Orphan of Angel Street Read online

  Annie Murray

  Orphan of

  Angel Street

  PAN BOOKS

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  PART TWO

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  PART THREE

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  PART SIX

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The woman who called herself Lily was making terrible, high sounds of pain.

  ‘’Ere – what’s all the racket about? You awright in there?’

  Ethel Bartlett stood outside the attic door, her breathing laborious and asthmatic. She wore a threadbare coat wrapped round a yellowed nightshirt with a filthy hem, and handknitted socks through which poked her big toes with their black, overgrown nails.

  A helpless whimper of distress came through the door. Ethel knew those cries all right. She’d heard them in slum houses where she’d lived all her life: the noise of birthing women trying not to disgrace themselves or disturb their other children, defeated by the intensity of their pain.

  ‘You can’t ’ave a babby in there – not on my mattress. Think of the mess! I’m coming in to ’ave a look at yer.’

  ‘No!’ the young woman gasped from the other side of the door. ‘I’m quite all right – thank you. I shall sleep now. Please – go back to bed.’

  Truth to tell, Ethel was mightily tempted to do as she said. After all, it was none of her business. She’d had more than enough troubles to last one lifetime already, ta very much. It had been as clear as day to her why this well-spoken stranger was here. But that wasn’t her business either of course. Push up the rent, no questions asked.

  She’d passed the woman two days ago outside the Barton Arms, and heard her enquiring of someone else in a low voice about lodgings. Ethel butted in.

  ‘I don’t take in children, you know,’ she said, giving her a sharp look as if she might have a family of six stowed up her sleeves.

  The white-faced woman had been wrapped in a sea-blue cloak and was carrying only a small case. She stared steadily back at Ethel. ‘No. No children.’ There would be no children.

  Of course, as soon as she had moved in, the pregnancy had been impossible to hide. It had all happened a bit soon for Ethel, who decided to hang on to her for a while for the rent then move her on. She’d closed her mind to the fact that this stranger calling herself Lily, who barely ever set foot out of the house, would soon have to give birth.

  Ethel pulled herself up straight, coughing so that phlegm rattled in her chest. If there was one thing made her feel bad it was women having babbies and all their carrying on.

  ‘It’s no good. I can’t ’ave yer going on like this in my ’ouse. I’m coming in.’

  As she pushed open the rough door a groan, more of mortification than pain, came from the bed. The woman tried to sit up. She had been lying on her side on the stained mattress. Though it was the coldest of nights, she had only a thin blanket for cover, and that one so darned and patched with scraps of cloth that it was impossible to tell what its colour had once been.

  The face lifted from the pillow had a sharply defined nose and jaw, white, waxy skin and a head of long white-gold hair darkened by sweat.

  Except for a chamber pot, Lily’s holdall and a low chair beside the bed on which rested a cup and a stub of candle, the room was completely bare. Even the drip of water which on milder days seeped through the roof of the slum attic was silenced tonight, frozen to a gleaming rind on the tiles under the cold eye of the moon.

  ‘Please go,’ Lily implored. ‘Leave me . . .’

  But in a second she pulled herself up on her knees in an animal posture, seized by the terrible, compressing pain.

  ‘No . . . oh no . . .’ Her teeth bit down into the rotten, sawdust filled pillow as the force of it built and built in her, breath hissing through her teeth, nostrils flaring. Her head flung back, hands gripping convulsively now at the edges of the mattress.

  ‘Oh God . . . God . . .’ Her mouth stretched open as if to scream, but she let out only a breathy croak as it reached its height, and as the pain seeped away she slumped forward, too exhausted even to sob.

  Moments later she found strength to push herself up and take a sip of water from the enamel cup. The hand holding the cup’s blue handle was slim and smooth, not calloused by the relentless, lifelong work of the poor. But despite her soft good looks, the pale eyes were full of fear and sorrow.

  The landlady stood watching her, lungs sucking in and out loud as old bellows.

  ‘Yer can’t carry on like this,’ Ethel hissed. ‘I mean, I ain’t no good to yer. I’ll get Queenie Rolf from over the way.’ She turned to go, socks catching on the rough wood.

  ‘No – I don’t want – ! No one, please . . .!’

  But Ethel was off down the stairs. Finally a door slammed making the cracked windows vibrate.

  Alone again, Lily listened in despair to her thumping steps. She had never imagined it was possible to sink to a state of such pain and degradation. She screwed her eyes tightly shut. It was coming on again: more and yet more, like an endless road to travel with only more pain waiting at the end.

  ‘Our Father,’ her lips moved. ‘Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy . . .’

  The rest of the prayer was taken up into gasping through the next, wrenching agony.

  These first days of a new century had brought no special relief to the living conditions in the tightly packed workers’ houses of Britain’s – in fact the British Empire’s – prime industrial city. Mayor Joseph Chamberlain may have razed a great swathe of ramshackle back-to-back dwellings in order to build the grand sweep of Corporation Street in the image of a Parisian boulevard, but there were still plenty of slums left. Their raw edges rubbed almost up against the splendour of the Council House on Victoria Square.

