Christmas Wish (3 page)

‘Isabella’s Bible is to go into my Magda’s keeping. I’ve listed the addresses of those who know where the others can be found at the front of this book and also there’s details of how to get hold of me. Magda will take care of it so that even if I drown at sea, she can take over and get the family back together. Can you do that for me, Magda? I promise you, it won’t be for long. We’ll all be together in no time once I’ve made me fortune and returned from the sea for good. No time at all.’

‘Yes, Dad,’ Magda said, though she said it softly, the words sticking in the dryness of her throat. He was leaving again. Leaving her, leaving the others, just as he’d left her mother.

During all this time of listening to him and his brother’s
wife, she’d felt her body growing colder and colder. The chill was only partly down to the dampness of the house where she’d already noticed fungus growing in one corner. The fire in the grate did little to warm the room, a spiral of damp-looking smoke rising lazily from solid black coal.

The fact was, she did not want to be here but was too young, too weak to disobey her father’s wishes.

With trembling hands, she took her mother’s Bible from her father and clasped it to her breast.

Satisfied that all appeared to be well, Brodie took Magda to one side and bowed to her level.

‘I’ve given your aunt money for your needs. You’ll be safe till I come back. Now I’ll be off to take care of the others. Remember, they’re all written in here.’ He tapped the Bible that she was hugging as tightly as a more favoured child would a doll or a teddy bear.

Magda felt her eyes fill with tears. Her father, Joseph Brodie, was the lynchpin between her past and her future – whatever that was likely to be. And he was leaving.

Aunt Bridget took hold of her shoulders. ‘Come on, Magda,’ she said soothingly, the dampness of her hands permeating through Magda’s coat. ‘Be a good girl and let your father go now. He’s work to do and you, my girl, have to be brave.’

Joe Brodie ducked out of the door. Once outside, he stopped and turned.

‘Be a good girl for your Aunt Bridget. I’ll be in touch soon.’

Together they watched him stride off down the street, Magda frozen to the spot, her Aunt Bridget still holding on to her shoulders.

The women in the house across the road were leering out of their windows, calling at him to come back and stay with them awhile.

‘You won’t regret it, sweetheart,’ one of them called.

Aunt Bridget turned a thunderous expression in their direction and brandished a threatening fist at them. ‘Sluts! You’re all sluts and the sooner you all burn in hell the better this world will be.’

‘Don’t tell us, Bridget Brodie. You’re as pure as the driven snow? Or perhaps the Virgin Mary?’

The woman’s words brought laughter from the other women gathered with her – women of every colour, every shape and size.

‘Foul-mouthed trollops!’ Aunt Bridget shouted back.

‘Been to the Red Cow of late, have you Bridget? Drank only milk and sat with your legs crossed, did you?’

Aunt Bridget scowled in their direction. ‘Hussies. Hussies, all of them.’

Magda looked up at her. ‘What do they mean?’

‘Wave to yer father,’ growled Bridget Brodie, her tone altered and her fist thudding into Magda’s back. ‘Show yer gratefulness, darkie,’ she said.

Alarmed by the form of address, Magda turned and looked into Bridget Brodie’s face. The blue eyes were sharp as bits of broken glass, the mouth that had smiled now pursed into self-righteous tightness.

Fear flooded Magda’s stout young heart. Lunging for the street, she shouted, ‘Dad! Come back!’

She only managed one shout before she was pulled back into the mean room, the door slamming tightly shut.

Her eyes remained fixed on that closed door. Had her father heard her? Was he coming back? She wished that he would.

‘Well,’ said Bridget Brodie, fists fixed on her hips, her expression dark and evil. ‘You’ve got no family now. No stuck-up foreign mother around to spoil you with ’er foreign ways. Four children living and her ungrateful enough to go and die.
And here’s me with no child to call my own. Now you’ve to rough it, my girl, just like everybody else around here.’

Magda’s eyes filled with tears, but still clutching her mother’s Bible, she held her head high. She would not cry. All this would pass as all things pass, just like her time in the workhouse.

‘I’m Magdalena Brodie, and one day I’ll be a lady.’

