The Slaidburn Angel

by M. Sheelagh Whittaker

  As the months went by, Margaret began calling Grace “mother,” a name that brought a deep smile strong enough to make it all the way to Grace’s soft eyes.

  A Surprise Visit from Aunt Isabella

  Grace stood speechless in the kitchen at Meanley, the letter John had brought still clutched in her hand.

  A visit from Isabella would be a great treat and her mother’s letter said that Isabella could be spared from her work long enough to wait with Grace for the new baby. The companionship and the help of another pair of woman’s hands would be a wonderful relief, especially since the work to be done around the farm was steadily increasing as the days lengthened.

  But what was her family thinking? Isabella, at least, knew that Grace had not told John about Thomas, and their ma had always been so accommodating before. Look how they had let Jane keep poor little Edward at the family home. Why the sudden need now to have Grace look after her own?

  What was she to do with little Thomas? What was she to tell John? The pregnancy and the wedding had come upon her so quickly, she still hadn’t found the right time to tell John about the little one she had left back in Ulverston. If she was honest with herself, she had to admit that she had been afraid to tell John about Thomas, afraid that even such a kind and loving man could be pushed too far.

  With Isabella and Thomas almost due to arrive, she was filled with dread. She would have to head off Isabella and make sure that they both told the same story about why she was travelling with a child, and he would simply have to go back with her. Harsh as it seemed, Meanley could never be his new home.

  John seemed very pleased that Isabella was coming to wait with her. Jane had always had her sister nearby in the village and John was glad that Grace would have a sister nearby too. For their part, the children were excited by the prospect of a visitor. Maggie and Matt were hoping that they would be allowed to stay home from school to greet their new aunt Isabella, but Grace was having none of that.

  It was a cheerful pair who arrived at the station to be met by John, Grace, and baby James, and fortunately John scooped up Tom in his arms and hurried him to the trap, giving Grace a moment to whisper to Isabella that John did not know that Thomas was her child. Isabella, at first taken aback that Grace had not yet found the nerve to tell John about Thomas, quickly rose to the occasion. By the time she, Grace, and James had caught up with John and the toddler and bundled themselves into the borrowed conveyance, she had concocted a story about being asked to care for Thomas while his mother was indisposed.

  On the way back to Meanley, Isabella cheerfully described their trip and gave fresh news of the family in Dalton-in-Furness. John was used to Grace’s quiet ways so it was no surprise to him that she didn’t say much, just busied herself feeding James and tickling Thomas with her feet. Thomas, unaccustomed to such attention, giggled softly and patted all the boots that he found himself amongst with his little hands.

  Once they arrived back at Meanley, the waiting children ran off with Thomas to show him their horse, Bonny, while Grace and Isabella set about to preparing some tea for the family. Grace shushed Isabella in the kitchen. There would be time enough for talking about what to do with Thomas after John was off across the fields at work.

  A Wonderful Place to Be

  Grace stood in the room flooded with May sunshine and fervently wished that something would happen to spare her telling John the truth about Thomas.

  How can this room full of sunshine warm my skin when my thoughts make me feel so dark and cold inside? she wondered.

  When Grace first came to work at Meanley, part of what seemed to have won John’s heart was her enthusiasm for the house and the farm. From the start she had loved how the house flooded with light from the huge windows, which had originally been built to provide light for cottage weavers working at hand looms. Just standing in the yard looking at the vista out toward Slaidburn had enabled her to begin to hope that she was safe at last.

  John had explained to her that his great-grandfather, a mason like himself, had built the walls of the farmhouse.

  “Isherwood sweat is in the mortar of Meanley Farm,” he proclaimed proudly.

  At first he had told her frequently how pleased he and Jane had been to gain the tenancy of Meanley, but as the relationship with Grace deepened he mentioned Jane less and less often.

  In their own way, the children loved Meanley as intensely as their father did. She could see their faces brighten when John talked about Isherwood sweat. The farm felt like a relative to them, a member of their own family.

  Isabella, too, had been admiring of Grace’s new home. To Isabella’s way of thinking, her sister’s situation was troubling but not impossible. Isabella believed that all that was required was the slow patient integration of Thomas into the Isherwood household, followed by a painful confessional evening of tears and requests for forgiveness, and Grace’s life would be finally back on track.

  “Isabella overestimates my charm and underestimates a husband’s pride,” Grace murmured sadly to herself.

  Old Enough to Observe, too Young to Understand

  My grandmother Margaret was just newly nine years old when Isabella and Thomas arrived at the farm. I imagine she welcomed the diversion provided by the visitors, and the chance to break routine, not to mention the treats they might get to eat.

  Nine years old can be an age of both wonder and premature wisdom. At nine you can do a lot of things on your own, but you still like to be cuddled and kissed goodnight by your parents. A dolly, especially one with blue eyes, a blue dress, and wings made of real feathers, can still hold an important place in a girl’s heart, even when it is surrounded by real live babies.

  At nine you can observe a lot, and adults often underestimate your acuity. And sometimes parents, because they want so badly to believe it, can convince themselves that you are comfortably handling emotions, even though you are not.

