by Gary Dolman
The cots were built in stacks four high in the dormitories to save Mr Walton valuable floor space, and she was lucky because hers was a topmost cot and that meant that there was only the thin slates of the roof between her and the Heavens above.
Because hers was a topmost cot, she didn’t suffer from the apprentice boys creeping in from their own dormitory next door and gawping and probing at her whilst she slept. There were no boys and there were no demons to peer into her coffin or to carry her away. The little wooden cots had needed no bell; no bell that would ring and ring and ring as the demons slipped inside and dragged her down to the Eighth Circle of Hell.
She didn’t mind the cold either, because it helped to keep her from sleeping. It was whilst she was sleeping that the memories would come. They knew somehow when she was too exhausted for busy or for her knife. They would come and they would spill into her dreams and turn them into nightmares. But if she succumbed, if she could hold off sleep no longer, Lizzie would often – mercifully – be awoken, and not only by the cold. She would be woken too by the little girls as they whimpered and cried from being hurt in the mill, or by the stench of their greasy, unwashed bodies, or, as was more usually the case, she would be woken by her own nightmares.
One Sunday, when she couldn’t be busy in the mill because God had said that no-one could be busy on that day, whilst she was soothing her mind with her whetstone and her knife, a memory spilled into her daydream. And because that day was a day of rest, when even God couldn’t be busy, the memory was of a demon. On that day a demon did peer into the coffins of the apprentice house.
It had come with a gentle knock on the door of the dormitory. The blade of her knife had trembled against the whetstone even though she knew it must be Tom who had knocked, because her Uncle Alfie never knocked.
“Girls,” he had said in his deep, slow, tick-tock voice, “And Lizzie,” (just as if she was a proper grown woman and not a little girl at all), “I would like all o’ ye to pay attention. I have a nurse here who has come from t’ other side o’ Harrogate to tend to thy injuries.”
Lizzie peered over the edge of her topmost cot and saw a thin, black shadow standing next to Tom; a thin, dark shadow blocking the light of the doorway.
She shuddered.
“Mr Walton ’as agreed it. A lot o’ ye ’ave been getting hurt in t’ machines an’ this lady has come ’ere as a philanthropist to help ye. She’s been visiting all o’ t’ ‘prentice houses round Knaresborough and doing it all from t’ goodness o’ her heart. She won’t be charging thee or Mr Walton or anyone else a farthing.
She’ll be a-coming round your beds to inspect all o’ ye for injuries so ye must speak nicely and respectfully and take care to do exactly as she says.”
Lizzie fell back flat against her mattress, her heart pounding like the big steam engine that churned and throbbed in the shed by the river.
‘She mustn’t know I’m here. She mustn’t see my cuts. She mustn’t ever stop me from cutting myself.’
Instinctively she pulled her shift tight against the stinging lines on her breasts, shielding them with her hands and lay, as still as a corpse, horrified at the thought of a life where there could be no more pain.
The sound of the woman came closer, growing louder and louder and louder. She was moving from cot to cot and the poor little girls were calling for her, begging for her to go to them, begging for the nurse – for the angel of mercy.
Little girls who beg for mercy seldom deserve it.
The angel passed along the coffins, peering in. It was checking the girls, examining them, sorting them. It was like an angel on the Day of Judgement, like an angel in black – an Angel of Death.
It was down there now – examining the girl in the cot just below her. She closed her eyes and stopped her breath and waited.
“You’re a pretty little thing,” the angel whispered to the girl in the cot below her. “Do you like working here? Answer me truly, my dear.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl in the cot below dutifully answered.
“The mill only pays you tuppence a week I believe. How would you like to earn pounds and pounds?”
Like an abscess bursting, the worst memory of all, the very worst memory and all of the other memories, every one of the foul and loathsome horde, poured from the secret black places of her mind. A great billow of dread rolled over her as she lay in her coffin and her brain shrieked and shrieked and screamed the name of the angel, of the Angel of Death:
‘Mrs Eire.’
