by Anna Jacobs
Cassandra came to link her arm in his. ‘I heard today that they’re going to set up a soup kitchen in the parish church for those who’ve no work at all. It doesn’t matter if you’re a member of the congregation or not. It’s to be held there three times a week, Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We can get a meal there on those days and that’ll be a big help.’
Edwin wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing to do this in the parish church. He’d been hoping the Minister of their own chapel, a more compassionate man, would organise something. But the Town Council in its wisdom had decided that all charity efforts were to be combined because help would go further that way. And since the parish church had the biggest hall by far, the soup kitchen was to be held there.
What was the world coming to when his lasses had to go out and eat the meagre bread of charity?
Maia still had two days’ work a week, so on the first Monday the soup kitchen was open, the other three sisters went to get tickets for it. People waited patiently in the long queue outside the church hall, not saying much. It was shaming to depend on charity and they felt the humiliation keenly.
Cotton workers might be used to tightening their belts when there was a downturn in trade, but they weren’t used to this almost total lack of work. Some had already left the town, seeking jobs in the woollen industry of nearby Yorkshire. Others had braved the south, where people spoke differently and the land was softer. It was said there was still work to be found there.
Those men who found it too hard to leave spent their days wandering round Outham like lost souls, not knowing how to fill their time. It was easier on the women, who at least had their homes to keep tidy, their children to care for.
When they got to the front of the queue, Cassandra and her sisters had to answer questions about their circumstances before they could be given anything.
The man from the committee, who was a member of the parish church, questioned them in a sharp, impatient voice, then said curtly, ‘I hope you’ll thank your Maker on your knees for this generosity.’ He waved one hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Go to the next table for your meal tickets.’
There a lady asked yet again, ‘Name?’
‘Cassandra Blake.’ She saw the lady write down Cass Blake. ‘That’s not my name.’ Her father had always refused to have their names shortened, saying he’d chosen them because they were beautiful names, belonging to the Greek goddesses he’d read about in the books the Minister had lent him.
The lady stared at her in outrage then turned to the person sitting next to her. ‘The impudence of this creature! She comes here to beg for food then corrects what I write.’
The Vicar came across. ‘Is there a problem, my dear Mrs Greaves?’
‘There certainly is. This young madam has actually dared to correct what I’ve written.’
‘But you asked for my name, then wrote something else down,’ Cassandra protested.
He bent over the long book in which the names were being inscribed. ‘Cass Blake.’
‘My name is Cassandra. I’ve never been called Cass in my life.’
‘My dear young woman, you should be grateful that this lady is generously giving her time to help you and not fuss about such unimportant details.’ He looked down his nose at her. ‘In any case, Cassandra is a most unsuitable name for a person of your station. I don’t know where your parents got that from but I wouldn’t have allowed them to christen you by such a name in my church. Now, take your tickets and move along quickly or I shall have you removed from the hall. The food is over there. One ticket for each day, remember.’
He spoke as if she hadn’t the wit to understand that. She hesitated, feeling outraged. But she’d eaten virtually nothing for more than a day, having slipped most of her portion to her father and Maia the previous night, because they still had to go out to work and because he’d been looking so tired lately.
When she went across to where they were serving the soup, she found herself facing her uncle Joseph’s wife on the other side of the table.
Without a flicker of acknowledgement, her aunt said, ‘Give me your ticket and take a bowl!’
The next lady ladled some soup into the bowl and a third lady passed Cassandra a piece of stale bread and a battered old spoon. ‘Here you are. Don’t forget to take the bowl and spoon to the table over there when you’ve finished.’
Cassandra forced a ‘Thank you,’ then escaped to a trestle table as far away from her aunt’s glare as possible. She set down her food with fingers that trembled, shaken by the encounter. Such hatred!
A short time later she was joined by Pandora, whose cheeks bore red patches and whose eyes were sparkling with anger. ‘That woman put down my name as Dora. Dora! And the Vicar scolded me when I tried to correct her.’
Xanthe followed her, setting the bowl down and splashing soup on to the table. ‘She put me down as Susan.’
A young man came across to join them. ‘I heard what that woman said to you. I think it’s shameful. Absolutely shameful. What right have they to change your names?’
Cassandra watched Pandora smile at him, saw how he blinked. Yet another male was entranced by her youngest sister, who didn’t even seem to notice the effect she had on men. She was definitely the beauty of the family, with hair so dark it was almost blue-black and eyes of a vivid blue.
‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked. ‘I’m on my own and I don’t know anyone else here.’
‘You’re welcome to sit with us,’ Cassandra said.
They began to eat. The bread was so stale and hard, they had to dunk it in the soup to soften it, which wasn’t good manners and drew scornful looks from the Vicar as he passed. But you couldn’t waste food.
The hall was soon full. The soup was unappetising, made mainly from cabbage, potatoes and bones, but no one left a drop.
‘Poor thin stuff this is!’ Pandora muttered. ‘I could make better myself. And the bread is days old.’
‘At least it’s not mouldy. And it’s free.’ Xanthe sighed. ‘I can see why Father stopped coming to this church, if that’s how they treat you. Do they think poorer people have no feelings?’
