The Newcastle agency were sending her four women they thought might be suitable and that was all she knew, she told Kane through her sobs, but if they were like the others she would not,
would not
be pressurised into taking someone about whom she wasn’t a hundred per cent confident.
Kane drew her out of the study where she had been sitting going over the theatre accounts and into the drawing room, where he made her put her swollen feet up on the sofa as he chafed her cold hands.
‘New rules,’ he told her gently but firmly. ‘From now on until the babies are born I take over the business side of the theatre. I know you want to do it yourself, but it’s too much at the moment and after all, I have been doing this kind of work most of my adult
life. Your baby will be in good hands, and these babies’ – he touched her stomach tenderly – ‘need a rested mother. All right? You can visit the theatre with me as often as you wish, but no more work. I mean it, Sophy. Dr Palmer was worried about the swelling in your legs and feet last week and it’s got worse, not better.’
She lay back against the cushions of the sofa, too tired to argue with him.
‘Regarding the nursemaid, I have no intention of forcing you to make a choice that doesn’t suit. We will manage. Somehow. And now you are going up to bed and I will bring you a dinner tray later.’
‘But it’s only seven o’clock!’
‘Bed, Sophy.’
He was worried, really worried, she could see it in his face, and it was this that made her nod and let him help her to her feet. They were crossing the hall, Kane holding her arm, when the doorbell rang. Harriet came hurrying out of the passageway which led to the kitchen, and on seeing her, Kane said, ‘I’m taking Sophy up to bed, she’s exhausted. Get rid of whoever it is and then warm some milk and bring it upstairs, would you.’
They were halfway up the stairs when Harriet opened the door. They heard her say, ‘Can I help you?’ and then a woman spoke in reply. They couldn’t hear what she said but as Sophy stopped dead, Kane glanced at her in surprise. ‘What’s the matter?’
Harriet was saying, ‘I’m sorry, but Mrs Gregory is indisposed. You’ll have to come back another time,’ as Sophy turned round and descended, Kane still holding her arm.
‘Bridget?’ Sophy’s voice was a whisper, and then as she reached the hall, she said more strongly, ‘Bridget? Is that you?’
Harriet stood to one side, clearly bemused, as the woman at the door pushed past her, saying, ‘Sophy? Sophy, lass! Aw, Sophy.’
In spite of her bulk Sophy flew across the hall and into Bridget’s arms. The women hung on to each other, both making unintelligible sounds which made their listeners wrinkle their faces against the mixed pain and joy they contained. It was a full minute before they drew back to look into each other’s faces and both had tears
streaming down their cheeks. ‘Oh, me bairn, me bairn, look at you.’ Bridget was smiling through her tears. ‘I knew you’d be as bonny as a summer’s day.’
Sophy couldn’t talk. Here was her Bridget and hardly any different to what she remembered. The same bright brown eyes and curly light brown hair and not a trace of grey, although Bridget must be fifty-five, fifty-six now.
Such was the look on Sophy’s face that Bridget said, ‘Now come on, lass, don’t take on so, not in your condition. Ee, I couldn’t believe it when Miss Patience told me. Twins, she said. Look, come an’ sit down.’ Bridget glanced helplessly at Kane who now stepped forward, taking Sophy’s arm once more as he escorted her into the drawing room with Bridget following and Harriet making up the rear.
When Sophy sat down she held out her hand to Bridget who came and sat beside her. Sophy hung on tight. She had the feeling that if she let go of Bridget’s hand, it would all turn out to be a dream. Looking up at Kane, she whispered, ‘This is Bridget, you remember I told you about her?’
‘I do.’ Kane smiled. ‘And you’re very welcome, Bridget. Harriet, I think we could all do with a cup of tea, don’t you?’
‘I never thought I’d see you again.’ Sophy squeezed Bridget’s hand and then, remembering her manners, she said, ‘Oh take off your hat and coat. You can have dinner with us, can’t you? Where are you staying? Are you living in Sunderland? Where’s Kitty and Patrick?’
Bridget smiled. When Miss Patience had told her that Sophy was a famous actress married to a wealthy man and living in a great big house, she’d wondered if her lass might have changed – got a bit uppity – but she needn’t have worried. ‘I only heard you were living in these parts today, lass,’ she said quietly. ‘The last I heard, you’d gone off somewhere but no one knew where.’