Old Rachel had told her of her other name as together they had slashed the whin bushes on the Stray. Old Rachel had said that Mrs Eire was nothing more than a common procuress.
Her brain shrieked and shrieked and Lizzie whispered the word: “Procuress.”
“I know some nice gentlemen with big houses in Harrogate who would love to have a pretty little thing like you…”
“PROCURESS!”
Her brain shrieked and screamed and now Lizzie screamed. She screamed the name, the other name that Rachel had taught her as they pretended that the dense, spiny stands of whin bush were Mrs Eire and they slashed and slashed and slashed.
“SHE’S A PROCURESS, A COMMON PROCURESS!”
Over the edge of her topmost coffin, Lizzie could see Mrs Eire, the common procuress staring up at her as the girls around them jumped up and screamed too. Her eyes were like Uncle Alfie’s eyes when he had stood in front of the empty black waters of the North Sea, slipping silently past the shore of the Holy Island. They were the very eyes of the Devil.
“You!” she hissed like a serpent. “It’s you, Alfred Roberts’ two hundred pound whore. So this is where Barty Price had you sent, is it? To spend your days weaving linen? That’s good. The Friday Club needs lots of fresh, clean linen for their beds, Lizzie, so they can…”
“HELP,” she screamed, “Tom, please help us. She’s taking the girls away for the gentlemen’s beds.”
And Tom had come. He hadn’t knocked, but neither had he crept in like a shadow, as Uncle Alfie or Mr Otter might have done. He had burst through the door as a saviour, into the shrieking, shrieking screams of the girls. And Mrs Eire, the common procuress, had fled. The demon had paid visit, and now, mercifully, it had gone.
Afterwards, when the girls had stopped screaming and her mind had stopped shrieking, Lizzie had begun to feel like a heroine. As she lay in her topmost cot in the apprentice house and watched the rainbow colours slide up and down the edge of her blade, she remembered Grace Darling. Grace Darling had been a heroine too; she had saved thirteen lives that surely would otherwise have been lost. Lizzie might not have saved the lives of the little girls sleeping, safe and quiet now in the cots all around her, but she had certainly, certainly saved their souls.
Just a few nights after she had begun to feel like a heroine, she had awoken in her little cot in the apprentice house to find a dead moth lying beside her on her mattress. Someone had told her that it was a mother shipton moth, named for the witch who had been born in the cave just over the river. They had pointed out the curious pattern on the wings, like two hags’ heads facing each other, and Lizzie had been thrilled. But now, the more she thought about it all as she lay awake in her topmost cot and watched the rainbows slide along her blade, the more she was convinced that it must have been Old Mother Shipton herself who had sent it.
For the moth was surely a messenger, bringing the word that everything would be fine, that the End of the World was coming, just as she had said it would, and that she, Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson, a heroine just like Grace Darling, could die at last.
She had asked more about the witch – no, surely not a witch – the prophetess. Tom had called her a prophetess and not a witch, and Tom seemed to know everything.
Old Mother Shipton – Ursula Shipton, she was told – had made many other startling prophesies during her lifetime. And every single one of them, she was promised, just as Tom who knew everything had promised, had come true.
They also told her that many people had thought Old Mother Shipton wicked whilst she lived. In fact, many had thought that she was a witch. They thought that her mama, Agatha Sontheil, was a wicked and sinful woman too, even that she was a harlot. They said that Mother Shipton had no mortal papa and wondered why they both hadn’t been thrown into the witch pool to see if they drowned.
But maybe, Lizzie thought as she lay awake in her topmost cot, maybe Old Mother Shipton wasn’t wicked at all. Maybe she was good and in Heaven at that very moment with the Lord Jesus and her own dear mama. Maybe she felt sorry for her, Lizzie Wilson, as she looked down from Heaven. Perhaps she even felt, just as Lizzie herself felt, that they were so very alike, with everyone thinking them wicked, with harlot mamas and with no papas. Maybe, just maybe, Mother Shipton wanted to help her.