When they went outside, they parted company from the young man and strolled home slowly. People used to walk briskly, Cassandra thought as she saw others sauntering along. Now there were so many long hours to fill, no one hurried.
She looked up to see only a few thin trails of smoke instead of a sky criss-crossed with thick plumes of dark smoke from mill chimneys. It looked wrong, as if this wasn’t their town any more, only a ghost of Outham.
It wasn’t till they were nearly home that Pandora said what they’d all been thinking, ‘Our aunt looked as if she hated us, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. Don’t tell father we saw her. It’ll only upset him.’
Pandora was silent for the length of the street, then said thoughtfully, ‘She always has such a strange look in her eyes.’
‘Never mind her,’ Xanthe said. ‘I want to go and change my library books. At least we’ll be able to do that any time we want now.’
‘I think we’re going to be very grateful for that library,’ Cassandra said. ‘At least reading costs us nothing.’
Joseph Blake closed his grocery store at nine o’clock that night as usual, saw his employees off the premises and locked up. He walked reluctantly up the stairs to the comfortable rooms where he and his wife had lived ever since her parents died. He’d eaten a meal with Isabel at six o’clock, seen what a foul mood she was in and claimed an urgent need to finish some accounts in the shop. There, as he supervised his employees and attended to the more important customers himself, he’d tried to work out what she could be so angry about this time.
She was often in a bad mood these days, it seemed. Their poor little maidservant was regularly reduced to tears, but Dot needed the work, because her family had no other source of income, so had to put up with it. If Joseph had tried to intervene, Isabel would have been even harder on the girl, so he bi
t his tongue and contented himself with slipping Dot the occasional treat from the shop, a broken biscuit or the untidy scraps of ham. He knew Isabel kept an eye on how much their maid ate and wasn’t generous.
Perhaps his wife had seen his nieces while she was out. That always put her in a bad mood. They were fine-looking girls and the youngest one was truly beautiful. He was sorry he didn’t know them, but Isabel had made it very clear before they married that if he wanted her, he had to sever all connection with his brother, and he’d given her his word, thinking he’d persuade her to change her mind later. But she never had. She came from high church stock and was proud of that, wanted no truck with those she called ‘canting Methodists’.
Only it seemed to him that she was the one doing the canting, mouthing meaningless religious phrases and living in exactly the opposite way to what the Bible taught. She’d been extremely jealous of his brother Edwin’s wife Catherine, who hadn’t been exactly beautiful but whose smiling face and kindly ways made friends for her everywhere. Isabel had few friends and her plain face was made even plainer by her sour expression.
It might have been different if they’d been able to have children. When they were first married, Isabel had carried one for seven months, seeming to soften and grow kinder with each month. But then she’d lost the baby, nearly dying herself in the process. She’d been too narrow and the birth had torn her inside, the doctor said. He’d added that she’d not be able to carry any more children to term so should avoid getting with child again.
She’d been ill for so long they’d moved in here with her parents, where her mother could look after her. And they’d not shared a bed from that day onwards. Which was a relief.
He’d soon learned to spend as much time as he could in the shop, had quickly understood why his father-in-law also did this. You could always find something to do there, checking the shelves, making sure the boy took out the deliveries promptly, seeing the salesmen from the various firms from whom they bought stock, or just sitting quietly after the shop closed, ostensibly checking the account books but in reality reading a newspaper or book.
When his parents-in-law died, he changed the shop’s name to Blake’s Emporium, which angered his wife but for once he’d stood up to her. He’d carried on running it in much the same way as before, however, because his father-in-law had been a good businessman.
Since the war in America things had changed. There was no need to order as much stock these days, because the Cotton Famine had affected people at every social level. The more affluent folk were unlikely to stop buying the basic necessities and wouldn’t starve like their poorer neighbours, which meant he would continue to make a living. But nearly everyone in the town had had to cut back their expenses, so his profits had gone down.
No putting it off any longer. He made sure the flaring gas lights were all safely extinguished and climbed the stairs to their living quarters.
Isabel was sitting waiting for him in her armchair near the fire, back stiffly upright, mouth tightly pursed, hands clasped in her lap. ‘How did business go today?’
‘Takings are down, but we’re still making a decent enough living.’
‘You should dismiss the youngest lad to keep the profits up.’
‘There are no other jobs in town and he’s the sole support of his family, so I’ll keep him on for as long as I’m able.’
‘My father would have dismissed him long before this.’
‘I’m not your father.’
She made an angry growling sound in her throat, but he didn’t care because she had no power to change anything. The shop had been left to him not her, thank goodness, because Mr Horton hadn’t believed women were able to understand business.
‘I’ll ring for our cocoa and biscuits,’ she said abruptly.
It wasn’t till they were sitting in front of the fire that she revealed the cause of her bad mood. ‘I saw those girls today. Three of them, anyway, I don’t know where the other one was. They came to the soup kitchen.’ Her narrow chest heaved with indignation as she added, ‘Like beggars! I was so mortified I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t acknowledge them, of course.’
