The Miner’s Girl (28 page)

Merry gasped. ‘Are you sure it was the mine agent?'

‘Miles Gallagher. Yes I am. I've been back a week now and I've seen him.' Suddenly he yawned. ‘Sorry. I've had little sleep since I've been back at Old Pit.'

‘Why don't you stay? I can make you a shakey-down bed in here.'

‘No, I can't. I can't risk it. Not until I do something about
him.
I'll go now. I'll be back though. And Miles flaming Gallagher will get what's coming to him, I promise you.'

‘Be careful, Ben, please.'

‘Oh, I'll be careful, pet, never fear,' her brother replied.

He kissed her forehead and went to the door. After she had seen him out she went back upstairs and put out the gas and lit a candle to go into the bedroom. She undressed quickly, blew out the candle and climbed into bed but her head was too full of Ben and she lay awake until it was almost morning before dropping off to sleep through sheer exhaustion. Consequently she woke tired and with an aching head. But still, not even that could dim the joy of having Ben back and alive.

There were so many questions buzzing round in her head though. Questions about Tom's father, the thought of him was hanging over her joy menacingly. Why had he done what he had to Ben? Ben was just a young boy when it happened, how could he have hurt the mine agent? Then there was her own son, Ben hadn't asked about him, did he not know? In fact he hadn't asked anything about her, how she had managed, about her marriage, not anything. But then there hadn't been
much time and perhaps he hadn't heard anything as he was in hiding and wouldn't have spoken to anyone from Winton Colliery or Eden Hope. She would go to Old Pit this afternoon, she decided, it was Boxing Day and she was free. Benjamin was spending the afternoon with Mrs Macready having a drawing lesson.

Merry didn't walk along the waggon way from the pit yard to get to Old Pit. She didn't want to meet anyone from the pit villages so she took a footpath through the fields to Coundon, turning off on the path that led down past Parkin's Farm. She hurried past the farm buildings but there was no one about. The day was rawly cold, already darkening and icy rain had started to fall. There was no one about at all; even the cattle were indoors at this time of the year and the only sounds were of rain dripping from the trees.

She climbed the sodden stile and her feet squelched in the puddle at the other side. Dirty water went over her shoes and her stockings were soaked. Gritting her teeth she plodded on until she came to the place where she had grown up but there was no sign of Ben and her heart lurched with disappointment. She stood by the pump and looked about her. Old Pit was much the same as she remembered it. Two of the houses had had their roof slates removed and there were other things missing but evidently there hadn't been much worth salvaging.

The door to the end house was open about an inch but it was warped with the rain and was stuck fast. She tried pushing it but it was hopeless. She walked round the side to the back door and found that it opened with a screech of wood on the flagstone when she pushed hard enough. There were no stairs to the upper floor – where they had been short pieces of metal jutted out from the wall.

Merry felt a surge of sadness as she remembered how her grandmother had struggled to keep the place clean and neat and tidy, and now it was simply a ruin. Leaves swirled in the corner with the draught and the iron range was red with rust instead of polished and shining from black lead.

Ben had covered his tracks well; she could see no sign of him, though there were ashes in the grate and a few cinders even. Merry went closer and saw a faint glow of red just dying. She went beneath the hole of what had once been the top of the stairs and called softly.

‘Ben?'

‘Merry! Why have you come here? I told you it was dangerous. Are you sure no one saw you?'

‘No, no they didn't,' said Merry. ‘There's nobody about, Ben, nobody at all. It's Boxing Day, the pits are off and any road it's blooming awful weather.'

‘Howay, come on up,' said Ben and let down a roughly knotted rope ladder. ‘You can climb that, can't you?'

‘'Course I can,' she asserted, though in truth the ladder swayed alarmingly as she stood on the first rung and she clung to the rope. Eventually though, she reached the top and Ben helped her into what had once been the bedroom. He was wearing a dark-blue topcoat such as a seaman might wear with the collar turned up on his neck, yet when he had touched her his hand was icy. There were a couple of blankets on top of some dried bracken in a corner and a pile of rags that he had obviously been using as a pillow. A chair with a broken back was there too and a small stool – a cracket, the miners called them, when they were used in the pits in very low seams. She looked in horror at this evidence of how poorly he was living in this bitter weather. As if to emphasise it rain began pattering at the window, some getting in immediately through the ill-fitting frame.

