by Kate Hewitt
DOWN JASPER LANE
By Kate Hewitt
Down Jasper Lane
Copyright ©2011 Katharine Swartz
Kindle Edition
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Cover by Lee Hyat, www.authorsoundrelations.com
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
FOUR
FIVE
PART TWO
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART THREE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
ONE
“There she is, Ellen. There she is.” Douglas Copley put an arm around his daughter’s shoulders as they stood at the rail of the third class deck of the RMS Carpathia. In the harbor before them, under a glittering summer sun, the Statue of Liberty stood, one elegant arm raised, ready to greet yet another shipload of hopeful immigrants to the shores of America, and the streets of gold fabled to lie beyond.
Passengers jostled at the railings, eager for this first view of their new country. After a week on the crowded steamer, the close air and the poor food, most were ready to step onto land, and into the dreams they’d spun for themselves. Ellen Copley couldn’t wait.
“What do you think to it, Ellen?” Douglas asked as he looked down at his daughter. Her hair had blown loose from its ribbon and framed her face in chestnut tendrils. Laughing, she held it away from her eyes and squinted into the sun.
“It’s wonderful, Da. Truly wonderful.”
He nodded in satisfaction. “It’s about time we had something wonderful, lass.”
Ellen merely nodded. She didn’t want to think about the past, about her mother’s grave only three months old, left in Springburn. She didn’t want to remember the months tending her in the stale air of the sickroom, the way hope slid so slyly into despair, and how Mam turned her face to the wall, an invalid these many years and far too ready to die.
At twelve years old, Ellen was ready to live. The future lay before them, as shining as the sea that stretched to a crowded shore, and it held a promise she couldn’t wait to see fulfilled.
The Copleys had been planning to emigrate to the United States since Ellen was four years old. Back then Douglas had talked about starting again with his older brother Hamish and their younger sister Rose. There was opportunity in America, fortunes to be made, or so you would believe if you listened to Douglas as he and Hamish spun their dreams in the flat’s tiny kitchen, sucking on their pipes, their booted feet stretched out to the little coal stove.
Ellen never understood just exactly what the Copley brothers planned to do; she heard snatches of conversation, talk of opening a shop, a factory, making decent money, breathing clean air. Douglas kept it all vague, waving his arms in the air, talking about things he’d heard or read in the paper.
“There’s a fellow in New York who made his fortune in irons. Irons. They’re electrical or some such. And then there’s that bloke in Georgia who’s made a mint off his nerve tonic. Coca-Cola, he calls it.”
Even as a small child Ellen understood that her father, who had spent his whole life working on the rail lines, could not hope to compete with inventors of electric irons or nerve tonics. But in truth she didn’t care what the nature of her father’s dreams were; she just liked the way he smiled and would sometimes suddenly snatch her into his arms, throwing her so high in the air that her mam scolded that she’d hit her head on the ceiling.
She watched her Da drop a handful of coins into the old, dented flour tin on the shelf above the cooking range nearly every Friday night, after he’d been paid from his job repairing locomotive engines at the Eastfield Running Sheds. She heard the sound of them hitting the bottom of the tin, and then later the more pleasing sound of them hitting and settling among the other coins. Sometimes, when Da was at work and Mam was having her afternoon nap, Ellen would push a kitchen chair next to the range and stare into the tin. The sight of all those farthings, half-pennies and even a few shillings made her heart beat hard. Da had said it cost four pounds to cross the ocean. Ellen could not fathom such an amount, yet surely the tin half-full of coins was nearly enough. She didn’t dare get it all out and count it; Mam was a light sleeper.
Then Hamish and his wife Ruth announced they had enough money at last. They’d take the Columbia Furnessia sailing from Glasgow on the sixth of June and they’d be in New York in just a week. From there they planned to head upstate to the Catskills or even Albany; they’d no desire to stay in another big city like Glasgow, amidst the choking coal dust of the Springburn railways. Rose, Ellen’s aunt and Douglas’ younger sister, a pretty, laughing girl who operated a stranding machine at Craigpark Cable Company, would go with them.
Ellen was only five then, but she remembered the way Hamish had raised his eyebrows at her father as they sat in front of the coal stove. It was a rainy evening in April and it had been a cold spring, and the stove still gave out a comforting heat. Ellen had scooted closer to it even though Mam often scolded her that she’d singe her plaits. There had been a girl a street over who had died from her hair catching fire from the stove, and her mother’s nerves were shattered from hearing the screams. But Mam didn’t scold her that night; Mam hadn’t scolded her in months. She just laid in bed, drifting in and out of sleep when she wasn’t racked by coughing.
“Well, Douglas?” Hamish asked, and Ellen saw her father’s gaze slide away. She felt her heart sink because she knew what that sliding look meant. It was the same look her father gave her when she asked for real bacon instead of bread and dripping, the same way he wouldn’t meet her eyes when she asked why there was no money for the tin this week. Usually it was followed by a warning look from her mother and a little sorrowful shake of her head.
