The Colours of Love (3 page)

The innkeeper’s wife looked somewhat askance. ‘And the little one?’ she pressed. ‘What shall I say you think about her?’

Theobald settled back in his chair and reached for the tankard of ale at his elbow. ‘Say that she’ll do,’ he said shortly.

Chapter Three

Harriet and Ruth were to look back and see the two weeks that followed Esther’s birth as a time of bitter-sweet joy. Harriet was grieving the loss of her tiny baby son, but was filled with thankfulness at the gift Ruth had given her; and for her part, Ruth begrudged even an hour spent in sleep, because she needed to cherish every moment with her daughter, before she was taken away to her new life. The two women often talked long into the night, but although Ruth told Harriet about her family, and the pride they felt at having risen from rags to riches, after her grandparents had emigrated to America from Ireland at the height of the potato famine in 1850, she said nothing about Michael. Harriet, fearing the subject was too painful, asked no questions, but wondered much. It was clear the two young people had loved each other, and it seemed too cruel to deny them their happiness. But through their misfortune she had been given a pearl beyond price: her precious baby girl.

The weather added to the sense that the three of them were removed from the real world. Since the day of the shipwreck, wild November storms had battered the Welsh coast unmercifully, the days dark and gloomy, with unremitting rain and sleet. The wind howled like a banshee, shaking the little leaded panes of glass in the windows of the inn until the women felt sure they would shatter. But inside their room, all was snug and warm. The fire sent flickering shadows over the beamed ceiling and illuminated their faces as they tended to the baby, each of the women wishing these days could last forever. But all too soon the time came when they had to depart – Harriet bound for the north-east of England with Theobald, and Ruth back to America.

The weather had turned colder in the last day or two, and on the day of departure they awoke to a hard frost, the window so thick with ice they could not see out. Before they had finished breakfast the odd desultory snowflake was wafting in the air, but neither Ruth nor Harriet was concerned with the weather. Both women had slept fitfully, and in the middle of the night Harriet had heard Ruth trying to stifle the sobs that were shaking her body, and she had got up and gone to her. After that there had been no sleep for either of them and it had been a relief that Esther, being so small, demanded feeding every two hours.

Now they were dressed for the journey, and Harriet was giving Esther her last feed before the carriage was due to arrive. Miss Casey had been staying at a bed-and-breakfast just outside the town where Theobald had resided, and was due to arrive later in the morning.

Ruth watched Harriet, with her own breasts aching, although they had been tightly bound to dry up the milk for the last days and had stopped leaking moisture now. But the ache was in her heart.

Once she had finished feeding the baby, and without asking Ruth, Harriet placed the infant in the other woman’s arms. They had both been dreading this day, and Harriet felt wretched at Ruth’s distress.

Tears trickling down her face, Ruth touched with her lips the baby’s eyes, her mouth, her cheeks, her little hands, kissing each tiny finger and then stroking her silky black hair. ‘I love you,’ she whispered softly to her. ‘I’ll always love you – always – although I can’t be with you. Forgive me for letting you go, but it’s the only way.’ A sob caught in her throat and she looked up at Harriet, who was crying too. ‘How am I going to bear it?’ she whispered brokenly. ‘Oh, Harriet, what am I going to do?’

Harriet sat down beside her then and took Ruth in her arms, the two of them swaying in an agony of shared grief above the sleeping baby in her mother’s embrace. Harriet didn’t try to speak, for there were no words to say after all. Nothing could make this easier for Ruth.

‘Will . . . will you let her second name be Joy?’ Ruth murmured after a while. ‘That’s what I want to give her, in placing her in your care: joy.’

‘Of course.’ Harriet hugged her. ‘And I’ll make sure she knows nothing but love and happiness, Ruth. I promise.’

‘I know.’ Ruth rested her head on Harriet’s shoulder for a moment and then, as they heard footsteps on the stairs outside the room, she stiffened.

The innkeeper’s wife poked her head round the door after knocking. ‘Your husband’s here, dear,’ she said to Harriet.

‘Tell him I’m coming in a minute.’

‘Right you are.’

Alone again, they stood up, Ruth smothering the sleeping baby in kisses and beginning to sob uncontrollably.

‘I can’t leave you like this,’ Harriet said through her own tears.

