breeze sprang up and cooled her down. And Rosie, her fat, middle-aged maid, came out with the tea tray and clucked about her, arranging cushions to make her comfortable while she drank her tea. Still Morgan did not come home.

  ‘I’ll walk down to the harbour, I think, Rosie,’ she said to the maid, whose name was not really Rosie but one that Morgan found heathenish and unpronounceable. Rosie looked worried.

  ‘Don’t go, missus,’ she said. ‘Captain West be angry, baby come soon.’

  ‘Why, man,’ snapped Mary pettishly, ‘the bairn’s not due for another four weeks. And any road, some of the women work in the fields right up to the day they have the babby. I’ll be all right, walking is good for me.’ Mary liked to relapse into the idiom of her own north-east when Morgan wasn’t about. It was comforting somehow.

  ‘Wait, I go with you,’ said Rosie, admitting defeat.

  Mary washed her hands and face, changed into a loose muslin dress and set off through the plantation on the track that led to the harbour. She walked in the middle of the track to avoid the ruts made by the cotton carts. It was dusty today but when the rains came, they became so thick with mud they were almost impassable. Rosie trotted beside her.

  As she walked, Mary called out greetings to the labourers she recognised by sight and Rosie cast anxious eyes at her; master didn’t like the missus to be familiar with the hands, as he called them.

  Mary found herself enjoying the walk and she slackened her pace and drew in deep breaths of the fresher evening air. As she neared the harbour she could smell the sea so she paused and closed her eyes for a minute, trying to pretend it was the North Sea, tangy and salty and with white-caps breaking and spraying on to the harbour at Seaham as they loaded the coal on to the collier boats from the staithes.

  Abruptly, she opened her eyes and walked on. There was no way she could really conjure up home; there were too many other smells, alien smells, and certainly not the smell of new-mined coal. Just brown dust and coconut oil and strange spices and cotton. A wave of homesickness would have overwhelmed her if she had allowed it but she pushed it to the back of her mind with determination. Sometimes it was an indulgence she could wallow in but only when she was alone in her bed, not in the day.

  Of course there was no sign of Morgan’s sloop in the harbour, nor in the bay beyond; it had been stupid of her to think there might be. There was only a cargo ship, dropping off something or other for the cotton gin that Morgan was building on the estate.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs West,’ said a voice so close to her right ear that she jumped and Rosie snorted. It was Wilson of course, Morgan’s overseer. No doubt he had been supervising the unloading. He was watching her with a slightly amused expression on his face, one eyebrow lifted in enquiry.

  ‘Oh. Hello, Wilson,’ she said, rather ungraciously. He was the only man she consciously tried to treat as an inferior, mainly because he always acted so bloody superior, she thought savagely.

  ‘If you’re looking for your husband, I’m afraid you won’t find him here.’

  He grinned, as one would at a child who does something innocent and so funny to the adult mind. Mary stared at him; she wasn’t going to admit that he had hit on the reason for her walk even if it was highly unlikely that Morgan would be here.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am simply out for a stroll and walked down here for a change of scenery,’ she said coldly. ‘Of course I’m not expecting to meet Captain West, I don’t expect him back for at least a couple of days.’

  Wilson raised his eyebrows further. ‘Oh? Funny, I expected him back yesterday, something must have come up to detain him.’

  ‘I must be going, good evening, Wilson,’ Mary said abruptly and turned on her heel. ‘It will be dark soon.’

  ‘If you wait a moment or two, I will give you a lift. I’m afraid there is only the cart, but perhaps it’s better than walking.’

  ‘Thank you, I prefer to walk,’ she snapped. ‘Come along, Rosie.’

  As she set off back up the track she could feel his eyes upon her and imagined what he was thinking. He would be laughing at her, she was sure of it, a silly little miner’s daughter with ideas above her station and a husband who went with anybody in skirts. She put her hand on her stomach as the baby shifted his position and kicked at her bottom rib; oh Lord, perhaps she should have ridden back on the cart, she hadn’t considered that the walk back to the house was a mile long and all of it uphill.

