Emma: There's No Turning Back

by Linda Mitchelmore

  ‘See! There’s only one way you could know if I needed tests and that’s if you poked your pretty nose in and asked the doctor and ’e told you.’

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Well, you’m not the only one, lovie. But don’t you fret. I’ll be ’ere to irritate you, like a boil what keeps returnin’ in the same sore place, for a while yet. Now, if you haven’t got anythin’ better to do than stand there gawpin’ at this little miss ’ere …’

  ‘I have. While Fleur was stopping with you I was able to get out and about and I just about filled my order book. Mr Clarke has sung my praises far and wide and I can barely keep up. Thank goodness your Edward’s been able to help.’

  ‘And aren’t I grateful for that! Gets the gurt lummox from under my feet. But don’t you go gettin’ too like they suffragettes, or whatever it is they’re called. Men don’t like it, and never will.’

  ‘Men have had things their own way for too long,’ Emma said, and then because she knew it would be a waste of breath arguing the subject with Mrs Drew, she added, ‘to meet halfway would be good.’

  ‘Jus’ you tell my Edward that, then, when I’m tryin’ to get ’im out of the ’ouse in the mornin’ and ’e gets slower movin’ by the second. The gurt lump.’

  Emma laughed. Edward seemed to be growing taller by the day, thickening up around the neck and the arms. At that moment Edward was taking an order of smoked haddock tartlets down to the Minnow Café. Emma had given him a threepenny bit to buy himself something on the way back, although she hoped he wouldn’t spend it on beer. It was Beattie Drew’s big fear that Edward would turn out a drinker like his father before him.

  ‘What’s the date?’ Beattie said.

  ‘Don’t you mean the time? Quarter past—’

  ‘No, I mean the date.’

  ‘The eleventh of April. Nineteen hundred and twelve. Why?’

  ‘Then that gurt ship with that …’ Beattie Drew stopped talking, put her hands over Fleur’s ears. ‘Sorry, lovie, but it ’as to be said … that trollop Caroline Prentiss should be in the middle of the Atlantic. And the best thing that could ’appen, for all of us, is if she falls overboard and no one sees ’er go.’

  ‘Beattie!’ Emma said. ‘Don’t think such a thing.’

  ‘No tax on thoughts, Emma Jago. Nor on voicin’ ’em neither. Now get yourself off to that swanky bakery of yours now it’s been fixed and there’s electricity in it and all and get your day’s work done.’

  Emma went, skipping almost all the way now that her heart was a little lighter. Fleur was back where she should be. Caroline Prentiss was well on her way to America. Miles was still under lock and key in one of His Majesty’s prisons – Emma didn’t know which, and didn’t care as long as he was in prison, so she wasn’t going to ask. Life should gentle along nicely for a little while, shouldn’t it?

  She hadn’t had a letter from Matthew brought to her in ages now. Days went by when she didn’t even think of him. Perhaps he was beginning to give up? Perversely, now that she was receiving fewer letters, Emma was starting to miss his handwriting now she wasn’t seeing it any more – he’d held the pen that had dipped in the ink to write ‘Emma Le Goff’. Matthew had once been very important in her life and there’d been a time when she’d fancied she was falling in love with him. Calf love, given she’d been only fifteen when she’d first met him. And he a good ten years older. But if things had been different? And if he hadn’t been married? Well, he is married, and so, in the eyes of everyone in this town, am I, Emma said to herself, as she pushed open the door to her bakery.

  ‘Stop wishing for the moon,’ her mama had often said, when Emma had yearned for something beyond her reach. ‘No one’s ever going to go there to bring you back a piece.’

  Emma took the mixing bowl from its shelf under the big table and plonked it down ready to start her day’s work.

  Another saying of her mama’s popped into her head – ‘You’ve made your bed, so you’d better lie in it.’

  ‘So I have, Mama,’ Emma said. ‘So I have.’

  And a wonderful bed it had been to be in with Seth last night. She might even give in and agree to marry him in the registry office over in Totnes next time he asked her. Might.

  ‘Have you told Emma yet?’ Olly asked. ‘It’s been over two weeks since you were told about—’

  ‘What do you think?’ Seth interrupted him. He knew exactly how long he’d known, and why he was putting off telling Emma.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How well you know me!’ Seth said.