Bridget Brodie looked amused. ‘Well, will ya now! Well, there’s pride fer you, and pride is one of the deadly sins. Do you not know that?’ Her aunt’s expression turned sour.

Magda cried out as rough hands marched her to the other side of the room where she was forced to kneel before a plaster statue with a pale face and even paler hands. The statue stood in a roughly formed alcove behind which light shone from the outside through a small glass pane.

‘There. Now ask the Blessed Virgin for forgiveness. And don’t get up till you’re sorry fer yer ways. And bow yer head respectfully,’ she said, landing a parting blow at the back of her head, forcing it forward.

Magda squeezed her eyes tightly shut and prayed as never before to the Mother of God, all the time clutching the Bible tightly to her chest.

Bridget Brodie saw how attached Magda was to that Bible and decided she was not finished with the girl yet.

Twisted with hate, she wrenched the Bible from Magda’s grasp. ‘I’ll take that, me girl! You’ll have it back when I say so and not before.’

‘That was my mother’s. My father said I was to take care of it.’

Another slap around the head. ‘Are you deaf, girl? You’ll have it when I say so. Isn’t that what I just told you? Now get back to asking the Blessed Virgin for forgiveness. And don’t get up till I tell you to.’

She pushed her back to where she’d been and kicked into the back of the child’s knees so that they buckled under her.

Bridget Brodie’s eyes glittered with satisfaction. At long last she had some power over Joseph Brodie, or at least over one of his brats. She would enjoy this time. She was determined to do so.

Damn Joseph Brodie. Damn his foreign wife. If he’d kept his promise to her, when she’d been single and plain old Bridget McCarthy, then perhaps she might have had babies with him. As it was she’d been rejected and in being rejected had married his brother and had no babies.

It was all Isabella’s fault, but now Isabella was gone. The sin of the mother had fallen onto the daughter and Bridget Brodie would make her pay for it.

‘I liked the boat,’ said Venetia to her sister. ‘It was the best part.’

Anna Marie eyed her twin with frightened eyes that shone like glass in a face that was paler than normal.

Her lips were still blue even though they’d long left the boat that had brought them across the Irish Sea.

They’d caught a train then a bus to Dunavon, a town that would have been swallowed up as a suburb in London. Anna Marie wished desperately that she was still in London simply because it was all that she’d ever known.

They made their way to where a pony and trap waited for them. Not a bus. A horse-drawn vehicle. They’d seen horse-drawn brewery drays back in London, but never a pony pulling a cart meant for passengers.

‘There. Now this is your grandfather. Say hello to him.’ Their father sounded bright and breezy but his manner was deferential as though he feared the man sitting up front in the trap.

The twins eyed the white-haired man who likewise eyed them. His eyes were a frightening blue, perhaps because he didn’t blink but looked at each of them as though in two minds whether he liked them or not.

Even their father, who never seemed afraid of anyone, had taken off his cap, screwing it around in his hands like a schoolboy about to be caned.

The girls dutifully muttered a muted hello, their voices tinny like the sound of clockwork when it’s fast running down.

Their grandfather grunted in a gravelly voice. ‘Well, get aboard. I haven’t got all day.’

Joseph Brodie hoisted the two girls and their meagre luggage into the back of the cart.

‘Be good,’ he whispered.

The cart dipped to one side as he got up into the front seat alongside his father.

‘Giddup!’

The girls started at the command as much as the pony between the shafts.

It began to rain, a soft, incessant drizzle for which Ireland, as they later came to find out, was famous.

Their father half turned in his seat. ‘Pull the tarpaulin up over you. That’ll keep you dry.’

He helped them do it.

Out of the rain but not liking the smell, the two girls wrinkled their noses.

‘It stinks,’ whispered Venetia.

Anna Marie just stared at her, fearing that if she opened her mouth to comment, the white-haired man with the fierce blue eyes might hear. She hadn’t liked the sound of his voice. She could never imagine herself ever speaking to him just in case she said the wrong thing. He was too frightening.

The two men up front also pulled bits of tarpaulin up over their shoulders. Both stared silently ahead, eyes narrowed against the icy beat of the needle-fine rain.