  Halfway back, Mary and Rosie had to stand aside as the cart came up behind them. This time she was glad to accept Wilson’s renewed offer of a lift and hadn’t even the energy to argue when the offer wasn’t extended to Rosie, who plodded on behind them, puffing and panting. When she reached the house, Mary went straight to bed and lay awake, lonely and exhausted. Suddenly she longed for Eleanor. By, she wanted desperately to talk to another woman from home.

  It was about two o’clock in the morning when Mary woke up and knew that her labour pains had started. The house was deserted except for Rosie so there was no one to send for the doctor, as Morgan had commanded she should do. She daren’t let Rosie go and leave her on her own; the pains were too strong and too frequent for that.

  Which was just how she wanted it, she told herself. Rosie knew what to do, she insisted she did, hadn’t she had ten children herself? And any road, Morgan wasn’t here, it was his fault that she had to get on with it in her own way. She was not worried; none of the miners’ wives in Hetton ever had a doctor at their lying-in, what did they want with a man there? It wasn’t decent.

  At ten past ten in the morning, Mary’s daughter was born, a little scrap of a thing, more blue than red like Eleanor’s babies had been so that Mary was instantly struck with a terrible fear for the tiny thing. How could such a weak scrap of a baby have kicked so hard at her ribs as to make them sore?

  But Rosie took the infant and smiled and said, ‘Baby fine,’ and wrapped her in one of the delicate embroidered sheets that Morgan had brought home one day for his son. As Rosie brought a basin of water to wash Mary, who was lying in her dishevelled bed, sweat-stained and smelling of blood and childbirth, Morgan walked in.

  Rosie paused for a moment and then her movements, which up to then had been deft and sure, became hesitant and she slopped a little of the water on to the sheet.

  ‘Get out of here, woman, I want to see my son,’ he snapped at her.

  Rosie hesitated and looked at Mary, lying exhausted and uncomfortable in the bed.

  ‘Out, you idiot!’ shouted Morgan and she put down the basin and scuttled from the room.

  ‘I told you to get the doctor,’ said Morgan without really looking at Mary. ‘I told you I didn’t want my son delivered by a heathen nigger.’ He went over to the cradle and gazed down at the baby. ‘He’s mighty small,’ he observed, sounding disappointed.

  ‘She’s a month premature,’ said Mary and watched for his reaction closely, half-fearful and half-pleased that he had not got what he wanted. At first she thought he hadn’t caught on to what she had said but then he took hold of the sheet in which the mite was swaddled and unwound it, none too gently.

  ‘A damned girl!’ he burst out, leaving the child unwrapped and turning on the bed in a fur
y. ‘You had the nerve to give me a damn girl! You never were any blasted good, you barren sow!’ He bent his body over her until his face was only an inch away from hers and spat out his insults. Mary quailed – surely he wasn’t going to hit her now? But as she stared at his handsome face made ugly with fury and cruelty, something sparked within her and, weak as she was, she sat up in bed and, taking him by surprise, pushed him away. For she had to make a fight, there was the baby to think of now; she couldn’t afford to be frightened for herself.

  ‘I’m hardly that, am I?’ she shouted at him, her voice weak at first but strengthening. ‘What are you, a bloody animal? That is your daughter in the cradle and if I ever catch you being rough with her again I swear I’ll swing for you, I swear by all that’s holy!’

  Morgan had stepped back in surprise and now he opened his mouth to say something but evidently thought better of it and with an oath he flung himself to the door; but when he got there he turned.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch the little beggar, she’s not like to last more than a few hours at any rate as far as I can see. I’ll just let nature take its course. You’d better watch your tongue in future, madam. I’m off now, this room stinks worse than a battlefield and don’t expect to see me until you’ve learned what side your bread’s buttered on!’

