by Maggie Hope
‘You want a billet? You can have one on the Mary Jane. We’re a bit short on this trip: one of the stokers has been taken off here. Something wrong with his gut, he’s in a bad way. It would get you back to North Shields and a few bob in your pocket, but mind, it’s a hard slog.’
Thomas paused with his ale halfway to his mouth. ‘I-I don’t know …’ he said. What if he were taken up by the bobbies as soon as they docked? Would they be looking for him or would it all be forgotten? By, but it would be grand to get back to England, though, it would an’ all!
‘Aye, well, if you don’t want to,’ said Jonty. ‘But the way I look at you and the way you’re expecting trouble, you’d be best off coming wi’ us.’
‘Go with you? Are you authorized to take on men?’ Thomas asked.
Jonty stared, then laughed. ‘You swallowed a dictionary have you? It sounds like it. What do you do when you’re at home? Not labouring, I would bet. Mebbe you’re not the man for the job.’
‘I’ve worked hard in my time!’ snapped Thomas. ‘I’ll do it an’ all, you’ll see if I’m up to it.’
‘Howay then. You’ll have to be signed on and the sooner the better, before they find someone else.’
Jonty got to his feet, swilled back the last of his ale and led the way out of the bar. ‘You got anything you want to pick up?’
‘Nothing that matters,’ Thomas admitted.
‘Howay then, let’s away. We’re off on the next tide.’
Life aboard the steamer was hard, harder than anything Thomas had done before, and the work of a stoker the hardest of all. His hands cracked and blistered and coal dust got into the cracks so that they began to look like a miner’s hands, only they were not hardened to it and he felt they never would be. But the work did not really occupy his brain and his thoughts went over the events of the last months, even years.
If only he had had that big win, how different his life might have been. If only he had not put everything into the last gamble, the South American railway scheme that would have made his fortune, aye and Lottie’s too. Hadn’t he only taken the money from the firm so that he could give Lottie a better life? Didn’t she deserve it after all she had been through? Oh, Lottie, he agonized. He had to see her again, he had to. As the days went by, filled with hard slog and indifferent food, the turmoil in his brain seemed to fuse with the ache in his muscles and the stinging pain in his hands.
‘If I get through this I’ll never gamble again, I swear to God,’ he mumbled to himself as he came off shift one day and fell into his hammock.
‘What’s that? Who the hell is that talking? Can a man not have a minute’s peace?’ an irate voice asked out of the gloom. ‘Shut your flaming face!’
Thomas didn’t hear it because he was already in an exhausted sleep.
It wasn’t until they were but two days out of North Shields that Thomas began to worry about how he was going to manage to see Lottie and yet keep hidden from the law. Where was she? Had she gone back to Durham? He would have to find out before he risked going there himself. There was one thing for sure, though, he would keep well away from Newcastle. Brownlow, Brownlow and Snape would have had to make good the client’s money he had taken. Though he had only borrowed it really; he had meant to pay it back. He was no thief. He would have repaid it were it not for the bad luck that dogged him. He would go to his mother’s house. Even if she had heard what he had done she would take him in. After all, it was a while ago now.
‘Oh, Thomas, Thomas.’ Eliza wept to see him standing on her doorstep. ‘I thought you were dead; Lottie thought you were dead.’
She was unable to move for shock, standing there on the back doorstep, for he had come in through the yard. She felt she was seeing things. He looked twenty years older than when she had last seen him and he was dressed in dirty old clothes like a common labourer.
‘Well, can I come in, Mother?’ Thomas asked. Maybe she didn’t want him in, he thought. Had she heard what he had done in Newcastle? She had evidently been in touch with Lottie.
‘Aye, come in, come in,’ she said, standing back from the door and wiping her eyes with the corner of her pinny. She put her hand on his arm as he brushed past her, almost as though to reassure herself he was real. She gazed up into his face. ‘You’re so brown, lad,’ she said, though what she wanted to do was shout and rage at him for leaving as he did without so much as a word.
