An Orphan's Secret

by Maggie Hope

  ‘We have to, lad,’ she said quietly, blushing to the roots of her hair. She felt her brother’s bitter gaze on her and wanted to die with embarrassment.

  ‘You hacky, dirty sod!’

  ‘Jack!’

  Meg looked at Jack Boy in astonishment. She had never heard him swear in her life before. But the men were ignoring her, squaring up to each other, her brother’s face red with rage, and Wesley’s too.

  ‘Why couldn’t you stick to the whores in Auckland? What did you have to go getting a decent lass like our Meg into trouble for? Come outside, I’ll show you what—’

  ‘Lads! Lads!’ Auntie Phoebe came running in, puffing and panting with the exertion. ‘They can hear you all over the rows.’

  But Jack Boy was fairly dancing with rage. Though younger than Wesley and not up to his weight, he was ready to take him on and Wesley was willing to fight too, Meg could see the angry sparkle in his eyes.

  ‘Wesley! Take no notice of him, man, he’ll come round in a minute.’ She caught hold of his arm and pleaded with him. And just then Jack Maddison came downstairs, his trousers pulled on over his nightshirt, braces dangling and his feet bare.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he said grimly. ‘Can’t a man have some quiet in his own house after he’s been on shift down the pit?

  There was a sudden silence. The boys and Meg didn’t know what to say so it was left to Auntie Phoebe.

  ‘Meg and Wesley Cornish here, they’re wanting to get wed,’ she said flatly.

  Jack Maddison said nothing. He walked into the kitchen, took his clay pipe from the high mantel and lit it, using a spill of paper from the brass pot at the side by the fire. He waited until the pipe was burning to his satisfaction before turning back to them.

  ‘Well, she cannot. She’s only a bairn as yet.’

  Meg and Wesley looked at one another as Jack Boy gave a short laugh.

  ‘Bairn or no, she’s having a babby herself,’ he blurted out.

  Jack Maddison took the pipe out of his mouth and Meg hung her head as he looked at her. She had thought she would never see any real feeling in her father’s eyes, he had carried that dead look with him for so long, but just at that moment a touch of real fire showed there.

  ‘You’ve shamed your mother’s memory,’ he stated, and tears welled up in Meg’s eyes.

  ‘Da!’

  ‘Don’t you call me Da, I’m no father of thine. Get your things and get out.’

  Meg couldn’t believe she was hearing it. What was Da saying? He’d never throw her out, she knew he wouldn’t, he was just angry, that was all it was. Getting woken up an’ all.

  ‘Da?’ she said, incredulous. She must have not heard him right.

  ‘Jack, man,’ Auntie Phoebe put in. ‘Jack, they’re going to get wed. Calm down man, it’ll be all right.’ She bit her lip anxiously. None of them could believe that Jack Maddison meant what he was saying.

  ‘You’d better be ganning or I’ll put you out, and you can whistle for your clothes,’ said Jack, ignoring the older woman as he stared grimly at Meg.

  ‘Da – this is our Meg, you can’t put her out,’ Jack Boy stepped forward to plead for his sister.

  ‘Oh, I can. An’ I don’t want you saying her name round here neither, or you can be off yourself.’

  There was a chorus of gasps and Meg turned blindly to find the straw box to pack her clothes in before remembering that Alice had it, away in Lancashire. She would have to make a bundle with her shawl. Her fingers trembled. She dropped the ends of her shawl and couldn’t tie the knot properly. It came undone the first time.

  ‘Here, I’ll do it.’ Wesley spoke for the first time. He was white and strained, looking more like a chastened schoolboy than a young man about to be married.

  ‘You get out of my house. Go on, you can wait outside if you still want her, or else be off with you,’ snapped Jack, and Wesley went without a word so that it was Jack Boy who secured the bundle and took it to the door for her.

  ‘I’ll try to help you, Meg,’ he whispered.

  She stood in the doorway and looked round at her father. She still couldn’t believe this was happening. He had sat down in the rocking-chair and was staring into the fire, puffing furiously on his pipe and deliberately not looking at her.

  ‘Jack, man!’ Auntie Phoebe said again, but she might as well have saved her breath, he didn’t seem to hear her.

  Meg walked slowly down the yard to the back gate. Wesley was there, standing round the corner leaning against the wall of the coal house. He looked at her sheepishly.

