No Greater Love (44 page)

Tens of thousands of men had perished. Whole battalions had been wiped out in a single day. Maggie was seized by a new fear for George and her brother Jimmy, who had not written to her for weeks either. She scanned the newspapers for confirmation that they were not among the casualties.

One afternoon on her return from work she glimpsed the postman toiling up the hill. Her heart began to bang painfully in her chest and her stomach turned as the grim-faced man approached. She waited by the gate, outwardly composed but inwardly sick at heart, dreading his missive.

He handed her a small square envelope with a gruff, ‘Miss Beaton?’

She nodded, speechless.

‘Letter for you. Glad it’s not a telegram. I’ve delivered too many o’ them lately.’

Maggie nearly fainted with relief. She took the letter with trembling hands, recognising George’s stiffly slanting script.

‘Ta very much!’ she croaked and fled into the house to read it.

Collapsing into a chair by the hearth, she prised the envelope open with a kitchen knife. Inside was a hasty scrawl from George and a short poem. Maggie read the tender words about her raven hair and laughed and wept over the silly, affectionate verse. She read and reread it.

Pressing it to her lips, she cried aloud, ‘Oh, Geordie, I love you, you daft man! Thank God you’re safe!’

Later as she was drawing the blinds and settling for the evening, she heard the gate creak open and footsteps approach up the pathway. These days she was more nervous of strangers calling, especially so late in the day. Someone knocked.

Maggie opened the door a crack and peered out ‘Who’s there?’ she demanded.

‘Irene,’ said a flat voice. ‘Irene Gordon.’

Maggie was taken aback by the sudden appearance of George’s sister but not altogether displeased at the young woman’s approach. They would after all be family soon.

‘Come in,
^’
Maggie beckoned, holding wide the door and noting how Irene had George’s strong-featured face.

‘I’ll not stop,’ Irene said, glancing in at the cottage warily. ‘Me da didn’t want me to come but I thought you should know.’

‘Know what?’ Maggie asked.

‘We got a telegram last week - about George.’

‘What are you saying?’ Maggie gulped, numbness creeping into her chest.

‘They said he was missing in action,’ she answered dully.

‘George? Missing? He can’t - I got a letter from him today...’

Irene gave her a pained look. She shook her head. ‘It must’ve been written before ... You see, he’s dead. They sent back his things.’

Maggie just stood rooted in the doorway, gripping the wall for support. ‘He can’t be dead,’ she wailed. ‘He can’t be!’

Irene pulled a crumpled envelope from her jacket pocket and thrust it quickly at Maggie.

‘This came back,’ she said shortly. ‘Here, tak’ it!’

Maggie, taking the letter, saw at once that it was the one she had sent George weeks ago telling him of their baby. It was unopened.

She closed her eyes tight and crumpled it in her hand. ‘Oh, my God! How can I bear it?’

Irene sniffed at her, embarrassed by her show of grief. ‘You would think you were his wife the way you’re carrying on. Just think what it’s like for me and his da and his brothers - we’re his family.’

Maggie was wounded by the woman’s insensitive words.

‘I was closer to Geordie than family,’ she answered defiantly, her eyes blazing with hurt. ‘We were going to wed when he came home.’

Irene laughed scornfully. ‘George never said any such thing to me. If he’d half cared for you he’d have married you long before.’

‘He wanted to,’ Maggie insisted. ‘It was me who put him off.’

Irene gave her a look of pure dislike. ‘Well, if you kept my brother waiting, you’ve only yourself to blame if you’re on your own now. I always told him he was far too good for you. Never did see why he kept going back to you when he could’ve had any respectable lass he wanted.’

‘Get away from here, Irene!’ Maggie shouted, trembling with rage and distress. ‘I’ll not listen to any more of your spiteful tongue!’

‘And I’ll not stop a minute longer in this wicked place,’ Irene retorted. ‘I’m glad you never became family - you were a bad influence on our George. You, with your radical ideas. At least you can’t touch him now, God rest his soul.’

Maggie’s knuckles went white as she clung to the doorpost, determined to keep her composure as Irene hurried away down the path. When she was through the gate, Maggie closed the door and sank against it, letting out a racking sob.