  He could not have said anything better designed to take all the fight out of Mary and she collapsed back on her pillows sobbing her heart out, but not until Morgan had slammed the door and gone out of the house, shouting for his crew as he went.

  After a while, Rosie ventured back into the bedroom, washed her, changed the sheets and made her comfortable, and Mary began to recover some of her spirit. The maid washed and dressed the baby in a lawn gown and laid her in Mary’s arms and as she gazed down at her daughter she saw that a faint pink was brightening the baby’s cheeks, that she turned her head and even waved a fist in the air. She nuzzled at Mary’s breast and cried in frustration as she couldn’t find the nipple.

  ‘Whisht now, babby,’ Mary crooned softly. ‘Whisht now, my bonny bairn.’ I’ll call her Ruth, she decided all of a sudden as the name popped into her mind. And she thought of the story of Ruth, who went into a far country with her mother-in-law.

  ‘Baby strong,’ commented Rosie. ‘She live.’

  ‘Oh, aye, she will,’ said Mary. ‘She’ll live to go back to Hetton with me.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Despite her worries and the dragging backache that plagued Eleanor during the whole of her pregnancy, her baby was born having gone full-term and was a perfectly healthy boy.

  ‘It would have been nice to have a girl this time,’ she said to Francis when he was allowed into the room to see mother and child.

  Francis smiled at her as she lay on the pillow with the baby by her side. ‘It doesn’t matter, my love,’ he said in the rather rough voice that he had developed this last year or so. ‘The main thing is that he is such a fine baby.’

  Eleanor nodded her agreement as she gazed at the newborn’s unfocused eyes and plump pink cheeks. He was larger than her other boys had been, she was sure, though she had no scales to weigh him.

  ‘Perhaps we will call him Edward?’ suggested Francis rather diffidently, and was instantly sorry he had. He didn’t want to upset Eleanor on this day of all days by reminding her of the child they had lost. But Eleanor wasn’t upset; she simply looked thoughtful.

  ‘Edward Wales Tait,’ she replied, surprising him by the inclusion of her grandmother’s name. ‘It will remind us of our other dear little Edward.’

  ‘A good idea,’ Francis said quickly. ‘Now I will go and let you get some rest.’

  Eleanor lay with her baby beside her, enjoying the quiet time before Prue came back from the beach with John and Francis William, reflecting on the last few months. They had been angry, bitter months for the most part with the anger mainly on her side and directed against Francis. She knew she was going too far sometimes but he had not retaliated, simply left the room or even the compound until he thought she had quietened down again.

  He had insisted that she travel back with him on the missionary ship and Morgan and his men had gone off in another direction.

  ‘We are all right here, Morgan will see us safely home and the boys are asleep down below,’ she had protested.

  ‘I wish you to come with me,’ Francis had insisted and he carried John while Prue carried Francis William aboard the missionary ship, both boys still asleep. Morgan looked on silently, with a sardonic half-smile.

  ‘I can never thank you enough, Captain West,’ Eleanor had said as she left the sloop. ‘If it hadn’t been for you …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, she couldn’t. Francis thanked him too, formally, his voice cold and distant. He ignored the mutterings of the seamen, especially the one he had man-handled out of the bush.

  Eleanor had held her peace on the journey because of the boys and the presence of Prue and the Fijians but once they were by themselves in their own bedroom, she had let her anger spill over.

  ‘You let us down, Francis,’ she said. ‘If it hadn’t been for Morgan West, my boys might have been dead. I’ll never forgive you, Francis.’ She hurled insults at him, insults that got wilder and wilder and Francis stood, white-faced, not even trying to defend himself. She stopped at last, exhausted and tearful, and sat down on the bed full of despair.

  ‘Dear God,’ she whispered at last. ‘How could I marry a man who cares nothing for me or my children?’

  Francis’s head had jerked up. ‘Eleanor! How can you say such a wicked thing?’

