The door of the Hanrahans’ hovel hung lopsidedly in its frame, no more than a fragile demarcation of privacy. Louisa’s light tap brought no response, but, as she knocked harder, the door opened of its own accord, revealing a miserable, earth-floored room, with rickety wooden steps leading to an upper chamber. A black and empty fireplace faced her, with the remains of a broken chair beside it; a straw palliasse lay in one corner and as she and the boy stepped tentatively inside, a rat scuttled into deeper darkness beneath the stairs.
‘But there’s nobody here,’ she whispered to the boy.
He shrugged. ‘Might be up there,’ he said, indicating the upper room.
Louisa cleared her throat, but as she called Moira’s name, her voice sounded small and squeaky with nerves. She called again, more strongly this time, and was rewarded by the sound of someone moving above. The door at the head of the stairs scraped open a few inches, and a female voice, harsh and unrecognisable, shouted down for them to state their business.
The boy was nervous, and demanded his penny of Louisa. Fiercely, she shook her head and grasped his thin shoulder. She shouted her own name and asked to speak to Moira Hanrahan. At that, the door opened fully, a pair of booted feet appeared, followed by skirts and petticoats; but the light entering the dingy hovel was so feeble that the figure was almost at the foot of the stairs before Louisa was able to distinguish Moira’s face. Her black, curly hair was disarrayed, her normally rosy cheeks white and pinched with cold; she almost fell into Louisa’s arms.
‘Miss Elliott – oh, Miss Elliott – thank God!’ she cried as Louisa hugged her.
‘Can I have my penny now?’ the boy demanded.
‘Of course,’ Louisa said, releasing herself from Moira’s arms. In her relief she took two pennies from her pocket, and, giving a lopsided grin, the boy curled his fingers around the coins and dashed away.
Moira was weeping openly, the kind of helpless, silent tears which slide unbidden and unchecked. ‘I swear by all the saints, I’m glad to see you, Miss. But I’m that ashamed for you to see this place. Don’t tell on me, will you? Promise you’ll not tell Mrs Petty or Miss Tempest what a hole this is?’
‘Now why should I do that? Hush yourself and tell me what’s wrong.’
‘My Ma’s dying,’ the girl said, and began to sob. It took Louisa some time to calm her, to decipher the story between her outbursts of grief, but she finally understood that Moira had arrived home the previous afternoon to find her mother terribly ill with the ‘flu, and the house full of gossiping women. It was, however, empty of what little furniture the family had possessed. Jumping to the wrong conclusion, Moira had berated the lot of them and cleared the house, only to discover later that her young brother Sean was the culprit.
She had gone to the pub where he worked behind the bar, to hear a tale that reduced her to more tears in the telling. Having talked for months about his ticket to America, having saved at his mother’s expense, young Sean had finally taken their few saleable possessions and pawned them. Choking and sobbing over his ingratitude, Moira cursed his name for leaving their mother without food or fire, for leaving a sick woman to die of a broken heart.
‘And he had the nerve to tell Ma she’d be all right — I was coming soon and I’d look after her!’
With some trepidation, Louisa followed Moira up the rickety steps. The old Irishwoman lay gasping on a narrow truckle bed. Several thin blankets and Moira’s coat were laid across her, but there was no warmth in the room, no fireplace, and aside from a pile of straw and an old wooden sea-chest, no furniture.
‘She will die if you leave her here,’ Louisa said, feeling the woman’s burning forehead and cold hands, the barely-flickering pulse at her wrist. ‘She needs warmth and care. Why don’t you get a doctor?’
Moira looked down. ‘There’s no money for doctors.’
‘But she should be in hospital,’ Louisa protested.
‘You mean the workhouse,’ Moira said bitterly. ‘Ma would rather die here than wake up in that place.’
Louisa turned on her, angrily. ‘That’s a wicked thing to say! How can you let her die? You can’t look after her. There isn’t even a fire in here!’
Stubbornly, Moira shook her head. ‘She’s not going to the workhouse. I’ll manage somehow.’
With a sigh of frustration, Louisa looked around. ‘Then we must get her downstairs and make a fire. Can you get one of the neighbours to help?’