He was surprised. ‘Are they that short of money? I’d have thought Edwin would still be earning something.’
‘They must be out of work or they’d not have been given tickets. I dread to think what people will be saying behind our backs, knowing we have relatives seeking charity like that.’
‘A lot of folk in the town need help now. It’s not my nieces’ fault there’s no work for them.’
‘Trust you to take their side. I’m sure those lazy young trollops don’t want to work.’
He didn’t argue, just sipped his cocoa and kept his expression calm as she went on and on. There was no doing anything but endure when Isabel got into this sort of mood, imagining insults where there were none and maligning his nieces, who were decent lasses.
He’d known she wouldn’t be an easy wife, but he hadn’t realised how bad living with her would be. He’d wanted the shop that came with her, the shop where he’d worked hard for ten years, so when it was clear that no other man was likely to marry her, he’d risked asking his employer’s permission to court his thirty-year-old spinster daughter.
His brother Edwin had hungered for learning but Joseph had hungered for money and comfort. Most of all, for a shop of his own.
He’d thought having children would soften Isabel. Now he knew nothing would ever soften her. Her mind was so warped with spite and temper, he sometimes questioned her very sanity.
But he would keep his promise to her father: he would always look after her, however difficult she was, in return for being given the shop.
2
In late November the whole country was outraged by the Trent Incident, when a US Navy vessel from the Northern States stopped and boarded a Royal Mail steamer which had just started its voyage from Cuba to England. At gunpoint they removed two passengers, who were Confederate diplomats on a mission to London.
The nation erupted into rage, and even those hungering from lack of cotton forgot their woes for a time as they expressed their outrage. Britain wasn’t at war with America, either North or South, but had declared its neutrality. The Americans had no right to do this! Many people clamoured for war to be declared on the North.
Edwin shook his head over this. ‘War’s a shameful way to settle a quarrel and I’m sure our dear Queen won’t allow it.
‘The Northern Captain was wrong, though,’ Cassandra protested. ‘He had no right to stop a British ship.’
‘No right at all.’ He smiled at her. He loved the way she understood what was happening in the world, though some folk said it wasn’t women’s business.
The Blake sisters, fretting over their lack of work, were more upset by the news their father brought home in early December about the local cotton industry. His employer had told him that twenty-nine mills in Lancashire had now stopped production and over a hundred others were on half-time.
‘So many people out of work, so many going hungry,’ said Maia. ‘Why does no one set up proper relief schemes to help us, instead of these soup kitchens?’
‘They’re talking about setting up a work camp for men just outside town,’ Edwin said. ‘Breaking stones.’
‘But that’s work for convicts!’ Pandora exclaimed.
‘It’s the Vicar’s idea. He’s a hard man, Saunders is, says people should be grateful for any work and at least the town can use the stones to mend the old roads and make new ones. They’re going to pay the men a shilling a ton for the stones they break.’
There was silence, then Cassandra asked, ‘How long will it take to break up a ton of stones?’
‘A day, they tell me, perhaps a little less if a man is strong.’
‘Six shillings a week isn’t enough to feed a family properly!’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’d do anything to earn money again,’ Xanthe said, ‘even break stones. But they won’
t let women do that. We always have to depend on our menfolk.’
‘And you’ve only got me,’ Edwin said. ‘I wish you’d married, my dear girls, at least one or two of you, so that you could have strong young men to depend on, not an old fellow like me.’
‘I’ll not marry till I meet a man I can love and admire,’ Xanthe said, ‘and who will recognise that I’m able to think just as well as him.’
‘I sometimes wonder if there are men like that for women of our class,’ Maia said sadly.
Cassandra was more concerned about the way her father had spoken of himself as ‘old’. He’d talked like that a few times lately. Was he feeling his age?
And he was right. What would they do if anything happened to him, especially now?
December was a very mild month, which was a godsend for people unable to afford fuel to heat their homes. But the end of the month was heavy with sorrow for the whole nation, because on the 14th the Prince Consort died. Everyone prayed for their Queen in the various churches and chapels. They’d all experienced loss of a loved one, after all, and knew how painful it was.
But the newspapers said the Queen was inconsolable, her grief going beyond the normal measure.
‘That poor lady bears a heavy burden as monarch,’ Edwin said. ‘She needed Prince Albert’s support even more than other women need their husbands. And she lost her mother last March as well, so it’s been a sad year for her. But at least she has her children to comfort her. Children are a wonderful consolation, a sign that life will continue.’
He looked round, smiling at his own lasses. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you after your mother died.’ Then he turned to Cassandra and proved his eyesight was as sharp as ever. ‘Take back that piece of potato you just slipped on to my plate. We’ll share what there is. I don’t want you going hungry for me.’
‘You’ve looked so tired lately.’ And had hardly touched his Greek books.
‘I’m growing old. I’m sixty now, after all.’
She didn’t say it but her uncle was two years older and yet he looked rosy and vigorous. Perhaps good food would make a difference to their father? Only she didn’t know how to get it for him. ‘You’d tell us if anything was wrong with you, wouldn’t you?’