‘Mam,’ he said and put his arms around her and kissed her cheek and suddenly they were both overcome by the emotion of the moment. Her body felt small and frail and he was shocked at how much she seemed to have aged. Awkwardly they went into the kitchen and she pushed the kettle on to the coals automatically and put the teapot to warm.
‘Does Lottie know you’re back?’ Eliza had her back to him as she asked the question.
‘No, I don’t know where she is,’ he said and she swung around to face him. ‘I reckoned you might.’
‘I do. I know my responsibilities even if you do not,’ snapped Eliza. She dumped the teapot on the table with such force that drops of tea welled up through the spout and spilt on to the scrubbed bare wood. She made no attempt to get cups or milk and sugar; she forgot about the tea.
‘Where is she, Mam?’ Thomas asked patiently. He did not sit down, just stood there by the table.
‘Over by Prebends Bridge, she has a cottage there,’ said Eliza. ‘Well, she couldn’t stay in Newcastle waiting for you to come home, could she? Poor lass, she must have been ashamed and devastated an’ all to have her man run away like you did.’
Thomas did not respond to her remark. What was there to say? ‘Give me her address, Mam,’ he repeated.
‘I’ll have to, I suppose. But don’t you think she’s gone through enough? By, you were never brought up to run away from your responsibilities, Thomas, you make me ashamed, you do an’ all.’
‘I know, Mam, I’m sorry. But give me her address, please.’
‘All right, all right! You stay away for God knows how long and then you cannot spend a few minutes talking to your mother. You’re not going right now, are you?’ Eliza remembered the tea and gestured towards it. ‘Stay and have a bite and a cup. By, lad you look that thin and poorly. Let me look at your poor hands, I can see they’re not right. By, what have you been doing to them? Slaving and skivvying by the look of them. Thomas …’
‘Mam, please, if you don’t tell me I’ll find out for myself somehow. Don’t worry, I’ll come back, I promise I will.’ Thomas turned to the door impatiently, then looked back again to his mother.
‘It’s 54 George Street, I told you I would give it to you. Go on, then, go.’
‘I’ll come back, Mam, I will,’ said Thomas. ‘But I have to see Lottie, you can see that, can’t you?’
‘Aye. Go then.’
She watched through the kitchen window as her son went down the yard, pulling the gate to after himself. His poor hands, she thought dully. When he came back, if he came back, she would mix an ointment of boracic and petroleum jelly to poultice them.
Well, she had work to do. Anne would be coming in for her tea and Peter too. She would make some panacklty. She went into the pantry for potatoes and onions, then cut some pieces of bacon from the slab on the cold shelf.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘Afternoon, Lottie,’ said Thomas.
She leaned forward the better to see him, for she couldn’t trust her eyes. Her glasses were on a string around her neck and her fingers shook as she put them on. His image swam into focus. It was Thomas’s face, albeit an older Thomas with greying hair and a furrowed face, and it was definitely Thomas’s voice. But still …
‘Thomas?’ she said.
‘None other,’ he replied, smiling the old smile. ‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’
‘Where have you been?’ she asked, for all the world as though he had stepped out for a paper and taken longer than she had expected.
‘Ask me in and I’ll tell you,’ he said with a small laugh. ‘Or
am I to stand here all day?’
She stood back and pushed the bridge of her glasses up her nose in an unconscious gesture. Her thoughts whirled. Thomas stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him. He was still smiling as he put his arms around her, but the smile faded as she stiffened, then shrank away.
‘Hey, now that’s not nice, Lottie,’ he said. ‘Here I’ve come home after being gone so long and you don’t want me to touch you. I’m your husband, Lottie, and you are my wedded wife.’
‘You ran away from me, remember,’ said Lottie. ‘You ran away and didn’t care what happened to me.’
‘Well, I had to get away,’ said Thomas reasonably. ‘I would have sent for you; I intended to send for you but the right time just didn’t come. Are you not going to even ask me how I am?’ He gave her a mocking smile as he walked past her and into the small sitting room without waiting for an answer. ‘Make a cup of tea, will you, lass? It’s a while since I had a decent cup of tea.’
