Fortune is a Woman (7 page)

He had no answer. "Happy Christmas, Francie," he said, feeling like Scrooge as he left. "There's a present on the table for you. Mrs. Benson and I surely hope you enjoy it. Oh, and there's one for Princess too. She's getting to be a big dog now."

Francie held Princess's collar so she wouldn't run after Dr. Benson. The dog was big and strong and stood as tall as she did, but it sat quietly at her side as she watched the carriage bouncing over the potholes down the rain-soaked drive, water spraying from under its wheels.

The weather turned icy that night, but the pot-bellied iron stove, fueled with apple logs, glowed with heat and the old wooden house was cosy. A fire burned brightly in Dolores's room and Francie stretched out on the hearth rug with Princess beside her. Propped on one elbow, her chin in her hand, she stared deep into the flames, listening to her mother's labored breathing. Dolores slept fitfully, waking every now and then to cough. Then the nurse would put down her knitting and hurry from her chair in the corner to gently wipe away the blood that trickled from the corner of her mouth, as darkly red as the port wine Harmon had sent.

Francie said quietly, "Mama's not better, is she? I can hear the noise in her chest, that rattling sound—"

"She's all right dear," the nurse said, looking up from her patient. But a worried frown appeared between her eyes and her jaw tightened. "Perhaps you and Princess should go to bed now, Francie," she said, smoothing Dolores's pillows. "Tomorrow's Christmas and we'll have a fine old time. Cook's fixing a goose and there's presents to be opened. Best you and your Mama get some rest now."

Francie bent to kiss her mother as she left, and then she said, "I'll pray to the baby Jesus tonight to help Mama get better."

"You do that, Francie," the nurse replied.

She woke early next morning. Her room was cold as ice, and pushing Princess from her feet, she flung back her blankets and rushed to the window. A light fall of snow covered the entire valley and the distant mountain tops sparkled in the pale sunshine. Snow dappled the branches of the trees and icicles hung from the gutter over the rainbutt.

"Oh, Princess," she cried, flinging her arms around the dog, "look what we got for Christmas." And with a great whoop of delight, she flung her coat over her nightie, pulled on her boots, grabbed the egg-basket and ran laughing down the corridor and out onto the porch.

The sun was already melting the snow into little pools that would turn to ice later that night. Francie ran around in excited little circles, making footprints while Princess jumped around her, barking madly. Then she half-ran, half-slid to the henhut, rooting out the chilly disgruntled birds and seizing their eggs, laid for once in their nests. Next she skidded down to the frozen pond, laughing at the attempts of the bewildered geese to paddle on the ice, and from there to the stables to feed Blaize some oats and to wish her a Merry Christmas.

Carrying her egg basket carefully, she hurried back to the house and tiptoed to her mother's room. The curtains were still drawn and though the embers in the grate still glowed faintly orange, it felt cold. The nurse was asleep in her corner chair, her chin sunk on her chest and her knitting still clasped in her hands. Francie tiptoed past her to the bed.

"Mama," she whispered, "look what the hens have sent you for Christmas. A beautiful, perfect brown egg." She held it up for her mother to see, but there was no reply.
Of course,
she thought,
it's too dark, she can't see it.
She went quickly to the window and drew back the curtain. "Here, Mama, look, it's specially for you—" And then she saw the great red stain that covered the sheets. It covered her mother's white lace nightdress, it stained her face and matted her beautiful black hair. And though Francie did not know what death was, she knew this must be it.

"Oh, Mama,"
she cried despairingly, taking Dolores's icy hand in hers and pressing it to her face, her tears mingling with her mother's blood. "Oh, Mama. This isn't what I prayed to the baby Jesus for for Christmas."

CHAPTER 5

1895

The same snowy Christmas Day that Francie found her mother dead, six thousand miles away in Yorkshire, England, Annie Aysgarth, aged sixteen, placed the bouquet of tightly curled bronze chrysanthemums beneath the granite angel on her mother's grave. Her three young brothers stood beside her, buttoned into warm overcoats and wrapped in woolen mufflers, their noses red with cold and their eyes watering in the bitter wind.

