Liza

by Irene Carr

  ‘I’d like to see him.’

  Randolph came to the office and stared at Mark and Cecily, who were dishevelled after their time behind bars. To begin with he was both suspicious and antagonistic, but as Merryweather explained the changed situation he grew red in the face. At the end he was silent for a minute, then muttered, ‘Looks like I made a fool of myself.’

  ‘It’s a mistake anyone might have made,’ Cecily said, seeming kindly.

  He glanced at Mark, saw his nod, and said, ‘Good of you to say so.’

  ‘I did try to tell you that I only wanted you to think about restoring my husband to his position, but you wouldn’t listen,’ Cecily reminded him gently.

  ‘Ahr Randolph said. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. To tell the truth the estate hasn’t been performing very well.’ His gaze shifted to Mark. ‘I wonder, if you aren’t suited elsewhere or if you can get away, would you care to come back?’

  Cecily rose from her chair. ‘Mark, darling, I must bathe and change. Why don’t you and Mr Stevenson discuss your business in the bar and I’ll join you later? Come along, Liza.’

  She and Mark had already expressed their gratitude to Liza but in her room Cecily did it again. ‘I’m very grateful, but if you’d waited another few days this man would have arrived from America and we’d have been let out. Still, all’s well that ends well.’

  Liza seized on that. ‘So you’re stopping this silly game and coming up north? It’s just as well. William is planning a birthday party for you on the Saturday.’

  Cecily stared at her, lips parted. ‘Good heavens, no. There’s no question of that. If Mark didn’t have this position to go to I would stay here with him because we are very happy. But now that I’m sure Stevenson is going to take him on I want to go to the estate as his wife and see him settled in there. I’ll marry him when I can. I will be in Sunderland to claim my inheritance, be sure of that, but not before my birthday. That was our agreement and if you want the other five pounds you’ll have to see it through. It’s not such a hardship. I told you it would be all right, didn’t I?’

  Liza was struck dumb. All right? All right! She recalled that first night when William had produced the photograph of Cecily. Then the confrontation with Betty Dixon, née Wood, and William’s assertion that she had virtually invited him into her bed. But when she recovered the power of speech she said nothing. She knew Cecily would brush aside those nerve-racking experiences.

  ‘Surely you can manage for a few more days?’ Cecily said.

  Could she? In the big house, with Martha and Mrs Taggart, and ... Yes, but Susan was waiting for her. Liza longed to see her.

  ‘We agreed,’ Cecily reminded her.

  They had, Liza because Cecily had saved her from the clutches of the cold North Sea. ‘I suppose so.’

  When Cecily had bathed and changed they went downstairs together. Randolph Stevenson and Mark were in the bar, deep in conversation about the estate, the details of Mark’s contract already agreed and sealed with a handshake. Cecily joined them but Liza said her farewells. Then Cecily murmured, for only Liza to hear, ‘Enjoy the party. William arranged it? I think I may have behaved badly to him and Uncle Edward. Please don’t tell Mark.’ She glanced at him fondly. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t approve and he’d be disappointed in me. I don’t want that.’

  So Liza left her to it. The rain still pelted down and she stood in the hotel doorway, a slight, erect figure under the shelter of the uniformed doorman’s umbrella. It was much more respectable than Merryweather’s battered one with its bent spokes. He hailed a hansom for her, and she returned to her hotel alone. She was happy and relieved. She had resolved another crisis and would be back aboard the Wear Lass next day.

  A message awaited her at her hotel, a note from William telling her to rejoin the Wear Lass just below Tower Bridge the following afternoon. Liza was eager to do that, but next morning she splashed through the rain again and made a hurried call at Harrods. A dress there had caught her eye when she had been shopping for Cecily. She had told herself then, with wry humour, that it was not suitable for wearing in prison — and wondered what was. But Liza had a use for it and bought it. The waist needed some alteration to fit her slim figure but she could manage that.

  The pilot boat took her out to rejoin the Wear Lass, and when the ship sailed Liza was admiring the dress in her cabin.

