A Mother's Love
Authors: Maggie Ford
Contents
Can she escape the hardships of her past?
Growing up in London’s tough East End, young Sara Porter has had to learn to take care of herself. Her mother resents her maternal responsibilities and has never shown her daughter the slightest bit of love.
Starved of affection, Sara vows not to let anyone get close and focuses instead on getting out of the East End. But still she hopes that one day she’ll find a real family to call her own...
Maggie Ford was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.
She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.
The Soldier’s Bride
1894
Chapter One
Beyond the lace curtains a wet April Saturday was drawing in early. Hackney Road was a clog of traffic from end to end, horse droppings churned to mud by rain, hooves and wheels. People crossing the road dodged erratically between hackney carriages and buses, everyone bent on getting home to make the most of one day of rest before Monday and the start of another working week.
The rumble of traffic and the shouts of paper boys intruded insistently into the quiet room. Mary Wilson drew in a shuddering breath, fingers to her lips to compose their trembling, and turned from the window to her daughter huddled in the high-backed leather armchair. The girl had hardly moved since being led there after her husband’s awful accident several hours ago. And them married hardly a year.
Mary compressed her lips and said yet again, ‘Harriet, I think you must come home with me and your father.’ Harriet Porter didn’t reply but Mary went on as though she had. ‘You can’t stay here after what’s happened. In your condition too.’ There was no response. If anything, the girl crouched lower into herself, slim, delicate fingers worrying at her beige serge skirt, crumpling it into tight folds, creasing them with small convulsive movements, the auburn head bent to the task as if that and nothing else was her sole intent in life.
She hadn’t lifted her head once, not even to sip the tea that was now cold in its cup, the milk a thin pallid film on the surface, as pallid as that small and pretty young face.
Mary Wilson went and plucked a taper off the mantelpiece, merely for the want of something more positive to do, and stooped to light it from the low fire in the grate. Reaching up over the brown chenille-covered parlour table, she drew down the fine chain dangling from the gas lamp above, her small stature only just allowing her to reach it with fore and middle fingers, and applied the taper. The mantle gave a tiny plop and hissed into greenish life, growing quickly white and brilliant beneath its cream glass shade.
The dusk chased back to the windows, Mary swished the heavy drapes together and came to sit opposite Harriet. Her small face, unusually smooth for a woman of forty-eight, threatened to pucker a little as she felt her daughter’s grief. The girl looked so wan … so completely dazed. She hadn’t even cried. It would have released so much of the pain there inside her if she had, but she just sat numbed and dazed. Grief could be so cruel.
‘They’ll be bringing Will back on Tuesday morning. Till then, I think you ought to stay with us.’
Still nothing. Not even a twitch. A small bubble of annoyance rose up inside Mary, unexpected and unbidden. It was there in her tone before she could check herself.
‘Harriet, are you listening?’
The unaccustomed sharpness in her mother’s voice penetrated Harriet’s numbed brain. She gave a violent start, and became abruptly conscious of her surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. The prints and photos tilting from their long cords on the walls looked unfamiliar. The clock under its glass dome on the mantelpiece, the ornaments also under glass – wedding presents to her and Will last July – those on the whatnot too: none held any meaning for a moment. The aspidistra fanning out of its blue glazed pot, another wedding gift, on the tall oval table in front of the drawn curtains, looked like a distant forest. The fire, lit for her sake despite this first week in April being warm … she couldn’t remember it being lit or who had lit it. And in front of her was her mother’s small face, sorrow-pinched but demanding an answer from her. She had to say something. But it was hard to make any sound come.
‘I’ll be all right here,’ she managed finally, her voice quavering.
She saw her mother go disapprovingly giraffe-necked under the high collar of her black dress. Already in mourning, she must have changed the moment Mr Hardy from the oil and candle shop next door brought the news of Will’s death. The thought, entirely detached from what had happened, of her mother hurrying to dress in the appropriate colour of mourning despite the intensity of the shock she had received, brought a ghost of a smile to Harriet’s small oval face, though the grey eyes remained blank. Trust Mum to have everything in its place no matter what.
‘Don’t be silly. Of course you won’t be all right.’
It was the tone her mother had used on her when she was a child. But she wasn’t a child now. She was twenty years old and married – or had been until … how long ago? Minutes? Hours? Harriet’s smile faded.
‘I want to stay here.’ Part of her wanted desperately to go with her mother, to be as far away from this house as she could and never return. But at her parents’ home, with her mind still confused, still shaky from shock, who knew what she might say to incriminate herself?
