Mulligan's Yard

by Ruth Hamilton

  ‘Do you have a problem with your hearing?’

  ‘No. No, I do not.’

  She repeated her statement.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he mumbled. ‘I shan’t marry.’ The next pause was mercifully short. ‘He fell in with a bad lot at university, or so I’m told. But I still think he’s been spoilt by his mother in the first place. You must urge Margot to stay away from him.’

  Back to Rupert, then, mused Amy. He never wanted to talk about himself, did he? ‘Why won’t you marry?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘If you’d had a daddy like mine, if you’d seen a marriage like my parents’, I’m sure you would opt for single status. I am better alone.’

  ‘Oh.’ She didn’t know what to say. Even when he was forced to talk about his personal life, he remained unmoved, detached, strangely non-involved with himself.

  ‘He caused trouble with a dancer at the Theatre Royal,’ said James. ‘There was a scandal.’

  Back again and again to Rupert Smythe. ‘Yes, I know.’ Amy smoothed her cashmere shawl. ‘It was very visible. Not everyone keeps secrets in the cellar, Mr Mulligan.’

  ‘There is no dancer in my cellar, Amy.’

  She decided to go for the full sheep. ‘What is in your cellar, then? Buried treasure, dead people, a mushroom farm?’

  He laughed. ‘Perhaps all three.’ He crooked his arm. ‘Shall we go back inside, Miss Burton-Massey? The air is becoming chill.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She took the proffered support and moved towards the door of A Cut Above.

  Inside, loud confusion reigned, but just for a few seconds. A sudden silence ensued, then the air was shattered by a dreadful, drawn-out scream. ‘That’s Eliza,’ whispered Amy, a hand straying to her throat.

  James Mulligan, taller by several inches than most men, looked over the heads of those in front of him, turning quickly to Amy when he had pinpointed the trouble. ‘I think your mother has fainted,’ he said softly. ‘Stay here till I find out.’

  The policemen, having heard the scream, barged in and cleared a path which closed behind them, blocking Amy’s way. But Amy was staying nowhere. She pursued James and the police, pushing aside any obstacle in her path, human or inanimate. Dr Jones, a friend of the Burton-Masseys for many years, was on his knees beside the supine form of Louisa. Two women were trying to comfort Eliza, who was almost as white about the face as the woman on the carpet.

  Margot clung to Rupert Smythe’s arm, her mouth open in an almost perfect O.

  ‘Quiet,’ said the doctor. ‘And give me some space, please.’

  The crowd stepped back, the two officers shooing them away with waving arms. Gordon Jones felt for a pulse, even placed his ear against Louisa’s chest. He placed his hand near her whitening lips, feeling for the slightest emission of breath. Instinctively, Amy grabbed James Mulligan’s hand.

  ‘Hold tight,’ said the Irishman. The woman was dead. James had seen enough of death to recognize its signature. ‘Be brave, Amy.’

  She clung to him as if he were a life-raft. Mother was so still and so pale. But surely she was alive? People did not die so quickly and so young.

  Dr Jones rose to his feet and looked at the three girls in turn. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, the words fractured by emotion. ‘She wouldn’t have known a thing. Your mother was dead before she hit the floor.’

  Eliza screamed again, and people clustered round her, gathered her up and took her away. Margot sobbed in Rupert’s arms. Amy wrenched her hand free, dropped to the floor and hugged the lifeless body of her mother. So brave and so strong Louisa had become of late. And she would not see the fruits of her labour.

  James knelt beside Amy. ‘I am so, so sorry,’ he said.

  For a reason she could not have explained or justified in a million years, Amy turned on him. ‘Look at your father’s handiwork,’ she cried, as she held her mother’s body. ‘He killed both my parents. Get away. Go on, go home.’

  ‘Amy—’

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she screamed, hysteria bubbling up into her throat. When Rupert Smythe stepped forward, she screamed at him too, opening fire with both barrels. ‘As for you, just stay away from my sister. Go and find another chorus girl, because that’s just about the correct level for you.’

  Silence weighted down by shock and grief hung in the air. Rupert Smythe and James Mulligan backed away towards the door. Rupert left before anything else could be said, but James remained by the door. Helen Smythe joined him. ‘It will be the shock,’ she told him, in an effort to explain Amy’s accusations against her son.

