by Joanna Rees
The
Runaway
Daughter
Joanna Rees
Contents
1. Inventing Miss Casey
2. Sixty Seconds
3. King’s Cross
4. Headlines
5. The Grand Hotel
6. Eros
7. The Waitress
8. The Boarding House
9. Robbed
10. Blackness
11. The Girl in the Green Coat
12. Taxi
13. The Dressing Room
14. Right Foot First
15. The Girls
16. Wisey
17. Percy’s Chaos
18. Mrs Bell’s Boarding House
19. Rudolph Valentino
20. Casper Gets His Way
21. Pilchards
22. Blanchard’s
23. The Best Teacher
24. The Mysterious Man
25. The Breakfast of Champions
26. The Rehearsal
27. Against Doctor’s Orders
28. To the Roof
29. A Breath of Fresh Air
30. High Kicks
31. Show Time
32. A Notice in the Paper
33. Shingled
34. The Hunt
35. The Crystal Ball
36. Nancy’s Wardrobe
37. The Conservatory
38. An Idea Takes Shape
39. Paddy Potts
40. Motherly Advice
41. Annabelle’s Party
42. That Man Again
43. Nancy’s Plan
44. The Bath
45. On the Sabbath
46. Hungover
47. Mr Connelly’s Mood
48. The Sign in the Fire
49. Remembering That Night
50. The Grand National
51. Nancy’s Endorsement
52. Mystic Alice
53. Shaken
54. A Lead at Last
55. The Bee’s Knees
56. The Café de Paris
57. Saying Hello
58. Mrs Clifford-Meade
59. The Telephone Call
60. A Summons From Mr Connelly
61. Some New Admirers
62. Perfect Seams
63. The Girl
64. Delivering the Goods
65. Miss Proust
66. Roses
67. Champagne and Oysters
68. Georgie
69. Archie’s Secret
70. Who Would Win?
71. Is He Stalking You?
72. Take It From the Top
73. Gordon’s Wine Bar
74. Betsy Confides
75. At the Flicks
76. The Serpentine
77. A Spark of Hope
78. Opera Glasses
79. Top Drawer
80. The Mysterious Studio
81. The American Bar
82. The Lipstick Mark
83. The Coat
84. The Prototype
85. Surprising Archie
86. At the Club
87. Trafalgar Square
88. A Dubious Hotel
89. In the Country
90. The Perfect Picnic
91. The Boathouse
92. Starlit Sky
93. Edward Is Cornered
94. The Cricket Match
95. Squashed in the Back
96. The Cheque Book
97. Tickets to Paris
98. The Presentation
99. Archie at Last
100. Clifford Court
101. Make It Real
102. Archie Is Not at Home
103. Georgie’s Threat
104. At the Police Station
105. Marcus Fox
106. Confronting Edward
107. Mrs Bell’s Stand
108. The Last Show
109. Walking Ghost
110. The Getaway
111. The Blonde
112. Le Train Bleu
113. Free at Last
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
For Roxie, with all my love
1
Inventing Miss Casey
The shrill whistle woke her. For a second she didn’t move, feeling the rattle of the steam train jolting her as she remembered her midnight flight across the moonlit field. How she’d spotted the stationary train impatiently puffing silvery clouds into the night air, how she’d managed to prise open the wooden carriage door with her shaking fingers and how she’d curled up in a tiny space behind the industrial cargo and packing boxes from the mill. How the exhaustion and terror had transported her to blackness.
Now her legs were stiff and her cheek was sore from where she’d been leaning against the cold metal machinery. And she was cold. So very cold. Her teeth chattered as she shivered in the icy air. She had that same fluttering feeling she’d had when she’d fallen asleep, as if the fear were darting around inside her, like the birds in her mother’s aviary.
How long since they’d last stopped? How far till she was far enough away?
Would she ever be far enough away?
She thought of the drama that was bound to be unfolding by now. She imagined her parents’ drawn faces when they discovered Clement’s body in the stable . . . her mother’s muffled scream.
Would they even be thinking of their daughter? Would they have noticed her absence yet? Probably not, she thought bitterly. Her mother had always been a muddled, ethereal presence – prone to lengthy bouts of illness, and concerned only with her birds and her absolute insistence on quiet. Her father, on the other hand, had always been as tempestuous as her mother had been timid, and he’d made it perfectly clear that Anna, like her mother, had always been an irritation to him. Lower down on his pecking order than the dogs.
Perhaps, though, her parents had drawn the correct conclusion straight away. Helped, no doubt, by Mark, the stablehand. He’d never liked her and she had no doubt that he’d readily describe how he’d seen her running for her life. And if he had, then the police were bound to have been called. Perhaps they were already chasing her . . .
Again, she fought down the fluttering fear. She’d got away, hadn’t she? She’d escaped.
Underneath the wooden carriage door, she could see an inch of the world outside. It was late February and the tracks flashed by with tufts of frosty grass.
