Mill Town Girl Read online

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ he yelled, leaping to his feet, pushing her aside, running, steaming into the kitchen.

  What had she done? Perhaps he hadn’t been going to . . . Oh, heavens. ‘Patrick!’ she cried, running now behind him to the sink, panicking at the sight of injury. Her hands shook as she turned the tap and cupped cold water in them, tipping it over his neck. His head was low over the sink and he was groaning as she doused a dishcloth under the tap and placed it on the scalded skin.

  ‘Take your coat off,’ she said, her voice catching in her throat with fear. ‘Here. I’ll do it.’ With trembling fingers she unbuttoned his tweed jacket and tried to ease his poor burnt arm through the sleeve.

  And it was off and he’d stopped moaning, and he’d slipped his good arm around her waist, and his fingers were sliding under her blouse upwards until they reached her breast. And it was as if his hand was electric or something, and he was holding her hard up against himself. He smelt of coal-tar soap and leather and her head was reeling with the scent of him.

  His face was wet and his wet mouth was on hers, and the banging of her heart was not from fear but from a sudden leaping response that was coming to her as if she’d known all along that this was the way it would be. That she’d gladly leave the Paths of Righteousness, when she found a man to love.

  At half-past eleven on Christmas Eve that same year of 1919, a twenty-four-year-old Scotsman, Douglas McGregor, stood at an upstairs window of the Swan, one of the oldest coaching inns in Cheshire. The Swan, left to him by a childless aunt, faced the town hall across the cobbled market square. Next to the town hall was the church of St Michael and All Angels whose muffled bell was tolling slowly, calling worshippers to the late service.

  The moon was high, the night was brilliant with stars and the church bell-tower made a sharp outline against the distant mountains. People crossed the gas-lit square in twos and threes and, from where he stood, Douglas McGregor could have seen, through the open church door, a line of ornate, gilded chandeliers hanging from the high reaches of the vaulted roof on long brass chains. Each one held aloft a hundred or more small flames, lit to celebrate a birth so long ago.

  Douglas saw none of it. His brown eyes were blurred with tears. His new-born son’s lusty cries coming from the next room could not compensate for the loss of Jeannie, who had slipped so quietly and quickly into death minutes after the baby was delivered.

  The priest had gone after baptising the baby in case it did not live. He’d named the child Alan, with Patrick Kennedy as the child’s only godparent. By now the priest would be preparing to celebrate mass at St Alban’s and in a minute Dr Walker would leave childbed and deathbed and find him waiting here. The doctor would have no comfort to offer and McGregor knew this, but ‘Why?’ he wanted to ask, ‘Why Jeannie? Why so young? She was nineteen. I survived four years of war, two torpedo attacks. I came home to Jeannie and a life of a fisherman. I believed that risk and peril were things of the past.’ The image of his dead wife, white and expressionless, swam before his eyes. Then he remembered Jeannie’s face as it had been, when, little more than a year ago, they had first set eyes on the Swan.

  It had taken them two days to travel from their Scottish village to Macclesfield, an ancient town built on an escarpment at the foot of the Pennine hills. It was night when the train halted at the station in Macclesfield’s cattle market. Facing them was the steep rise of Churchwallgate, which, with the nearby ancient steps, linked the two markets. The Swan, they knew, was in the market place at the town’s highest point. Their instructions were to walk up Churchwallgate, which rose steeply around and under the towering church. They set off, tired and weary, past squalid, dismal cottages whose inhabitants filled the narrow side streets with their cries. Their hearts sank as they glanced down dark alleyways and saw noisy taverns and slime-filled gutters.

  At last they reached the top and halted, breathing deeply after the climb. They stood and they stared. They stood at the high iron gates of St Michael and All Angels and looked across at the Swan, a white-washed, three-storey inn, which took up almost half of one side of the square. ‘Is that ours, Douglas? Really ours?’ she’d whispered, holding tightly on to his hand as if she’d been afraid of falling. Between the inn and the shops an arched entrance led to stables and coach yards and the inn’s oak-framed windows and dark timbering stood out clearly, even on a half-lit night such as last December’s. The colourful sign above double oak doors was attractive but unnecessary since ‘The Swan Inn’ was painted in large black letters between the first and second storeys.

