Hidden Currents

by Rowena Summers

  To Carrie’s horror, she saw Wilf go for his brother’s throat, and Pa had the devil’s job to prise them apart. She could be thankful that the Woolleys and most others had gone on their way now, and that they were virtually outside their own front door.

  ‘I’ll not have my boys fighting over a piece of skirt,’ Pa roared, banging their heads together to their mutual howls of pain and rage. ‘You may think yourselves men, but I’m still your father, and while you’re under my roof, you’ll behave accordingly, do you understand?’

  ‘Does that include threatening to kill a man outside the church?’ Wilf snapped, and ducked again as Sam took a swipe at him.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this, so get inside, all of you,’ Ma suddenly said, her voice alarmingly shaky.

  She was the most stoical of women, but Carrie could see that her eyes were large in her pinched, white face, and she suddenly remembered Ma’s condition. Ma might be scornful about letting it upset her normal working life, but emotional upsets were different. She couldn’t predict how family squabbles were going to affect her now.

  ‘Ma’s right,’ Carrie said shrilly. ‘You should all be ashamed of yourselves for upsetting her so, and with the babby to think about and all.’ She clamped her hands to her mouth at once, as Billy turned his round, inquisitive eyes on her.

  Pa pushed them all inside, but it was too late. Billy began his shrieking questions at once.

  ‘What babby? There ain’t no babby in this house, only me. You always said I was the babby, Ma.’

  ‘And you always hated me saying it, didn’t you?’

  He conveniently ignored that. ‘I don’t want no other babby,’ he howled. ‘I shall hate it and I shan’t speak to it, nor let it play with my things. I shall hide my top and my marbles away from it.’

  Frank’s laughter stopped him in full flood. ‘And a good thing too, squirt. We don’t want the babby to be swallowing marbles and choking itself, do we?’

  Billy glared at him. Somehow Frank’s words made the babby more of a loving, breathing certainty than anything else. His stocky little figure was as taut as a statue, and Ma made a rare gesture of affection towards him and tried to gather him into her arms. His reply was to pummel her in the stomach in his frustration. She was taken completely off-balance and she staggered backwards, grasping at the settle to save herself from the blows.

  ‘Billy, no!’ Carrie gasped, pulling the unwitting child away from her mother.

  ‘I’m all right, and he didn’t know what he was doing,’ Ma said, breathing quickly. ‘But I suppose that’s summat else that’ll need to be explained soon.’ And it was obvious that she didn’t relish the thought of doing so.

  Before any of them could stop him, Pa had boxed Billy’s ears, which started the boy screeching indignantly.

  ‘I ain’t done nothing!’ he yelled. ‘And I don’t want no whining babby in this house, neither. I’ll go and live at the orphanage if you bring it here, so there.’

  Carrie could have laughed at his comical little face, if it hadn’t been so obvious that the situation was so tragic to him. He stood defiantly, rubbing his sore ears, his shoulders stiff and hunched, his face blotchy with trying to hold back the tears.

  She went to take him in her arms, but he wrenched away from her, wanting nobody. He went stomping up the stairs, crashing the bedroom door behind him. As Pa made to go after him, Ma put out a hand and stopped him.

  ‘Let him be, Sam. He’s put out at the thought of not being the babby any more, but he’ll come round to it.’

  She was calmer than the lot of them, Carrie thought. Calmer than Pa, who looked thunderous again.

  ‘Seems like none of us have got much choice about that,’ he said savagely, and turned on his heel to go out the front door and away down the street.

  He had impressed on them all their lives that it was only the low-life who went wandering aimlessly on a Sunday, and such activities were frowned on by respectable folk, which made his action all the more damning.

  In the silence that followed, they could hear his Sunday boots striking on the cobbles before the sounds finally died away. Then, Carrie was only too aware of her heart’s pounding, and the way her Ma’s breath had caught. She heard Wilf clear his throat and Frank give a nervous laugh, but it was fast dawning on them all that Billy wasn’t the only one resenting the coming baby.