  He knew he was going to have to tell Emma sometime that Miles had escaped from custody a second time, and that Olly had been certain it was Miles who had accompanied Caroline onto the Titanic. Please God, let Olly be right, Seth thought – and not for the first time. At least it would mean that Miles was out of the country as well as Caroline.

  ‘Perhaps, now,’ Seth said, ‘Emma and I can get on with our lives.’

  Taking that telephone call from Sergeant Emms had nearly given him a heart attack. How he’d got through breakfast without telling Emma that Miles had strangled a warder, then made his escape – with the aid of others it had been hinted at by the sergeant – Seth would never know. Emma was usually so astute, so quick to sense his moods. Thank goodness she hadn’t been quite so astute that morning, nor had she put up any resistance to Fleur going to stay with Mrs Drew. She’d accepted readily enough that the reason he had suggested it was so that Caroline or an accomplice wouldn’t find Fleur at Mulberry House should she be thinking of kidnapping her and taking her to America.

  ‘I’ll give Miles one thing,’ Olly said. ‘His disguise was pretty good. He was wearing spectacles and, my guess is, more than a few layers of clothes because I’d bet my sweet life prison food doesn’t get a man to the size he was going up the gangplank. And a hat that was a couple of sizes too big for him, it came down on his nose almost. I got that close to him in the Cock and Sparrow.’ Olly put his index fingers in the air, about a foot apart, to show Seth just how close he’d got to Miles.

  ‘But he was billing and cooing and gazing into Caroline’s eyes so deep I doubt he’d have heard a bomb go off, never mind me saying, “Have a good trip.”’

  ‘You didn’t speak to him?’

  ‘ Of course I didn’t, you daft bugger, I’m only teasing. But I got close enough to be certain it was him. I saw his eyes. Jago eyes. Same as yours.’

  ‘Don’t remind me!’ Seth said.

  Olly grimaced. Sorry for bringing that up the grimace said. ‘Someone sprung him, Seth, that’s for sure.’

  Olly was right, Seth knew he was. And he had a sick feeling in his gut that it was the money he’d given Caroline that had done it.

  ‘Travelling on false documents, no doubt,’ Olly added.

  And if they were, then Seth knew that the extra £500, which he’d neglected to tell Emma he’d parted with, and which he’d given Caroline on top of the £1,200 she’d asked for, had more than likely paid for them. Well, good riddance. Money well spent. In the end he’d sold his ma’s shares – parting had been a pang, but it had been the right thing to do. He didn’t want to risk selling any of his cottages in case the new buyers made the sitting tenants homeless – and especially not Mrs Phipps, whose unmarried daughter, Margaret, was due to have her baby any day, so he’d heard. And he hadn’t mentioned that to Emma either – about young Margaret Phipps expecting – because to do so would have upset her, seeing as she was finding it so hard to conceive herself.

  ‘It was him, though,’ Olly went on. ‘That swagger he always had. Prison didn’t knock that out of him. And his height, of course. Easily the tallest man going up that gangplank. I didn’t know Miles and Caroline were seeing one another.’

  ‘Neither did I until a few weeks ago,’ Seth said sharply, wanting to banish the thought as quickly as he could, that both he and his brother had known the pleasures of Caroline Prentiss’s body.

  He wondered why there hadn�
�t been a more careful watch at the port for an escaped prisoner, especially one who was well over six feet tall, as Miles was. Be grateful for small mercies, Seth told himself. Be grateful there wasn’t.

  ‘And my money’s on more vermin coming out of the woodwork at some stage where Miles is concerned. Talking of whom, are you sure you shouldn’t tell the authorities what I’ve told you?’

  ‘Certain,’ Seth said.

  It would only open up a can of worms – the money he’d given Caroline for a start; could he be accused of being an accessory after the fact because he’d given it to her?

  ‘Not that I’m at all sure now it was her or him, of course.’ Olly laughed. ‘There were hundreds of women with white-blonde hair and fancy hats getting on that ship. I might have been mistaken one of them was called Caroline Prentiss going up that gangplank, mightn’t I? And I could have been mistaken about her companion’s height. Didn’t see a thing, did I?’ Olly screwed up his eyes and mimed groping about like a blind man.

  Seth laughed. ‘Nothing you’ve told me about,’ he said. ‘Now drink up – we’ve both got homes to go to. And thanks.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ Olly said.

