The Flight of Swallows (22 page)

‘Eeh, ’tis not up ter me, lass, an’ why Pearl?’ Kizzie had asked her.

‘Well, she looks like one, our Kizzie,’ though to Kizzie’s certain knowledge their Meggie had never clapped eyes on such a thing. ‘Sorta plain, pale, but wi’ summat smooth about ’er.’

‘Tha’ can be a bit daft at times, our Meggie.’ Kizzie had been amazed but she didn’t care what the infant was called.

Charlotte came to the outskirts of Batley, guiding Misty along cobbled highways lined on either side with small terraced houses, the actual road busy with horse-drawn vehicles, farm carts, small gigs such as the one she drove, men on horseback, men dragging handcarts, and all moving steadily towards the centre of the town. It was Thursday, market day, and the market-place was a sea of covered stalls where anything might be bought from a reel of cotton, new and secondhand clothing, boots, farm eggs, butter, jars of honey, farm implements, lidded baskets filled with cackling hens, and as they moved nearer to the square, the busier it became. There were tramlines running beside the market and a tramcar rattled by pulled by horses. When it stopped a dozen people alighted, mostly working women come to spy out a bargain on the stalls.

Charlotte had been given instructions by a helpful passer-by as to how she might get to the nearest shoddy mill. The passer-by, a respectable working man in his decent go-to-market suit and bright blue neckerchief, looked somewhat surprised that this well-bred and well-spoken lady in her gig should ask for such a thing. No, she didn’t know the name of the mill, she told him, but as she had learned there were many such in the town of Batley, perhaps he could direct her to the closest.

The name of the mill turned out to be Victoria Mill owned by Edward Ramsbottom and it was off Commercial Street. Aye, just go straight on . . . pointing his finger along the road.

Commercial Street was cobbled, like most of the streets in the town and the gig bounced in the ruts. It was, like the market-place, busy with men in caps, women in shawls, a donkey pulling a small cart, a boy pushing a trolley on wheels in the centre of the road so that they were forced to swerve to avoid him, women in aprons and boys in knee-length trousers. Lining the road were dozens of shops: Smith’s the watchmaker, Salter’s Boot Store, Clayton’s Garment Store, the front of each shop shrouded with a canopy as though the sun were cracking the flagstones, Kizzie murmured.

They turned at the corner of Rutland Road as instructed by the helpful working man, drove along it for a hundred yards and there it was. Their destination. Victoria Shoddy Mill. Edward Ramsbottom, prop.

Charlotte drew in her breath. ‘Well, here it is, Kizzie. Our future and theirs.’

‘If I knew what tha’ were up to ’appen I might understand.’ Kizzie looked at the wide gates that opened into a yard that was a hive of activity: a positive whirlwind of men and wagons, great bales that looked to be made up of filthy tatters lying about the yard. More loaded wagons edged past them as they stared in horrified fascination, disgorging more bales to those already piled there while others took away bales that seemed no different to those that had just arrived.

Shoddy was the result of mixing old rags with some virgin wool, a process developed almost a hundred years previously. The rags came from old clothes which were collected by ragmen for a price, the rags being then sold to the rag merchant. Another source was new rags bought by the rag merchant as scrap from clothing manufacturers and tailors. It was these rags that Charlotte was after.

‘Rug-making, Kizzie,’ Charlotte said absently. ‘I told you about it earlier.’

‘What?’ Kizzie turned to stare at her.

‘Rug-making. With Jenny to show them how, I mean to employ girls—’

‘Prostitutes?’

‘No, not particularly. Girls who are in trouble and can’t get work. Like Jenny. But not just to make sturdy rag rugs to be sold on the market and laid on the kitchen floor, but wall hangings, like the ones Jenny makes. When Patsy Ackroyd sat in the drawing room she spotted Jenny’s work and was greatly interested. She thought it was a painting. So there we have two outlets for the girls’ work.’

‘Two. Good God, lass, dost know what tha’re talking about? Dost ’onestly think Mr Brooke’ll let thi’ go in that there mill an’ deal wi’ men?’

‘He won’t know, Kizzie.’

‘It’ll get back to ’im, lass. There’s nowt ’appens ’ereabouts that don’t get back to ’im.’

‘I’ll just have to take the chance then, won’t I?’