  It’s true,’ she insisted. ‘All you care about is God and how many natives you can bring to Him. Your family doesn’t even count against that.’ Even as she said it, she knew she was being vastly unfair but she was driven, she had to hurt him as badly as she had been hurt, she had to. She could not believe that he had been as frantic about the kidnapping of the children as she had been.

  What might have been said after that she didn’t know, for just then there was a scream from the children’s room, a scream so terrible she was convinced that something else was happening to the boys. Jumping to her feet, she fled to the door with Francis close behind her to find John running down the hall to the outside verandah, dragging his little brother after him.

  ‘John, John, what are you doing?’ she cried but he couldn’t hear her; he was deep in some dream, some nightmare of his own. She snatched up Francis William, who was heavy with sleep and hardly knew what was happening, and hugged him to her while Francis caught hold of John.

  ‘Stop now, stop!’ Francis said, holding on to John as he fought and struggled to get away, panic and fright giving him a wild strength.

  ‘Let me go!’ screamed the boy, and Eleanor knelt beside him, the younger boy still in her arms. ‘They’re going to hurt us, we have to get away!’

  Francis put his arms around John and held him close. ‘No, no, John, no, it’s Daddy, we’re not going to let anything happen to you, we’re not. This is just a bad dream, wake up, John, wake up. You’re safe now.’

  Gradually the unseeing panic left the boy’s eyes, he stopped screaming and began to tremble with reaction and Francis swept him up and carried him to bed.

  ‘Don’t go away, Daddy, you won’t go away?’ John was weeping quietly now and Francis looked at Eleanor, who had followed him into the bedroom with Francis William, who went back to sleep as soon as she laid him down.

  ‘I won’t go away, son,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay here until you go to sleep.’

  ‘No, don’t go away at all,’ insisted the boy.

  ‘I’ll just be in the next room,’ Francis assured him and after a while the boy’s trembling stopped and he slept.

  They waited a few minutes to make sure John was all right and then tip-toed from the room.

  Outside, Prue was hovering, dressed only in her nightdress, over which she had thrown a shawl. Behind her stood Matthew, his bandaged hand showing white against his dark skin.


  ‘Poor bairn,’ whispered Prue. ‘It’ll be a long day before he forgets. No doubt we’ll have our work cut out with him.’

  ‘Go to bed, Prue,’ Francis said rather sharply, averting his eyes from her attire. Then, obviously feeling he was being a bit hard, ‘You need your sleep too, you have had a bad time as well. But don’t think we’re not grateful for what you did for the boys, we will never forget it.’

  Eleanor was tired to death but she couldn’t help a bitter dig at him when they were back behind the closed door of their bedroom.

  ‘No, what would we have done without Prue? Do you find it galling to have to thank her, Francis? After all you have said about her in the past, I mean.’

  ‘Come to bed, Eleanor,’ Francis replied wearily. ‘It is the shock of what has happened which is making you say such terrible things. You will be sorry for them in the morning.’

  ‘I will not,’ said Eleanor as she slipped into her side of the bed and turned her back on him.

  John’s nightmares had continued for the rest of the summer. They occurred with monotonous regularity two or three times a week and each time they involved Francis William so that in the end Eleanor had moved the younger boy into Prue’s room and had Prue sleep in the same room as John. Eleanor’s thoughts turned to John as she lay with her new baby in her arms; she thought about his troubles at least once a day, worrying, trying to think what to do. Should she take him to Australia, back to Sydney to see a doctor who knew about these things?

  It was Francis’s attitude when he was with the children that had gradually calmed her bitter feelings towards him. He so obviously loved them; he had such great patience with them. For their part, the boys loved Francis with an uncritical devotion; their eyes lit up and they would throw themselves on him every time he returned to them from one of his trips round the islands. John had even come to accept the trips, knowing his father had to go away on the Lord’s business from time to time.