Now Douglas sucked long and hard on his pipe and said, his gaze still not meeting his brother’s, “I don’t rightly know, Hamish. We might wait awhile, see if a better fare comes along.”
Even at five years old Ellen knew there was no better fare. How could there be? The next day, when her mam had her usual sleep—they’d been getting longer, sometimes lasting hours—she resolutely pushed the chair towards the stove and took down the tin from the shelf. It was heavy, promisingly so, and Ellen nearly lost her balance on the chair. She set the tin on the table and slowly, methodically, counted the money out into neat piles. She checked and counted again.
The tin held just a little over two pounds. Half, Ellen knew—it took her a moment to work it out, for she’d never been good at sums—of one fare. She sat there for a moment, staring o
ut at the heavy gray sky, the sound of the engine yards a constant clamor in the distance, the coal dust as thick and black as ever on the window sill no matter how she or Mam dusted, and then in careful silence she put all the money back in the tin and replaced it on the shelf. She never said a word to anyone.
Ellen remembered going with her father to the docks to see the other Copleys off. Hamish, Ruth, and Rose were no more than blurred faces in her memory, figures standing at the railing of the ship as her father waved with determined cheer and Ellen felt the sting of bitter disappointment like an acrid taste in her mouth, worse than coal dust. She wanted to be on that ship, sailing into her future, and she clung to her father’s hearty words as they turned away, the ship no more than a speck on the horizon.
“It’ll be us soon, lass. When there’s a better fare. Another month or two. When the weather’s warm and your mam can catch her breath.”
Ellen nodded, wanting to believe, yet even at that young age doubts struck at her heart. She lay awake in the night, listening to her mother’s desperate wheezing before she finally erupted into hacking coughs that tore as much at Ellen’s soul as they did Ann Copley’s chest. She saw the clutter of patent medicine bottles on the table next to Mam’s bed—Colden’s Liquid Beef Tonic and Leonard’s Blood Elixir—and knew why there wasn’t more money in the tin.
The weather warmed, the pallid sunshine streaking through the windows of the flat, bathing Springburn’s engine yards in gold, and her mother never did catch her breath.
The spring slipped into a damp, chilly summer, and then autumn again, and all the while her once-robust mother seemed to shrink and fade. Her times away from bed, cooking and cleaning and taking care of her family and flat were farther and farther in between, and the careworn look on her face told Ellen that her mother could no longer pretend that they would be heading westward when the weather turned... again.
Douglas still pretended, though. Ellen knew he needed to; he clung to that thin thread of hope as if it could pull him all the way across the ocean. In a place like Springburn, where men lived and died without the coal dust ever leaving their lungs, it was sometimes all they had. In the evenings he brought the ships’ timetables to their flat, poring over them by the light of the oil lamp. Sometimes Ellen would sit on his knee and watch as he traced the ship’s passage on a map with a work-grimed finger.
“Across all that ocean, see Greenland there... a cold place, that. All the way to New York City... a city of islands, Ellen, covered in buildings, some touching the sky. They call them skyscrapers, they do. Imagine that.”
The journey, however, did not stop in New York. A year after their departure Hamish and Ruth sent a letter saying they had settled in Vermont, opening a general store in the small town of Seaton. Rose had married an Irishman and gone right up to Canada with him. The letters from her relatives were infrequent but treasured. Ellen loved to hear her father talk about Vermont, an armchair expert.
“Vermont’s the place to be. Plenty of trees, and fields as far as the eye can see. And the rivers! The fish fair jump into your hand.” He spoke with such certainty that Ellen half-believed he’d been there and seen it for himself. She loved to hear about the farmhouse he’d build, with her own bedroom with a window looking out on a chestnut tree. They’d have kittens, of course, and a cow or two, and perhaps some sheep.
“And a dog, Ellen,” her father would say seriously. “A man has to have a dog.”
“May I name the kittens?” Ellen asked. “And may they be gray ones?”
Her father nodded thoughtfully, drawing on his pipe. “I reckon so.”
Sometimes while her father pored over his maps and timetables Ellen would take a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper—the edges of the newspaper or inside of some flour sacking—and draw pictures. She liked to draw what she imagined America looked like, with the sun and trees and even the two little kittens. Sometimes her father would look at her drawing and nod approvingly while Ellen half-shielded it with her hand in embarrassment.
“That’s quite good,” he’d say, as though surprised.
Her mother liked her drawings too; when Ellen sat by her sickbed she would sometimes while away the hours as her mother slept by drawing whatever took her fancy. Once her mother woke up and watched her without speaking.
Ellen finally felt her mother’s troubled gaze upon her and started in her chair. “Do you need some tea—or another spoonful of medicine—the blood elixir seems to help—”
Her mother shook her head and beckoned to the scrap of paper with one thin hand. Uncertainly Ellen handed it to her and watched as her mother studied the little sketch of their view of the street, a few raggedy children playing among the weeds, a fat storekeeper watching them speculatively, hands planted on his aproned hips.
