No Greater Love (47 page)

‘Why don’t you leave and find yourself work in the factories or summat?’ Millie suggested.

‘I’ll not leave without you, Millie, you’re me family now,’ Maggie answered.

‘Eeh, hinny, I couldn’t gan back to the streets at my age. I’m better off in here, for all it’s a prison.’

‘Then I’ll stay with you,’ Maggie declared. ‘I’ve been licking Matron’s boots to get a job clerking in the office; they’re short since that lad was called up and I’ve got the skills.’

‘But you could do that outside,’ Millie said, baffled as to why Maggie should want to stay now she had recovered.

‘But if I work in the office I’ll find out where they’ve taken Christabel,’ Maggie said with urgency, her grey eyes lighting with determination.

Millie shook her head and drank the dregs. ‘So that’s your plan?’ she grunted.

‘Aye,’ Maggie nodded. ‘To think me bairn is already one year old. I sometimes try and imagine what she looks like, Millie. She must be dark-haired like me and George, but does she have his dark eyes? Or perhaps she’s like our Susan and me dad with fair hair and blue eyes.’ She turned suddenly to Millie, the tears springing to her eyes. ‘It’s terrible not knowing,’ she whispered.

Millie hugged her tightly. ‘I know, hinny, I know.’

***

By the spring, Maggie had wheedled her way into the office and set about organising the files and books that had been left in a shambles by a series of temporary clerks and untrained attendants. The Master was ageing and no longer took an interest in the running of the workhouse; he was almost a recluse in his house across the courtyard, confined by gout and lethargy. Maggie worked for the Senior Relieving Officer who kept short hours and drank from a bottle of whisky he kept locked in his desk. He seemed surprised by Maggie’s efficiency and diligence and was soon content to let her work alone while he became increasingly absent.

In March, Maggie heard rumours of dissatisfaction among the Board of Guardians that the workhouse was being badly run. She overheard an argument between the Master and Matron about the lack of trained staff and the shoddiness of equipment.

‘I’ve got inmates sleeping on the floors with only two nurses to control nearly three hundred women on the night shift,’ Matron complained. ‘It’s Bedlam!’

‘Then take some of the older girls from the children’s wing as probationers,
^’
the Master replied. ‘I don’t want to be bothered with your problems, woman, I’m a sick man.
^’

Matron had stormed off and Maggie had buried her head in her work in case anyone suggested she should turn nurse.

Disappointingly, she had found no reference to Christabel in the dusty registers and it occurred to her that the place was so lax they may not have recorded her birth or her subsequent removal. All she had to go on was a curt remark from the midwife who had been there at the delivery, saying that her baby had been taken from the workhouse soon after birth but she did not know where. Still, Maggie determined to go on looking.

Then in April a storm blew up around her when it was discovered that funds had gone missing. Matron warned her that she was under suspicion and that the Board of Guardians would be interviewing her the following day. Until then she was suspended from working in the office. Maggie waited, furious at the accusations and ready to give any fat Guardian who pointed a finger at her a piece of her mind.

She was ushered into a stark room in the Master’s house where three of the Board awaited her.

‘Margaret Beaton,’ Matron introduced her and left, banging the door.

Maggie stared boldly at the men before her. Then suddenly the man on the end raised his head and Maggie gawped.

‘Mr Heslop?’ she gasped and coloured in confusion at seeing the butcher.

‘Maggie!’ Heslop spluttered. ‘What in God’s name are you doing here?’

‘You know this inmate?’ the middle Guardian asked sharply.

‘Yes indeed,’ Heslop said, standing up. ‘Please, Maggie, come and sit down.’

The others muttered their disapproval but the butcher ignored them.

Maggie found herself shaking, all her resolve to be insolent gone. She answered their questions quietly and at the end John Heslop asked to question her alone for a few minutes. He led her out into the Master’s garden and sat her down on a wrought-iron bench surrounded by fading daffodils.

‘Tell me what happened to you, Maggie,’ Heslop asked gently, his whiskered face full of concern.

Maggie told him of her struggle to stay outside the workhouse and then how she had given in for the sake of the baby.

‘Why didn’t you come to me for help?’ he chided.

