The Innkeeper's Daughter (28 page)

Joe laughed. ‘I reckon he has.’

Bella slipped off her apron and pushed past him. ‘Silly beggar,’ she muttered, hiding her disappointment that it wasn’t who she had hoped and knowing that she should stop even thinking about him.

Joe had shown Justin Allen into the saloon and he was looking about him as Bella entered and dipped her knee.

‘Miss Thorp.’ He gave a polite bow. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you.’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘We’ll be opening soon. How can I assist you?’

He hesitated. ‘Well, it’s not really a matter of requiring assistance. I wanted to come by and ask how things are progressing and if you are happy with trade and so on?’

‘We are,’ she said. ‘It’s proving better than we’d hoped for, although a bit early to say whether ’customers who are coming are just curious or will become our regulars.’

‘Quite so,’ he said, fiddling with his gloves. ‘I also wanted to ask if you would do me the honour of accompanying me to an hotel I’d like to show you to discuss some other options.’

Bella blushed. This wasn’t at all what she’d expected. Did brewers normally drop in on their tenants or ask them out? She couldn’t recall anyone calling on her father. Or did he have some other motive? There was something she wanted to talk to her mother and Joe about which would in time involve the brewery, but not yet. The business had not yet settled down.

‘Wh-when were you thinking of, Mr Allen? At the moment we are rather busy getting ’Maritime up and running.’

‘Oh, yes, I realize that of course, but I wondered about next Sunday? Perhaps for afternoon tea?’

‘I see – well, I see no reason why not.’ She hesitated. ‘So, erm, is there a particular place that you were thinking of?’

‘Indeed yes. The Station Hotel. You are aware of it, of course? Have you perhaps been already? They have a small orchestra playing on Sundays which I thought would be rather pleasant.’

Heavens, she thought. Whatever will I wear?

‘I haven’t been,’ she admitted. ‘We’ve been rather busy since we moved here.’ She gave a nervous laugh. ‘Not much time for social events.’

‘Well then – would you care to, that is if you haven’t anything else too pressing? I realize it is your day off. Shall we say at about three thirty? We can walk, it isn’t very far – unless, of course … I could bring a cab if you prefer?’

She laughed. He seemed anxious to be correct, she thought. ‘It’s only round ’corner, Mr Allen. I’m sure we can manage a walk there.’

He picked up his bowler, which he’d placed on a table. ‘Very well. Thank you. I’ll look forward to that. Sunday then, at about three thirty.’ He gave another short bow, Bella dipped her knee and he left by the front door as she stood staring after him.

‘Ha!’ Joe came in immediately. ‘What was all that about?’

‘Don’t know. He wants me to go with him to ’Station Hotel. On Sunday. Something to discuss, but he didn’t say what.’

‘He’s tekken a shine to you, Bella, that’s what it is.’ Joe nodded solemnly. ‘Mebbe he’s going to propose. But he’ll have to realize that he’s to ask my permission first, seeing as I’m your older brother.’

She saw the gleam in his eyes. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous!’ she countered. ‘Come on. Let’s go down in ’cellar. We need to tap another barrel of bitter.’

Joe had asked her not to let him go into the cellar on his own. He said he didn’t trust himself not to help himself to a tot of spirit. Even though it was sometimes inconvenient for them both to be down there at the same time, Bella wanted to help him get over his addiction and so far it seemed to be working.

She told her mother what Mr Allen had suggested, and after thinking about the matter for a while Sarah suddenly announced that Bella should buy a new outfit for the occasion.

‘Apart from your grey dress you’ve not had owt new for some time,’ she said. ‘And that was for work, not for best. So get yourself off to look in ’shops. There’s no time to find a dressmaker before Sunday but I’m sure we can afford to buy you something ready to wear.’

Reuben was due to call after they had closed that afternoon to show Bella how to set out the accounts and she had intended asking him if he thought they were progressing all right and making a profit. Perhaps I could see if he thinks there’s enough money for a suit of clothes for Joe as well as an outfit for me.

But when he showed her how to set out the incoming cash and the outgoings, he asked tentatively, ‘I trust you each take out a salary, Bella?’

She looked at him. ‘Do you mean Ma and me and Joe?’ and when he nodded she said, ‘Why, no. We never have. We’ve only ever taken out what we need from ’takings, for shopping and – things. We’ve never taken a wage, not any of us, and I don’t know if Father did either.’