  Now Douglas lifted the sash and felt the frosty air catch the back of his tight throat. He closed his eyes for a second, trying once more to shut out the image of Jeannie’s lifeless face, afraid that this picture would for ever be superimposed in his memory on the face he loved.

  He thought back to early summer when she’d told him, blushing like a young maid, that their child was expected before the turn of the year. He remembered feeling pride swelling in his chest.

  ‘We’ll find a house,’ he told her as he hugged her to him. ‘The Swan’s respectable – a fine living but no a place to bring up children.’

  His few months as owner had shown him that they could afford to rent one of the houses on the edge of town where the narrow, medieval streets broadened out into straight roads and, wandering randomly from these, the lanes and widely-spaced houses of the well-to-do where Patrick and Danny Kennedy were building houses.

  ‘I wouldn’t want my bairns to live near the rough end of town,’ Jeannie had said. ‘I don’t like to see children dirty and hungry, like the poor wee beggars down Churchwallgate and Churchwall Street. I’d love a house, Douggie. A big one, with a garden. Can we afford it?’

  He remembered the excitement in her face as she’d added, echoing his own thoughts, ‘Patrick and Danny Kennedy are building houses on Lincoln Drive. There’s two’ll be ready come spring and we’ll have a big family, God willin’.’

  Their house would be ready in early summer and only himself and the child to fill it. Now the baby’s plaintive cries were filling the dark space behind him. Would he be able to bring up their son alone? Should he send the wee one up to Scotland to be brought up by its aunts and uncles? No, he wanted to keep the child by him.

  Douglas leaned out over the sill, feeling cold air sharp against his face, chilling the dampness under his eyes. The bells of St Michael’s were pealing out now, the joyful sound ringing out over the rooftops of the ancient mill town, over the apex of the town hall roof and over to the distant Pennine hills, whose higher slopes were already shining white, making them appear nearer, reminding Douglas of the Grampian mountains of home.

  Churchwallgate and its network of smaller streets was well served with rough taverns and the sounds of drunken revelry reached Douglas’s ears; an ugly cacophony that even the bells could not drown. He pulled the window down at the sound, behind him, of Dr Walker entering the room.

  ‘I’m sorry, McGregor.’ The young doctor stood beside him. ‘We could have done nothing even if we’d been expecting it.’

  ‘Did she suffer?’ Douglas’s voice was strained. He swallowed hard to gain control, not wanting the doctor to see how deep his grief went or guess that once he was alone he would give himself over, in privacy, to the tears that were welling up in his throat.

  ‘No. She’d know nothing. She’d just feel tired. She lay back and closed her eyes. You saw the rest.’

  Jeannie had sunk against the pillows and closed her eyes after Douglas had held her. It was a few minutes before the nurse noticed her pallor and the light, sighing breathing that told of the haemorrhage that would take her so quickly from them.

  ‘There’s a woman on Mill Street who lost her baby yesterday. Shall I ask her to nurse your son for you?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘If that’s the best thing. Do what ye have to.’ Douglas drew the curtains across the window and switched on the light. ‘I’ll keep the bairn with me here. I�
��ll no send him oot. Ask the woman to come here to feed him, will ye?’

  ‘I will. And I’ll ask Jack Cooper, the farmer, to come to see you. His wife delivers the country babies. She keeps a special cow and a goat for the ones whose mothers can’t feed them.’ Dr Walker put a hand on the big Scotsman’s shoulder in a gesture of friendship, paused for a moment and added, ‘He’s a fine boy. Strong and healthy.’

  Douglas looked at the doctor and saw in his face a sadness that mirrored his own. The man had done his best to save Jeannie and he’d feel the death of a patient deeply. Douglas was not alone in his loss.

  ‘Thank ye,’ he said. ‘I’ll be a good father to him.’

  It had been going on for six months and her need of him was growing. It was mid-February, midnight, and bitter cold outside. Inside the Temperance Hotel the windows were hoary with frost.

