‘Where are you going so early?’ Adelaide asked, emerging from her bedroom carrying baby Freddie.
‘To see Mrs Worthington.’ She was putting on her hat.
‘What will you say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Take her some eggs,’ said Adelaide.
For a good two minutes it seemed that Louisa wouldn’t come to the door but just as Pearl had decided she should make her way to the back of the house to break in, she called, ‘Go away. I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
‘I will go away, Mrs Worthington, but please hear me out first. I have a plan that might interest you.’
‘Nothing you can say will interest me.’
‘Then at least take the eggs I have for you.’
‘I’d choke on them.’
‘Please, can we talk inside? You never know who’s listening and what I want to say isn’t for public consumption.’
Louisa opened the door wide enough to allow Pearl in. She led her through the house and into the backyard, where there was a small table with two chairs. ‘This secret enough?’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine what business we have that the whole world doesn’t know already.’
‘They don’t know you’re having a baby,’ Pearl said bluntly. ‘That’s what I want to talk to you about. I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way you’d hoped with Mr Duffy. But it would have been a mistake.’
‘And who are you to judge?’ Louisa’s face was the colour of soot. Her expression was ashes. ‘You’ve never been married so you haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘And I might never have the faintest idea,’ Pearl agreed. ‘But you need help and I want to offer mine.’
‘In that case, get rid of the baby, find me a husband, and give me a thousand pounds and a ticket to England. You can get rid of the stupid horses. You can burn my house down. You can let it be known that I never had any intention of marrying the man no one ever believed was your cousin and you can wipe the last month from my life so I can do it again without you or Martin Duffy in it.’
Pearl said without smiling, ‘Which first?’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘What about this? I can arrange for you to go to Sydney and stay with Annie McGuire, who is the kindest woman on earth. She’ll look after you until you have the baby and she’ll help you decide what to do with the child once it’s born.’
It wasn’t what Louisa wanted to hear. Louisa didn’t want to hear that she was having a baby. She didn’t want to look into the next six months and see in it a misshapen body and a life inside her. She wanted to slap Pearl McCleary across the face for reminding her, and then she didn’t. Then she wanted with all her heart for Pearl McCleary to fix it for her. She stared into the bedraggled flower beds and the trees that shielded her from the horror of the horses but not the horror of the rest of her life.
‘Who is Annie McGuire?’
‘The woman who raised me.’
‘And why would she help me?’
‘Because I’ve asked her to.’
‘Already? Without consulting me?’
‘You don’t have to go. But if you don’t go, what will you do?’
Louisa dropped her gaze. ‘There’s a woman in Stony Creek,’ she said so quietly that Pearl might not have been intended to hear.
‘There’s always a woman. But is that what you want? The woman in Stony Creek could kill you as well as the baby. This way is better. You can just pack up and go. Annie could pass you off as her niece.’
‘Oh, Miss McCleary. I’m from Hampshire. Why would I be her niece? At least Martin sounded as if he might be your cousin.’
‘Then you could be a pregnant widow from the country who’s come to her for peace and quiet.’
Louisa stared into the unkempt garden, striving to picture possibilities she might be able to accept. ‘I could just pack a few things and go, couldn’t I?’
‘The sooner the better.’
‘People might think that Martin and I have eloped. That would show them.’
‘They might. It would.’
‘It means no more Mr Stokes.’
‘It does.’
‘And no point in Baby Worthington delivering more horses.’ Louisa smiled at last. Her sigh was long and steady.
In her expression, Pearl saw nothing more sinister than relief. ‘How long have you known it was Mrs Murdoch?’ she asked.
‘A while. When you said she spoke like a man, I knew. Knowing made no difference. She was never going to stop. She hates me.’
‘Why?’
Louisa shrugged. ‘Jealous. She thinks her husband is in love with me.’
‘And is he?’
‘I’m certainly not in love with him.’
The many questions Pearl could have asked lingered for a minute, as Louisa considered the ground at her feet, then drifted away. What would she do with the answers once she had them? ‘Another reason to go,’ was all she said. And so it was decided.