It was all coming back, leaping into perspective, stark yet still unreal: the crack Will’s head had made as it struck the newel post at the foot of the stairs; his body sprawled below her in the narrow hall, head jammed against the door to his printer’s shop, feet under the cane table against the opposite wall. It had happened so quickly. He’d been gripping her arm, pushing her ahead of him up the stairs to the bedroom. She could still hear herself, pleading.
‘No, Will, please – not like I am. I can’t!’
His voice had been harsh. ‘Bugger you can’t!’
He had let go of her to swing an arm across. Shielding her face from the backhander, her hand on his chest to fend him off, she had heard him cry out, seen his arms reach out for a hold that wasn’t there. His large handsome face had been so amazed, his blue eyes fixed on her in surprise, in horror.
But she couldn’t have pushed him, a big strong man like him, her a slip of a thing and eight months pregnant at that. His foot must have slipped off the top step. She couldn’t have pushed him. But if she had … If she had, then she had killed him. If she blurted it out then God alone knew what would happen to her.
She’d said nothing to the police about Will forcing her upstairs to satisfy his lust after an extended lunchtime drink with colleagues over at the Queen’s Arms; she’d merely told them that she’d been getting his tea. A smell of bloaters had borne that out. They had accepted her suggestion that he must have lost his footing – drunk, of course; the reek of port and brandy was still in the air – had even commiserated with her, a tragic young widow, heavily pregnant, with no man now. Were they to know …
‘I want to stay here.’ Fear made her tone sharp and Mary gave a shuddering sigh of exasperation.
‘I can’t force you. If that’s what you want, I’ll stay with you.’
‘No.’
‘I can’t leave you here alone.’
‘I’ll take the tincture the doctor left, the laudanum. I’ll sleep.’ Her voice sounded flat, lifeless. She passed a hand across her forehead. ‘I’m tired. You go now, Mum. Come back first thing. I can’t think now. I don’t want to think …’
Mary leaned forward and took her daughter’s icy hands between her own. ‘Your father will see to all the arrangements. Mrs Hardy next door said she’ll make sandwiches for everyone to come back to after the …’ She broke off, tears glistening in her grey eyes. ‘It’s going to be an awful ordeal for you, Harriet, like you are. If only I could take this burden off you. To think he’ll never see his child, poor Will.’
Her grip on Harriet’s hand tightening convulsively, Mary was about to draw her poor grieving daughter to her small bosom when voices and the heavy creak of her husband’s tread on the stairs stopped her.
The burly figure of Jack Wilson came into the room, with Mrs Hardy close behind. He already wore a black band on his arm, the conventional badge of mourning, but his manner was as bluff and forthright as always as he looked at his daughter and correctly interpreted her set expression.
‘Not changed her mind then? Mrs Hardy has kindly offered to stay if she needs someone with her. Don’t like to say it, but I’ll have to go soon. My men are still waiting for their week’s wages. The boys can wait till they get home.’
A cabinet maker with a small but thriving business, he employed both his sons as well as one French polisher and one joiner. His thick greying brows drew together as he eyed his daughter. His voice grew forceful in a final effort to persuade.
‘Look here, Harriet, do as your mother says. It’s not as if there’s no room for you. Your sisters are married with homes of their own, and only John and George are at home now – the house is big enough.’
The house in Approach Road to Victoria Park was three-storied with a basement for servants. In fact the Wilsons employed two servants: a cook and a maid of all work. Despite being in London’s East End, the area had boasted a grander aspect only a few years previously. Its fine terraced houses had been built for the upper middle class who had factories and businesses conveniently near to the London docks, but as the poorer classes had spread further east, the rich had moved out, leaving their large houses to slightly lesser beings: the lower middle class of shopkeepers, smaller businessmen and bank clerks. Now Harriet’s and both her sisters’ rooms at the top of the house stood vacant.
‘You know you’re welcome …’
‘I’m sorry, Dad!’ She stopped him in desperation. ‘I want to stay here. I want …’ How could she tell them what she wanted and why?
‘I’ll keep an eye on ’er,’ Mrs Hardy said quickly, her Cockney accent earnest. ‘I’ll stay with ’er till it’s bedtime. I’m only next door. She can give me a key an’ all she ’as ter do is bang on the wall an’ I’ll be in like a shot.’
It was settled. Harriet knew only relief as her cold cheek – it felt icy even to her – was finally kissed, tearfully by her mother, awkwardly by her father, before they both departed with obvious misgivings about leaving her virtually on her own.
Left alone with her, Mrs Hardy became attentive. The girl was her charge now. She was determined to comfort.
‘A nice cup of tea, luv,’ she decided. The girl was so young. And having a baby after losing a husband hardly bore thinking about.