Oh, stop your griping
. That other self was scathing. She’d never been able to stand them that indulged in maudlin self-pity, and she was too long in the tooth to matter one way or the other; the little lass was all that counted. How all this would end she didn’t know, but, she told herself, she’d take one day at a time. The future was too big to tackle otherwise. Perhaps the doctor would come through after all, make a stand for the little lass?
She relaxed back on the hard bed with a deep sigh, bringing her swollen legs up slowly, one after the other. But the governors wouldn’t like having their charity challenged; most of them had looked the other way so often their heads were permanently fixed in that position. What was one little bairn to any of them? They came strutting round in their top hats and tails once a year, their fancy wives dressed in silk and satin with bits of lace pressed to their noses as though the place stank, and then off they went again in their fine motor cars, full of righteous satisfaction and with their social consciences appeased for another year. What did they know of real life, any of them? Her hand reached for the bottle of laudanum in her shift pocket and then stopped abruptly. No, she’d had enough the night, there was the little lass to think of and she wanted to hear her if she stirred or they had visitors.
Her faded eyes flicked towards the closed door. Not that it would do Matron any good to come back now, but you never knew with her type - the unnatural ones, because if ever a woman was unnatural, the Matron was. To get pleasure out of whipping little bairns . . . Maggie shivered, then leant back and closed her eyes. Give her Florrie Shawe any day. Spitefulness she could understand, but this other . . .
She never was sure what woke her, but when Maggie opened her eyes and saw the dim outline of Matron Cox bending over Sarah’s bed, her hands pressing a pillow over the child’s face, she still lay unmoving for a moment, her mind unable to accept what her eyes were seeing. And then she smelt the smoke, and saw the bed ablaze at the far end of the room, and panic propelled her upright as swiftly as her bulk would allow and with a suddenness which took the other woman completely by surprise.
‘
Sarah!
’
Her shriek, when accompanied by the spring forwards that enabled her to tear the pillow out of the Matron’s hands, gave her a slight advantage for a moment but almost immediately the other woman recovered, her face contorted with hate as she hit out at Maggie’s face with enough force to send Maggie tottering backwards as she desperately tried to stay on her feet.
‘You stupid dirty old woman.’ The Matron slowly advanced on her, spitting the words through clenched teeth. ‘How dare you think you can take all this away from me,
how dare you
! I’ve built this place up out of nothing, nothing, do you hear me? It was a filthy, lice-ridden hovel when I took over, and I’ve given twenty years of my life to making it what it is today. No one - not you, not that jumped-up little doctor - will take it away from me.
It’s mine
.’
‘Get away from me.’ There was no movement from the bed and it was that, rather than the other woman’s rage and the billowing smoke, that was filling Maggie with sick dread. ‘You’re mad.’
‘You thought you’d got the better of me, didn’t you,
didn’t you
? You and that fancy doctor? But it’ll be my word against his when you’re out of the way, and there’ll be those that swear the girl fell into a thorn bush. Dr March has never had cause to doubt me in all the years he’s been visiting here.’
‘You bought his silence with whisky.’
‘What do you know about it?’ The Matron’s eyes were unblinking although Maggie’s were streaming in the stifling air, her lungs labouring. ‘You! A fat low piece like you. You think I don’t know about your little habit, your “medicine”? There is nothing that happens in this place that I don’t know about, and even your dear friend Jessie Bryant will have to say you’re doped most nights. Of course it’ll be a mystery why you had a pack of candles alongside of you, but perhaps the child was frightened, nervous of the dark? Yes, I think that would be it—’
Sarah suddenly coughed and spluttered from the bed. It took the Matron’s attention long enough for Maggie to strike out at the other woman’s face with a force she didn’t know she was capable of, the blow hitting the Matron straight between the eyes and felling her to the floor like a log.
She could barely see a hand in front of her now, the whole room was filled with black acrid smoke that made breathing agonizing and her eyes blind, but she reached the bed, scooped Sarah’s limp body under one arm, and turned towards the door.
It seemed like an age before she felt the doorknob beneath her fingers, and at first she thought the door was locked as it remained rigid under her frantic efforts, until she remembered it opened outwards rather than inwards. She fell into the corridor outside, kicking the door shut behind her before taking great gulping pulls of clean air, her chest feeling as though it was on fire.
Sarah was stirring again, but feebly, and now Maggie crawled along the corridor, dragging the child with her, until she reached the big brass bell next to the fire bucket filled with sand, one of which was on each floor of all three houses.
The clanging of the bell sounded startlingly loud in the quiet of the early morning, but it was still some minutes before the sound of running feet told Maggie they had been found, and she could relax her aching, swimming head back against the wall where she was sitting, after telling Jessie Bryant the Matron was still in the burning infirmary.
Chapter Four
‘Well, it never rains but it pours, eh?’
Sarah stared in surprise at Dr Mallard. She hadn’t expected the colloquialism from him.
‘Don’t tell me you were trying to burn the good Mrs McLevy in her bed?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Sarah said indignantly, her chin jerking at him. ‘Mother McLevy had kept a candle going by her bed in case I woke up and was frightened, and it tipped over and set the bedding alight.’
It was the story Maggie and the doctor had decided to tell her, fearing that the truth, on top of the events of the day before, would be too much, and Rodney was pleased at the child’s easy acceptance of the fabrication. The effects of the second sedative Maggie had given Sarah so soon after the first had kept her in a drugged stupor throughout the Matron’s attack, and she remembered nothing beyond darkness and not being able to breathe.
‘So it’s the Mother I’ve got to take to task is it?’