  When you don’t have the knowledge and the vocabulary for adult experience, you substitute words and ideas that you know for those that you do not comprehend. You do not even always know that you don’t understand what is happening.

  When I was nine a stranger tried to rape my sister. She ran into the house screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, a man just tried to raid me.” Or so I thought she said.

  My father immediately reached over, picked up the phone, and called the police, which struck me as a strange reaction to his daughter’s cries of upset about a man trying to “raid” her. What was even more surprising, and scary, was that the police came over to our house right away and talked in serious voices with my sister and my dad in the hall outside my room. I remember hearing a policewoman’s voice asked for a brown paper bag in which to put my sister’s trousers.

  Many years later, looking back on that confusing and frightening night, I realized that the word that she had been saying was, of course, rape.

  Hardly any of us have the emotional experience or the vocabulary for murder, especially child murder. While life on a farm puts you closer to the animal experience of life and death, that doesn’t help you with people, especially those closest to you. Nine-year-old Margaret’s experience with death was centred entirely on the loss of her mother. Unlike in her mother’s childhood, none of Margaret’s siblings had died as infants, and her grandparents were all deceased before she was born.

  In fact, it seems almost impossible to think what experiences could have prepared the nine-year-old Maggie for what was about to happen to her, including appearing as a witness at a murder trial and then departing forever from Meanley Farm and the life she had loved there.

  Bewildering and Frightening Times

  It was all so bewildering. One day everyone was excited and having sweets for tea, and the next day her new mother looked sick and pale and their visitors didn’t seem like fun anymore.

  When the pretty young woman she had been told to call Aunt Isabella showed up at Meanley with a little boy whose name was Thomas Dockrah, it looked like they could al
l have a bit of a holiday, maybe even go on a picnic or something. Isabella didn’t bother much with Thomas, but Margaret knew her way around little boys; her own brother Tom was much of an age with Thomas and they had lots of fun playing in the fields. Margaret found Thomas Dockrah to be a sweet little boy and so quiet you would hardly know he was there.

  Still, the atmosphere of the visit was tense and strange. Isabella and Grace kept going off to whisper to each other, with Grace anxious and Isabella increasingly impatient. And her dad seemed surprisingly gruff.

  Maggie was feeding the two Toms a slice of bread in the kitchen when she heard Isabella and her mother talking.

  “I’m can’t go back to Dalton with Thomas, our ma and pa said it was time that you looked after your own. And I’ve got to get back to my job or I’ll lose it,” hissed Isabella.

  “John will never forgive me for lying. I told him that James’s father had deceived me with promises of marriage when it turned out he had a wife already. What will he think when he knows that I had a child even before I left Dalton?” moaned Grace.

  “Ma’s sick and she just can’t take care of him and all the others,” argued Isabella. “And you have such a good place to look after him here.”

  All week long Isabella and Grace held hushed conversations. Sometimes Grace would end up crying.

  “He’s such a mite, but he doesn’t know me. How can I keep him? I have to think about caring for the little one that John and I will soon have,” she sobbed.

  Unbeknownst even to Maggie, many plans were developed and discarded before Isabella and Grace hit on the plan to take young Thomas and put him in the Clitheroe workhouse.

  Isabella had insisted that she would not take him back to the Ulverston workhouse — her mam was just done taking him out of there. She had no wish to drag the child back to Cumbria, and she feared her parent’s wrath if she arrived back at home with him still in tow.

  They fixed on a plan. Grace was desperate to get the child out of the house, so on Saturday they announced that they were going to reunite Thomas with his mother at the train station and then do some marketing in Clitheroe. They knew there was a workhouse there and had convinced themselves that it was the solution to the problem of Tom.

  The neighbours over at Chapel Croft agreed to lend the women their trap for the journey, and John walked over with them to help harness the horse. To Grace’s horror, John suggested that he go along with them, but then he decided of his own accord that he had better stay near home and help his neighbour mend his barn door.

  By the time she, Isabella, and the two children finally managed to set off for Clitheroe, Grace was shaking with anxiety. She felt weak and nauseated and had been too nervous to eat any breakfast back at Meanley.

  When John suggested he might join them on their trip to the market, she had been horrified, then relieved when he changed his mind. She felt her emotions had been tied to the pulley in the barn, up and down they went. She had been touched by John’s helpfulness in asking Tom Rushton if they could borrow the trap and in harnessing the horse for her, and she felt sickened by her deceit of such a kind, good, generous man.

  Her little Tom was a good sweet child and he sat quietly on the floor of the trap as they drove along. He was silent and undemanding, as usual. Even at his young age, he was quite accustomed to unexplained changes in his life.

  Isabella chattered incessantly as they drove along. Now that she had Grace alone at last, with a plan to get rid of Tom, she was full of questions about Grace’s life: How had she got pregnant with Tom? Why didn’t the baby’s father marry her? How could she have let it happen again with James? What did she think about sister Jane and her little one? Why did the Gardner girls seem to fall pregnant with no husbands? Did John suspect that Grace was Tom’s mother? Had she told him about Jane’s little lost boy? Did he imagine the baby was actually Jane’s or even Isabella’s?

