A Liverpool Legacy

by Anne Baker

  ‘The Maynards must once have been an important family,’ Simon said.

  ‘We still are,’ Kenny said, ‘we’ve got a factory. But why don’t we have servants?’

  ‘We have Mrs Brunt to do the heavy work, and Mungo to do the garden.’

  ‘But they aren’t proper servants, are they?’ Kenny said. ‘Are we poor now?’

  ‘Not as rich as we were,’ Simon said sadly.

  ‘Times change,’ Millie told them. ‘Nobody has servants these days because there are plenty of better jobs about.’

  ‘I still can’t see much family resemblance.’ Simon was once again studying the framed print.

  ‘Good,’ Kenny said. ‘We don’t want to look like Uncle James when we grow up, do we?’

  Millie wanted to learn more about Pete’s family, and when the children were in bed that night she returned to his parents’ bedroom, but she kept turning over the things she’d already seen. She gave up and went to the study instead. She’d hardly ever come here when Pete was alive and she hadn’t used it much since. It was a darkish masculine room furnished in high Victorian style, and must have been used by his father and grandfather before him. The scent of cigar smoke still seemed to hang there though Pete had never smoked.

  There was a large and heavy roll-top desk, and several cupboards in which old business files were packed tight. She blew the dust off one dated 1900 and opened it on the desk. Her interest was gripped in moments, here was the balance sheet for that year, showing a handsome profit. She took out more. Year after year, good profits had been made. She was particularly interested in the years of the Great War, and found as she’d expected that turnover fell away, but less so than in the war they’d just had. She was pleased to see it had recovered quite quickly in the years that followed.

  Tiring of balance sheets, she started opening the drawers in the desk and came upon some large leather-covered notebooks. She opened one and found the pages were closely covered with writing that was small and crabbed and hard to read. It took her a few moments to realise it was a diary. The writer had not made entries every day but had recorded his or her thoughts and deeds and dated them, filling several pages at one sitting.

  Millie was thrilled with her find, this was exactly what she needed; she couldn’t have asked for a better way of finding out more about Pete’s family. But whose diary was it? She knew Pete had never kept one, but it wasn’t his father’s either. She’d just seen examples of his handwriting in the business files, and he wrote in large, strong script.

  On one of the flyleaves she saw the name Eleanor Mary Willis Maynard. So the diary had belonged to Pete’s mother, the mother-in-law she had never met. Millie counted the diaries, there were twelve in all and they completely filled the large bottom drawer of the desk. They were all dated. She looked through them until she found the earliest one, it was for the year 1878.

  She took it, but before going to bed she went to the playroom where the children had left the albums of photographs they’d been looking at. She wanted to see what her mother-in-law had looked like.

  A good-looking woman was smiling out of the sepia prints. She wore her hair piled on top of her head with a few wisps of fringe and was stiffly corseted into a wasp waist. Her wedding pictures were here. She’d been married in the family church as Millie had, but her dress had been much more ornate. Pete’s father looked young and elegant in full morning dress and he had a moustache. It had been high summer and the overdressed guests were pictured in the back garden, there was even a photograph of a five-tier wedding cake. Life, Millie mused, had been very different then.

  She went to her room intending to have a long read, but she was tired and once she’d settled against her pillows she soon gave up, the writing was too squashed and tiny to decipher easily. But over the following days and weeks she dipped into them every night before she went to sleep, and found them absolutely riveting. She’d discovered that Pete’s mother Eleanor had married William Frederick Maynard in 1877 when she’d been seventeen and he twenty-six. Eleanor had written:

  It is not easy starting married life under the eyes of Freddie’s father but he insisted that we live with him. It wasn’t our choice, we were looking for a small house for ourselves, but Freddie said, ‘I’m afraid we have to give in on this, poor Pa is lost without Mum and he needs you to take care of the house.’

  That terrified me at the time, as I knew little about housekeeping, and he is very fussy and often finds fault with what I do. But then he doesn’t like me.

  The trouble is that Freddie’s father, William Charles Maynard is a disappointed man. He wanted Freddie to marry his cousin Margaret Haskins. They grew up together and were great friends, she was the cousin whose company he enjoyed most, but he knew she was in love with someone else and he wanted to marry me.

  Freddie had his way over that, but my father-in-law doesn’t approve of my family, he thinks the Willises are not in the same class as the Haskins and the Maynards. My family have been watch and clock makers for generations but modern industrial methods have put them out of business. The watches that my family designed and made by hand, piece by careful piece, and then fitted together, are now stamped out on machines and made to sell at half the price. My family are reduced to repairing the new timepieces when they go wrong. Watch repairers, Charles calls us with such a note of disdain in his voice.

  His father had this dream of earning a fortune and building a great family dynasty to enjoy it. It was his aim to build up and manage a profitable business on which his family and their progeny could live in comfort for the rest of their lives, but now his life’s work is almost in tatters. He has the business and the house, but his big family has been decimated, and he is looking to me and Freddie to produce a big family and replace the generation of Maynards that has been lost.