Avoiding the wagons and the men who stopped work to stare at her and Kizzie, she drove in through the gates and pulled up in front of steps leading to what might be offices. Climbing down from the gig, she beckoned to one man who seemed to have a knowing air about him and, when he had hurried across, asked him politely if he could see to her horse and gig and if he could direct her to Mr Ramsbottom’s office.

He would have willingly helped her, for she was a good-looking young woman but his mouth dropped open and he seemed to be speechless.

‘Is there something wrong?’ she asked him, aware that the yard which had been so noisy a minute or two ago was now as quiet as a churchyard.

‘Mr Ramsbottom,’ she prompted him, glad when Kizzie sidled up to her, standing close.

‘Nay, lass,’ the man croaked. ‘Mr Ramsbottom don’t come ’ere. ’Is manager’s in’t th’office though. Reckon tha’ could talk to ’im.’

She was dressed in one of her fashionable outfits bought in Paris. A skirt, flared and reaching her ankle bone and a three-quarter coat in a shade of dove grey with gloves and kid boots to match. Her hat was plain by the standards of the day, for knowing she would be entering a factory she had put on a dove-grey boater with a ribbon round it in yellow. She looked glorious, the sunshine putting golden streaks in her tawny hair which was tied up with a yellow ribbon into a bun just beneath the brim of her boater. She was excited and there was a flush of rose in her cheeks, though one of them looked suspiciously – to them who knew about such things – as though she had been thumped and her poppy lips were parted, ready to smile.

‘Bloody Nora!’ one brawny fellow whispered. ‘What’s goin’ on?’ But none of them could answer since they were as amazed as he.

As she and Kizzie approached the doorway indicated by the fellow holding Misty’s reins, a man in a suit, totally different to the men in the yard, stepped down from the bottom step, quite speechless with astonishment for a moment since women,
ladies,
like her did not enter places like this.

‘May I help you?’ he enquired when he had regained his speech, looking her up and down with great interest, his eyes appreciating what he saw.

‘I am here to speak to . . . to the manager so if you would direct me to him I would be obliged.’

‘Well,
madam,
I’m not sure whether Mr Scales can see anyone just at the moment. He is a busy—’

‘And you are?’ cutting through his somewhat affected speech, which sounded as if he hadn’t always spoken thus.

‘I am his . . . his . . .’

‘Yes?’ She lifted her head imperiously.

‘I work in the office.’

‘Then will you be kind enough to announce me to Mr Scales.’

The man shifted uncomfortably and at her back an interested crowd of men and boys nudged one another and waited to see what would happen next, the interruption to their work most pleasing to them. It was not often – in fact never – that a lady such as this one brightened up their day.

She followed the clerk up the steps with Kizzie at her back.

As Misty trotted up the drive they could see the doctor’s gig standing by the gate of the Dower House.

‘Now what’s ’appened?’ Kizzie asked anxiously. They had left Jenny quite recovered from the birth of her baby, and both babies doing well. At least Rose was doing well and Pearl . . .
Pearl
 . . . was beginning to pull round with the attention Meggie gave her. There was no need for him to call again, he had told them only last week and now he was here, so what catastrophe had befallen their little household while they had been away?

They pulled up, leaving their gig next to the doctor’s, jumping down on to the gravel and hurrying through the front door into the kitchen. Doctor Chapman was sitting by the fire opposite Jenny who was nursing her baby. He was calmly sipping a cup of tea while Meggie hovered by the kitchen range, a grizzling Pearl in her arms. In a chair pulled up next to the doctor’s was a young girl, probably about fifteen, and even as the two women hesitated in the doorway it was evident she was one of Doctor Chapman’s waifs, those who came to his home in the dead of night asking for help. She was pregnant, sported a black eye and a badly split lip which seemed to have been sewn up, as a small thread hung from the wound.

Doctor Chapman stood up politely and smiled.

‘Ah, there you are. I was just saying to Megan I really must go for I have visits to make at the Clayton. The Clayton Hospital in Victoria Square, you know?’

They didn’t, not really, but they both nodded, eyeing the young girl in the chair.