‘You can. You must.’ Ruth wrapped the baby’s blanket more securely around her tiny shape, and then thrust the little cocoon at Harriet. ‘Take her, now, while I can still do this. Please, Harriet, help me do what’s right for her.’

They embraced one last time and then Harriet walked to the door with the baby cradled in her arms, opening it and leaving the room without looking back. Ruth felt her heart being torn from her soul with a pain so intense she had to ram her fist into her mouth to stop herself from screaming, and she began to panic. She couldn’t do it – she couldn’t let her baby go. She would run away from them all, grab her baby and disappear somewhere.
Michael, oh Michael, why aren’t you here? Why didn’t you follow me and find me somehow?

Choking on her tears, she paced the room, wringing her hands together, before opening the door and going onto the landing. She wouldn’t run after Harriet and her baby, she knew that, but in the last moments something had broken and torn deep inside her and it would never heal, no matter how many years she continued to live.

She couldn’t see the main room of the inn from the small square of landing, but she could hear voices, and suddenly the panic was strong again. She had to have one last glimpse of her baby; she had to see her go.

She ran back into the room and began to struggle to force the frost-rimed window open, pushing with all her might until at last the ice splintered and the window sprang wide. Peering out, she saw Harriet being helped into the waiting carriage by the coachman, and caught a glimpse of Theobald inside as he leaned forward to take the baby. And then the horses’ hooves were clattering on the cobbles and the carriage moved out of sight, and there was only the snow falling thickly now out of a laden sky . . .

Immediately she was settled in the carriage with a thick rug over her knees, Harriet reached for the baby, smoothing the blanket from her little face. She glanced at Theobald and saw that his gaze was fixed on the child in her arms. ‘She’s a bonny little thing,’ he said softly. ‘I’d forgotten how bonny.’

‘Yes, she is.’ The observation unnerved her; it was as though he was questioning the baby’s parentage, but Harriet knew it was her guilty conscience putting a hidden meaning in his voice, and this was confirmed when he said with evident pride, ‘She takes after my mother. Can you see the resemblance?’

She had never met Theobald’s parents, for they had both died some years before he had married her, but there was a large portrait of them in the hall at home, and her husband was the very image of his father. Taking a deep, steadying breath and trying to keep the tremor out of her voice, she said, ‘It was the first thing I noticed about her.’

Gratified, Theobald leaned back in his seat, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. After a moment or two he cleared his throat. ‘I meant to ask before, what did – what was her name? Mrs Flaggerty? – what did she have?’

‘Ruth Flaggerty, yes. She had a little boy.’ Harriet didn’t know if he had been told about the stillbirth, but was banking on the fact that he hadn’t bothered to ask about Ruth. Self-centred to the core, Theobald rarely concerned himself with anything that didn’t directly impinge on him, and in this instance it would work to her advantage. If he knew one of the babies had died, he might begin to wonder.

Theobald nodded. ‘Damned funny time for her to come and visit relatives in England, wasn’t it? And that companion of hers – a grim-looking woman.’

‘I understand the visit had been arranged for some time.’

‘Still damned funny, and her husband not accompanying her seems fishy to me. Did she say anything about him?’

‘Only that she loved him very much and was missing him.’

Theobald had lost interest in the conversation. Adjusting his position on the hard seat, he muttered, ‘This leg is giving me gyp. Can’t sleep for more than a couple of hours, even with the pills the quack gave me. Why we ever made the damned trip to see your sister, I don’t know. I won’t be gallivanting abroad again, I can tell you. And them Americans – damned funny ideas some of ’em have got. No, give me England every time.’

Harriet could have said that she had never wanted to travel halfway across the world in the first place, and that she knew full well why Theobald had insisted on making the trip. One of her sisters had married an English earl and the other, Bernice, had bagged a very wealthy and influential American senator. In the past Theobald had been somewhat dismissive of the latter, affecting an air of snobbish condescension and belittling his brother-in-law’s venture into politics, but when the US President, Warren G. Harding, had died suddenly of a massive stroke in August, and his successor – the taciturn Calvin Coolidge – had turned out to be a good friend (a very good friend) of Bernice’s husband, Theobald had suddenly seen the potential of having someone in the family who rubbed shoulders with the President of the United States. They had spent three months with her sister, and Theobald had been ecstatic when they had been invited to dinner at the White House. For herself, she didn’t like her brother-in-law, and she had found that she disliked President Coolidge even more, and it had sickened her the way Theobald had ingratiated himself with them both.