Lottie stared after him, unable to believe what was happening. She followed him into the sitting room. He was sitting on the only armchair there, taking off his shabby boots. Stretching out his legs and putting his feet on the steel fender, he sat back in the chair, and closed his eyes for a minute.
‘By, that feels good,’ he said. ‘I’ve dreamed of this all the way back from that hellhole I’ve been in. A room with a proper armchair to sit in and my dear wife by my side.’
Lottie saw red. She went over to him and kicked his feet from the fender, then leaned over him and slapped him across the face with all her might.
‘God damn you, Thomas Mitchell!’ she screamed at him. ‘Where have you been? I said. Where? You’ve ruined my life! You rotten excuse for a man, you swine …’
She got no further, for Thomas jumped up from the chair, caught both her hands in one of his and hit her so hard that her head rocked from side to side and waves of blackness swamped her brain. He swore as he pushed her down on to the hard, stone-flagged floor and tore the buttons from her shirtwaister in one movement, as he took it by the neck and wrenched it open.
Her head bumped painfully against the stone and she was incapable of any resistance as he dragged up her skirt and forced her legs apart with his knee. He held her there as he unbuttoned his trousers and forced himself inside her. He had loosed her hands by now but they were pinned between her body and his. When she finally got one arm free, she managed to rake his face with her nails, yet he hardly seemed to feel it. He simply knocked her hand away and grasped her breast with a horny hand, squeezing and twisting at the soft flesh until he gave one last grunting thrust and collapsed on top of her. She lay there, barely conscious, unable to breathe until he rolled off her, panting heavily.
Eventually, he got to his feet and buttoned up his trousers, before sitting back in his chair and put his feet back on the fender, crossing them negligently. Steam rose from his socks with the heat of the fire and the smell of him filled the air to the extent that she felt suffocated. Her vision cleared gradually and she sat up, pulling her shirtwaister together, wincing as her breast throbbed even more when she brushed it with her arm. Her thighs ached, her belly ached, there was a stabbing pain in her groin and a throbbing in her head. She pulled ineffectually at her skirt but it wouldn’t go down properly until she got to her feet.
He turned his head and looked at her and she stared back with utter loathing.
‘You filthy beast,’ she said and paused, for her head was swimming again now she was upright. She sat down abruptly on a hard-backed chair she had bought at the second-hand market in Durham marketplace. It was the only other chair besides his in the room and had a carved back, which dug into her bruises, but she had to get off her feet before she fell down again.
‘Aye, well you don’t get a lot of opportunity to wash on a tramp steamer. Nor time either.’
‘You stink! God forgive you for what you’ve just done to me.’
‘Hey! I’m your husband, aren’t I? And you are my wife. I did nothing I hadn’t a perfect right to do, I did not.’
Thomas was smiling now, a cold smile. She could hardly recognize him for the man she had married. There was nothing in him at all of the boy she had known before then. How could a man change so much? His personality was totally different. He was a stranger in Thomas’s body.
‘You raped me,’ she said, with no expression in her voice.
‘A man cannot rape his own wife, Lottie,’ he said, smiling in amusement. ‘Did you not know that? Well, you can believe me, I’m a lawyer.’
‘Well, you don’t look like one.’
Suddenly Lottie couldn’t bear to remain in the same room as he was. She rose to her feet and went out of the room, though every step gave her pain. She went into the kitchen and felt the water in the set-pot boiler; it was barely warm but it would have to do, for she was desperate to wash off the stale male smell of him. Bringing in the tin bath from its nail in the yard wall, she used the ladle tin to empty the water from the boiler into the bath and began to take off her clothes.
Hearing a noise from the other room she stopped undressing abruptly and took a chair and propped it under the handle of the door to hold it closed, before taking off the rest of her clothes and stepping into the bath. She scrubbed herself clean with lye soap and would have done it again but for the fact that she was worried he would manage to find a way through. She jumped uncontrollably as she heard his footsteps and again when he tried the door handle, rattling it angrily.