‘This is Violet,’ deepening his smile as he turned to the girl. ‘As you can see, she is to have a child and last night her father gave her . . . well, you can see what he did to her so I have brought her here to you.’ He hesitated, looking from one to the other. ‘That is all right, isn’t it? You did say you were to take in girls who were in trouble and would have employment for them?’

Charlotte took a deep breath, remembering the snarling fury on her husband’s face as he burst into this very room and ordered her to come home; his stated intention to close the place if she did not obey him; to turn out these vulnerable children, for that was what they were. The evening spent at the Ackroyds and what had happened when they returned. Her face was bruised on one cheek though Kizzie, the most diplomatic of friends, had said nothing and then he had . . . he had . . . she almost said
raped her,
in her own mind of course, though she knew it had not been rape. If it had she had been a most willing victim. What was he to say when he learned of what she had done today? When the wagon arrived carrying the shoddy she had bought? When she showed him quite blatantly that she meant to go her own way and be damned to the Ackroyds and the rest of them. Mr Scales had proved to be a very pleasant young man who obviously was enthusiastic about his work. He gave them quite a wordy explanation on the source of the goods he worked with, explaining that the ‘tatters’ they saw in the yard had come from Poland, from the gypsies of Hungary, from the beggars and scarecrows of Germany, from the frowsy peasants of Muscovy, along with snips and shreds from monks’ cassocks and noblemen’s cloaks, lawyers’ robes, waxing lyrical on what was apparently of great import to him. They would be shredded by ‘devils’, the machines that turned them into what was called mungo fibre, after they had been sorted and put into baskets by quality and colour. She and Kizzie had picked over what was on sale, queried the price and even, on Mr Scales’s recommendation, inspected the canvas and hessian to be had at a stall on Batley Market.

Now she placed a comforting hand on Violet’s arm, noticing that the girl flinched as though used to human touch only in the form of blows. Doctor Chapman watched her, then, satisfied, moved towards the door.

‘I can see she is welcome here so I’ll get along. Let me know’ – glancing in the direction of the telephone – ‘if you should need anything. He hesitated for a moment. ‘What you are doing is very worthwhile, Mrs Armstrong, but are you sure your husband approves?’ There were not many gentlemen of Brooke Armstrong’s standing who would agree to his wife taking in these girls and giving them a place to have their babies with a decent roof over their heads and, not only that, but providing them with decent work in what was practically his own home. Most females of Brooke Armstrong’s class were little better than possessions, pampered, true, well cared for and protected as one might care for a decent horse. They were bred to be, if possible, decorative in the drawing room, fertile in the bedroom, useful in the running of the home and were given little freedom to pursue their own interests. There were exceptions, of course, women of wealth and strength of character, mainly unmarried, who forged their own lives. Many of them were raising their heads above the parapet, ready, if asked, to fight for their rights, as they saw it, in the new movement of suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union, in which his own wife was interested. And why not? He himself was a keen advocate of women’s suffrage; after all, had not Emily been beside him, fought beside him, in everything he believed in and surely had the right to be his equal in everything.

But the young, lovely Mrs Armstrong who could be no more than seventeen or eighteen was not made of the stuff of his Emily!

Charlotte exchanged a glance with Kizzie, for none knew better than she what Brooke would say and perhaps do.
Try to do!

‘My husband is not . . . not in total agreement, no, but he is a kind man, generous, fair and will come round when I explain what I am doing and why. I am not the sort of woman to spend my days calling and leaving cards—’

Realising she was saying too much, she clamped her rosy lips together and moved towards the door, indicating that she was to show the doctor out. She opened the door, watched by Kizzie though Meggie and Jenny were absorbed by the infants they were cradling and Violet seemed to be senseless and in a private hellish world of her own.

Wallace Chapman turned in the doorway.

‘Have you had a fall, Mrs Armstrong?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘A fall?’

‘I notice your cheek is bruised.’

Involuntarily she put her hand to her face where Brooke’s hard hand had struck her, then she forced a smile.

‘Ah, yes. I walked into a . . . a . . . door, Doctor.’

‘I see. It’s surprising how many females do that. I may have something in my bag for that if you would care to—’

‘No, no, thank you, Doctor.’

‘Very well, as you like.’ Then he was gone, striding towards the gate where his gig waited.

When she turned back into the kitchen Kizzie was already ushering the stunned figure of Violet towards the staircase murmuring about a bath and a rest.