‘Heck, Ben, you can't live like this,' she said.

He shrugged. ‘I've lived in worse places and when I was but a bairn an' all. When you toil in the gold mines and it's so hot you fancy your brains are frying, all that keeps you sane is the thought of an English winter.'

She gazed at her brother: his skin was burned dark bronze and showed no sign of fading; his eyes had become shuttered and cold and she guessed he was looking back to those days. Her heart ached for him.

‘The mines? I thought you were going on the farms?'

‘Aye, well we were sold off like cattle at the other end. Most of the lads were Catholics and some of them went to farms. Me, I went to a mine owner. I was in the mines three years before I got away.'

‘You're home now,' she said softly.

‘Aye, but I can't come out into the open until I've seen to
him
.' He shook his head as though clearing his mind, went to the window and peered out. ‘You sure no one followed you?'

‘No Ben, no one did.'

‘Well, there's no one there, any road.' He turned back into the room, smiling self-consciously. ‘I'm not worried, really, I can take care of myself now and you an' all. This Gallagher chap is only a man after all.'

‘Still, best be careful, Ben,' said Merry.

‘Oh, I will, believe me, I will,' he assured her. ‘Now, come and sit down and tell me what's been happening to you in all these years.' He squatted on his hunkers against the wall in the age-old way of miners, and Merry took a seat. This was the moment she had been dreading. She wondered how to tell him about Benjamin and about her failed marriage. About the fact that Miles Gallagher's son was Benjamin's father. He was looking up at her expectantly but she was hesitant about where to begin. In the end he helped her.

‘I know you have a son, that you must have been married,' he said. ‘What happened? Did your man die?'

‘No, he's not dead, no,' she replied. Once she started on the story of her marriage she told it as it had happened, right until the day when Robbie had locked her out.

‘The rotten sod!'

Ben had listened with only the occasional ejaculation of anger or surprise. She stumbled over the telling how the diphtheria epidemic had taken little Alice, almost taken Benjamin.

‘Oh my God, I'm sorry, Merry,' he murmured and she looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap as the pain of it came back in full force. Still, she went on, glossing over the times Robbie had hit her, but not about the way he had treated Benjamin. When she came to tell him of the day her husband had put her out of the house he jumped to his feet and paced the room.

‘I'll kill him, I will, I'll flaming well kill him!' he said savagely.

‘No, Ben, don't, just leave it. He did Benjamin and me a favour, really. We're both of us happier where we are.'

Merry got to her feet and looked around the room again.

‘You can't stay here, Ben, of course you can't. You will have to find somewhere else.'

‘I will, don't worry about me, Merry,' he replied. ‘I'll be all right.'

Walking home she pondered on the fact that he had hardly mentioned Benjamin; asked not a single question about him. But it would come out; it had to, she thought. And what would he think when he found out who Benjamin's father was?

Merry looked around the flat when she got home, seeing anew how comfortable it was, especially in comparison to the conditions at Old Pit where Ben was living. She was so glad to see him, to know he was not dead and yet . . . already she was worrying about him, worrying what he was going to do. For he must have a plan, he had probably been thinking of a plan all the years he was exiled.

The questions whirled around in her head until it ached. Why had Mr Gallagher done what he had done to a lad as young as Ben had been? He had gone to such extraordinary lengths to get Ben away, he must have bribed the captain of that ship taking orphans to the colonies. Yet it would have been so easy to get rid of Ben in that drift mine or down the old ventilation shaft. But he had stopped short of killing the boy. Why?

Ben could sleep here sometimes, she decided as she dusted the waiting and consulting rooms ready for morning surgery – providing he came secretly after Benjamin had gone to sleep and left early in the morning. Benjamin was a good sleeper, rarely waking once he was settled for the night. She would insist on it next time she saw him, otherwise he would end up with pneumonia. Tomorrow she would somehow manage to take him a basket of food, a pie perhaps, soup to heat up.

