Connie’s Courage (2 page)

The light coming in through the small window burnished her russet hair. Connie peered closer into the mirror. It was so unfair that Ellie should have been the prettier of them, she fretted, unaware of the attractiveness of her own looks; her pretty oval-shaped face; her green eyes with their thick, dark, curling eyelashes, her neat straight nose.

Not that she did not have her admirers! She giggled, remembering how, not so very long ago, a cheeky baker's boy had stopped his bicycle to tell her that she had an extremely kissable mouth. Connie loved flattery and compliments, almost as much as she loved pretty clothes and fun and laughter.

Why was Kieron taking so long? He should have been back by now!

Impatiently she started to pace the floor. In New York they wouldn't have to share a privy with all the other lodgers in the house, they would have one all to themselves, maybe even two! They would have a huge house, and she would have her own maid to help her change her clothes, just like Ellie had had when she had lived at Hoylake with Aunt and Uncle Parkes.

Kieron would become a very important man, and on her birthday he would present her with a beautiful diamond necklace. All the admiring new friends she would make in New York would be envious of her, especially when she told them the romantic tale of how Kieron had seen her and fallen in love with her, and how they had been married on the
Titanic.

As she slid into the pleasure of her favourite daydream, Connie was able to forget her surroundings and her anxiety over Kieron's absence.

‘Connie let me in!'

Connie woke with a start. She had dozed off and her body felt cramped. Quickly she got off the bed and hurried over to the door, unlocking it and throwing her arms round Kieron as soon as he stepped into the room. Her face was alight with excitement, questions tumbling from her lips.

‘Where have you been? I fell asleep waiting for
you! Where are the tickets, Kieron? Show them to me! I want to see them. Oh, Kieron, I can't wait for us to leave here and get to America.'

The smell of dirt, human excrement, vomit and alcohol that pervaded the whole of the boarding house where they were renting a room, was even stronger with the door open and Connie hurried to close it.

Of all the lodgings she and Kieron had occupied since they had run away together, this house in Back Court, one of Liverpool's most run-down housing areas, was easily the worst. Connie hadn't wanted to come to Liverpool, but Kieron had refused to listen.

His Uncle Bill had some work he wanted Kieron to do for him in Liverpool, he had told Connie. But when she had asked him what it was, and why, if he was working for his uncle, they did not have more money, Kieron had flown into one of his tempers and told her she asked too many questions.

If she wanted more money, he had told her, then she had better write to her sister and ask her for some! Connie had told him that she would do no such thing, and that she would rather starve than go begging to her sister.

They had quarrelled badly about it, and Kieron had become so angry that Connie trembled inwardly now, remembering how shocked and frightened she had felt.

But nothing would make her write to Ellie. She had begged her elder sister once for her help and
been refused it, and now Connie was stubbornly determined not to do so ever again.

It was all right for Ellie, happily married to Gideon, with everything she could possibly want, even if her first husband had committed suicide, leaving Ellie pregnant and alone and with his lover and her child on her hands.

Connie gave a small sniff. Now there was a scandal! Ellie's first husband, Henry, had taken a lover while working in Japan for his father's shipping line. The Japanese woman had given birth to Henry's child, and travelled to England, with her baby daughter, to find him.

But trust Ellie to come out of it all whiter than white, with everyone singing her praises, and a second husband in Gideon Walker who had loved her right from the start! As Kieron loved her, Connie tried to reassure herself. Even if he hadn't been showing it very much lately.

Uncomfortably, Connie admitted, that she and Kieron seemed to spend all their time quarrelling these days. Since their arrival in Liverpool, he had taken to disappearing for hours at a time, returning the worse for drink and refusing to tell her where he had been, other than that it was on his Uncle Bill's ‘business'.

He certainly always seemed to be able to find the money for drink, even when they had none for decent food or accommodation. Connie had seen the pitying looks the other women living in the court gave her, but she had refused to acknowledge
them, hugging to herself instead, the knowledge that soon she and Kieron would be starting their new life together.