“You have a gift, Ellen,” Mam said softly. “A gift from God. Use it well.”
Since her mam was always talking about God, Ellen only nodded. She was glad her mother seemed to like the drawings, at any rate.
Sometimes Ellen’s father took her to the Glasgow docks, to watch the ships set sail. “We’ll be waving from the deck one of these days,” he’d say cheerfully, his arm around Ellen’s shoulders, the dream firmly in place despite the fact that Ann Copley spent most of her days in bed, and at ten years old Ellen had taken over nearly all of the housework and cooking.
Then the doubt that had gnawed at Ellen’s heart began its treacherous work on Douglas’. Ellen couldn’t remember when they stopped going to the docks. She wasn’t sure when her father stopped bringing the timetables back to the flat. She did remember the day her father asked her to leave school to stay home and nurse her mother.
He drew her onto his knee, as if she were a child, even though she had turned eleven last month. “I’d do it myself, lass, if I could. But I need to be at the sheds, you know that.”
Ellen nodded in understanding, for without her father’s job as an engine repairman they would likely be out on the street. Yet she could not suppress the sharp stab of disappointment at the thought of leaving school, those neat rows of desks and the pleasing squeak of chalk on slates, the respite she’d had from the small, stuffy flat and the stale smell of sickness.
“It won’t be long,” her father said, and his voice trembled slightly. “God help us all, it won’t be long.”
Ellen slipped off her father’s knee. At that moment, she felt as grown-up as Mrs. MacDougall upstairs with her six children and a husband who had addled his brain in an engine accident. She didn’t belong on her father’s knee anymore, like a child asking for sweets.
“Don’t you worry, Da,” she said. “I can manage.”
Ellen took on the full responsibilities of their small household with grim determination. She haggled in the market and hung out the washing in the courtyard in the back, beat the rugs against the front stoop and made soups with what vegetables were left in the basket, pursing her lips and rolling up her sleeves just like any other housewife in Springburn, whose man made his living in the rail yards, where a quarter of the world’s trains were made, or so people said.
She watched with cool detachment when other children lined up by the railway-owned steamboat for a school trip to Broughty Ferry before turning away, her shopping basket on her arm. And if she thought of another, bigger ship, she told no one.
She also put away her pencil and scraps of paper and stopped drawing. There was no time for such childish pursuits anymore, and there was nothing she wished to draw.
Every once in a while a letter from America would come, and Douglas would read it aloud in a flat, even voice. Ann would smile faintly, as if listening to a fairy story, to hear of the trees and fresh air, the simple living and the easy prosperity. Hamish had taken to running a general store with genial ease, and Ruth had a good head for business. Hamish urged Douglas to join them ‘when he could’. Douglas didn’t read those parts; Ellen only found them after, when she smoothed the crumpled paper and studied the words as if they held the key t
o something still.
She had a burning desire to leave the cloying air and damp walls of the sickroom, and the narrow, grimy streets of Springburn beyond. To hope, even when it felt as if there was nothing left to hope for.
Then Ellen’s mother died. It had been a long time coming, and when Ann Copley finally breathed her last, Ellen could only feel a weary sorrow, coupled with the guilty stirrings of relief. She wished she’d felt more, and maybe she would have once, but time and care had taken too much from her. Her mother’s suffering was finally over; the last few months Ann had been racked by coughing and insensible with pain; even the costly elixirs Douglas bought at the druggist’s didn’t help any longer.
The flat seemed empty without her mother’s presence, and although Douglas once suggested Ellen return to school, it didn’t seem practical. Who would scrub and cook and wash? Who would go to market, darn her father’s socks?
Besides, Ellen admitted quietly to herself, she wouldn’t fit in with the other children who hadn’t yet left the schoolroom for the reality of work, although they would soon enough. She felt years older, yet she wasn’t yet thirteen.
Two months after her mother died, Douglas Copley brought home the timetable of the RMS Carpathia. He handed it to Ellen silently, and she gazed at it for a moment before looking up at him.
“She leaves in three weeks,” he said. “I haven’t saved quite enough for two tickets yet...”
“You’ve been saving?” Ellen said in surprise. Her father had not put money in the tin in years.
Douglas smiled and shrugged. “On the quiet. I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
Without a word Ellen slid from her chair and went to the shelf above the range. She could reach it without a chair now, easily, and she took down the old flour tin and handed it to her father. He looked inside, his mouth dropping open in surprise. “How...”
Ellen smiled; it felt like her first real smile in years. “I’ve been saving too.”
His eyes glinted with emotion as he looked up. “You’re a good lass,” he said, his voice hoarse. “A good lass.” He rested one work-roughened hand on her hair, briefly, and Ellen wished she could put her arms around him. A few years ago she would have, and he would have given her one of his old bear hugs, yet with the cares and worries that had weighed heavily on both of their shoulders, that easy affection had slipped away. She didn’t know how to get it back, or if she even had it in her anymore.