  I want babies, I would love to have a family and so would Freddie. He wants sons to follow him in the business and he wants to please his father. I come from a large family and the Willises are, to say the least, prolific. Within three months we had happy news for Freddie’s father, his first grandchild was on the way. There was such rejoicing and he started to look on me with more favour.

  When Millie discovered that Eleanor was Freddie’s second wife she felt they had much in common. She could see things from her point of view and it brought the mother-in-law she’d never met closer to her. It seemed Freddie’s first wife had died of tuberculosis at twenty-three years of age without having any children.

  But that night Millie read that Eleanor’s hopes were dashed.

  We are all sick at heart, I have had my second miscarriage, but Freddie said, ‘Don’t give up hope, we’ll wait until you are stronger and then try again. You are still very young.’

  But his father was in tears when he came to my room see me. Seeing such a proud man in tears and knowing I am the cause of it is very upsetting.

  Millie knew all had eventually come right for Eleanor when she’d had Peter, and was glad she’d been able to put her miscarriages behind her.

  Back in the present, things did not seem to be coming right for Sylvie. She’d always been rather shy and introverted but she’d seemed to enjoy her job in the firm’s typing pool. This was run by Miss Franklin, a spinster who looked older than her years, and who also acted as James’s secretary when he came to work. The firm started young girls there straight from commercial college, so they could gain experience before being promoted to secretary to a senior member of staff.

  Sylvie had made friends among her colleagues, and went out occasionally with Louise Lambert and also Connie Grey and her brother, who worked in the production department. But she’d never had a special boyfriend and had always seemed content to spend most of her leisure time with the family.

  Now suddenly she was moody and rebellious and dissatisfied with everything. Millie knew that she was grieving for Pete, and th
at the manner of his sudden death had been horrifyingly traumatic for her. She was hoping that in time Sylvie would get over it. She filled her weekends with trips out with Simon and Kenny, and visits to either Valerie’s home or Helen’s.

  Eric had sold off some of the jewellery and both girls had done exactly what they’d said they’d do. When Millie knew there was sufficient money in Pete’s account to pay the legacies he’d willed to those of his children who had not reached their majority, she rang Mr Douglas to ask if she could expect Pete’s will to be settled now.

  ‘Yes, my dear, all is in order. I’ll arrange for a trust fund to be drawn up for the children and their legacies to be paid in. But the law is notoriously slow and the Probate Registry will take its time to settle your husband’s affairs as it does for everybody else. I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient for a few more weeks.’

  Now her financial difficulties had been solved, Millie felt she could wait. She enjoyed her job but thought Uncle James and his sons were being difficult. They were spending a lot of time together in James’s office. James told her they were assessing the present set-up of the company and making plans, but when she’d asked him later about the plans, he evaded the question, and he never came to the lab to discuss any changes.

  Pete had called a meeting of the department heads once a month so everybody knew what was being planned and what progress had been made. Apart from Andrew, all of them had worked for the firm for twenty to thirty years and had kept the place running during the war. Tom Bedford ran the soap production, while Albert Lancaster was responsible for talcum powder. She dreaded the time when they’d want to retire and was grateful it was still a year or two off. Dan Quentin their sales manager was a little younger, very efficient and always smartly dressed, and their buyer was Billy Sankey. He was a bit of a maverick but they were all fond of him.

  Pete had trusted the senior managers and they’d always done their best for him. They were continuing to work hard now and everything was running smoothly, but it was nearly four months since Pete had died.

  Yesterday, she’d had a word with Tom Bedford. ‘James brought Marcus to the factory floor the other day,’ he told her. ‘When I approached them and asked if I could be of any help, they said no. They didn’t speak to anybody but they were taking notes as they walked round and peered into everything.’ Albert Lancaster told her much the same thing.

  Millie had no idea how they spent their time in the office. As far as she could see, they were doing precious little.

  Millie continued to find the diaries fascinating and was trying to read more of them, but the pages were so crammed with tiny writing which was hard to decipher that it was taking her a long time. There were little anecdotes about Pete and his brother, snippets of information about the Maynard business and information about the garden and their favourite recipes. Millie was totally hooked.

  She’d decided it would take years to read them from beginning to end, and she was dipping first in one diary and then another in her search for facts about the family. She knew she must be more methodical, and began marking the passages she’d read.

  She thought of giving one of the books to Sylvie and getting her help, but Sylvie was at last acting like a normal teenager wanting to be out and about all the time. What she needed was more sleep.

  The diaries were heavy on her stomach in bed and Millie took to reading them at the roll-top desk on Sunday afternoons as well, and asked herself how much of his mother’s life Pete had known.