A similar decision under similar circumstances was being reached regarding the immediate future of Miss Norah Quirk. ‘You’re going, my girl, whether you like it or not,’ her mother was saying. ‘I don’t know what you agreed with Archie Stokes but nothing was worth the disgrace you’ve brought on our family. We are respected hoteliers. You’ll stay in Ballarat until I send for you.’
‘But Mr Stokes was right,’ the sulky girl protested. ‘Martin Duffy was trying to steal something. And those women did advertise.’
‘None of it was your business,’ said her mother. ‘Now get up and get dressed. I’ve packed your bag. I want you on your way the minute you’ve eaten. Mr Wang will take you to the coach.’
‘What about the Post Office? They’re expecting me.’
‘I’ll tell them not to. Now get up!’
Within the hour, the troublesome daughter, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a very wide-brimmed hat tied with a scarf, was sitting up next to the driver from the brewery and she was carted out of town to obscurity. After such a night, why wouldn’t cutting and running be the order of the day?
On the other hand, surely it wasn’t the intention of Archibald Stokes who, for so long, had held the town in the palm of his hand? But it had been in the wind. Oh yes. The wind had most definitely changed direction with the arrival of the housekeeper’s cousin. Mr Stokes had, every morning and every night since he’d clapped eyes on the blighter, held up a finger to test the wind’s direction. Well before dawn on the morning after the night before, he detected a gale so hostile that cutting and running was most definitely the proper thing to do.
Wally Mason, a potato farmer from beyond Stony Creek, had pitched up as he usually did, before dawn, with unusual news. Cocky Watson, the very man whose shoddy sacks Stokes had been confiscating throughout the war, had been arrested on the road to Myrtle Grove on suspicion of dealing in goods stolen from the Australian Army Ordnance Corps. ‘Arrested. Who arrested him?’ Mr Stokes had asked in alarm. ‘No one’s told me about any arrest.’
‘Not one of the usual coppers,’ Wally had reported. ‘Someone on army business. So are we agreed? Twenty quid the lot?’
‘Twenty quid?’ bawled Mr Stokes from habit. ‘Forget it.’ But there’d been no time to haggle, or any point. He’d told thieving Wally Mason to give his bill to Mrs Lambert, who’d settle it at the end of the month, take it or leave it, then he’d hurried to his office, locked the door and sat at his desk to think. The loss of Cocky Watson was the last straw. It was time to go, no doubt about it. He’d listened to that wind howling all night long,
The town hadn’t turned against young Duffy. It had turned against Norah Quirk. The Mayor had turned against him because Joe Fletcher’s presence had terrified the life out of him. And who was Mr Fletcher, he would like to know, turning up when he never turned up?
Now here was Cocky Watson arrested, and the last person he could trust not to blow the whistle was Cocky Watson, a coot of a bloke always grizzling about something. The quartermaster had w
arned him he was pushing his luck and maybe he had. Maybe he had given it one shove too many.
‘Time to go, Archie m’lad,’ the grocer said to himself. ‘But first things first.’
Chapter Forty-eight
‘Mrs Worthington has decided to go to Sydney until she has the baby,’ Pearl reported to Adelaide as she removed her hat and checked the kitchen fire in one swift movement. ‘She can stay with Annie McGuire. I’ve written to her. Mr Duffy will deliver the letter as soon as he gets to Sydney.’
‘One less thing to worry about,’ Adelaide replied. But she hadn’t spent an undue amount of the night worrying about her neighbour. Without the faintest idea what to do about her, she’d decided quite quickly to do nothing. She had enough on her own plate and her intention now was to work on what was in front of her. She may well have woken with the same dread she’d taken to bed, but by the time she was dressed, she was sure of one thing: it would not defeat her. She would entertain no more foolish hopes for Martin Duffy. He might love her as he’d acknowledged the night before and she might love him a little bit but she couldn’t seriously imagine a future with him. Not in Prospect, and she’d never leave Prospect. She had no great sense of loss. Not for him or Marcus. Instead she found herself embracing a sense of purpose. Marcus had left her to it, and now he was gone she would act on her own judgement.
