Mulligan's Yard
Page 41
They travelled past the wall that restrained coals, Amy holding fast to his hand while he made his practised way through several small cellars. At last, he stopped and placed the lantern on an upturned crate.
She breathed in the cellar’s dankness, a scent given only to places never visited by sunlight. As her eyes adjusted, they lit upon a rocking horse, a dolls’ house, a case from which spilled assorted small toys. Closing her eyes, she sent herself back to childhood, saw three little girls playing and squabbling over the better doll, a father acting like a bear, chasing, catching, causing shrieks and squeals of delight. Amy swallowed. Yes, this had been her home.
James unlocked another door, led her into one of the very tiny rooms. She stopped abruptly in her tracks, saw a slice of light piercing a grating, followed its path until her gaze rested on a figure of the crucified Christ. The table on which it stood was clothed in a pristine white cloth on which rested a makeshift tabernacle and a pair of tall candlesticks.
From behind a little curtain at the centre of this altar, James took a chalice, a paten, a stole.
Her throat was suddenly dry and tight. The food, the bread. He had been – no! Surely not? ‘This is no more,’ he whispered across two yards of semi-darkness. ‘But I don’t want you to think I sacrificed it for you. It is finished.’
‘Finished?’
‘I was released from my vows a month ago.’
There was nothing she could say, so she kept silent.
‘Being ordained seemed a good idea at the time, Amy. I was raised a Catholic, was educated by monks. And my temper – my father’s temper – kept me from living the ordinary life.’ He stopped, pondered. ‘As a priest, I felt safe. Then, coming here to mop up after my father, I began to feel differently, became a man who had made a mistake.’
This was a mistake of giant proportions, thought Amy, as she absorbed the shock. ‘You said you were a teacher.’
‘I told no lie, Amy, for many priests teach as well as ministering. And, yes, I did see your father’s war, as I was a chaplain for two years.’
Amy stood rigidly still. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she mumbled at last. ‘You gave this up, but not because of me?’
‘You are a part of it, but not the whole,’ he said.
She nodded thoughtfully. ‘You were a chaplain in the Great War. Then you went home to run a church and a school.’ She felt forced to repeat everything in order to take in the magnitude of the moment.
‘Yes.’
She paused for thought. ‘What do you want from me, James Mulligan?’
‘A wife,’ he answered, ‘a soulmate, one who cares for and about others.’
Amy bowed her head. This promised to be complicated, though anything worth having usually arrived with baggage. This handsome philanthropist was to share her life. The concept of refusing him did not enter her consciousness, because she had loved him since . . . since for ever, since before meeting him. ‘I will marry you,’ she said, noticing that he was completely motionless. ‘Did you think I would say no?’
He waved a hand through light and shadow, the move sweeping across all the tools of his calling – candlesticks, vestments, the paraphernalia of Mass and Communion. ‘I am, to say the least of it, a Catholic, and my children must be reared as such.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she replied.
‘And you will live here with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the yard?’ he asked.
‘The yard will continue,’ she answered. Mona still had the wash-house, there was A Cut Above, there were people who had worked there for donkey’s years. ‘We shall rename it Mulligan’s Yard officially,’ she said, ‘because Margot will not mind and I am to become Mrs Mulligan. You deserve recognition for what you have done in this town.’
He crossed the space and knelt before her.
‘Get up,’ she chided. ‘I shall only laugh.’
‘Marry me,’ he ordered.
‘I will,’ she returned, ‘but get off your knees.’ She smiled up at him after he had risen. ‘Why didn’t you come as a priest? Why did you pretend to be a layman?’
He laughed softly. ‘Would you have done business with a priest? A raving Roman?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered.
‘Then never mind, for we are agreed, are we not?’ He spat on his hand, shook hers. ‘That’s a good bit of business we just did, my love, and we have shaken on it, too.’
‘Yes, James, you played a good hand there.’
They left the cellar, left the past behind and climbed stone steps into the kitchen.
In the hallway of Pendleton Grange, an elderly Irishwoman wept into her apron. With the turn of an ace, her brother had brought together this wonderful couple. She dried her eyes and spoke into the soft silence of morning. ‘For once, you played well,’ she told Thomas Mulligan. ‘May God forgive me for saying so.’
THE END
Mulligan’s Yard
Ruth Hamilton is the bestselling author of twenty-five novels, including Mulligan’s Yard, Dorothy’s War, The Judge’s Daughter, The Reading Room, Mersey View and That Liverpool Girl. She has become one of the north-west of England’s most popular writers. She was born in Bolton, which is the setting for many of her novels. She now lives in Liverpool.
Also by Ruth Hamilton
A Whisper to the Living
With Love from Ma Maguire
Nest of Sorrows
Billy London’s Girls
Spinning Jenny
The September Starlings
A Crooked Mile
Paradise Lane
The Bells of Scotland Road
The Dream Sellers
The Corner House
Miss Honoria West
Saturday’s Child
Matthew & Son
Chandlers Green
The Bell House
Dorothy’s War
The Judge’s Daughter
The Reading Room
A Parallel Life
Mersey View
Sugar and Spice
That Liverpool Girl
Lights of Liverpool
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My family – Alice, David, Michael, Susan and Elizabeth.
Dorothy Ramsden, researcher, Bolton.
Members of America On Line who also helped with research.
Staff at Bolton Central Library.
Sweetens Books of Bolton, who provided me with information.
The Revd Geoff Garner and his wife, Elisabeth, for investigating crematoria throughout Britain.
All my friends for sensing when to visit and when to stay away!
Father Albert Shaw of St Helen’s Church, my friend and confessor.
I say goodbye to Jenny Byrne, who died in June 2000.
First published 2012 by Macmillan
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-230-76492-7 EPUB
Copyright © Ruth Hamilton 2012
The right of Ruth Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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