  Pa didn’t want it either, and it was so unbelievable, even in their present circumstances, that Carrie couldn’t even imagine how Ma would feel about that. The Stuckeys were a close-knit family, and had always defended one another, no matter what … and all of a sudden, it seemed that anything and everything was conspiring to tear them apart.

  Chapter 8

  By the time August had slid into September, an occasional morning frost was already glazing the streets and reddening the noses of the early risers. Those who had work went about their business and ignored the changing of the season. Those who didn’t, but who were accustomed to rising at dawn, gave an habitual small shiver at the smell of autumn in the air, and tried to ignore the dread thought of the idle winter that was just around the corner.

  Then they mostly snuggled back beneath the bed-clothes, pretending to themselves and their families that they were making the most of the inactivity while it lasted, while sending up a fervent prayer that it couldn’t last for ever.

  Those who never got up early were completely unaware of such inconveniences as belt-tightening due to the lack of money to buy food. Or of sending small boys to the docks to collect any coal bits or wood shavings to use on the stove for cooking what meagre fare they had, and to store up in sheds and lean-tos and bunkers for the winter fires.

  * * *

  Helen Barclay never rose before the hour of ten o’clock. Her father was one of Bristol’s rich financiers, and it was only when she heard the wheels of his carriage leave the house for his splendid offices in the city, that she decided it was time enough for her to leave her luxuriously warm bed. She had become accustomed to eating her breakfast in her room, and it was a little ritual in which she was indulged by her Mama and everyone else in the Barclay’s Clifton mansion.

  That September morning Helen was putting the finishing touches to her toilet. Her irritating maid had helped her through the ritual of dressing in her shifts and the hooped wire underskirt, and then into the new morning gown of soft lilac voile. Sophie had teased wisps of her golden hair into becoming little trails around her face and piled the rest of it into a rich thick knot on the top of her head.

  ‘You look a real picture and no mistake, Miss Helen,’ Sophie said, in the sycophantic way that was beginning to heartily grate on Helen’s ears.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what it’s all for,’ she said to herself, and not expecting any comment.

  The pudgy-faced girl sniffed.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know why you should be so discontented, miss. Seems to me you’re a young lady who can have anything she wants, so you’ve no reason for sounding so out of sorts, begging your pardon, of course.’

  Helen swivelled round on the velvet-covered dressing-table stool. The girl took far too many liberties for someone only here on a probationary basis. She would be given her month’s grace, but after that, Helen would shed no tears to see her go.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand!’ she said, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice. ‘How would you know how pointless it feels to be dressed up like a peacock at ten in the morning., with nowhere to go and no-one to see, and then having to take it all off again after lunch to be on my best behaviour when Mama’s friends come for afternoon tea?’

  She paused for breath, furious with herself for even deigning to discuss such matters with this gossipy girl.

  Sophie sniffed, having been in service for various young ladies long enough to recognise the signs when she saw them, and pert enough to speak her mind when she felt like it.

  ‘You’re just peaky, that’s all. ’Tis what we common folk call the time of the mo
nth, and the gypsy’s curse. You fine folk like to pretend it don’t happen to you, but it’s no respecter of persons.’

  Helen went a delicate pink. It was certainly something her elegant mother never referred to, and would never do so in front of servants! The temptation to tell the girl to leave the room at once was tempered by knowing the truth of her own irritability, and she gave a grimace.

  ‘You’re impertinent to say such things, but I shan’t deny that the sooner the next few days are over, the better. Why do you call it the gypsy’s curse anyway?’

  ‘Just because I’m one o’ they common folk who talks common, miss,’ the girl said, tongue in cheek.

  Her inverted snobbery made Helen all the more annoyed.

  ‘And do all common folk have such interesting topics of conversation?’ she said sarcastically. She knew very well that they were fencing with each other, but it was a mite less irksome to spark with her maid than to wander about the house, reading or embroidering or picking at the pianoforte, or any one of the other little amusements a young lady was supposed to enjoy during the tedious hours of the morning.

