As Alexander strode to his bedroom he heard a voice beyond the open door singing lustily. He paused for a moment, entranced by the cheerful sound, and then entered. The maid was crouched over the fender, brushing the grate, unaware of his presence. She carried on singing about the Waters of Tyne, a song that took him back to his boyhood. He stood there quite still, not wanting to interrupt her. Then when she sang the last refrain he joined in.
Kate whipped round, startled. She gasped in shock, her face going crimson to see him suddenly standing there. If he only knew she had been thinking about him as she sang the love song!
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ Alexander grinned. ‘I was enjoying your singing and didn’t want you to stop.’
Kate felt her face going even hotter as she stared up at him. ‘I always sing - can’t help meself, sir.’
She turned away quickly, but something about her pink-cheeked face and the tendrils of brown hair escaping under her cap was familiar. Alexander looked at her more closely.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
She half turned round. ‘Kate, sir.’
The slim oval face, the glimpse of blue eyes under the dark lashes, the song ... It came to him abruptly.
‘You’re the wood sprite with the berries!’ he cried in recognition. ‘You sang that song to Her Ladyship at the servants’ ball, didn’t you?’
Kate laughed to cover her embarrassment, inwardly thrilled he had remembered her after all.
‘Aye, I did.’ She stole a look at him and dared to add, ‘And you danced a polka with me.’
He laughed too. ‘So I did,’ he admitted, though he had forgotten the moment until now. He crossed the room, discarding his riding jacket on the bed, and splashed water into the wash bowl. Unselfconsciously, he plunged his face in the water and reached for a towel.
Kate went back to scrubbing the grate, acutely aware of his movements from the corner of her eye.
Alexander rubbed his face and studied the girl. ‘So you work at the castle - you’re not a nymph from the woods after all.’
‘Been here since old Lady Ravensworth died, sir,’ Kate answered while still vigorously leading the grate. ‘Her Ladyship took me in when Farnacre was closed up. She’s been that good to me.’
‘She is a very generous lady,’ Alexander said, leaning against the bed.
Kate thought of the casual sketches on the table and couldn’t help wondering about his relationship with Her Ladyship. Lily had called him a fortune-hunter. Kate hurried to finish and gather up her brushes.
Alexander watched her. She looked hot and flustered and keen to be gone. A smut of soot was smeared across her cheek and he had a sudden desire to wipe it clean. He half moved towards her, but her blue eyes widened in alarm so he stopped.
‘I’ll be off, sir,’ she said with a quick bob, and rushed for the door.
‘Goodbye, Kate. Come and sing to me again,’ he called after her.
She did not reply. Alexander gave a rueful smile. Beauty could be found in unexpected places. He went to the table and pulled a folder out of the drawer. Leafing through the sketches he found the old pencil drawings he sought - a girl stepping down from a cart with a flash of ankle and a smooth oval cheek under a straw hat.
Sitting down at once, all thought of lunch forgotten, he reached for a blank piece of paper and picked up the ink pen. If he focused on her eyes he could conjure up the rest of her fair face and the wisps of escaping hair on her pale brow. Alexander began to draw.
Chapter 12
The next day, Kate went hurrying up to the east tower with hot water and left it outside Alexander’s room. She thrilled to think of him lying just feet away in the small bedroom, imagining him waking and stretching in the bright morning light. Other guests brought valets with them to attend to their needs and put out their clothes, but not this man. He seemed different from other well-to-do visitors, not quite family and not quite guest.
The casual gossip of other staff only increased Alexander’s mysteriousness in Kate’s eyes. Was Pringle-Davies a man of business or an artist? A long-lost family member or a chancer who took advantage of His Lordship’s good nature?
Later in the day, she returned with coal. To her disappointment the room was empty and the fire needed no tending as he had not lit it the night before. She left the extra coals and retreated. All that week she hoped to glimpse him when polishing the stairs or sweeping the corridors, but there was never any sign. Picnics were ordered daily from the kitchen and she assumed he went out riding or on outings with Lady Ravensworth in the fine weather.
The days were now long, and Kate enjoyed walking out in the evening after her duties were finished to visit Aunt Lizzie and the family. The quickest way was to pass the stables, go down the back drive and cut along a bridlepath through the woods to the back of the gardeners’ cottages. Alfred always ran out to greet her and talked nonstop about what he had been doing that day. Lizzie would give her a cup of elderflower juice and Alfred would drag her off to the gardens to find Peter and George.
On one particularly warm evening at the beginning of June, she took the long way back to the castle around the fishing lake. It was tranquil in the fading light, flies hovering above the still surface, an empty boat moored on the far side. Somewhere in the encircling trees a fox called soulfully to its mate. She loved the peaceful quiet of this place, an antidote to the bustle of the castle. It was so far removed from the cramped, noisy, teeming life on Tyneside that she was used to that she never tired of walking its woodland paths.
She did not find its solitariness frightening, for she liked to think of her mother visiting here as a young woman with her two small daughters. A day in paradise, Rose had called the Sunday School outing. And that was what it looked like that evening, Kate mused.