  She replaced it carefully in its big box, then dressed in the glistening black oilskins William had bought for her. She had not used them on the journey south but needed them now on the open bridge, where she found William, similarly dressed. The rain still fell steadily and the ship was butting into the wind: drops rattled on the oilskins. William was scowling into it as it sluiced down his face, but he grinned down at her when she appeared at his side. ‘Room for two of you in there.’

  Liza knew the oilskins were voluminous, the hem of the coat sweeping the deck, but she didn’t care. The ship was slipping downriver in the early dusk, on either side the jewelled strings of lights on the shore, and more moving on the river, white and yellow, and the red and green navigation lights of the other ships that crowded the water. Liza found it hugely exciting and stood with William through the hours until his watch was done and he handed over to the first mate.

  They went down to their cabins, which were side by side, and shrugged out of the oilskins, close to each other in the narrow passage. ‘You enjoyed yourself up there,’ William said.

  ‘It was exciting.’

  He looked at her flushed face and shining eyes. ‘I can see that.’ She could feel her cheeks warming, but then he went on, ‘I learn something new about you every day. The Cecily I knew would never have done that. You’re not like her at all.’

  Liza did not trust the direction in which the conversation was turning. ‘Well, I loved it,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Goodnight, William.’ She stepped over the coaming into her cabin, shut the door behind her and leaned against it with his ‘Goodnight’ echoing in her ears. She heard his door close, hung up her oilskins to dry and undressed. She could hear him moving in the cabin next door, faintly, through the steady beat of the engines. Then he was still and she curled up in her narrow bunk, blew out her oil lamp, closed her eyes and slept. She could not know it, but William lay awake for some time.

  * * *

  A thousand miles south another ship ploughed northward. Down in the hold the chief stoker, stripped to a coal-blackened vest, bawled, ‘Put some muscle into it, you lazy bugger! You’re only half-way through your watch and we want more steam.’

  Vince Bailey, similarly dressed and blackened, took up his shovel again. ‘I didn’t sign on for this.’

  ‘You wanted to work your passage and that’s what you’re doing.’

  Vince had found life hard in Australia, too hard for his liking. He had spent his money and had no way except this of returning to England. Shovelling coal for four hours at a time, twice in every twenty-four, was fiendishly hard. ‘I said I wanted a passage back to London,’ he whined. ‘That’s where you said we were going.’ He had intended to batten on his sister in London.

  ‘That was before we took on this cargo for somewhere else,’ said the chief stoker contemptuously. ‘This is a cargo ship, not a bloody cab. Now, put your back into it!’

  Vince moaned but obeyed, driving the big shovel into the coal and hurling it into the gaping red mouth of the furnace. Somebody will pay for this, he swore to himself.

  * * *

  Liza awoke to sunshine streaming through the porthole of her cabin. The rain had ceased but she could feel the worsened motion of the ship, the soaring lift and then the drop, the roll and slow recovery. She dressed and went up to the bridge, where she found William standing his watch, balancing easily on long legs set wide. She stood beside him but cautiously kept one hand on the bridge rail. ‘You’re a glutton for punishment,’ he joked, ‘but we’ll make a sailor of you yet.’ Then he pointed over the bucking, plunging bow. ‘A friend of ours.’

 
; ‘A friend?’ Liza peered at the ship, very like the Wear Lass, a mile or so ahead of them. ‘She’s the Frances Hopkinson,’ William explained. ‘You’ll remember we followed her into the Thames. She’s making better time than us but Jock McAvoy was always a driver. She’s homeward bound, too — I expect his wife wants to get back to Newcastle.’

  Homeward bound. That applied to her, Liza thought. Just over a week to go and she would be with Kitty and Susan. She was looking forward to that, yearning for it. But at the same time ...

  Ferguson, the first mate, came on to the bridge then, in jacket and thick jersey, ginger hair cropped short under his cap. ‘Here’s my relief,’ William said. He handed over the watch to the other man and turned to Liza. ‘Breakfast?’

  They ate together, served by Archie Godolphin, who somehow managed hot plates and the coffee-pot despite the ship’s pitching and rolling. ‘If it gets any worse it’ll be cold grub because I won’t be able to keep pans on the stove,’ he warned.

  William nodded. ‘Sandwiches and tea. I don’t think it’s going to improve today.’ He went off to his cabin to deal with some paperwork.