She was unsure how long she cried, crumpled on the stone flags, but when she finally levered herself up and dried her eyes, the sky outside was a dusky indigo. She lit a candle and curled in George’s chair by the fire to reread his poem. It was the only thing she had left to give her comfort and reassure her that Irene’s terrible doubting words were untrue.

Then, quite suddenly, Maggie felt a strange fluttering in her belly. At first she thought it was caused by her upset, a spasm after so much weeping. Then she felt again the rippling across her stomach and placed her hands gently on the small swelling. Sitting in the pale candlelight, Maggie instinctively knew that she had felt the baby stir in her womb for the first time.

Outside in the frosty courtyard, the workhouse children were singing carols for the Master and his family. They stood huddled in their drab serge suits and pinafores on the steps of the Master’s house, warbling about shepherds and the baby Jesus, their breath ascending in frozen clouds.

Maggie could see them as she passed along the open corridor between the infirmary and the dining hall. She was stiff from bending and ached all over from scrubbing the floors of the ward, but she still paused in the cold to watch the determined group of carollers waiting for some small treat for their efforts. Were they all orphans? she wondered. Or were they separated from their parents, locked away in their own wards and schools while their widowed mothers or pauper fathers worked as scrubbers and gardeners, kitchen maids and bricklayers for the workhouse?

Maggie had been inside St Chad’s for barely a month, yet it felt like an age since she had done anything else but wash floors in the hospital alongside the drunks and the mad. At first she had been horrified that all patients were thrown together; the consumptives and the mentally sick, the elderly infirm and those with venereal disease, and all looked after by a handful of probationer nurses who were largely pauper girls raised in the workhouse. And then there were the unmarried mothers like herself; young and homeless, spurned by their families or without any relations at all. They were looked upon by Matron and the Master as the most sinful and inferior of them all. This was as near to the children as the staff allowed Maggie and the other pregnant inmates, lest their wickedness contaminate the innocent.

‘Idleness breeds sinfulness!’ Matron would cry as she set them the backbreaking tasks of cleaning or doing laundry in the hospital, right up until the birth. And there was no luxury of confinement afterwards as there was for married mothers, Maggie thought bitterly. She had seen a girl return to work on the wards the day after giving birth, her baby whisked away without her even knowing if it was a girl or a boy.

Maggie put protective hands over her swollen belly where her unborn baby turned restlessly.

She could hardly recall the summer, after the news of George’s death. She had gone around like a pale ghost sunk in mourning for her lover. She had continued working, mechanically, like one of the automated pistons at the factory, acting without thought. Then after weeks of this half-living, she had pulled herself together and walled up her grief for George, forbidding herself to think of him. It was the way she had coped with her father’s death as a child.

During all this time John Heslop had been her only visitor. He came to share his sorrow at hearing the news of George’s death and asked awkwardly if she needed any help. It had not been obvious then that she was pregnant and Maggie had been far too embarrassed to tell him and so she had sent him away, telling him she could manage quite well on her own. Heslop had not called again.

Once, Maggie had been to try and see Susan, but Richard had been there and refused to let her in and all Maggie caught was a glimpse of her cowering sister surrounded by squalling infants. She had shuddered at the sight of messy motherhood and retreated quickly.

It had not been until November that her pregnancy had really begun to show and then the foreman had told her she was no use to them in such a condition and would have to go. There were plenty of other eager girls who would snatch at her job to pack shells into boxes, he told her bluntly.

First the furniture was pawned and then George’s books and the silver frames from Alice Pearson to pay the rent and eat and keep warm during the dark, chilly November days. Then she could pay the rent no longer and Hibbs told her she would have to leave, there was a family from Cumbria desperate for lodgings who were working at the yards. She saw the relief on the farmer’s face that he would be rid of her at last, the strange, lonely woman who the children thought was a witch and who he knew had been a troublemaker before the war. Besides, she had lived like a trollop with George Gordon and was now obviously carrying his child and Mrs Hibbs had been badgering him to evict her for months.