She might be a child of Jarrow too, but there was something about this place that tugged at her very soul and made her feel she belonged. Perhaps it was due to stories of Ravensworth that Rose had passed down from her own grandmother, who had worked here long ago, before Queen Victoria had come to the throne. Perhaps she was a country girl at heart. Or maybe it was the first time since she was a small girl that she was truly happy again.
A rustle in the trees and a snap of twig behind her made Kate swing round, startled out of her reverie. A figure loomed out of the twilight clutching a stick. Kate stepped back, preparing for flight.
‘Don’t go!’ the man pleaded and strode up to her. The dying sun caught the auburn light in his hair.
‘Mr Pringle-Davies!’ she gasped.
‘I saw you from across the lake,’ he smiled, ‘my wood nymph. You looked quite alone.’
‘I’ve been visiting my aunt at the cottages,’ Kate managed to say despite the hammering in her chest. ‘I left my Uncle Peter at the walled garden and came this way.’
‘Are you meeting someone, Kate?’ he asked. ‘This seems a fine trysting place.’
‘No, sir,’ she gulped, ‘no one.’
He studied her a moment. ‘Then will you allow me to walk you home?’
She smiled at him at last and his heart missed a beat.
‘If you please, sir,’ she blushed.
‘It would please me greatly,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk around the lake first and enjoy the sunset.’
They set off side by side on the wide path, each heady with their daring. Kate knew she should have declined and hurried home; Alexander knew he should not be encouraging the girl, for it could come to nothing. But neither of them wanted to obey sensible thoughts on such a magical evening.
He asked about her uncle and joked at how mischievous he had been towards him as a boy.
‘Peter was very long suffering - I must’ve been the bane of his life. I was wild in those days,’ he said. ‘Did you live here then, Kate?’
‘No, sir, I come from near Shields.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Born in Jarrow, sir.’
Alexander stopped and exclaimed, ‘Jarrow? Well, well!’
Kate looked at him quizzically.
‘I knew Jarrow too as a boy - briefly. Stayed there with relations of mine. My cousin Edward was rector of St Paul’s.’
Kate said without thinking, ‘So that’s why you’ve got that picture on your wall?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re very observant.’
‘It just caught me eye,’ she said bashfully.
He smiled. ‘It’s hung there since I was a boy. I always used that room when Cousin Edward - Canon Liddell - brought me to stay.’
Kate gaped. ‘Canon Liddell was your relation?’
‘Yes.’ Alexander smiled in surprise. ‘Did you know him?’
Kate shook her head. ‘But me father did - Mam said so, said they were friends,’ Kate said proudly. Something made her omit that they only knew each other because her mother had cleaned for the Liddells.
Alexander looked pleased. ‘What’s your father’s name?’
‘Fawcett. William Fawcett.’
He frowned as he tried to remember. The name sounded familiar. There had been a William, a kind man with a handsome wife who had once taken him to the circus. When his beloved cousin Edward had fallen ill, Alexander had wanted to go to live with them rather than be sent away to strangers. Could it be possible that this was the same man’s daughter?
‘Perhaps I met him then,’ he smiled. ‘Visitors were always coming to the rectory. Kate Fawcett, I feel as if I know you!’
She grinned back at him and they continued to walk.
‘I was very fond of my cousin Edward,’ he told her. ‘He was a father to me for a while - when my own father wanted nothing to do with me. My mother was a Liddell, you see - caused a scandal by eloping with a coachman and died before I got to know her. I’m a bit of a black sheep. Then along came Jeremiah Davies and adopted me - saved me from the house of correction.’
His speech was flippant, but his tone was bitter. Kate was astonished he was telling her any of it. Perhaps he was drunk.
‘How unhappy you must’ve been,’ she murmured.
Alexander gave her a sharp look, then realised it was true. He had been deeply unhappy and lonely as a boy, latching on desperately to anyone who showed him an ounce of affection. How strange that this ordinary girl from Jarrow should understand that so plainly when he had denied it for years. Except Kate Fawcett did not strike him as ordinary. She had more than surface prettiness. A simple dignity and inner grace shone through her that made him forget she was a mere housemaid.
‘It’s like a ship losing its anchor,’ Kate continued quietly, ‘when a bairn loses a mother or father. My father died when I was barely six years old.’
Alexander felt a sudden closeness to her. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘So that’s how you came on hard times?’
Kate flinched at the touch as if she had been scalded. ‘Aye, we’ve had hard times,’ she flushed. ‘Mam lost two of her bairns an’ all. But she’s brought up another four and lived to tell the tale.’
‘She must be a remarkable woman. Just like her daughter.’ Alexander searched her face in the half-dark.
Kate’s heart thumped. ‘You don’t know me, sir.’
He leant closer. ‘I’d like to get to know you, Kate.’
She dropped her gaze, suddenly unsure of the situation. Suky’s words of warning rang in her head. Watch out for that sort. Fancy silks and common serge don’t mix...
‘I must be gettin’ back, sir,’ she said hastily, stepping away, ‘else I’ll be locked out.’
Alexander said sardonically, ‘I know where to climb in when the back door’s bolted - did it as a lad.’
‘Well, I’m no lad and I’ll be in a heap of bother from the housekeeper if I start climbing in windows!’