  ‘I dunno about the rest of ’em, but some do, I daresay. Even the girl who comes to collect the laundry fineries ain’t above a bit o’ morning gossip,’ Sophie said, wondering how long it would be before Miss Barclay tired of all this chit-chat.

  ‘What girl? Oh, you mean Carrie Stuckey. Well, what does she have to say, ninny?’ Helen said, wondering why she was bothering with all this, but caught now by the chatter of this plain-faced doll.

  She leaned back against her dressing-table, while the girl stood, fidgeting. She really was a sketch, Helen thought, with her brown hair wild and unruly, and a decidedly shifty look. The girl, Carrie Stuckey, for all her humble background, had far more of an air about her than this thin scarecrow!

  ‘I dunno much about her,’ Sophie said with a shrug. ‘Though there’s always rumours below stairs, o’ course.’

  Helen sat up straighter. Her Mama would be furious at her for probing for kitchen gossip, but her Mama was quite content to while away her morning hours doing little or nothing, while Helen was not.

  ‘What rumours? Is she in some kind of trouble?’

  To her surprise, she didn’t want to think so. She remembered the girl who brought back her exquisitely laundered finery, accompanied by her small scallywag of a brother. She remembered her more clearly from the day she’d seen her on Clifton Downs, flushed and sparkling beside a more common-looking girl. And a handsome young man had clearly found Miss Carrie Stuckey as attractive as any society lady.

  Sophie snorted. ‘’Tain’t her that’s in trouble, but her whole family, be all accounts. Out of work, the lot of ’em, so Cook says, and only the mother and Carrie doin’ any work at all. Cook says she heard as how the mother’s expecting another babby an’ all.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  Helen was startled by such intimate details, and wondered just how Cook seemed to collect so many tit-bits of information. Those below-stairs had all the best luck in such respects, she thought in annoyance, and then scolded herself for not giving due sympathy to all that Sophie had said. Poor Carrie.

  But even though she might feel sympathy for the girl and her family, she had no real notion of what a disaster a new baby was going to be for them if the men continued to be out of work. A small baby didn’t eat much, did it? And she was sure the other rich Clifton families beside themselves, for whom the Stuckey women worked, would gladly donate some baby clothes when the infant arrived. It never even occurred to Helen that such generosity would be seen as charity.

  * * *

  Sophie finished picking up clothes and tidying them away in closets, and asked Helen if she could take an hour off to visit that sick friend of hers in the city.

  ‘I suppose so, but your friends do seem to have very frequent illnesses,’ Helen commented.

  ‘’Tis the damp that gets ’em every time,’ Sophie said glibly. ‘You wouldn’t know about that, miss, living in such warm surroundings.’

  ‘Oh, all right, off you go,’ Helen said, before she had to listen to another whining session about how lucky the likes of the Barclays were, compared with the peasants who lived in damp miserable hovels. Sometimes she wondered why Sophie didn’t just stand with her hand held out for alms and be done with it.

  She was still sitting by her window, gazing out across the Downs where a group of urchins teased a dog with a stick, when her mother came bustling into her bedroom. For a heavily built, well-proportioned lady, Gertrude Barclay normally managed to retain an air of enviable serenity and coolness, but today she was unusually flushed. As usual, she came straight to the point of her visit.

  ‘Have you borrowed my jade ear-rings, Helen?’

  ‘Of course not. I wouldn’t take them without asking, Mama,’ she said mildly. ‘You were wearing them at dinner last evening, I remember.’

  Helen didn’t particularly want to remember last evening’s dinner party, with several young men paraded for her approval in so clumsy a fashion by her father. She was in no hurry to be married, unless it was to a man of her own choice. So far, one hadn’t appeared on her horizon who was remotely interesting enough for her to want to spend the rest of her life with him.

  ‘I know I was wearing them last evening, and I removed them in my bathroom because they were pinching my ears,’ her Mama said testily. ‘I should have replaced them in my jewel case, but I can’t have done so, because they’re not there. I especially wanted to wear them this afternoon, since Lady Wetherby admired them so much.’