  Carrie always waited until the house was asleep before she could go to his room on silent, slippered feet, downstairs to the room beneath her own, where he waited for her. Under the sheets she was naked. She would put her silk chemise on under her dressing-gown as soon as the house was still. He liked to have something to take off her, he said. It excited him.

  She did not allow him to come to her. Nobody would think it odd that she, the owner of the hotel, should be the last to retire, she told him. But if she permitted him to come to her she would not have been able to refuse him. As it was, she could deny herself the sinful lusts of the flesh and wonder, on the chosen lonely nights, at her hypocrisy. For she was more than ever pious, at chapel, and she knew that she was as a whited sepulchre.

  Since the very first time, she’d tried not to ask herself what Father would have said. For she was a different woman from the one her father had meant her to be. She was truly sinful now. She had come to delight in voluptuous feelings, finding that she was living in a state of heightened awareness, letting her imagination have control of her. All the things Father had warned her against.

  Odours were stronger, colours were brighter, words and music could move her to tears. Even the bells, which before had seemed to be tolling her life away, now matched the strong heartbeat that always preceded Patrick’s arrival. She knew when he was approaching the house for her heart set up its thumping seconds before her ears caught the sound of his footfall outside in the street.

  And she was softer, her clumsy stiffness gone, and she moved easily, gracefully, in time to the music in her head and the strong thud of her pulses. And it was all the things her father had warned her against.

  At the start she felt that it was written on her face for all to see. Her hands shook when she handed him his letters. She avoided his eye, afraid that in front of other lodgers the leaping passion they aroused in one another with no more than a quick glance would give the lie to their formality of manner. Yet nobody had seen it.

  Now she allowed him to take her to her bed, in her own room, on the two afternoons each week when Mrs Bettley and the bedroom girl weren’t there. Tonight she lay, waiting. There was no sound but that of her own heart hammering in her throat and her ears. She would go to him tonight and in the morning, at dawn, she would return to her cold bed in her scented room.

  She looked at the shaft of moonlight, palely lighting the window, and remembered. Last night, after their loving, they had talked for a while. She had a habit of reliving it, remembering every word, every look, and dwelling on them when he wasn’t there.

  They had been in his bed, until an hour before dawn when he’d lit the gas light above the bed and leaned, looking down at her. ‘Caroline Aurora,’ he said in the deep baritone voice that made her insides curl up. ‘What beautiful names.’ A great wide smile came across his face and he asked her, ‘Do you know who Aurora was?’

  ‘Is it something to do with Aberdeen?’

  ‘No. Aurora was the goddess of dawn.’

  ‘Huh,’ she said. He knew a lot. He and Danny had had a lot of schooling in Ireland. They’d gone to a Catholic college, he told her. It was funny really. You’d think that people who’d had a lot of schooling wouldn’t have to work as they did. ‘So what did she do?’

  ‘She rose from the bed of her husband at the end of each night to open, with her rosy fingers, the Gates of Morning. Then Apollo drove the sun chariot from the eastern palace.’

  She smiled back at him, relaxed. ‘That’s what I do, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Spend my nights with you. Rise at dawn.’

  He was laughing softly, placing a finger over her lips to hush her as he told her the rest of the story. ‘After Aurora flung back the pearly gates she flashed across the darkness before the Sun God drove his fiery steeds across the heavens.’

  Carrie always seemed to be two paces behind him in his flights of fancy. She was still dwelling on the first part of the story. ‘Well, you’re not my husband,’ she said.

  ‘Aurora turned her husband into a grasshopper when he became old and ugly,’ Patrick went on, smiling, teasing her, ‘for she’d gifted him eternal life, but not eternal youth and she knew he would never die.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  He laughed. ‘She fell in love with a young hunter and schemed to have him kill her rival.’

  ‘She wasn’t very virtuous then, was she?’ Carrie said. ‘They were pagans. As bad as those in Shakespeare’s stories if you ask me. All that stabbing and killing!’