  Into these slums were packed the worker bees to staff the great industrial hive of Birmingham which gave of its creativity to the world in metalwork, engineering, jewellery and a whole host of other trades. The children who survived the insanitary conditions were raised knowing no other options but working the factories or in service to the rich until they could hand over the burden of toil to their own children, as had generations of hard-working Brummies before them.

  Into one such house on the north side of the city, on an icy night in January 1900, another
child was born. Attending the birth were Ethel, yawning frequently to the full stretch of her jaws, and Queenie Rolf, who was built like an all-in wrestler, could drink many a man flat on his back and had tarnished silver hair long enough to sit on, which gave off a rancid smell.

  The baby girl came into the world to her mother’s silence. The woman’s face was pulled into a helpless rictus of pain as she squatted in the candlelight, undergoing the seemingly impossible feat of pushing her child out into life. Then came the catlike cries of the baby, and the blood. Oh heaven, so much blood. Something she’d never known about, such was her innocence.

  ‘It’s a little lady!’ Queenie cried, hoiking the child up by the legs and giving her backside a robust smack.

  Lily lay back on the crinkled sheets of the Birmingham Despatch which Ethel had stuffed under her and, not looking at the child, let out a long moan of relief and sorrow.

  ‘Yer awright now, bab,’ Queenie said. With skilled hands she dealt with the umbilical cord and, a little later, the afterbirth. She washed the blood and pale waxy rime from the baby’s body with water from a cracked pudding basin and was about to wrap her in an old rag when Lily protested in a weak voice.

  ‘No – look! In there . . .’

  She pointed to her leather bag. Queenie bent down and her capacious bloomers gave a loud rip.

  ‘Oh Lor’ – they’ll be round me flamin’ ankles in a minute!’ She opened the small bag and she and Ethel exclaimed at the sight of a neatly folded and beautifully stitched layette.

  ‘Don’t take it all out,’ Lily snapped, seeing Queenie’s beefy, blood-smeared hands about to reach into the case. ‘Please,’ she added more politely. ‘There are the things she’ll need on top.’

  Queenie drew out a tiny flannel vest and napkin, a strip of muslin for binding the cord and a tiny nightshirt and shawl for swaddling the child.

  ‘She’ll want all this on tonight. Proper brass monkey weather.’

  Lily herself had begun shaking violently, teeth chattering.

  ‘’Ere, Ethel, fetch ’er a cuppa tea, eh? That’ll be the shock of it as well as the cold, bab – takes some people that way.’ She handed over the tightly wrapped baby into Lily’s trembling arms, her foul breath making the young woman shrink from her. ‘You’ll be able to give ’er a bit o’ titty now – that’s what she’ll be after. Then you can give yerself a good wash over and get yer ’ead down.’

  ‘And we can all do the same,’ Ethel added resentfully.

  They saw though, that Lily made no attempt to suckle the child. She reached down into the case and pulled out two pound notes. Queenie’s and Ethel’s jaws nearly hit the floor and their hands whisked out quickly.

  ‘Well!’ Ethel’s face was all gummy smiles. ‘Ooh yer shouldn’t really. . .’ The money had already vanished into her coat. ‘Ever so good of you . . .’

  Queenie was stowing the money somewhere deep in the recesses of her cleavage and grinning into Lily’s exhausted young face, its blonde hair matted and tumbling on her shoulders. ‘You make a picture, the pair of yer. And she’s as fine a babby as any I’ve seen into the world.’

  Through chattering teeth, Lily managed to say, ‘Thank you. Thank you both for your help.’

  An hour later, disregarding her body’s crying need for rest, Lily had washed herself as well as she could. She used two of the napkins from the layette to stem her own flow, her hands still shaking as she tried to dress herself. She could hear Ethel’s snores, like those of an ancient hound, from down below.

  Ethel had cleared away the newspaper from the bed and the room was as bare as it had been before. Lily sat for a few moments on the edge of the mattress in the guttering light of the candle, holding her sleeping baby, looking solemnly into the wrinkled face. The terror had gone from her eyes and now there was only an infinite sadness. She knew the child needed food, but she must resist her own instincts and deny her her mother’s milk.

  There was not time to sit for long and suddenly her movements were urgent again. Hanging on the back of the door was her blue cloak which she wrapped round her, pulling its velvet hood over her head. She arranged the warmly swaddled child on one arm, and taking the case with her other hand she crept as silently as she could manage down the rough stairs and let herself out into the frozen night.

  As morning dawned, winter sunlight seeping through air choked with the effluents of Birmingham’s hundreds of factory chimneys, the blue-brick pavements were white with frost which put an illusory shine on the city’s grime. Rooftops sparkled as the sun rose, melting the frost into dark, damp patches on the tiles.