Maggie could not look at him. ‘I was too ashamed,’ she admitted. ‘I thought you would have despised me. Like the rest of my family.’

Heslop tutted. ‘I could have done something for you,’ he insisted. ‘It would have been better than this.’ He waved at their surroundings. ‘St Chad’s is a godless place. That’s why I agreed to come on the Board two months ago, to try and change things. If only I’d known.’

They sat in silence for a moment while two thin pigeons swooped about looking for food.

‘I’ll have this business about the money cleared up,’ the preacher continued. ‘The Relieving Officer is under suspicion but the authorities here would have preferred to blame an inmate. Then we must get you out of here.’

Maggie looked at him directly. ‘I don’t want to go. Not until I’ve discovered what’s happened to Christabel.’

He briefly covered her hand with his own. ‘They won’t let you keep her. The child may very well have been adopted by now.’

Maggie drew her hand away and glared. ‘They’ve no right to keep her from me! I want to bring Christabel up as my daughter so she knows where she comes from, who her father was, to know that she’s loved.’

She saw Heslop flush at her directness.

He gripped the back of the bench. ‘Let me find you a position outside the workhouse,’ he pleaded. ‘Since inheriting my uncle’s house in Sandyford, I’m in need of a housekeeper myself. I’ve delayed moving into it because domestic help is so difficult to find these days.’

Maggie was touched by his offer. ‘You’re a kind man, Mr Heslop, but all I ask of you is help in finding Christabel.’

The butcher sighed and shook his greying head. ‘Come and keep house for me, Maggie, and I’ll do what I can to discover your daughter’s whereabouts.’

Maggie smiled for the first time and touched his hand fleetingly. ‘Thank you, Mr Heslop.’ As he stood up, she added, ‘There’s just one other thing you should know.’

Heslop looked at her.

‘I promised Millie Dobson I would take her with me when I left.’

‘Millie’s here too?’ he exclaimed. ‘And Annie?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Annie died over a year ago. Millie’s on her own, apart from me.’

Heslop answered without hesitation. ‘Then she must come and live in Sandyford too. I seem to remember she could cook soup after a fashion.
^’

‘Between the two of us we can manage,’ Maggie smiled. Walking back with the lanky butcher, feeling the spring sun on her shoulders, Maggie felt a tug of optimism. She no longer believed Matron’s pronouncements that God was punishing her for her wickedness, for such a God would not have allowed Millie to be there to comfort her in her blackest hours. And it could just be possible that this benign God had sent Heslop to rescue her from the workhouse and set her on the road to finding Christabel.

‘Why don’t you go and see her, Maggie?’ John Heslop suggested.

They were sitting having tea in the drawing room of the house in Sandyford, the August sunshine spilling in through the lace curtains of the bay window. Maggie had still not grown accustomed to living in such a beautiful house, with its view onto the ornate railings and pocket gardens of the terraced row opposite. She inhabited the attic rooms with Millie but John Heslop insisted that they share their meals and that the women should have the use of the drawing room in the afternoons and evenings.

Increasingly, while Millie went out at night to find company in the town pubs, pretending to Heslop she went to visit a cousin, Maggie would spend her free time reading - newspapers, books, pamphlets - whatever she could lay her hands on. It was as if she had been starved of words for two years and now could not devour enough of them.

She looked up from the newspaper which had been telling her of the new offensive by the Allies on the German front line.

‘She’d not want me to,’ Maggie countered. ‘Not after all this time.’

‘I think she would. You wouldn’t have to explain about anything, Susan knows you’re working for me.’

Maggie looked across at the gaunt-faced man in the winged brocade chair by the unlit fire and marvelled at how he tried to solve everyone’s problems. Often in the past she had thought of him as interfering, trying to order people’s lives when they did not want it, trying to save them from what he saw as their mistakes. But there was a deeper quality to John Heslop that Maggie had discovered while living under his roof. He cared nothing for the wagging tongues at chapel who disapproved of his taking in the women from the workhouse; he just went ahead and did what he saw to be right and just.