She got to her feet, hobbling as they were so numb with the cold. She stretched her arms up with difficulty, the full sleeves of her mother’s best Sunday woollen coat stiff with the layers of clothes beneath it. Her breath steamed in front of her face as she stamped her feet, pressing her hands into her armpits and shivering again. Then she rubbed her face and felt the indent of the machinery’s steel stamp on her skin from where she’d been leaning against it. ‘Casey,’ she read now on the brown-grey iron.
Casey.
That could be her name.
Miss Casey. It was good to make a new decision for a new day. Like the decision to hide on this train. Fast and life-changing. Where there’d only been despair, this was a whole new way of living. Impetuously. Impulsively. The opposite of who she’d been until now – pushed down, trodden upon, so suppressed that life had been an agonizingly slow grey. But not any more. Because now that she’d run away from Darton Hall, she – Anna Darton – could be anyone. Anyone at all.
Casey . . . yes.
She’d take it. Isn’t that what she’d decided? That she would reinvent as she went along. Because that was the only way she could cope with this terrifying descent into her future. Like she was sand pouring through an hourglass.
Verity. It came quite suddenly. She didn’t know why. She’d certainly never known a Verity before. Apart fr
om the mill worker who’d once danced around the maypole on that holiday long ago. The full-breasted girl’s smile flashed in her mind’s eye.
Verity. Yes. That worked, she decided. Because, as of this very moment, for the first time in her life, she was free to be the truest version of herself. And, since this was 1926, she could be as modern as she dared to be. As modern as those brave suffragettes who made her father furious.
‘Verity Casey,’ she said aloud. Around her, the rhythm of the train sounded like the start of a song. Verity Casey didn’t have to be scared. She could be fearless.
She would be fearless.
2
Sixty Seconds
The train slowed as it entered the suburbs of the city, the brakes on the huge wheels making a deafening screech below the boards of the carriage. After fiddling with the catch for twenty minutes and some serious hefting, she’d managed to slide the door open several inches, and now she – Verity – stood and watched the slums slide by. The sun had come up and she bathed her face in it, longing for some much-needed warmth.
She hadn’t dared to hope that the train might have been travelling south, but during the last hour they’d slowed and passed through a station and she’d heard someone calling out that this was a freight train to London.
It was a gift. The train might have been going anywhere – she hadn’t cared a jot, only that it was somewhere other than that oppressive Lancashire valley she’d always called home. But this wasn’t somewhere else. This was London. The home of artists, poets, flapper girls, musicians and the kind of people of consequence that she longed to breathe the same air as. Somehow, coming to London changed everything.
She peered out at the tracks below her and at the high brick walls banking them, stained black with soot, thinking how inhuman it all seemed and not at all like the lively hub of activity she’d imagined from the occasional copy of the Daily Sketch that she’d read. She didn’t care, though – anything to distract her from the constant thoughts of Clement, which seemed to burn through her mind. Don’t think about him now, she told herself. Don’t think about it at all. You’ve ended it. Clement’s lifelong reign of terror is over.
She took a deep breath of the smoggy air, breathing in the sulphurous tang, which reminded her of the smell of struck matches, and she wondered whether Martha would be lighting the fire in the drawing room this morning. For a heady moment, as she thought of Martha there and herself here, the lightness of her freedom soared inside her. She was free, wasn’t she? At last.
Above the railway embankments, brown tenement blocks rose to the white sky. She saw a line of drying washing – tatty grey bloomers stretched between two grubby high windows. Talk about airing your dirty linen in public, she thought.
She smiled, remembering how she’d added some lace trim to a pair of her own bloomers, then dyed them pink with beetroot juice – much to Martha’s horror. But what her mother’s stern housekeeper didn’t understand was that having jaunty bloomers and that tiny bit of pretty lace below her dowdy skirts had the capacity to infinitely brighten a girl’s day.
But then Martha, with her grey hair and grim scowl, had always belonged in the same camp as her mother – the one that believed all clothing should be utilitarian and functional. Just like the way they approached life. Afraid of doing anything that might attract even a tiny bit of attention. And it was dull, dull, dull.
Should she be feeling guilty that she was free of them now? Probably, but she wasn’t. Instead she smiled, silently blessing the people in the tenement blocks, despite their terrible underwear. God bless you, she thought.
She ached to be right there. In the city. Amongst the people. The shops and theatres and cafés. They were all here – tantalizingly close. She could almost smell it. But how? How could she become a part of it? Now that she’d run away, what on earth was she going to do to get by? And, as if directed by her thoughts, her stomach let out an almighty growl of hunger.
She ducked out of sight now, as another train pulled up on a parallel track. It had dark-green livery, its windows embossed with gold lettering. Sneaking a peak, she saw a man in a smart suit stretching up to retrieve a leather suitcase from the overhead rack in one of the busy carriages.
Who knew where that train was going? Or this train, for that matter? In fact, now that she thought about it, perhaps this one wouldn’t stop at a passenger station at all. And how would she explain herself, if anyone caught her here amongst the machinery? She might get punished – or, worse, found out.