  The streets gradually came to life: men in broken down boots, collars up on their coats, hurried to early morning shifts, breath swirling from them. Horses’ hooves clashed over the cobbles pulling delivery carts and drays, steered by men still red-eyed with sleep as the ‘lighter uppers’ were extinguishing the last gas lamps street by street. Women were feeding families, sweeping out houses and calling to neighbours in their everyday work clothes: blouse, long skirt, boots, sacking apron and often a cap to top it off. Their day had long begun.

  In Kent Road, Aston, the bolts were being drawn open behind the heavy doors of one of two solid, red-brick institutions which faced each other along that street. On one side of the road stood St Philip’s Elementary School. Across from it, with its pointed gothic windows and wrought iron railings, Joseph Hanley’s Home for Poor Girls, founded 1881, as spelt out by the brass plaque beside the front porch.

  One of the heavy doors now opened and a middle-aged woman stepped out, hair caught up in a bun, clothes covered by a white apron and holding a workmanlike broom. She leant the broom against the wall and raised both hands to try and fasten some stray hanks of her hair, then stopped, catching sight of the little bundle in the narrow porch.

  ‘Oh my Lord!’ – stooping at once. ‘On a night as cold as this. It’ll be a miracle if . . .’ She lifted the baby close to her, and was satisfied to hear her breathing. The baby woke and began to snuffle, then cry.

  The woman, who was called Meg, carried the baby down the steps to the street, instinctively rocking her and saying, ‘Ssssh now, will yer.’ Seeing no one she could connect with an abandoned baby, in truth hardly expecting to, she turned back, shaking her head.

  She didn’t see from the steps of the school, a little further along, a young woman in a blue velvet cloak squatting to watch her over the low wall. One of her hands was clenched to her heart, the other pressed tight over her mouth as this stranger holding her child climbed the steps.

  Meg looked round one more time and then stepped inside and closed the door. As she did so a great moan of anguish escaped from the young woman at the gates of the school.

  ‘Looks a fine enough child,’ the matron said, unwrapping the baby on a table softened only by a piece of sheet. She picked her up for a moment, carefully scrutinizing her face, and went to the window through which poured hard winter light. The baby sneezed twice. ‘Doesn’t seem blind, at any rate. Pale of skin though, is she not? Could almost be an albino, except the eyes look normal enough.’

  ‘Don’t we ’ave to get the doctor in?’ Meg suggested nervously.

  ‘Oh, later’ll do.’ Matron carried on with her inspection at the table, pulling at the naked limbs as the child yawled furiously at the cold and interference by this heavy-handed woman.

  ‘Well, this one’s got a pair of lungs and a temper to match!’ she bawled over the baby’s screams. ‘That umbilical cord’ll need some attention. You can take her up to the infants in a moment or two, Meg.’

  Matron’s hands felt along the top of the baby’s head, fingers burrowing in the fuzz of gold hair for the fontanelles. The screaming rose higher. Meg, a softer-hearted woman, winced. This new matron, Miss O’Donnell, fresh over from the west coast of Ireland, seemed more at home with livestock of a farmyard variety than children.

  ‘No deformities that I can see.’ She started to close the white garments back over the child. ‘Hon
est to God, leaving a child on the street on a night like the one we’ve just had. The ways of these people! Shouldn’t be allowed to breed – someone ought to have ’em castrated, the whole feckless lot of ’em. Mind you – this one’s not of bad stock, I’d say – good strong spine and limbs . . .’

  Meg was waiting for Matron to say something about the quality of the child’s fetlocks when the woman exclaimed, ‘Well now – what’s all this then?’

  From where they had been tucked between the layers of soft white linen, Miss O’Donnell’s thick fingers drew out a wadge of money, and folded neatly with it, a white handkerchief. The matron seized on the notes, counting them eagerly.

  Meg picked up the handkerchief and held it out to Miss O’Donnell who was still taken up with the money.

  ‘Five pound – would you believe it! Well, isn’t this the fruit of genteel fornication if ever I saw it. Five pound!’

  ‘Look – there’s this too.’

  Miss O’Donnell took the handkerchief. On one corner of it, embroidered in mauve silk thread, she read one word: MERCY.

  ‘Have mercy,’ Meg pondered.

  ‘Ah well.’ Miss O’Donnell tossed it back on the table, slipping the folded notes into her apron pocket. ‘If she’s given her nothing else at least the child has a name. Let her be called Mercy Hanley.’

  Part One

  Chapter One

  June 1907

  ‘Mercy – come on, ’urry up!’

  The second morning bell clanged down in the hall. Even up in the dormitories they could sense Matron’s impatience as she rang it. Waiting around for anything was not one of Miss O’Donnell’s favoured occupations in life.

  ‘If you’re late for breakfast again there’s no telling what she’ll do!’

  Amy, three years older, tugged the worn flannel dress which was really too small, over the younger girl’s head. Mercy knew she was quite capable of dressing herself but each of them adored this game of mothering and being mothered.