‘They don’t care much for me, since I moved away,’ Moira admitted, ‘And I cursed them all yesterday when I thought they’d made off with the chairs and things.’
Eventually, the girl was persuaded to go to the bar where Sean had worked; Louisa reasoned that the landlord might offer some assistance out of sympathy. To ease things, she gave Moira most of what money she had.
It seemed an age till her return, but return she did, with a burly friend of Sean’s who was willing to help. He eyed Louisa like a nervous horse, but with the coals and kindling he had brought he managed to coax a small fire into life, and reluctantly handed over the miniature of brandy that the landlord had sent. He moved the truckle bed, and carried the sick woman downstairs.
The activity drew forth observers from the other hovels. A female child of indeterminate age, with red-rimmed eyes and a sore, runny nose, was pushed forward by one of the women. Hesitant, fearful, she asked if there was anything to be done. Before Moira could send her away, Louisa thanked her kindly and went with her to where her mother stood, shawl pulled down across her forehead.
‘If any of you have the time and kindness to sit with Mrs Hanrahan, I’m sure her daughter would appreciate it,’ Louisa said slowly and clearly. ‘There’s a warm fire, and I intend to send out for some food.’
The woman’s eyes met hers for a fleeting second; the broken toe of her boot pushed at the mud in front of her. Finally, she nodded. ‘I could,’ she said at last.
‘There aren’t any chairs, I’m afraid.’
‘I’ll bring a stool,’ the woman said, and turned towards her own door.
Returning to Moira, Louisa told her to take the rest of the money to buy food. ‘I have to get back to Blossom Street, or Mr Tempest will think I’ve absconded too. This fog’s getting thicker, and it will be dark soon. I’ll try and come again tomorrow, but I can’t promise. If you should need me, go to the printing shop on Fossgate. It isn’t too far, and Mr Tempest will let me know.’
But this drove the girl into an even greater state of panic.
‘He’ll have her taken inside,’ she wept. ‘She’s going to die, I know she is, but I don’t want her to die in there. Mr Tempest will send the Guardians, I know he will.’
‘Moira,’ Louisa said firmly, ‘I have to tell him what’s going on. If I don’t, he’ll think you’ve run away and get another maid. You can’t afford to lose your job, now can you? I promise I’ll make it all right – I promise.’
Only half-convinced, Moira let the woman and her daughter in, taking Louisa back through the maze of stinking alleys to the main road; they parted by the bread shop where Louisa had met her young guide, and the smell of fresh bread reminded her that she, too, had not eaten all day; but it hardly seemed to matter.
In the broader reaches of Walmgate, the fog was thicker. Solitary figures passed, ghost-like, their footsteps muffled; it was impossible to see across the street, and getting darker by the minute. Louisa began to be afraid. All that she had read and heard about the area, coupled with what she had seen today, worked on her imagination, so that she shrank from shadows and halted to listen to muted noises.
She saw the glow of a lamplighter’s pole ahead of her and hoped that she could follow him to Fossgate and the more familiar parts of the town; but he was coming towards her, leaving only the gas lamps, like feeble glowworms, to guide her through the swirling fog. It stung her eyes, until she was sure she could see its particles dancing before them. It filled her nose and mouth so that she could taste its acrid edge, and distorted her sense of
hearing until she was sure she was being followed. All thoughts of Blossom Street were abandoned; the printing shop on Fossgate was the safety she was aiming for. Would she never reach the bridge? Panic ate into logic; she began to hurry, broke into a run, realised suddenly that the lights had disappeared, cobbles were beneath her feet, and she was lost.
The sound of horses’ hooves and heavy wheels increased her panic. In desperation, she ran forward, tripped over a pavement edge, and fell sideways against a brick-built wall.
Twelve
Both Edward and Albert Tempest were horrified at the state in which Louisa arrived, to the extent that Mr Tempest gave her a cup of tea in his own china cup, and offered to call a cab to take her back to Blossom Street. He insisted that he had known nothing of Moira’s circumstances.
That, as much as Louisa’s badly bruised and grazed cheek, infuriated Edward. ‘He should make it his business to know,’ he muttered as he helped Louisa into the cab. Edward’s eyes were anxious, showing more of his true fears than he realized. ‘It’s a bad area, Louisa. You were lucky — it could have been so much worse.’