  James shook his head. ‘Shock releases truth,’ he whispered. ‘Amy spoke from the heart. What she said about my father was perfectly correct.’ He nodded, as if counting the seconds as they passed. ‘Your son is a wastrel, Mrs Smythe, but this is not the time to discuss the skeletons in our cupboards. Three young ladies have lost their mother just now.’

  Helen bit back remarks that might have served to improve the reputation of her beloved Rupert. The Irishman was right – this was scarcely the time or place to defend the living.

  Amy, Eliza and Margot were shepherded out by police and many willing chaperones. As they passed James, Amy looked straight through him, as if she could see nothing at all. Eliza had to be carried, while Margot, so recently happy in the presence of Rupert, was now in a state bordering on the hysterical.

  James, after making sure that the doctor had gone with the Burton-Massey girls, took it upon himself to clear away stragglers and to wait with Helen Smythe for the ambulance. Just one constable remained, the second having run across the road to Bolton’s main police station.

  Helen picked up a scarf and spread it across Louisa’s stilled features. ‘She had a headache,’ she announced, to no one in particular.

  The policeman sighed loudly. ‘It’ll be one of them brain bleeds, a bit of a stoppage what’s burst, like,’ he said. ‘Aye, we see a lot of this kind of thing in our line of work. She won’t have known what hit her.’

  James sat with his head bowed, hands clasped between his knees. All he could hear was Amy’s voice, the accusation, the anger. Thomas Mulligan, gone but not forgotten, continued to do his worst.

  Eight

  The funeral service for Louisa Burton-Massey was held at the Church of St Augustine on Thicketford Road at the bottom of Tonge Moor. The main cortège consisted of a horse-drawn hearse and two carriages for family and household staff. Behind these vehicles, others tagged along, a mixture of motor cars and carts in many shapes and sizes.

  It occurred to Amy, as she followed her mother on this final journey, that death prompted people to remember those they had ignored for years: several faces from the past had decided to put in an appearance on this sad day. In death, Louisa deserved a visit; in life, she had been relegated to the rear seats of memory, just another penniless widow trying to offload three daughters before following her husband into the great beyond.

  The service was beautiful, Amy supposed. St Augustine’s was high Anglican, its speciality the quality of its choir. The singing was excellent, almost inspirational. Amy fixed her gaze on the coffin and allowed ‘Abide With Me’ to flow over her. She could smell incense and flowers, while the scent of beeswax rose from highly polished pews.

  It was a proud church, cared for as well as any fine drawing room. This was the house of the Lord, a comfortable extension of everyone’s home, a place where one could visit and think about life’s problems and joys. The clergy’s attitude was that there was no harm in coming in to check a shopping list or to rest weary feet. Jesus’s house was like any other, except that the Host here was invisible, precious and deserving of total respect.

  Amy remembered how Mother had answered when questioned about St Augustine’s. Why did she travel so far on Sundays? Could she not have used a church nearer to the village of Pendleton? Wasn’t St Augustine’s rather Roman in its celebrations?

  Louisa’s reply had always been the same. ‘God is special, so we should dress
up for Him. Had I wanted a drab Christianity, I should have become a Methodist.’ Oh, Mother, Mother. How you tried, how you changed, how you battled to set up the business. And how you loved this beautiful, glorious little church.

  The first real tears followed gravity’s path down Amy’s cheeks. Busy with arrangements, tired from comforting her sisters, she had squashed her own grief. But now, in this place which had always made Louisa and her family welcome, the oldest of the dead women’s children was finally overcome. Sweet voices of young choristers, excused from school for the funeral, enveloped her, penetrated her inner self. Mother had gone, and no one would see her like again. In recent months, Mrs Louisa Burton-Massey’s true colours had shone through, had been as bright as the sunlight now piercing stained glass in St Augustine’s windows.