  ‘Where am I going to go?’ she asked helplessly, and he flushed an even deeper red than before.

  ‘I cannot take you home. First I’ll have to go and tell me mam.’

  Meg nodded. Up the row a pair of housewives were standing by a yard gate, arms folded and eyes avid with curiosity as they watched the young couple.

  ‘Go on then,’ she said, and put her bundle down on the dirt of the back lane. She was past caring about getting dirt on her clothes.

  She was standing there, gazing unseeingly at the wall opposite, when Auntie Phoebe came out.

  ‘What are you going to do, lass?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Meg. ‘Wesley’s gone to ask his mam, see if I can go there.’

  Auntie Phoebe eyed the two women further up the street and her expression changed from concern to truculence.

  ‘Have you nowt better to do than gawp at folks as is in trouble?’ she shouted, and the women retreated behind their own walls. They knew better than to start an argument with Phoebe Lowther. She knew all the gossip about everyone in the row and wouldn’t be slow in bringing it out in defence of her family, they were well aware of that.

  ‘Howay, pet, come in with me. We’ll wait in our house, away from that lot.’

  Phoebe picked up the bundle and led Meg round to her kitchen door.

  ‘Wesley won’t know where I am, though,’ she protested weakly.

  ‘Aye, he will, I’ll keep an eye out for him. Any road, he’s likely to be a long time yet persuading his mother. If I know owt about that Jane Cornish, that is.’

  Meg was filled with dread. What was she going to do if Wesley weakened and didn’t wed her? What if his mam changed his mind for him?

  Sixteen

  ‘Are you going to live with me and Auntie Phoebe and Uncle Tot now?’

  Bella beamed at Meg, obviously delighted at the prospect, and she had to smile back even though she felt more like crying.

  ‘Stop asking questions, that’s a good lass,’ said Auntie Phoebe. ‘Howay now, Bella, help me make the tea. You can peel the potatoes for me. You like to do that, don’t you?’

  They had waited and waited and Wesley hadn’t come back. Meg had just about given up any hope that he would.

  ‘I’ll do them for you, Auntie,’ she offered. ‘I could do with something to do.’

  ‘Bella likes to do them. You sit still, Meg, you’ve had some shocks today.’ Auntie Phoebe hadn’t said anything about Wesley not coming back but Meg knew the subject was lying between them and her aunt must also think he wasn’t coming back.

  What was she going to do? She couldn’t stay here, she knew she couldn’t. If she stayed here Da wouldn’t have Auntie Phoebe in the house either, and then how would he and the lads manage? They needed a woman to see to things. There was Jack Boy, for instance. He’d already come in from the pit and there was no dinner for him, and Miles would be in any minute now from back shift. He’d be hungry an’ all. Miles was a growing lad, he was always hungry.

  Meg fretted on, her mind jumping from one worry to the next. If Alice was here now, it would be all right to leave the menfolk to her, Alice was a good little housekeeper. But she was in Manchester, wasn’t she? Maybe she would come home . . . I’ll write to her, decided Meg, I’ll tell her. But Da might come in any minute, might say it was all a mistake, he wanted his Meg to come home.

  ‘Get that down you.’

 
Auntie Phoebe placed a mug of tea in front of Meg, adding a spoonful of condensed milk. She sat down at the table beside her, sighing.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think Wesley Cornish is coming back, he’s been too long.’

  The sound of the words spoken aloud, the words which had been running through Meg’s head for the last hour or two, seemed to make them definite.

  ‘Can I stay here the night, Auntie? Da’ll likely have calmed down by the morning.’

  Auntie Phoebe looked doubtful. ‘You can stay an’ welcome, pet. But I don’t know how your da will take it.’

  Just what Meg had been thinking herself but she didn’t know what else to do. She stirred her tea in the mug, round and round, round and round. This day was a nightmare, a terrible nightmare. It was almost worse than the nightmare about the candyman. This nightmare wasn’t going to end, that was the worst of it, she fretted. And just then, there was a knock at the door.

  ‘I’ll go, I’ll go,’ cried Bella, dropping a potato into the water with a splash which marked her clean pinny. Eagerly she ran to the door. Bella loved company.

  ‘Is Meg here?’

  Her heart leaped as she turned to face the door and saw Wesley stooping under the low lintel.

  ‘Eeh, Wesley, lad, we thought you weren’t coming back,’ said Auntie Phoebe, relief shining in her smile.