  The diaries were in his desk drawers so it seemed likely he’d read them, but he’d been very open, talked about everything and he’d never mentioned them to her. She thought he’d have encouraged her to read them if he’d known what was in them. He’d been proud of what his father had achieved, and talked of him from time to time. Tonight Millie had come to bed early and was feeling drowsy until she read:

  Freddie and I were invited by a business connection to a pheasant shoot on an estate in Wales. It was a clear sunny day but cold and we wives were taken up to the moor to join them for a picnic lunch in a specially erected tent. Our vehicle was pulled by four horses and also carried the food and the servants to serve it.

  It was a substantial meal with hot soup and a casserole taken up in hay boxes and as the men had had a successful morning, they were in a jolly mood and spent rather too much time over it. The beaters were sent off promptly to drive the birds into position for the first afternoon shoot and when reminded, the men rather hurriedly picked up their guns to resume their sport. We ladies went for a short walk in the opposite direction to allow the servants time to repack the dishes and tidy up the brake for our return.

  We heard a few shots and then agitated cries and calls, and knew something had gone wrong. We rushed back to the tent but the shooting brake had already gone racing past us and we heard that a serving woman had been accidently shot and was being taken to the doctor.

  It was only when I saw Freddie sagging against a tent pole in great distress that I realised he was the one who had shot her. Everybody was kind to him, offering support, condolences and brandy, and agreeing that the woman had caused the accident. She had no reason to be in the place where it had happened. It made them lose interest in pheasant shooting and we all went back to the house.

  Mrs Trott was a woman from the village, not one of our host’s servants, and had been hired for a few days to help with the shooting party. When the news reached us at dinner that she had died, poor Freddie was in a fever of remorse, made worse when we learned she was a widow of only a few months, her husband having been killed in a threshing accident at harvest time. Even worse was the news that she had a two-month-old son being cared for by a neighbour.

  I have never seen Freddie so stricken. Some of the house guests left the next morning but we couldn’t go home. Freddie wished to make amends. Our host sought other relatives of the Trott family but none were to be found and the neighbour to whom the child had been entrusted already had seven children of her own and no wish for more.

  As the child was an orphan, Freddie could see only one solution: we would add him to our family, a brother for our darling Peter. Both Freddie and I had been longing for another baby. What I really wanted was a little girl, but Freddie wanted sons to run his business when they were grown up. This baby boy, although dressed in rags, was quite handsome, and appeared well fed and healthy. Peter was now coming up to two and a half years old, so this baby would fit into our family very well.

  We will bring him up in greater comfort than his mother could ever have done. He will receive a good education and will have a better life than he would otherwise have done, and at two months of age, he need never know that we are not his natural parents. Neither need Peter, he is not old enough to understand. The child had been named Sidney, but we had him christened William James.

  Millie sat back feeling shocked. The Maynard family had secrets she’d never even suspected. Had Pete known about this? She was quite sure James did not, he’d been proud to say that he and his sons were of the Maynard bloodline, and superior to her who had only married into the family. Well, she could certainly put them in their place now, and wouldn’t it serve them right? She positively itched to do it.

  They’d been more than rude to her, shown their dislike and their wish to put her out of the business. Next time they came to the lab trying to make trouble for her she would have all the ammunition she needed to silence them.

  It was only when she’d thought it over that she asked herself if Pete would do that. He was a much kinder, more generous person than she was; she’d heard him say several times that he must not be unkind to James. James was his brother and allowances must be made if he did not feel up to coming to work.

  Perhaps Pete had known and that was why he’d not told her about his mother’s diaries. It had been his parents’ secret too, and on further consideration she decided she must
respect their wishes. She could not tell James or his sons that they’d been born into a background as lowly as hers. Pete wouldn’t want her to do that.

  She was glad now that she hadn’t told Sylvie about the diaries. Goodness, she’d even thought of asking Valerie and Helen to read some of them, and would have done had they not always seemed so busy with their own families.

  Millie was wide awake now and continued to read. Eleanor was comparing her two boys.

  Peter is much the brighter. He’s more alert, into everything while James is quite bucolic and doesn’t seem to have Peter’s energy. Freddie believes nurture plays a greater part in a child’s development than nature and quotes the Jesuit saying, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’

  They’d both wanted to believe the upbringing he’d have would enable James to play a useful part in running the business.

  Well, there would be no argument now. Pete had definitely turned out to be the more able person.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A few days later, Millie found a typed memo on her desk calling a staff meeting at ten o’clock that morning in James’s office, which was also used as their boardroom. ‘About time,’ she said aloud to Denis.

  She set out promptly and met Andrew Worthington heading in the same direction. She’d hoped she could count on him as an ally against Marcus, but she’d been disappointed by his lack of interest in her problems. Except to say an occasional good morning, he’d barely spoken to her since that lunchtime when she’d asked for his help.

  There was no one else within hearing and today his dark green eyes looked into hers as he asked diffidently, ‘How are you getting on? Did you decide how you were going to raise the money you needed for those legacies?’

  ‘Yes, it’s all sorted,’ she said cheerfully. ‘The family stepped in to handle it.’