She gave a last glance around the surgery and went upstairs to prepare Benjamin's supper, feeling a little better about Ben now she could do something for him. Yet still she was worried about him for she knew he was determined to get revenge on Tom's father and Miles Gallagher was a powerful man in the area.

Merry refused to think about how she was going to tell Ben about her son, his namesake. She would have to, of course, and yet again wondered what he would do when he found out the boy's father was Miles Gallagher's son.

Tom was just ending surgery when the telephone rang. He sighed heavily as he picked up the receiver. He had had an interrupted night, being called out to a minor accident at the mine. Then the surgery had been full after being closed for the Christmas holidays and he had a full list of house calls to start – now this was probably yet another.

‘Dr Gallagher,' he said even as he was finishing writing up the last patient's notes. If it wasn't too urgent he would be able to snatch a cup of coffee before he set off. Lunch was likely to be very late.

‘Tom!'

He sat forward, leaning his elbow on the desk. It was his stepmother and she sounded almost hysterical.

‘Yes? What is it? Is something wrong, Bertha?'

Bertha gave a strangled sound that could have been a laugh or a cry. ‘Wrong? Wrong? Tom, there has been an accident.'

‘Father? Is it Father?'

‘My father and yours, Tom, both of them, the fools went down the Winnipeg! Oh, I don't know what to do, Tom, I don't. How could they do this to me?'

‘He's not dead, is he?' Tom was having trouble making his stunned brain take in what she was saying.

‘Dead? Of course he's dead, what do you think? He's—'

‘I'll be right over,' he said and put down the receiver so he didn't hear the end of the sentence as she went on about him being an old man and Miles should never have allowed it to happen.

Within half an hour Tom had arranged for the neighbouring practice to take over his day's work for him and was driving out towards Willington which was north of the river and the sharpest way to get to Winnipeg
Colliery. He was thankful that he had recently bought a car, a Wolsey, which he had second-hand from a colleague who had bought it on impulse but couldn't get the hang of driving it, and whose wife hated it. Otherwise he would not have been able to afford an automobile, not yet – after all, a new car of the same type cost £260. As it was it cost him less than £200 and had taken all his savings. He judged it well worth it, however; it saved him time, being all of five-horse power. It was a two-seater but after all, he hadn't a family to consider.

Bertha was in the sitting-cum-drawing room of her father's house, not sitting down but striding up and down in agitation.

‘Oh, you're here,' she greeted Tom. ‘He's not back yet; he's arranging for the . . . body to be brought home. Though probably there will be a post-mortem, won't there? Oh, I don't know what is happening, we women just have to wait, that's what men expect, isn't it?'

Tom looked at her in perplexity. ‘Who?' he asked. His mind had gone completely blank.

Bertha looked at him impatiently. ‘Who what? Miles, of course. He didn't even come to tell me himself, sent an overman would you believe.'

‘My father? You mean he's all right?'

Bertha sighed impatiently. ‘I said so, didn't I?'

She had not, Tom thought but didn't say. ‘And your father, what happened?'

‘The old fool went down the mine with Miles and slipped into a hole or something, I don't know. Now look how he's left me.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Tom. ‘Sit down, do. This has been an awful shock to you. I'll ring for some tea, shall I?' He went to the bell pull by the side of the fireplace and tugged the cord.

‘Sorry. Yes of course.' Bertha sat down by the fire but within a couple of minutes was up again and striding to the window, looking out, then coming back. When the maid brought in tea, Tom poured her a cup, added milk and two spoonfuls of sugar and took it to her. He sat down opposite her chair with his own cup and watched her as he sipped. He could give her a sedative but really he should call the family physician. She was bursting with nervous energy and would be totally exhausted if she didn't slow down.

‘Here he is now,' she said from the window where she had carried her tea. ‘Now we'll find out what happened.' She put her cup down on the windowsill and turned to face the door, her demeanour showing how she was bracing herself.