Liza (2 page)

‘
Of course, you can.’ Cecily fumbled excitedly in her handbag and found her purse. ‘I’ll pay you five pounds.’

Five pounds! That was nearly three months
’ pay! Liza swallowed. ‘I — can’t. They’d find me out.’

‘
No, they won’t! How can they? I told you, they’ve never seen me. Uncle Edward hasn’t even a photograph, except the one of my class, taken when I first went to school in Switzerland. I was seventeen and among another dozen girls. It could be anyone.’ She hurried on: ‘Look!’ She held out her palm on which lay five golden sovereigns. ‘Just for four weeks. Then, when I am due to inherit, I will come north and say, "Here I am!" I’ll give you another five pounds and off you go to Newcastle.’

Liza was dumb. She stared at temptation in the shape of the sovereigns but common sense told her this was a mad idea. She shook her head regretfully: five pounds — no, ten
— would buy her a breathing space in which to put her life together. The siren moaned again. She averted her gaze from the coins in Cecily’s palm and turned to the window.

She saw the black mass materialise out of the grey, formless at first, then swiftly hardening into a ship with her bow pointed at the
Florence
Grey
. Liza watched it charge towards her, looming larger with every second. There was a running figure on the deck of the other vessel, his arms waving, and she could make out men on the bridge now. She heard Cecily shriek, ‘She’s going to hit us!’ And seconds later the sharp bow smashed into the
Florence
Grey
amidships on the starboard side.

She heeled over from the force of the blow and her engines stopped as her assailant ground along her side with a screeching and clanging of tortured metal. The ships parted then and that lethal bow, crumpled now, was turning away, then slid off into the fog, lost to sight. The siren of the
Florence
Grey
blared continuously, the signal for a vessel in distress. It sounded like the wail of an animal mortally wounded.

‘
Captain says to take to the boats! You ladies come along o’ me!’ the sailor shouted from the door.

‘
Take my suitcase, please!’ Cecily called. She rolled the rug into a ball and tucked it under her arm. The sailor muttered under his breath but obeyed — and took Liza’s as well.

‘
Thank you,’ Liza said.

‘
That’s all right, Miss, but hurry. I don’t reckon she’s got long.’ As he spoke the ship lurched, listing to starboard.

The girls followed him to a boat on the port side. The men there had already undone the lashings and taken off the cover. They helped Liza and Cecily into the boat and tossed in their cases after them. Liza
’s fell on one corner and burst open. She grabbed it and plumped down beside Cecily as the boat was lowered, with one sailor forward and another aft, manning the  falls and ready to cast off. Because of the list it bumped and grated against the ship’s side as it descended towards the dark sea. But then the man aft yelled a warning, the ship lurched again and Liza and her case were thrown out into the sea.

She fell between boat and ship, looked up to see the steel wall of the
Florence
Grey
and the boat surging in to crush her between the two. The sea closed over her head and she knew she was about to die. Oh, Mother! she thought in despair.

1

17 FEBRUARY 1886, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE

Twenty years before the
Florence
Grey
sailed from Hamburg, Kitty Thornton fought for the life of her child.

‘
This could be the death of her,’ said Aggie, sixty and bulky in a rusty black dress that brushed the floor. ‘It was always you or her folks sent for when there was a confinement or somebody to be laid out. Now it looks like Kitty’s turn. She’s far ower auld to hev a bairn, poor lass. And premature!’ The whisper carried — just — to the other woman stooping over the bed.

Jinnie was of an age but taller, skinny as a rake. She replied, low-voiced,
‘We cannae dae owt aboot it noo, Aggie.’

Both women were Kitty
’s neighbours, come in response to this emergency. Their words did not register with Kitty, who lay on the wrinkled sheet and cried out shrilly and weakly, in agony. Outside the wind moaned and rattled the windows, old, warped and loose in their frames. Rain hammered on the streaming panes. At one in the morning, the streets outside were empty, the cobbles glistening wetly in the darkness, each one a little island.

Aggie whispered again,
‘And falling off a chair, Jinnie! What was she daeing, standing on a chair?’

Jinnie sighed.
‘She’s been taking in washing since she had to give up as barmaid. She was standing on the chair to hang it up in the kitchen.’ They were in the small bedroom, the bed taking up most of the space, its side clapped against one wall, its head against another. There was a straight-backed chair, an old chest of drawers and an aspidistra on a spindle-legged table. A print of a sailing ship was the only picture. The grate in the fireplace was black and empty. There had not been a fire in it for years, even in the winter’s cold, because of the cost of coal.

‘
And her man?’ Aggie enquired. ‘That Andrew should be here, but where is he?’ ‘The last letter she had off him, he was in America and bound for China.’ Jinnie pulled a handkerchief from a pocket of her pinny and mopped the brow of the woman on the bed. ‘There now, Kitty, there now, bonny lass.’

‘
He’s all reet, had his fun and buggered off out of it,’ Aggie whispered.

‘
Never mind Andrew, though I saw him just afore he sailed and he’d heard there was a babby on the way. He was in a rare worry. But where’s that bloody doctor?’

As she spoke he was climbing down from his trap with its flickering lamps. He left his pony standing in the rain and tramped along the passage, his boots echoing hollowly on the boards. In the kitchen, the other ground-floor room rented by Kitty, he nodded at the other three women, more neighbours, sitting around the fire. A line was stretched across the room, just below the ceiling, festooned with damp washing. Kitty had hung up some of it before she fell and the neighbours had completed the job. The doctor ducked his head to pass under it and went on into the bedroom. Someone whispered,
‘He’s in a bad temper.’