  Grace’s brief answers did little to enlighten Isabella. Made even more tired and ill by the new child in her womb, she seemed sunk into depression. She passed little James over to Isabella to hold so that she could manage the horse and she stared grimly at the road ahead.

  The road to Clitheroe is hilly and lightly travelled, and the countryside can seem very bleak. The air was cool, especially in the shade, and they all moved closer together to keep warm.

  The women had no plan for Thomas beyond leaving him at the workhouse. It was not Grace’s intention to come and reclaim him later. She had never really lived with him and she didn’t see how she could start now. He was going to the workhouse to stay until he was old enough and strong enough to find some kind of work to do. Maybe, some day, he could work on a farm. She had heard that some of the workhouse children were sent to work in the mills but she didn’t know what kind of work children did in such places. Such prospects seemed a long way off right now.

  A Bizarre and Tragic Day

  The long straight pathway leading up to the door of the Clitheroe Union Workhouse was bordered on either side with ugly gnarled and twisted trees. The scene was cold and forbidding. But then, so was the matron.

  Little Thomas had been in the Ulverston workhouse for several months of the previous year, so it never even occurred to Grace and Isabella that there would be any problem leaving him here in Clitheroe. The news that he needed a bill of admission totally confounded their plan.

  There was nothing left for them but to take Thomas back to Meanley and confess all to John. The prospect rendered Grace almost helpless with horror.

  Still they had to get a grip on themselves; they had two little children to look after, goods to pick up, and errands to run. While they had set off early, the journey home would take some time, and John would be looking out for their arrival home.

  The return trip was long and silent. Grace drove, lost in her own thoughts, sighing from time to time, while Isabella held tight to baby James, who was conveniently asleep. Little Tom travelled silently on the floor of the trap, in his nest of rugs.

  At last, weary but somehow almost peaceful, they pulled up in the yard at Meanley. But when they began to unload the trap, Isabella suddenly told Grace that she feared Thomas was dead.

  Immediately, the yard outside of Meanley was filled with rush and confusion. After a hasty exchange, Isabella scooped up Thomas, wrapped him in her shawl, and set off down the meadow toward Slaidburn. Grace went indoors, handed baby James over to Maggie to change and put to bed with barely a word of greeting or instruction, then went off over the fields in the same direction as Isabella. The trap and horse were simply left abandoned in the yard.

  An hour later, John came home to find Grace and Isabella gone again, so soon after their return, with the horse and trap still standing in his yard. Shocked at their behaviour, he went looking for his wife and her sister.

  Meanwhile, the two women were walking about the countryside in a state of near hysteria, trying to think what to do with the dead child. Desperate, they finally decided to leave it by the stream below the Langcliffe Cross Bridge. Isabella had to hoist herself over the wall, then Grace passed her the little body. She slipped several times trying to get it down to the water’s edge, but they both felt certain that no one could see the little shape from above.

  It was Grace’s idea to keep some of the clothes, her need to look after the soon-to-be living overriding her sorrow for the dead.

  Dusk was falling as they passed some people out walking, but the sisters hoped that they just looked like they were on a walk of their own.

  To Isabella fell the burden of thinking up a story about where they had left young Thomas. Grace claimed she simply couldn’t think at all and Isabella agreed rather waspishly that this certainly did seem to be the case.

  It was late and becoming cold when John finally caught up with them. Isabella now had the shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders and Grace was shivering so much her teeth were chattering.

  The next morning Maggie asked where Thomas had gone. She had seen Isabella with
what seemed to be a child in her arms in the yard, and she was curious about why the women had hurried off. The adults were preoccupied and paid her questions no heed, but that didn’t stop her wondering.

  Some of Thomas Dockrah’s clothes had been brought back to the house — his jacket, frock, socks, and boots. It seemed very strange to Maggie that he had gone back to his mam without all his clothes.

  Her dad seemed sad and that worried Maggie. Dad usually was the one to put on a cheerful face, even when things were grim. His manner was stern as he went about his chores, and mother and Aunt Isabella seemed to be avoiding him throughout the day. It was almost dark when, approaching the kitchen quietly, Maggie overheard mother and Isabella in agitated conversation as they prepared the tea.

  “John insists on us telling him straight what happened,” she heard Grace whisper, just before Dick came running in to ask, “When’s tea?”

  And it wasn’t long after the tea dishes were put away that the policeman, Police Constable Sutcliffe, came walking up the lane.

  A Conscientious Police Constable

  P.C. Sutcliffe was respectful as he entered the Isherwood home at Meanley; he carefully wiped his boots at the door and held his helmet in his hand as he addressed farmer John Isherwood, John’s wife, and his sister-in-law.

  Sutcliffe immediately explained his reason for coming to the farmhouse. He was looking into the case of a young boy who had been found dead in the stony stream bed under Langcliffe Cross Bridge.