  Archie jerked a thumb at Liza’s empty plate. ‘You’re enjoying this voyage more than your last, I’m glad to see.’ Liza smiled at him. ‘I am.’

  ‘As I said afore, it’s a pleasure to have you aboard, Miss. To tell you the truth, I took a liking to you the first time I saw you, when we picked you up, you and that other lass. In fact, I thought she was the young lady, with her hoity-toity ways.’

  Liza kept her smile in place. Suppose he had aired his opinion in front of William and started people questioning whether she was Cecily Spencer? ‘Really?’

  ‘Just at first,’ he said awkwardly. ‘But I soon saw who was the real lady.’

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Cecily, Liza thought. But she took this as a warning that she could not lower her guard even with only a week to go. She was grateful to Archie. She got up and kissed his cheek, then skipped out of the saloon.

  That day Liza read in her cabin, spent more time on the bridge, lunched. The sea, if anything, was rougher now, under a leaden sky, but the Wear Lass steamed steadily northward. In the late afternoon she was off Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast and Liza sat in the saloon, drinking tea. She had to hold the mug to keep it on the table as the ship rose, fell and rolled, but she was relaxed after two days of worry and hunting criminals, at peace with the world.

  Then the ship’s siren blared above her, deafening, and she ran to the bridge.

  20

  FRIDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 1907, AT SEA

  As Liza stepped up off the ladder on to the bridge gratings the siren blared again. She clapped her hands over her ears, and removed them only when the teeth-jarring wailing stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked then.

  William turned from where he stood with Ferguson by the helmsman. ‘Jock McAvoy is stopped and flying NC, the signal for a vessel in distress. We used our siren to show we’d seen it.’ Liza saw the Frances Hopkinson ahead. The signal flags, splashes of colour, were flying from her yardarm. There were figures on the wing of her bridge, peering back at the Wear Lass. In the distance Liza could see land.

  William saw the direction of her gaze and said quietly, ‘Without engines the wind and tide will set her ashore and she’ll break up. We’ve got to haul her off — we’re the only other ship in sight.’

  The beat of the engines slowed until the ship was moving at only walking pace. They were passing the Frances Hopkinson close with only fifty yards or so of foaming grey water between them. William had a tin megaphone in his hand now. ‘There’s Jock,’ he said. He lifted the megaphone and bawled into it: ‘Hello, Jock! You’re wanting assistance?’

  Captain McAvoy also had a megaphone and his answer came back tinnily over the narrow strip of churned sea. ‘Aye, I do!’

  ‘I’ll throw you a line.’

  But Jock had not finished: ‘I’m wanting a tow to Newcastle. The missus fell down the companion a half-hour back. She says the bairn’s on the way and she wants to get home to her mother. Ye wouldn’t have a doctor on board?’

  Archie, come from his galley out of curiosity and standing just below the bridge, said, ‘A doctor? What does he think we are? A White Star liner?’

  ‘Shut up!’ William snapped. ‘Poor old Jock,’ he muttered, ‘and his wife. This is her first. She must be in a state.’

  Liza could believe it: having her first child with no help except from ignorant, heavy-handed sailors! She stared at the sea heaving between the two ships, imagined a boat crossing that neck of water and bouncing like a cork, imagined the things that might go wrong with the birth. Suppose it was me? She gulped, then said in a small voice, ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, I’ll go over to help Mrs McAvoy.’

  He struggled with this. ‘Do you mean you know about —these things?’ At that time young ladies were left in ignorance of childbirth.

  Liza helped him: ‘I’m not a midwife but I know a little about it.’ She had picked up quite a lot from all those times she had gone to confinements with her mother and Jinnie —and giving birth to Susan. ‘I’ll be better than no one at all.’ She hoped that would prove true.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ William said, but he looked at her with respect. ‘We won’t need that heaving line to pass a towing hawser.’ Then he shouted to Archie, ‘Fetch Mr Ferguson and call all hands. We’re going to lower a boat.’ And through the megaphone: ‘We haven’t a doctor, but I’m sending you a boat with a line and a young lady who will care for Mrs McAvoy.’

