Читать книгу Connie’s Courage - Annie Groves, Annie Groves - Страница 7

Ellie Walker stood tensely in the elegant drawing room of her Winckley Square house and looked anxiously at her husband, Gideon.

The trauma she and all the other Pride children had suffered with the death of their mother might have ended for her with her marriage to her childhood sweetheart, but Ellie wanted it ended for all her siblings: Connie, who had so recklessly run away with Kieron Connolly; John, their brother, who had endured so much misery before he had become apprenticed to the Preston photographer for whom he now worked, and young Philip, who was in danger of growing up not knowing that he had a brother and two sisters. Ellie longed to have Philip safely here under Gideon’s roof, and in the nursery with their two young sons, Richard and Joshua. But right now, it was Connie who concerned her the most.

Ellie knew that Connie had disgraced herself beyond redemption in the eyes of the world by what she had done, but she couldn’t help but love her.

‘Is there any news of Connie yet, Gideon?’ she demanded, clasping her hands together. Gideon Walker frowned as he looked at his distressed wife. ‘Come and sit down,’ he urged her.

Waiting until she had done as he asked, he began gently, ‘You know that through the agent my late mother used to find me, we’ve discovered that Connie and Kieron Connolly have stayed at a variety of addresses.’ Gideon hesitated, not wanting to distress Ellie further by telling her that these addresses had, more often than not, been in areas no respectable person would ever want to admit living in.

‘But where is she now, Gideon?’ Ellie pressed him worriedly. ‘Have you found her?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Gideon responded heavily. The last thing he wanted to do was to upset Ellie, but he knew that she had to be told the truth.

‘Kieron Connolly bought tickets for them to sail on the Titanic. According to the passenger manifest he bought one in his own name and one in Connie’s,’ he told her quietly.

‘What?’ Ellie stood up, her hand to her mouth. ‘But that means … You mean she’s left England. She’s going to America? Has he married her, Gideon?’

‘Not as far as we can tell. Her ticket was in her own name, Connie Pride.’ Gideon answered her, adding firmly, ‘Under the circumstances, perhaps it will all be for the best.’

Gideon knew how much his wife’s tender heart ached for her disgraced sister, but privately he acknowledged that Connie’s departure for America was probably in all their best interests, including Connie’s own.

Her reputation had been destroyed, and no one on her mother’s side of the family was prepared to so much as speak her name any more, never mind find it in their hearts to forgive her and welcome her back into the fold, as his soft-hearted Ellie wanted to do.

Tears welled in Ellie’s eyes, as she struggled to accept what Gideon was saying, but she didn’t argue with him.

It had been nearly a week now since Kieron left, and Connie had done little other than sleep, and stagger weakly downstairs and across the yard to use the privy. She refused to refer to it as the ‘bog’ as her neighbours so cheerfully did.

It was on one of these occasions that she saw a new family, all wearing mourning, moving in to one of the other houses, and she smiled bitterly to herself to see how the mother, a small, fragile, obviously middle-aged woman, whose facial features were obscured by her heavy widow’s veiling, glanced around herself in numb despair.

The small group were huddled together, the mother trying to comfort the young girl who clung to her skirts, whilst a tall, too thin, young man hurried to open the door for them. A lock of soft, brown hair flopped over his forehead, and would have fallen into his eyes if it hadn’t been for his spectacles. He looked pale, and moved slowly, as though he had been ill.

Well, his health certainly won’t mend living here, Connie acknowledged cynically. That they were not used to the kind of surroundings they now found themselves in was obvious. Their clothes might not be fashionable but they were clean and pressed, the young girl’s apron immaculately starched.

Did they believe they were the only people here to think themselves above such a place, Connie wondered angrily, as the mother lifted her skirt above the dirt of the yard.

‘Oh, I am sure the house will be better inside, Harry,’ the woman murmured bravely.

The young man was shaking his head and looking very unhappy. ‘Mother you cannot live here. We must find somewhere better.’

Connie glared at them. Better was it! Well, good luck to them. Normally the only place a person moved to from one of these poverty-ridden slums was either a wooden box or the poorhouse. Which reminded Connie, her own landlord would be calling soon for his rent money, and she had no idea how she was going to pay him. She cast an anxious look toward the entry to the back alley, half-afraid to see him suddenly appear.

One of her neighbours, making her way to her own house, gave her a curious look. Connie hadn’t made any friends amongst the other women living in the court. She and Kieron hadn’t been there long enough, and besides she knew that they would shun her if they knew that she and Kieron weren’t married.