Titanic
sailed in less than three days' time, and Connie had parted with the single reminder she had left of her past life and her beloved mother – she had given Kieron the piece of jewellery her mother had left her, so that he could sell it to raise the money for their fares.

It had all been so different when she had been growing up in the comfortable, happy household her mother had run in Friargate above their father's butcher's shop. Theirs had been a home filled with love and laughter, and secretly she still missed those days dreadfully. She had certainly never envisaged that she might one day be in her present situation.

‘Kieron, the tickets!' she begged again.

‘Shut that bloody noise, will you!' he answered her aggressively.

Connie looked at him anxiously. ‘Kieron, you did get the tickets, didn't you?' A pleading note had crept into her voice, and she was beginning to panic. ‘We'll be sailing in three days, and you said that you would get them today!' she reminded him, unable to keep the anxiety and distress out of her voice.

‘Aw, will yer stop nagging me, Connie. There'll be plenty of time to get the bloody tickets tomorrow.'

‘But you said you would get them today. Why didn't you? Where have you been?'

‘What I do wi' me time is no bloody business of yours. You don't have no rights over me!' he told her in an ugly voice.

Connie bit her lip, her face flushing at his deliberately hurtful reference to the fact that they weren't married.

At times like this, it was as though he had become a stranger. She could feel the mortified prick of tears at the back of her eyes, but she willed herself not to let them fall. No, she might not be Connie Connolly, but she was Connie Pride, and pride was what she had!

With that pride she turned back to look at him, and saw something in his eyes that made her heart start to beat with anxious, apprehensive strokes. ‘What is it? What's wrong?' she demanded immediately.

‘Nothing's wrong, exceptin' that I'm sick and tired of your nagging,' Kieron told her, pushing her away so roughly that she fell against the table.

‘I'm beginnin' to think I should tek me Uncle Bill's advice and have nowt more to do wi' you,' he added bitterly.

Connie flinched at the sound of Kieron's uncle's name. There was something about him that was dark and frightening, and Connie was secretly glad that, in America, they would have the safety of the Atlantic Ocean between themselves and Bill Connolly.

‘Kieron, you don't mean that!' she protested. ‘You love me!'

‘Get out of me way, I'm going out,' Kieron answered her angrily.

‘Kieron!' Connie begged him, but he ignored both her protest and her shocked tears, pushing her out of his way as he headed for the door.

Things would be different once they were on board the
Titanic,
Connie comforted herself after he had left. She was unhappy and hungry, but there was no money for her to run down to the pie shop and get herself something hot to eat. She blinked fiercely, determined not to let herself cry, and remembered her father's butcher's shop, and the happy home life she had known before the death of her mother.

Kieron glared furiously across the smoke-filled, filthy room at the man sitting opposite him. On the table between them was the money they had both staked – and the winning hand the other man had just gloatingly revealed.

Kieron could never resist a gamble. It lured and possessed him, like drink or women lured and possessed other men. It was a need and a lust that overwhelmed everything else in his life. His decision to run away with Connie had been made on the toss of a coin – heads, he took her; tails, he didn't.

‘Bad loser as well as a bad player, are you, Connolly?' his opponent sneered as he made to
pick up his winnings, including the money Kieron had gambled and lost. The money he had been supposed to use to buy his and Connie's tickets for the
Titanic.
The laughter of the men watching died abruptly, as Kieron swore and jumped up, reaching for one of the empty bottles standing on the table. Smashing it downwards to break it against the table, he lunged toward his opponent stabbing the jagged glass into his throat before anyone could intervene and stop him.

The bright red blood spattering everything matched the dark red murderous mist rising up inside him.

A barmaid coming in to collect the glasses screamed, and the man standing closest to Kieron grabbed hold of him, gesturing to two of his companions to help him.

‘Leave ‘im, mate. We've got us own skins to think about,' one of them started to refuse.

‘He's Bill Connolly's nephew,' the other man reminded him sharply.