They both looked at each other and laughed, the seriousness of moments before broken.
‘Come on then, Kate,’ he said, ushering her in front of him.
They said little else on their brisk walk back, Kate keeping ahead of him. At the foot of the terrace, by the hothouses, they parted. Kate took the path round to the back of the castle and Alexander the steps leading up to the front.
‘Good night, Kate,’ he called with a wave of his walking cane.
‘Sir,’ she answered, picking up her skirt and running into the dark shadows.
That fiery sunset marked the end of the spell of good weather and when Kate rose early the next day it was grey and wet. Gazing out at the rain drumming on the courtyard cobbles, she wondered if she had dreamt the previous evening. The head housemaid had been suspicious of her late return and started asking questions. Kate decided not to venture out that evening in the wet, though she longed to come across Alexander in the grounds again.
Two days later she and Hannah were told to clean out the bedroom in the east tower. Rushing there, Kate found to her dismay that it was empty. All trace of Alexander was gone. She tried to hide her disappointment and helped Hannah strip the bed and bundle the linen into a basket. They swept out the room and carried away the ashes from the dead fire.
What did she expect? she berated herself. For all his chequered childhood, he was a gentleman far out of her reach with business to take him elsewhere. He had more in common with Lady Ravensworth than he ever would with her. That night by the lake he had merely been kind in offering to see her safely home. It was just talk of Jarrow and the mention of the Liddells that had made her feel closer to him than she should have dared.
She had given him the impression that she was from a social class not far removed from the rector’s. He had assumed she had fallen on hard times because her father had died, little guessing that being housemaid to Lord Ravensworth was a dream come true for a girl who had begged round the streets of Tyneside. She had kept from him that her mother had remarried a boorish drunk who could not even write his own name.
He may have talked to her, but it had not meant the same for him. He was gone as he had before, without warning, and it might be months before she set eyes on him again. She must bury her foolish feelings for him.
Chapter 13
A week after returning home to Darlington, Alexander felt restless once more. There had been no excuse to stay on at Ravensworth, though he had promised Cousin Emma he would return for the summer ball in July. The fine weather had broken and he had left abruptly, desiring a taste of town life. But a few days of his father’s company and social calls were enough.
He arranged to go to Newcastle to check on timber imports and visit their shipping agents, ignoring Davies’s complaints that it could be done by letter. He booked into a boarding house near the Central Station that he used before voyages, run by tight-lipped widow Timmins, who kept the narrow house spotless for her travellers.
Alexander made a cursory call to the agents on the quayside and spent the rest of the week wandering the anonymous city with his notebook and pen. When the sun shone through the billowing chimney smoke that hung over the town he sat on walls and quaysides, drawing the life of the streets: dockers and draymen, pedlars and hawkers, children crouched over games of marbles in the dust. When it rained he retreated to a bar and sat in the corner nursing a pint of beer and sketching his fellow drinkers.
He felt compelled to draw people, recreating the faces of his childhood as he listened to their sharp, lilting voices and quick laughter. But every time he caught sight of a young woman with a basket on her arm or a face shaded by a bonnet, his thoughts turned to Kate. She was in every sketch he made. He tried to draw what he saw, but the curve of her jaw or her slim waist, the line of her neat ankle or the edge of her smile came out on the paper.
He could not rid his mind of
her. What was it about her that made him unable to settle to anything but this frenzied drawing? She was pretty, but he had seen prettier young women in Gothenburg. She sang well, but with an untrained voice. As he drank his fill and became morose he realised it was something to do with her uncomplicated naturalness, her simplicity of speech, the way she had sympathised with him. He detected a generosity of spirit and a loving nature.
And she came from Jarrow and her family had known his. It did not concern him that she was beneath him socially; such barriers had never held the importance that they did for others, people like Davies. After all, his mother had run off with a coachman. Barriers were there to be broken, in Alexander’s view.
He could not work or sleep in this state of preoccupation. He must get back to Ravensworth. Alexander returned to his boarding house and penned a letter to the earl, inviting himself to stay.
By return of post, a note came from Lady Ravensworth, telling him he must come at once. With the house still in mourning there was a dearth of visitors, so it was his duty to cheer them up. Two weeks after leaving the castle, Alexander was hurrying back.
***
Kate and Hannah were sent to prepare the bedroom. Kate knew at once that Alexander must be returning, for no one else used the room. She found it hard to contain her excitement or from blurring out to the other maid that she had met and walked with this gentleman in the woods.
‘Wonder why he always sleeps in this room?’ Hannah asked. ‘Bit poky, if you ask me.’
‘He used it when he was a boy, that’s why,’ Kate answered without thinking.
‘How would you know?’ Hannah looked at her sharply.
Kate flushed. ‘So I’ve heard - from me Uncle Peter - he knew him as a lad.’ She turned and busied herself polishing the leather-topped table.
‘What would a gardener know?’ Hannah said sniffily.
Kate said nothing, not wanting to get into an argument or be questioned further.
THE JARROW TRILOGY: all 3 enthralling sagas in 1 volume; The Jarrow Lass, A Child of Jarrow & Return to Jarrow Page 53