‘I’m all right,’ she assured him, but she understood what he was trying to say: she might have been mistaken for a prostitute.
‘You mustn’t go there again. Promise me?’
Louisa sighed. ‘I’ve already promised Mr Tempest,’ she said quietly. ‘But I doubt he’ll do anything about Moira.’
‘If she comes here for help,’ Edward promised, ‘I’ll see to it myself.’
Stark images of Walmgate haunted Louisa that night. Hovels with thin walls and broken roofs, the damp earth floor of that downstairs room, and Moira’s mother, breathing feebly in the scant warmth from that smoky fire.
She had washed her hair and dried it in front of the schoolroom fire, had washed herself and donned fresh clothes, but hours later she could still smell the dank air of those filthy courts.
Tired and restless, the next day she was edgy to the point of anger, her patience with Victoria, and particularly Rachel, stretched to breaking point. The promise not to reveal the sordid facts of Moira’s existence had to be honoured, and she said little beyond the fact that the girl’s mother was ill, that Moira needed help, and this had delayed her return to Blossom Street. She was glad that the cause of her accident had been so mundane. After a while, the girls stopped asking questions.
Moira returned that evening. Albert Tempest saw her in his study, with only Louisa present. He did not want his daughters’ ears sullied by unnecessary details.
Shaking with cold and shock, Moira gave him the bald facts: that her mother had died in the early hours of that morning, the doctor had come to verify her death, and her mother’s body had been taken to the mortuary. She would be buried in a public grave, as there was no money for a proper funeral.
Albert Tempest grunted a few conventional words of condolence, but Louisa privately suspected him of being unconcerned. The fact that Moira’s mother was a Roman Catholic seemed to relegate her, in his eyes, to a position beyond sympathy. To him she would be one of the undeserving, feckless poor, to whom it was immaterial where they lived or died. He did, however, give Moira permission to attend the funeral.
Louisa took Moira into the kitchen for a warming drink and something to eat, and, ignoring Mrs Petty’s clucks and sniffs, made the girl comfortable beside the blazing kitchen fire.
Later that evening, needing to talk to Moira for her own conscience’ sake, she went up to her attic room. She asked whether Moira’s family had always lived in Butcher’s Yard, and the girl’s eyes filled with tears as she shook her head.
‘When we first came to York we lived in a proper house by Fishergate Postern. Pa had a good job on the railway, and never did he touch a drop, God rest his soul. He was killed, though, when I’d be ten — after that things got a mite desperate. Ma tried hard, but she was never what you’d call a good manager — the older ones left, you know, sent a few shillings when they could, nothing regular. Ma ended up in Butcher’s Yard a couple of years after I was sent into service. Just a skivvying job, you know, like Ellen. It was a good place, though — I don’t know why I moved. Still,’ she said with a shrug, ‘it’s a job, to be sure, and now Ma’s gone I can be thinking of moving on. I’ve a sister in London – maybe she’d look out something for me.’
Her voice, strangely quiet, was still so rich with the accents of Ireland that Louisa said she had imagined Moira a more recent immigrant.
‘Ah well,’ the girl smiled. ‘When it was secrets they were keeping, Ma and Pa still talked the Gaelic. And you know it’s all Irish they are down Walmgate — a real home from home for Irishmen, whether from Donegal or County Cork. And don’t they all hate each other,’ she laughed, ‘fighting in lumps on a Saturday night!’
‘So which county were you born in?’
‘Me? I was born in Waterford — the city, that is. Not that you’d be knowing it for a city, Miss Elliott – excepting the slums, it’s nothing like York, nothing at all...’ She went on to describe the poverty, the lack of work and her own parents’ reasons for leaving, while Louisa listened in horror.
The mention of Waterford brought Robert Duncannon vividly to mind; as though he whispered in her ear, she heard him saying that wealth and privilege were not everything, and his sincerity sickened her. It might not be everything to him, but even a tiny portion of that wealth could work miracles for people like Moira and her family. His family’s position, no doubt founded on the suffering of others, was intolerable. She would never again be able to look into his eyes without seeing Moira’s mother in that appalling hovel; and the image of that boy, old before his time.