Bill Connolly was well-known in the area, and not someone it was wise to cross. There would be some very unpleasant repercussions for anyone known to be here this evening, especially if Kieron Connolly was taken by the police.

As they dragged him toward a side door, Kieron made a savage grab for the money, crushing the bloodstained notes in his hand.

When midnight came and went and Kieron had still not returned, Connie finally left the chair where she had been sitting waiting for him, and crawled into bed.

It was almost lunchtime the next day when he returned, and Connie flung herself at him, sobbing in relief, and demanding, ‘Where have you been? I was so worried … I hate this place, Kieron. I can't wait for us to leave. How could you leave me here on my own all night …'

‘I didn't,' Kieron stopped her.

‘What?' Connie's forehead creased in confusion.

‘If anyone should come round here asking any questions, Connie. I was here all night. Never left the house all evening, I didn't,' he told her. ‘And you better not be forgetting that if'n anyone should ask. Otherwise you'll have me Uncle Bill to answer to,' he said threateningly. ‘If'n anyone was to come round here asking after me and where I was last night, you're to tell ‘em that I was home with you, and that we was tucked up all nice and so cosy in bed together for ten o'clock … Understand? ‘Cos you'd better had!'

Connie's mouth had gone dry, and her heart was hammering against her ribs.

‘Kieron. What … What's happened? You aren't in some kind of trouble, are you?'

‘You're asking too many questions, Connie. And me Uncle Bill wouldn't like that! It's him as says
you're to say what I just told yer, if anyone comes asking,' he warned her.

Connie gave a small shiver. What was Kieron trying to say? What had he been doing? She was no fool and she knew he must be in some kind of trouble if he wanted her to provide an alibi for him.

‘Oh, and I've got the tickets for the
Titanic,'
he added, almost as though it was an afterthought. ‘So you can stop pestering me about it. Went out special like I did, this mornin', whilst you was still in kip.'

Connie hesitated. Kieron was concealing something from her, she knew that, but she was afraid to push him too hard, and at least he had got the tickets!

Kieron shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He had used the money he had snatched back from the man he had murdered to buy their steerage tickets, more out of fear for his own safety than any desire to fulfil his promise to Connie. But of course he wasn't going to tell her that.

In fact, he was beginning to think that his father and his Uncle Bill had it right when they warned him that he would regret getting involved with Connie. She was a girl from a very different background to his own who did not understand their ways as one of their own would have done. Connie came from a respectable, hard-working family; Kieron's family inhabited a much darker world of
thievery and violence, even though Connie herself had not realised it as yet.

Thrilled by Kieron's announcement, Connie dismissed her anxiety and flung her arms around his neck. This time Kieron didn't reject her.

The minute she opened her eyes, Connie was wide awake. It was only just dawn but she was too excited to go back to sleep. Today was the day they left for Southampton and the
Titanic!
They would reach Southampton by evening, and planned to go straight from the station to the port, ready to board the
Titanic
ahead of her departure at noon the next day. Connie's small case was already packed!

Eagerly she pushed back the thin, greying bedcovers, and got out of bed, singing happily under her breath.

‘Mother Mary! Will you stop that caterwauling!'

Kieron had been out the previous night drinking, saying his farewells to his friends and his Uncle Bill, Connie guessed. It had been gone midnight when he had banged on their door, demanding that she let him in.

Now, in the pale morning light, he looked a very different man from the handsome young man she had fallen in love with. Drinking had bloated out his face, its flesh a pasty greyish colour, except for where his unshaven jaw bristled darkly.

‘Kieron, get up. We've got to hurry. We mustn't
miss the train,' Connie chivvied him. ‘And I want …'

‘You want. Who the hell cares what you want!' Kieron told her, staggering to his feet. ‘You're a bloody rope around me neck, that's what you are. A bloody Protestant who ‘ud open her legs for any un who'd have her! No decent Catholic girl would do what you've done. Me mam ‘ud sooner see me sisters dead! Me Uncle Bill's in the right o' it. It's time I was rid of yer. An rid of yer is exactly what I aim to be!'