When she asked her mother, she said she didn’t think so, but there was never much they needed out in Holderness.

‘But that is not the point, dear lady,’ Reuben said quietly. ‘If you are in business you must keep a proper set of books to show the tax inspector.’

Sarah looked blank and said she had never had anything to do with the money. Joseph had always handled it.

‘Well, I think you must start now,’ Reuben told her. ‘You can’t possibly compare one year with another if you don’t know how much you earned or how much your costs are.’

‘Show our Bella,’ she said. ‘She’s old enough to handle that side of things.’

‘Actually, I’m not sure if she is, but perhaps Joe is, and if I show them both what to do we can then put it in your name, Mrs Thorp, as you are the innkeeper.’

So Bella began her instruction into bookkeeping; Joe said he didn’t want to, but that he would gladly take a salary as it would be the first time ever. However, Reuben insisted that he should also take instruction, as it might one day come in useful. Bella quite enjoyed doing the figures, and she learned that they were in a very profitable business. The following day her mother produced some sheets of notepaper with figures on them and said she had been jotting down the money they had taken at the Woodman since Joseph had died.

Reuben Jacobs put his head in his hands in mock dismay and asked if they would like him to look after the accounts until such time as everything was in order; they agreed that they would but said that he must charge his usual fee, to which he replied that he would.

Bella went shopping for a new outfit on the strength of now earning a salary. She usually made her own clothes, but it was rather nice, she decided, to look in the shop windows at various fashion styles and try some of them on. She was torn between a cream wool dress and a deep red one with a high neckline and a boned bodice, and finally settled on the red as she thought it looked very cheery in the cold dreary weather. She also purchased a horsehair underskirt and several cotton
petticoats
at the insistence of the shop assistant, who said they were essential to show off the skirt’s deep flounces.

As snow was forecast she also bought a loose grey mantle, warm gloves and a matching bonnet and came out of the shop feeling dizzy and guilty, wondering what her mother and Joe would say.

What they said, when she tried on the outfit to show them, was that she looked very grand, and her mother suggested that she go out again the next day to buy a new pair of boots, for her old ones looked very shabby under her new outfit.

‘Well, I think I might go shopping for a new jacket and trousers,’ Joe said. ‘What do you think, Alice? Want to come wi’ me and help me choose?’

Alice blushed and looked at Bella and Mrs Thorp. ‘I can do,’ she said. ‘If you like.’

‘I do like,’ Joe said. ‘We’ll go ’day after tomorrow after Bella’s got fixed up wi’ her new boots, an’ then it’ll be your turn, Ma. Might as well spend it now that we know we’re solvent.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ his mother protested. ‘Got to leave summat for a rainy day.’

Henry came into the kitchen; he walked home from school alone now. ‘It
is
a rainy day,’ he told his mother. ‘I’m wet through! You look nice, Bella. Is that new?’

Bella washed her hair and dried it in front of the fire. Her hair was very thick and long and took a long time to dry. It had a deep curl in it, but Alice had said she would tie it up in rags for her to make it look even curlier.

‘I wish mine was like yours,’ she said. ‘Mine is so fine and straight.’

‘But lovely,’ Bella said. ‘It shines like silk.’

And it did. Since Alice had come to live with them and was eating good food, she looked much better; she’d put on weight, and when her hair wasn’t tied back in a bun it hung down her back like a pale gold curtain. And Bella knew she wasn’t the only one to notice. She had seen Joe casting admiring glances too.

On the following Sunday morning Bella woke early. She reached out to twitch the curtains open. It was still very dark and yet there was a luminous glow to the sky which puzzled her until she thought
Snow!
and slid out of bed, draping a shawl round her shoulders. She looked out and her eyes lit up with pleasure. It was snowing, the sky full of swirling flakes which were glowing in the light from the gas lamps outside the Maritime.

She quickly dressed in warm clothing and wool stockings and crept downstairs, where she put on her rubber boots, unlocked the door to the alleyway and went down it to the street.

The snow was coming down thick and fast in great fat flakes so that she could barely see in front of her. She laughed with joy; the first snow of winter had always delighted her and she stepped out into the pristine whiteness and walked to the top of Anne Street. She breathed in icy breaths which set her nostrils tingling and with parted lips she looked down Paragon Street which was like a white river, untouched as yet by wheels or hooves or footprints, and gazed at the snow-encrusted buildings with their soft and deep white windowsills and patterned window etchings.