  Margot’s arm crept around her older sister’s shoulders. Amy was in charge now. At twenty-two, Amy would have to become the pilot, the navigator, the sailor in the crow’s nest. Margot, heartbroken on her own account, was further stricken by the knowledge that Amy would now be forced to look after everyone and everything. While the older girl was used to running the home, a new business was a huge responsibility. Mr Mulligan had promised to do all he could, but Amy was scarcely speaking to him. The business would be closed for a while, closed before it had opened properly.

  Mr Mulligan had offered Pendleton Grange as venue for a post-funeral buffet, but he had been thanked and refused. The Burton-Massey girls did not want to drink tea or sherry after their mother’s burial, so the congregation could simply disperse and fend for itself.

  Margot withdrew her arm and fiddled with a glove. She was an orphan. Scarcely out of her teens and with both parents dead, she felt terrified. Rupert was in the church, had been dragged along by Helen and Camilla, Margot suspected, but he had made no move to comfort Margot in the days since Louisa’s death. Just a dream, Mother had said. Both Eliza and Amy had agreed that Rupert was a waste of time and space, though Eliza had been slightly kinder than Amy. A thousand buttonholes stared Margot in the face. How many miles of stitching was that? Hems might make a less than welcome change. How many miles in a thousand hems? Poor Mother was in that box, crated up like fruit from foreign parts. It was fancy, polished, decorated with brass, but it was still a wooden container.

  Eliza simply breathed. Since Louisa’s death, she had felt strangely liberated, as if expecting that her own life might now begin in earnest. She missed her mother, had been shocked by so sudden a departure, yet she retained a calm that did not match the seriousness of this occasion. Unable to weep, she found within herself little need to mourn. Sometimes, she did not know who or what she was; this was one such time.

  At the rear of the church, James Mulligan leaned on his cane. He wore his everyday clothes, but tie and gloves were in plain black, not the greys and blues he usually favoured. Like a dagger twisting in his son’s stomach, Thomas Mulligan’s sins refused to be digested. James Mulligan’s father had caused all this.

  He closed his eyes, smelt burning peat, whiskey on his father’s breath, on his clothes, even in his sweat. Mammy running across the yard, screaming when the shovel winded her, curling like a foetus as she tried to protect her face and belly. The day had come, of course, the day when James, albeit still in his thirteenth year, had throttled the man to within an inch of total asphyxia. ‘Touch my mammy again and I’ll see you in hell.’ Even when young, James had dwarfed most adults.

  So Mammy had sent her beloved son away to be educated in Dublin by Christian Brothers. The money to support him had come from the Church, a fact that had been intoned regularly whenever James had failed at his books. The brothers had not been cruel; they had simply sought to remind him that the Catholic Church was his sponsor and that he should repay his betters by working hard.

  Mammy had been found dead in a field, supposedly trampled to death by a bull whose temperament had been remarkably good. Even as a ten-year-old, James had spent many happy hours talking to Samson, leading him about, answering the loud snorts, which always managed to sound tame when compared to the bellowings of other male cattle. Samson had loved Kitty Mulligan above all other beings; Samson had not killed her.

  Thomas Mulligan had murdered his wife. The product of the union between Kitty Gallagher and Thomas Mulligan stood now mourning another of that wild man’s victims. Had Alex Burton-Massey lived, he might have recovered from the wounds of war. Had Mulligan Senior not cheated his gambling partner, the man would probably not have killed himself. And now, his widow was on her way to everlasting joy.

  James opened his eyes and stared at the backs of three young women. Amy, tough on the outside, tender beneath the veneer, was crying. He could tell from the movement of her shoulders that the sobs had erupted at last. Eliza, unnervingly beautiful, had drawn herself to one side, as if separating herself from this grievous occasion. Eliza’s grief was internal, he judged, and she retained a strength that showed sometimes in her face, often in her movements. Eliza, James decided, was possessed of a degree of self-management that would help her to survive. Margot, the youngest, seemed to be staring at the floor. James knew that he could not return to Ireland until these girls were settled. The sins of the father had, indeed, been visited upon this particular son.