Thirteen
When Louisa arrived home on Saturday morning, Bessie was black-leading the cold kitchen range. A little packet of soft graphite stood with a stone mixing jar and several brushes and cloths on a paper by the hearth. Polishing energetically, she looked up at Louisa’s greeting, revealing black hands and a comically smudged nose. Louisa grinned as she dropped a kiss on the older woman’s forehead.
‘You look nearly as pretty as I do, Bessie, with that black blob on the end of your nose.’
Almost as a reflex action, Bessie wiped it with the back of her hand, and Louisa laughed outright. ‘Now you’ve made it worse!’
Bessie grumbled and stood up, seeing Louisa’s grazed cheek for the first time. ‘Oh, my lamb, is that what you did the other day? Mr Edward told us —’
‘It’s not so bad, Bessie. The bruise is coming out now, which makes it look worse than it is. I must admit, though, I was glad I didn’t meet anyone I knew coming through town.’
Gathering up her brushes and cloths, Bessie grunted. ‘Aye, well, you’ve a visitor coming today.’
‘A visitor? Who?’
‘That gentleman who stayed here. Him that called, the day of Miss Elizabeth’s funeral.’
Louisa rescued the tabby cat from Bessie’s feet, burying her face in its soft fur to cover her agitation. ‘You mean Captain Duncannon?’
‘Aye, that’ll be him,’ Bessie replied with a sniff, and proceeded to light the already laid fire. While it burned up, she scrubbed the hearth, fortunately ignoring Louisa, who stood with the cat in her arms. The tabby purred and nuzzled her, its paws ecstatically kneading her shoulder and breast.
‘He called the other evening — Thursday I think it was. I know it was still foggy, but I think he came by cab... Talked to Miss Mary in the parlour, I took them some tea in. Anyway, she must have told him about your fall, because she said he was calling today to see how you were.’
Inwardly, Louisa groaned. He would decide to call today, when she was looking and feeling dreadful. ‘You don’t sound very approving, Bessie,’ she commented, wondering whether she should refuse to see him.
Bessie sniffed again as she sat back on her haunches and surveyed the fire. ‘Well, Miss Louisa, I’ll be honest – Miss Emily put the wind up me when he was staying here. She said he was trouble, and I can’t help but
think she was right. I know you’re a bonny lass, but it’s what his intentions are that worries me.’
The cat gave a little cry of protest as Louisa involuntarily squeezed it to her breast. Suddenly she was very angry. No matter her own opinion of Robert Duncannon, Bessie had no right to cast aspersions upon his character.
‘You needn’t worry on that score, Bessie,’ she said sharply, adding, for good measure, ‘He’s nothing to me, whatever his intentions. Just because Mamma seems dazzled by his station in life doesn’t mean to say that I am. I thought I might be out when he called, but I’ve changed my mind. Perhaps if he sees me like this, it might just put him off for good.’ She dropped the cat unceremoniously onto a chair, and opened the bag she had brought from Blossom Street.
‘Can you get these things clean for me? They’re badly stained around the hems, I’m afraid.’
Bessie took the bundle of linen and examined the damage to Louisa’s dress. ‘Oh, I’ll have these clean in no time. Look, why don’t you sit down and let me make you a nice cup of tea?’
While Bessie continued with her jobs, Louisa sipped her tea, feeling strangely exhausted. The cat leaped up, turning itself round and round until it was comfortable. She stroked it absently, gazing out of the kitchen window, at the long, narrow yard, shadowed by the looming city wall. The sky above was brightly blue, with little scudding clouds driven by a sharp wind. It was almost the end of February, and tomorrow would be Leap Year’s Day. A mocking half-smile appeared on her lips as she thought of the old custom. What a pity today was not the twenty-ninth, she thought bitterly, else she could have asked the Captain to marry her, and what would he have said to that?
Interrupting her thoughts like a warning knell, the booming bells of the Minster beyond the wall struck twelve, and a glass on the window-ledge vibrated in unison against the pane.
Louisa Elliott Page 12