One day, Tom told them that the great viaduct, built high over the River Nidd, was almost finished at last. The temporary wooden falsework arches supporting the spans were to be dropped clear, the rails laid, and Knaresborough was to be joined to the railway. He said that Mr John Walton intended to use the railway to take his famous ‘Knaresborough Linens’ to the big cities across Yorkshire and even to London to be sold. It would of course be commercial folly not to.
But then, on March the Eleventh, as she could never forget, as she was fastening a broken thread for what seemed to be the hundredth time that day, there was a rumble exactly like that of thunder over the constant roar of the looms. The weavers, their work forgotten, ran to peer through the little grimy windows, and Lizzie ran with them. There was nothing outside but clear, blue skies. But there had definitely been a rumble exactly like thunder and she wondered, she wondered with all her heart, if it could be – if it could really be the End of the World.
A wave, a great boiling, angry wall of water surged round the curve of the river, dragging its arms along the banks and sweeping everything aside. Behind it, a grey, billowing storm cloud – no, not a storm cloud, a cloud of glory – was filling the gorge and smothering everything in its path.
Lizzie fell to her knees and sobbed in grateful relief.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you, Mother Shipton.’
Old Mother Shipton had smiled on her from Heaven. She had sent her moth and Lizzie was not afraid. She gave thanks that this was surely Armageddon, and the Lord Jesus was coming at last in His Clouds of Glory.
People were running. Everywhere, people were running and screaming and shouting. Then the word went round, from window to window, from bay to bay:
‘The viaduct has collapsed. The railway bridge has fallen into the river!’
It was true. Even before it was finished, Thomas Grainger’s great viaduct had fractured and collapsed, and been swallowed up by the Nidd.
Hadn’t it been foretold? Had Ursula Shipton not prophesied that once the high bridge fell, the End of the World would surely come? The viaduct was the highest bridge of all. One and eight and eight and one made eighteen. She was eighteen. One and eight and eight and one was the same whichever way you looked at it. She could hear her cousin’s voice – John’s voice – echoing through her mind.
‘It’s symmetrical, Lizzie. Look, it has a central line of symmetry.’
The moth was the same, the moth that she was sure Ursula Shipton had sent to her – it was symmetrical too. And so was the bridge. Dear Lord, so was the bridge. It was perfectly symmetrical with four pillars just like the four numbers, two small at either end, two large in the middle. And more: When the perfect, round, falsework arches had reflected in the waters of the Nidd, they had formed the number eight. The pillars were number ones. The viaduct had formed an enormous number, just as Ursula Shipton had foretold: It was one and eight and eight and one, and now – now the bridge had fallen. It wasn’t the road bridge Mother Shipton had spoken about in her prophesy, it was the rail bridge – the viaduct. The viaduct was – it truly was – the highest bridge of all.
She reeled, almost overwhelmed by the waves of sudden realisation that were sweeping over her:
‘Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.’
Those were her words. Railway carriages had no horses and there didn’t seem a day could go by when there wasn’t a railway accident on some line or other… or bridge. And this bridge –the viaduct – was the highest bridge of all.
‘The World shall End when the High Bridge is thrice fallen.’
Tom had told her – had promised her – that the old high bridge had fallen twice already. And now there was a new high bridge, and now it had fallen too. They were thrice fallen and the world was going to end.
She closed her eyes and hung her head, trembling in an obeisance of excitement and anticipation.
‘Oh, come for me, Lord Jesus. I am ready and I am waiting for Your loving embrace. There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away. Amen’
The waters of the Nidd turned black. They writhed and boiled and filled with the detritus of Armageddon itself: crushed and splintered falsework timbers, shredded canvass shrouds, chattels washed from the riverbanks, and a boy.
A boy!
Lizzie opens her eyes. She looks and sees him; she sees a boy lying face down in the icy waters of the North Sea, being pulled into a fishing coble, and she hears again Little Sarah’s scream of terror. It compounds inside her head with the shrieks and the screams of the End of the World and with the clattering of the looms, and grows louder and louder and louder.
‘There’s a boy. There truly is a boy in the water.’