  And you would naturally want to flaunt them in front of her again, Helen thought, with a glimmer of amusement. But the amusement faded as she saw the genuine distress in her mother’s eyes. The ear-rings had been a birthday gift from her father, and were really rather fine.

  ‘You can’t have lost them, Mama,’ she protested. ‘Perhaps Papa put them away somewhere for safe keeping.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He wouldn’t have noticed them, and no-one else has been in the bathroom except for that stupid temporary maid. I can’t imagine she’d have been bright enough to put them away in a safe place. If she did, she hasn’t had the sense to tell me.’

  She paused, and Helen knew a sharp frisson of anxiety. The ear-rings weren’t outrageously valuable, but valuable enough to fetch a good price at a pawn-broker’s. And they weren’t the only things to go missing from the house lately.

  Other things had disappeared, a silver cigarette box, a crystal vase that had been supposedly smashed but never seen again, an opal brooch, a set of tortoise-shell hairbrushes with silver rims … Until now, the items had been assumed to be inadvertently mislaid, and would eventually turn up … Just as sharply now, Helen couldn’t help remembering the maid’s slick way of filtering such ideas into the mind. And the jade ear-rings were certainly the most valuable of all the items.

  ‘You surely don’t think that Sophie —’ Helen began, jumping up from her window seat with her hands clenched tightly at her sides.

  ‘I most certainly do think,’ Gertrude snapped. ‘Where is the girl? I want her brought here at once.’

  Helen ran her tongue around her dry lips. ‘She’s not here. I gave her an hour’s grace to go and visit her sick friend. She must have been gone almost that long already.’

  She felt sick to her stomach. If Sophie was indeed the thief, then she might never return, especially if the jade ear-rings had been her most-valuable prize, and most likely to begin a hue and cry. Helen hated to think they had been so betrayed, but it was obvious that there were no such doubts in her mother’s mind. She had never cared for the bumptious girl the domestic employment agency had recommended, and Helen guessed they would never get her patronage again.

  ‘Come with me, Helen, and we’ll get to the bottom of this right now.’

  There were those who compared Gertrude Barclay with an outrigger in full sail when she stormed out of a room with all guns blazing. Helen followed quickl
y, her heart pounding, knowing there was bound to be a scene if Sophie had returned, and her mother accused her outright of stealing. And what if they were wrong? She tried to remonstrate with her mother.

  ‘Please don’t go rushing in and accusing her, Mama,’ she begged. ‘Give her a chance to defend herself.’

  ‘She’ll need to defend herself in a courtroom if she’s a common thief,’ was the reply. She picked up her skirts and climbed the uncarpeted stairs to the servants’ quarters, to pause, breathing heavily, outside Sophie’s shared room.

  Gertrude opened the door without knocking. The room was as empty, as it should be, with the servants about their work. Helen wrinkled her nose at the smell of stale cheap scent and sweat that permeated it. She had hardly ever visited the servants’ rooms, which were horrid little places with tiny windows, and with the beds all squashed together. But she did know that the girls kept their boxes of belongings on top of their wall closets. There was one missing, and there was only one explanation for that.

  ‘She’s gone,’ she said hoarsely. ‘But she couldn’t have known she was under suspicion.’

  ‘You’re far too gullible, my dear. She had obviously decided that with the theft of my ear-rings it was time to move on. No doubt it was all planned, and this so-called visit to a sick friend was just a ploy. Has she asked for time off to visit this sick friend before?’

  Helen nodded dumbly. Three or four times recently … how could she have been so foolish as to be taken in?

  ‘And I daresay these other visits were to pass on the things she had taken as well, so that nothing could be found in her room. I’ll have the law on her for this!’ Gertrude snapped, clearly incensed.

  ‘But you don’t have any real proof, Mama.’

  She didn’t know why she was bothering to defend the girl, except that she felt so badly let down, and so very stupid … But she found that she was talking to the air, as her Mama turned and clattered back down the stairs with far less decorum than usual. Perhaps the proof would be in Sophie’s box, when and if the law caught up with her, but more likely, the items would have been quickly pawned or sold.