Martha Aysgarth had been dead for nearly four years now, but Frank Aysgarth still brought his family to pay their respects every Christmas Day, snow or shine. And it was mostly snow, Annie thought, shivering mournfully, wishing her father would make his annual pilgrimage in the summer; she just knew her mother would not have wanted them standing about in the cold and likely catching their deaths too.

The boys stamped their numb feet, the nails in their heavy boots ringing on the icy path, while their father stood, his black bowler clasped in both hands, thinking of Martha. Annie thought worriedly of the goose cooking slowly in the oven at home, afraid that the fire she had banked with coal before they left might have gone out. It wasn't that she was disrespectful to her mother—she came every week to care for her grave—but if dinner was late then her father would be angry and Frank Aysgarth's displeasure would put a blight on the whole of Christmas Day.

Just when she thought she could bear the cold no longer her father stepped back, placed his bowler hat firmly on his head and said, "Right, we'll be off home, then. Dinner's at one o'clock." He strode briskly through the cemetery gate, his youngest son, Josh, walking beside him with Annie behind and Bertie and Ted bringing up the rear. Annie almost tripped over her feet in her eagerness to get back home to the two up, two down row house in Leeds with the attic room that was hers and the cold cellar where on rainy days the family wash hung to dry amid the jars of homemade preserves and sacks of flour and potatoes. But she dared not run until they had reached the Horse and Groom on the corner of Montgomery Lane and her father said, "I'll just stop in for a pint with the lads. I'll be home at five minutes to one, Annie."

She nodded, wondering as she always did what her mother had found to love in him. Frank Aysgarth was a burly, gray-haired man with a bristling gray moustache, wind-reddened cheeks, and a dour disposition. He was a man of habit who had risen at the same hour, eaten at the same hour and gone to bed at the same hour every day for as long as Annie could remember. He liked his house clean, his children quiet, and his meals properly prepared and served on time. He brooked no argument and his word was law.

Sometimes when she was alone in the house on Montgomery Terrace, Annie would look at the brass-framed wedding photograph and marvel at how her pretty, laughing, brown-eyed little mother had ever married such an old stick-in-the-mud, because even on his wedding day Frank Aysgarth looked unjoyful, full of the importance of the occasion and his new responsibilities.

Her mother had told her the story of how, when he met her, Frank already had several jobs. He had left school at the age of twelve to work at the rope factory in Burmantofts, then at the brewery in Wakefield and at a printing works in Eastgate, but none of these had suited him. Beneath his solid facade lay the heart of an entrepreneur and one thing he noticed wherever he worked was that factories always needed cardboard boxes to ship their goods in. With a few pounds in his pocket he rented his own "factory," a small drafty room in the arches beneath the Leeds railway bridge. Then he arranged to buy a quantity of cardboard and set himself up as "Aysgarth's Cardboard Box Manufacturers."

When he met Martha he was making a living—just, but there was very little money left over for courting. Still, he couldn't resist her laughing brown eyes and found himself calling at her house several nights a week.

Annie's mother always said that Frank never actually went down on bended knee and
asked
her to marry him, but one evening he came to her house carrying a mahogany mantel-clock she had admired in a shop window in the Calls. It had cost him ten shillings, more money than he had earned that week. He said, "Here, lass, it's for you. I saw how you admired it and it'll look good on our mantel shelf." Martha said she just assumed from that that they were to wed and went ahead with her plans, accumulating a small pile of cotton sheets and towels in her bottom drawer, sewing a simple trousseau and her wedding dress of soft white voile trimmed with satin ribbons and hand-crocheted lace.

Everyone said how pretty Martha was and how lucky Frank Aysgarth was when she finally walked down the aisle on his arm, clutching a sheaf of tall lilies and smiling her dazzling smile. They spent their two-day honeymoon at a drafty boardinghouse on Scarborough's south side, which cost Frank his last fifteen shillings, returning, subdued, to their rented room on Marsh Lane. And the very next day Martha started work at her husband's side.

They worked hard, cutting and sticking the cardboard boxes to order. Then Frank would stack them up on his homemade delivery truck—a wooden crate on a set of wheels, dragging his heavy load through Leeds, sometimes for miles, to its destination.