  Ten minutes later the boat was in the water with two seamen at the oars. They fended off the cockleshell from the steel wall of the ship’s side as they rose and fell. Liza sat in the sternsheets, in oilskins again, already glistening with the salt spray, and in a cork lifejacket. She held tight to the side of the boat as it soared level with the ship’s deck. Then the wave passed under and it dropped like a stone, leaving her stomach behind. She swallowed as the boat lifted under her again, then the seamen thrust it out from the ship’s side, the oars bit into the sea and they were heading for the Frances Hopkinson. They towed behind them, like an umbilical cord, a line being paid out from the Wear Lass.

  The boat bounced like a cork, but with the two sailors heaving at the oars it had soon crossed the narrow neck of water and was swinging in to the side of the Frances Hopkinson. Liza saw the Jacob’s ladder dangling down the ship’s side, swallowed again but was ready: she had been through this before in the North Sea only three weeks ago. It seemed much longer than that.

  A rope hung beside the ladder. She grabbed it and looped it round her waist, made it fast, and then she was on the ladder, climbing. She knew she was showing an immodest amount of her calves and ankles but did not care. It was not for long. The sailors on the deck above her hauled on the rope, pulling her up the ladder quickly. Then they were lifting her over the bulwark, setting her on her feet, and hauling in the line from the Wear Lass.

  ‘I’m pleased to see you, Miss.’ Jock McAvoy had come down from his bridge to receive her. He was thirty or so, sandy-haired, not as tall as William but still looked down at Liza. ‘I’ll take you to see my wife.’ He led her to his cabin in the superstructure. ‘I was wanting her to stay at home for this voyage but she was all for coming and she’s kept very well all along — until she had this fall.’ He turned to look at Liza, a worried man. ‘She’s afeared she’ll lose the bairn. I’m afeared I’ll lose her.’

  Liza decided he needed reassurance. ‘I’ve known women who had a fall bring on the birth and mother and child were fine.’ It was true.

  Apparently Jock took heart from this. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘It is,’ Liza told him.

  He paused at the cabin door. ‘That’s good to know. Thank you, Miss ... ?’

  ‘Cecily Spencer,’ Liza supplied.

  He opened the door, ushered her in and announced, ‘Here y’are, Bridget. Miss Cecily Spencer has
come over from the Wear Lass to help you, so you can stop worrying now.’

  Liza saw that Bridget McAvoy was scarcely older than herself, a tall blonde girl in the narrow bunk, on top of the covers, not under them. She looked frightened. Her hair had come down and hung lank about her shoulders. She still wore her day clothes, a brown dress over white petticoats. ‘You’re taking me home to my mam?’ she quavered.

  ‘Aye, sure I am,’ Jock said stoutly. ‘We’re getting a tow from Bill Morgan. Ye ken him, the big lad. They’re hauling in the hawser now and I should be up there.’ He blew her a kiss from where he stood in the doorway, then he was gone.

  Bridget smiled tremulously. ‘Bless the man. He’s nearly as frightened as I am.’ Then she dissolved into tears. ‘I’m so glad to see you.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it,’ Liza joked. She divested herself of lifejacket and oilskins, kissed Bridget and said brightly, ‘Now, let’s get those clothes off you, pop you into a nightie and make you a bit more comfortable.’ That was done with difficulty because of the ship’s rolling and pitching, but finally Bridget was back in the bunk. Then Liza examined her. ‘Seems all right.’ She covered the girl. ‘I’m just going out for a few minutes.’

  ‘Don’t be long,’ pleaded Bridget.

  ‘I won’t.’

  Liza went out on deck, seeking the galley. Night was falling over the huge, humping seas. The wind was gale force, whipping foam from the crests of the waves. She could see the men above her on the open bridge, and beyond the bow the shadowy outline of the Wear Lass, a ghost ship in the darkness. The big towing hawser stretched out to her from the Frances Hopkinson in a shallow curve. Liza watched the Wear Lass longingly for a few seconds: the battered tramp steamer represented home and William would be on her bridge.

  When she found the galley she told the cook, ‘I want a clean bucket full of hot water, please. Bring it down to the captain’s cabin.’

  ‘Right y’ are, Miss.’

  Liza returned to Bridget. She brushed the girl’s hair, and when the hot water came she washed her face. ‘Does that feel better?’