But on the other train, in a crowd, she could blend in and disappear. Quickly she grabbed her carpet bag from the corner. She had to get on that train right now. Her heart hammered with the decision she’d made. It was so risky. If anyone looked out of the window, they would see her.
Take everything one minute at a time, from now on. She forced the words into her head, as if she were spelling them out on the typewriter in Papa’s study.
‘Sixty seconds,’ she whispered, bracing herself. ‘Come on, Verity Casey. You can do it.’
She yanked her red woollen beret down low over her head and pulled up the collar of her coat. Then, quick as she could, she threw her bag onto the track and, willing herself to be all right, she jumped.
3
King’s Cross
She landed on the hard gravel, her heart pounding. She’d never felt so exposed, or so small. But her survival instinct kicked in as she looked at the great iron underbelly of the train with its terrifying pistons.
You can do this.
She picked up her skirts and hopped across the tracks onto the wooden sleepers, as if she were running away from Clement on the stepping stones across the brook. She’d always been faster than him. She always would be now.
The outside door of the train was higher than she’d expected. She hauled herself up onto the latticed metal step with difficulty, in order to reach the wooden handle. She heard a rip coming from one of her skirts as she yanked it free.
The door swung open towards her, almost making her lose her balance.
Sixty seconds. Nearly there . . .
She threw her bag into the carriage and then hauled herself up. Once through the door, she stood quickly, brushing herself down, realizing she was shaking all over. Had anyone seen her? It was hard to know, but suddenly the train was moving. Passengers began stirring in the compartments on either side of her.
‘Are you well, Miss?’ It was a man – a conductor, she realized with a jolt, his brow furrowing beneath his peaked cap, as he walked between the carriages and spotted her in the small walkway. A second earlier and he’d have seen her ungraceful entrance.
She watched him now as he looked from her to the wooden door, but she saw immediately that he had dismissed the thought that she could possibly have come from outside. She looked down at her knuckles, which were still scuffed and bloodied. She’d forgotten to put on her gloves and she needed to smarten up. To not look like . . . like – goodness, she could hardly even think the word – like a criminal.
She pressed herself against the corridor wall and shoved her hands behind her.
‘Taking some air, that’s all,’ she said, trying to mask the tremor in her voice with a haughty lift of her chin – just one of the things she’d picked up from those ghastly elocution lessons that her mother had insisted upon. She was aware that a strand of her long hair had fallen out of the bun she always wore it in, and she had to resist the urge to blow it away from her face.
‘Be careful, Miss. It’s a long way down to the track. Wouldn’t want a pretty young lady like you to fall out and ruin that nice coat,’ the conductor said, tipping his hat, before moving along into the next carriage. ‘King’s Cross in two minutes,’ she heard him say.
She looked down at her mother’s lilac checked wool coat. She realized now for the first time how conspicuous her clothes made her look, how the guard would already be able to identify her by her coat and hat, if anyone were to ask. But they wouldn’t, she reassured herself.
She was about to be just one person in a teeming metropolis.
She opened the window, leaning out as the platform came into view. Railway porters hauled trolleys along it through the crowd of passengers. The train slowed and shuddered to a halt in a bellowing hiss of steam beneath the round clock, the hands of which now clicked to half-past nine.
Anna – no, Verity, she reminded herself – opened the door and jumped down, before hurrying along the platform to a wooden bench. There she hastily pulled on the kid gloves she’d stolen from her mother’s tallboy. Then, pretending that she had somewhere important to be and holding her head high, she made her way with the crowd towards the ticket barrier.
A portly inspector with a bushy grey moustache was punching tickets as he ushered passengers through to the busy concourse. What would he do to her when he caught her without a ticket?
But she was Verity Casey and she was all brand new, she reminded herself. Verity Casey could very well have lost her ticket. She could very well be down from, say, York, and visiting her aunt in a smart London townhouse.
Believe me, she willed, approaching the inspector and smiling shyly at him. Cook had always told her that she could get anything by batting the eyelashes of her baby-blue eyes.
‘Ticket, Miss.’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ she said, laughing at her own silliness at not having it ready. She put her hand in the coat pocket of her mother’s coat, holding eye-contact with the guard and then frowning. ‘Oh, that’s strange. It was here a second ago,’ she said. She made a show of checking the other pocket and then her bag. ‘Oh no! Don’t say I’ve dropped it.’ She looked behind her at the ground, then back at the guard, believing her lie so thoroughly that she might actually be able to summon tears.
‘Excuse me. Excuse me!’ A woman directing a porter with a trolley full of luggage bustled up from behind. ‘Whatever is the hold-up? We’re in a hurry here.’
The inspector met Anna’s pleading eyes and made a decision. ‘Go through, Miss. But be more careful next time.’
4
Headlines
Clutching her bag and trying to look like she had a purpose, Anna headed out of the station, looking at the motorcars and omnibuses, the taxi cabs and the bicycles. It was noisy and quite overwhelming, and the air felt thick with fumes. But it was intoxicating to be in the city, nonetheless.