When Martha fell pregnant she worked right up until the final week because they needed the money so badly, and a week after Annie was born she was back at the factory with the new baby wrapped in a blanket sleeping in a cardboard box at her side.

Business grew worse and money became even tighter and the poor cold rented room seemed even smaller. Sometimes there would be no wages on a Friday night and just bread on their dinner table. Frank spoke less and less and the baby seemed to cry more and more. Finally Frank said it was no good, they just couldn't make ends meet. He had to do something about it. He borrowed a few pounds and sent Martha and the child back to her family while he went off to seek his fortune in America.

Martha didn't realize she was pregnant again until he had been gone a month and again she worked until the final week, but this time there was no Frank around for his son's birth.

In five years Martha never heard a word from him. He never sent home a penny and everybody laughed at her, stuck with two kids and no husband. She found herself a job cleaning at a big house up at Lawnswood and many a time she had to walk there because the children needed new boots or winter jackets and she didn't have the tramfare. There was no room for her and two kids at her folks' house and now they were crammed into one cheap rented room on a mean little back street.

Then one spring day she was sitting on the doorstep shelling peas into a bowl and getting a breath of fresh air when she saw a man walking down the street toward her. He was smartly dressed in a brown suit and polished brown boots with a bowler hat on his gray head and he had a full beard and moustache. At first she didn't recognize him. Then, as he came closer she stood up, staring at him. She said, "It's Frank, isn't it?"

"Aye, lass, it is." He looked down at the children clinging to her apron and he said, "And these are my bairns."

Martha told Annie she held up the boy to him, but Frank never so much as touched him because he wasn't one to show his feelings, though she could tell he was pleased.

Over a meager tea of bread and cheese Frank told how he had started out in New York working as a laborer erecting steel girders for a lofty new skyscraper. The work was hard and dangerous, but the pay had been too good to turn down and for months he had clambered over scaffolding high above the streets of Manhattan, until the harsh freezing winter and a bout of pneumonia had put a stop to it. When he recovered his health he determined to find himself a better climate and with a few dollars in his pocket headed west "To seek my fortune, same as all the others," he'd said, with a rare smile at Martha.

Annie had stood by her mother's chair, her round brown eyes as big as saucers, excitedly twisting her clean pinafore in her chapped red hands, while Bertie leaned against his father's knee, listening raptly as he told them stories of San Francisco. "A city of hills above the most beautiful bay in the world," he said. He told them of the blue-gray winter skies and unexpected white fogs that rolled over them without warning; and about how rich the people were, "From mining gold and silver," he said as they "oohed" and "aahed" in wonder, thinking of the piles of precious golden coins the rich must have.

"There was alius plenty of building going on," Frank said. "I started at the bottom again, but I soon worked my way up. I learned how to build houses for the rich and houses for the working folks. Now I know what they want and I know how to give it to them at the right price."

Looking Martha in the eye, he took a thick wad of notes from his inside pocket and laid it on the table in front of her. "That's all my wages for the past five years," he said. "Less living expenses, of course, and the boat fare back home again. There's enough there to buy our bairns what they need and something pretty for yerself. I reckon you've earned it," he added with a glance at her worn dress.

Martha's eyes filled with tears and Annie slid her arms comfortingly around her neck. "It's just that I'm so happy," Martha sniffed, mopping her eyes on a corner of her flowered apron.

"No need to take on so," Frank muttered, clearing his throat, embarrassed as he always was by any show of emotion. "We'll be out of this place and into something better tomorrer. But that's only temporary—I've enough money now to start up in the building business for meself, and I promise the first house will be for you, Martha."

He was as good as his word. They moved to a small rented workman's cottage and then a year later, the next baby, Ted, was born. Just a couple of months after that, true to his promise, Frank moved them all into number one, Montgomery Street, the first in a row of houses he built and only the first of many he was to erect over the years.

Martha and Frank Aysgarth were a happy enough couple, folks said knowingly; they kept to themselves and didn't try to live above their station now that Frank was making money, though there was a good deal of speculation as to exactly how much he was making with half of Harehills disappearing under Frank's terraces of small, identical redbrick, slate-roofed houses. He had been right; he knew the business, he knew what people wanted, and he knew how to sell it to them at the right price. He was getting rich.