‘Put your hat back on, Miss McCleary. I’m off to sack Mr Stokes but I’d like you by my side.’ And where, as recently as a week ago, she might have dithered this way and that arguing with herself and Miss McCleary all the way up the high street about the wisdom of what she was doing and the manner in which it could best be managed, today she rehearsed only what might happen if things turned ugly, which was to pick up the nearest heavy tin and throw it. But they didn’t.
The shop had yet to open so it was empty of bodies apart from Mrs Lambert’s, which was tired and listless after hours pouring on behalf of the committee.
‘Mr Stokes about?’ asked Adelaide. Mrs Lambert nodded towards the office door. ‘Would you mind the baby for a minute? Miss McCleary and I have business with him.’
Mrs Lambert took the pram with pleasure. But the office door was locked. Adelaide used her own key to unlock it, and in doing so startled the living daylights out of her manager, who’d imagined he had all the time in the world to make his getaway. He was shoving ledgers into a baker’s basket, which he quickly covered with his jacket.
‘Ah, Mrs Nightingale and Miss McCleary. What a night that was, eh? That Miss Quirk has an imagination on her, doesn’t she?’
‘I’ve come to sack you, Mr Stokes. I’m not giving you notice. I’m ordering you to place that basket on the floor, move away from it and its contents and leave the premises now or I’ll call the police and have you arrested for theft.’
The grocer opened his arms in a gesture of innocence and astonishment. ‘Mrs Nightingale …’ he began. But this wasn’t any Mrs Nightingale he recognised. This was a Mrs Nightingale, he decided later, who might well have advertised for a part-time husband to take the place of an existing husband clearly of no further use to her.
‘Go,’ she said.
So he changed tack. ‘You can’t sack me, Mrs Nightingale, because I’ve resigned. There’s a letter here already composed and addressed to you. I have no wish to work for the likes of you. This shop will collapse without me, and do you know what I say to that? Good riddance.’ With that, he scuttled out of the office through the storeroom to the delivery bay, leaving Pearl and Adelaide to contemplate the mess he’d made of the desk and the filing cabinets.
‘Mr Stokes is no longer with us,’ Adelaide informed Mrs Lambert and Ginger, who’d turned up late and was now cleaning the windows. ‘But it will be business as usual. I’ll be running the place from now on.’ Mrs Lambert, pushing the pram back and forth, said that was fine by her but what should they do about cash for the till. Mr Stokes had cleaned it out before they’d arrived as well as all the money from the safe.
In the Mayor’s house, affairs could not have been more different from the morning before. There was no balance of power being fought over, no acid repartee about whose service was more important to the nation, no sense of doom looming over the Mayor or his hopes for the railway. Mrs Mayberry was a broken woman.
Despite her impeccable planning, despite the majesty of the occasion, despite its civic importance, despite the significance of her rallying cry to a better future with her somewhere near the helm, the party on which she had pinned so many hopes had been a catastrophe. It would be remembered only as the night Norah Quirk and Maggie O’Connell had fallen out over an Irish tinker, and the awful disgrace of Mrs Nightingale and Mrs Worthington, who’d apparently advertised for a man everyone agreed had been a gigolo. ‘You must sack Miss O’Connell the minute she walks in the door,’ was the only feeble instruction Florrie could issue.
‘Of course,’ said George. He could afford to be generous because he was perfectly comfortable with the night before. He’d displayed integrity and statesmanlike diplomacy. In fact he felt quite buoyed by the way things had turned out.
In the end, there had been as much eating and drinking and laughing and dancing as there should have been at a celebration whether it was for peace in our time or a win at the races. There had been a scene or two, but no bones broken, nothing had been stolen and Mr Stokes, it now seemed to him, had been put in his place though he wasn’t sure by whom. His private plan was to extricate himself from Mr Stokes as quickly as he could. It was one thing to share the occasional useful confidence and to accept the odd useful bottle or leg of something but asking him to resurrect the stolen-land business had been one presumption too many and his vindictiveness towards the ladies Beyond The Arch had been unsavoury in the extreme.