‘When was that?’
‘Years back, just before I went across the water with my mam an’ da.’
‘You went back to Ireland?’
Kitty nodded. ‘But I’d asked about you before then. I went knocking at the door of the vicarage one day about a year or so after your aunt had thrown us out, and she threatened to have the police on me. Vicious, she was.’
‘She’s dead now, my uncle too.’
‘Aye, I know, lass. Miss Patience told me.’
‘Bridget, why don’t you start at the beginning and tell us the full story,’ Kane suggested, as Harriet came in with the tea tray.
‘Well, there’s not a lot to tell, sir. When your aunt,’ she turned to Sophy again, ‘got rid of us, we hung about these parts for a bit. I didn’t want to move too far afield because of you. But then we got the offer of work from a farmer at one of the hirings. The pay wasn’t much but it was Silksworth way so still close. The cottage he let us have was no more than a pigsty of a place, holes in the roof, all sorts, but we stuck it for a while. Then on me half-day off one Sunday I went to the vicarage. I wanted to let you know I was thinking of you, lass. That I hadn’t gone far. Your aunt was there. She said you’d been sent away and you weren’t coming back, and if I came again she’d have me locked up for stealing. Well, I’ve never stolen anything in me life, as you well know.’
Sophy nodded. ‘She was a hateful woman, Bridget.’
‘Then me mam got poorly, the cottage was so damp and cold, terrible it was, and then as luck would have it, we got set on at a big house in Newcastle.’
‘Newcastle? Oh, Bridget, I was at school in Newcastle! We might have met.’
‘You were? Well, I never. Well, me mam never really got better, not like she’d once been anyway, and she’d always had a hankering to go back to Ireland to see her sisters an’ that, and in the end she got right poorly and me and Da knew if we didn’t go soon, that’d be that. But I came back to the vicarage before we went, just in case. This little maid answered the door and when I asked after you she said there’d been a big row and you’d gone and no one knew where, but you weren’t coming back. I gave a letter to her to give to you on the off-chance.’
‘I never got it.’
‘No, well you wouldn’t if your aunt had anything to do with it,’ said Bridget darkly. ‘Anyway, we went back to Ireland and me mam died within the year but Da wanted to stay on, and as I was all he’d got . . . He went a month ago, God rest his soul, so I thought I’d come back and see if I could find out if you were all right. I’ve thought about you all the time, lass, and that’s God’s honest truth. I went to the vicarage but there’s new folk there and the lady – nice soul, she was – didn’t know anything about you, but told me Miss Patience had married a Dr Alridge and they lived Barnes Park way. I booked into a bed and breakfast last night and then went knocking on doors asking, but when I found the right house Miss Patience was out for the afternoon. So I went back tonight.’
Bridget didn’t add here how amazed she had been at the welcome she’d received. She remembered Miss Patience as a spiteful little madam with a tongue on her like her mother, but the warm, friendly woman who had invited her in and told her about Sophy’s success and given her Sophy’s address had been kindness itself.
‘And here I am,’ Bridget finished softly.
‘Here you are.’ Sophy hugged her again, she couldn’t help it. ‘Can you stay, Bridget? I don’t mean just tonight, although we’ll get your things picked up from the bed and breakfast in a little while, but for good? Can you?’
Bridget looked at Kane, clearly taken aback. He smiled broadly.
‘We’re looking for a nursemaid for when the twins are born and somehow I think we’ve found her,’ he said. ‘If you’re free, of course?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’ Bridget looked at Sophy. ‘Oh, lass, lass, I can’t believe it. I’ve been a bit low since my da went, not having bairns of my own, but I’ve always thought of you as my bairn . . .’ And then she stopped, again glancing at Kane as she said, ‘Not wishing to take liberties, sir.’
‘Take all the liberties you want, Bridget. You’ve done my wife the power of good. Now, give me the address of where your things are and Ralph will go and fetch them,’ he said briskly, pretending not to notice the tears in Bridget’s eyes. ‘And then we’ll see about
settling you in. I’m sure my wife will want to show you the nursery later, but for now I’ll leave you two to chat.’ He put out his hand and touched Sophy’s cheek before leaving the room.
‘He seems a grand man, lass,’ Bridget said softly.
‘He is a grand man, Bridget.’