He was, at being hailed from his bed, with his jacket and trousers pulled on over his nightshirt. He had not expected this call for another month and did not like the sound of it. His only consolation was the knowledge that his fee for the confinement had already been paid. Kitty had scraped it together over months of penny-pinching economies.

The women by the bed moved out of his way as he shed his damp ulster and tossed it aside with his hat. Jinnie said, ‘She’s having a bad time, Doctor.’

He grunted, washed his hands in the bowl they brought him and examined his patient.

When he stood back Aggie asked, ‘Will she be all right, Doctor?’

‘
We’ll see,’ he replied guardedly. ‘She’s not young to be having her first child . .

‘
Ah! Dear, dear!’ Aggie sighed.

‘
Andrew! Oh,
Andrew
!’ Kitty cried out.

‘
Now then,’ the doctor said. And braced himself.

The child was born as the light of dawn showed grey through the curtains over the windows. Jinnie handed the scrap to Kitty and asked,
‘What are you going to call her?’

Kitty, small in the bed and exhausted now, managed a smile and replied,
‘Eliza. Nicer than Kitty.’

‘
If the poor little bairn lives,’ Aggie muttered, under her breath.

2

17 FEBRUARY 1886, SUNDERLAND

In the afternoon of that day Millicent Spencer called for her doctor. He came quickly to the comfortable house on the hill that looked down on the town. He brought with him a nurse, and a specialist who came in his own richly appointed carriage and left it in the drive. Millicent had not wanted the pregnancy and was determined to have all the assistance she could obtain for her confinement.

Charles, her husband, backed her in this, but her money would pay the bills anyway. He waited on the landing outside the bedroom, pacing restlessly. At twenty-five he was tall and fair, florid and fleshily handsome. He heard the child
’s cry from behind the closed door with more relief than joy. ‘Thank God, that’s over.’

His brother, Edward, a man of forty, smiled.
‘Congratulations.’ He was shorter, broader, fair but lean.

Charles nodded brusquely.
‘Thank you.’ Then he reverted to the conversation of a minute or two earlier: ‘I think you’re wrong. If we sold all the old ships we’re running and bought just two or three new, bigger vessels, we could make a fortune.’

Edward demurred.
‘As I’ve already said, I think that too much of a gamble. I prefer to go more slowly.’

Charles flapped a hand impatiently, and the argument went on. They were partners in the shipowning business left to them by their father, but by the terms of his will Edward had the casting vote and he was implacable now.

They broke off when the bedroom door opened and the doctor said, ‘Come and see your daughter, Charles.’

They entered and Edwa
rd congratulated Millicent, normally willowy, blonde and blue-eyed, now tired and wan: ‘You have a beautiful daughter.’

The child was in the arms of her nurse and Millicent declared petulantly,
‘I’m exhausted. Take her to the nursery.’

‘
Have you decided on a name for her?’ Edward asked. ‘No,’ Charles said shortly. He glanced at his wife, his brows raised.

She shrugged her shoulders in an elegant silken bed-jacket.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘
My mother — her grandmother — was Margaret,’ Edward suggested.

‘
No.’ Millicent wrinkled her nose. ‘Much too ordinary. I think ... Cecily. Yes — Cecily.’

Soon afterwards Edward left.
‘I am expecting a young visitor.’

‘
I think you’re making a mistake, taking on something like that,’ Charles said, ‘but it’s your affair. You won’t stay to dinner, then?’ The invitation was lukewarm.

‘
Thank you, but I think I should meet him.’

The specialist
’s carriage had gone but Edward’s was waiting for him. He patted the horses’ necks and stroked their noses. ‘My brother’s wife has just given birth to a daughter, Gibson. I’m an uncle.’

‘
Glad to hear it, sir.’ And his young coachman drove him home.

The house was bigger than he needed with its six bedrooms — he lived alone — and another half-dozen for his servants, but it had been his childhood home and had been left to him by his father. He was happy enough there.

The carriage wheeled in through the gates, always open by his order. He would not bar the way to anyone needing shelter. Mrs Taggart, his housekeeper, met him at the front door. ‘Mrs’ was a courtesy title; she had never married. Nor had Elspeth Taggart ever disclosed her age and no one dared ask it, but she had been in his and his father’s employ, at first as a scullery-maid, for twenty-five years. She was rosy-cheeked, red-haired and straight-backed, with a large bunch of keys dangling from the waist of her black dress. She greeted Edward with a smile. ‘The young person has arrived, sir. He’s in the parlour.’

‘
Good.’ He walked down the hall, polished floorboards gleaming either side of the carpet, with Elspeth at his heels, and turned into the drawing room at the front of the house — to her it was always the parlour. It was a big room but smaller than the dining room on to which it opened and which stretched the depth of the house.

‘
It’s like a barn,’ she would say. ‘You could have a dance in there.’

The windows were tall and the furniture was good and plentiful, but it made only little islands in the space. On the walls pictures of ships mingled wit
h portraits of the Spencers, Charles and Edward, their father and grandfather. Two capacious armchairs and a chesterfield ringed the glowing fire but there was also a sprinkling of straight-backed chairs. A nurse in black — shoes, coat and bonnet — sat on one, a small boy perched on her knee. She set him on his feet and stood up when Edward entered. He motioned to her to sit and went to stand before the fire. ‘Thank you for bringing the boy,’ he said. ‘So this is William.’

She nodded.
‘Yes, sir, this is Master William.’

The boy was sturdy, but no more than five years old and tired. He rubbed his eyes and yawned, but was silent and attentive. Edward ha
d no children and no experience of them. He was not sure how best to approach this one. ‘You’ve had a long journey, William, all the way from Bristol.’

‘
Yes, sir.’

‘
Do you know who I am?’