Making no comment, she looked out of the window into the swirling snow, her thoughts back at the inn with Ruth. Part of her – a part she was deeply ashamed of – had been glad to leave the American girl. She had wanted to put some distance between them. The giving-over of the baby had seemed too good to be true, too miraculous a gift when she had thought all was lost, and the fear that the gift would be snatched back and that Ruth would change her mind had been with Harriet night and day, however hard she battled against it. But now she was safe. She looked down into the small, sweet face that had become her world. She could be Esther’s mother in reality. The danger was over. But, having lost babies of her own, she knew what Ruth was feeling.

‘I’ve made arrangements for a nanny to be in place at home when we return,’ Theobald said some time later, when they had sat in silence. ‘And Mrs Norton is also seeing to setting up some interviews for a new lady’s maid for you.’

Harriet would have preferred to choose her own nanny for Esther, but she made no comment on this. Inclining her head, she murmured, ‘Poor Atkinson.’ She had barely given her maid’s untimely death a thought in the last two weeks, with all that had happened. Her guilty conscience prompted her to say, ‘Atkinson had a widowed mother who was completely dependent on her. I would like to settle a sum of money on the woman, so that she is not destitute. There will be no help from any other quarter.’

Theobald frowned. ‘Surely that is not necessary?’

‘Nevertheless, I would like it. We have been given so much, Theobald’ – she looked down at the baby in her arms – ‘can’t we afford to be generous?’

She thought he was going to refuse, but after a moment he nodded. ‘If it would please you, I will see to it that she receives a monthly allowance for as long as she is alive,’ he said magnanimously. ‘Will that do?’

‘Thank you.’ Harriet was in no doubt that his current benevolence was due solely to the child in her arms. Nor did she fool herself that his good mood would last. He would think nothing of spending a small fortune on a thoroughbred stallion in order to impress their social set in the local hunt, but he was far from being a generous man. With this in mind, she pressed, ‘And it will be enough for her to live comfortably?’

‘Yes, yes, enough to keep her out of the workhouse, if that is what you are asking,’ he said irritably.

And Theobald knew all about the horrors of the workhouse, being on the board of the Workhouse Guardians. But to hear him talk, every poor soul incarcerated in that hellish place was there because of their own delinquency, Harriet thought, glancing at his hard face. She had accompanied him to the workhouse just once in the early days of their marriage, when he had insisted that she acquaint herself with the ‘duties’ expected of her as his wife. From the moment they had passed through the high, forbidding gates into a big yard surrounded by brick walls, she had felt the terror of the building. The principle that those who sought relief in the workhouse should be divided into groups was a flawed one, in Harriet’s opinion. Men were separated from women, thus breaking up families; and both groups were again divided into the able-bodied, the aged and children. However, no proper provision was made for the sick and the mentally ill, and vagrants were totally ignored. The austere uniform, the workhouse diet – the staples of which were coarse bread, cheese, gruel and potatoes – the rigid discipline and harsh punishments had left her shocked and sickened.

She had asked Theobald why the hair of both the little boys and girls was severely cropped, and why the adult inmates had their hair cut in a standard rough-and-ready manner, to which he had replied shortly, ‘Hygiene.’ He had also given this as the reason for the severe workhouse clothing, although she had suspected (and rightly) that it was more for reasons of economy, and as a badge of pauperism.

When she had objected to the biblical text over the door of the dining hall – ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat’ – saying that the workhouse had taken St Paul’s words out of context, Theobald had been furious with her, and they had had their first disagreement on the way home in the carriage. ‘Poverty is a necessary and indispensable ingredient in society,’ he had growled at her. ‘Without it there would be no labour, and without labour no riches, no refinement and no benefit to those possessed of wealth. There is a section of the poor who have always been poor, and will always remain so; everyone has the ability to work and take themselves out of the mire, but some choose to remain there. It is indigence, and not poverty, that is the evil; the poor should always be reminded of this, and thus motivated to work for their living. It was work that took my father from mediocrity to great wealth in his lifetime.’