Listlessly Connie made her way back to her room. She felt weak and light-headed, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten, but she wasn’t hungry anyway. Perhaps if she was lucky she might just go to sleep tonight and never wake up again.

Self-pityingly she thought about how her family would react to her plight. They would be happy to see her dead, she was sure! Her aunts would not have dreamed of hiring a servant who lived in the kind of conditions Connie now did. Her grimy, darned clothes were shabbier even than those worn by her aunt’s scullery maid.

She touched her concave belly, and turned her face into the grimy pillow to weep.

Three doors away, Connie’s new neighbours were exploring their new home.

‘Mother, you can’t stay here,’ Harry Lawson protested, as he looked around the shabby parlour.

‘Harry, we’ll be fine,’ Elsie Lawson tried to reassure her son, but in reality she was as appalled by her surroundings as he was. Her elder daughter was yet to join them, so Elsie told Harry brightly, ‘When Mavis gets here we’ll set to and clean it up.’

It was only just a month since she had lost her husband. Thieves had broken into his grocery shop and bludgeoned him to death.

Elsie was still in shock. The shop had been a rented property, as had the pretty house they had lived in, and her husband had only left her a small amount of money. Of her three children, only one was working, and Harry’s job as a junior schoolteacher at Hutton Grammar School paid him only a pittance.

She had been told that property was much cheaper to rent down in this part of the city, and naively she had not fully understood why!

‘You can’t stay here, Mother,’ Harry was repeating. ‘I’ll leave Hutton when my contract finishes at the end of next term, and I’ll look for another teaching job.’

‘You will do no such thing, Harry Lawson,’ Elsie stopped him angrily. ‘What do you think your poor father would say if he could hear you saying that? He was that proud of you, Harry. Getting a scholarship and all! And there’s no better public school hereabouts than Hutton. You said when they took you on, that you were lucky and what an honour it was to be chosen to teach there. I know they don’t pay you much now, but when one of the older teachers retires, they’re bound to give you a promotion,’ she finished proudly.

Harry shook his head. Everything she had said was true, but he couldn’t leave his mother and sisters to live here.

‘This place will be all right for now,’ Elsie assured him again, with a cheerfulness she was far from feeling. ‘Once I’ve given it a good clean and got some of our own things in, it will look a lot better – you wait and see.’

Harry smiled. He knew how proud both his parents were of him. But he had seen the pretty young girl crossing the yard earlier, her face pinched with cold and hunger, her dress shabby and faded. His heart had gone out to her. There was no way he wanted to see his own sisters ending up like that. He had been granted some special leave because of his father’s death, and he decided he would spend that time making enquiries to see if he could get a teaching post with a less prestigious school. He needed to find somewhere where he could live out, and not in, as he had to at Hutton, and to try to get some extra part-time work to help with the family finances.

‘Titanic Sinks – Hundreds Feared Dead!’

Gideon’s stomach lurched with disbelief as he stared at the headlines in his morning paper.

He picked it up and scanned the front page article. It was true! The liner its owners had claimed was unsinkable, had sunk!

That news, in itself, would have been shocking enough, without the fact that Connie had been on board it.

Ellie was upstairs in the nursery, and he had a mad impulse to throw the papers on the fire before she could see them.

He heard her footsteps crossing the hall and she came into the room, her eyes bright with happiness and love; her mouth curved into a delighted smile.

‘Gideon, you’ll never guess what! Joshua has just smiled at me! Nurse says he is still too young, but I know that he did. Oh, I wish you could have seen –’ Abruptly she stopped speaking as she saw the look on his face. ‘What. What is it?’

He went to her and gently led her to a chair, holding both her hands as he told her quietly, ‘There is bad news, Ellie. The Titanic has sunk with a terrible loss of life.’ He kept hold of her hands, and watched her as she struggled to assimilate what he had said.

‘The Titanic … But no! That can’t be true! She’s unsinkable! It was in the papers! She cannot have sunk … Connie is on board her!’ Ellie protested pathetically, before catching her breath and denying frantically, ‘No, Gideon! No! No!’ Shocked tears streaming down her face, Ellie turned to him. ‘There will be survivors though, surely?’ she begged.

Gideon felt the pity grip his throat. Connie had been a steerage passenger, but he couldn’t bring himself to remind Ellie of this, and take her hope away from her. But something in his expression must have betrayed him because suddenly she demanded, ‘You think that she’s dead, don’t you?

Oh, Gideon! This is all my fault! I should have done more for her, Gideon. If I had she would never …’

Gideon was not going to allow that!