‘Lottie, let me in or it will be the worse for you,’ he said.
‘I will not!’
Lottie hurriedly climbed out of the bath and rubbed at herself with a towel before pulling on her clothes over her still damp body. What she really wanted to do was throw the lot on to the fire but her clean clothes were upstairs in the bedroom closet.
He had stopped rattling the doorknob, had he given up? As she hesitated, she heard a noise behind her.
‘Now then, Lottie, have you got the kettle on yet? I’m fair parched for a cup of tea.’
She whirled to see him right behind her. He must have gone out of the front door and around the street and in through the backyard. Oh, why hadn’t she locked the back door?
‘Don’t touch me,’ she warned, backing away from him and picking up the brass poker from the fireplace. ‘I swear if you do, I’ll swing for you.’
Thomas laughed and took a step forward. ‘Now, Lottie, you know you won’t use that on me.’
‘I will, I will indeed,’ she said as she took a tighter grip on the poker. The pain in her breast deepened and her heartbeat raced. She began to feel dizzy again and it took all of her willpower to stay upright.
Thomas hesitated, gazing at her uncertainly, then he shook his head. ‘No, you won’t do that, Lottie,’ he said and stepped closer.
It was done in a minute. She didn’t even think about it. She brought the poker up to hit him and he sidestepped away from the blow. His foot caught in the clippie rag mat Lottie had laid as a hearthrug and he fell on to the unemptied tin bath which was sitting there. His head hit the side handle, slipped from there to the fender and he lay, stunned. Lottie dropped the poker and it clattered on the tin hearthplate, resounding over and over.
She had killed him. She had killed him. The phrase repeated and repeated in her head. God help me, she thought. She could hear herself screaming in her brain but nothing was coming out. She stepped back from the clippie mat and sat down by the table. Some water was still sloshing in the bath. The rest was soaking into the mat, some sizzling on the hot hearthplate, a trickle running over a flagstone to a groove then along the groove to the next one. Some of it was pink. Why was it pink? Was there blood in it?
He was so still, she thought – one thought among a chaotic jumble of thoughts. She couldn’t remember whether she had hit him with the poker or not. No, of course she hadn’t. Had she? Whether she had or not, she would have to tell the polis.
She would swing for him, s
he had said. But she had not meant it, no, she had not. She was defending herself …
Thomas groaned and she jumped into the air in shock and her heart beat even more wildly. Was it her imagination? She stared at him. His hand moved – he brought it up to touch his face, hold his forehead. She leaned over him and saw that his eyes were open and he was staring back at her.
‘Well, woman, I thought you were going to go for me there. Come on, come on, help me up, my head’s fit to burst.’
‘I will not.’
Thomas pushed himself into a sitting position using the fender as a prop. He breathed out heavily and groaned. ‘My head is fit to burst, Lottie,’ he said and suddenly he sounded just like the old Thomas to her so that she moved towards him, hesitated for only a second or two, then helped him up and into the fireside chair. He leaned back, his head on the bentwood frame that held the rails together. He closed his eyes and seemed to slip into sleep.
Lottie watched him for several minutes but he did not move. After a while she emptied what was left of the water from the bath into a bucket and took it into the yard and poured it down the drain, then took out the bath itself and hung it on the nail in the wall. She took the soaking mat outside too and dried up the water slopping about on the stone flags. In all the time it took her to clear the mess in the kitchen he did not wake up.
It took all her willpower to make herself touch him. She felt his forehead; it was cold and clammy but not icy. There was a pulse beating at his temple. She felt quite detached somehow, as though he really were a stranger, a tramp who had wandered into the house. Stepping back from him, for the smell was overpowering now with the heat of the fire drying out his clothes, she pondered what to do about him. Eventually, she went upstairs to her bedroom and changed her clothes.
Downstairs again, she saw he had moved only a little and seemed to be in an even deeper sleep.
She would fetch Eliza, she thought. Eliza was a Nightingale nurse besides being his mother; she would know what to do. She covered him with a blanket and left him.