Bella was a country girl used to vast tracts of snow-covered meadows, but here was a wonderland with yellow light glowing in pools beneath the lamp posts and here and there a matching glimmer from a window of some early riser like herself.

She saw a sinewy movement as a lanky figure uncurled from a doorway and stretched. There were just the two of them in the whole street and as the youth turned in her direction, without thinking Bella gave an involuntary wave. He looked up with something like eagerness in the lift of his head and began to lope towards her.

Bella was startled. She was merely sending a greeting to a stranger and she began to back away until he spoke; his voice was husky as he said, ‘Morning, miss. Do you need me for summat?’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

‘ERM, NO,’ BELLA
said. ‘I was just – saying good morning, I suppose. I saw you there and—’

‘Oh!’ He seemed disappointed. ‘I thought – mebbe you needed me for an errand.’

She recognized him then. It was the youth Reuben Jacobs had whistled for to look after the horse and cart when they’d first come to look at the Maritime.

‘Why are you out so early?’ she asked.

‘I live out,’ he said, and broke out into a paroxysm of coughing. ‘Excuse me,’ he apologized, breathing heavily. ‘It’s my morning cough. I’ll be all right in a minute.’ He coughed again several times, but turning his head away from Bella.

‘What do you mean, you live out?’ Bella asked. ‘You mean – out in ’street?’

He nodded, seeming to be too breathless to speak immediately. ‘In a doorway. I’ve found a really good one, quite deep, and ’shop won’t be open today so I could stop all day.’

‘Would you like some breakfast?’ She spoke without thinking. ‘And our fire stays in all night so you could get warm.’

He was very tall and thin and she thought about thirteen or fourteen years of age; he looked down on her, his expression puzzled and wary. ‘I’ve no money to pay,’ he said, digging his hands in his trouser pockets and pulling out empty tattered linings. ‘I’ve not run any errands for a day or two.’

They were both covered in snow by now and Bella shivered.
‘I
wasn’t expecting you to pay. Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m ready for a cup of tea.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ he said in a hoarse, rasping voice. ‘I’ll pay you back somehow, running errands or owt. You can ask Mr Jacobs; he knows I’m honest.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I remember you, and if Mr Jacobs trusts you, then I will too.’ She led him back down the side passage and into the Maritime, bolting the door behind them. ‘We don’t open on a Sunday.’

‘I know. I used to bed down in ’alley afore you moved in, but then some tramps came wi’ their dogs an’ I didn’t like ’em, so I had to move on.’

So he doesn’t think of himself as a tramp, she thought curiously, and strangely enough he looked quite clean in spite of his old worn jacket and the too-short trousers which showed his bare and bony ankles.

Sarah was up and in the kitchen stirring something in a pan, although not yet dressed and still in her woollen dressing gown. ‘I thought you’d be out playing in ’snow,’ she began, and then looked up. ‘Hello, who’s this then? A waif ’n’ stray?’

‘No, ma’am,’ the boy was quick to answer. ‘Me name’s Adam. Adam Richards. Born ’n’ bred in Hull. Everybody knows me.’

‘He’s been sleeping out in ’street, Ma,’ Bella explained. ‘I’ve met him before – he runs errands. Reuben Jacobs knows him.’

‘Well, I’ve no silver to lock up,’ Sarah said, ‘so you’d better sit down. Porridge?’ She lifted the pan up.

‘Please!’ Adam licked his lips.

Sarah poured the gruel into three bowls and sat down opposite him, then pushed a bowl of sugar towards him. ‘So how come if everybody knows you, nobody else has invited you for breakfast?’

He lifted the spoon to his mouth, but then put it down again to answer her. ‘Too early, probably, and then there’s not many folk about at this time on a Sunday, not till it’s time for ’church service.’

Sarah gave a grunt but didn’t speak again until he’d eaten some of the porridge. Then she said, ‘And I suppose if
everybody
knows you, they don’t think o’ feeding you, because they think somebody else is doing it.’

‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘I think that’s probably right. An’ I don’t beg, you see. I try to work for my living. I think Mr Jacobs tries to find errands for me to run; he knows I’ve got my pride.’