  How to atone? Would they accept the return of their property more easily now that Louisa was dead? And what would they do with it? There was a mortgage to be repaid, and would the sale of the inn cover that? Why should they sell the whole yard? Those businesses could keep them in comfort. No – he had to free the Grange of debt before returning it to its rightful owners. As for the inn, that would probably have to be sold whatever – it was not making money. He closed his eyes and counted the hundreds, possibly thousands, needed now to put Pendleton Grange to rights. Giving it back was not enough: the house should support itself, should make its own income. Otherwise, it would surely become a millstone far too heavy for the necks of three young women. Sighing deeply, James opened his eyes and bade his mind break free of its circular thinking. The house, the farms, the yard and the inn must rest awhile.

  The vicar was speaking. ‘Louisa Burton-Massey was a true lady. Had it not been for her and others of her ilk, St Augustine’s Church would not be here. She and her husband gave unstintingly so that both church and vicarage could be maintained.

  ‘After the premature death of her husband, I visited Mrs Burton-Massey frequently, as her grief was immense. I can only hope that I gave that good woman a degree of comfort. Just prior to her own death, Mrs Burton-Massey set up a business in an attempt to provide some security for Amy, Eliza and Margot, her three daughters. The last time I saw her, she was laughing and happy. I am sure that she meets her Maker now in a state of grace.

  ‘She had a very strong faith, a total belief in God and His Holy Trinity. There is a soul newly arrived in Heaven this day.

  ‘I leave you now to pray silently and inwardly as we all thank God for sending us such a wonderful human being.’

  Amy could not pray. She tried to tell God of her gratitude, but she resented Him for taking Mother so early. Louisa had spent five solid years in torment, a mere four months as a tangible person. Still, Heaven had no time. Heaven went beyond all known dimensions; it was a state of simple happiness. Was Father there? Did God allow suicides to grace Paradise?

  James left the church, the vicar’s words echoing in his mind. The untimely deaths of two people made him guilty by proxy, since he was the son of a wicked man. Louisa might not have worked so hard, might not have died, had he, James Richard Mulligan, found a way to force the woman to take back her property. The ace of spades, the devil’s card, the— Who was that? Staring down Thicketford Road towards Tonge Moor, he saw a short fat man. He had seen him before, quite recently, too.

  Ambling along slowly in an attempt to look casual, James went towards Peter Wilkinson. An insurance agent, Wilkinson might have been on his rounds, but he was standing so still, his piggy eyes seeing nothing, it seemed, except for the c
hurch in which Louisa’s service was currently taking place. ‘Looking for someone?’ James asked, when he reached the side of this oily, repulsive Guardian of the Light Eternal.

  ‘What?’ Like one waking from a dream, the man almost shook himself.

  ‘Your brother keeps the Pendleton bakery and post office, does he not?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Small eyes raked over the Irishman’s face. ‘And you are James Mulligan.’

  ‘I am.’ James shuddered involuntarily.

  ‘You were at the funeral?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your culpability made you leave early. Had it not been for your father . . .’ He shrugged, lifting fat hands in a gesture of despair. ‘But we can’t be responsible for the misdeeds of our fathers, I suppose.’

  James leaned against the wall. The father of Peter Wilkinson had produced a strange creature. James suddenly felt very cold, as if the temperature had plummeted within these few seconds. He had noticed this man lurking on the edge of Sniggery Woods, had investigated, had discovered Eliza singing a sad song. Peter Wilkinson had been watching Eliza Burton-Massey, of that fact James was certain. And then there were the rumours, quiet whispers, words spoken in hushed tones by people who had chosen not to linger within the long shadows cast by Wilkinson’s Light.

  ‘Aren’t you a Catholic?’ the man asked now.

  ‘I am indeed.’

  ‘And you’ve attended a C of E service?’

  James nodded.

  ‘A sin for you, isn’t it?’

  James forced himself to meet the malevolent stare. ‘There are sins and sins, Mr Wilkinson. I can be cleansed quite easily.’ He paused for effect. ‘The cleansings in my Church do not involve the laying on of hands.’

  Wilkinson staggered back a pace. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  James remained quiet for several seconds. ‘I mean whatever you choose to make of it, sir. But you would be wise to watch your step.’ He turned as if to leave, then swivelled on his heel. ‘By the way, an American friend sent me some cuttings from a Dallas daily. Every time one of your burning bushes ignites, there seems to be a strong smell of paraffin in the vicinity.’