‘Ellie, you have nothing to blame yourself for,’ he assured her immediately. ‘Connie was always headstrong and wilful, and you did your best for her.’

‘The family will have to be told,’ Ellie whispered, as though she hadn’t heard him.

‘I shall do everything that is necessary,’ Gideon assured her.

‘She might have survived. There will be survivors, won’t there, Gideon?’ Ellie repeated helplessly. ‘Such a new modern liner, there would have been lifeboats and …’

Gideon said nothing. According to the papers there had not been enough lifeboats to hold all the passengers, and those travelling steerage, like Connie, would have had the least chance of surviving.

As tears filled Ellie’s eyes, Gideon took her in his arms. ‘I’ll get young John round here, aye, and send a message to your father as well. And your ma’s family – the posh lot – will have to be told, I suppose.’

Ellie couldn’t speak. How could it be possible that Connie could be dead, drowned? Wilful, naughty, reckless Connie. Connie, her little sister.

‘Well, what I want to know is, what on earth Connie was doing on the Titanic in the first place?’

Amelia Gibson’s voice was sour-apple sharp as she looked accusingly at Ellie. Gideon had informed Ellie’s mother’s family, the Barclay sisters, of the news via Ellie’s aunt, Amelia Gibson, who was also their neighbour.

Ellie shook her head and looked at Gideon. Connie had not been on the list of survivors posted by the White Star Shipping Line and published in the national papers, and nor had Kieron Connolly.

‘Well, if you want my opinion Ellie, it’s probably all for the best,’ Amelia Gibson was continuing virtuously.

‘All for the best!’ Ellie’s whole body trembled as she stopped her. ‘Aunt, Connie is probably dead. How can that be for the best!’ Tears welled in Ellie’s eyes.

Immediately Amelia bristled and fixed Ellie with an angry glare.

‘I shouldn’t have thought it was necessary to explain my words to you. I refuse to sully my lips by discussing any of your sister’s disgraceful behaviour. She has brought shame on herself and shame on our family as well. If my poor sister had lived to see –‘

‘If Mama had lived, then none of this would have happened,’ Ellie couldn’t stop herself from bursting out.

Ignoring her, Amelia continued grimly, ‘When I think of what she made your poor Aunt Jane suffer with her wilful ways. She and your Uncle Simpkins did their best for her, taking her in and giving her a good home, just as your Aunt Parkes did for you, and we all know how Connie repaid their generosity.’ Her thin lips folded in a forbidding line. She was a disgrace to our family. She could never have returned to live amongst decent respectable people!’ Amelia went on. ‘And, in my opinion, she is better off dead!’

‘Aunt, I won’t have you speak of her like that,’ Ellie protested immediately. ‘How can you say such things about her?’

‘I say them because they are true, Ellie! When a woman behaves as Connie has done and loses her reputation, she loses everything, and there can be no purpose to her continuing to live. Had Connie ever dared come to my door, I would not have let her in, and neither would any of my sisters. Indeed, I would not have spoken to her if I had seen her in the street. She was already as good as dead so far as I was concerned. I cannot understand why you waste your tears on her, Ellie, for she certainly did not deserve them.’

After they had gone, Ellie wept in Gideon’s arms.

‘Oh poor Connie, Gideon … How could my aunt speak so, and be so cruel!’

Gideon held her tightly.

‘I know that Connie did wrong, but …’

‘You would forgive her and take her in, I know that, Ellie, but there would be many people like your aunt who would not forgive or forget what she did, and who would shun her for it.’

Ellie knew that what he was saying was true. But she knew she would have forgiven her sister had she done a hundred times worse, if only she could have her back alive and safe!

There was a sudden commotion in the hallway, and her younger brother John came bursting in.

The moment she saw John, Henrietta – Ellie’s stepdaughter, the child of her late husband and his Japanese lover – ran eagerly toward him. After her first husband had committed suicide, Ellie had made herself responsible for the frail Japanese woman who had travelled all the way from Japan with her young daughter to find the man she loved. But Ellie’s compassion and care had not been enough to heal Minaco’s broken heart. After Minaco’s death, and Ellie’s own subsequent marriage to Gideon, Ellie had insisted that they adopt the orphaned little girl, knowing herself how hard it was to grow up without loving parents.

Henrietta was both pretty and sweet-natured, and Ellie and Gideon loved her as though she were their own child.

‘And how’s my beautiful girl, today?’ John asked Henrietta mock-severely as he set her on his shoulders. ‘Have you been good and learned your lessons?’

As Henrietta giggled at his teasing, Ellie said quietly, ‘John, there is bad news about Connie.’