  ‘I said I would. You didn’t think I’d run away, did you?’

  Wesley was speaking to Auntie Phoebe but he was looking at Meg and watching the conflicting expressions chase across her face.

  ‘You did! You thought I wouldn’t come,’ he accused her, but he sounded more amused than annoyed. ‘You don’t trust me yet, then, do you Meg?’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ she answered swiftly. ‘We knew Wes would come, didn’t we, Auntie?’ She looked at her aunt, daring her to deny it.

  ‘Well, what did your mam say?’ demanded Phoebe impatiently, deliberately not looking at Meg. What they’d thought didn’t matter now that Wesley had come. Besides, Tot would be in from the pit soon and she wanted this settled before he came.

  ‘You’ve to come along of me,’ said Wesley, smiling at Meg, pleased to be relieving one of her worries at least. He did not say his mother would be happy to welcome her and Meg was fairly sure he had spent all this time using his powers of persuasion on Jane Cornish. That would be the reason he was late coming back.

  ‘Right now?’ she asked, dreading the thought of facing his mother again.

  ‘Aye, you might as well. I’ve to go to work in half an hour.’

  Meg’s heart sank. That meant she was going to be on her own with her future mother-in-law for the rest of the afternoon and evening. But there was nothing she could do, she had to go with Wesley now.

  ‘Don’t forget, Meg, if you need me at all, I’m here, you just have to ask,’ Auntie Phoebe said softly as Meg and Wesley were leaving.

  ‘I know, Auntie, don’t think I’m not grateful either,’ Meg answered. But in her heart she knew that her aunt was pleased that she wasn’t going to have to take her in and cause more friction with the Maddisons.

  Meg followed Wesley up the row and round to his house, hardly noticing the curious eyes at every window. She was too full of sorrow at leaving the house in Pasture Row where she had worked so hard to raise her brothers and sisters. And now she had to leave the lads to fend for themselves. But she would write to Alice as soon as she could, she promised herself.

  I’m sorry, Mam, she cried inside. I am, I’m that sorry. For Da was right. She had failed her mother and shamed her memory an’ all.

  Whatever it was her son had said to Jane Cornish, it had had an effect, for she held her tongue when Meg came into the house, keeping her remarks to the bare necessities. Meg was to have the front room where there was a chiffonier bed, the twin of the one in which she had slept at home. Wesley had quickly changed into his pitclothes and picked up his bait tin and water bottle and gone off to work, leaving his womenfolk to sort themselves out. This was when Meg expected Jane to turn nasty. She was all prepared for it, determined the older woman would not upset her any more than she already had been that day.

  ‘Poor lad,’ Jane remarked to the air somewhere over Meg’s head, after the door closed behind Wesley. ‘How’s he supposed to get through a shift at the coal face after a day like the day, I don’t know. He’ll be needing pit props to hold his eyelids open.’ But she spoke mildly enough as she took up her knitting and sat down before the fire in the kitchen, working furiously away on a woollen sock. Meg watched her for a minute or two then awkwardly sat down on a hard wooden chair at the table.

  ‘We’ll have a bite of tea just now,’ said Jane casually, not even looking up from her knitting. ‘I’ve got a knuckle of bacon and some taties left off Wesley’s dinner. I’ll fry them up with a bit of onion.’

  Meg could only blink her eyes in surprise at the change in Jane. What had Wesley said to his mother to cause this complete about face?

  In the following days, spent in a kind of limbo as she waited for the wedding date to arrive, Meg began to realise that the change in her future mother-in-law was only on the surface. Jane didn’t seem able to stop herself from letting the odd acid remark escape her lips, and sometimes Meg would turn unexpectedly and see a malevolent glare directed at her, swiftly veiled as she caught Meg’s eye.

  ‘What did you say to your mother to make her change her mind about me?’ Meg ventured to Wesley one Sunday morning when Jane had gone to chapel.

  Meg herself had not attended any chapel service since she’d left Pasture Row. Oh, she told herself she would go back as soon as she was decently married, but just now, no, she couldn’t face the sly glances and whispers of the other girls.