  The men chinked glasses and downed their beer.

  Seth would tell Emma about Miles tonight … maybe.

  ‘Isn’ it terrible, Em? Terrible!’ Ruby said, pushing open the door to Emma’s bakery and marching in without knocking. She swiped her hat from her head and plonked it on a corner of the table.

  ‘What is? The price they’re charging for petticoats in Rossiters?’

  Honestly, Ruby didn’t change at all, did she? When they’d worked together at Nase Head House she’d been forever asking questions it was impossible for Emma to answer, and she was still asking them now.

  ‘That as well,’ Ruby said. ‘Seven shillin’s and sixpence I ’ad ter pay just after Christmas for a flannelette one. I’m not made of money like some I could mention.’ She poked her tongue out playfully at Emma. ‘But that’s not what I meant. You haven’t ’eard ’ave you?’

  ‘Ruuuby!’

  ‘Sorry. The Titanic. It’s sunk. ’Undreds ’ave gone to a watery grave.’ Ruby shuddered. ‘I can’t think of anythin’ worse. I’d ’ave been the first ter go if I’d been on that ship, seein’ as ’ow I can’t swim.’

  The Titanic had sunk? Emma had to grasp the news. The ship was unsinkable so all the papers had said. People had paid hundreds of pounds for the best cabins. The food was going to be better than in any Paris restaurant. And Caroline Prentiss had been on it.

  ‘There’s some survivors though. Would ’ave been more only there weren’t enough lifeboats, so Tom told me it said in the Western Morning News. Gawd, but don’t ’e brag about ’ow good a reader ’e is! Anyway, enough lifeboats or no, I bet those that managed to get in one don’t go on boats no more though, don’t you?’

  Emma shook her head, pressed her lips together. While her heart went out to the victims of this terrible disaster, and their families, the uncharitable part of her hoped Caroline Prentiss wasn’t a survivor.

  ‘’Ave you ’eard a word I’ve said?’

  ‘Of course I have. It’s shocking.’ And I’m busy she wanted to say. But she knew that if she did, Ruby might consider her unfeeling. Callous even.

  But Emma had a big order to fulfil for her first private client: ten, eight-inch crab tarts for a party the owner of Steartfield House – next door to the Esplanade Hotel – was giving. Mr Clarke had recommended Emma to him. Steartfield House! The home of Paris Singer, no less. The Singers, Americans, were reputed to be the richest family in the bay on account of the sewing machines they had developed. She really must get on because the reason Ruby was here on her day off – a bit late it had to be said – was to help her, since Emma had given Edward the day off for his birthday. But Ruby didn’t look as though she had the slightest intention of rolling up her sleeves and getting stuck into pastry-making just yet.

  ‘The news is all over town, Em, I don’t know ’ow you ’aven’t ’eard. The newspaper stands was full of it when I came past just now on the way ’ere – well, I can read the word Titanic well enough ’cos ain’t we seen it in every paper for months, but the rest I had ter guess. A friend of Mr Smythe’s was on it, so Mr Bell said when ’e gave ’im the news. ’E looked ever so sad, as anyone what ’ad a relative or a good friend on it might. I don’t know anyone who was on it, Em. Did you?’

  Yes. Emma struggled to blank her mind so she didn’t feel ecstatic at the thought Caroline Prentiss might have been one of those who’d drowned. God would strike her dead on the spot for thinking such things, wouldn’t He? Thank goodness Seth had been firm about making sure Caroline Prentiss did not take Fleur. How dreadful it would be if his daughter had been on the boat and had drowned.

  Ruby filled the kettle from the tap in the sink and plonked it on the hob. She set two cups on saucers and spooned tea from a caddy into the pot. She seemed to have run the course of what it was she had come to say and had noticed now that Emma hadn’t uttered a word.

  ‘What is it, Em? I’ve just given you news you didn’t want to ’ear, ’aven’t I? Who was on it that you know?’

  ‘No one, Ruby. You haven’t given me bad news for myself,’ Emma lied. You’ve given me hope, hope that Caroline Prentiss is one of the victims she wanted to say, but never would. What an evil thought! So, she amended it to ‘I hope if Caroline Prentiss has drowned that it was quick and painless’.

  ‘What then?’ Ruby said. ‘It’s summat. You’m never at a loss for words normally.’

