‘Not any more she won’t.’ He stared at her for a moment and she stared back. ‘She’ll be out of here within twenty-four hours, you have my word on that. You’ll stay with the child until then?’
‘I said, didn’t I.’ Maggie bristled slightly and the glimmer of a smile touched his face before he said soothingly, ‘Of course, I’m sorry.’
‘You can be sure I’ll look after her, Doctor.’ She was immediately ashamed of her testiness, but it had been a day and a half and with her feeling under the weather too. ‘I’ll sleep with one eye open an’ all.’
‘That wouldn’t be a bad idea, Mrs McLevy.’
They walked over to Sarah’s bed together and stood looking down on the small girl, who seemed very young and very fragile to Rodney. She was fast asleep, a result of the strong sedative Rodney had given some twenty minutes earlier, her long eyelashes lying on cheeks that resembled white marble.
‘She’ll be all right? I mean once the pain lets up a bit?’
‘Physically.’ He continued looking down at the bed. ‘But mentally . . . What does this sort of thing do to a young mind?’
‘There’s worse things than a beatin’, Doctor, an’ they happen to girls as young as Sarah, especially ones lookin’ like she does.’ Maggie’s voice was flat and low.
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’ He turned to her now and his voice was as flat as hers as he said, ‘You think me very naive, don’t you?’
‘Naive?’ She felt embarrassed and that didn’t happen often. ‘Not exactly naive, Doctor, more . . .’ - what was the word? Maggie searched her limited vocabulary and found it - ‘more idealistic. You’ve been brought up as a young gentleman, an’ I’ve nothin’ agen that, heaven forbid, but it’s different for the likes of Sarah. I’m not sayin’ there’s not decent folks among the workin’ class either’ - her tone was suddenly defensive - ‘but it’s the same in every place, I suppose; it’s the bairns what suffer.’
‘Why is she here? Has she any family?’
‘Not as I know of. She was abandoned, left as a baby.’
‘I see.’ He glanced round the cheerless room. ‘So she has lived in the institution all her life?’
Maggie nodded slowly. ‘But like I said, Doctor, there’s worse places for a bairn lookin’ like she does. Here she’s clothed an’ fed an’ she has a bed to sleep in at night. When I was a bairn, it was a flea-infested flock mattress on the floor, an’ that shared atween four of us, top an’ tailed. Me mam worked from dawn to dusk an’ still there was never enough to eat, an’ me da drank his wage most weeks afore me mam could get her hands on it. When he was in work, that is.’
‘But you were together, as a family.’
She looked at him pityingly. He was idealistic all right, and the poor blighter was going to have a rough time of it, because one thing was for sure, if he was working with old Dr March he was going to have his eyes opened with a vengeance. Why hadn’t he got something in the better part of town, where all the nobs were? But the lad had a good heart. The thought mellowed her and her voice was quiet when she said, ‘Aye, lad, that we were,’ and left it at that.
Chapter Three
It was the middle of the night when Sarah awoke from her drug-induced sleep, and she was immediately aware that she hurt, everywhere; and then remembrance came, hot and sharp, causing her to cry out, ‘Mother McLevy?’
‘It’s all right, me bairn, it’s all right.’
Maggie lumbered off the next bed as quickly as her bulk, and the dose of laudanum she had taken earlier, would allow, and bent over the small girl who had raised herself slightly on her elbows. ‘You settle back down, there’s a good lass. I’ll give you somethin’ to help you sleep, eh?’
‘Where . . . where is he?’
‘Who, hinny?’
‘The doctor with the smiley voice,’ Sarah said weakly.
‘Dr Mallard? You mean Dr Mallard, he’s replacin’ old March an’ not afore time—’
‘Where is he?’ There was a fretful note in Sarah’s voice now and Maggie’s hand came to the child’s brow which she found to be over-warm.
‘He’s gone, but don’t fret yourself, he’ll be back in the mornin’. Now, you have a dose of this an’ it’ll make you feel better.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Dr Mallard said for you to have it.’ Maggie was nothing if not crafty, and when Sarah took the bitter-tasting mixture without further remonstration she added, ‘There’s a good lassie. The doctor’ll be pleased with you when he comes, now won’t he, takin’ all your medicine.’
‘Where’s . . . where’s Matron?’
Maggie followed Sarah’s train of thought and said, matter-of-factly and without expression, ‘The doctor said for her to keep away, don’t you remember? An’ I’m stayin’ with you till you’re better, all right?’ She didn’t add the doctor had said he would make it his business to see Matron was dealt with. Somehow she couldn’t quite believe herself he would win that particular battle.
‘My mam didn’t want me, did she.’ It was a statement, not a question, and followed with, ‘I hate her.’
‘Now, now, hinny.’
‘I do.’ The beautiful picture she had drawn in her mind was gone, torn away with each lash of the cane, and it was this more than anything else that was causing the grinding pain inside her head. Now there was nothing except real life, and the awareness was almost too much to bear.
With a wisdom born of her roots, Maggie didn’t try to shift the conversation to more comfortable ground or offer platitudes. The doctor had been right, it wasn’t Sarah’s physical state that was at risk, so now she said, ‘You don’t know your mam didn’t want you, hinny, just that she couldn’t keep you an’ that’s quite different. There were times when I was near givin’ away my William after his da had died, an’ that for his sake, not mine, I might add. Your mam probably thought she was doin’ right by you.’
‘You didn’t give him away though, did you?’
‘No, lass, I didn’t, but he might be alive now if I had, ’stead of which the fever took him when he was barely seven years old.’