‘And you’re an actress, Miss Patience said? Fancy that.’
Sophy nodded. ‘I went to London when I left the vicarage once my schooling had finished. The row, it was about my mother. My beginnings. Did – did you know that the story about her marrying a Frenchman wasn’t true?’
Bridget bit her lip. ‘Not till you’ve just said, lass, although I have to admit I always had my suspicions. Me mam an’ da believed it, but they didn’t have as much to do with your mother as I did when she came home.’
‘She wasn’t married to my father.’
‘Well, all the same for that she was a real lady, lass, and nice with it, if you know what I mean. I liked her.’
Sophy put out her hand and clasped Bridget’s once again. ‘Thank you. Anyway, I went to London . . .’ She told Bridget everything, about Cat, about Toby, Kane’s accident, filling in the missing years as they sat by the fire drinking another cup of tea together. Then they went through to the kitchen and Sophy introduced Bridget to Sadie and Harriet, explaining their shared background. When Kane came out of the study where he had been finishing the accounts Sophy had been working on earlier, the four women were laughing at one of Sadie’s witticisms, and he said again, but to himself, ‘Yes, the power of good,’ as he looked at his wife from the kitchen door. And, although not a churchgoing man, he sent up a swift prayer of thanks for the little Irishwoman who had come knocking at their door.
The next few weeks passed without mishap and the house ran more smoothly than it ever had. Bridget fitted into the household as though she had always been there, and she and Sadie hit it off immediately, for which Sophy was thankful. Harriet had Ralph, and although Harriet was very fond of Sadie, she obviously preferred to sit by her own fireside with her husband once Josephine was tucked up in bed and her work in the house was finished for the day. Now, instead of Sadie retiring to her cottage at some point after she and Harriet had served dinner to Kane and Sophy and then made the kitchen spick and span, she and Bridget sat by the range drinking tea and putting the world to rights.
It had been agreed that, for the present and until the twins, once they arrived, were old enough to go through the night, Bridget would sleep in the room next to the nursery so she was always on hand to help with night-feeds and so on. But once the children were older, Bridget would join Sadie in her cottage and the two women would share the little home.
The only cause for concern as the last weeks of the pregnancy progressed was the swelling in Sophy’s feet and legs. This persisted, to a greater or lesser degree, during the whole of the month of
November. A bitterly cold November, with thick frosts and ice and the odd snow flurry.
Dr Palmer had flatly forbidden his patient to leave the house, and in truth Sophy didn’t think she could have done so even if she’d had his blessing. Looking at herself in the bedroom mirror, it was amazing to think she hadn’t known she was pregnant at first. Once her stomach had started to expand it hadn’t known how to stop, and even Harriet, the most tactful of creatures, had to admit Sophy looked as though she was going to burst. Sophy agreed with her – over the last weeks she felt as though she was going to burst too. She slept half-sitting up, propped against a pile of pillows because if she lay down flat she felt as though she couldn’t breathe, and she waddled rather than walked. In the last weeks her appetite had all but vanished, because, as she said to Kane when he worried about her small portions at the dinner-table, there was no room for anything but babies in her abdomen.
But Sophy was happy and it showed.
On the afternoons when Kane was working in his study or out checking on how things were going at the theatre with Ralph, she would join the three other women in the kitchen and sit in Sadie’s comfy armchair in front of the glowing range. The four of them would drink endless pots of tea, gossip about this and that, discuss names for the babies and generally enjoy themselves while the Arctic conditions outside made the kitchen all the more cosy. Sadie and Bridget’s knitting needles kept up a steady click-clack while they talked, and the pile of baby clothes grew week by week. Josephine revelled in all the attention she got, playing on the big thick clippy mat at their feet with her toys or having stories read to her. It was a halcyon time and despite her enormous bulk, Sophy was utterly content.
She felt slightly guilty at times that she was detached from the outside world, the things that had mattered so much just weeks ago were fading into the background. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about the theatre, the women there, the bigger picture of the fight for the vote – just that it was difficult to concentrate her mind on anything but the forthcoming event. Her physical discomfort made
sure of that. But the wonder of having Bridget back had given her a reassurance about the birth and caring for the babies afterwards, that nothing else could have done. Bridget had been with her from the beginning, she felt as though the little Irishwoman was part of her in a way that no one else was, and she loved her every bit as much as a mother.