  ‘I’m just thinking of all those families forever broken by the loss of loved ones,’ Emma lied again.

  ‘Oh, is that all,’ Ruby said. She made the tea, then she rolled up her sleeves way past her elbows. ‘Better get to work then, ’adn’t I?’

  ‘You can,’ Emma said. ‘But I have to go and see Seth. I really have.’ She untied the strings of her apron and threw it over the back of a chair. ‘Take four pounds of flour and half that of butter and make the pastry. Put it on the marble slab to cool. I should be back by the time it has.’

  And then Emma fled from the room, grabbing her coat from the hook en route, and ran to the harbour to find Seth.

  Ruby had been right. The newspaper hoarding outside Minifies said it all:

  WORLD’S BIGGEST SHIP

  TITANIC SINKS AFTER COLLISION

  WITH ICEBERG

  APPALLING LOSS OF LIFE

  Seth would know about it already, but Emma still needed to see him.

  She had a stitch in her side and had to bend over double to get rid of it.

  ‘Emma? What’s wrong? Is it Fleur?’ Seth said.

  Struggling to catch her breath, Emma shook her head. She pointed to the newspaper hoarding outside Minifie’s tobacconist shop.

  ‘Oh, that,’ Seth said. ‘I know, I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Do you think …’ Emma began.

  But Seth stopped her. ‘I don’t know what to think, sweetheart,’ he said. He took Emma by the elbow and walked her along the quay so they were out of earshot of his crew. ‘There’ll be a list of victims soon. If Caroline and …’ Seth put a hand to his mouth.

  ‘Caroline and who?’ Emma said. ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get home.’

  ‘No you won’t. You’ll tell me now. I know you, Seth Jago, you’re hiding something from me. You’ve been making more telephone calls these past weeks than I’ve ever known you make. I know it’s your telephone and you can call who you like, and in case you think I’ve been listening in, I haven’t. All the same I haven’t heard you mention the word “fish” once in any of those conversations so my guess is they weren’t telephone calls about your business.’

  ‘Ssh,’ Seth said. ‘We don’t want everyone to hear our business.’

  ‘Then why have you been keeping things from me?’

  A crewman yelled at Seth, then, to say was it all right if he cast off.

  Seth let go of Emma’
s elbow. ‘Stay there,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  He ran along the quay and Emma couldn’t help but admire the lithe way he did it – as though he could run for miles and miles and not feel the effort. The sun, still low in the sky at this time of the year, was making his raven hair gleam like polished coal … if anyone would be daft enough to polish coal.

  A shiver ran through Emma that Seth could run out of her life any time he chose because he wasn’t bound by law to her, was he? She couldn’t imagine a life without Seth in it, though. She’d been too sharp with him just now and while he hadn’t been cross with her, she knew he wished she hadn’t been so snippy.

  She watched as Seth loosed the mooring rope and threw it to Adam Narracott who waved a farewell before coiling the rope and dropping it on the deck. Emma had watched her papa do the job Adam Narracott had just done a thousand times, and a sadness that she’d never see him do it again blanketed her like damp fog. So many fishermen had lost their lives to the sea, and her papa, who had jumped in to try and save a drunken crewman who’d fallen in, had been one of them.

  Seth was walking back towards her now. The look on his face was solemn. His eyes searched for hers until they met and locked.

  Reaching her, Seth put his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something and I don’t want you to react. No shriek—’

  ‘Seth, don’t tell me how to behave, to react. Please.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it normally. But I want your solemn promise that just this once you will do as I ask.’

  God, what was he going to tell her? She felt sicker now than she had after she’d eaten a pan of curdled cream when she was six years old. She’d retched and retched all night long and half the next day.

  Emma nodded.

  Seth pulled her closer, so their noses were almost touching, and whispered.

  ‘I have it from a totally reliable source that Miles boarded that boat with Caroline.’

  Emma felt her eyes grow wide with surprise. Or horror – she wasn’t sure which. The name ‘Miles!’ screamed in her throat and it hurt like hell keeping it there, not being able to let it out. How long had Seth known Miles wasn’t in custody any more? Had Miles escaped again? Had he been prowling around Mulberry House? Had he had something to do with the fire in her bakery? Was that why Seth had insisted Fleur go and stay with Beattie Drew? Was it?