‘I don’t believe there was any such advertisement,’ he said to poor, limp Florrie, a misjudged remark because it somehow caused her to rally.
‘Don’t mention those women to me. They are prostitutes, all of them. I intend to form a committee to denounce them. They are everything I abhor.’
If this wasn’t exactly what she’d said the night before, it counted for little. His wife was a woman of strong conviction and high moral standards. The Mayor saw a gleam of intention creep across his wife’s sorrowful demeanour and took steps to smite it. ‘I would watch and wait, my dear. See what everyone else thinks before you do anything decisive. It might be a good idea if we went to visit William in Sydney for a few weeks. What do you reckon?’
‘I’m afraid you’re fired again,’ he said to Maggie when he found her minutes later in the kitchen contemplating the very large pile of washing up the boys had failed to tackle in the chaos. ‘My wife won’t tolerate your presence in this house a minute longer. You brought dishonour upon it and dishonour can’t be tolerated.’ He was speaking loudly because the marital bedroom door was open and he knew his wife was listening for any suggestion of disloyalty.
‘Suits me,’ said Maggie. ‘It’s all yours.’ She collected her belongings, including the folder with her name on it, which she’d already removed from the Mayor’s office, and three magazines containing her favourite stories. What did it matter? She was already an outcast. If she held her head high as she walked through the town, looking at no one, hearing nothing, it was only pride, the little she had left. Her poor head ached as it had never ached. Smashed dreams racketed about in it as noisy as the wheels of an out-of-control cart. They crashed into sorrow and rejection; they bounced over rage and defiance. She would lock up the house that was now beyond hope; she’d take the boys to the city to find a life that could be no worse than the one they had here. But first she’d settle a score or two. She wouldn’t leave without saying what needed to be, and now could be, said because there would be no feelings to spare or comeuppances to reckon with.
In she bustled to Nightingales. ‘What are you staring at?’ she demanded of Ginger, whose expression, had she bothered to decipher it, was not of glee but of concern. Into the o
ffice she barged, where she found not Mr Stokes but Pearl bouncing the baby on her hip and Adelaide bent over the desk, staring at a page of figures that might have represented something in Egyptian.
‘Hello, Maggie. You’re good at sums. I can’t make head or tail of this,’ said Adelaide. ‘Mr Stokes has done a bunk with the contents of the safe and everything in the till. I’m trying to work out how much he’s taken.’
‘Shh,’ said Pearl to the baby. ‘Mrs Lambert, can you get me a rusk?’
Of course Maggie was good at sums. She was especially good at calculating what should be and what wasn’t. Within a very short space of time, no more than a few hours, which passed in a heartbeat, she was able to compare one set of books to another set of books and calculate the amount missing. She was also able to explain the inconsistencies, which were as obvious to her as the sixpence missing from the change Archie Stokes had given her for her cheese. By lunchtime, she’d handed to Adelaide a page of numbers arranged in neat columns all ending in totals. The piece of her mind she’d intended for Norah Quirk once she’d dealt with Mr Stokes was all used up in the joy of arithmetic calculations, which was just as well because Norah Quirk was halfway to the border.
News of Miss Quirk’s flight was delivered by Theresa Fellows, who also reported that Lorna Stutt was to be comfortably restored to her proper position at the Post Office. The job at Myrtle Grove had only ever been temporary; she’d been marking time there only until Miss Quirk could be given the heave-ho.
Everyone would have laughed and laughed had the situation not been totally eclipsed by the news that Mr Stokes had cleaned out the safe and done a bunk from Nightingales. No one could believe it. ‘The bloody bugger!’ said Maisie Jenkins tearfully on hearing that the love of her life had taken to the hills. ‘Where does that leave me?’ She spoke for the town, whose mood swiftly changed from hungover to disbelief, rapidly escalating to fury at a grave injustice.
Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband Page 27