‘I wish my mam had kept me and I’d died,’ Sarah said dully, her tongue feeling too big for her mouth. ‘I do.’
‘Lass, all things pass.’ Maggie sat herself down on the edge of the narrow iron bed, and carefully drew Sarah against her copious bosom, rocking her gently as they both became quiet. She continued long after she knew the child was asleep, her chin sunk into the folds of her neck and her eyes wide open.
What would become of this fierce little individual whom she loved like her own? It was a thought that had come more and more often of late, along with a sense of unease only the dulling effects of the laudanum could ease.
Sarah was too bright, too beautiful. She didn’t fit into the mould the world demanded of its working class, and it was this very thing that had grated on Florrie from the moment she set eyes on the lass. The world could be unforgiving, oh aye, it could that, and not just with the likes of Sarah either. Look at the poor King, or Duke of Windsor as he was called now. All he’d wanted to do was to marry the woman he loved, and he’d lost his crown because of it. What had she read he’d said when he married his beloved Wallis Simpson in June? Oh yes, she’d got it now - ‘After the trying times we have been through we now look forward to a happy and useful private life.’ Well, stepping out of the mould could be got round when you were the King of England, and no doubt his life, and his wife’s, would still be well oiled.
But Sarah? Maggie stared over the child’s head, her face sombre. Sarah didn’t have the connections or the money the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson had had. Beauty without intelligence would have been all right for the bairn - Maggie nodded silently to herself, her eyes looking inwards - the lass would have gone one of two ways then. An early marriage to one of the more determined rough types down on the docks or, likely as not, one of the madams would have snapped her up and had her working to service the never-ending supply of customers straight off the boats. Either way she would have found her niche in life. But Sarah was bright, she thought about things and felt them deeply too. Oh aye, she felt them all right, she’d never known a bairn with the capacity to feel like this one.
Maggie’s mind travelled back some six years to the first time she’d felt the stirrings of a love that was soon to become fiercely maternal. She had been helping out in the foundling nursery due to some of the Mothers being down with influenza, and had come into the yard during the children’s mid-morning recreation to find a little group of sturdy-legged boys surrounding two small girls, one in particular standing out as she faced her tormentors with blazing eyes.
‘You’re daft, you are, Sarah Brown.’ One of the boys, who was verging on six and a good deal bigger than the blond-haired little girl facing him, had closed in on the small figure, who was clutching something next to her chest. ‘Give it ’ere else I’ll skite your lugs.’
‘No, I won’t.’
As the child had spoken, Maggie had noticed the other little tot - a smaller, thinner child with straight brown hair cut pudding-basin short - move closer to her friend’s side, her chin rising a notch as she’d said, ‘You leave her alone, Mick McBride.’
‘What’s going on here?’
As the group of boys had scattered, Sarah had said, ‘It’s the frog, Mother,’ offering up her hands in which reposed a small round-eyed frog. ‘They were throwing stones at it to make it jump an’ they’ve hurt its leg, look.’
Maggie looked, and then backed a step or two as the frog made a half-hearted attempt to escape from the small hands.
‘It’s come from the garden and it’s lost, it’s looking for its mam.’
‘Is it?’ Maggie was not a lover of things small and green, and her voice reflected her scepticism.
‘Mick McBride was going to step on it, he was.’ Rebecca had chimed in indignantly at this point, her plain little face red with outrage. ‘An’ he kicked Sarah’s legs an’ all, but she still wouldn’t let him have it.’
‘It
is
looking for its mam.’ Sarah had been quite adamant. ‘She’s in the pond, there’s dozens of frogs in there.’
Maggie had been unable to refuse the unspoken request, and so the three of them had left the confines of the yard, and walked through to the Home’s vegetable garden, depositing the small amphibian close to the large pond at the far end of the grounds before making their way back to the nursery.
The two little girls had chatted away the whole time, and at some time on the return journey Sarah’s small hand had slipped into hers, and love had been born as simply and as quickly as that. Not that she didn’t love Rebecca, Maggie reasoned quietly as her conscience twanged. She did, aye, she did, but it couldn’t be denied that somehow Sarah had got under her skin in a way that had never happened with any other bairn except her own lad, her William.
Oh, what was she going on about? Maggie eased Sarah down on to the bed and straightened slowly, grimacing as her bones creaked. It wouldn’t do her any good thinking like this and worrying. What would be, would be. The easy philosophy that had carried her through some fifty years of life didn’t work so well these days. She knew in her head that it did no good to fight against the pricks, but every time she looked at the child her heart said otherwise.
Why had this child come into her life anyway? She walked across to the bed she had been lying on before Sarah had awoken, her tread heavy. When William had died she’d thought she’d go mad for a time, prayed for it, anything would have been better than seeing his poor little body stretched out on the bed in their one damp room in her mind’s eye every time she shut her eyes. She hadn’t slept in weeks, not really, and then someone had introduced her to the laudanum, and after that . . .
She’d made a bit of a name for herself where she’d lived. She’d heard them talk, and seen the curtains twitch more than once when she’d arrived home well-oiled and with a different bloke in tow every night. Not that she’d ever got paid for it. She shook her head at the accusing voice in her mind. But she’d needed comfort, a warm body next to hers in the long night hours when everyone else had someone. And then even that had paled, and she’d got older . . .
When she’d come to work at the Home she had never expected to feel affection for anyone again; she hadn’t wanted to. Three square meals and a warm bed was all she’d asked, but she’d reckoned without Sarah. She glanced across at her, hunching her shoulders against what the child meant to her. She’d wanted a peaceful old age, a slow fading away . . .