  ‘The gods were immortal,’ he explained. ‘They didn’t have to think about mortal sin.’ Then he looked serious for once. ‘But you don’t open the gates, Carrie, like your namesake. You won’t go out into the day, into the daylight, with me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ he started to say, then touched her face and held it so that she had to look into his eyes, ‘if I asked you to follow me, Carrie, when I leave . . .’

  ‘Leave?’ she asked quickly. ‘You’re not leaving, are you?’

  ‘I’m staying until Danny’s settled. He’s a settling man.’

  ‘What are you, then?’ she interrupted, fear of losing him making her voice go high and sharp.

  ‘A wanderer, Caroline Aurora. I’m not done with it. I was a sailor when the war came, a wandering, free-roaming merchant sailor.’ He lay back and took her hand in his. ‘Would you come with me?’ he said, without looking at her. ‘Would you open your gates?’

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ she answered.

  ‘Carrie, my love,’ he said, holding her fingers in a tight grip that seemed to be telling her something at odds with the gentle tone of his voice. ‘I’ve something to tell you. Something to ask you. You must try to understand. I want you to come away with me.’

  She felt fearful for what he was about to say. She snatched her hand from his and sat up, her loose hair falling across her face and shoulders, hiding her. ‘I don’t understand you at all,’ she said, puzzled and edgy now. ‘What are you asking? You want me to leave all this?’

  She waved her bare arm around. ‘All this. All me and Father worked for? Our Jane? The chapel? This is my life, Patrick. It’s everything to me.’

  ‘And yet you love me,’ he said softly. ‘When you are at your most needful, when I make love to you, you tell me that you love me.’

  She was silent for a moment. She had said it. But it wasn’t true. For that was one of the worst things. She didn’t love him – she only wanted him. It was lust she felt, wicked, sinful lust of the flesh. ‘I don’t love you.’

  ‘You do, Caroline Aurora,’ he answered in the knowing way he had. ‘You do. Oh, you do.’

  ‘I don’t. I feel ashamed of myself for doing what we do. That’s not love.’

  ‘It’s love, Carrie,’ he said with quiet emphasis.

  ‘It’s not the sort I could change my life for,’ she told him before lying down beside him again.

  ‘It’s the only kind that matters. Between a man and a woman,’ he’d continued, ignoring her worries.

  ‘Don’t you feel shame?’ she said. ‘Guilt?’

  ‘I do. I go
in mortal sin, Carrie.’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘But you’re a Roman Catholic. You can go and confess.’ She sat up again quickly and looked at him. ‘You don’t . . . ? You haven’t? You’ve not confessed, have you?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve confessed.’

  Now she was worried. She fought to keep her voice down as she said, ‘You’ve told that priest? That young priest at St Alban’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve not said who you’ve sinned with. Not mentioned my name, have you?’

  ‘I have.’ He smiled at her, for all the world like a man with no cares.

  ‘So that priest knows? That young priest? I’ll never dare look him in the eye.’

  ‘He’s bound to secrecy, Carrie,’ he said, but his eyes were laughing at her.

  ‘But he knows!’ She felt a flush of anger rising in her, in the face of his amusement. ‘What did he say?’

  His face was serious again. ‘He said that I should want to be married to the woman I love.’

  ‘And what did you tell him? That I’d never betray my father’s memory? That I’d never leave the chapel?’

  ‘Oh, Carrie,’ he’d said, pulling her down on to himself, ‘come here.’ And then they were aroused again and in such need that thoughts of sin and such things had been of no account until afterwards when she had risen to dress and return to her room.

  He looked at her tenderly and said, ‘There is a big, beautiful world out there, Caroline Aurora. It’s yours for the taking. You should go out of your night. Open the Gates of Morning.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she’d asked him.

  ‘Why do you keep Jane on at school?’ he asked. ‘She could help you.’

  Carrie pulled the belt tight around her waist and looked at him. ‘I promised my father before he died that Jane would have a better chance than I had,’ she said. ‘I left school at twelve to help Mother. Help her run this place. I can manage it by myself. I had to, after Father died.’

  He reached for her hand. ‘You could have time to enjoy life, Carrie, if you let Jane do her share.’