Water trickled from their eyebrows, their noses and their chins and down their necks, soaking their clothes.

Each man smouldered with his own thoughts, though one more angrily than the other.

‘I do mean it, Father,’ Joseph Brodie began hesitantly. ‘I’ve got the wanderlust out of my system, honest I have.’

Dermot Brodie grunted.

He didn’t sound convinced.

His son swiped the water away from his eyes, thinking how he could convince the old man that he was a reformed character, deserving to be applauded for his efforts.

‘I know I’ve let you down, you and Mother, but I mean what I say. And don’t I have the children to consider, now that Isabella is gone?’

His father grunted again.

‘As soon as I’ve settled the girls, I’ll go back over to England and fetch Magda. After all I can’t expect Bridget to look after her forever. And then there’s Michael – little Mikey. I was thinking he was too young for the crossing, him just a baby and all that. The good folk I’ve left him with will make sure he’s well taken care of until I go back for him too. And then won’t that be grand! The whole family back together again!’

He glanced at his father’s bearish profile, the white eyebrows, the hair, the grim set of the mouth. He wanted a sign that he’d been believed even though, as usual, he’d somewhat embellished the truth. He’d taken money for Michael and most of that was already gone.

With little coinage left in his pockets he had no choice but to return to sea. The truth was that he had no intention of bringing either his eldest daughter or his baby son over to Ireland.

Magda would be all right – she’d be grown soon. As for Michael, well, the Darbys had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They were without children and he had children in need of a home and a mother. If he delved deeply into his heart of hearts, he might admit to himself that he’d never
wanted children. He’d wanted Isabella, his Italian beauty, and the only way he could have her was to marry her; she’d made that pretty plain from the start. He wouldn’t have done it for any other woman, but Isabella. He’d done it for her, the love of his life.

The town of Dunavon was left behind, the plain, no nonsense facades of downmarket Victorian buildings and squat cottages giving way to hedgerows and fields.

Damp, cold and frightened, the girls peered out from beneath their covering, cowering together for comfort as well as warmth.

The sight of so much greenery was new to them; London just couldn’t compete. Anna Marie eyed it with interest, Venetia with dismay. Venetia had liked the shops and bustle of a big city. She didn’t like the look of this at all.

Anna Marie, however, was beginning to relax. She was still frightened of the old man sitting up front, but if she could only escape into those fields now and again she might forget he existed.

They turned off the narrow road into one that was no more than a lane, its surface pitted with stones and craters that were presently full of water. They were about to arrive at Loskeran Bridge Farm.

Their father, sitting up front, locked his gaze on the old farmhouse, the only one of two storeys in the whole area.

Though better than most, it still looked mean when compared to buildings he’d seen all over the world. Not that he could voice his opinion; his father was a proud man and would hit him down for it.

Smoke curled lazily from the chimney as though fighting against the rain in its efforts to reach the sky.

Nothing much had changed since he’d left; the pigs still smelled the way he’d remembered them, the chickens still
clucked around the yard, and the few cows his father owned stared at him as they chewed cud in rain-soaked fields.

Joseph Brodie could always be counted on to put a brave face on things. He could also charm the birds off the trees, or so his shipmates often said, and indeed he believed this to be true. He could charm anybody – with one exception.

His father spit on the ground before stepping down from the gig.

‘I don’t believe a bloody word you’re saying.’

His son had already alighted, leaving him with the pony and trap.

‘My darling Joe!’

Molly Brodie’s arms were locked tight around the broad back of her favourite son, her firstborn, her lovely boy and the light of her life.

Dermot grimaced. From the moment they’d received the letter telling them their son’s intentions, Molly had been over the moon, springing about the place sprightlier than she’d done in years.

‘You have to give the boy a chance,’ she’d said when he’d voiced his opinion that their son was lying and would leave them literally holding the baby. Not that he minded having his granddaughters under his roof, but they’d be little help around the farm, nothing like a strong son, that was for sure. But was Joe telling the truth? Would he stay and work on the farm?

Molly had pleaded with Dermot the same way she used to plead when his sons were boys and he’d taken off his belt. Not enough times, in his opinion, but for the most part he’d given in to her – just as he was doing now.