Maggie had gone in the only clothes that now fitted her and carrying a bag of precious belongings: a book of poems, the photograph of her and George and the one of Emily Davison, George’s postcards and letter, a Bible that had been her grandmother’s and her suffragette sash. Looking around the bare cottage that had been home to her and George, she gulped back the tears and lifted her chin defiantly at the children from the huts who had crept up the hill to see her go.

‘Witch!’ they shouted at her as she laboured down the pathway.

‘Whore!’ shouted one of the older boys she had once drenched in urine.

Maggie stopped by him, her eyes ablaze. ‘I’m a suffragette!’ she roared at him and marched on with as much dignity as a woman eight months pregnant could muster.

She knew of no one who might take her in. The Samuels had sold up and sailed to America at the beginning of the war and none of her family would have her under their roofs. In desperation she thought of her former friend Rose who might just take pity on her until she had the baby, even though Rose had not spoken to her since the arson attack on Hebron House and her cohabiting with George.

She went to the house in Elswick but found it occupied by a young family.

‘They moved away,’ the new tenant revealed. ‘We’ve been in nearly two year.’

‘Where did they go?’ Maggie asked, her hope fading.

‘Seaside somewhere, for the old mother’s health - or so the neighbours told me. Don’t know where.’

Maggie had wanted to faint on the pavement as it suddenly struck her how alone in the world she was, how estranged from everyone by the life she had chosen to lead. For a moment she thought of Heslop but could not bring herself to go begging to the preacher. He was a chapel man and in his eyes she would be a fallen woman bearing a bastard child. She could not bring such disgrace to his doorstep. Besides, his cleaner Mary Smith would soon tell everyone in Gun Street of the depths to which she had fallen.

No, it was best if no one from her old neighbourhood knew, Maggie determined; she would go quietly into the workhouse, have her baby and return to the outside world with few the wiser. She had heard whispers of such scandals before, where foolish, luckless girls had disappeared for a few months and returned without fuss as if nothing had happened, the illegitimate babies adopted or disposed of in orphanages.

So Maggie had gone to the Poor Law Guardians and thrown herself on their mercy. The next day she had been admitted to St Chad’s and given a bed in a dormitory among other female paupers.

Her first surprise was to find the old prostitute, Millie Dobson, among them, wheezing and with a face like parchment. She let forth a string of abuse on seeing Maggie, blaming her for the state of her daughter Annie who was wasting away in the infirmary, her delicate health ruined by her stint in prison for suffragism.

‘And I’m too old to make a living on the streets,’ Millie had snarled.

‘Too drunk, you mean!’ another woman scoffed.

Millie swore foully at the other inmate and Maggie had to intervene to prevent them fighting there on the dormitory floor.

‘I’m very sorry about Annie,’ she said simply. ‘I didn’t mean her to get involved in my campaign.’

‘Aye, well, where’s all your high ideals got us now, eh? In the bloody workhouse, that’s where!’ Millie spat. ‘And look at the state of you.’ She pointed at Maggie’s belly. ‘Whose is it?’

‘George Gordon’s,’ Maggie said, flushing.

Millie snorted. ‘Men! They’re the source of all trouble. Not owning up to it, is he?
^’

Maggie winced. ‘He never knew. George died in France before I could tell him,’ she told Millie quietly.

The haggard woman was silenced. She put a hand on Maggie’s arm and squeezed it, then turned away and said no more.

But after that, she and Maggie had helped each other, sharing their chores and any extra food or warm clothing they could scavenge. Over the past month, the old, foul-mouthed prostitute had become her closest friend, Maggie thought ruefully, and with the friendship had returned a deep determination to carry on striving for something better. After all, any life would be better than the one she was living now, Maggie told herself as she stopped to listen to the carol singing. Unaccustomed tears stung her eyes as she heard their young voices singing the Christmas hymns of hope and she thought how each one of them had been brought into the world in the same way as her baby would be, struggling and pushing from the womb. Maggie was filled with a strange mixture of fear and expectancy.

Millie appeared beside her.

‘Got a piece of bread for you,’ she hissed. ‘Annie couldn’t manage it at tea.’

‘You have it,’ Maggie answered.

‘You need it more than me, hinny,’ Millie insisted, patting Maggie’s stomach.