  ‘Nowt. Well, not much any road,’ said Wesley. He was sitting in his shirt-sleeves, unshaven and collarless, his feet, clad only in a pair of the woollen socks knitted by his mother, stretched along the length of the steel fender. He saw Meg’s disbelief and qualified his answer. ‘Aye, all right, but I didn’t say much.’ He grinned impishly at her. ‘Well, I did say I was getting wed no matter what she thought, and as I could only get one house from the colliery, where was she going to live if she wouldn’t have you in the same house as her?’

  Meg gasped at the cruelty of it and for the first time felt some sympathy for Wesley’s widowed mother. No wonder she was bitter. But Wesley didn’t appear to see it like that at all, he seemed to be amused by his mother’s discomfiture.

  Meg thought of her own family, Da and Jack Boy and Miles. None of them had been to see her though every day she expected a message at least. She sent a note round by Auntie Phoebe when she saw her in the store, telling them the date of the wedding. But there was no answering word from them. There was a hole in her life now. She woke at midnight every night, the time when she should have been calling Jack Boy ready to go on fore shift. Every day she fretted about whether they were getting a proper dinner.

  One Saturday morning she managed to catch Miles as he left the pit yard with his marras, and asked how Da was, and Jack Boy, and were they eating properly. But Miles was embarrassed in front of his mates and anxious to get away to his quoits game. The local collieries competed with each other on Saturday afternoons and Miles was emerging as a champion player.

  ‘Aw, go on, our Meg, you didn’t think we’d starve just ‘cos you’re not there, did you?’ was all he would say.

  She wrote to Alice in Salford, asking her to come home, and had a reply by the next post.

  ‘I’m sick of it here any road,’ wrote Alice, ‘but I have to work a month’s notice. Mrs Rutherford treats me like a skivvy and the lasses round here think they’re something better than us from Durham just because they work in a mill. Dirty stinking places they are too! And Jane Thompson is walking out with a lad now, so I’ve no one to go out with on my afternoon off.’

  Meg had not told Alice about the baby, just that she was getting married. Plenty of time for explanations when her s
ister came home, she thought.

  It was with a full heart that Meg set out with Wesley and his friend for Bishop Auckland on the morning of her wedding. It was already December and the wind bitingly cold as they walked along the road leading into the little town, so that they turned off on to the path through Badger Wood which was a short cut to the west of the town, grateful for the relief the trees and bushes afforded them. Above them they could hear the wind soughing through the bare branches of the trees and the cold became damp and penetrating. Meg shivered.

  ‘Cheer up, lass,’ said Wesley. ‘It’s a wedding we’re going to, not a funeral.’ He winked at his best marra, Dick Adamson, who grinned back. Dick had been prevailed upon to ‘stand up’ for them at the register office. Jane had refused to come, making the excuse that she would have a bit of tea ready for them when they came back.

  Wesley looked uncomfortable in his Sunday suit and a high white starched collar which cut into his neck. Every few steps he would poke a finger down the front of it and try to ease it away from the red mark which was appearing on his skin.

  Meg was wearing a deep blue serge costume with a long jacket which buttoned up to the neck. Wesley had insisted on spending most of his meagre savings on it.

  ‘It’s a waste, Wesley,’ she had protested when he had taken her into Auckland to buy the outfit. ‘We’ll need things for the baby more like.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Meg. You want to look nice, don’t you?’ he had brushed aside her objections. Jane had sniffed and looked more miserable than ever.

  ‘There’ll be no luck for you both, not with him seeing the dress before the wedding day,’ had been her only comment.

  The loose jacket covered Meg’s burgeoning pregnancy, though, and she was glad of that as she walked alongside Wesley and Dick.

  As they left the wood and turned towards the Cockton Hill end of town, Meg’s depression deepened. They were getting closer and closer to the register office and panic began to rise in her.

  Why was she marrying Wesley Cornish? She would have managed on her own once the baby was born. She was strong, she could work and look after it. And yet here she was, tying herself to a man she didn’t love, a man who had forced her. For that was what he had done even though she had gone out for the walk with him willingly enough. She peeped up at him as he lifted his chin yet again and pulled his collar away from his neck with his forefinger. He was a stranger to her, even though she had known him for years. For a minute Meg considered turning tail and running as far away from him as she could. But just then the child inside her, perhaps responding to the unrest she was feeling, turned in her womb and kicked heavily at her lower ribs. A strong, lusty kick; a kick which reminded her that the baby was innocent, it was she who had got into this mess and she owed the child a decent start to life, no matter what.