Sarah’s face as she looked at him made it plain she was working out in her mind if he was serious or not, and when she grinned and said, ‘She can’t half be shirty when she wants to,’ he assumed she’d come to the right conclusion.
‘I don’t doubt it.’ He paused before adding, ‘How do you feel today?’
‘All right.’ She didn’t, her body ached all over from the Matron’s cane and her chest was all sore from the smoke, but she didn’t want to talk about that when there were more important issues at stake, issues she felt this tall, handsome, god-like person in front of her could solve. She hitched up in the bed a little, trying not to wince as her seared flesh rubbed on the cotton sheet, and glanced round Mother McLevy’s room as she pondered how to put her enquiry without it sounding cheeky. But there wasn’t a way. ‘Dr Mallard?’
‘Yes?’ Rodney had prepared himself for all sorts of difficult questions relating to the night before, so it was with considerable surprise that he heard her say, ‘Are . . . are you married?’
‘What?’
‘A wife, have you got a wife?’
‘A wife?’ The big blue eyes were reproachful, underlining his obtuseness, and he collected himself quickly as he said, ‘No, Sarah, no. I don’t have a wife.’
Sarah tried hard to keep her satisfaction from showing, but something of it came over in her voice when she said, ‘I’m nearly ten you know, my birthday’s next month.’ She didn’t tell him it was in the last week of October; every week was important to convince him of her maturity.
‘Is that so.’
‘And lots of girls marry when they’re sixteen.’
‘Yes, they probably do.’ He knew he couldn’t smile, but a tremor passed over his face as he turned away. He hadn’t expected to find any humour in the morning, when he had received the telephone call from one of the governors first thing, but he had reckoned without the fighting spirit of this tiny little morsel. He extracted some clean dressings from his bag and kept his voice brisk as he said, ‘Shall we take a look at that wound on your neck, Sarah?’
She should have asked him if he’d got a sweetheart. The thought suddenly occurred to her and it was more how she was going to approach that, than the pain of having the blood-dried dressing changed, that kept her quiet for a few minutes until he had finished.
Rodney found the anger that had flared yesterday begin to boil again as he dealt with the bruised and battered little body, although he was relieved to see there appeared to be no signs of infection. That a woman, the supposedly softer and gentler side of the human race, could do this to a child was beyond him, and she must have gone clear off her head to do so much damage before she was stopped. It was as well she was in the prison hospital, he thought grimly. Far from treating her for smoke inhalation and minor burns, he would have felt like strangling the woman if he’d got his hands on her after this latest madness. But that was it, she was mad, she had to be.
‘Dr Mallard?’
‘Yes, Sarah?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ She couldn’t ask him, not now. She bit on her lip and then spoke the other thought which had been troubling her all morning and was intrinsically linked with the first. ‘Do . . . do I have to go back?’
‘Go back?’
‘To the dormitory, to . . . the others.’ Mary Owen would believe what Mother Shawe had said, and if she believed it the others would believe it, she’d make them. The thought was unbearable and Sarah twisted in the bed now as the doctor finished washing his hands and turned to face her. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘I’m sure Mrs McLevy will lend you her bed until you’re feeling better.’ He had spoken in a jocular tone but there was no response from the little face watching him, and his own countenance straightened as he said, very gently, ‘You won’t be able to stay in Mrs McLevy’s room for ever, now will you?’
‘No.’>
‘And Mrs McLevy will still be here even when you are back with your friends.’ He walked over to the bed as Sarah stared fixedly at him, sitting down on the edge of it and taking one small hand in his. ‘You know she is very fond of you, don’t you, and there is nothing to worry about as far as the Matron is concerned; she won’t be coming back to Hatfield, not ever again. In a few days you’ll be back with your friends and all this will just be like a bad dream.’
A few days. Not months, not even weeks - days. Sarah wriggled her small bottom as her heart sank. Oh, why couldn’t you just grow up in one big rush? But she wouldn’t go back,
she wouldn’t
, she’d . . . she’d run away. Anything would be better than seeing Mary Owen’s satisfied face.
As she pushed the thumbnail of her free hand into her mouth and started chewing it, still without taking her eyes off Rodney’s face, Rodney found he was way out of his depth - and not for the first time since coming to this desolate backwater, as he termed Sunderland. Why hadn’t he had the sense to apply for a post in Coventry or Oxford, anywhere but the north? What had made him do it? He felt the harsh rasp of truth against his mind and turned his thoughts sharply from Vanessa. That was dead, gone. She was lost to him as completely as if she was six feet under the earth, and he wouldn’t take her back now if she crawled every inch of the way from London. And he’d knock these daily telephone calls of hers on the head too. He’d refuse to take them from now on whatever the consequences.
‘I don’t want to go back.’ Sarah brought his attention back to herself after a full minute of silence, and then she surprised both of them when she suddenly flung herself at him, pressing her small body against his chest as she sobbed quietly into his jacket. He was quite still for a moment and then his arms came round her, and he said, ‘There now, there now, it can’t be as bad as all that.’ His words mocked him. It was every bit as bad as that and the child knew it.
When Mrs McLevy had put him fully in the picture earlier that morning as to the sequence of events that had started the ball rolling, he had been doubly dumbfounded at the insensitivity of some of the people in charge of these young minds. That this woman, this Florence Shawe, had taunted the child with the facts of her beginnings in front of her classmates, was quite incredible. He’d said as much to Mrs McLevy, and her reply of, ‘I know, lad, I know, I felt the same meself, but Florrie’s conscience is givin’ her hell over all that’s happened if that’s any comfort,’ had merely brought forth the sharp rejoinder, ‘It’s no comfort at all, Mrs McLevy.’