A week ago he had come home from the shop in the west of Newcastle to genteel Sandyford fulminating about Richard Turvey’s treatment of Susan. The feckless Londoner had finally run off with Helen, having pawned most of Susan’s possessions and left his wife with three young infants to care for alone. Maggie could well imagine the fear and humiliation that her husband’s going had brought Susan. It would be the final shattering blow to all her unattainable dreams of respectability and prosperity. Yet Maggie dreaded returning to her old neighbourhood, for fear of stirring up past ghosts. It suited her to live quietly and industriously in distant Sandyford where she was known only as the housekeeper at number 28, biding her time until she found Christabel.

This was now her most important mission and she was growing impatient with John Heslop’s half-hearted attempts to find her. All he could discover was that the baby had been removed shortly after birth from St Chad’s to some other institution; indeed many of the infants had been scattered to different homes when the nursery wing had been requisitioned for war wounded. Heslop told her to be patient and that tracing the child would be easier once the war was ended. Until then, Maggie wished to live a life cocooned from the pains of the past, suspended in limbo until that time when her daughter would need her.

To go and comfort Susan now, to see again the places she associated with her divided family, her growth to womanhood and suffragism, her life with George, would only bring the painful past back to haunt her. Not for one moment did she allow herself to reflect on what might have been had George survived the Somme. Such thoughts only came to her in sleep, tearing at her new-found peace and waking her sweating and weeping in the night.

‘Susan would think I had just come to lord it over her,’ Maggie said, shaking her newspaper irritably. ‘And I couldn’t face going back to Gun Street anyway, not without Mam and Granny Beaton there.’

‘You wouldn’t have to. Susan and the children are living with your Aunt Violet,’ John told her.

‘Aunt Violet’s taken them in?’ Maggie exclaimed.

‘She’s been a lonely woman since your Uncle Barny died last year,’ Heslop replied. ‘I think it gave her the excuse to make her peace with Susan.’

Maggie snorted. ‘Aye, and make Susan feel beholden to her forever.’

Heslop said nothing but the look he gave her showed Maggie he thought she was being unfair. Her annoyance grew.

‘Well, she would never have taken me in when I was carrying George’s baby,’ she said, and saw the pink spots of anger or embarrassment flood John’s cheeks as they did whenever she mentioned her dead lover.

‘You’ll never know because you were too proud to go to anyone for help,’ he replied sharply. ‘Besides, she’d probably view Susan’s predicament differently.’

Maggie sprang up, allowing the newspaper to cascade to the floor. ‘Meaning what?’ she demanded. ‘That my baby was worth nothing because she had no legitimate father?’ She glared at the preacher’s aghast face. ‘Tell me, was it better to be married to a creature like Turvey who flaunted his adultery with Helen under Susan’s nose and made her life a hell or to reject the sham of marriage like I did and live with a man because I loved him and he loved me?’

‘I’m not going to judge you,’ John replied tersely.

‘Why not? Everyone else has!’ Maggie cried. ‘George would never have been shunned and condemned for spawning an illegitimate child like I was. But an unmarried mother is the lowest of the low in our hypocritical society. Men can do as they please while women are dependent on their charity or cast beyond the pale!’

‘That’s nonsense,’ John blustered, standing up and clasping his hands in front of the empty grate as if a fire burned there. ‘You talk as if women have no power at all and yet they are running our factories in the war effort, they run the home, our churches. . .’ His voice trailed off at the sight of Maggie’s contemptuous face.

‘Aye, on behalf of men,’ she replied with scorn. ‘The power is still all yours even if some of us do have the vote. We might fight for a hundred years but nothing will change because men don’t want it to and women like Susan and Helen just allow men to carry on having it their own way. They lie down and let lads trample all over them because they think they’re inferior and don’t expect any better, because society tells them they’re capable of doing nowt beyond the bed and the kitchen stove!’

John flushed puce at her outspokenness. ‘Maggie, you’re so full of anger,’ he fretted, ‘but we’re not all Richard Turveys, believe me. I admire the capability of women and I encourage where I can. Didn’t I help you in your suffragism, trying to keep you from prison?’

Maggie saw his distress and tried to control her temper. ‘You did help me and I was grateful that you hid me at the mission. But you only did that out of friendship for my mother, out of common kindness, not because of any great conviction for the women’s cause. You made it plain you were unhappy with my involvement as I grew more militant. Remember the time you came to me at Arthur’s Hill and told me to renounce my beliefs?’ Maggie reminded him.