She runs. She runs through the weaving shed to the stairwell beyond. Round and round, down and down the spiral stairway, as fast as her legs and the panic deep in her belly will let her. She heaves open the door at the bottom and runs out into the yard. The air, thick now with the Cloud of Glory, fills her mouth, her throat, choking her heaving lungs.
She kicks off her slippers and dodges and pushes her way to the engine shed, to where the river is grasping and clawing at the swarming crowd.
“Where is he?” she screams, “The boy, where has he gone?”
‘Oh, please, Lord Jesus, please don’t let him have drowned. He is so very little.’
The people from the mill have heard her and they look too, pressing around her, jostling like hydrangeas for a better view.
‘But why are they just standing there, staring but doing nothing? Why won’t they help? Why don’t they tell me where he is?’
She runs along the bank, pleading with them.
“Please, for the love of God, have you seen Peter Lovegood? No, not Peter Lovegood, the other boy.” she means. “Can you see him? Tell me! Help me, please?”
A white shape turns on the surface of the water and slides into the current of the old mill race. It’s him! She leaps. The current, overpowering and unstoppable with the strength of twenty-five horses, pulls her down and suffocates her. It spins her around and pushes her into the narrow channel too. She sees him just ahead of her. Like something preternatural, the shape that is the boy twists and loops in the surging current, rushing further and further away. She reaches out, straining to catch it. The mill race bottoms; the shape slows, and becomes languid in the exhausted current, and she has it. She has it grasped in her hand – no, not it; him – she has him tight in her grasp. Her foot strikes something hard and she kicks against it. There is fresh, cool air on her face. She gasps at it and feels it rush into her lungs.
And then a power that is not her own takes hold of her and she ascends from the water. It is the Lord Jesus come for her at last.
But no, it’s not the Lord Jesus; it’s Tom, just Tom, in the water with her. He has Peter Lovegood – no, not Peter Lovegood – the boy; he has the little boy in his hands too, and he lifts both of them up onto the riverbank. The boy is coughing, coughing and vomiting out river water. He’s alive.
‘Oh, thank you, Lord Jesus for letting him be alive. He is so lit
tle, too little to be dead, and far too little to be lost to his dear mama.’
Because the next day was Sunday, that accursed day of rest, Mr John Walton himself invited her up to his big house outside the town. Tom was there too. He was there in his capacity as mill foreman, dressed in his very best Sunday clothes. They were to take tea with Mr Walton as a special treat and to celebrate her famous deed of courage.
Mr John Walton himself had declared that she, Elizabeth Beatrice Wilson, was a true North Country heroine. She had not of course saved as many lives as Grace Darling had done, but she had been very courageous nonetheless, considering that she was just a workhouse apprentice girl. And Mr John Walton had declared that if there had been a shipload of little boys in the Nidd that day, then Elizabeth surely would have saved them all too.
Grace Darling had saved thirteen souls from certain death and she, Elizabeth Wilson had saved just one, and he was very little. But she knew, and Tom knew that she had also saved the souls of the little girls in the apprentice house, and she knew, and perhaps Tom knew too, that she had saved a mama the agony of having her precious little boy taken away to Heaven.
It turned out that no-one except Tom and Mr John Walton had realised that she was a heroine, just as Grace Darling had been, and she was glad of that. She was relieved because with the collapse of the viaduct and the damming of the river and the flooding of the town, her famous act of heroism hadn’t been reported in the Harrogate Advertiser at all.
Uncle Alfie read the Harrogate Advertiser, and she shuddered to think how he might have read about her and her famous deed of courage, and how, in a philanthropic moment, he might have come to seek her out once more.
She didn’t suppose the Lord Jesus read the Harrogate Advertiser, because as she had learned at Sunday school, He was omniscient. So she was sure that He would have known about her famous deed of courage, and so would her mama and Old Mother Shipton. Mother Shipton had sent her moth to tell her that the End of the World would surely come. One and eight and eight and one made eighteen and the bridge had fallen. Now she had saved a boy and the souls of the girls and she was a heroine, just like Grace Darling had been a heroine and Grace had only to endure life until she was twenty-seven.